Читать книгу Toledo, the Story of an Old Spanish Capital - Hannah Lynch - Страница 4

Table of Contents

HERE may be said to begin the real history of Toledo, from this until the fatal battle of Guadalete, the capital of Spain, since it was the heart of Gothic rule. The backward pages of its story are blurred and insignificant, judged by their traces, though we may imagine, if it were possible to build up the effaced picture of Toledo under Roman power, we should find a very superior civilisation. Instead of a flourishing Roman colony, Atanagildo’s choice of this “strong place” was merely the establishment of a rough barbaric camp. It is doubtful if, until Wamba’s time, the Goths had the art of profiting by such heritage as the decadent vanquished had left them. As a race they inspire even less interest than their brethren east and north.

Family love was no strong element in the development of the Royal House, as the quaintly heartless story of San Hermengildo proves. Leovigildo was reigning then, and he, an Arian, committed the imprudence of marrying his eldest son, Hermengildo, to a French Goth, Ingundus, the niece of Saint Leander of Seville. With such powerful interests on the side of Rome, it is not surprising that the Arian prince speedily abjured his heresy, to the anger and dismay of his father. Unfortunately, his conversion did not imply the practice of any of the Christian virtues. Religion accomplishes the very thing we should have thought its mission to forbid: it arms the son against his father. The two sects, oddly enough representing the doctrine of peace and goodwill on earth, meet outside the walls of Seville in armed encounter. Hitherto the spectacle had been war and persecution and their attendant horrors on the side of Pagan against the noble and martyred Christian. From this we were to learn that Christian versus Christian could show quite as pretty a figure in atrocities as ever the persecuting worshipper of the gods. Here we have an infuriated father and a rebellious son ready to cut one another’s throat, and of the two it can hardly be said that the Catholic saint shows to better advantage. Indeed, in their correspondence both reason and dignity are on the side of Leovigildo, who writes to his son: “I associated you with my power from earliest years, not that you should arm strangers against me. Thou dost blunt thy conscience, and cover thyself with the veil of religion,” he acutely adds, while Hermengildo’s reply is an inflated and pragmatical attack on the baseness of his father’s creed and the superiority of his own.[3]

Hermengildo is beaten, his forces scattered, and thanks to the intercession of his brother, Recaredo, instead of the expected death sentence, his father sentences him to exile at Valencia. As a Christian, a martyr, and a canonised saint, Hermengildo presents an original figure. Even the harsh wisdom of Moses condemns him, and the worst Pagan would hardly condone his unprovoked assault on his father, by way of converting him to a belief in Christ’s divinity; while instead of quietly enduring the consequences of his abortive rebellion and his inappropriate expression of faith, he went about the coast, begging the assistance of the Greeks in another attempt to proselytise by the sword, and seize his father’s throne by the same stroke. The Spanish historians, to whom this method of conversion is particularly sympathetic and of unquestionable logic, disregard the side question of revolt, and delight in weighing upon Hermengildo’s lofty efforts in behalf of truth. His object they accept as the laudable extirpation of error. Indifferent to his natural relations to the king he desired to dethrone, Gamero says: “Perhaps, like Alaric, within his breast, a secret voice had commanded him to go forth and destroy the power of Arianism in Spain; to establish upon the ruins of paganism and false sects the immortal throne where the god of Sabahot is worshipped, and on which shines with eternal splendour the immaculate purity of Mary.” And so he complacently follows the unfilial prince on his bellicose mission through Estremadura, now occupying Merida, again attempting to take Seville and his former court, seeking support in France with the hope of arming his brother-in-law, Sigeric, against his father. All Gamero laments is his unsuccess. The Arian father did precisely what Hermengildo would have done in his place; he seized his son, flung him into a dungeon, first at Toledo, then at Tarragona, where he was beheaded after stoutly refusing to accept communion from the hands of an Arian bishop. His form of refusal is proudly recorded by St Gregory of Tours as an admirable one: “As a minister of the devil, only to hell couldst thou guide me. Away and go, coward, to the punishment prepared for thee, and which thou deservest.” We hardly detect the influence of Christian mildness and sweetness in this address. However, all saints cannot resemble St Francis of Assisi, and even St Fernando of Castille boiled his enemies alive in great pots of water over huge fires. This is Gamero’s admiring epitaph: “Thus on the 13th April, 584, ended with glorious martyrdom the life of this hero of the Spanish Church, whose blood effaced any faults as a man he may have committed, and was a perennial source of happiness and fortune to our country.”

Morality is, after all, like criticism, only a matter of existing convention and national temperament. Believe the right thing, and one’s vices are a matter of small account. In the mediæval times, with a proper amount of faith, one might with impunity, boil one’s enemies or roast them before a fire, and be duly canonised and offered to posterity as a saint and a just man. But be as virtuous and as austere as Marcus Aurelius, believing the wrong thing, and the orthodox historian will manage to be blind to your virtues, and offer you for public contumely. So we have a legend of sanctity centred round this extremely unedifying prince, who took up arms against a father not convicted of any particular injustice or enormity, plotted with France to dethrone him, and after an unnatural career, died furious and unresigned, breathing curses upon his enemies. Behold him one of the glories of that curious medley of Pagan qualities and unchristian vices, Mediæval Catholicism. The historians will not even permit the poor father to grieve and regret his own harshness in peace. His sorrow and remorse are not accepted as the natural sentiments of a man whom a just anger had carried beyond the endurance of nature. We are forced to regard them as the tardy recognition of his own iniquity and error. We are told in triumph that the monarch died weeping and repentant in the arms of St Leander of Seville, the friend and uncle by marriage of his exiled son. Could anything be more natural than this touching and piteous picture of an old man, doubtful of himself, turning in his grief to the one great friend of his son? The action in its simple humanity is worth all the grandiloquent insolence of the saint and martyr Leovigildo mourned, in whose story virtue and sanctity are equally unevident.

