The town goes up from a seven-sided Plaza. It is stone, but mellow. Its streets are criss-crossed with surprising squares, irregular in shape and level. Old houses bearing shields seem to stoop as if time-softened in the mounting swirl. The cathedral stands waist-high among roofs. Its grandiloquent splendor is town-bound. Only the loftiest windows catch the free heaven for the nave. The doors of the cathedral open on many levels. Far up in the transept is a golden window topping a stair of carven oak: and this window is a door upon a street. Burgos begins to terrace up less gently. Houses, streets, arched galleries over steps are all one stone: but everywhere the gray walls crack: lilacs bloom in every crevice. Windows are open: flowers wave in them. Black-gowned women make shadows. In the gutters which are clean, play children, warm like their mothers, lyric like the lilacs.... A running bloom in Burgos mounts with the streets until they match the steeples of the churches, until the harsh high churches are engulfed. A green hill dappled with cherry is the height of Burgos. And here is a castle.
It is a famous Castle. It belonged to the first Counts of Castile, ere Castile was a kingdom. It witnessed the marriage of Ruy Díaz de Vivar, el Cid, to Ximena: and in its shadow stood the Cid’s solar, his “city dwelling.” It dominates the town. But it is ruin. It appears to have no importance. A paltry mass of rock it is, weeds in its cracks, gashes in its sides, and its top agape with earth and shrubs. It stands alone upon the top of the hill and crumbles into dust. Behind it are shanties: asses, dogs, hens possess the theater of its glory. The walls that once enclosed the city go down irrelevant now from the castle ruin: their cubos and bastions droop into a row of modern tenements, one spot of which is a tavern—a noisy mouth—filled with the red coats and red calls of soldiers.
What is this castle in the life of Burgos? A disused memory. It stands above a town whose fluent smile is turned away from it. Surely, it is no symbol?
Nor does the Cid’s spirit, more than that of Burgos, appear to chime with the ruin. The Cid lived in the eleventh century. Shortly after his death, he was immortalized by the poet of El Cantar de Mío Cid, probably a Christian menestral, residing in the Moor country of Medinaceli. The romancero painted the Cid afresh. He was a mobile scoundrel. His king, Alfonso of León, distrusted him and ordered him forth from his seigneurial seat Vivar. Ruy Díaz was penniless: but he possessed a trunk whose iron-thonged flanks you can still admire in the chapel of Corpus Christi of the cathedral. He filled this coffer with rock and sand, and sealed it. By his friend, Martín Antolínez, he caused it to be carried to Raquel and Vidas, rich Jews of Burgos. “These are my treasures,” he told the wily Jews. “I am exiled. Guard my wealth for me as security and loan me six hundred marks. The contents of my coffer are worth vastly more; but I am a simple knight and I need cash to pay my people at Vivar, and to lodge my wife with the monks of Cardeña. Six hundred modest marks.”
The Cid crosses into the Moor country of Aragon and begins his raid on the Moslem. Like the Jew, the Moslem is free game—a wilder sort of boar. God sent him into the world for Catholics to prey on. The Cid is out for spoils. It does not occur to him to convert a Moor: he strips him. But he is canny: he never quite strips him bare. He wants him for a friend as he turns his back to go on other raids. At last, the Cid captures Valencia, by guile rather than arms. He is a rich man now! He has sent gifts to mollify Alfonso, and to Ximena and to the monks of Cardeña. (Of course, he does not repay the Jews.) But he imports a bishop to Valencia del Cid, one completely fitted out with all the latest golden implements of worship—quite as a millionaire of Pittsburgh imports a chef from Paris. Listen to mío Cid reflecting on his luck.
All these winnings the Campeador made his.
“Thanks be to God who of the world is master!
“Before I was poor, today I am rich;
“I have money and lands, I have gold and wide possessions,
“And for sons-in-law I have the Counts of Carrión,
“All battles do I win, it is the will of the Lord.
“Muslim and Christian hold me in great fear.
“Yonder in Morocco where are the Muslim mosques,
“They might open to my attack. Who knows? perhaps they have
“The dread that I may come: but I am not so minded.
“I’ll not go seek the Moor; here in Valencia I’ll stay.
“And let them bring me their wealth: with the help of the Lord
“They’ll keep on paying me—or whomever I delegate.”
This is the constant temper of the first hero of Castile whom the changing mood of Spain was to turn at the last into a fanatical crusader. He has conquered another Moorish town:
“Hearken to me, Albar Fánez, and all my valiant knights!
“With this castle we have won great spoil;
“Many Moors have died; few do I see still living.
“As to survivors, both the men and the women, there’s no one who will buy them
“If we cut off their heads. Nary a bit would we gain.
“Let’s save them for ourselves; now that we are the masters.
“We’ll lodge in their houses; we’ll make them wait on us.”[11]
The Cid reminds us vividly how far his Spain was yet from the ultimate, classic Spanish character, four hundred years after the battle had begun between the Moor and Christian. In the Cid are all the elements of that character—in their raw, chemically unfused state. But in the sense that Isabel was Castilian, and that the Castle is Castilian, he is not Castilian and he is not Spanish. His spirit is pagan and is European. No such light-hearted, almost comic bellicosity exists among the Semites to whom warfare was a solemn, religious matter. The Cid is the knight-errant, the medieval sportsman, stripped, however, of the mystic and amorous sentiment which Christianity later put upon the freebooters of the northern forests. The Cid is cheerful and fluid as any pagan: but he has a trait which no true Teuton knight possessed: his extreme concern with money. The Cid fights like a Goth: but he figures like a Phœnician. And, like an Arab, he keeps moving.
From time to time, the Cid is minded that he is fighting for the Lord, that Christ is his captain, and that the Moor (aside passing alliances and friendships) is his spiritual foe. He gets this notion from the Moor himself: and it is well to realize how weakly the Christian has adapted it after four centuries of fighting. Meantime, the Arab who had crossed the Strait in a flame of religious passion, cooled and lost his sectarian, desert ardor. Spain was become a simmering chaos with no clear elements. Christian and Moslem were often in alliance. The Ideas of Cross and Crescent resided unalloyed only in monasteries. The process of osmosis whereby the Christian was to inherit the religious fanaticism long lost by the Moslem did not reach its climax until the Age of Isabel.