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 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
THE STORY OF 
 
 SPAIN 
 
 BRIEFLY TOLD 
 
 BY ^ 
 
 MARY PLATT PARMELE 
 
 Author of "France," "England," "United States," 
 "Germany," "Who, When, and What?" etc. 
 
 PUBLISHED FOR THE 
 
 BAY VIEW READING CIRCLE 
 
 Central Office, Flint, Mich. 
 1898 
 
9857 
 
 Copyright, 1898, 
 
 BY 
 
 MARY PLATT PARMELE. 
 
 TWOCOPIEoRECtlVED. 
 
 press of the 
 
 Continental Publishing Co.» 
 
 25 Park Place, New York. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 In presenting this book to the public the 
 author can only reiterate what she has already 
 said in works of a similar kind: that she has 
 tried to exclude the mass of confusing details 
 which often make the reading of history a 
 dreary task ; and to keep closely to those facts 
 which are vital to the unfolding of the narra- 
 tive. This is done under a strong conviction 
 that the essential facts in history are those 
 which reveal and explain the development of 
 a nation, rather than the incidents, more or 
 less entertaining, which have attended such 
 development. And also under another con- 
 viction: that a little, thoroughly compre- 
 hended, is better than much imperfectly 
 remembered and understood. 
 
 M. P. P. 
 
 New Yo-ry.. June is, 1898. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Ancient Iberia — The Basques — The Keltiberians — 
 The Phenicians — Cadiz Founded, . . . i 
 
 CHAPTER n. 
 
 Struggle between Phenicians and Assyrians — 
 Founding of Carthage — Decline of Phenicia — 
 Rise of Roman Power — First Punic War, . 9 
 
 CHAPTER in. 
 
 Hamilcar — Hannibal — Siege and Fall of Saguntum 
 — Rome Invades Spain — Scipio's Policy — Cadiz, 
 (Gades) Surrendered to the Romans — By What 
 Steps Iberia Became Spain — Fall of Carthagin- 
 ian Power — How Spain Became a Roman 
 Province, 15 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Sertorius — Story of the White Hind — Rome Fights 
 Her Own Battles on Spanish Soil — Battle of 
 Munda — Csesar Declared Dictator — The Ides of 
 March — Octavius Augustus — Spain Latinized — 
 Four Hundred Years of Peace, . . . . - 24 ; 
 
Vlll CONTENTS, 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Northern Races in the History of Civilization — 
 Roman Empire Expiring — Ataulfus — Attila and 
 the Htms — Theodoric — Evaric Completes Con- 
 quest of Spanish Peninsula — Europe Teuton- 
 ized — Difference between Anglo-Saxon and 
 Latin Races, 30 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Ulfilas — Arianism — The Spanish Language — Brun- 
 hilde— Leovigild — His Son's Apostasy — Arian- 
 ism Ceases to be the Established Religion of 
 Spain, 39 
 
 CHAPTER Vn. 
 Toledo — Church of Santa Maria — Wamba, . . 45 
 
 CHAPTER VHL 
 
 Decline of Visigoths — Roderick — Count Julian's 
 Treachery — Mahommedanism — Tarif — Proph- 
 ecy Found in the Enchanted Tower — Tarik — 
 Roderick's Defeat and Death — Moslem Empire 
 Established in Spain, 50 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Musa's Dream of European Conqtiest — Charles Mar- 
 tel— Characteristics of Mahommedan Rule — 
 Mission of the Saracen in Europe — The Germ 
 of a Christian Kingdom in the North of 
 Spain, . , .58 
 