Recaredo, his son and successor, solemnly abjured Arianism before the third Toledan Council, as the inscription on his statue outside the Alcázar records. We may imagine this unhappy son and brother weary for the moment of bloodshed and strife, and anxious to put an end to dissension in his kingdom. It would suffice to explain the wise and eloquent speech he addressed to his subjects, exhorting all to be of one faith, to enter the bosom of the Church, and accept its dogmas as he had done. His speech must have been miraculously persuasive, and his influence over his people almost magnetic, since nearly all to a man yielded to the earnest prayer of a tired and suffering heart, and consented to make his religion theirs. And thus it might be hoped, after the terrible domestic tragedy Recaredo had been obliged to witness, powerless to prevent it, the reign of violence, persecution, and discord was over, and the religious power of Toledo permanently established upon tolerant lines. But this was to count without the spirit of the times. After the first shock of misery and bereavement had passed, the turbulent sense of revolt on one side, and determination to crush it on the other, broke out in all its malignant force. The Arian bishops, goaded on by Leovigildo’s widow, hurled their vote of resistance to the establishment of Roman influence. Here we have another instance of the charming inconsistency of the prolix Spanish historians. Leovigildo was nothing less than a monster, because he punished conspiracy and rebellion, and his Catholic son, condemned justly by the laws of the day to death, was a haloed martyr. Recaredo remains a just and magnanimous sovereign when he cuts off the heads and hands of the Arian conspirators; and the premature death of the queen dowager, Gosvintha, is deeply lamented, because her step-son was thus deprived of the duty of cutting off her rebellious head. Why was she less of a saint, one asks, than Hermengildo? She, too, rebelled on behalf of principle, and surely a step-son is a more natural antagonist in the field than a father! But for the historian conspiracy against a legitimate heretical sovereign may be an article of faith and duty, whereas the heretic who conspires against the monarch of the right faith is a fiend. It is this hopeless lack of logic and sense that renders so dreary and unillumined a task the reading of Spanish history. The humorists, alas! wrote dramas and novels, and history was left to the terrible Mariana, the credulous Masdeu, and the one-sided Gamero.

At the next Toledan Council, Recaredo presided in all pomp, accompanied by his queen, Baddo. The sovereigns first, then all the converted Arians, bishops, priests, deacons, and lords and leaders, read aloud this act of allegiance to Rome. Recaredo was the first to swear: “I, Recaredo, King, maintaining with my heart, and affirming with my word, this true and holy confession, which alone the Catholic Church professes all over the globe, have subscribed with my right hand, God protecting me.” Baddo, his wife, then swore: “I, Baddo, glorious queen, have subscribed with my hand and all my heart to that faith I believe in and have admitted.” Followed the oath of each bishop and priest; and then came the turn of the nobles. Imagination readily enough evokes the scene from such dry details, and pictures one of exceptional solemnity, with a touch of barbarism, beginning to borrow undreamed of luxury from a departed civilisation, without taste or tact to render that luxury beautiful. We have only to visit the Musée de Cluny to form some notion of Gothic gold-work by inspection of the Gothic votive crowns discovered in Toledo, and it is easy to picture this rough humanity, from monarch to knight, in their flowing cloaks, grave, impressed, all in deadly earnest, and the mitred and mighty prelates forming an inner circle, in gold and silvered embroideries, bejewelled, and full of glory and contentment. The importance of the nobles we gather from a list of Gothic dignitaries. First came the dukes, counts, palatines of the royal house. Then came the first count, the count of the drinking-cup, Escansias; the chamberlain, Count Cubiculario; the chief groom, Count Estabulario; then the major domos, counts of the patrimony, the counters-in-chief, Count Numerario, the count of the viands, Count Silonario; knight of the youths, Count of the Espartarios, captain of the guard; Count of the Sagrarios, keeper of sacred things; Count of the Sargentarios, keeper of the treasure. The grandees or ricos hombres were governors of the territories and kingdoms.

St Isidor has painted Recaredo as a model of all the Christian virtues, which is decidedly excessive praise in the face of such accentuated vices against the mild sublimity of that scarce practised creed as an inflexible spirit of vengeance and cruelty, and a bigotry in his new religion as hard and determined as that of his Arian fathers, once the early lesson in adversity had been learnt and forgotten. However, in spite of defects rather belonging to his barbarous times, few natures being able to resist the forces of environment and general feeling, than to the man himself perhaps, he remains unquestionably one of the wisest and strongest of Gothic kings, and his personality is all the more marked by contrast with that of his feeble son, Luiva II., who was dethroned by Viterico, a senseless usurper, shortly afterwards assassinated at table by his own servants and cast into the street, where the infuriated populace seized the corpse and dragged it up and down the hilly streets and lanes of Toledo, eventually flinging it into a filthy hole as unfit for decent burial.

Gundmar’s short reign furnished no reason to doubt his well-meaning intentions. He quelled a rising among the Vasco Navarrese and the Imperial troops, and convened a council at Toledo to decide in the town’s favour against the sacerdotal pretensions of Carthagena. But his successor is a figure worth noting, and in his reign takes place the first of those unfortunate outbreaks against the Jews, for which dismantled and impoverished Spain still pays so heavy a price. Before the Moors came, Toledo’s source of prosperity and wealth sprang from her Hebrew colony, and the anti-Semitic movement, started by Sisebuth, had probably no other object than the barbarians’ desire to appropriate Jewish gold. Sisebuth himself is spoken of in history as the father of the poor, and is extolled for his compassionate heart and his liberality. His horror of suffering and blood was so great that he sent his own doctors to tend the stricken enemy when he was compelled to go to war, and paid out of his own purse to his soldiers the ransom of their captives. Servitude and blood-shedding were equally abhorrent to him. The annalist Frêdégaire tells of him, as an example of exquisite sensibility in those rude times, which would be no less rare in our own, that in the thick of battle with the Imperial army, seeing the Greek soldiers fall in numbers under the savage blow of his men, he rushed into their midst, shouting: “Woe to me whose reign should see the flowing of so much human blood,” and frantically drove away his soldiers from the wounded Byzantines. The pity was such excellent sentiments were not cultivated on behalf of the Jews. Having twice defeated the Byzantine army, Cesario only procured a treaty of peace on condition the Jews were expelled from Spain. And in 616, Sisebuth published his famous edict against the children of Israel, offering them the harsh alternative, within the year, of professing the Christian faith, and accepting baptism, or being publicly flogged a hundred whip-strokes, shaven and shorn, robbed of their goods, and expelled from the kingdom. One hardly understands why the shaving and flogging should have been ordered, since appropriation and expulsion ought to have sufficed. Even the Fathers of the Church had the grace to protest against the needless inhumanity of this edict, though the Toledan bishops in a council upheld it. Yet history accepts him as a mild and upright judge, a magnificent prince, a valiant and humane captain, the friend of the poor, the protector of letters. He himself dabbled in literature, wrote in the swollen and exaggerated Gothic manner, composed several earnest and dogmatic letters in refutation of Arianism, which he addressed to the King and Queen of Lombardy, severely reprimanded Bishop Eusebius for the disorders of his existence, and commanded Bishop Caecilius to return to his diocese, which he had forsaken for the monastery. Clearly a monarch not to be trifled with even by the bishops, whom he kept in check, and whose public and private life he insisted on regulating. He conquered the Asturians and the Vascons, and overthrew the Byzantine power in Spain, seizing most of the Imperial towns and weakening the Imperial forces at Cadiz. At home he built the church of St Leocadia.

