The Moors in Spain

by Stanley Lane-Poole

IT is time to glance at the opponents of the Moors in the North. We have seen how Pelayo gathered together the remnant of the Goths in the inaccessible caves and fastnesses of the Asturian mountains; how this remnant soon advanced beyond its early boundaries, and, taking courage from the indifference or the disunion of the Berber tribes who were quartered on the frontiers of the Mohammedan dominions, gradually recovered most of the territory north of the Sierra de Guadarrama, and there established the kingdom of Leon and the county of Castile; while the separate kingdom of Navarre arose further east, beneath the Pyrenees. We have also seen how these Christian kingdoms were in a state of almost constant war with their Moorish neighbours, and might have been seriously dangerous but for the no less constant divisions which neutralized the various Christian States. So long as the kingdom of Cordova remained strong and undivided, while the Christians of Leon, Castile, and Navarre wasted their vigour in civil wars, the Moors were fully equal to the task of preserving their dominions. But when the kingdom of Cordova fell, and Andalusia became a prey to petty dynasties, each of which thought first of its own interests, and then perhaps of the interests of the Mohammedan power at large, the Christians became more venturesome, and were enabled to wring from the Moors a considerable accession of territory. During the confusion of the eleventh century, when almost every city in Andalusia formed a State by itself, we have seen that the Christians scoured the land of the Moslems with their victorious armies, and exacted tribute from many of the most important Moorish princes. At this time Fernando the First had united the greater part of the north under his own sceptre. He had combined the conflicting provinces of Leon and Castile, and incorporated the Asturias and Galicia in his dominions. Fernando was undoubtedly the most powerful monarch in all Spain at this time; he had annexed Lormego, Viseu, and Coimbra in Portugal, and took tribute from the kings of Zaragoza, Toledo, Badajoz, and Seville; and though his imprudent division of his dominions among his three sons and two daughters involved the north in a series of civil wars after his death, Alfonso VI. "the Valiant" eventually succeeded in cementing the scattered fragments together again, and henceforward the progress of the Christian power in Spain was inevitable. It was only the immense bribes of the Mohammedan princes (who paid blackmail to a fabulous amount to buy off the Christians), and the armies of the Almoravides in the background, that prevented the entire reconquest of Andalusia by the Christians at this period of Moorish weakness. As it was, the Moors were in no sense their own masters; they were harassed between the dread of Alfonso and the scarcely less alarming supremacy of their Almoravide ally; and in the end they had to succumb to the latter. At this time we find the Christians interfering in most of the political affairs of the Mohammedan states; Christian armies overrunning their territories and demanding heavy tribute for their goodwill; and so complicated became the alliances between the two parties that many Christian mercenaries were to be found in the armies of the Moors, vigorously assisting in campaigns of devastation and sacrilege through Christian provinces, while Moors were ready to join the Castilians against their fellow-Moslems. It was, in short, a time of adventurers, of paid mercenaries, of men who fought for personal interest and profit, instead of for king and country.

We should make a great mistake if we regarded the warriors of Leon and Castile as anything approaching an ideal of knightly honour and chivalry, and a still greater error would be to imagine them polished, cultivated gentlemen. The Christians of the north formed the most striking possible contrast to their Moorish rivals. The Arabs, rough tribesmen as they had been at their first arrival, had softened, by contact with the Andalusians and by their own natural disposition to enjoyment and luxury, into a highly civilized people, delighting in poetry and elegant literature, devoted to the pursuit of learning, and, above all, determined to enjoy life to the utmost. Their intellectual tastes were unusually fine and delicate; they were moved by emotions which could only be felt by men of taste and savoir vivre. They were romantic, imaginative, poetical, speculative, and would bestow on a well-turned epigram what would have sufficed to pay a regiment of soldiers. The most tyrannical and bloodthirsty among their despots was held in some contempt if he were not also something of a poet, or at least instinctively appreciative of polished wit and courtly eloquence. Music, oratory, as well as the severer pursuits of science, seemed to come naturally to this brilliant people; and they possessed in a high degree that quality of critical perception and delicate appreciation of the finer shades of expression which in the present day we associate with the French nation.