CONTENTS, IX 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Pelayo and the Cave of Covadonga — Alfonso I. — 
 Berbers and Arabs at War on African Coast — 
 War Extends to Spain — The Omeyyad Khalifs 
 Superseded by the Abbasides — Abd-er-Rah- 
 man — Omeyyad Dynasty Established at Cor- 
 dova — Ineffectual Attempt of the Abbasides to 
 Overthrow Abd-er-Rahman— Character of This 
 Conqueror, ........ 64 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 Charlemagne — Battle of Roncesvalles, . . .69 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 Conditions after Death of Abd-er-Rahman — Abd- 
 er-Rahman II. — Arab Refinements — Eulogius 
 and the Christian Martyrs — Abd-er-Rahman 
 III.— A Khalifate~At Cordova— The Great 
 Mosque— The City of "The Fairest "—Death 
 of Abd-er-Rahman III., 72 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 Rough Cradle of a Spanish Nationality in the 
 Asturias — Alfonso III. and His Hidalgos and 
 Dons — Guerrilla Warfare with Moors — Jeal- 
 ousies and Strife between Christian Kingdoms — 
 Civil War — Almanzor — Ruin of Christian State 
 Seemed Imminent — Death of Almanzor — Berber 
 Revolt — Anarchy in Moorish State — A Khalif 
 Begging a Crust of Bread — Berbers Destroy 
 Cordova — Library Burned — City of The Fairest 
 a Ruin — Asturias — Leon and Castile United — 
 Alfonso VI. — The Cid— Triumph of Christians — 
 
X CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Moors Ask Aid of the Almoravides — Christians 
 Driven Back — Death of the Cid — A Dynasty of 
 the Almoravides — The Alhomades — The Great 
 Mahdi — Moorish People Become Subject to 
 Emperor of Morocco — His Designs upon 
 Europe — The Pope Proclaims a Crusade — , 
 Alhomades Driven out of Spain by Christians 
 — Moorish Kingdom Reduced to Province of 
 Granada, 78 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 European Conditions in Thirteenth Century — 
 Visigoth Kings Recover Their Land — Its 
 Changed Conditions — Effect of Arab Civiliza- 
 tion upon Spanish Nation — Fernando III. — 
 Spain Draws into Closer Companionship with 
 European States — Alfonso X. — Spain Becoming 
 Picturesque — The Bull-Fight — Beautiful Gra- 
 nada — The Alhambra, 87 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 Perpetual Civil War between Spanish States — Cas- 
 tile and Aragon Absorb the Others and in Con- 
 flict for Supremacy — Pedro the Cruel — The 
 Black Prince His Champion against Aragon — 
 John of Gaunt — His Claim upon the Throne of 
 Castile — His Final Compromise — Political Con- 
 ditions Contrasted with Those of Other 
 States, 94 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 Death of Juan II. — Enrique IV. — Isabella — Her Mar- 
 riage with Ferdinand of Aragon — Isabella 
 
CONTENTS. XI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Crowned Queen of Castile — Ferdinand, King of 
 Aragon — The Two Crowns United — Character- 
 istics of the Two Sovereigns — The Inquisition 
 Created — Jews Driven out of the Kingdom — 
 Abdul- Hassan's Defiance — Zahara — Family 
 Troubles at the Alhambra — Ayesha and Boab- 
 dil — Alhama Captured by Ferdinand — Boabdil 
 Supplants His Father — Massacre of the Aben- 
 cerrages — Granada Besieged — Its Capitulation 
 — Moorish Rule Ended in Spain, . . . loo 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 Columbus and Isabella — Isabella's Private Griefs — 
 Her Death — Charles, King under a Regency — 
 Charles Elected Emperor of Germany — Spain 
 during His Reign — Cruelties in the East and 
 in the West — Vain Struggle with Protestantism 
 —Abdication and Death of Charles, . . . io8 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 Philip II. — Union of Spain and Portugal — The Duke 
 of Alva in the Netherlands — War with Eng- 
 land — Spanish Armada Destroyed — Death of 
 Philip II. — Spain's Decline — Glory of the Name 
 Castilian, 117 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 Philip III. — Rebellion of the Moriscos — Last of the 
 Moors Conveyed to African Coast — Don Quixote 
 — Philip IV. — Louis XIV. Marries Spanish In- 
 fanta — A Diminishing Kingdom — Carlos II. — 
 First Collision between Anglo-Saxon and 
 Spaniard in America — Close of Hapsburg Dy- 
 nasty in Spain, 125 
 