But of the growth of the town we learn little. Literature in those days was more moral than descriptive, and the Gothic kings of Toledo, when not fighting the Byzantines and Vascons, seem chiefly to have been engaged in discovering elegant flowers of speech, and cultivating the very finest obscurity of expression. Suinthila, looking from the seven rocky hills of his martial town, could tell himself that the kings of Toledo ruled from Cadiz to the Pyrenees, from Atlantic to Mediterranean shores, while Chindasvinthe, in his semi-Roman palace, looked peacefully across the vega and along those foliaged banks of the quiet Tagus that had beguiled Pyrrhus and his mate from the East, and recreated himself with the art of letters. St Eugenius and St Braulion of Zaragoza were the honoured recipients of his royal epistles, in which he writes of “an eloquence adorned with the most flowery words and girdled with all the harmonies of fine language,” and plunging further into unlucid intricacies hymns an “eloquence suggesting a royal clemency, an observation wherein shines the zeal displayed in the travail of literary composition.” When he led his troops to battle, it is to be hoped that his military addresses to them revealed less fearfully the travail of literary composition. Surely the harmonies of fine language so admired by him were never more inappropriately “girdled” against the encroachments of ordinary sense. He speaks of someone “who will not succumb from a need of understanding” and “who is not meagre through poverty of spirit.” His successor, Recesvinthus, displayed the same Gothic tendencies and rhymed in the highest obscurity, in proof of the “fatness” of his wisdom, which verses he dedicated to the grateful Fathers of the VIIth Council, who being Gothic, probably understood and relished them. But Recesvinthus deserves the recognition of bibliophiles, for he had a passion for collecting old manuscripts, and was extremely particular about their authenticity and corrections. He too persecuted the Jews, and his morals were doubtful.

The most famous archbishop of Toledo under Gothic rule was San Ildephonso. His parents, Stephen and Lucy, were noble Goths of almost royal blood, distantly related to the King Atanagildo. Ildephonso was educated by his uncle, St Eugenius III. At an early age he developed a passion for learning, and was sent to Seville to the care of the famous Doctor St Isidor. It would be astonishing if breathing so much sanctified air the young Ildephonso did not become himself a saint, or the reverse. His saintly master grew so attached to his pupil that when Ildephonso expressed a wish to return to his parents at Toledo, St Isidor locked him up. After a considerable while he yielded to his disciple’s prayer, and allowed him to depart. The youth, after a short stay at his father’s house, left it for the monastery of Agalia outside Toledo. Stephen flew into a violent rage upon the discovery, and attacked the monastery with armed followers. The monks hid the lad, while Stephen and his band searched the building from roof to cellars, and departed swearing profusely. His mother was more reasonable, and besought St Eugenius to intervene and obtain her son’s permission to follow his vocation. Shortly before his death, St Eladio consecrated him and gave him holy orders (632). He was first abbot of the monastery of St Cosmos and St Damian, and on the death of Adeodato, became abbot of the monastery of Agalia where he had received orders. Inheriting from his parents, he devoted the inheritance to the foundation of a convent for nuns, and on his uncle’s death, 659, he was raised to the vacant archbishopric of Toledo. Heretics began to discuss the perpetual virginity of Our Lady, and Ildephonso wrote his first notable book, De Virginitate perpetua Sanctae Mariae adversus tres infideles, the three infidels being Elvidio, Theudio, and Eladio, natives of Narbonne. The saint’s triumph in polemics was immediate, and the infidels were pronounced as completely crushed. The whole court followed the King and the Archbishop to the church of Saint Leocadia to give loud thanks. Kneeling at the saint’s tomb, suddenly a group of angels appeared through clouds and sweet scents; the clouds fainting, the young martyr was revealed in the midst of the group, and smiling graciously upon Ildephonso, said, Ildephonse per te vivit domina mea. The astounded archbishop, rapidly recovering his bewilderment, held out his hand to grasp the saint’s veil, and the King Recesvinthus, kneeling beside him, passed him his knife, with which Ildephonso cut off a piece of the veil, which, together with the knife, is now kept among the Cathedral treasures. The mass of St Leocadia, composed by the archbishop, was then solemnly sung, and this was the first inauguration of a feast since adopted by the Church of Rome, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Thanks from heaven did not rest with Mary’s messenger, St Leocadia. Nine days after entering the church to recite matins, the archbishop saw a strange flame upon the wall. Approaching, he discovered the queen of heaven seated on his own marble chair enveloped in heavenly radiance, who thus addressed him: Propera, serva dei charissime, in occursum, et accipe munusculum de manu mea, quod de thesausus filii sevi attuli. The present she brought him from heaven was a splendid chasuble wrought by angels, in which the Virgin with her own hands vested him, while the celestial choir chanted around him. The vision faded in a faint smoke, and only the perfumes and the vague echo of remote music remained, while St Ildephonso lay prostrate in ecstasy, kissing the spot the Virgin’s feet had touched, ubi steterum pedes ejus. He was found in this attitude by the clergy and multitudes, and his fame, owing to this second miracle, spread far and wide, till Rome dispatched two legates to inquire into the legend. Thus it was that the Pope and the King of Spain came to be canons of the Cathedral of Toledo, which took precedence of all others in the land. In a few weeks St Ildephonso returned the Virgin’s visit in heaven, and he was buried in all pomp beside the patron of the city, St Leocadia.

But of all these Gothic sovereigns, the most important for Toledo was Wamba, the only one now gloriously remembered. Wamba it was who built the great walls, traces of which to-day remain. Most of the Gothic inscriptions were in honour of Wamba, though these have nearly all disappeared. His defaced statue it is that greets you welcome to his ancient citadel and capital. One of these vanished inscriptions is preserved in the Chronique rimée des rois de Tolède by the anonymous writers of Cordova.[4] It was traced on Wamba’s famous walls: Erexit factore Deo rex inclitus urbem, Wamba suæ celebrem protendedens, gentis honorem. Vos sancti domini, quorum hic præsentia fulget. Hunc urbem et golebem solito salvate favore.

For the Toledans, Wamba remains a personage of fabulous virtue and merit. We first meet him at the funeral of Recesvinthus, when by general election he was proclaimed king. He was an old warrior, neither ambitious nor over-confident, it would appear, and he humbly declined an honour he did not feel fitted to accept. So frantic was the sense of disappointment that a duke walked up to him angrily and threatened to kill him on the spot if he persisted in his refusal, and confronted with a crown and a formidable Toledan blade, the humblest sage that ever drew breath would naturally choose the crown. Wamba bowed to spontaneous choice, and made his triumphal entry into the capital, Sep. 20, 672, nineteen days after his compulsory acceptance of the throne. It was no easy seat, and all his prowess, his undoubted genius and his popularity could not keep him thereon unmolested, though Bishop Quiricus had anointed him amid universal rejoicings. Lope de Vega assumes that this really remarkable man was of peasant origin, but later historians agree that he was of good blood, a much more likely fact, as the barbarous Goths were sticklers for aristocratic prestige, and the law kept very distinct the nobiles and the vilidies. However virtuous the man of obscure origin might be, it is doubtful if a fierce Gothic duke would have threatened to murder him if he declined so stupendous an honour as the right of ruling that duke and his fellow-nobles.

