says a Spanish rhyme. Obedience to the king is conditional; it is based upon the monarch's respect for the supreme order of justice, and his submission to a tacit or explicit contract between king and people. Charters, traditions, and usages limit the absolutism of the monarch. In the Cortes of Orcana in 1469 it is declared that the king is the "mercenary" of the people, who pay him a "salary."[[2]] All Spanish obedience is steeped in this kind of pride; the nobles of Aragon feel themselves individually the equals of the king, and collectively his superior. The cities, federated into hermandades or unions, treat with the monarch; they form a State within the State; they oppose the Government and force it to recognise their privileges. In 1226 the cities of Aragon and Catalonia demand of Jaime II. the grant of a charter of popular rights. Insurrections are frequent, and are incarnated in a hero of the rude national epic: the Cid. Mariana, a historian, authorises any violence directed against royal tyranny.
This individualism upholds a strict justice against the narrowness of the laws and the Byzantine debates of lawyers; against sentences, penalties, and tribunals. Poems and proverbs express this continual clash between the juridic ideal and the law; the Peninsular conscience condemns the partial and precarious justice of the codes. Joaquin Costa writes: "Of all the epics known to me—whether national or racial—the Spanish has done most to elevate the principle of justice, and has rendered the cult of justice most fervent." Austere and inviolable, the law represents a category of eternal relations, beside which all individualities are insignificant, even that of the king, and all institutions fragile, even the Church.
Stoical because it believed in pure justice; nourished by rude heroisms, inward visions, romances, and legends; exalted by mystic dialogues, and hardened by centuries of religious wars; the Spanish spirit, full of enthusiasm, entered upon the Renaissance, that sixteenth century which was to reveal the new continents across the ocean, the laws of Nature behind her mystery, and to create imperious personalities which opposed themselves to Fate. Then Spanish individualism broke out into mysticism, audacity, and adventure: it was the epoch of conquistadors, of politicians, of inquisitors, of Jimenez and Pizarro, Torquemada, Loyola, and Cortez. Spain broke through the circle of the Old World, fought in defence of Christian civilisation at Lepanto, and of Catholicism in Germany and Flanders; coveted the Mediterranean countries; colonised an immense and unknown continent; threatened Europe with the religious imperialism of Charles V. and Philip II., and, thanks to the legions of the Duke of Alba, imposed her will on the Pope. Her policy had the old Roman majesty and force; literature had found its "golden age"; philosophy proposed the vast harmonious solutions of Fox Morcillo, and laid down the bases of natural and national law by the pens of Francisco de Vitoria and Domingo de Soto. It was a splendid prodigality of energy, creation, conquest, and heroism—the last stage of a history of violent stoicism, which announced a long and majestic decadence.
Distrustful of hierarchies, Spanish individualism created social and democratic forms. Traditions, doctrines, customs, and laws denoted an exact sense of human equality. "Monachal democracy," said Menendez-Pelayo, in speaking of Spain, because the levelling of all classes offered certain conventual characteristics, and because there was a Christian basis to the fervour of the equalitarians; a "picaresque" democracy, wrote Salillas, alluding to the equality of the knight and the picaro, to the double phenomenon of a proud people making pretensions to nobility and a careless aristocracy continually drifting into democracy by reason of the lack of middle classes and the traditional idleness of the hidalgo. An anarchical democracy, inimical to hierarchy, proud and undisciplined, according to the analysis of Unamuno, in his profound work, En torno al Casticismo; a democratic Cæsarism, thought Oliveira Martins, for the absolutism of the monarch was not feudal royalty, but rather a principality of the Roman type. The king presided over a democracy of knights, mystics, adventurers, and rogues. This spirit of equality may be observed even in the formation of the Spanish aristocracy; the Gothic and hereditary nobility is foreign to the evolution of the Peninsular. The national aristocracy is to be found in the bosom of the Church; it is elective, subject to the current popular vicissitudes, to such a degree that the ecclesiastical councils are more truly national than the military councils and assemblies. Servitude is less rude in mediæval Spain than in the rest of Europe; the cultivator progresses, but disappears from the other side of the Pyrenees before the invasion of feudalism, and the hired or leasehold cultivator is almost free. There are tributary nobles: between the democracy and the nobility there are no irreducible divisions.
This equalitarian development is especially notable in the political world. In Spain feudalism is not a national institution, and the spirit of Gothic kingship becomes transformed under Iberian influences. In Leon and Castile the nobility are less powerful than in France or other parts of Spain, Catalonia, Navarre, and Aragon.[[3]] The social classes are not superimposed in rigorous order; cities acquire franchises, and "popular seigneuries" are formed.
