Every one must come prepared for Spanish trains to go at a leisurely pace—about fifteen miles an hour is the average of the express route. From Palencia to Oviedo was a twelve-hour trip, and the distance covered was a hundred and sixty miles. Of course one crossed the Cantabrian mountains, the continuation of the Pyrenees along the northern coast, and they are no slight barrier since they sometimes rise to a height of 8,000 feet.
We passed the city of León toward noon, when there came a respite from the dull treeless plain, for, beyond the town stretched a thinly-wooded district which gave the first reminder since leaving the Basque valleys that the season still was autumn. After central Spain, the bleak hills that now began seemed positively beautiful,—so many pleasures are relative.
Slowly the train climbed the mountain wall that from earliest times has protected the Asturian principality from the invader. Near the summit, emerging from a tunnel several miles long, we looked out over a glorious panorama, the beauty not being relative this time, but as truly magnificent as some of Switzerland's show views. The storm had covered the peaks with freshest snow, the sky was a frosty dark blue, mountain rose behind mountain for miles, the white road was flung a sinuous ribbon round the folds of the hills; below lay fertile valleys of greenest grass with greenest trees and happy nestling farms. The secure mountain wall gave the Asturian courage to build a home wherever his whim chose. He was not forced like the Castilian by centuries of Moorish inroads to herd in a compact town.
As the puffing train waited for breathing space on the crest of the pass, a group of peasants boarded it. They wore the white wooden clogs of the province that differ from ordinary clogs by having stilts, a couple of inches high, to lift them above the mud; and they brought with them, on a sledge, as wheels are of no use up these steep hills, an antique curiosity of a trunk. We began to hope that old costumes and customs still held in this isolated corner of the world, though the engineering of the road in the descent was disturbingly up-to-date,—a series of loops, cuts, and sharp turns; sometimes three parallel lines of rail over which we were to pass lay one below the other, sometimes directly across the valley we saw our trail; a distance of twenty-six miles is covered where a crow would fly seven.
The principality of Asturias has given its name to the heir apparent of the Spanish crown since the 14th century, when a daughter of the Duke of Lancaster married the Spanish king's eldest son, and her father claimed for her a title equal to that of Prince of Wales to the English throne. The connection by marriage between Spain and England has been a frequent one. It began in the 12th century, when Henry II's daughter married Alfonso VIII of Castile; later the Plantagenet Edward I had for wife a Spanish infanta. From the two daughters of Pedro the Cruel, who married into the English royal family, on one side descended Henry VIII, from the other, by a marriage back again in Spain, sprang Isabella the Catholic. After the ill-fated union of Isabella's daughter with Henry VIII and that of Mary Tudor and Philip II, connection by marriage between Spain and England ceased for centuries. To-day, as all the world knows, the young queen of Spain, Doña Victoria, with the same blonde hair as Isabella, is an Englishwoman, and a rosy little prince bears the title of these distant mountains.
It is a fitting title for the heir to the throne, since this province is the cradle of Spanish nationality, and never was vassal to Roman or Moor. The people are a mixture of the aboriginal Iberians and the Visigoths who were here finally merged in one people and here reconstructed the Spanish monarchy. So proud is an Asturian of his origin that he thinks, like the Basques, that his mere birth confers nobility; every native of the province is an hidalgo. Did not the Asturian lady, the duenna of the Duchess, remark to Don Quixote that her husband was hidalgo como el Rey porque era montañés?
When in 711 the last of the Gothic kings, Roderick, was defeated by the Moors who had lately crossed from Africa, a remnant of the Christian army took refuge in these northern mountains. At Cavadonga, an historic defeat was inflicted on the Moslem army in 718, by Pelayo, Spain's first king, chosen leader because he was the bravest of the people. The Moorish chronicle, too close to the struggle to see its vital issues, speaks of "one Belay, a contemptible barbarian who roused the people of Asturish."
Without Cavadonga the face of Europe had been changed. Had not the Mussulmans from Africa met this repulse, they had pushed on beyond the Pyrenees before the Franks were strong enough to withstand them. Often rose this thought when reading the sentimental regrets for the Moors in Spain found in guide books and histories. Had Spain not warred for eight hundred years against the invader, had she not endured with such Spartan courage the insecurity of life and property caused by ceaseless forays from the south, European civilization had been put back for centuries. Like most virile nations, she has the defect of her qualities, and when the final victory was hers she went too far. But this should not blind us to the nobility of the Reconquista.
Within reach of Cavadonga, sacred to every Spaniard as the cradle of his race and religion, I could not help asking the cause of the ceaseless regret for the Moor. A lover of the picturesque, like Washington Irving, has a right to gloss over the days of the Alhambra, but it seems strange for serious history to hold up the Mohammedan in Spain as a model of cleanliness, industry, and tolerance in contrast to the Christian, in face of the centuries of piracy by sea, the barbarity of African prisons where thousands of Spaniards languished in chains, and also—a thought that often came to me when walking through the filthy, narrow streets in Moslem countries—if the Moor in Spain is to be so regretted, why are not the northern cities of Africa models for modern Christians to emulate? The Moor came from them, and many of his race left Spain to return to them. I would not belittle the Arab civilization in the Peninsula, for under the Ommiade dynasty, Cordova reached a distinguished height of culture, but what I object to is the partisan spirit that places Moors on one side to be praised and extenuated, and Spanish Christians on the other to be condemned. Facts are so distorted that many think the re-conquest of Andalusia meant the substitution of backward ignorance for an enlightened rule, whereas the Moors themselves, long before the coming of their northern conquerors, had destroyed their own higher civilization. The flower of their culture (always an exotic, for Islamism as hitherto interpreted is incapable of strengthening it) was withered before Alfonzo VI and the Cid had set foot further south than Toledo.
Under the Ommiade caliphs, for about five generations, life probably resembled the golden picture drawn for us as typical of Moorish sway. A few able rulers disguised the fact that the government was never anything else but a despotism. This siglo de oro was well over by 1030. Some barbarous warrior tribes, from Africa, the Almoravides, swept away the feeble remains of Ommiade rule, to be in their turn routed by other African invaders, the fanatic Almohades. These last persecuted Averroës as holding views too liberal for a true Mohammedan, and the scholar died in misery and exile, just as in the same century the remarkable Spanish-Jew, Maimonides, was accused of teaching atheism by his fellow Israelites. Rejected by his own people, the fame of Averroës came later through his study by European Schoolmen. His teachings, like most of what is of value in Arab learning, was of Greek origin, and had reached him by way of Persia, which never wholly conformed to the set tenets of Islam. Why do the anti-Spanish historians never mention that in the same era in which Averroës, the philosopher, was persecuted by his fellow-believers, a college of translators under the patronage of the Archbishop Raimundo of Toledo, from 1130 to 1150, put into Latin the most scientific works of the Moors?