The start of Wamba’s brief but glorious reign was marked by treachery and revolt. His general, of Greek origin, Count Paul, in conspiracy with the Count of Nîmes and the Bishop of Maguelonne, rose against him in Narbonese Gaul. Wamba was then fighting the eternal Vascon, the hereditary enemy of the Kings of Toledo, but he left the Basque country and marched into Gaul, capturing the Pyrenean fortresses, attacking Narbonne by land and sea, and seizing Béziers, Agde, Maguelonne, and then he fell upon Nîmes. Never were French prisoners treated with greater courtesy and consideration. Not only did he free them but sent them off with splendid gifts. For Count Paul alone was he adamantine. He condemned the rebel to walk barefooted between two dukes on horseback, who led him in leash by the hair of his Greek head through the Gothic ranks at Nîmes. Then Wamba on horseback coldly surveyed the ignoble procession, while poor Paul was forced to prostrate himself before his outraged master. In public the King rebuked him, and then we are sorry to record of so great a man, publicly kicked him and ordered his head to be shaved. The shaving and the kick might fittingly have been suppressed with dignity added to the picture of stern Wamba on horseback. To see his enemy grovelling at his feet ought to have contented even a Goth. But no. When Wamba made his triumphal entry into Toledo, the unfortunate Paul and his accomplices walked behind—shaven, forlorn, barefooted, robed in camel’s hair, and instead of graceful, superfluous locks, Paul wore a mock crown of laurel. He was not without a certain grim humour King Wamba, you perceive, and one would like to have seen his Gothic visage as his glance fell upon the laurel crown. Not benignant of a surety, possibly sardonic.

But it is not in connection with Count Paul that Wamba’s name reaches us to-day and like that of the fatal Rodrigo, is permanently attached to Toledo. Forgotten the long list of Gothic sovereigns, forgotten the councils they presided over, the battles they lost and won, their achievements, follies and virtues, their epistolary flowers of speech and decrees. Only Wamba and Rodrigo remain, one a historic fact, the other vaguely and unveraciously defined through legend and romance. As I have said, coming up from the station, the traveller is greeted upon the dusty curving road by the noseless statue of King Wamba, who built upon the Roman remains a magnificent wall round the city, raised ramparts, towers, and chapels, and for eight years was the untiring benefactor of the city and the people, till treachery rewarded his splendid services by deposition in the hour of illness and condemned him to claustral reclusion.

In his days, the Bridge of Alcántara still existed with its marvellous Roman arch, one of the most finished and graceful Roman monuments of Spain. For the Goths had the virtue not to destroy any of the Roman remains, though they were incapable of profiting by what they found. They it was who, at Wamba’s orders, built the walls and palaces of Toledo, and gave

PUENTE DE ALCANTARA.

the city its definite note of architecture, a note the Moors were careful not to efface, all in adding their own ineffaceable stamp, for the Moors were great artists and had the secret of utilising what they influenced. If the Spanish Goths began by modelling their architecture on the Roman remains in their capacity of imitators and not inventors, the Moors, inventors and assimilators, forced the Goths to modify their style by the famous mudejar order. Violence must be a rudimentary instinct of humanity, since the milder and less florid mudejar remains a single feature in Spanish architecture, while the rough Goths have the secret of impressing their individuality on all the entire Peninsula, and so with their flowers of speech, vapid, empty, and void of sincerity which to this day have entered the language of the country, unaltered by the march of centuries, ornate and unintelligent, untouched by modern civilisation, of which the Spaniards take no heed. The ruins of this dead Gothic art are best studied at Toledo. Here you have it purest, the fourth century style with its coarse and pointed leafage, its laboured workmanship, its ornamentation, symbols, and figurative caprices, then so new and bold, and which are never repeated in the Arabic or Byzantine architecture later.

Fragments of this art of Wamba’s days may be seen in the ruined church of San Genes, in the bath of the Cava, never a bath, where never the legendary Florinda bathed, and in the wall of a house in the calle Lechuga, as well as in the façade of the Bridge of Alcántara. In the beginning of Gothic rule it was chiefly architecture that flourished, but Wamba’s immediate predecessors, we have seen, preferred literature and libraries, cultivated poetry, the epistolary art, and such research as the obscure times afforded, which they called science, and founded colleges. Their costume was half Roman, since they borrowed what they knew of civilisation from the Romans. They wore silk embroidered cloaks, let their hair grow long, like their Merovingian brethren, to mark their superiority to the short-cropped Celt-Iberians they had conquered; the women wore costly habits and splendid jewels, and all the nobles drank from golden cups and washed in silver basins. The value and beauty of their goldsmiths’ work are abundantly testified by the nine great votive crowns in the Musée de Cluny, where the famous treasure of Guarrazar is preserved. These magnificent gold crowns of the seventh century were discovered near Toledo in 1858 by a French officer who owned the property La Fuente de Guarrazar where these historic crowns were buried. They were probably buried at the time of Tarik’s invasion, and remained nearly eight centuries underground. The most important, as well as the largest and most beautiful, is the crown which bears the inscription in letters of gold cloisonné and incrusted, Reccesvinthus Rex offeret. To show the value of the workmanship of this crown, I cannot do better than quote here in full its official description in the catalogue of the Musée Cluny by M. du Sommerard: “King Recesvinthus’ crown is composed of a large and massive golden band. It opens with a double hinge, and is richly framed by two borders of gold cloisonné, and incrusted with red Carian stones, those which Anastasius calls gemmis alabandinsis, and in relief has thirty Oriental sapphires of the greatest beauty set in golden borders, mostly of considerable dimension. Thirty-five pearls of a no less notable size alternate with the sapphires on a golden ground incrusted with the same stones, and twenty-four little gold chains, starting from the lower circle of the crown, suspend large letters in gold cloisonné and incrusted, whose disposition form the words:

Reccesvinthus Rex Offeret.

Each of these letters ends with a pendant of gold and fine pearls holding a pear of rose sapphire. The king’s crown is suspended by a quadruple chain of beautiful workmanship which attaches it to a double gem of massive gold enriched with twelve pendants in sapphire, and this gem, whose branches are open, is surmounted by a capital in rock-crystal, finely wrought; then comes a ball of the same material, and then a golden stem which forms the starting point of the suspension.

The cross which occupies the centre of the crown and is attached to the gem by a long golden chain, is not less remarkable for its elegance of form and richness of material. It is in massive gold relieved by six lovely sapphires and eight big fine pearls, each jewel is set in relief in open claws, and behind is still the fibula that hooked it to the royal mantle.

