History of Spanish Literature, vol. 3 (of 3)

by George Ticknor

But, in the mean time, another tremendous invasion had burst upon Spain; violent, unforeseen, and for a time threatening to sweep away all the civilization and refinement, that had been preserved from the old institutions of the country, or were springing up under the new. This was the remarkable invasion of the Arabs, which compels us now to seek some of the materials of the Spanish character, language, and literature in the heart of Asia, as we have already been obliged to seek for some of them in the extreme North of Europe.

The Arabs, who, at every period of their history, have been a picturesque and extraordinary people, received, from the passionate religion given to them by the genius and fanaticism of Mohammed, an impulse that, in most respects, is unparalleled. As late as the year of Christ 623, the fortunes and the fate of the Prophet were still uncertain, even within the narrow limits of his own wild and wandering tribe; yet, in less than a century from that time, not only Persia, Syria, and nearly the whole of Western Asia, but Egypt and all the North of Africa had yielded to the power of his military faith. A success so wide and so rapid, founded on religious enthusiasm, and so speedily followed by the refinements of civilization, is unlike any thing else in the history of the world.[428]

When the Arabs had obtained a tolerably quiet possession of the cities and coasts of Africa, it was natural they should turn next to Spain, from which they were separated only by the straits of the Mediterranean. Their descent was made, in great force, near Gibraltar, in 711; the battle of the Guadalete, as it is called by the Moorish writers, and of Xerez, as it is called by the Christians, followed immediately; and, in the course of three years, they had, with their accustomed celerity, conquered the whole of Spain, except the fated region of the Northwest, behind whose mountains a large body of Christians, under Pelayo, retreated, leaving the rest of their country in the hands of the conquerors.

But while the Christians, who had escaped from the wreck of the Gothic power, were thus either shut up in the mountains of Biscay and Asturias, or engaged in that desperate struggle of nearly eight centuries, which ended in the final expulsion of their invaders, the Moors[429] throughout the centre and especially throughout the South of Spain were enjoying an empire as splendid and intellectual as the elements of their religion and civilization would permit.

Much has been said concerning the glory of this empire, and the effect it has produced on the literature and manners of modern times. Long ago, a disposition was shown by Huet and Massieu to trace to them the origin both of rhyme and of romantic fiction; but both are now generally admitted to have been, as it were, spontaneous productions of the human mind, which different nations at different periods have invented separately for themselves.[430] Somewhat later, Father Andres, a learned Spaniard, who wrote in Italy and in Italian, anxious to give to his own country the honor of imparting to the rest of Europe the first impulse to refinement after the fall of the Roman empire, conceived the theory, at once broader and more definite than that of Huet, that the poetry and cultivation of the Troubadours of Provence, which are generally admitted to be the oldest of Southern Europe in modern times, were derived entirely and immediately from the Arabs of Spain; a theory which has been adopted by Ginguené, by Sismondi, and by the authors of the “Literary History of France.”[431] But they all go upon the presumption that rhyme and metrical composition, as well as a poetic spirit, were awakened later in Provence than subsequent inquiries show them to have been. For Father Andres and his followers date the communication of the Arabian influences of Spain upon the South of France from the capture of Toledo in 1085, when, no doubt, there was a great increase of intercourse between the two countries.[432] But Raynouard[433] has since published the fragment of a poem, the manuscript of which can hardly be dated so late as the year 1000, and has thus shown that the Provençal literature is to be carried back above a century earlier, and traced to the period of the gradual corruption of the Latin, and the gradual formation of the modern language. The elder Schlegel, too, has entered into the discussion of the theory itself, and left little reason to doubt that Raynouard’s positions on the subject are well founded.[434]

But, though we cannot, with Father Andres and his followers, trace the poetry and refinement of all the South of Europe in modern times primarily or mainly to the Arabs of Spain, we must still, so far as the Spanish language and literature are concerned, trace something to them. For their progress in refinement was hardly less brilliant and rapid than their progress in empire. The reigns of the two Abderrahmans, and the period of the glory of Córdova, which began about 750 and continued almost to the time of its conquest by the Christians in 1236, were more intellectual than could then be found elsewhere; and if the kingdom of Granada, which ended in 1492, was less refined, it was, perhaps, even more splendid and luxurious.[435] The public schools and libraries of the Spanish Arabs were resorted to, not only by those of their own faith at home and in the East, but by Christians from different parts of Europe; and Pope Sylvester the Second, one of the most remarkable men of his age, is believed to have owed his elevation to the pontificate to the culture he received in Seville and Córdova.[436]

