[221] Isidore Justin Severin, Baron Taylor, was born at Brussels in 1789. His father was an Englishman, and his mother half Irish, half Flemish. Isidore was naturalized as a Frenchman, and after serious studies and artistic travels throughout Europe, he returned to France on the Restoration with a commission in the Royal Guard. His Bertram, written in collaboration with Charles Nodier, had a great success on the Paris stage in 1821. In 1823 he accompanied the French army to Spain, and on his return was made Commissaire Royal du Théâtre Français, in which capacity he authorized the production of Hernani and the Mariage de Figaro. In 1833 he arranged for the transport of the two obelisks from Luxor to Paris, and in 1835 he was commissioned by Louis Philippe with an artistic mission to Spain to purchase pictures for the Louvre, and on his return, having transferred the Standish collection of paintings from London to Paris, he was named Inspecteur-Général des beaux arts in 1838. He died in 1879.
[223] Alcalá de Guadaira; Arabic, Al-Kal’ah, the fort, or castle. A name necessarily often repeated in Spain, where the Goths, who are so proudly remembered, have left so few records of their three hundred years’ dominion in the place-names of the Peninsula, and where the Arab, at all times detested, is yet remembered in the modern names of wellnigh every town, river, and headland in Southern Spain, and in many places throughout the entire Peninsula. The most celebrated of all these castles is, of course, Alcalá de Henares, the birthplace of Cervantes, the seat of the great university of Ximenes. This Alcalá is known as that of Guadaira, i.e. the river of Aira, the Arabic Wady al Aira. The town at the present day, though small, is a very important place, with some eight thousand inhabitants, and over two hundred flour-mills, and is known as the “oven of Seville,” El horno de Sevilla. Carmona—the Roman Carmo and Arab Karmanah—with double the population, was the last stronghold of Peter the Cruel, and is full of historic associations.
[226] Madoz, in his Diccionario Geografico-estadistico, published in 1846, half a dozen years after the date of Borrow’s visit, says nothing under Carolina, Carlota, or Luisiana of this supposed German colonization. Yet Carolina and eighty-four neighbouring villages form a most interesting district, known as the Nuevas poblaciones de Sierra Morena, especially exempted from taxation and conscription on their foundation or incorporation by Olavides, the Minister of Charles III., in 1768. It is possible that some German colonists were introduced at that time. Among the eighty-five pueblos constituting this strange district is the historic Navas de Tolosa, where the Moors were so gloriously defeated in 1212.
[230] Wellington.
[232] Cordova was taken on October 1, 1836.
[234] “Look you, what men they were!”
[235a] ‘The king has come, the king has come, and disembarked at Belem.’—Miguelite song.
[235b] Charles V., or Carlos Quinto, is the title all too meekly accorded even in Spain to their king Charles I., fifth only of German Karls on the imperial throne, the Holy Roman Emperor. If Charles himself was not unpopular in Spain, even though he kept his mother Joanna, the legitimate queen, under lock and key, that he might reign as Charles the First in Spain, his Germans and his Germanism were devoutly hated. The next Carlos who reigned in Spain, correctly styled the Second, was nearly a fool, but Charles III. was the best and most enlightened of the sovereigns of Spain until the days of Alfonso XII. Charles IV. abdicated under pressure of Napoleon in 1808, and then Don Carlos the Pretender naturally assumed the style and title of Charles the Fifth.
[236a] See Introduction.
[236b] The Genoese was presumably referring to the sister-in-law of Don Carlos, called La Beira. See Ford, Handbook of Spain, 1st edit., p. 822.