The diadem is of plain gold within, but the exterior, which the sapphires and fine pearls set in relief ornament, has another particular decoration, which consists in a set of palm leaves in open cutting whose leaves are filled with blades of the same red material which looks like cornelian stone at first sight, of which we have already spoken.

The sapphires which decorate the band, and whose setting is largely treated, are, we have said, thirty, all of the finest water, and many of them show traces of a natural crystallisation by facets; the two principal ones, which are placed in the centre of each face, are not in diameter less than thirty millimetres. The pearls are also of an exceptional size, and only a few have been affected by time. The suspension chains are composed each of five fine gems cut in open work, and the stem that supports the whole is of massive gold.

The number of sapphires that ornament this crown, the cross and the gem are not less than seventy, of which thirty are of matchless size, the pearls the same. The pendants which terminate the letters of the diadem are, as well, decorated with enamel enchased in golden borders.

So much to prove that the charge of luxury against the Toledan Goths is not unfounded. A people so enamoured of gold and jewels and embroidered silks as they at this time were, would naturally be disposed to forget the rude lessons of war and camp. Wamba had improved their town and made it a fair and comfortable place to dwell in, and the barbarians without the gates were quieted now by frequent defeat. And so, the wise and virtuous Wamba once deposed by trickery and smuggled off the throne in a cataleptic fit, garbed in the monk’s gown of renouncement, the period of Gothic decadence set in. Its day of triumph and ordered rule had been a brief if brilliant one, and it had by patient effort evolved its own rude and unstable civilisation out of rough-shod conquest. From Ataulfo and his horde of barbarians, pouring, famished and athirst, across the Pyrenees, to lettered Recesvinthus and austere Wamba, who would make an effective figure even in our own times, the range in humanity is long, the dividing sea is wide and deep. But if swift had been the triumph, swifter still and more inexplicable was the decline. A more unhappy and reckless descent to oblivion history does not record. Towards the end of the seventh century, the glory of Toledo had so sensibly diminished that a haze lies upon its subsequent history to the lurid fame of the doomed day of Guadalete. We hear dimly of deplorable vices, of a demoralised clergy, of effaced and degraded sovereigns, of a people given up to every shameful pleasure and wrapped in effeminacy and indolence.

The private story of King Egica is a curious and an unedifying one, told at length by Lozana in his Reyes Nuevos and by the Conde de Mora in his History of Toledo. Egica fell violently in love with his niece, Doña Luz, who, on her side, loved more passionately than wisely her other uncle, Don Favila. Favila seems a disreputable enough fellow, since he took the last advantage of his niece’s passion, and left her to face the most atrocious troubles that might have ceased by manly behaviour on his part. It is one of those complicated and incomprehensible episodes in history that leave us aghast. Favila is elsewhere supposed to have murdered his brother by a blow on the head for the sake of that brother’s wife. At any-rate he pursued Doña Luz and, as Lozana naïvely asserts, with her permission entered her bedroom one night, and there kneeling before the statue of the Virgin (exquisite absence of all sense of the ludicrous revealed even in modern Spanish plays where the same sort of thing happens), they proclaim themselves man and wife with the usual results. In a little while the watchful and suspicious king perceives that his niece, Doña Luz, is enceinte. The lady understands her own and the coming infant’s danger, so she has an ark made, and after a secret delivery, places the infant in it like another Moses, with quantities of linen, jewellery and money, and her women float it down the Tagus, where, by a miracle, it is found by her uncle, Grafeses, who lives at Alcántara. Not knowing whose is the child, Grafeses takes it home. At Toledo the king suspects what has happened, but can find out nothing definite, so, still true to biblical tradition, he decides to tackle the new-born infants. He sends for a list of all the children born in and without Toledo during the past three months, with the name of each father, hoping thus to discover an unfathered babe with which to charge Doña Luz. The number of babies born during the three months in the city of Toledo reached 10,428, and in the suburbs surpassed 25,000. What a different story from that of to-day! One wonders where there was room for the immense population of olden times. Alas for the vindictive king! All the babies had authentic fathers and mothers, and there was no reaching Doña Luz by this device. There remained another and less primitive vengeance. He ordered one of his gentlemen, Melias, to attack her publicly as “a lost woman.” Because she refused to become his mistress, and became somebody else’s (his brother’s), he decided she should be burnt for impurity. Excellent logic of man! On Doña Luz’s first appearance at Court Melias charged her with impropriety, and the king fiercely ordered her to reply to the accusation. “My Lord,” said Luz, with much dignity, “how would you have me reply to such a charge? God knows, and you, my lord, see that I cannot give him the reply he merits, since he is a cavalier and yet accuses me, a woman, of evil.” The king, base churl, not touched by this admirable reply, mockingly assures her that he is uncertain whether to address her as dame or maid, and defies her to find a defender, having previously forbidden his courtiers to take up her cause. At all times the picture of a disappointed lover vindictively pursuing the woman who has refused to listen to him is particularly hideous, but never more than here, where the insulted lady is so noble and patient and he such a ruffian. Without a defender, he adds, she is destined to burn for her lack of chastity. She asks for a delay, and this is surlily granted. Just as the fire is being prepared for the unfortunate Doña Luz, Don Favila arrives from the Asturias. It is not made clear to us why he did not remain and provoke a duel with Melias at once, but the historians unctuously assure us that he kissed his wife (in the eyes of God) wept over her, told her to hold her soul in patience, and returned to the Asturias in search of money. The delay must have been unendurably long, and one wonders at Egica’s unnatural command of temper, when even now, as I, alas! too well know, it takes a long time, even with the aid of steam, to get from Toledo to the Asturias. In hot haste, however, Don Favila returned to Toledo, challenged Melias, and all the court assembled in the Vega beneath the archbishop’s palace, to watch the fight. Doña Luz remained in her chamber, full of sorrow and fear for Favila. The king ordered the Duke of Cabra and Count of Merida with three hundred cavaliers to guard the Vega, and, under pain of death, prevent anyone from assisting the combatants. His fierce desire, not even concealed, was that Favila should be killed, and Doña Luz thus placed more utterly at his mercy. The knights met with a terrible shock of steel, so that both were unhorsed and nearly killed. This report reached Doña Luz and prostrated her. She hurried out to see for herself; and Favila, recovered from his faint, looked up and gave her a glance of reassurance and love. He was only dizzy as was proved by his alert spring to his feet and quick rush upon his lady’s enemy, through whose slanderous mouth he thrust his sword inflicting thus a death wound. He coolly drew out his sword, wiped it, and advancing to the royal seat, he bowed before the king and queen, and haughtily hoped that Doña Luz’s reputation now was cleared. Not satisfied, Egica sent another knight, Bristes, (what unutterable cads those Gothic knights were!), to challenge the lady’s innocence, and Bristes went gaily forth on his base sovereign’s behalf to meet Favila to whom he shouted: “I will kill you and have Doña Luz burnt.” Favila wisely replied: “deeds not words weigh” and ran his sword through the braggart’s body. Much to his grief and disappointment Egica was forced to admit the lady’s vindication, but demanded her lover’s sword, which provoked a fresh onslaught. Grafeses stayed the clash of steel by coming to court to learn the meaning of all these wild doings, and, on passing through his niece’s room, on his way to the queen’s chamber, recognised a handkerchief which resembled those folded round the infant of the ark he had picked up on the banks of the Tagus at Alcantara. Questioning his niece, he discovered the nature of her relations with Favila, and instantly insisted on their marriage. The king was still bent on another duel, and sent Longaris to fight Favila about the sword, when a hermit comes to court and, in the name of heaven, stops the duel by revealing, as a divine message from above, the secret loves of Doña Luz and Don Favila. Both the cavaliers were wounded, and Doña Luz flung herself on her knees before the king and begged for mercy for her lover. After long hesitation, impelled by the hermit’s command from heaven to accept the inevitable, Egica gives in, signals the end of the third duel against Doña Luz’s happiness, and permits, gracelessly of course, after Favila’s recovery, his public marriage with the thrice unfortunate Doña Luz. He and the queen were witnesses, and Grafeses, a kind of deus ex machina, proclaimed the infante Childe Pelayo, the future hero and victor of Covadonga. Egica’s other feat was to persecute anew the Jews for an imaginary conspiracy to convert Spain into a Hebrew kingdom. He pronounced them slaves, took their children from them, and forebade them to intermarry.

