This is the incongruous legend of Witiza. During his father’s life-time, he ruled at Tuy in Galicia, and proved himself pious, mild, just and generous. His morals were unimpeachable, and while humane to all, he was indulgent to his personal enemies, and freely granted pardon and favours to malcontents. Such a man seems a fitter subject for canonisation than San Hermengildo. Then this excellent monarch, in middle life, with character and habits formed, comes down to Toledo, and without rhyme or reason, we hear of him suddenly as a blind and bloody-minded scoundrel. From sage and saint he turns into an historic ogre, not content with libertinage in himself but constraining his subjects to follow his example, and for sheer viciousness’ sake, commanding an austere and chaste clergy to marry. No villany, no crime seems too base and preposterous for the archbishops to lay to his account. For the benevolence of Tuy we have rank injustice, for the mildness envenomed cruelty, and every anterior virtue is replaced by its pendant vice. Yet Witiza’s power at Tuy was no less than his power at Toledo. He had his court and his throne in both towns, and there was no reason on earth why he should act the wise man in the north, and the unreasoning reprobate in the south. We suspect his first act of clemency on reaching Toledo, in annulling Sisebuth’s edict against the Jews, had much to do with the joint vituperation of the archbishops and the subsequent historians. Not only did he recall them, but, misplaced generosity in mediæval eyes, he restored to the unfortunates their appropriated property and wealth, and permitted them to live and earn unmolested in his kingdom.
Witiza’s defence has been ingeniously undertaken by the Père Tailhan in his interesting notes to the rhyming chronicler of Cordova, a contemporary of Witiza. Here we meet the clement Prince of Tuy, whose mildness, in spite of a natural impetuosity held in check, was his greatest crime in the eyes of immediate posterity, unswervingly kind to all who approached and addressed him, described by his enemies, the Moors, as the most just and pious of all the Christian kings of his time, and a man of blameless life. Count Fernando Gonzalez refers to him as “a powerful king, of indomitable courage and of noble heart.” The anonymous writer of Cordova, who was in a position to judge, writes of his reign as one of peace and prosperity and universal happiness. Was the devil incarnate the invention of the four respectable archbishops? Of course the dull and bigoted Mariana follows in their footsteps. Don José Godoz Alcantara is of a different opinion:—“Witiza,” he writes, “initiated his reign by the most ample act of generosity. He restored to the destitute their dignities and wealth, publicly burnt all proofs and denunciations of conspiracy; wishing to cure a degenerate aristocracy of the passion of power, and direct their spirit of sedition to the arts of peace, he knocked down Wamba’s famous walls, and according to the picturesque phrase of the Archbishop Don Rodrigo, ‘pretended to turn arms into spades.’”[5] The only crime the traveller in Spain will find it difficult to forgive, is this act of vandalism in knocking down Wamba’s walls. He could have exhorted his subjects to practise the arts of peace, all in leaving these great walls untouched in their monumental beauty. But this is what the reformers of humanity never will do. They are never happy until they have sacrificed the picturesque on the altar of utility. Witiza, we see, was in advance of his age. He was a “modern” man, a creature of fads and fantasies. This was how he came by his quaint notion of refining the deplorable morals of Toledo. He could think of no other way of steming the tide of general sensuality but in legalising polygamy. So fierce a race fallen into bad habits was hardly to be sermonised with success. The legal state of polygamy he regarded, along with Oriental sages, as preferable to indiscriminate and wide-spread libertinage. It is still a nice question unsolved in civilised Europe whether several legitimate wives or their unrecognised substitutes constitute a higher or lower state of morality. Witiza was only less hypocritical than civilised Europe, that is all. But to pretend that bigamy is more scandalous than private disorder is absurd. Witiza’s notion of reform may have been primitive and instructive, but it does not justify the legend of his own evil life. To begin with, if he had been the degraded sensualist the archbishops and Mariana describe him, he would not have troubled about reform at all, and he may have had sound reason for requesting the clergy to marry since historians are agreed that they had become utterly demoralised.
The same haze of legends blurs for us the figure of his unfortunate successor, Roderick of the Chronicle. On one side we hear of him as ascending the throne an octogenarian, on another as the impassioned lover of the beautiful Florinda, the brilliant president of a brilliant court; carried to battle in a litter, and riding thither on a legendary steed, fulgent and valiant; disappearing from the field and disgracefully hiding in a monastery; fighting like a hero and falling in the fray. We are told that he was a coward by the pen that depicts him valorously and recklessly approaching the unknown terrors of the enchanted palace of Hercules, though Florinda’s charming leg is not more vaporous upon research than the vanished walls of this palace. It matters little now whether the archbishop Rodrigo’s ivory-carven car drawn by mules carried his unhappy namesake to the fatal field of Guadalete or the legendary steed flashing its way through mailed ranks. However he comported himself, he lost his kingdom, and his resting place is forever unknown.
