What was the result of all this widely spread diplomacy, so extraordinary at the end of the fourteenth century, we do not know, except that the first ambassadors sent to Tamerlane and Bajazet chanced actually to be present at the great and decisive battle between those two preponderating powers of the East, and that Tamerlane sent a splendid embassy in return, with some of the spoils of his victory, among which were two fair captives, who figure in the Spanish poetry of the time.[323] King Henry was not ungrateful for such a tribute of respect, and, to acknowledge it, despatched to Tamerlane three persons of his court, one of whom, Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, has left us a minute account of the whole embassy, its adventures and its results. This account was first published by Argote de Molina, the careful antiquary of the time of Philip the Second,[324] and was then called, probably in order to give it a more winning title, “The Life of the Great Tamerlane,”—Vida del Gran Tamurlan,—though it is, in fact, a diary of the voyagings and residences of the ambassadors of Henry the Third, beginning in May, 1403, when they embarked at Puerto Santa María, near Cadiz, and ending in March, 1406, when they landed there on their return.
In the course of it, we have a description of Constantinople, which is the more curious because it is given at the moment when it tottered to its fall;[325] of Trebizond, with its Greek churches and clergy;[326] of Teheran, now the capital of Persia;[327] and of Samarcand, where they found the great Conqueror himself, and were entertained by him with a series of magnificent festivals continuing almost to the moment of his death,[328] which happened while they were at his court, and was followed by troubles embarrassing to their homeward journey.[329] The honest Clavijo seems to have been well pleased to lay down his commission at the feet of his sovereign, whom he found at Alcalá; and though he lingered about the court for a year, and was one of the witnesses of the king’s will at Christmas, yet on the death of Henry he retired to Madrid, his native place, where he spent the last four or five years of his life, and where, in 1412, he was buried in the convent of Saint Francis, with his fathers, whose chapel he had piously rebuilt.[330]
His travels will not, on the whole, suffer by a comparison with those of Marco Polo or Sir John Mandeville; for, though his discoveries are much less in extent than those of the Venetian merchant, they are, perhaps, as remarkable as those of the English adventurer, while the manner in which he has presented them is superior to that of either. His Spanish loyalty and his Catholic faith are everywhere apparent. He plainly believes that his modest embassy is making an impression of his king’s power and importance, on the countless and careless multitudes of Asia, which will not be effaced; while, in the luxurious capital of the Greek empire, he seems to look for little but the apocryphal relics of saints and apostles which then burdened the shrines of its churches. With all this, however, we may be content, because it is national; but when we find him filling the island of Ponza with buildings erected by Virgil,[331] and afterwards, as he passes Amalfi, taking note of it only because it contained the head of Saint Andrew,[332] we are obliged to recall his frankness, his zeal, and all his other good qualities, before we can be quite reconciled to his ignorance. Mariana, indeed, intimates, that, after all, his stories are not to be wholly believed. But, as in the case of other early travellers, whose accounts were often discredited merely because they were so strange, more recent and careful inquiries have confirmed Clavijo’s narrative; and we may now trust to his faithfulness as much as to the vigilant and penetrating spirit he shows constantly, except when his religious faith, or his hardly less religious loyalty, interferes with its exercise.[333]