The Christians of the north were as unlike this as can well be conceived. Though descended from an older kingdom, the northern states had most of the qualities of new nations. They were rude and uncultivated; few of their princes possessed the elements of what could be called education, and they were too poor to indulge in the refined luxuries of the Moorish sovereigns. The Christians were simply rough warriors, as fond of fighting as even their Moslem antagonists, but even better prepared by their hard and necessarily self-denying lives for the endurance of long campaigns and the performance of desperate deeds of valour. They had no idea of the high standard of chivalrous conduct which poets afterwards infused into their histories; they were men of the sword, and little besides. Their poverty made them any man's servants; they sold their valour to him who paid them best; they fought to get a livelihood. We have seen how the great minister Almanzor won his victories against Leon and took Santiago with the aid of a large contingent of the Leonese themselves, who perceived clearly enough on which side their fortunes were to be made. The history of the eleventh century in Spain is full of such examples of the employment of Christian chevaliers d'industrie by Moorish princes; but of these none has ever attained such celebrity as the Cid, the national hero of Spain.

The Cid's proper name was Rodrigo Diaz of Bivar, and he was called the Cid because that was the title which his Moorish followers naturally gave him. A Mohammedan gentleman is still addressed in Egypt and elsewhere by the title Sīd, which is a corruption of the word Seyyid, meaning "master." The Cid, or "master," was also styled Campeador, which signifies "champion," or, more accurately, "challenger," because his exceeding prowess made him the natural challenger in those single combats which in Spanish wars commonly preceded a general engagement between two armies. A famous warrior would advance before the ranks, as Goliath of Gath stood forth before the armies of Israel, and challenge the opposing forces to send him out a champion; and none was more renowned for his triumphs in this manner of warfare than Rodrigo Diaz, "myo Cid el Campeador," as the old chronicler affectionately calls him. It is not easy to decide how much of the splendid history which has gathered round the exploits of the Cid is true. The Christian chroniclers stopped at nothing when they began to describe their national hero; and the enthusiasm that did not shrink from relating how the King of Leon seized Paris, and conquered the French, Germans, Italians, and even the Persians, can be trusted still less when it sounds the glories of the beloved Cid. The Spanish ballads surround their hero with a saintly aureole of all the virtues, and forget that many of these virtues would not have been understood or appreciated by the Cid himself or his contemporaries in Castile. The Arabic writers are generally more trustworthy, but their judgment can hardly have been unbiassed when they spoke of a Christian who worked such misery to the Moslems of Valencia as did the famous Campeador. Yet even they call him a "miracle of God."

In this critical age we are frequently obliged to abandon with regret the most charming traditions of our childhood's histories; and the Cid has not been spared. A special book has been written by an eminent Orientalist to prove that the redoubtable Challenger was by no means the hero he was supposed to be; that he was treacherous and cruel, a violator of altars, and a breaker of his own good faith. Professor Dozy maintains that the romantic history of the Cid is a tissue of inventions, and he has written an account of "the real Cid" to counteract these misleading narratives. He founds his criticisms mainly on the Arabic historians, in whom, despite their national and religious bias, he places as blind a reliance as less learned people have placed in the Chronicle of the Cid. Yet it is surprising how trifling are the differences that can be detected between his "real Cid" and that romantic Chronicle of the Cid, the substance of which was compiled by Alfonso the Learned only half a century after the Cid's death, and which Robert Southey translated into English in 1805 with such skill and charm of style that his version has ever since been almost as much a classic as the original. Every one can separate for himself the obviously legendary incidents in the delightful old Chronicle without any assistance from the Arabic historians, who deal chiefly with one period alone of the Cid's career; and the best popular account of the hero, in discriminating hands and with due allowances, is still Southey's fascinating Chronicle. The Cid of the Chronicle is not at all the same as the Cid of the Romances; and while we cheerfully abandon the latter immaculate personage, we may still believe in the former. Of course our Cid had his faults, and was guilty of not a few thoroughly indefensible acts. He was no very orthodox champion of the faith, for he fought as well for the Moors as for the Christians, and would as dispassionately rob a church as a mosque. But all this is clear enough to any one who reads the Chronicle, and it does not make the Cid anything but what he always was—a hero of the rude days of yore. If we are to limit our definition of heroism to characters that display all Christian virtues, long-suffering, gentleness, and pity, we shall have to dismiss most of our old friends. Achilles was not very gentle or compassionate when he dragged the body of Hector round the walls of Troy: but Achilles is the hero of the Iliad. Nine out of ten of the heroes of antiquity committed a host of acts which we moderns, with our superfine sensibilities, call cruel, ungenerous, even dastardly. It is a pure perversion of history to apply latter-day codes of morality to the heroes of bygone ages. Let us admit that they are not all gold; and then let us delight in their great deeds, the mighty swing of their sword-arm, the crushing shock of their onset, their tall stature and flashing eyes as they ride to meet their foes. We do not expect them to be philosophers or strict advocates of the theories of political economy. We are quite satisfied with them as they are: heroes,—brave, gallant leaders of men.

