The glorious reign of Jayme or James the Conqueror, which followed, and extended from 1213 to 1276, exhibits the same poetical character with that of the less fortunate reign of his immediate predecessor. He protected the Troubadours, and the Troubadours, in return, praised and honored him. Guillaume Anélier addressed a sirvente to him as “the young king of Aragon, who defends mercy and discountenances wrong.”[506] Nat de Mons sent him two poetical letters, one of which gives him advice concerning the composition of his court and government.[507] Arnaud Plagnés offered a chanso to his fair queen, Eleanor of Castile;[508] and Mathieu de Querci, who survived the great conqueror, poured forth at his grave the sorrows of his Christian compatriots at the loss of the great champion on whom they had depended in their struggle with the Moors.[509] At the same period, too, Hugues de Mataplana, a noble Catalan, held at his castle courts of love and poetical contests, in which he himself bore a large part;[510] while one of his neighbours, Guillaume de Bergédan, no less distinguished by poetical talent and ancient descent, but of a less honorable nature, indulged himself in a style of verse more gross than can easily be found elsewhere in the Troubadour poetry.[511] All, however, the bad and the good,—those who, like Sordel[512] and Bernard de Rovenac,[513] satirized the king, and those who, like Pierre Cardenal, enjoyed his favor and praised him,[514]—all show that the Troubadours, in his reign, continued to seek protection in Catalonia and Aragon, where they had so long been accustomed to find it, and that their poetry was constantly taking deeper root in a soil where its nourishment was now become so sure.
James himself has sometimes been reckoned among the poets of his age.[515] It is possible, though none of his poetry has been preserved, that he really was such; for metrical composition was easy in the flowing language he spoke, and it had evidently grown common at his court, where the examples of his father and grandfather, as Troubadours, would hardly be without their effect. But however this may be, he loved letters, and left behind him a large prose work, more in keeping than any poetry with his character as a wise monarch and successful conqueror, whose legislation and government were far in advance of the condition of his subjects.[516]
The work here referred to is a chronicle or commentary on the principal events of his reign, divided into four parts;—the first of which is on the troubles that followed his accession to the throne, after a long minority, with the rescue of Majorca and Minorca from the Moors, between 1229 and 1233; the second is on the greater conquest of the kingdom of Valencia, which was substantially ended in 1239, so that the hated misbelievers never again obtained any firm foothold in all the northeastern part of the Peninsula; the third is on the war James prosecuted in Murcia, till 1266, for the benefit of his kinsman, Alfonso the Wise, of Castile; and the last is on the embassies he received from the Khan of Tartary, and Michael Palæologus of Constantinople, and on his own attempt, in 1268, to lead an expedition to Palestine, which was defeated by storms. The story, however, is continued to the end of his reign by slight notices, which, except the last, preserve throughout the character of an autobiography; the very last, which, in a few words, records his death at Valencia, being the only portion written in the third person.
From this Chronicle of James the Conqueror there was early taken an account of the conquest of Valencia, beginning in the most simple-hearted manner with the conversation the king held at Alcañiç (Alcañizas) with Don Blasco de Alagon and the Master of the Hospitallers, Nuch de Follalquer, who urge him, by his successes in Minorca, to undertake the greater achievement of the conquest of Valencia; and ending with the troubles that followed the partition of the spoils after the fall of that rich kingdom and its capital. This last work was printed in 1515, in a magnificent volume, where it serves for an appropriate introduction to the Foros, or privileges, granted to the city of Valencia from the time of its conquest down to the end of the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic;[517] but the complete work, the Chronicle, did not appear till 1557, when it was published to satisfy a requisition of Philip the Second.[518]
It is written in a simple and manly style, which, without making pretensions to elegance, often sets before us the events it records with a living air of reality, and sometimes shows a happiness in manner and phraseology which effort seldom reaches. Whether it was undertaken in consequence of the impulse given to such vernacular histories by Alfonso the Tenth of Castile, in his “General Chronicle of Spain,” or whether the intimations which gave birth to that remarkable Chronicle came rather from Aragon, we cannot now determine. Probably both works were produced in obedience to the demands of their age; but still, as both must have been written at nearly the same time, and as the two kings were united by a family alliance and constant intercourse, a full knowledge of whatever relates to these two curious records of different parts of the Peninsula would hardly fail to show us some connection between them. In that case, it is by no means impossible that the precedence in point of time would be found to belong to the Chronicle of the king of Aragon, who was not only older than Alfonso, but was frequently his wise and efficient counsellor.[519]
