As, however, they gradually grew inured to adversity, and understood the few hard advantages which their situation afforded them, they began to make incursions into the territories of their conquerors, and to seize for themselves some part of the fair possessions, once entirely their own. But every inch of ground was defended by the same fervid valor by which it had originally been won. The Christians, indeed, though occasionally defeated, generally gained something by each of their more considerable struggles; but what they gained could be preserved only by an exertion of bravery and military power hardly less painful than that by which it had been acquired. In 801, we find them already possessing a considerable part of Old Castile; but the very name now given to that country, from the multitude of castles with which it was studded, shows plainly the tenure by which the Christians from the mountains were compelled to hold these early fruits of their courage and constancy.[3] A century later, or in 914, they had pushed the outposts of their conquests to the chain of the Guadarrama, separating New from Old Castile, and they may, therefore, at this date, be regarded as having again obtained a firm foothold in their own country, whose capital they established at Leon.
From this period, the Christians seem to have felt assured of final success. In 1085, Toledo, the venerated head of the old monarchy, was wrested from the Moors, who had then possessed it three hundred and sixty-three years; and in 1118, Saragossa was recovered: so that, from the beginning of the twelfth century, the whole Peninsula, down to the Sierra of Toledo, was again occupied by its former masters; and the Moors were pushed back into the southern and western provinces, by which they had originally entered. Their power, however, though thus reduced within limits comprising scarcely more than one third of its extent when it was greatest, seems still to have been rather consolidated than broken; and after three centuries of success, more than three other centuries of conflict were necessary before the fall of Granada finally emancipated the entire country from the loathed dominion of its misbelieving conquerors.
But it was in the midst of this desolating contest, and at a period, too, when the Christians were hardly less distracted by divisions among themselves than worn out and exasperated by the common warfare against the common enemy, that the elements of the Spanish language and poetry, as they have substantially existed ever since, were first developed. For it is precisely between the capture of Saragossa, which insured to the Christians the possession of all the eastern part of Spain, and their great victory on the plains of Tolosa, which so broke the power of the Moors, that they never afterwards recovered the full measure of their former strength,[4]—it is precisely in this century of confusion and violence, when the Christian population of the country may be said, with the old chronicle, to have been kept constantly in battle array, that we hear the first notes of their wild, national poetry, which come to us mingled with their war-shouts, and breathing the very spirit of their victories.[5]
CHAPTER II.
First Appearance of the Spanish as a Written Language. — Poem of the Cid. — Its Hero, Subject, Language, and Verse. — Story of the Poem. — Its Character. — St. Mary of Egypt. — The Adoration of the Three Kings. — Berceo, the first known Castilian Poet. — His Works and Versification. — His San Domingo de Silos. — His Miracles of the Virgin.
The oldest document in the Spanish language with an ascertained date is a confirmation by Alfonso the Seventh, in the year 1155, of a charter of regulations and privileges granted to the city of Avilés in Asturias.[6] It is important, not only because it exhibits the new dialect just emerging from the corrupted Latin, little or not at all affected by the Arabic infused into it in the southern provinces, but because it is believed to be among the very oldest documents ever written in Spanish, since there is no good reason to suppose that language to have existed in a written form even half a century earlier.
How far we can go back towards the first appearance of poetry in this Spanish, or, as it was oftener called, Castilian, dialect is not so precisely ascertained; but we know that we can trace Castilian verse to a period surprisingly near the date of the document of Avilés. It is, too, a remarkable circumstance, that we can thus trace it by works both long and interesting; for, though ballads, and the other forms of popular poetry, by which we mark indistinctly the beginning of almost every other literature, are abundant in the Spanish, we are not obliged to resort to them, at the outset of our inquiries, since other obvious and decisive monuments present themselves at once.
The first of these monuments in age, and the first in importance, is the poem commonly called, with primitive simplicity and directness, “The Poem of the Cid.” It consists of above three thousand lines, and can hardly have been composed later than the year 1200. Its subject, as its name implies, is taken from among the adventures of the Cid, the great popular hero of the chivalrous age of Spain; and the whole tone of its manners and feelings is in sympathy with the contest between the Moors and the Christians, in which the Cid bore so great a part, and which was still going on with undiminished violence at the period when the poem was written. It has, therefore, a national bearing and a national character throughout.[7]
The Cid himself, who is to be found constantly commemorated in Spanish poetry, was born in the northwestern part of Spain, about the year 1040, and died in 1099, at Valencia, which he had rescued from the Moors.[8] His original name was Ruy Diaz, or Rodrigo Diaz; and he was by birth one of the considerable barons of his country. The title of Cid, by which he is almost always known, is believed to have come to him from the remarkable circumstance, that five Moorish kings or chiefs acknowledged him in one battle as their Seid, or their lord and conqueror;[9] and the title of Campeador, or Champion, by which he is hardly less known, though it is commonly supposed to have been given to him as a leader of the armies of Sancho the Second, has long since been used almost exclusively as a popular expression of the admiration of his countrymen for his exploits against the Moors.[10] At any rate, from a very early period, he has been called El Cid Campeador, or The Lord Champion. And he well deserved the honorable title; for he passed almost the whole of his life in the field against the oppressors of his country, suffering, so far as we know, scarcely a single defeat from the common enemy, though, on more than one occasion, he was exiled and sacrificed by the Christian princes to whose interests he had attached himself.