Meanwhile the Mahometans ruled mildly and well. The native Christians living among them kept their religion, churches, and clergy, as well as their laws and tribunals except in cases involving capital punishment, or where a Mahometan was a party in the suit. The usual consequences of race-contact followed; over wide tracts Arabic became the common language, and so remained even after Moslem power had fallen. As late as the fourteenth century public acts in many parts of Spain were written in Arabic. As the result of this intermixture, there was the linguistic medley called lingua franca, a composite of Arabic, Gothic, Latin, Hebrew, and Gallic, with the Romance, or corrupted Latin of Spain, united with the Limousin, the language of the gay science spoken in Languedoc and Provence, as a base. Out of this came the Castilian, which after undergoing various modifications settled into the Spanish language, leaving it substantially in its present form, though refined and polished by subsequent centuries of civilization. It was not, however, until near the reign of Alfonso X., 1252-1282, long after the Christians had emerged from the mountains and had mingled with the reconquered indigenes, that the Castilian became perfectly established as a written, settled, and polite language. Nor were the consequences of Arabic occupation confined to language; they tinged the whole life of the nation.
The Spaniards who under Pelayo had taken refuge in the mountains of Asturias, in 716 founded a small government called the kingdom of Oviedo. There the seeds of liberty, trampled by adversity, took root, and from the patriot soil arose a nation that spread its branches wide over the land. Gradually the Christian kingdoms enlarged. First Galicia, then, two hundred years later, Leon and Castile were added to the little empire. The latter part of the tenth century the kingdoms of Leon, Castile, and Navarre, held the northern extremity of the Peninsula, while all the rest was under the dominion of the caliphate of Córdova.
THE EIGHT-CENTURY WAR.
And now, emerged from the mountain fastnesses whither they had fled before this southern swarm of turbaned Infidels, the sturdy Christians press heavily on their foe. Inch by inch, each step counting a century, they fight their way from the Pyrenees back to Granada. Assuming the title of caliph, Abdurrahman III. defeats the Christians at Zamora on the Douro, but is in turn repulsed, in 938, at Simancas. In vain the Mahometans call to their aid the Almoravides of Morocco; their race upon the Peninsula is run. As portions of the country are wrested from them, lands are awarded to notable Christian leaders, who at intervals pause in their holy crusade, and fall to warring on each other; and by these intestine brawls more Christian blood is spilt than by all the cimiters of the Saracens. At such times the Infidels might turn and make the Christians an easy prey; but centuries of opulence, and, except along their northern border, of inaction, have sapped their strength and left them nerveless. It is the old story alike of peoples, sects, and individuals; discipline, begotten by necessity, engenders strength, which fattened by luxury swells to weakness.
The beginning of the eleventh century finds the Christians occupying about half the Peninsula, that is to say the kingdoms of Leon, Castile, Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal. Leon was but another name for the kingdom of Oviedo, or Asturias, the birthplace of Spanish nationality. Castile—Roman, castella; Arabic, ardo-l-koláa, land of castles, so called from the castillos, or forts, built there—though destined eventually to absorb all the kingdoms of the Peninsula, was at first a republic, consisting of a few small towns or fortified castles, which had united for mutual protection from both Mahometans and contentious Christian brethren. In 1037 Leon was united by Ferdinand I., called the Great, to Castile; and from its central position, and the strength arising from perpetual vigilance, the new kingdom gradually widened and added to its dominions, until eventually all the kingdoms of the Peninsula were united under the banner of Castile. Navarre belonged to a French count, whose successor drove the Saracens from the territory adjacent on the south-west, and founded the kingdom of Aragon.
In 1085 the Cid, a Castilian chieftain, born at Búrgos, and famous in poetry, romance, and war, seized Toledo, and overran Valencia; in 1118 Alfonso of Aragon wrested Saragossa from the Moors. Portugal, hitherto a province of Castile, assumed the title of kingdom in 1139. Finally the four kingdoms of the north, together with Portugal, formed a league against the Infidels, and in a great battle fought in the Sierra Morena, near Tolosa, in 1212, Mahometan power in Spain was effectually broken. In this decisive engagement the Christian confederates were commanded by Alfonso III. of Castile, who never rested till the followers of the Prophet were driven from the central plateau. To the kingdom of Castile, Ferdinand III., 1217-1252, annexed Jaen, Córdova, and Seville, which with difficulty were held by his son Alfonso X., surnamed the Wise—a better scholar than soldier, as we see. Alfonso XI. was succeeded by Pedro el Cruel, who died in 1369.
SPAIN'S GRANDEUR.
A succession of singularly brilliant events, culminating in the empire of Charles V., brought Spain, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, to the front rank among European powers. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, which in 1479 united the crowns of Aragon and Castile; the conquest of Granada in 1492, terminating eight centuries of almost continuous warfare; the discovery of America the same year; the annexation of Naples in 1503, and of Navarre in 1512, after the union of Spain and the Netherlands in the marriage of Juana, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, with Philip the Fair, son of the Emperor Maximilian I., and father of Charles V., all coming in quick succession, form a train of important incidents unparalleled in the history of nations. Before the death of Philip II. in 1598, the empire of Spain extended to every part of the globe—Portugal, conquered by the duke of Alva in 1580; Sicily and Sardinia, Artois and Franche Comté, the Balearic and Canary islands; in Africa—Melilla, Ceuta, Oran, and Tunis; in Asia—the Moluccas and the Philippine Islands, together with several settlements elsewhere; beside a large part of the two Americas, which alone comprised about one fifth of the world.
But nations like men must die. The full measure of prosperity had been meted out to Spain, and now she must lay it down—such is the inexorable law of progress. It was the very irony of autocracy, that one man should rule half the world! Spain's pyramid of greatness, which assumed such lofty proportions during the reign of their Catholic Majesties, culminated during the reigns of their immediate successors. A long line of ambitious and able princes had raised the empire to a giddy height; but with an illiterate and non-progressive populace, no sooner did the rulers become incompetent than the nation fell in pieces. In the height of his grandeur Spain's grandest monarch surfeited of success and abdicated; and with the death of his son Philip the glory of the empire departed. Then might her epitaph be written—Nine centuries of steady growth—a long and lusty youth, more than falls to the lot of most nations—and in three brief centuries more she rose, and ripened, and rotted.
It is not with death, however, but life, we have to do. Intellectual sparks were lighting up the dark corners of the earth, and a series of brilliant epochs began with the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella—modern Golden Ages they might be called. The golden age of Spain, dating from 1474 to 1516, was followed by Germany's golden age, which was during the reign of Charles V., 1519-1558. Then came England with the reign of Elizabeth, 1558-1603; then France under Louis XIV. and Louis XV., 1640-1740; Russia under Peter the Great, 1672-1725; and Prussia under Frederick the Great, 1740-1786. During this time European civilization was bursting its narrow confines and encircling the hitherto unknown world in every direction.