As day after day brought tidings to the people of Granada of the barbarities perpetrated in the Alpujarras, the whole city was filled with grief and consternation. The men might be seen gathered together in knots in the public squares; the women ran about from house to house, telling the tale of horrors which could hardly be exaggerated in the recital. They thronged to the churches, where the archbishop and the clergy were all day long offering up prayers to avert the wrath of heaven from Granada. The places of business were abandoned. The shops and booths were closed.[55] As men called to mind the late irruption of Aben-Farax, they were filled with apprehensions that the same thing would be attempted again; and rumours went abroad that the mountaineers were plotting another descent on the city, and, with the aid of their countrymen in the Albaicin, would soon deluge the streets with the blood of the Christians. Under the influence of these fears, some took refuge in the fortress of the Alhambra; others fled into the country. Many kept watch during the long night, while those who withdrew to rest started from their slumbers at the least noise, supposing it to be the war-cry of the Moslem, and that the enemy was at the gates.
Nor was the alarm less that was felt by the Moriscoes in the city, as it was certainly better founded,—for the Moriscoes were the weaker party of the two. They knew the apprehensions entertained of them by the Christians, and that, when men have the power to relieve themselves of their fears, they are not apt to be very scrupulous as to the means of doing so. They were afraid to venture into the streets by day, and at night they barricaded their houses as in a time of siege.[56] They well knew that a single act of imprudence on their part, or even the merest accident, might bring the Spaniards upon them, and lead to a general massacre. They were like the traveller who sees the avalanche trembling above him, which the least jar of elements, or his own unwary movements, may dislodge from its slippery basis, and bring down in ruin on his head. Thus the two races, inhabitants of the same city, were like two hostile camps, looking on each other with watchful and malignant eyes, and ready at any moment to come into deadly conflict.
In this stage of things the Moriscoes, anxious to allay the apprehensions of the Spaniards, were profuse in their professions of loyalty, and in their assurances that there was neither concert nor sympathy between them and their countrymen in the Alpujarras. The government, to give still greater confidence to the Christians, freely distributed arms among them, thus enabling them, as far as possible, to provide for their own security. The inhabitants enrolled themselves in companies. The citizen was speedily converted into the soldier, and every man, of whatever trade or profession,—the mechanic, the merchant, the lawyer,—took his turn of military service. Even the advocates, when attending the courts of justice, appeared with their weapons by their side.[57]
MUSTER OF TROOPS.
But what contributed above all to revive the public confidence was the care of the government to strengthen the garrison in the Alhambra by the addition of five hundred regular troops. When, by these various means, the marquis of Mondejar saw that tranquillity was restored to the capital, he bestowed all his thoughts on an expedition into the Alpujarras, desirous to crush the insurrection in its bud, and to rescue the unfortunate captives, whose fate there excited the most dismal apprehensions amongst their friends and relatives in Granada. He sent forth his summons accordingly to the great lords and the cities of Andalusia, to furnish him at once with their contingents for carrying on the war. The feudal principle still obtained in this quarter, requiring the several towns to do military service for their possessions, by maintaining, when called upon, a certain number of troops in the field, at their own expense for three months, and at the joint expense of themselves and the government for six months longer.[58] The system worked well enough in those ancient times, when a season rarely passed without a foray against the Moslems. But since the fall of Granada, a long period of inactivity had followed, and the citizen, rarely summoned to the field, had lost all the essential attributes of the soldier. The usual term of service was too short to supply the experience and the discipline which he needed; and far from entering on a campaign with the patriotic or the chivalrous feeling that gives dignity to the profession of arms, he brought with him the mercenary spirit of a trader, intent only on his personal gains, and eager, as soon as he had enriched himself by a lucky foray, or the sack of some ill-fated city, to return home, and give place to others, as inexperienced and possessed of as little subordination as himself.[59]
But, however deficient this civic militia might be in tactics, the men were well provided with arms and military accoutrements; and, as the motley array of troops passed over the vega, they made a gallant show, with their gay uniforms and bright weapons glancing in the sun, while they proudly displayed the ancient banners of their cities, which had waved over many a field of battle against the infidel.[60]
But no part of the warlike spectacle was so brilliant as that afforded by the chivalry of the country; the nobles and cavaliers who, with their retainers and household troops, had taken the field with as much alacrity on the present occasion as their fathers had ever shown when roused by the cry that the enemy was over the borders.[61] They were much inferior in numbers to the militia of the towns. But inferiority of numbers was more than compensated by excellence of discipline, by their perfect appointments, and by that chivalrous feeling which made them discard every mercenary consideration in the pursuit of glory. Such was the feeling of Luis Paer de Castillego, the ancient regidor of Córdova. When offered an independent command, with the emoluments annexed to it, he proudly replied: "I want neither rank nor pay. I, my sons, my kindred, my whole house, will always be found ready to serve our God and our king. It is the title by which we hold our inheritance and our patent of nobility."[62]
With such loyal and high-mettled cavaliers to support him, Mondejar could not feel doubtful of the success of his arms. They had, however, already met with one reverse; and he received tidings that his advance-guard, sent to occupy a strong pass that led into the mountains, had been driven from its position, and had sustained something like a defeat. This would have been still more decisive, had it not been for the courage of certain ecclesiastics, eight in number—four of them Franciscans, and four of the Society of Jesus—who, as the troops gave way, threw themselves into the thick of the fight, and by their example shamed the soldiers into making a more determined resistance. The present war took the form of a religious war; and many a valiant churchman, armed with sword and crucifix, bore his part in it as in a crusade.
Hastening his preparations, the captain-general, without waiting for further reinforcements, marched out of Granada on the second of January, 1569, at the head of a small body, which did not exceed in all two thousand foot and four hundred horse. He was speedily joined by levies from the neighbouring towns—from Jaen, Loja, Alhama, Antequera, and other places—which in a few days swelled his little army to double its original size. The capital he left in the hands of his son, the count of Tendilla; a man of less discretion than his father, of a sterner and more impatient temper, and one who had little sympathy for the Morisco. By his directions, the peasantry of the vega were required to supply the army with twenty thousand pounds of bread daily.[63] The additional troops stationed in the city, as well as those who met there, as in a place of rendezvous, on their way to the sierra, were all quartered on the inhabitants of the Albaicin, where they freely indulged in the usual habits of military licence. The Moriscoes still retained much of that jealous sensibility which leads the natives of the East to seclude their wives and daughters from the eye of the stranger. It was in vain, however, that they urged their complaints in the most respectful and deprecatory terms before the governor. The haughty Spaniard only answered them with a stern rebuke, which made the Moriscoes too late repent that they had not profited by the opportunity offered them by Aben-Farax of regaining their independence.[64]
Leaving Granada, the captain-general took the most direct route, leading along the western slant of the Sierra Nevada, that mountain-range which, with its frosty peaks glistening in the sun like palisades of silver, fences round the city on the south, and screens it in the summer from the scorching winds of Africa. Thence he rapidly descended into the beautiful vale of Lecrin, which spreads out, like a gay carpet embroidered with many a wild flower, to the verge of the Alpujarras. It was now, however, the dead of winter, when the bright colouring of the landscape, even in this favoured region, watered as it was by numerous fountains and running streams, had faded into the sombre tints more in harmony with the rude scenes on which the Spaniards were about to enter.