Xll CONTENTS, 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 New European Conditions— Louis XIV. — War of 
 the "Spanish Succession" — Marlborough 
 Checks Louis at Blenheim — Archduke Aban- 
 dons Sovereignty in Spain — Peace of Utrecht 
 — Further Dismemberment of Spain — Gibraltar 
 Passes to England — Bourbon Dynasty — Com- 
 mences with Philip V. — Ferdinand VL — Carlos 
 in. — Expulsion of the Jesuits, .... 131 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 A Dismantled Kingdom — Spanish-American Colo- 
 nies — England and France at War over Ameri- 
 can Boundaries — Spain the Ally of France — 
 Loss of Some of Her West India Islands, and 
 Capture of Havana and Manila by British — 
 Florida Given in Exchange for Return of Con- 
 quered Territory — Growing Irritiation against 
 England — France Aids American Colonies in 
 War with England — Spain's Satisfaction at 
 Their Success — Its Effect in Peru — Revolution 
 in France — Rapid Rise of Napoleon — Carlos IV. 
 Removed and Joseph Bonaparte King — Spain 
 Joins Napoleon in War against England — Tra- 
 falgar — Arthur Wellesley — Joseph Flees from 
 His Kingdom, 137 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 Liberal Sentiment Developing — Constitution of 
 1 812 — Ferdinand VI. and Reactionary Meas- 
 ures — Revolt of all the Spanish- American 
 Colonies — The Holy Alliance — The Monroe 
 Doctrine — Revolution in Spain — Spain under 
 
CONTENTS. Xlll 
 
 PAGE 
 
 the Protectorate of the Holy Alliance — Ferdi- 
 nand Reinstated — Two Political Parties — Six 
 Spanish-American Colonies Freed, . . . 144 
 
 CHAPTER XXHI. 
 
 The Salic Law and the Princess Isabella— The 
 Carlists — Regency of Christine — Isabella II. — 
 Her Expulsion from Spain — Amadeo — An Era 
 of Republicanism — Castelar — Alfonso XII. Re- 
 called — His Brief Reign and Death — Alfonso 
 XIII., 150 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 Birth of an Insurgent Party in Cuba — Ten Years' 
 War — Impossible Reforms Promised — Revolu- 
 tion Started by Jose Marti, 1895 — Attitude of 
 the American Government — General Weyler's 
 Methods — Effect upon Sentiment in America — 
 Destruction of the Battle-Ship Maine — Verdict 
 of Court of Inquiry — War Declared between 
 Spain and America — The Approaching End, . 154 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 No name is more fraught with picturesque 
 and romantic interest than that of the '' Span- 
 ish Peninsula." 
 
 After finishing this rare bit of handiwork 
 nature seems to have thrown up a great 
 ragged wall, stretching from sea to sea, to pro- 
 tect it; and the Pyrenees have stood for ages 
 a frowning barrier, descending toward France 
 on the northern side from gradually decreas- 
 ing heights — but on the Spanish side. in wild 
 disorder, plunging down through steep 
 chasms, ravines, and precipices — with sharp 
 cliffs towering thousands of feet skyward, 
 which better than standing armies protect the 
 sunny plains below. 
 
 But the '' Spanish Peninsula,'' at the time 
 we are about to consider, was neither '' Span- 
 ish " nor was it a peninsula. At the dawn 
 
2 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 of history this sunny corner of Europe was 
 known as Iberia, and its people as Iberians, 
 
 Time has efifaced all positive knowledge of 
 this aboriginal race; but they are believed to 
 have come from the south, and to have been 
 allied to the Libyans, who inhabited the 
 northern coast of Africa. In fact, Iberi in 
 the Libyan tongue meant freeman; and Ber- 
 ber, which was the plural form of that word, 
 was the term by which all of these western 
 peoples were known to the Ancient Egyp- 
 tians. 
 
