Читать книгу Legends & Romances of Spain - Lewis Spence - Страница 9

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The rise of Castilian as a colloquial and literary tongue was achieved by the ceaseless struggle of the hardy race who spoke it against the Saracen occupation of their native land. As the Castilian warriors by generations of hard fighting gradually regained city after city and district by district rather than province by province, their language encroached by degrees upon the area of that of their Arab enemies,9 until at length the last stronghold of the Moors fell and left them not a foothold in the Peninsula. “It was indeed a rude training which our forefathers, mighty and hardy, had as a prelude to so many glories and to the conquest of the world,” says Martinez in his novel Isabel de Solis.10 “Weighed down by their harness and with sword in hand, they slept at ease no single night for eight centuries.”

From the period of the defeat of Roderic, “last of the Visigoths,” at the battle of Xerez de la Frontera in 711 until the fall of Granada in 1492, Spain was indeed a land of battles. Almost immediately after their first defeat by Arab arms the armies of the Visigoths were pursued to the north-western limits of the Peninsula, where they, found a rallying-place in the mountains of Biscay and Asturias. There, like the Welsh after the Saxon invasion of Britain, they might have become reconciled to the comparatively narrow area left to them, but the circumstances of their virtual imprisonment served only to unite them more closely in a common nationality and a common resolve to win back their original possessions.

For many generations their efforts were confined to border forays and guerrilla fighting, in which they were by no means uniformly successful, for the fiery courage of the Saracens would permit of no mere defensive policy, and nearly every victory of which the Castilians could boast was counterbalanced by reverses and losses which their inferior numbers could ill sustain. But by degrees their valorous obstinacy was rewarded, and ere a century had passed they had regained the greater part of Old Castile. The very name of this province, meaning as it does ‘the Land of Castles,’ shows that even when regained it was held only by fortifying its every hill-top with strongholds, so that at last this castellated tract gave its name to the race which held it so dearly. Before another twenty years had passed the Castilian warriors had established a footing in New Castile, and from this time onward seem to have been assured of ultimate success.

The fall of Toledo in 1085, after three centuries and a half of Saracen occupation, marked a further epoch in the southern advance of the Castilians, and by the taking of Saragossa in 1118 the tables were turned upon the Arab invaders, who were now driven into a more confined part of the country, to the south and south-west. This circumstance, however, seems to have consolidated rather than crippled their resisting powers, and they had yet to be reckoned with for nearly four centuries ere, with the fall of Granada, Boabdil, or Abu-Abdallah, the last of the Moorish kings, gave up its keys to Ferdinand of Castile, looked his last upon the city, and crossed to Africa to fling away his life in battle.

In these circumstances of constant strife and unrest the Romantic literature of Spain was born. It is by no means remarkable that its development coincided with the clash of arms. Trumpets re-echo in its every close. As it expresses the spirit of a martial race, it was also the nursling of necessity, for from the songs and fables of mighty heroes the knights of Castile drew a new courage and experienced an emulous exhilaration which nerved them on the day of battle. Well might the wandering knight of Castile chant, as in the old ballad:

Oh, harness is my only wear,

The battle is my play:

My pallet is the desert bare,

My lamp yon planet’s ray.11

Border warfare, with its frequent change of scene and constant alarms, was a fitting introduction to errantry.