Sun and Shadow in Spain

by Maud Howe Elliott

is a rugged watch-tower on the Toledo side; the tower that for so many centuries stood opposite has disappeared.

“The Bridge of San Martin is on the other side of the town. When you cross it, please cry out, ‘My eye, Betty Martin,’—Yankee for mihi Beato Martino, to me blessed Martin, an old crusading war cry heard in Toledo before. The walls of Wamba extend from the Bridge of Alcantara to the Bridge of San Martin. The river runs round three sides of the city; the walls on the fourth make it impregnable.”

“We may as well have Wamba’s story now; we shall have to hear it some time,” sighed J. “I want to sketch the bridge from here. Fire away, boy!” Patsy, loaded and primed with information, fired.

“There isn’t much to tell! I always liked Wamba because, for a long time, I confused him with Wamba, son of Witless the Jester, in Ivanhoe,” Patsy confessed.

“That’s the way he always begins his longest yarns,” J. groaned.

According to Patsy’s yarn, this real Wamba was the last of the great Gothic kings, who, in spite of the tricks of his enemies, the churchmen, has left his mark on Toledo and on Spain. Wamba was an old soldier who lived just at the time when the Gothic power was on the wane, and Rome, for a second time, was becoming mistress of Spain. When the Gothic nobles elected him King, Wamba at first refused the throne. Then they gave him his choice of death or kingship, and he was finally forced to accept. He taught his people what they had almost forgotten, ‘to fight the good fight’; in his time there was a last flicker of the old Gothic spirit. But Wamba was too free and independent to suit the churchmen, and they contrived to give him a sleeping draught that threw him into so deep a trance that his followers thought the King was dead. He was prepared for burial, as is still the fashion for great personages, as if he had been a monk, and a tonsure was shaved on his head. When he came to himself, the churchmen maintained that a man who had worn the dress and the tonsure of a monk could never again reign as King. So, having reigned against his will, wisely and too well, he was forced to abdicate against his will, and retire to a monastery where he ended his days. Staunch old fellow that he was, the Church was too strong for him, as it has been for most political reformers from that day to this.

The Visigoths laid hold upon our imagination at Toledo as the Romans had at Italica, and the Moors at Cordova. Those fair northmen came to Spain when Rome had grown old and feeble, her iron hand relaxed. The Romans had come as conquerors, carrying the eagles through Spain. They marched rapidly; twenty miles a day was their average. They smote Spain—Iberia they called it—hard, and left their imperishable mark upon her. The coming of the Visigoths was more a vast migration than a conquest. They moved slowly, wandered rather than marched, encumbered with women and children, flocks and herds. They wandered over Europe, crossed the Pyrenees and settled the Peninsula. The impress they have left on Spain is as different from the Roman as their coming differed from the triumphal progress of the Romans.

“It is not so easy to find traces of the Visigoths in Spain as of the Roman or the Moor,” little Don Luis had assured us.

“That is a pity,” was Patsy’s answer, “for the Visigoths were the nicest people who ever came to Spain!”

They have not left so strong a mark on things material as Roman or Arab; they seem never to have held the land as firmly. Was it because they brought their wives with them, and neglected the dark-eyed Iberian women, skillful, like the dancing girls of Gades, in the dance with the castanets? To find traces of the Gothic occupation do not look for vast ruins of temple, circus, aqueduct or bridge. A few capitals in the Mosque of Cordova, the bas-relief of a hunting scene in the Museum, the city walls and the ruins of the palace of Wamba at Toledo—we saw little else to remind us of the Gothic rule in Spain, as far as material things go. The crown of King Swinthila at Madrid was the most impressive relic of the Visigoths we saw. It is of gold, surrounded by rosettes of pearls and sapphires, in a delicate red paste cloisonné setting.