But the great voyagings of the Spaniards were not destined to be in the East. The Portuguese, led on originally by Prince Henry, one of the most extraordinary men of his age, had, as it were, already appropriated to themselves that quarter of the world by discovering the easy route of the Cape of Good Hope; and, both by the right of discovery and by the provisions of the well-known Papal bull and the equally well-known treaty of 1479, had cautiously cut off their great rivals, the Spaniards, from all adventure in that direction; leaving open to them only the wearisome waters that were stretched out unmeasured towards the West. Happily, however, there was one man to whose courage even the terrors of this unknown and dreaded ocean were but spurs and incentives, and whose gifted vision, though sometimes dazzled from the height to which he rose, could yet see, beyond the waste of waves, that broad continent which his fervent imagination deemed needful to balance the world. It is true, Columbus was not born a Spaniard. But his spirit was eminently Spanish. His loyalty, his religious faith and enthusiasm, his love of great and extraordinary adventure, were all Spanish rather than Italian, and were all in harmony with the Spanish national character, when he became a part of its glory. His own eyes, he tells us, had watched the silver cross, as it slowly rose, for the first time, above the towers of the Alhambra, announcing to the world the final and absolute overthrow of the infidel power in Spain;[334] and from that period,—or one even earlier, when some poor monks from Jerusalem had been at the camp of the two sovereigns before Granada, praying for help and protection against the unbelievers in Palestine,—he had conceived the grand project of consecrating the untold wealth he trusted to find in his westward discoveries, by devoting it to the rescue of the Holy City and sepulchre of Christ; thus achieving, by his single power and resources, what all Christendom and its ages of crusades had failed to accomplish.[335]
Gradually these and other kindred ideas took firm possession of his mind, and are found occasionally in his later journals, letters, and speculations, giving to his otherwise quiet and dignified style a tone elevated and impassioned like that of prophecy. It is true, that his adventurous spirit, when the mighty mission of his life was upon him, rose above all this, and, with a purged vision and through a clearer atmosphere, saw, from the outset, what he at last so gloriously accomplished; but still, as he presses onward, there not unfrequently break from him words which leave no doubt, that, in his secret heart, the foundations of his great hopes and purposes were laid in some of the most magnificent illusions that are ever permitted to fill the human mind. He believed himself to be, in some degree at least, inspired; and to be chosen of Heaven to fulfil certain of the solemn and grand prophecies of the Old Testament.[336] He wrote to his sovereigns in 1501, that he had been induced to undertake his voyages to the Indies, not by virtue of human knowledge, but by a Divine impulse, and by the force of Scriptural prediction.[337] He declared, that the world could not continue to exist more than a hundred and fifty-five years longer, and that, many a year before that period, he counted the recovery of the Holy City to be sure.[338] He expressed his belief, that the terrestrial paradise, about which he cites the fanciful speculations of Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustin, would be found in the southern regions of those newly discovered lands, which he describes with so charming an amenity, and that the Orinoco was one of the mystical rivers issuing from it; intimating, at the same time, that, perchance, he alone of mortal men would, by the Divine will, be enabled to reach and enjoy it.[339] In a remarkable letter of sixteen pages, addressed to his sovereigns from Jamaica in 1503, and written with a force of style hardly to be found in any thing similar at the same period, he gives a moving account of a miraculous vision, which he believed had been vouchsafed to him for his consolation, when at Veragua, a few months before, a body of his men, sent to obtain salt and water, had been cut off by the natives, thus leaving him outside the mouth of the river in great peril.