Two figures stand out in this prolonged and monotonous legend in exaggerated, it may even be said, in false relief. Witiza and Rodrigo are charged with the ruin of the Toledan kingdom. No less than four archbishops, in no moderate language, have recorded the tale of Witiza’s iniquities, Sebastian of Salamanca, Isidor Pacense, Lucas of Tuy, and Rodrigo of Toledo. None of these writers were contemporaries of Witiza, and they wrote in days when research was nigh impossible, and when we may doubt if a premium was put upon accuracy. How much even of our own history is a matter of hearsay? and does there exist a man so fortressed by virtue as to live without the range of slander if he be so unfortunate as to excite enmity or jealousy; above all, if he tread on the susceptible toes of prejudice? This is what Witiza precisely did. And the prejudice he wounded was ecclesiastical, and ecclesiastical rancour we know at all times has proved the bitterest man can provoke.

But we also find the notable figure of the Archbishop of Toledo, Julian, a fluent and accomplished writer, and a saint. The anonymous chronicler of Cordova tells us that his origin was Jewish, a fact suppressed by the anti-semitical Spanish historians. He succeeded Quiricus and wrote the history of Wamba’s reign, all in proving himself a model pastor. His accomplishments were varied. He was a historian, an orator, theologian, polemist, poet, and musician. So much genius and sanctity in a Goth was little short of an impertinence. The list of his writings is vast, but only a few remain. Some are in Greek, most are in Latin, and their matter is hardly of general interest. He wrote the Apology of Real Faith in reply to the heresies of Apollinarius, and sent it to Pope Leo II. It reached Rome after the pope’s death. The succeeding pope, Benedict, replied to it, and two years later the reply reached the Archbishop of Toledo. It provoked a learned treatise to prove that the writer was in accord with Isidor of Seville, Fulgence, Ambrose, Augustine and Cyril of Alexandria. Three ecclesiastics were dispatched with the precious document, and it took them fourteen months to reach Rome. Meanwhile three other popes had succeeded Benedict, and the fourth called a council to consider the matter. All Spain hung on the decision; the king was worried and alarmed, not knowing if he should regard his erudite archbishop as a heretic or one of the faithful. At last the messengers from Rome arrived, bringing praise and admiration from a pope to whom the document had not been addressed, while between him and Leo, the original disputer of Julian’s orthodoxy, four popes placidly lay in their tombs. Julian died three years after this triumph, having ruled during ten brilliant years of primacy, 690, and was buried with St Ildefonso in the church of St Leocadia.

This is the incongruous legend of Witiza. During his father’s life-time, he ruled at Tuy in Galicia, and proved himself pious, mild, just and generous. His morals were unimpeachable, and while humane to all, he was indulgent to his personal enemies, and freely granted pardon and favours to malcontents. Such a man seems a fitter subject for canonisation than San Hermengildo. Then this excellent monarch, in middle life, with character and habits formed, comes down to Toledo, and without rhyme or reason, we hear of him suddenly as a blind and bloody-minded scoundrel. From sage and saint he turns into an historic ogre, not content with libertinage in himself but constraining his subjects to follow his example, and for sheer viciousness’ sake, commanding an austere and chaste clergy to marry. No villany, no crime seems too base and preposterous for the archbishops to lay to his account. For the benevolence of Tuy we have rank injustice, for the mildness envenomed cruelty, and every anterior virtue is replaced by its pendant vice. Yet Witiza’s power at Tuy was no less than his power at Toledo. He had his court and his throne in both towns, and there was no reason on earth why he should act the wise man in the north, and the unreasoning reprobate in the south. We suspect his first act of clemency on reaching Toledo, in annulling Sisebuth’s edict against the Jews, had much to do with the joint vituperation of the archbishops and the subsequent historians. Not only did he recall them, but, misplaced generosity in mediæval eyes, he restored to the unfortunates their appropriated property and wealth, and permitted them to live and earn unmolested in his kingdom.

Witiza’s defence has been ingeniously undertaken by the Père Tailhan in his interesting notes to the rhyming chronicler of Cordova, a contemporary of Witiza. Here we meet the clement Prince of Tuy, whose mildness, in spite of a natural impetuosity held in check, was his greatest crime in the eyes of immediate posterity, unswervingly kind to all who approached and addressed him, described by his enemies, the Moors, as the most just and pious of all the Christian kings of his time, and a man of blameless life. Count Fernando Gonzalez refers to him as “a powerful king, of indomitable courage and of noble heart.” The anonymous writer of Cordova, who was in a position to judge, writes of his reign as one of peace and prosperity and universal happiness. Was the devil incarnate the invention of the four respectable archbishops? Of course the dull and bigoted Mariana follows in their footsteps. Don José Godoz Alcantara is of a different opinion:—“Witiza,” he writes, “initiated his reign by the most ample act of generosity. He restored to the destitute their dignities and wealth, publicly burnt all proofs and denunciations of conspiracy; wishing to cure a degenerate aristocracy of the passion of power, and direct their spirit of sedition to the arts of peace, he knocked down Wamba’s famous walls, and according to the picturesque phrase of the Archbishop Don Rodrigo, ‘pretended to turn arms into spades.’”[5] The only crime the traveller in Spain will find it difficult to forgive, is this act of vandalism in knocking down Wamba’s walls. He could have exhorted his subjects to practise the arts of peace, all in leaving these great walls untouched in their monumental beauty. But this is what the reformers of humanity never will do. They are never happy until they have sacrificed the picturesque on the altar of utility. Witiza, we see, was in advance of his age. He was a “modern” man, a creature of fads and fantasies. This was how he came by his quaint notion of refining the deplorable morals of Toledo. He could think of no other way of steming the tide of general sensuality but in legalising polygamy. So fierce a race fallen into bad habits was hardly to be sermonised with success. The legal state of polygamy he regarded, along with Oriental sages, as preferable to indiscriminate and wide-spread libertinage. It is still a nice question unsolved in civilised Europe whether several legitimate wives or their unrecognised substitutes constitute a higher or lower state of morality. Witiza was only less hypocritical than civilised Europe, that is all. But to pretend that bigamy is more scandalous than private disorder is absurd. Witiza’s notion of reform may have been primitive and instructive, but it does not justify the legend of his own evil life. To begin with, if he had been the degraded sensualist the archbishops and Mariana describe him, he would not have troubled about reform at all, and he may have had sound reason for requesting the clergy to marry since historians are agreed that they had become utterly demoralised.