The Cid was a real hero to the Spaniards: first, because he fought so magnificently, and that used once to be title enough to reverence; secondly, because, like the mythical Bernardo del Carpio and the real Fernando Gonzalez, he was the champion of Castile, and had bearded the King of Leon, and thus represented the immemorial jealousy which the Castilians entertained for the powerful neighbours who absorbed their province; and thirdly, because the minstrels forgot his long alliance with the Moors, or contrived to give it a disinterested aspect, and remembered him only as the great champion of the Christian people against the infidels. But the very cause which specially commended him to the Castilians, his insubordination to King Alfonso, made him a less perfect hero to the writer of the Cronica General, from which the Chronicle of the Cid was extracted. That writer or compiler, Alfonso the Learned, King of Leon and Castile, could not approve the haughty independence of the Cid towards his own forerunner the sixth Alfonso. Hence in Southey's version of the Chronicle (which is enriched with many extracts from the Poem of the Cid and other sources) we have a check upon the excessive adulation of the ballads and romances. There is no lack of details in the work which are anything but creditable to the Cid; but, nevertheless, the true heroic character, with all its faults and limitations, is well sustained, and the record forms a wonderfully interesting picture of a stirring time and the greatest figure among the Spanish chevaliers.

The story of the Cid would fill a volume by itself; all we can attempt here is to extract a few of the most striking passages of the Chronicle. The youth of the hero is, to a large extent, merged in myth; he first comes into historical documents in 1064, when, though scarcely more than twenty, he had already won his title of Challenger by a triumphant single combat with a knight of Navarre, and was soon afterwards appointed commander-in-chief of the forces of Castile. He helped Sancho of Castile to overcome his brother Alfonso of Leon, by a surprise which savoured strongly of treachery, but which passed for good strategy in those rough-and-ready times. After the murder of Sancho by Bellido, under the walls of Zamora, the Cid passed into the service of his successor, the very Alfonso whom he had before driven into exile. The king at first welcomed the invincible knight of Castile to his court, and married him to his own cousin; but jealous rivals poisoned his mind, already filled with the memory of past wrongs, against Rodrigo (or Ruy Diez, as he is styled in the Chronicle), and in 1081 the Cid was banished from his dominions. The Chronicle must tell the story of his farewells:

"And the Cid sent for all his friends and his kinsmen and vassals, and told them how King Don Alfonso had banished him from the land, and asked of them who would follow him into banishment, and who would remain at home. Then Alvar Fañez, who was his cousin-german, came forward and said, Cid, we will all go with you, through desert and through peopled country, and never fail you. In your service will we spend our mules and horses, our wealth and our garments, and ever while we live be unto you loyal friends and vassals. And they all confirmed what Alvar Fañez had said; and the Cid thanked them for their love, and said that there might come a time in which he should guerdon them.

"And as he was about to depart he looked back upon his own home, and when he saw his hall deserted the household chests unfastened the doors open, no cloaks hanging up, no seats in the porch, no hawks upon the perches, the tears came into his eyes, and he said, My enemies have done this.... God be praised for all things. And he turned toward the East and knelt and said, Holy Mary Mother, and all Saints, pray to God for me, that He may give me strength to destroy all the Pagans, and to win enough from them to requite my friends therewith, and all those who follow and help me. Then he called for Alvar Fañez and said unto him, Cousin, the poor have no part in the wrong which the king hath done us; see now that no wrong be done unto them along our road; and he called for his horse. And then an old woman who was standing at her door said, Go in a lucky minute, and make spoil of whatever you wish, And with this proverb he rode on, saying, Friends, by God's good pleasure we shall return to Castile with great honour and great gain. And as they went out from Bivar they had a crow on their right hand, and when they came to Burgos they had a crow on the left.