But the tale of the great tournament with which he started his disastrous reign, must be told at length as one of the most resplendent pages of courtly history. Whatever may have been the end of his reign, he certainly began it in the most sumptuous spirit of hospitality and generosity yet recorded. Was ever such a tournament given before? Princes and lords and their followers came in swarms from all parts of Europe to high Toledo, upon her seven steep hills. Hearken only to the names, and say if they do not make a page in themselves as delightful as any of Froissart’s. The lords of Gascony, Elmet de Bragas, with a hundred cavaliers; Guillamme de Comenge, with a hundred and twenty; the Duke of Viana, with four hundred cavaliers; the Count of the Marches, with a hundred and fifty; the duke of Orleans, with three hundred cavaliers; and four other Dukes of France, with four hundred. Then came the King of Poland, with a luxurious train, and six hundred gentlemen of Lombardy; two marquises, four captains, with twelve hundred cavaliers. Rome sent three governors and five captains, with fifteen hundred cavaliers. The Emperor of Constantinople, his brother, three counts, and three hundred cavaliers came, as well as an English prince, with great lords, and fifteen hundred cavaliers. From Turkey, Syria, and other parts, nobles and princes to the number of five thousand came, without counting their followers and servitors, and different parts of Spain alone furnished an influx of fifty thousand cavaliers. What a poor affair our modern exhibitions and sights, even the Queen’s Jubilee, seem after reading of such a brilliant and stupendous gathering of guests at King Roderick’s court of Toledo.
He was, as I have said, a King to visit, with nothing of Spanish inhospitality about him. He ordered all the citizens to sleep without the city walls in the ten thousand tents he had fixed in the wide Vega, and give up their houses to his foreign guests. Be sure he paid them for the sacrifice in princely style, for out of Eastern fable never was such a prince as Don Rodrigo, the last of the Goths. All the expenses of the foreigners, including their mounts and armour, were his, for they were not permitted to use their own lances, swords, armour or horses. Never were guests entertained with such prodigious splendour. He ordered palaces to be built for them, and laid injunctions on builders, furnishers and purveyors to spare neither expense nor luxury. The whole Peninsula was scoured in search of armourers and iron-workers, and over fifteen hundred master armourers with their apprentices and under-hands were hastily gathered together in Toledo in more than a thousand[6] improvised iron-shops, working for six busy months at shields and lances and exquisitely wrought damascene armour for every lord and knight, the guest of their king. Each guest on arriving received, as well as house and board, his horse, full armour, shield and lance. The tourney opened on a Sunday, and presented such a scene as imagination alone can depict. We are not told the precise spot, but we may suppose the quaint three-cornered, the ever irresistible Zocodover. Rasis el Moro records each guest’s formal reply when asked if he desired to fight? “For this we have come from our lands; firstly, to serve and honour these feasts; secondly, to see how they are carried out; thirdly, to prove your body, your strength, and learn what you are worth in arms.”
Hearing of these great feasts, the Duchess of Lorraine, persecuted by her brother-in-law, Lembrot, came to Toledo to implore Rodrigo’s protection. Rodrigo received her with cordiality, and lodged her in the royal palace, and as official defender charged Sacarus with her cause. Lembrot was called to Toledo to meet the Duchess’s knight, and came with a great train. He, too, was generously entertained, and pending the clash of steel which was to decide the quarrel between Lembrot and the Duchess, the Queen gave a sarao, which was even a more brilliant and gorgeous spectacle than the tourney. Fifty ladies danced with fifty of the greatest lords, and never was such a constellation of European titles joined in a single diversion. The ladies’ names are not recorded, but there were in the first dance the King of Poland, the French prince, the Emperor of Constantinople, the son of the King of England (simply called el hijo del Rey de Inglaterra), the Spanish infante, the Duke of Viana, the Duke of Orleans, the Count of the Marshes, the Marquis of Lombardy, and Count William of Saxony.
This enchanting moment preceded bloodshed, for on the next day the two uncles of Lembrot were killed by Sacarus, thus proclaiming the innocence of the Duchess to whom Lorraine was then restored, and, along with other fallen knights, lay the King of Africa. The dead were buried with great pomp at the expense of their splendid host, and thus ended a tournament surely without equal as a spectacle in history. The chronicle of Don Rodrigo devotes nearly a hundred pages to this picturesque event.
