“Of Ternate and Tidore, whence merchants brought
Their spicy drugs,”—
striving, for a long time, to hide from the competition of other nations the history and resources of the oppressed race whom they compelled to minister to their love of gain.[214]
Quite as uncertain in authority and less elegant in style are the histories of Garcilasso de la Vega,—a gentle and trusting spirit rather than a wise one; proud of being a captain in the service of the king of Spain, and allied, as a son of one of the unscrupulous conquerors of Peru, to the great house of Infantado; but always betraying the weaker nature of his mother, who was of the blood royal of the Incas, and never entirely forgetting the glories of his Indian race, or the cruel injuries they had suffered at the hands of Spain. He was born at “Cuzco, in Peru, the seat of Atabalipa,” in 1540, and was educated there, amidst the tumults of the conquest; but, when he was twenty years old, he was sent to Spain, where, under difficult and trying circumstances, he maintained an honorable reputation during a life protracted to the age of seventy-six.
The military part of his personal history, which consisted of service under Don John of Austria against the Moriscos of Granada, was not of much consequence, though he seems to have valued himself upon it not a little. The part he gave to letters was more interesting and important. This portion he began, in 1590, with a translation of the “Dialogues on Love,” by Abarbanel, a Platonizing Jew, whose family had been expelled from Spain in the persecution under Ferdinand and Isabella, and who in Italy had published this singular work under the name of “The Hebrew Lion.” The attempt, so far as Garcilasso was concerned, was not a fortunate one. The Dialogues, which enjoyed considerable popularity at the time, had been already printed in Spanish,—a fact evidently unknown to him; and though, as it appears from a subsequent statement by himself, he had obtained for his translation the favorable regard of Philip the Second, still there was an odor both of Judaism and heathen free-thinking about it, that rendered it obnoxious to the ecclesiastical authorities of the state. Garcilasso’s first work, therefore, was speedily placed on the Index Expurgatorius, and was rarely heard of afterwards.
His next attempt was on a subject in which he had a nearer interest. It was a “History of Florida,” or rather of the first discovery of that country, and was published in 1605,—a work which, when, twenty years before, he spoke of writing it, he appropriately called “The Expedition of Fernando de Soto”; since the adventures of that extraordinary man, and his strange fate, not only form its most brilliant and attractive portion, but constitute nearly the whole of its substance. In this Garcilasso was more successful than he was in his version from the Italian; and his “History of Florida,” as it is still called, has been often reprinted since.
But, in his old age, his heart turned more and more to the thoughts and feelings of his youth, and, gathering together the few materials he could collect from among his kinsmen on the Pacific, as well as from the stores of his own memory and the records already accumulated in Spain, he published, in 1609, the first part of his “Commentaries on Peru”; the second of which, though licensed for the press in 1613, did not appear till 1617, the year after its author’s death. It is a garrulous, gossiping book, written in a diffuse style, and abounding in matters personal to himself. In its very division, he acknowledges frankly the conflicting claims that he felt were upon him. The earlier half, he says, relates to the eighteen Incas known to Peruvian history, and contains an account of the traditions of the country, its institutions, manners, and general character; all which he offers as a tribute due to his descent from the Children of the Sun. The remainder—which, with many episodes and much irrelevant, but not always unpleasant, discussion, contains the history of the Spanish conquest, and of the quarrels of the Spaniards with each other growing out of it—he offers, in like manner, to the glories of the great Spanish family with which he was connected, and which numbered on its rolls some of the brightest names in the Castilian annals. In both parts, his Commentaries are a striking and interesting book, showing much of the spirit of the old chronicles, and infected with even more than the common measure of chronicling credulity; since, with a natural willingness to believe whatever fables were honorable to the land of his birth, he mingles a constant anxiety to show that he is, above every thing else, a Catholic Christian, whose faith was much too ample to reject the most extravagant legends of his Church, and too pure to tolerate the idolatry of that royal ancestry which he yet cannot help regarding with reverence and admiration.[215]
The publication, in 1610, of “The War of Granada,” by Mendoza, had—as might have been anticipated from its attractive subject and style—an effect on Spanish historical composition; producing, in the course of the century, several imitations more worthy of notice than any thing in their class that appeared after the great work of Mariana.
The first of them is by Moncada, a nobleman of the highest rank in the South of Spain, and connected with several of the principal families, both in Catalonia and Valencia. His father was, successively, viceroy of Sardinia and Aragon; he himself was governor of the Low Countries and commander-in-chief of the armies there; and both of them filled, in their respective times, the most important of the Spanish embassies. But the younger Moncada had tastes widely different from the cares that beset his life. In 1623 he published his “Expedition of the Catalans against the Turks and Greeks”; and when he died, in 1635, just after putting to rout two hostile armies, he left several other works, of less value, one or two of which have since been printed. The History of the Catalan Expedition, by which alone he has been known in later times, is on the romantic adventures and achievements of an extraordinary band of mercenaries, who, under Roger de Flor,—successively a freebooter, a great admiral, and a Cæsar of the Eastern Empire,—drove back the Turks, as they approached the Bosphorus in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and then, after being for some time no less formidable to their allies than they had been to the infidel, settled down into a sort of uneasy tranquillity at Athens, where their historian leaves them.
It is an account, therefore, of a most wild passage in the affairs rather of the Middle Ages than of the Spanish peninsula,—one that may be trusted, notwithstanding its air of romance, since its foundations are laid in the great work of Zurita, and one by no means wanting in picturesque effect, since its details are often taken from Ramon Muntaner, the old Catalan, who had himself shared the perils of this very expedition, and described them in his own Chronicle with his accustomed spirit and vigor. Parts of it are very striking in themselves, and strikingly told; especially the rise of Roger de Flor till he had reached the highest place a subject could hold in the Greek empire, and then his assassination in the presence and by the command of the same Emperor who had raised him so high,—his blood soiling the imperial table, to which, with treacherous hospitality, he had been invited. The whole is written in a bold and free, rather than in a careful style; but the coloring is well suited to the dark ground-work of the picture, and, though less energetic in its tone than Mendoza’s “War of Granada,” of which, from the first sentence, we see it is an imitation, it is often more easy, flowing, and natural.[216]