“My brother and the rest of the people,” he says, “were in a vessel that remained within, and I was left solitary on a coast so dangerous, with a strong fever and grievously worn down. Hope of escape was dead within me. I climbed aloft with difficulty, calling anxiously and not without many tears for help upon your Majesties’ captains from all the four winds of heaven. But none made me answer. Wearied and still moaning, I fell asleep, and heard a pitiful voice which said: ‘O fool, and slow to trust and serve thy God, the God of all! What did He more for Moses, or for David his servant? Ever since thou wast born, thou hast been His especial charge. When He saw thee at the age wherewith He was content, He made thy name to sound marvellously on the earth. The Indies, which are a part of the world, and so rich, He gave them to thee for thine own, and thou hast divided them unto others as seemed good to thyself, for He granted thee power to do so. Of the barriers of the great ocean, which were bound up with such mighty chains, He hath given unto thee the keys. Thou hast been obeyed in many lands, and thou hast gained an honored name among Christian men. What did He more for the people of Israel when He led them forth from Egypt? or for David, whom from a shepherd He made king in Judea? Turn thou, then, again unto Him, and confess thy sin. His mercy is infinite. Thine old age shall not hinder thee of any great thing. Many inheritances hath He, and very great. Abraham was above a hundred years old when he begat Isaac; and Sarah, was she young? Thou callest for uncertain help; answer, Who hath afflicted thee so much and so often? God or the world? The privileges and promises that God giveth, He breaketh not, nor, after he hath received service, doth He say that thus was not his mind, and that His meaning was other. Neither punisheth He, in order to hide a refusal of justice. What He promiseth, that He fulfilleth, and yet more. And doth the world thus? I have told thee what thy Maker hath done for thee, and what He doth for all. Even now He in part showeth thee the reward of the sorrows and dangers thou hast gone through in serving others.’ All this heard I, as one half dead; but answer had I none to words so true, save tears for my sins. And whosoever it might be that thus spake, he ended, saying, ‘Fear not; be of good cheer; all these thy griefs are written in marble, and not without cause.’ And I arose as soon as I might, and at the end of nine days the weather became calm.”[340]
Three years afterwards, in 1506, Columbus died at Valladolid, a disappointed, broken-hearted old man; little comprehending what he had done for mankind, and still less the glory and homage that through all future generations awaited his name.[341]
But the mantle of his devout and heroic spirit fell on none of his successors. The discoveries of the new continent, which was soon ascertained to be no part of Asia, were indeed prosecuted with spirit and success by Balboa, by Vespucci, by Hojeda, by Pedrárias Dávila, by the Portuguese Magellanes, by Loaisa, by Saavedra, and by many more; so that in twenty-seven years the general outline and form of the New World were, through their reports, fairly presented to the Old. But though some of these early adventurers, like Hojeda, were men apparently of honest principles, who suffered much, and died in poverty and sorrow, yet none had the lofty spirit of the original discoverer, and none spoke or wrote with the tone of dignity and authority that came naturally from a man whose character was so elevated, and whose convictions and purposes were founded in some of the deepest and most mysterious feelings of our religious nature.[342]
Romantic Chronicles.—It only remains now to speak of one other class of the old chronicles; a class hardly represented in this period by more than a single specimen, but that a very curious one, and one which, by its date and character, brings us to the end of our present inquiries, and marks the transition to those that are to follow. The Chronicle referred to is that called “The Chronicle of Don Roderic, with the Destruction of Spain,” and is an account, chiefly fabulous, of the reign of King Roderic, the conquest of the country by the Moors, and the first attempts to recover it in the beginning of the eighth century. An edition is cited as early as 1511, and six in all may be enumerated, including the last, which is of 1587; thus showing a good degree of popularity, if we consider the number of readers in Spain in the sixteenth century.[343] Its author is quite unknown. According to the fashion of the times, it professes to have been written by Eliastras, one of the personages who figures in it; but he is killed in battle just before we reach the end of the book; and the remainder, which looks as if it might really be an addition by another hand, is in the same way ascribed to Carestes, a knight of Alfonso the Catholic.[344]
Most of the names throughout the work are as imaginary as those of its pretended authors; and the circumstances related are, generally, as much invented as the dialogue between its personages, which is given with a heavy minuteness of detail, alike uninteresting in itself, and false to the times it represents. In truth, it is hardly more than a romance of chivalry, founded on the materials for the history of Roderic and Pelayo, as they still exist in the “General Chronicle of Spain” and in the old ballads; so that, though we often meet what is familiar to us about Count Julian, La Cava, and Orpas, the false Archbishop of Seville, we find ourselves still oftener in the midst of impossible tournaments[345] and incredible adventures of chivalry.[346] Kings travel about like knights-errant,[347] and ladies in distress wander from country to country,[348] as they do in “Palmerin of England,” while, on all sides, we encounter fantastic personages, who were never heard of anywhere but in this apocryphal Chronicle.[349]