“My fair sons,” she said, “it is a noble purpose, an object worthy of Christian swords. It is good that you should win your knighthood by fighting for Holy Church, rather than for your own vain-glory. If your father thinks this attempt wise, it will be well, if not—”
“If not,” said Dom Duarte, “I will not consent to the year of tournaments my father proposed for us. It is a mockery, a pretence—I hate false seeming.”
“You do well, my son,” said the English mother; “yet the tournaments might show you fit for real warfare.”
“That might be very well for the younger ones,” said Pedro.
“I am taller than you,” said Enrique, indignantly.
“You said I should be your page, and I will not stay at home,” said Fernando.
“Hush, my boys; do not dispute,” said the Queen. “Remember, the true glory is in doing our duty. If every prince and gentleman went out to war, who would punish evil-doers and succour the distressed at home! Your father, who is the wisest man alive, knows that; and Edward must remember it when his time comes. For you younger ones it will be different. The blessed saints guide you to seek the right, and to be worthy of your forefathers.”
To whatever degree of cultivation and even of virtue the Mohammedan kingdoms had attained among themselves, and whatever injury to learning may have been caused afterwards to mediaeval Christendom by their violent expulsion from the Peninsula, the Moors of Africa were and must have been simply an embodiment of evil. The organised system of piracy which they maintained rendered life and property totally unsafe all along the Mediterranean. A regular system of ransom was in vogue, and where the friends of an unfortunate captive were unable to satisfy their demands, neither rank, nor age, nor calling, was any protection; and noble knights and aged priests were chained to the oars of their galleys, or toiled among the sands of Africa, while their fate remained a mystery to their friends at home—whether death, prolonged suffering, or far worse, apostasy had been their portion. Martyr or renegade, it was an awful choice, to be placed once for all before many an honest, ignorant squire or knight; but “captive among the Moors” was written in many a pedigree of Southern Europe, in some few even of distant countries. More still returned, impoverished by their ransom, to tell of their frightful sufferings; while, most terrible thought of all, girls and children disappeared now and again—to what fate? Every Christian sovereign and gentleman felt the ransom to be a disgraceful black-mail demanded of them, which yet they knew not how to refuse! There is nothing in the modern world that is quite analogous to the situation.
The Moors were the enemies of life and property, like the brigands of our own time, only infinitely more powerful, and as such were feared and hated. They were also, of course, as now, unbelievers, outside the pale of the Church; their conversion was a subject of prayer; they were, or might have been, the objects of missionary labour. But the Moors of the Middle Ages were something more than this. They were not only ignorant of Christ; they were the hereditary enemies of Christendom: not merely of Spain, of Portugal, or of France, nor exactly of the Church Catholic, as we should understand it, but of that sort of visible, territorial embodiment of it for which, in old romance, the Seven Champions fought and which Arthur and his Knights laboured to spread, and the defence of which made honour as well as religion a spur to every Crusader. Therefore it was not only as national and personal enemies, or as blinded heathens, that the knights of Europe regarded the Turks and Moors, but as the powerful foes of Christ’s kingdom on earth, embodied in Christian nations; so that national honour and religious fervour worked together, and glory alike for earth and for Heaven was won in attacking the Crescent with the Cross. It was not only very sad for a Christian man to see the unbeliever triumph, it was very disgraceful also.
Alas! if all the evil in the world could have been so embodied!—if Christendom had had no foes in its own household!—the fight between good and evil would indeed have been simplified, though not dispensed with. It was very clear to an old Christian champion that it was his duty to fight with evil; to do so with a pure heart and unwavering spirit was just as hard then as now. Our heroes lived in the dawn of a new day: when other duties were rising into view, other talents coming to be consecrated, but when the old visible symbolical struggle was still in full force. For faith, for knowledge, for good government, for the honour of Christendom, for the old and the new, they all fought and toiled—and one died.