 But it is suspected that the Iberians found 
 it an easy matter to flow into the land south 
 of the Pyrenees, and that they needed no 
 boats for the transit. There has always ex- 
 isted a tradition of the joining of the two con- 
 tinents, and now it is believed by geologists 
 that an isthmus once really stretched across 
 to the African coast at the narrowest point of 
 the Straits, at a time when the waters of a 
 Mediterranean gulf, and the waters flowing 
 over the sands of Sahara, together found their 
 outlet in the Indian Ocean. 
 
 There is also a tradition that the adventu- 
 rous Phenicians, who are known to have been 
 in Iberia as early as 1300 b. c, cut a canal 
 
A STIORT^ HISTORY OF SPAIN. 3 
 
 through the narrow strip of land, and then 
 built a bridge across the canal. But a bridge 
 was a frail link by which to hold the mighty 
 continents together. The Atlantic, glad of 
 such an entrance to the great gulf beyond, 
 must have rushed impetuously through, 
 gradually widening the opening, and thus, at 
 last, permanently severed Europe and Africa; 
 drained the Sahara dry; transformed the 
 Mediterranean gulf into a Mediterranean Sea; 
 and created a *' Spanish Peninsula." 
 
 How long this fair Peninsula was the un- 
 disturbed home of the Iberians no one knows. 
 Behind the rocky ramparts of the Pyrenees 
 they may have remained for centuries uncon- 
 scious of the Aryan torrent which was flood- 
 ing Western Europe as far as the British Isles. 
 Nothing has been discovered by which we 
 may reconstruct this prehistoric people and 
 (perhaps) civilization. But their physical 
 characteristics we are enabled to guess; for 
 just as we find in Cornwall, England, linger- 
 ing traces of the ancient Britons, so in the 
 mountain fastnesses of northern Spain linger 
 the Basques, who are by many supposed to be 
 the last survivors of that mysterious primitive 
 race. 
 
4 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 The language of the Basques bears no re- 
 semblance to any of the Indo-European, nor 
 indeed to any known tongue. It is so diffi- 
 cult, so intricate in construction, that only 
 those who learn it in infancy can ever master 
 it. It is said that, in Basque, '' you spell Solo- 
 mon, and pronounce it Nebuchadnezzar." 
 Its antiquity is so great that one legend calls 
 it the '* language of the angels," and another 
 says that Tubal brought it to Spain before the 
 lingual disaster at Babel! And still another 
 relates that the devil once tried to learn it, 
 but that, after studying it for seven years and 
 learning only three words, he gave it up in 
 despair. 
 
 A language which, without literature, can 
 so resist change, can so persist unmodified by 
 another tongue spoken all around and about 
 it, must have great antiquity; and there is 
 every reason to believe that the Basque is a 
 survival of the tongue spoken by the primi- 
 tive Iberians, before the Kelts began to flow 
 over and around the Pyrennees ; and also that 
 the physical characteristics of this people are 
 the same as those of their ancient progenitors; 
 small-framed, dark, with a faint suggestion of 
 the Semitic in their swarthy faces. 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 5 
 
 We cannot say when it occurred, but at last 
 the powerful, fair-haired Kelts had sur- 
 mounted the barrier and were mingled with 
 this non-Aryan people, and the resulting race 
 thus formed was known to antiquity as the 
 Keltiberians. 
 
 It is probable that the rugged Kelt easily 
 absorbed the race of more delicate type, and 
 made it, in religion and customs, not unhke 
 the Keltic Aryan in Gaul. But the physical 
 characteristics of the other and primitive race 
 are indelibly stamped upon the Spanish peo- 
 ple; and it is probably to the Iberian strain in 
 the blood that may be traced the small, dark 
 type of men which largely prevails in Spain, 
 and to some extent also in central and south- 
 ern France. 
 