The most prominent episode in the life of the legendary Rodrigo is his famous intrigue with Florinda. We are told that Count Julian, Governor of Ceuta, sent his daughter to be brought up at Court, where she was in a sense the King’s ward. Nothing remains in history to support this tradition, for it is now asserted it was never the Gothic habit to have the daughters of absent noblemen brought up at court as the sovereign’s wards. Then we hear of the Cava’s baths, where Rodrigo, from his palace windows, overhanging the river outside the Puenta de San Martin, beheld her bathing. Inspection proves these ruins to be the old foundation of a bridge, nothing more. The story of the Cava dates from the fourteenth century, when an Arabian writer, Aben-en-Noguairi, in a volume called El Limita de la prudencia en las reglas de la prudencia, gives the legend. The historian Gamero thus defines the word Cava as applied to Florinda in explanation of her condition of violated maiden. Caba proceeds from Caat, an Arabian tribe that came to Spain in Wamba’s reign, descended from Heber of Jewish origin. When the Jews at the seventeenth Council of Toledo, under Egica, were ordered to be destituted and sold as slaves, while their children were to be taken from them and forcibly brought up as Christians, the saying was that the Caba was violated, that is, that this entire tribe, forced to become Christian in preservation of its wealth and property, had prostituted itself. From the current phrase, the historians applied the word to a particular woman, and poetically named her Florinda. From Eve downward all her daughters have had to share her fate in supporting all the blame of human disasters. Neither war, defeat, nor blunder nor wreckage of nations or of individuals is accepted by man as properly and adequately explained, if some woman is not the man’s or the nation’s evil genius. Unprompted by woman, man is a serene and prudent animal, and but for Florinda, who never existed (though the historians gravely reproduce a touching and eloquent letter of hers to her father recording in fine and dignified phrases the story of her wrongs, and beseeching her father to vindicate her outraged honour and punish the unworthy King), the last of the Toledan sovereigns might have ended his days in his bed, and, undesirable fate for Spain! the Moors might never have crossed the narrow strait. As Gamero says: “Ultimately the story of Rodrigo’s guilty love for a lady of the palace was created.” A lady’s name once introduced, it followed a fatal and romantic legend should be invented, and what prettier than conversion of the broken bridge on the enchanting marge of yellow Tagus into a syren’s bath, with Rodrigo, the inflammable warrior, fresh from his encounter with dethroned gods and their emissaries in an enchanted palace, looking down on the maiden as she disported in the water from the windows of his luxurious Gothic palace? The legend once started, it is inevitable that the traitor should follow, and hence the elusive and mysterious figure of Count Julian, who advances into the picture on a mission of paternal vengeance, and treacherously opens the gates of Spain to the predatory Berbers. The Turks had entered Spain, and it needed some other explanation than national pluck, enterprise and determination to account for their almost unopposed approach towards Toledo; and what so likely an instrument of misfortune as the mythical father of the fabulous Florinda? So history was written, in all faith in those naïve days. Don Faustina de Bourbon remarks that this fable was not heard of before the dominion of the Asturian monarchs in southern Spain; not until the Cid took Valencia, and Alonzo basely seized Toledo, the kingdom of his Moorish protector and host. Such fables accord with the childish, superstitious yearning and need to associate the land’s misfortunes with the personal iniquities of those who rule it. Roderick may have been no saint, and small blame to him in those grossly immoral times, but we need not attach to his shoulders the packet of national sins and disorders. Because the abuses among the clergy and the nobles had reached a repulsive depth of infamy, and public morals were in a lamentable state, is no reason to insist on his violation of Florinda, or refer as the Viscount Palazuelos does in his modern guide-book of Toledo, in an excess of unromantic austerity and disdain “to the guilty loves of Rodrigo and Count Julian’s daughter.”[7] There is no proof whatever that Rodrigo was the wretched sensualist the historians delight to paint. His crime was (and that the Gothic race shares with him) that he unworthily lost a large kingdom to a small invading force, and his shame lies in his inexplicable defeat.
But for traitor there was never any need to invent Count Julian (whom the Père Tailhan insists was a certain Roman Urban who accompanied Tarik, and whose name was distorted into Julian), nor Florinda. Treachery existed nearer home in Witiza’s family. Rodrigo had deposed Witiza, and the usurper was repaid by the treachery of Witiza’s sons and his brother, Oppas, foolishly thinking the Berber raid would only prove a transient panic which would permit them to dispossess the usurper, and claim Witiza’s throne. Instead of a mere raid, the invasion turned out one of the most astonishing conquests of history.
Rodrigo’s army was immense; Tarik’s only numbered twelve thousand men. The battle took place on the banks of the Wadi-becca; it lasted a week, beginning on July 19th, 711. Two wings of the Spanish army were commanded by Witiza’s worthless sons, chiefly manned by malcontents and their serfs. So when the commanders ordered their men to give their backs to the enemy, there was no difficulty on the question of obedience. The centre, commanded by Rodrigo, stood its ground valiantly, but unassisted, at length gave way, and the Turks literally hacked the Christians to pieces. It was an appalling massacre. Rodrigo’s fate, as I have said, remains unknown. Did he fly, was he killed? Did he sink into the marsh where his embroidered saddle and silken cloak were found? We hear on one side that Roderick disappeared mysteriously from the battle-field; on the other, that he fought valiantly and when forced to retreat, did so, fighting his way step by step, sword in hand, and fell with his face to the enemy as befits a soldier. He was supposed in this version to have been buried at Visein, and 160 years later, Alfonso the Great, in reconstituting that fallen town, discovered the dust of the defeated monarch with the inscription on a stone—Hic requiescit Rudericus (ultimus) rex Gothorem.[8]