Of the Cántigas, there are extant no less than four hundred and one, composed in lines of from six to twelve syllables, and rhymed with a considerable degree of exactness.[44] Their measure and manner are Provençal. They are devoted to the praises and the miracles of the Madonna, in whose honor the king founded in 1279 a religious and military order;[45] and in devotion to whom, by his last will, he directed these poems to be perpetually chanted in the church of Saint Mary of Murcia, where he desired his body might be buried.[46] Only a few of them have been printed; but we have enough to show what they are, and especially that they are written, not in the Castilian, like the rest of his works, but in the Galician; an extraordinary circumstance, for which it does not seem easy to give a satisfactory reason.
The Galician, however, was originally an important language in Spain, and for some time seemed as likely to prevail throughout the country as any other of the dialects spoken in it. It was probably the first that was developed in the northwestern part of the Peninsula, and the second that was reduced to writing. For in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, just at the period when the struggling elements of the modern Spanish were disencumbering themselves from the forms of the corrupted Latin, Galicia, by the wars and troubles of the times, was repeatedly separated from Castile, so that distinct dialects appeared in the two different territories almost at the same moment. Of these, the Northern is likely to have been the older, though the Southern proved ultimately the more fortunate. At any rate, even without a court, which was the surest centre of culture in such rude ages, and without any of the reasons for the development of a dialect which always accompany political power, we know that the Galician was already sufficiently formed to pass with the conquering arms of Alfonso the Sixth, and establish itself firmly between the Douro and the Minho; that country which became the nucleus of the independent kingdom of Portugal.
This was between the years 1095 and 1109; and though the establishment of a Burgundian dynasty on the throne erected there naturally brought into the dialect of Portugal an infusion of the French, which never appeared in the dialect of Galicia,[47] still the language spoken in the two territories under different sovereigns and different influences continued substantially the same for a long period; perhaps down to the time of Charles the Fifth.[48] But it was only in Portugal that there was a court, or that means and motives were found sufficient for forming and cultivating a regular language. It is therefore only in Portugal that this common dialect of both the territories appears with a separate and proper literature;[49] the first intimation of which, with an exact date, is found as early as 1192. This is a document in prose.[50] The oldest poetry is to be sought in three curious fragments, originally published by Faria y Sousa, which can hardly be placed much later than the year 1200.[51] Both show that the Galician in Portugal, under less favorable circumstances than those which accompanied the Castilian in Spain, rose at the same period to be a written language, and possessed, perhaps, quite as early, the materials for forming an independent literature.
We may fairly infer, therefore, from these facts, indicating the vigor of the Galician in Portugal before the year 1200, that, in its native province in Spain, it is somewhat older. But we have no monuments by which to establish such antiquity. Castro, it is true, notices a manuscript translation of the history of Servandus, as if made in 1150 by Seguino, in the Galician dialect; but he gives no specimen of it, and his own authority in such a matter is not sufficient.[52] And in the well-known letter sent to the Constable of Portugal by the Marquis of Santillana, about the middle of the fifteenth century, we are told that all Spanish poetry was written for a long time in Galician or Portuguese;[53] but this is so obviously either a mistake in fact, or a mere compliment to the Portuguese prince to whom it was addressed, that Sarmiento, full of prejudices in favor of his native province, and desirous to arrive at the same conclusion, is obliged to give it up as wholly unwarranted.[54]
We must come back, therefore, to the “Cántigas” or Chants of Alfonso, as to the oldest specimen extant in the Galician dialect distinct from the Portuguese; and since, from internal evidence, one of them was written after he had conquered Xerez, we may place them between 1263, when that event occurred, and 1284, when he died.[55] Why he should have chosen this particular dialect for this particular form of poetry, when he had, as we know, an admirable mastery of the Castilian, and when these Cántigas, according to his last will, were to be chanted over his tomb, in a part of the kingdom where the Galician dialect never prevailed, we cannot now decide.[56] His father, Saint Ferdinand, was from the North, and his own early nurture there may have given Alfonso himself a strong affection for its language; or, what perhaps is more probable, there may have been something in the dialect itself, its origin or its gravity, which, at a period when no dialect in Spain had obtained an acknowledged supremacy, made it seem to him better suited than the Castilian or Valencian to religious purposes.
But however this may be, all the rest of his works are in the language spoken in the centre of the Peninsula, while his Cántigas are in the Galician. Some of them have considerable poetical merit; but in general they are to be remarked only for the variety of their metres, for an occasional tendency to the form of ballads, for a lyrical tone, which does not seem to have been earlier established in the Castilian, and for a kind of Doric simplicity, which belongs partly to the dialect he adopted and partly to the character of the author himself;—the whole bearing the impress of the Provençal poets, with whom he was much connected, and whom through life he patronized and maintained at his court.[57]
The other poetry attributed to Alfonso—except two stanzas that remain of his “Complaints” against the hard fortune of the last years of his life[58]—is to be sought in the treatise called “Del Tesoro,” which is divided into two short books, and dated in 1272. It is on the Philosopher’s Stone, and the greater portion of it is concealed in an unexplained cipher; the remainder being partly in prose and partly in octave stanzas, which are the oldest extant in Castilian verse. But the whole is worthless, and its genuineness doubtful.[59]
Alfonso claims his chief distinction in letters as a writer of prose. In this his merit is great. He first made the Castilian a national language by causing the Bible to be translated into it, and by requiring it to be used in all legal proceedings;[60] and he first, by his great Code and other works, gave specimens of prose composition which left a free and disencumbered course for all that has been done since,—a service perhaps greater than it has been permitted any other Spaniard to render the prose literature of his country. To this, therefore, we now turn.
And here the first work we meet with is one that was rather compiled under his direction, than written by himself. It is called “The Great Conquest beyond Sea,” and is an account of the wars in the Holy Land, which then so much agitated the minds of men throughout Europe, and which were intimately connected with the fate of the Christian Spaniards still struggling for their own existence in a perpetual crusade against misbelief at home. It begins with the history of Mohammed, and comes down to the year 1270; much of it being taken from an old French version of the work of William of Tyre, on the same general subject, and the rest from other less trustworthy sources. But parts of it are not historical. The grandfather of Godfrey of Bouillon, its hero, is the wild and fanciful Knight of the Swan, who is almost as much a representative of the spirit of chivalry as Amadis de Gaul, and goes through adventures no less marvellous; fighting on the Rhine like a knight-errant, and miraculously warned by a swallow how to rescue his lady, who has been made prisoner. Unhappily, in the only edition of this curious work,—printed in 1503,—the text has received additions that make us doubtful how much of it may be certainly ascribed to the time of Alfonso the Tenth, in whose reign and by whose order the greater part of it seems to have been prepared. It is chiefly valuable as a specimen of early Spanish prose.[61]
Castilian prose, in fact, can hardly be said to have existed earlier, unless we are willing to reckon as specimens of it the few meagre documents, generally grants in hard legal forms, that begin with the one concerning Avilés in 1155, already noticed, and come down, half bad Latin and half unformed Spanish, to the time of Alfonso.[62] The first monument, therefore, that can be properly cited for this purpose, though it dates from the reign of Saint Ferdinand, the father of Alfonso, is one in preparing which, it has always been supposed, Alfonso himself was personally concerned. It is the “Fuero Juzgo,” or “Forum Judicum,” a collection of Visigoth laws, which, in 1241, after his conquest of Córdova, Saint Ferdinand sent to that city in Latin, with directions that it should be translated into the vulgar dialect, and observed there as the law of the territory he had then newly rescued from the Moors.[63]