If this assumption is warranted—and it is supported by the evidence of the bas-reliefs mentioned by Carderera—it would seem that the Spaniards had progressed more rapidly in the armourer’s craft than their contemporaries. Greaves, jambs, or leg-armour of plate, were unknown in Northern and Central Europe till the fourteenth century. Hewitt thinks they were of German origin because they are sometimes referred to in documents of that age as beinberga, from the German beinbergen. He admits that they might have been copied from the examples of classical times with which their wars in Italy would have familiarized the Teutons. “In the South of Europe the greaves were already become of a highly ornamental character, as we may see from the sculpture of Gulielmus de Balmis (1289), from a bas-relief in the Annunziata at Florence.” [The greaves are ornamented with floral devices and écussons, and are strapped on to chausses of mail.] But in Spain we get a yet earlier example, even supposing the leg-armour on the Jaca and Benevivere effigies was not of this sort.
Don Bernaldo Guillen de Entenza was major-domo of Aragon, and one of the bravest knights in the train of King Jaime I. the Conqueror. He died a few days after the victory over the Moors at Enesa in 1237, and was buried at the Monastery of Puig, near Valencia. His sculptured figure reveals every detail of his apparel (see plate 2). He wears a hauberk of mail reaching to the middle of the thigh, and to the finger-tips, the fingers of the glove being separated; the face is framed in the hood of mail (camail), and the head protected by a round chapelle-de-fer, ornamented with studs, and a strengthening band. Over the hauberk is worn a sleeveless surcoat, embroidered at the breast and reaching below the knee; it is split up at the sides to allow greater freedom to the limbs. Both surcoat and hauberk are bordered with a fringe, except at the neck, where the surcoat seems to be edged with a setting of stones or studs. A baldric encircles the lower body, and supports a short, broad cross-hilted sword on the left hip, and a dagger or misere-corde on the right. The pommel of the dagger is carved into the resemblance of a grotesque human face.
The legs are protected by greaves of plate armour, with ornamental lengths up the middle. The knees appear to be furnished with genouillères or knee-caps of iron. The sollerets, pointed shoes, are of mail.
Here, then, in Aragon, in 1237, we find a knight armed with those defences which did not become common in Europe for another century. The circumstance, though it may not in itself appear to be of much importance, is interesting, as proving how quick was the Spaniard of that day to avail himself of the latest appliances and inventions of the age. Aragon, at least, seems to have kept pace with Italy, which is generally allowed to have set the fashion in military equipment. And we find that the armourer’s craft was sufficiently important at Barcelona to constitute a guild, which was existing in 1257.
In the citadel of Lerida there is a fine sepulchral monument showing us that valiant knight, Don Guillelmo Ramon de Moncada, Seneschal of Catalonia, armed cap-à-pie (see plate 3). He died about the middle of the thirteenth century. Like his brother-in-arms, at Puig, he wears the camail and hauberk. Over the forehead he wears a coronet, with shields and studs and gilt fleurs-de-lys. The surcoat, which shows the hauberk beneath, is tastefully embroidered with pearls, and is charged with eight écussons, or shields, each supported by two doves. The garment must have been a beautiful work of art. The Seneschal wears jambs (leg-armour) and cuisses (thigh-armour) of plate, and what are unmistakably genouillères of the shell pattern. His shoes are likewise of plate. The armpits and elbows are protected by pieces new to us—the round plates, called palettes or rondels, elsewhere rarely found before the end of the century. Here again, and in the articulated fingers of the mail glove, we have evidence of the advanced condition of the armourer’s art in Spain. This is also demonstrated by a comparison of this effigy with one of identical date—that of a knight in Haseley Church, Oxfordshire (Hewitt, Vol. I., plate 46.) Here the armour is entirely of mail, neither jambs nor coudes (coudières, elbow-plates) being shown. Nor are there any traces of the rich ornamentation seen on the Aragonese warriors’ surcoats and mantles.
These were the spacious days of Ferdinand of Castile and James of Aragon, when province after province, city after city, were wrested from the Moor, and the defeat of Roderick was wiped out on the very spot where he had endured it five hundred years before. Cordova, Valencia, Murcia, Seville, fell in turn before the Christian arms. The armourer-sergeants, wandering through the bazaars of the captured Moorish cities, and curiously examining the products of their dusky fellow-craftsmen, must doubtless have gleaned many new ideas and scraps of useful knowledge. Ibn-Said, born at Granada in 1214, has left it on record that in his time Murcia was renowned for its coats of mail, its cuirasses, and for every description of iron armour incrusted with gold; it was likewise celebrated for its saddles and harness richly gilt. In fact, continues the Moorish chronicler, for all articles of military equipment, such as bucklers, swords, quivers, arrows, and so forth, the workshops of Andalus surpassed those of any other country. He boasts the beautiful inlaid swords of Seville, which were not inferior to those of the Indies.[B] Cordova, the great centre of industry and refinement in the Peninsula, never achieved fame for its steel manufactures, but its oval leather shields (adargas) were known as early as the tenth century, and used all over Europe, but more particularly in Spain, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Some interesting relics of Saint Ferdinand are enshrined in the Royal Armoury. The remains of the cloak in which the saintly King was buried (N9) are thus described in the Catalogue (see plate 1). “Its texture is of silk and gold, made like an Oriental tapestry, checkered, the first of the squares being crimson and a dirty white, with gold castles, and the second with red lions rampant, like those of the Spanish arms, but turned to the left of the shield. The border is woven in horizontal bands, a wide one in the centre, composed of graceful floral designs, blue and red, on a gold ground; two narrow ones, yellow, on the outer edges of the former, and outside these other two bands of Arab lacework of gold on a crimson ground.”
The azicates (long-necked Moorish spurs) of St. Ferdinand (F189 and 160) are of easily-worked iron. What remains of the incrustation of gold is adorned with little silver castles, similar heraldic devices in gilt being distinguishable on the springs of the straps.
The Conde de Valencia de San Juan endeavours to prove—and, I think, with success—that the sword numbered G21, believed at one time to be the Cid’s famous blade “Colada,” is no other than the “Lobera” of St. Ferdinand. How the name “Lobera” came to be applied to a sword is unknown. The Conde hazards a conjecture that it was named after a gentleman called Guillen Lobera, who is referred to in the memoirs of Jaime I. of Aragon. The word was first used in this connection by the Saint himself, who, on his death-bed, bequeathed to the Infante Manuel for all his inheritance, “his Lobera sword, which was of great virtue, and by means of which God had greatly helped him.”
Not less interesting is the passage in the chronicle of Alfonso XI., referring to the famous battle of Salado: “Then the King sent word to Don Juan, son of the Infante Manuel (grandson of Ferdinand), by a gentleman, to ask why he and those in the front did not pass the river. And an esquire, called Garci Jofre Tenoryo, son of the Admiral killed by the Moors, who was a vassal of the King and in the front, said to Don Juan, that his Lobera sword, which he said had virtue, would do the most work that day.”