The pillars of Spanish chivalry were of the same quality and character as those of other countries. Spain had her military orders, her institutions of Calatrava, Saint James, and Alcantara; while the militia of the Temple and the friars of the Hospital were richer in possessions in Spain than in any country of the West. She had, also, her ballads and romances, in prose and verse, descriptive of the wars and loves of chivalry: but I cannot discover, with some writers, that the chivalric muse sung either a sweeter or a higher strain in Spain than in France or England. Her minstrelsy, indeed, was peculiar, and so was her national character. On one side, longings for patriotic independence, and consequent hatred of the Moors; on the other, the loves and friendships of humanity, unaffected by difference of religion or country. The Troubadour chaunted his lays of love and war in Spain; and his appeals found a ready way to the heart in Arragon; for of that part of the Peninsula the Provençal was the vernacular dialect.
Heroes of chivalry.
Pelayo.
Spain is rich in her heroes, both of romance and chivalry. The Spaniard will not acknowledge that the Moor was, for a moment, left in tranquil possession of his conquest; and he points to a hero, named Pelayo, as collecting the remnants of the Christians in the mountains of Asturias, immediately after the general triumph of the Moorish arms. He resisted the Moors till his three hundred followers dwindled to thirty. His enemies then left him to perish, for hitherto his food had only been honey, found in the crevices of the rocks. But, in after times, the folly of this disdain was seen; for these thirty men were the nucleus round which the scattered Spaniards collected.[181]
Bernardo del Carpio.
Truth does not cast many gleams on Bernardo del Carpio, the next in time and rank of Spanish knights. If we may credit the historians of his country, it was he who nourished, in the Asturias, the plant of national liberty; for when Alfonso the Chaste would have made the land over which he ruled part of the dominions of Charlemagne, the nobility, headed by Bernardo, repelled the invader, and annihilated the French peerage at Fontarabbia. Much of this, perhaps the whole, is the mere dreaming of national pride, not deserving regard: but when I find mingled with the story the assertion that Bernardo gained the alliance of some of the Moors, and that, in after parts of his life, he fought also under Moorish banners, I accept these circumstances as valuable, and consider them as indications of general principles and manners, whoever may be the hero of the tale.
Charlemagne’s expedition into Spain.
Of the far-famed expedition of Charlemagne into Spain, little or nothing is known, though some French writers have defined the extent of his dominion in that country with the precision with which the political changes of modern times can be traced. Tradition, song, and history, unite in proving that he went into Catalonia and Arragon; but it does not seem that he established any government in those countries; and his march was rather the wild adventure of a knight than the grave purpose of kingly ambition. The Spaniards, as we have seen, claim the honour of defeating him in the valley of Ronscesvalles; but the Arabs also assert their title to the same feat of chivalry: and, still further to embarrass the matter, it has been contended, with equal plausibility, that the French under Charlemagne were worsted by the Navarrese and people of Acquitain; and thus that the French of the Adour and the Garonne defeated the French of the Seine. The land between the Ebro and the Pyrenees, and called the Spanish March, was governed, some centuries before the twelfth, by the counts of Barcelona, who owned the feudal sovereignty of the kings of France. This territorial acquisition has been generally referred to the sword of Charlemagne, not, however, on sound historical proof, but rather from the practice of monkish chroniclers, of honouring that emperor with all the deeds of arms which could not accurately be ascribed to any other warrior.
The life of the Cid.
In the life of Count Fernan Gonsalez fiction and fact are blended beyond all power of extrication; and we must descend to the eleventh century for a genuine picture of the Spanish cavalier. No one is dearer to the proud recollections of a Spaniard than the Cid Rodrigo Diaz de Bivar: for it was by the valour of his arms that the momentous question of superiority between the two great powers in the Peninsula was decided as every Christian and Spanish heart could have wished. The honour of his chivalry is bright and pure; for to swear by his knighthood, affé de Rodrigo, is still the most solemn form of a Spaniard’s asseveration.
The marriage of Don Diego Laynez, a Castilian gentleman, and Donna Teresa Rodriguez, daughter of a count and governor of Asturias, was followed in the year 1026 by the birth of a son at Burgos, who was called Rodrigo Diaz, and of Bivar, from the conquest made by his father of a town two leagues north of Burgos; but he was more generally designated as the Cid, from the Asiatic title, Es Sayd, (my Lord,) which five Moorish emirs whom he conquered gave him, and which his king confirmed.[182] Indeed, from the number of his victories over the Moors, he emphatically merited this title.