The monarchy, too, undergoes this process of levelling or democratisation. The Emperor aims at equilibrium in equality; he destroys the excessive privileges of the aristocracy and the people; in the political conflict he leans to one side or the other alternately. The popular tongue consecrates the equality of the social classes: "In a hundred years a king becomes a thrall; in a hundred and six a thrall becomes a king." "All are equal to the king, except in wealth."
The Spanish commune lasts, because it is the centre of this great democracy. From the beginnings of Peninsular history we see the cities struggling for their independence. They reproduce the djemaa of the Atlas, beyond the Straits of Gibraltar, amid the Berbers, the parents of the Iberians; the djemaa is the African progenitor of the Spanish commune; both make an equal distribution of goods, and endeavour to avoid poverty. The djemaa, or municipality, or commune, isolated and autonomous, constitutes the political unit: the State is a confederation of free cities. The Spanish towns defend their liberties against every form of artificial unity, whether Phoenician, Greek, or Roman. Rome reigns for seven hundred years; but because she partially recognises the autonomy of the municipalities, the Spanish democracy; she increases civil rights, founds small republics, which elect their own magistrates, administer the communal finances, and discuss the payment of imposts and the distribution of lands in their ward. Thus Spanish individualism is satisfied. Rome, absorbing and centralising under the Cæsars, destroys local liberty; but a deep-seated current re-establishes the autonomy of the peoples when the Roman power decays. Assemblies of free citizens govern the cities; the Visigoth monarchy, at the suggestion of the national Church, respects the municipal organisation. Thus a hybrid system springs up, feudal in the Germanic character of the predominant aristocracy, democratic by virtue of the Councils, the Church, and the tenacious power of the cities. In the struggle against the Moors the kings compound with the proud, free cities, conceding charters and municipal privileges in exchange for a tribute of gold or flesh and blood.
Liberty and democracy are of more ancient date in Spain than in England. The charter of Leon, dated 1020, anterior to the great English charter, grants the municipalities an administrative and judicial jurisdiction; it recognises the hereditary rights of the serf in the soil which he tills, and his full liberty to change his seigneur; herein we see a modified feudalism. The first charters of Castile recognised the rights of the cities. In the councils of Burgos in 1169 and of Leon in 1188 the delegates of the municipalities figured; even in the Cortes of Aragon, where the Germanic tradition was predominant, representatives of the cities were admitted as early as the twelfth century. The overlord, who extended his protectorate over a city, did not despoil it of its former sovereignty; the Behetrias were cities or groups of cities which chose as their guardian a baron or warrior chief, without losing anything of their autonomy. The cities, proud of their privileges, united with the royal power in struggling against the nobility; thirty-four of them, in 1295, constituted the Hermandad (brotherhood, guild) of Castile, which eventually numbered as many as a hundred cities. In ancient Spain we are always discovering something of the nature of a contract, a concert of free wills, a perpetual concordat between governors and governed. From the Iberian tribe to the Roman city, from the city with its franchises to the villages grouped in hermandades, and from these to the popular juntas which defend Spain against the power of France and organise an epic resistance, there is an obvious historical continuity. Local patriotism is inimical to ambitious constructive policies. Many peoples invade the Peninsula—Semites, Berbers, Arabs, Copts, Touaregs, Syrians, Kelts, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Franks, Suabians, Vandals, Goths: they become superimposed like geological strata, draw apart from one another in the mountainous parts of Spain, and convert the quarrels of provinces and the rivalries of cities into regional conflicts and racial antagonisms.
In the clash of Spanish individualities, in the rude assertion of municipal prerogatives, in the democratic developments which are so hostile to any hierarchy, an African or Semitic patriotism is revealed, which converts history into a bloody tragedy. In the arid Castilian plain, confined by its glaring horizons, under its burning sun, we see the spectacle of a proud people defending absolute principles with aggressive faith. Religion is dry and fiery as the desert. Señor de Unamuno, writing of Spain,[[4]] calls her "a nation fanatical rather than superstitious, to whom the Semitic monotheism is better adapted than the Aryan polytheism." Jews and Moors are expelled from the Peninsula in the name of simple and rigid ideals, by an intolerance at once religious and political. Thus the spiritual integrity of Spain is achieved; but industry decays, poverty increases, decadence appears, and in a Spain drained of its blood by autodafés and emigrations a solitary cross is raised, the symbol of an African Christianity, to which the love of mankind is a stranger.