 But the Keltiberians were Keltic in their 
 religion. There are now in Spain the usual 
 monuments found wherever Druid worship 
 prevailed. Huge blocks of stone, especially 
 in Cantabria and Lusitania (Portugal), stand- 
 ing alone or in circles, tell the story of Druidi- 
 cal rites, and of the worship of the ocean, the 
 wind, and the thunder, and of the placating of 
 the powers of nature by human sacrifices. 
 
 The mingling of the Kelts and the Iberians 
 
6 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 in varying proportions in different parts of 
 Spain, and in some places (as among the 
 Basques) their minghng not at all, produced 
 that diversity of traits which distinguished the 
 AsHirians in the mountain gorges from their 
 neighbors the Cantabrians, and both these 
 from the Catahnians in the northeast and the 
 Gallicians on the northwest coast, and from 
 the Lusitanians, where now is Portugal; and 
 still more distinguished the Basques, in the 
 rocky ravines of the Pyrenees, from each and 
 all of the others. And yet these unlike mem- 
 bers of one family were collectively known as 
 Keltiberians. 
 
 While this race — hardy, temperate, brave, 
 and superstitious — was leading its primitive 
 life upon the Iberian peninsula, while they 
 were shooting arrows at the sky to threaten 
 the thunder, drawing their swords against the 
 rising tide, and prizing iron more dearly than 
 their abundant gold and silver, because they 
 could hammer it into hooks, and swords, and 
 spears — there had long existed in the East a 
 group of wonderful civilizations: the Egyp- 
 tian, hoary with age and steeped in wisdom 
 and in wickedness; the Chaldeans, who, with 
 '' looks commercing with the skies," were the 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 7 
 
 fathers of astronomy; the Assyrians and 
 Babylonians^ with their wonderful cities of 
 Nineveh and Babylon, and the Phenicians, with 
 their no less famous cities of Sidon and Tyre. 
 Sidon, which was the more ancient of these 
 two, is said to have been founded by Sidon, 
 the son of Canaan, who was the great-grand- 
 son of Noah. 
 
 Of all these nations it was the Phenicians 
 who were the most adventurous. They were 
 a Semitic people, Syrian in blood, and their 
 home was a narrow strip of coast on the east 
 of the Mediterranean, where a group of free 
 cities was joined into a confederacy held to- 
 gether by a strong national spirit. 
 
 Of these cities Sidon was once the head, 
 but in time Tyre eclipsed it in splendor, and 
 writers, sacred and profane, have sung her 
 glories. 
 
 These Phenicians had a genius for com- 
 merce and trade. They scented a bargain 
 from afar, and knew how to exchange '' their 
 broidered work, and fine linen, and coral, and 
 agate" (i Kings xxvii. i6), their glassware 
 and their wonderful cloths dyed in Tyrian 
 scarlet and purple, for the spices and jewels 
 of the East, and for the gold and silver 
 
8 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 and the ivory and the ebony of the south 
 and west. 
 
 Their ships were coursing the Red Sea and 
 the Persian Gulf and bringing back treasures 
 from India and searching every inlet in the 
 Mediterranean, and finally, either through the 
 canal they had cut, or the straits it had made, 
 they sailed as far as the British Isles and 
 brought back tin. 
 
 But the gold and silver of the Iberian 
 Peninsula were more alluring than the spices 
 of India or the tin of Britain. So upon the 
 Spanish coast they made permanent settle- 
 ments and built cities. As early as iioo B. c. 
 they had founded beyond the '' Pillars of 
 Hercules,'' the City of Gades (Cadiz), a walled 
 and fortified town, and had taught the Kelt- 
 iberians how to open and work their gold and 
 silver mines systematically; and in exchange 
 they brought an old civilization, with new 
 luxuries, new ideas and customs into the lives 
 of the simple people. 
 
