This was singularly the misfortune and the fate of the Provençal and of the two principal dialects into which it was modified and moulded. For the Provençal started forth in the darkest period Europe had seen since Grecian civilization had first dawned on the world. It kindled, at once, all the South of France with its brightness, and spread its influence, not only into the neighbouring countries, but even to the courts of the cold and unfriendly North. It flourished long, with a tropical rapidity and luxuriance, and gave token, from the first, of a light-hearted spirit, that promised, in the fulness of its strength, to produce a poetry, different, no doubt, from that of antiquity, with which it had no real connection, but yet a poetry as fresh as the soil from which it sprang, and as genial as the climate by which it was quickened. But the cruel and shameful war of the Albigenses drove the Troubadours over the Pyrenees, and the revolutions of political power and the prevalence of the spirit of the North crushed them on the Spanish shores of the Mediterranean. We follow, therefore, with a natural and inevitable regret, their long and wearisome retreat, marked as it is everywhere with the wrecks and fragments of their peculiar poetry and cultivation, from Aix to Barcelona, and from Barcelona to Saragossa and Valencia, where, oppressed by the prouder and more powerful Castilian, what remained of the language that gave the first impulse to poetical feeling in modern times sinks into a neglected dialect, and, without having attained the refinement that would preserve its name and its glory to future times, becomes as much a dead language as the Greek or the Latin.[567]
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Provençal and Courtly School in Castilian Literature. — Partly influenced by the Literature of Italy. — Connection Of Spain With Italy, Religious, Intellectual, and Political. — Similarity of Language in the two Countries. — Translations from the Italian. — Reign of John the Second. — Troubadours and Minnesingers throughout Europe. — Court of Castile. — The King. — The Marquis of Villena. — His Art of Carving. — His Art of Poetry. — His Labors of Hercules.
The Provençal literature, which appeared so early in Spain, and which, during the greater part of the period when it prevailed there, was in advance of the poetical culture of nearly all the rest of Europe, could not fail to exercise an influence on the Castilian, springing up and flourishing at its side. But, as we proceed, we must notice the influence of another literature over the Spanish, less visible and important at first than that of the Provençal, but destined subsequently to become much wider and more lasting;—I mean, of course, the Italian.
The origin of this influence is to be traced far back in the history of the Spanish character and civilization. Long, indeed, before a poetical spirit had been reawakened anywhere in the South of Europe, the Spanish Christians, through the wearisome centuries of their contest with the Moors, had been accustomed to look towards Italy as to the seat of a power whose foundations were laid in faith and hopes extending far beyond the mortal struggle in which they were engaged; not because the Papal See, in its political capacity, had then obtained any wide authority in Spain, but because, from the peculiar exigencies and trials of their condition, the religion of the Romish Church had nowhere found such implicit and faithful followers as the body of the Spanish Christians.
In truth, from the time of the great Arab invasion down to the fall of Granada, this devoted people had rarely come into political relations with the rest of Europe. Engrossed and exhausted by their wars at home, they had, on the one hand, hardly been at all the subjects of foreign cupidity or ambition; and, on the other, they had been little able, even when they most desired it, to connect themselves with the stirring interests of the world beyond their mountains, or attract the sympathy of those more favored countries which, with Italy at their head, were coming up to constitute the civilized power of Christendom. But the Spaniards always felt their warfare to be peculiarly that of soldiers of the Cross; they always felt themselves, beyond every thing else and above every thing else, to be Christian men contending against misbelief. Their religious sympathies were, therefore, constantly apparent, and often predominated over all others; so that, while they were little connected with the Church of Rome by those political ties that were bringing half Europe into bondage, they were more connected with its religious spirit than any other people of modern times; more even than the armies of the Crusaders whom that same Church had summoned out of all Christendom, and to whom it had given whatever of its own resources and character it was able to impart.
To these religious influences of Italy upon Spain were early added those of a higher intellectual culture. Before the year 1300, Italy possessed at least five universities; some of them famous throughout Europe, and attracting students from its most distant countries. Spain, at the same period, possessed not one, except that of Salamanca, which was in a very unsettled state.[568] Even during the next century, those established at Huesca and Valladolid produced comparatively little effect. The whole Peninsula was still in too disturbed a state for any proper encouragement of letters; and those persons, therefore, who wished to be taught, resorted, some of them, to Paris, but more to Italy. At Bologna, which was probably the oldest, and for a long time the most distinguished, of the Italian universities, we know Spaniards were received and honored, during the thirteenth century, both as students and as professors.[569] At Padua, the next in rank, a Spaniard, in 1260, was made the Rector, or presiding officer.[570] And, no doubt, in all the great Italian places of education, which were easily accessible, especially in those of Rome and Naples, Spaniards early sought the culture that was either not then to be obtained in their own country, or to be had only with difficulty or by accident.
In the next century, the instruction of Spaniards in Italy was put upon a more permanent foundation, by Cardinal Carillo de Albornoz; a prelate, a statesman, and a soldier, who, as Archbishop of Toledo, was head of the Spanish Church in the reign of Alfonso the Eleventh, and who afterwards, as regent for the Pope, conquered and governed a large part of the Roman States, which, in the time of Rienzi, had fallen off from their allegiance. This distinguished personage, during his residence in Italy, felt the necessity of better means for the education of his countrymen, and founded, for their especial benefit, at Bologna, in 1364, the College of Saint Clement,—a munificent institution, which has subsisted down to our own age.[571] From the middle of the fourteenth century, therefore, it cannot be doubted that the most direct means existed for the transmission of culture from Italy to Spain; one of the most striking proofs of which is to be found in the case of Antonio de Lebrixa, commonly called Nebrissensis, who was educated at this college in the century following its first foundation, and who, on his return home, did more to advance the cause of letters in Spain than any other scholar of his time.[572]
Commercial and political relations still further promoted a free communication of the manners and literature of Italy to Spain. Barcelona, long the seat of a cultivated court,—a city whose liberal institutions had given birth to the first bank of exchange, and demanded the first commercial code of modern times,—had, from the days of James the Conqueror, exercised a sensible influence round the shores of the Mediterranean, and come into successful competition with the enterprise of Pisa and Genoa, even in the ports of Italy. The knowledge and refinement its ships brought back, joined to the spirit of commercial adventure that sent them out, rendered Barcelona, therefore, in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, one of the most magnificent cities in Europe, and carried its influence not only quite through the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, of which it was in many respects the capital, but into the neighbouring kingdom of Castile, with which that of Aragon was, during much of this period, intimately connected.[573]