The same haze of legends blurs for us the figure of his unfortunate successor, Roderick of the Chronicle. On one side we hear of him as ascending the throne an octogenarian, on another as the impassioned lover of the beautiful Florinda, the brilliant president of a brilliant court; carried to battle in a litter, and riding thither on a legendary steed, fulgent and valiant; disappearing from the field and disgracefully hiding in a monastery; fighting like a hero and falling in the fray. We are told that he was a coward by the pen that depicts him valorously and recklessly approaching the unknown terrors of the enchanted palace of Hercules, though Florinda’s charming leg is not more vaporous upon research than the vanished walls of this palace. It matters little now whether the archbishop Rodrigo’s ivory-carven car drawn by mules carried his unhappy namesake to the fatal field of Guadalete or the legendary steed flashing its way through mailed ranks. However he comported himself, he lost his kingdom, and his resting place is forever unknown.

But the tale of the great tournament with which he started his disastrous reign, must be told at length as one of the most resplendent pages of courtly history. Whatever may have been the end of his reign, he certainly began it in the most sumptuous spirit of hospitality and generosity yet recorded. Was ever such a tournament given before? Princes and lords and their followers came in swarms from all parts of Europe to high Toledo, upon her seven steep hills. Hearken only to the names, and say if they do not make a page in themselves as delightful as any of Froissart’s. The lords of Gascony, Elmet de Bragas, with a hundred cavaliers; Guillamme de Comenge, with a hundred and twenty; the Duke of Viana, with four hundred cavaliers; the Count of the Marches, with a hundred and fifty; the duke of Orleans, with three hundred cavaliers; and four other Dukes of France, with four hundred. Then came the King of Poland, with a luxurious train, and six hundred gentlemen of Lombardy; two marquises, four captains, with twelve hundred cavaliers. Rome sent three governors and five captains, with fifteen hundred cavaliers. The Emperor of Constantinople, his brother, three counts, and three hundred cavaliers came, as well as an English prince, with great lords, and fifteen hundred cavaliers. From Turkey, Syria, and other parts, nobles and princes to the number of five thousand came, without counting their followers and servitors, and different parts of Spain alone furnished an influx of fifty thousand cavaliers. What a poor affair our modern exhibitions and sights, even the Queen’s Jubilee, seem after reading of such a brilliant and stupendous gathering of guests at King Roderick’s court of Toledo.

He was, as I have said, a King to visit, with nothing of Spanish inhospitality about him. He ordered all the citizens to sleep without the city walls in the ten thousand tents he had fixed in the wide Vega, and give up their houses to his foreign guests. Be sure he paid them for the sacrifice in princely style, for out of Eastern fable never was such a prince as Don Rodrigo, the last of the Goths. All the expenses of the foreigners, including their mounts and armour, were his, for they were not permitted to use their own lances, swords, armour or horses. Never were guests entertained with such prodigious splendour. He ordered palaces to be built for them, and laid injunctions on builders, furnishers and purveyors to spare neither expense nor luxury. The whole Peninsula was scoured in search of armourers and iron-workers, and over fifteen hundred master armourers with their apprentices and under-hands were hastily gathered together in Toledo in more than a thousand[6] improvised iron-shops, working for six busy months at shields and lances and exquisitely wrought damascene armour for every lord and knight, the guest of their king. Each guest on arriving received, as well as house and board, his horse, full armour, shield and lance. The tourney opened on a Sunday, and presented such a scene as imagination alone can depict. We are not told the precise spot, but we may suppose the quaint three-cornered, the ever irresistible Zocodover. Rasis el Moro records each guest’s formal reply when asked if he desired to fight? “For this we have come from our lands; firstly, to serve and honour these feasts; secondly, to see how they are carried out; thirdly, to prove your body, your strength, and learn what you are worth in arms.”

Hearing of these great feasts, the Duchess of Lorraine, persecuted by her brother-in-law, Lembrot, came to Toledo to implore Rodrigo’s protection. Rodrigo received her with cordiality, and lodged her in the royal palace, and as official defender charged Sacarus with her cause. Lembrot was called to Toledo to meet the Duchess’s knight, and came with a great train. He, too, was generously entertained, and pending the clash of steel which was to decide the quarrel between Lembrot and the Duchess, the Queen gave a sarao, which was even a more brilliant and gorgeous spectacle than the tourney. Fifty ladies danced with fifty of the greatest lords, and never was such a constellation of European titles joined in a single diversion. The ladies’ names are not recorded, but there were in the first dance the King of Poland, the French prince, the Emperor of Constantinople, the son of the King of England (simply called el hijo del Rey de Inglaterra), the Spanish infante, the Duke of Viana, the Duke of Orleans, the Count of the Marshes, the Marquis of Lombardy, and Count William of Saxony.

This enchanting moment preceded bloodshed, for on the next day the two uncles of Lembrot were killed by Sacarus, thus proclaiming the innocence of the Duchess to whom Lorraine was then restored, and, along with other fallen knights, lay the King of Africa. The dead were buried with great pomp at the expense of their splendid host, and thus ended a tournament surely without equal as a spectacle in history. The chronicle of Don Rodrigo devotes nearly a hundred pages to this picturesque event.

