But presently to the Alcalde came an old lady with a strange but welcome story. She told how she had seen a fight between two gentlemen, the previous night, from her bed-chamber window. She witnessed the fatal termination, and lo! the light of her candle fell full on the face of the murderer; and as he bent forward, she heard his knee crack. By his features and by this well-known physical peculiarity, she recognised, beyond all possibility of a mistake, the king.
Next day the Alcalde invited his sovereign to attend the execution of the criminal. Greatly wondering, no doubt, Pedro came. Dangling from a rope he beheld his own effigy. “It is well,” he said, after an ominous pause. “Justice has been done. I am satisfied.”
We may be inclined to disagree with the king’s conception of justice as evinced on this occasion. More equitable and humorous was his action when a priest, for murdering a shoemaker, was condemned by his ecclesiastical superiors to suspension from his sacerdotal functions for twelve months. Pedro thereupon decreed that any tradesman who slew a priest should be punished by being restrained from exercising his trade for the like period!
The catalogue of this Castilian monarch’s crimes proves interesting if gloomy reading. He left his wife, Blanche de Bourbon, to perish in a dungeon; he married Juana de Castro and insultingly repudiated her within forty-eight hours; he put to death his father’s mistress, Leonor de Guzman. He threw the young daughter of his brother, Enrique de Trastamara, naked to the lions, like some Christian virgin-martyr. But the good-humoured (and possibly well-fed) brutes refused to touch the proffered prey. Not wishing to be outdone in generosity by a wild beast, Pedro ever afterwards treated the maiden kindly. She was known, in remembrance of her terrible experience, as Leonor de los Leones.
The Jew, Don Simuel Ben Levi, had served Pedro long and only too faithfully as treasurer and tax-gatherer. It was whispered in his master’s ear that half the wealth that should fill the royal coffers was diverted into his own. Ben Levi was seized without warning and placed on the rack, where the noble Israelite is said to have died, not of pain, but of pure indignation. Under his house—so the story has it—was a cavern filled with three piles of gold and silver so high that a man standing behind any one of them was completely hidden. “Had Don Simuel given me the third of the least of these three piles,” exclaimed the king, “I would not have had him tortured. Why would he rather die than speak?”
Somewhat more excusable was the treatment meted out to the Red King of Granada, Abu Saïd; for this prince was himself a usurper, and had behaved traitorously towards his own sovereign and his suzerain, the King of Castile. Fearing Pedro’s resentment, he appeared at his court at Seville with a retinue of three hundred, loaded with presents, among which was the enormous ruby that now decorates the Crown of England. He was received in audience by the Spanish king, whom he begged to arbitrate between him and the deposed King of Granada. Pedro returned a gracious reply, and entertained the Red King in the Alcazar. Before many hours had passed the Moors were seized in their apartments and stripped of their raiment and valuables. Abu Saïd, mounted on a donkey and ridiculously attired, was taken, with thirty-six of his courtiers, to a field outside the town. There they were bound to posts. A train of horsemen appeared, Don Pedro among them, and transfixed the helpless men with darts, the king shouting as he hurled his missiles at the luckless Abu Saïd, “This for the treaty you made me conclude with Aragon!” “This for the castle you lost me!” The Moors met their death with the stoical resignation of their race.
That atrocities committed against Jews and infidels, against even members of the royal family, should be regarded with indifference by the public of that day need not surprise us. But the people of Seville tamely suffered the most cruel wrongs to be inflicted by the tyrant on their own fellow-citizens. After his (or rather the Black Prince’s) victory over Don Enrique at Najera (1367), the Admiral Bocanegra and Don Juan Ponce de Leon were beheaded on the Plaza San Francisco. Garci Jufre Tenorio, the mayor of the city, also suffered death. The property of Doña Teresa Jufre was confiscated because she had spoken ill of his Majesty. Doña Urraca Osorio, because her son had taken part with Don Enrique in the revolt, was burned at the stake on the Alameda. Her servant, Leonor Dávalos, threw herself into the flames and shared the fate of her mistress. In consequence of this persecution, Seville lost several of her most illustrious families, which either became extinguished or removed themselves to other parts of Spain.
So much for the picturesque if repugnant personality of Pedro I. With his sinister memory the Alcazar is so intimately associated, and the part he took in its reconstruction was so conspicuous that this may be deemed the proper place to deal with that famous building—one of the two most important in Seville.
THE ALCAZAR
“The Alcazar,” says Señor Rafaél Contreras, “is not a classic work, nor does it present to-day that stamp of originality and that ineffaceable character which distinguish ancient works like the Parthenon and modern works like the Escorial. In the Alcazar of Yakub Yusuf the influence of the heroic generation has faded away, and it portrays instead the daily life of our Christian kings who have enriched it with a thousand pages of glorious history. The Almohades, who impressed on the building their African characteristics in 1181, and Jalubi, who had been a follower of Al-Mehdi in the conquest of Africa, left on its walls traces of the Roman influences met with in the course of their movements. St Ferdinand, who conquered it, Don Pedro I., who restored it, Don Juan II., who reconstructed the most elegant apartments, the Catholic sovereigns, who built within its precincts chapels and oratories, Charles V., who added more than a half in the modified style of that epoch of the Renaissance, Philip III. and Philip V., who enlarged it still more by building in the adjacent gardens—these, and other princes who inhabited it during six centuries, have changed the original structure to such an extent that to-day it is far from being a monument of oriental art, though we find it covered with fine arabesques and embellished with mosaics and gilding.”