 But they bestowed something far beyond 
 this — something more enriching than silver 
 and gold, — an alphabet, — and it is to the 
 Phenicians that we are indebted for the alpha- 
 bet now in use throughout the civilized world. 
 
CHAPTER 11. 
 
 Such an extension of power, and the acqui- 
 sition of sources of wealth so boundless, ex- 
 cited the envy of other nations. 
 
 The Greeks are said to have been in the 
 Iberian peninsula long before the fall of Troy, 
 where they came with a fleet from Zante, in 
 the Ionian Sea, and in memory of that place, 
 called the city they founded Zacynthus, which 
 name in time became Saguntum. Now they 
 sent more expeditions and founded more 
 cities on the Spanish coast; and the Babylo- 
 nians, and the Assyrians, and, at a later time, 
 the Persians and the Greeks, all took up arms 
 against these insatiate traders. 
 
 Phenician supremacy was not easily main- 
 tained with so many jealous rivals in the field, 
 and it was rudely shaken in 850 B. c, when 
 
 " The Assyrians came down like a wolf on the fold, 
 Their cohorts all gleaming with purple and gold, 
 
 and the Phenician power was partially broken 
 at its source in the East. 
 
 It is with thrilling interest that we read 
 
lo A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 Isaiah's prophecy of the destruction of Tyre, 
 which was written at this very time. For the 
 Phenicians were the Canaanites of Bible his- 
 tory, and '' Hiram King of Tyre " was their 
 king; and his ''navy," which, together with 
 Solomon's '' came once in three years from 
 Tarshish/' was their navy; and Tarshish was 
 none other than Tartessus, their own prov- 
 ince, just beyond Gibraltar on the Spanish 
 coast. Nor is it at all improbable that Span- 
 ish gold was used to adorn the temple which 
 the great Solomon was building, (i Kings 
 ix., X.) Shakspere, who says all things better 
 than anyone else, makes Othello find in the 
 fatal handkerchief '' confirmation strong as 
 proofs from holy writ." Where can be found 
 '' confirmation " stronger than these " proofs 
 from holy writ"? And where a more mag- 
 nificent picture of the luxury, the sumptuous 
 Oriental splendor of this nation at that period, 
 than in Ezekiel, chapters xxvii., xxviii.? 
 What an eloquent apostrophe to Tyre — 
 " thou that art situate at the entry of the sea, 
 a merchant of the people, for many isles.'' — 
 '' With thy wisdom and with thine under- 
 standing thou hast gotten thee riches," and, 
 *' by thy great wisdom and by thy trafUck hast 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. II 
 
 thou increased, and thine heart is lifted up." 
 And then follows the terrible arraignment — 
 '' because of the iniquity of thy trafficky And 
 then the final prediction of ruin — •" I will 
 bring thee to ashes upon the earth "; '' thou 
 shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any 
 more." Where in any literature can we find 
 such lurid splendor of description, and such 
 a powerful appeal to the imagination of the 
 reader! And where could the student of his- 
 tory find a more graphic and accurate pic- 
 ture of a vanished civilization ! 
 
 In 850 B. c, the same year in which the 
 Assyrians partly subjugated the Phenicians in 
 the East, the city of Carthage was founded 
 upon the north coast of Africa, and there com- 
 menced a movement, with that city as its cen- 
 ter, which drew together all their scattered 
 possessions into a Punic confederacy. This 
 was composed of the islands of Sardinia, Cor- 
 sica, part of Sicily, the Balearic Isles, and the 
 cities and colonies upon the Spanish Peninsula 
 and African coast. As the power of this con- 
 federacy expands, the name Phenician passes 
 away and that of Carthaginian takes its place 
 in history. 
 