The most prominent episode in the life of the legendary Rodrigo is his famous intrigue with Florinda. We are told that Count Julian, Governor of Ceuta, sent his daughter to be brought up at Court, where she was in a sense the King’s ward. Nothing remains in history to support this tradition, for it is now asserted it was never the Gothic habit to have the daughters of absent noblemen brought up at court as the sovereign’s wards. Then we hear of the Cava’s baths, where Rodrigo, from his palace windows, overhanging the river outside the Puenta de San Martin, beheld her bathing. Inspection proves these ruins to be the old foundation of a bridge, nothing more. The story of the Cava dates from the fourteenth century, when an Arabian writer, Aben-en-Noguairi, in a volume called El Limita de la prudencia en las reglas de la prudencia, gives the legend. The historian Gamero thus defines the word Cava as applied to Florinda in explanation of her condition of violated maiden. Caba proceeds from Caat, an Arabian tribe that came to Spain in Wamba’s reign, descended from Heber of Jewish origin. When the Jews at the seventeenth Council of Toledo, under Egica, were ordered to be destituted and sold as slaves, while their children were to be taken from them and forcibly brought up as Christians, the saying was that the Caba was violated, that is, that this entire tribe, forced to become Christian in preservation of its wealth and property, had prostituted itself. From the current phrase, the historians applied the word to a particular woman, and poetically named her Florinda. From Eve downward all her daughters have had to share her fate in supporting all the blame of human disasters. Neither war, defeat, nor blunder nor wreckage of nations or of individuals is accepted by man as properly and adequately explained, if some woman is not the man’s or the nation’s evil genius. Unprompted by woman, man is a serene and prudent animal, and but for Florinda, who never existed (though the historians gravely reproduce a touching and eloquent letter of hers to her father recording in fine and dignified phrases the story of her wrongs, and beseeching her father to vindicate her outraged honour and punish the unworthy King), the last of the Toledan sovereigns might have ended his days in his bed, and, undesirable fate for Spain! the Moors might never have crossed the narrow strait. As Gamero says: “Ultimately the story of Rodrigo’s guilty love for a lady of the palace was created.” A lady’s name once introduced, it followed a fatal and romantic legend should be invented, and what prettier than conversion of the broken bridge on the enchanting marge of yellow Tagus into a syren’s bath, with Rodrigo, the inflammable warrior, fresh from his encounter with dethroned gods and their emissaries in an enchanted palace, looking down on the maiden as she disported in the water from the windows of his luxurious Gothic palace? The legend once started, it is inevitable that the traitor should follow, and hence the elusive and mysterious figure of Count Julian, who advances into the picture on a mission of paternal vengeance, and treacherously opens the gates of Spain to the predatory Berbers. The Turks had entered Spain, and it needed some other explanation than national pluck, enterprise and determination to account for their almost unopposed approach towards Toledo; and what so likely an instrument of misfortune as the mythical father of the fabulous Florinda? So history was written, in all faith in those naïve days. Don Faustina de Bourbon remarks that this fable was not heard of before the dominion of the Asturian monarchs in southern Spain; not until the Cid took Valencia, and Alonzo basely seized Toledo, the kingdom of his Moorish protector and host. Such fables accord with the childish, superstitious yearning and need to associate the land’s misfortunes with the personal iniquities of those who rule it. Roderick may have been no saint, and small blame to him in those grossly immoral times, but we need not attach to his shoulders the packet of national sins and disorders. Because the abuses among the clergy and the nobles had reached a repulsive depth of infamy, and public morals were in a lamentable state, is no reason to insist on his violation of Florinda, or refer as the Viscount Palazuelos does in his modern guide-book of Toledo, in an excess of unromantic austerity and disdain “to the guilty loves of Rodrigo and Count Julian’s daughter.”[7] There is no proof whatever that Rodrigo was the wretched sensualist the historians delight to paint. His crime was (and that the Gothic race shares with him) that he unworthily lost a large kingdom to a small invading force, and his shame lies in his inexplicable defeat.

But for traitor there was never any need to invent Count Julian (whom the Père Tailhan insists was a certain Roman Urban who accompanied Tarik, and whose name was distorted into Julian), nor Florinda. Treachery existed nearer home in Witiza’s family. Rodrigo had deposed Witiza, and the usurper was repaid by the treachery of Witiza’s sons and his brother, Oppas, foolishly thinking the Berber raid would only prove a transient panic which would permit them to dispossess the usurper, and claim Witiza’s throne. Instead of a mere raid, the invasion turned out one of the most astonishing conquests of history.

Rodrigo’s army was immense; Tarik’s only numbered twelve thousand men. The battle took place on the banks of the Wadi-becca; it lasted a week, beginning on July 19th, 711. Two wings of the Spanish army were commanded by Witiza’s worthless sons, chiefly manned by malcontents and their serfs. So when the commanders ordered their men to give their backs to the enemy, there was no difficulty on the question of obedience. The centre, commanded by Rodrigo, stood its ground valiantly, but unassisted, at length gave way, and the Turks literally hacked the Christians to pieces. It was an appalling massacre. Rodrigo’s fate, as I have said, remains unknown. Did he fly, was he killed? Did he sink into the marsh where his embroidered saddle and silken cloak were found? We hear on one side that Roderick disappeared mysteriously from the battle-field; on the other, that he fought valiantly and when forced to retreat, did so, fighting his way step by step, sword in hand, and fell with his face to the enemy as befits a soldier. He was supposed in this version to have been buried at Visein, and 160 years later, Alfonso the Great, in reconstituting that fallen town, discovered the dust of the defeated monarch with the inscription on a stone—Hic requiescit Rudericus (ultimus) rex Gothorem.[8]

It is idle now to ask what is true in all these conflicting accounts, or stop to ask which statement is the right one, that Rodrigo was a gallant prince in the prime of life when he began his short reign of one year, or, as an Arabian historian has asserted, a sick and feeble old man of over eighty.

His defection or disappearance completed the catastrophy, the most fatal and final in the record of any land, and Tarik profited by the circumstance. Both malcontents and Jews joyfully received him and threw wide open the gates of Toledo to his advance. Hither he came with fresh laurels gathered at Ecija, surrounded with the flower of his army, while he sent around detachments against Cordova, Archidme, and Elvira.

To the Jews he owed his easy conquest of Toledo, and the Goths alone were to blame for this. It was only natural the unhappy and persecuted Jews should welcome any foreign invasion that helped to deliver them and sweep their brutal oppressors into obscurity. Witiza’s clemency was too isolated a fact in Gothic rule to be remembered by them or to inspire the faintest hope for continued tolerance. The next monarch might even prove worse than Sisebuth or Egica. It was safer to rely on the Moor, who would probably remember their good-will, and would hardly maintain a prejudice against them in favour of the Christians. As for the nobles and prelates, they lost their heads and flew northward. The city was speedily emptied of all the Goths who had the means of flight. Most of the patricians emigrated to Galicià; the archbishop retreated to Rome, and in payment for their treachery, Witiza’s sons claimed land to the extent of three thousand farms, which Tarik granted them. Oppas, Witiza’s brother, was named governor of Toledo, until Tarik’s splendid victory brought over from Africa Musa, infuriated and jealous. Instead of thanking his lieutenant, he acknowledged his services by publicly horsewhipping him when the dismayed victor came submissively to meet him at the city gates.