I
LEON
There is something cold and forlorn about the little city of Leon, that one-time capital of Spain; something chill and wintry, not explained even by the snowy peaks of Asturias bounding the horizon on the north. It is the chill of age. Other cities there are, even in Spain, older than Leon, but with them time has dealt more gently. It was but natural that this town should wither and grow old. Very much out of the world it lies, in as remote a situation as could be found in southern Europe. It has long outlived its destiny—and that was an honourable one. The blood of no new race has ever been infused into its veins. Founded by S. Sulpicius Galba in 70 A.D. as the headquarters of the Seventh Legion (Legio Septima), when it grew into a town, doubtless its first inhabitants were the unconquerable Celts of the Cantabrian Mountains. When the wild Suevi took refuge in this north-western corner of the peninsula, Legio, as it was then called, was nominally subject to them. Leovigild added it to the dominions of the Visigoths in 540, but despite this change of masters it probably remained Celtic to the core. The Moorish yoke endured here but twenty-five years. So near to the great mountain barriers, where the new Spain was born, which contained the nucleus of the new monarchy and nation, it was naturally among the first prizes of the kings of Pelayo’s line. Issuing from those passes which had proved a death-trap to the Moorish hordes, the Christians of Asturias wrested this city from the invader in the year 742, and with a very brief interval it was henceforward to know none but a Spanish yoke. We do not hear of much effort on the part of the Saracens to recover or to hold it. We can fancy that the spirit and resolution of those children of the South were numbed in these wintry plains, within sight of the everlasting snows, almost within reach of the tempests of the northern seas. But it was a place that suited well the temper of the champions of Christendom in Spain. It was grim, it was stern, it was rude and simple. Behind was the glorious cradle of the nation, the citadel of Spanish freedom; before were the plains whereon to do battle with the Moor, the streams that flowing south pointed the way for the Spanish knight. Leon was the first stage of a journey which was to end only at the Pillars of Hercules. Every town in the peninsula marks a forward step of the Christian, a backward step of the Moslem. Leon was outpost first, capital after. It seems to have been attacked and perhaps destroyed by the enemy during the ninth century, for we read that Ordoño I. rebuilt it. Under Alfonso III. the frontier of the nascent kingdom was carried forward to the Douro. At Leon men slept more peacefully. Alfonso, upon his abdication in 912, pursuing the policy afterwards so harmful to Spain, divided his dominions among his children. Leon was allotted to Garcia; and two years later, on the death of that prince and the accession of his brother Ordoño II., it became the capital of the united realms of Galicia and Leon, to which in 923 with the crowning of a third brother, Froila II., was added the ancestral province of Asturias.
In the Middle Ages, where the Court was the scaffold was not far away. And the new capital was soon to see something of the darker side of regal authority. Ordoño II. attributed his defeat at Val de Junqueras to the defection or mutiny of the Counts of Castile, the wardens of the eastern marches. Summoning four of them into his presence at his palace at Tejares, he placed them under arrest, and sent them in chains to Leon, where after a painful captivity they were put to death. This was not the last tragedy to cast a shadow over the little capital. Meanwhile, under Ramiro II., the name of the town began to be applied to the whole kingdom. It was the scene of the imprisonment of the aspiring Fernan González, Count of Castile; and by him and a Navarrese army it was besieged during the reign of Ordoño III. Under the terrible Al Mansûr, the Moslem tide swept up to the very peaks of Asturias. Leon was submerged, the city taken and burned, and Fernando II. was glad to find an asylum in the mountain fastnesses of his ancestors.
This was but a temporary check to the Christian fortunes. In 1002 the announcement was made from every pulpit in free Spain, ‘Al Mansûr is dead and buried in Hell.’ Emerging once more from their retreat, the Leonese recovered their capital, which was henceforward to remain uninterruptedly in Christian hands.
Alfonso V., the Restorer of Leon, mindful of the precedents set by Visigothic kings, held an ecclesiastical council at his capital in the year 1020. There was a great concourse of prelates and nobles from all parts of Christian Spain. The conference took place in the cathedral church of St. Mary, founded by Ordoño II., and King Alfonso and Queen Elvira presided in person. Of the fifty-eight ordinances and resolutions, thirty-one embodied the municipal constitution of the town of Leon—the first town in Spain to receive a charter. Indeed, it was probably the first town in mediæval Europe to obtain the privilege of self-government.
The history of the city thenceforward becomes merged in the history of the kingdom and in that of Spain generally. But here and there in the annals of the time certain events stand out as specially associated with it. In the year 1029 the young Count Garcia of Castile came hither to espouse Sancha, the sister of King Fernando III. His movements were watched by the three sons of the Count of Vela, whom his father had put to death. Their manner towards the young Count implied rather friendship than enmity. But one morning, as he entered the church of San Isidoro, they fell upon him and slew him. The assassins were burned to death; but their deed served to intensify the bitter rivalry of Castile and Leon.
There were other ecclesiastical councils held here in 1106, 1114, 1134, 1228, and 1288. And in 1137 the church which had been defiled with the young Garcia’s blood was the scene of the impressive coronation of Alfonso VII. as Emperor of all Spain—a title which no Spanish king could justly bear, till Charles came from Flanders in 1517 to rule over a Spain for ever united.
For a hundred years longer the little city by the northern hills posed from time to time as an imperial capital, but with the union of the crowns under San Fernando the headship of the kingdom passed to Burgos and Toledo. For a century more the court of the Spanish kings was in the ever-moving camps, on the ever-shifting battlefield. The claims of Leon to rank as capital were forgotten. The echoes of warfare far away on the banks of the Jucar and Guadalquivir hardly reached her walls. She fell asleep. She had harboured the founders of national independence; she had borne the brunt and stress of battle, had been in the van in the fierce strife between Christian and Moslem. Everything that happened to Leon happened a very long time ago; and it might all have seemed a dream if the genius of the architect had not bequeathed to our own day great memorials of the glory made by kings and prelates.
Leon, as we know, does not derive its name from ‘the lions introduced by the Carthaginians,’ as some old chroniclers believed, but from the legion quartered here in the first century of the Christian era. The old name of the place was Urbs Legionis. Remembering the peculiar pronunciation of the Spanish G, the modification of the Latin word into its present form is easily explained.
The legion which preserved the pax Romana in this remote corner of the empire may have varied in strength from six to seven thousand men of all arms. The camp was rectangular, and measured 380 by 570 metres. It was confined by the wall, of which the northern, eastern, and part of the western sides remain,—or rather the bases, for the masonry of the upper part reveals the handiwork of various subsequent ages. Walking round the city, you notice the stout round bastions outcropping between the houses which frequently obscure the trace of the wall. Of the four Roman gates, faced with marble slabs and inscribed with the names of the commanders of the legion, two remain—the eastern, or Bishop’s gateway, behind the cathedral, and the low semicircular arch in the Plazuela del Conde de Luna.