The language, however, which was thus brought from the North by the Christian conquerors, and became modified as it advanced among the Moorish population of the South, was, as we have seen, by no means the classical Latin. It was Latin corrupted, at first, by the causes which had corrupted that language throughout the Roman empire, even before the overthrow of the Roman power,—then by the inevitable effect of the establishment in Spain of the Goths and other barbarians immediately afterwards,—and subsequently by additions from the original Iberian or Basque, made during the residence of the Christians, after the Moorish conquest, among the mountaineers, with whom that language had never ceased to prevail. But the principal cause of the final degradation of the Latin at the North, after the middle of the eighth century, was, no doubt, the miserable condition of the people who spoke it. They had fled from the ruins of the Latinized kingdom of the Goths, pursued by the fiery sword of the Moslem, and found themselves crowded together in the wild fastnesses of the Biscayan and Asturian mountains. There, deprived of the social institutions in which they had been nurtured, and which, however impaired or ruined, yet represented and retained to the last whatever of civilization had been left in their unhappy country; mingled with a people who, down to that time, appear to have shaken off little of the barbarism that had resisted alike the invasion of the Romans and of the Goths; and pent up, in great numbers, within a territory too small, too rude, and too poor to afford them the means of a tolerable subsistence, the Christians at the North seem to have sunk at once into a state nearly approaching that of savage life,—a state, of course, in which no care or thought would be given to preserve the purity of the language they spoke.[449] Nor was their condition much more favorable for such purposes when, with the vigor of despair, they began to recover the country they had lost. For they were then constantly in arms and constantly amidst the perils and sufferings of an exhausting warfare, embittered and exasperated by intense national and religious hatreds. When, therefore, as they advanced with their conquests towards the south and the east, they found themselves coming successively in contact with those portions of their race that had remained among the Moors, they felt that they were at once in the presence of a civilization and refinement altogether superior to their own.
The result was inevitable. The change, which, as has been said, now took place in their language, was governed by this peculiar circumstance in their position. For, as the Goths, between the fifth and eighth centuries, received a vast number of words from the Latin because it was the language of a people with whom they were intimately mingled and who were much more intellectual and advanced than themselves, so now, for the same reason, the whole nation received, between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, another increase of their vocabulary from the Arabic, and accommodated themselves, in a remarkable degree, to the advanced cultivation of their Southern countrymen and of their new Moorish subjects.
At what precise period the language, since called the Spanish and Castilian, can be said to have been formed by this union of the Gothicized and corrupted Latin that came from the North with the Arabic of the South, cannot now be determined.[450] Such a union was, from its nature, brought about by one of those gradual and silent changes in what belongs essentially to the character of a whole people, which can leave behind them no formal monuments or exact records. But the learned Marina, who may perhaps be safely trusted on this point, asserts that no document in the Castilian language, with a date anterior to the year 1140, exists, or, in his opinion, ever did exist.[451] Indeed the oldest yet cited is a confirmation of privileges by Alfonso the Seventh, in the year 1155, to the city of Avilés in Asturias.[452] However gradual, therefore, and indistinct may have been the formation and first appearance of the Castilian as the spoken language of modern Spain, we may no doubt feel sure, that, about the middle of the twelfth century, it had risen to the dignity of being a written language, and had begun to appear in the important public documents of the time.
From this period, then, we are to recognize the existence in Spain of a language spreading gradually through the greater part of the country, different from the pure or the corrupted Latin, and still more different from the Arabic, yet obviously formed by a union of both, modified by the analogies and spirit of the Gothic constructions and dialects, and containing some remains of the vocabularies of the Germanic tribes, of the Iberians, the Celts, and the Phœnicians, who, at different periods, had occupied nearly or quite the whole of the Peninsula. This language was called originally the Romance, because it was so much formed out of the language of the Romans; just as the Christians, in the northwestern mountains, were called by the Arabs Alromi, because they were imagined to be descended from the Romans.[453] Later, it was called Spanish, from the name taken by the whole people, and perhaps, at last, it was even more frequently called Castilian, from that portion of the country, whose political power grew to be so predominant, as to give its dialect a preponderance over all the other dialects, which, like the Galician, the Catalonian, and the Valencian, were, for a longer or shorter period, written languages, each with claims to a literature of its own.
The proportion of materials contributed by each of the languages that enter into the composition of the Spanish has never been accurately settled, though enough is known to permit an adjustment of their general relations to each other. Sarmiento, who investigated the subject with some care, thinks that six tenths of the present Castilian are of Latin origin; one tenth Greek and ecclesiastical; one tenth Northern; one tenth Arabic; and the remaining tenth East Indian and American, Gypsy, modern German, French, and Italian. Probably this estimate is not very far from the truth. But Larramendi and Humboldt leave no doubt that the Basque should be added; and, while Marina’s inquiries give a smaller proportion to the Arabic, those of Gayangos raise it to an eighth. The main point, however, is one concerning which there can be no doubt;—the broad foundations of the Castilian are to be sought in the Latin, to which, in fact, we are to trace nearly or quite all the contributions sometimes attributed to the Greek.[454]
The Spanish, or Castilian, language thus formed was introduced into general use sooner and more easily than, perhaps, any other of the newly created languages, which, as the confusion of the Middle Ages passed off, were springing up, throughout the South of Europe, to take the place of the universal language of the Roman world. The reasons of this were, that the necessity for its creation and employment was more urgent, from the extraordinary relations between the Moors, the Muçárabes, and the Christians; that the reign of Saint Ferdinand, at least as late as the capture of Seville in 1247, was a period, if not of quiet, yet of prosperity and almost of splendor; and that the Latin, both as a written and a spoken language, had become so much degraded, that it could offer less resistance to change in Spain than in the other countries where a similar revolution was in progress.[455] We must not be surprised, therefore, to find, not only specimens, but even considerable monuments, of Spanish literature soon after the first recognized appearance of the language itself. The narrative poem of the Cid, for instance, cannot be dated later than the year 1200; and Berceo, who flourished from 1220 to 1240, though he almost apologizes for not writing in Latin,[456] and thus shows how certainly he lived in the debatable period between the two languages, has left us a large mass of genuine Spanish, or Castilian, verse. But it is a little later, and in the reign of Alfonso the Tenth, from 1252 to 1282, that we are to consider the introduction of the Spanish, as a written, a settled, and a polite language, to have been recognized and completed. By his order, the Bible was translated into it from the Vulgate; he required all contracts and legal instruments to be written in it, and all law proceedings to be held in it; and, finally, by his own remarkable code, “Las Siete Partidas,” he at once laid the foundations for the extension and establishment of its authority as far as the Spanish race and power should prevail.[457] From this period, therefore, we are to look for the history and development of the Spanish language, in the body of Spanish literature.
APPENDIX, B.
ON THE ROMANCEROS.