In the midst of this flourishing empire lived large masses of native Christians, who had not retreated with their hardy brethren under Pelayo to the mountains of the Northwest, but dwelt among their conquerors, protected by the wide toleration which the Mohammedan religion originally prescribed and practised. Indeed, except that, as a vanquished people, they paid double the tribute paid by Moors, and that they were taxed for their Church property, these Christians were little burdened or restrained, and were even permitted to have their bishops, churches, and monasteries, and to be judged by their own laws and their own tribunals, whenever the question at issue was one that related only to themselves, unless it involved a capital punishment.[437] But, though they were thus to a certain degree preserved as a separate people, and though, considering their peculiar position, they maintained, more than would be readily believed, their religious loyalty, still the influence of a powerful and splendid empire, and of a population every way more prosperous and refined than themselves, was constantly pressing upon them. The inevitable result was, that, in the course of ages, they gradually yielded something of their national character. They came, at last, to wear the Moorish dress; they adopted Moorish manners; and they served in the Moorish armies and in the places of honor at the courts of Córdova and Granada. In all respects, indeed, they deserved the name given to them, that of Mozárabes or Muçárabes, persons who seemed to become Arabs in manners and language; for they were so mingled with their conquerors and masters, that, in process of time, they could be distinguished from the Arabs amidst whom they lived by little except their faith.[438]

The effect of all this on whatever of the language and literature of Rome still survived among them was, of course, early apparent. The natives of the soil who dwelt among the Moors soon neglected their degraded Latin, and spoke Arabic. In 794, the conquerors thought they might already venture to provide schools for teaching their own language to their Christian subjects, and require them to use no other.[439] Alvarus Cordubensis, who wrote his “Indiculus Luminosus” in 854,[440] and who is a competent witness on such a subject, shows that they had succeeded; for he complains that, in his time, the Christians neglected their Latin, and acquired Arabic to such an extent that hardly one Christian in a thousand was to be found who could write a Latin letter to a brother in the faith, while many were able to write Arabic poetry so as to rival the Moors themselves.[441] Such, indeed, was the early prevalence of the Arabic, that John, Bishop of Seville, one of those venerable men who commanded the respect alike of Christians and Mohammedans, found it necessary to translate the Scriptures into it, because his flock could read them in no other language.[442] Even the records of Christian churches were often kept in Arabic from this period down through several succeeding centuries, and in the archives of the cathedral at Toledo, above two thousand documents were recently and are probably still to be seen, written chiefly by Christians and ecclesiastics, in Arabic.[443]

Nor was this state of things at once changed when the Christians from the North prevailed again; for, after the reconquest of some of the central portions of the country, the coins struck by Christian kings to circulate among their Christian subjects were covered with Arabic inscriptions, as may be seen in coins of Alfonso the Sixth and Alfonso the Eighth, in the years 1185, 1186, 1191, 1192, 1199, and 1212.[444] And in 1256 Alfonso the Wise, when, by a solemn decree dated at Burgos, 18th December, he was making provision for education at Seville, established Arabic schools there, as well as Latin.[445] Indeed, still later, and even down to the fourteenth century, the public acts and monuments of that part of Spain were often written in Arabic, and the signatures to important ecclesiastical documents, though the body of the instrument might be in Latin or Spanish, were sometimes made in the Arabic character, as they are in a grant of privileges by Ferdinand the Fourth to the monks of Saint Clement.[446] So that almost as late as the period of the conquest of Granada, and in some respects later, it is plain that the language, manners, and civilization of the Arabs were still much diffused among the Christian population of the centre and South of Spain.

When, therefore, the Christians from the North, after a contest the most bitter and protracted, had rescued the greater part of their country from thraldom, and driven the Moors before them into its southwestern provinces, they found themselves, as they advanced, surrounded by large masses of their ancient countrymen, Christians, indeed, in faith and feeling, though most imperfect in Christian knowledge and morals, but Moors in dress, manners, and language. A union, of course, took place between these different bodies, who, by the fortunes of war, had been separated from each other so long, that, though originally of the same stock and still connected by some of the strongest sympathies of our nature, they had for centuries ceased to possess a common language in which alone it would be possible to carry on the daily intercourse of life. But such a reunion of the two parts of the nation, wherever and whenever it occurred, necessarily implied an immediate modification or accommodation of the language that was to be used by both. No doubt, such a modification of the Gothicized and corrupted Latin had been going on, in some degree, from the time of the Moorish conquest. But now it was indispensable that it should be completed. A considerable infusion of the Arabic, therefore, quickly took place;[447] and the last important element was thus added to the present Spanish, which has been polished and refined, indeed, by subsequent centuries of progress in knowledge and civilization, but is still, in its prominent features, the same that it appeared soon after what, with characteristic nationality, is called the Restoration of Spain.[448]