But James of Aragon was fortunate in having yet another chronicler, Ramon Muntaner, born at Peralada, nine years before the death of that monarch; a Catalan gentleman, who in his old age, after a life of great adventure, felt himself to be specially summoned to write an account of his own times.[520] “For one day,” he says, “being in my country-house, called Xilvella, in the garden plain of Valencia, and sleeping in my bed, there came unto me in vision a venerable old man, clad in white raiment, who said unto me, ‘Arise, and stand on thy feet, Muntaner, and think how to declare the great wonders thou hast seen, which God hath brought to pass in the wars where thou wast; for it hath seemed well pleasing to Him that through thee should all these things be made manifest.’” At first, he tells us, he was disobedient to the heavenly vision, and unmoved by the somewhat flattering reasons vouchsafed him, why he was elected to chronicle matters so notable. “But another day, in that same place,” he goes on, “I beheld again that venerable man, who said unto me, ‘O my son, what doest thou? Why dost thou despise my commandment? Arise, and do even as I have bidden thee! And know of a truth, if thou so doest, that thou and thy children and thy kinsfolk and thy friends shall find favor in the sight of God.’” Being thus warned a second time, he undertook the work. It was, he tells us, the fifteenth day of May, 1325, when he began it; and when it was completed, as it notices events which happened in April, 1328, it is plain that its composition must have occupied at least three years.
It opens, with much simplicity, with a record of the earliest important event he remembered, a visit of the great conqueror of Valencia at the house of his father, when he was himself a mere child.[521] The impression of such a visit on a boyish imagination would naturally be deep;—in the case of Muntaner it seems to have been peculiarly so. From that moment the king became to him, not only the hero he really was, but something more; one whose very birth was miraculous, and whose entire life was filled with more grace and favor than God had ever before shown to living man; for, as the fond old chronicler will have it, “He was the goodliest prince in the world, and the wisest and the most gracious and the most upright, and one that was more loved than any king ever was of all men; both of his own subjects and strangers, and of noble gentlemen everywhere.”[522]
The life of the Conqueror, however, serves merely as an introduction to the work; for Muntaner announces his purpose to speak of little that was not within his own knowledge; and of the Conqueror’s reign he could remember only the concluding glories. His Chronicle, therefore, consists chiefly of what happened in the time of four princes of the same house, and especially of Peter the Third, his chief hero. He ornaments his story, however, once with a poem two hundred and forty lines long, which he gave to James the Second, and his son Alfonso, by way of advice and caution, when the latter was about to embark for the conquest of Sardinia and Corsica.[523]
The whole work is curious, and strongly marked with the character of its author;—a man brave, loving adventure and show; courteous and loyal; not without intellectual training, yet no scholar; and, though faithful and disinterested, either quite unable to conceal, or quite willing, at every turn, to exhibit, his good-natured personal vanity. His fidelity to the family of Aragon was admirable. He was always in their service; often in captivity for them; and engaged at different times in no less than thirty-two battles in defence of their rights, or in furtherance of their conquests from the Moors. His life, indeed, was a life of knightly loyalty, and nearly all the two hundred and ninety-eight chapters of his Chronicle are as full of its spirit as his heart was.
In relating what he himself saw and did, his statements seem to be accurate, and are certainly lively and fresh; but elsewhere he sometimes falls into errors of date, and sometimes exhibits a good-natured credulity that makes him believe many of the impossibilities that were related to him. In his gay spirit and love of show, as well as in his simple, but not careless, style, he reminds us of Froissart, especially at the conclusion of the whole Chronicle, which he ends, evidently to his own satisfaction, with an elaborate account of the ceremonies observed at the coronation of Alfonso the Fourth at Saragossa, which he attended in state as syndic of the city of Valencia; the last event recorded in the work, and the last we hear of its knightly old author, who was then near his grand climacteric.