 Carthage became a mighty city, and con- 
 
12 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 trolled with a strong hand the scattered 
 empire which had been planted by the 
 Syrian tradesmen. Carthaginian merchants 
 and miners were in Tartessus, and were plant- 
 ing cities and colonies throughout the penin- 
 sula, and a torrent of Carthaginian life was 
 thus pouring into Spain for many hundred 
 years, and the blood of the two races must 
 have freely mingled. 
 
 There are memorials of this time now ex- 
 isting, not only in Phenician coins, medals, 
 and ruins, but in the names of the cities. 
 Barcelona, named after the powerful family of 
 Barca in Carthage, to which Hannibal be- 
 longed. Carthagena, a memorial of Carthage, 
 which meant '' the city "; and even Cordova is 
 traced to its primitive form, — Kartah-duba, 
 — meaning '' an important city." While Isa- 
 beUa, the name most famous in Spanish annals, 
 has a still greater antiquity; and was none 
 other than Jezebel — after the beautiful daugh- 
 ter of the King of Sidon (the '' Zidoneans "), 
 who married Ahab, and lured him to his 
 downfall. And we are told that this wicked 
 siren whose dreadful fate Elijah foretold, 
 was cousin to Dido, she who Virgil tells us 
 '' wept in silence " for the faithless ^neas. 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 13 
 
 With what a strange thrill do we find these 
 threads of association between history sacred 
 and profane, and both mingled with the mod- 
 ern history of Spain. 
 
 But Phenicia, for the '' iniquity of her 
 traffick/' was doomed. The roots of this old 
 Asiatic tree had been slowly and surely per- 
 ishing, while her branches in the West were 
 expanding. In the year 332 B. c. the siege and 
 destruction of Tyre, predicted five hundred 
 years before by Isaiah, was accomplished by 
 Alexander the Great, and the' words of the 
 prophet found their complete fulfillment-r- 
 that the people of Tarshish should find no 
 city, no port, no welcome, when they came 
 back to Syria! 
 
 But on the northern coast of the Mediterra- 
 nean there was another power which was wax- 
 ing, while the Carthaginian was waning. 
 The chief occupation of the Roman Republic 
 was not trade, but conquest. A bitter enmity 
 existed between the two nations, and Rome 
 was determined to break this grasping Asiatic 
 confederacy and to drive it out of Europe. 
 The Spanish Peninsula they knew little about, 
 but the rich islands near her own coast — they 
 must be hers. 
 
14 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 When, after the first Punic war (264-241 
 B. c), the Carthaginians saw Sardinia and 
 Sicily torn from them, Hamilcar, their great 
 general, determined upon a plan of vengeance 
 which should make of Italy a Punic province. 
 His people were strong upon the sea, but for 
 this war of invasion they must have an army, 
 too. So he conceived the idea of making 
 Spain the basis of his military operations, and 
 recruiting an immense army from the Iberian 
 Peninsula. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Carthaginian occupation of Spain had 
 not extended much beyond the coast, and had 
 been rather in the nature of a commercial alli- 
 ance with the Spaniards. Now Hamilcar de- 
 termined by placating, and by bribes, and by 
 force if necessary, to take possession of the 
 Peninsula for his own purposes, and to make 
 of the people a Punic nation under the com- 
 plete dominion of Carthage. So his first task 
 was to win, or to subdue, the Keltiberians. 
 He built the city of New Carthage (now 
 Carthagena), he showed the people how to de- 
 velop their immense resources, and by prom- 
 ises of increased prosperity won the confi- 
 dence and sympathy of the nation, and soon 
 had a population of millions from which to 
 recruit its army. 
 
 When his son Hannibal was nine years old, 
 at his father's bidding he placed his hand upon 
 the altar and swore eternal enmity to Rome. 
 The fidelity of the boy to his oath made a 
 great deal of history. He took up the task 
 
1 6 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 when his father laid it down, inaugurated the 
 second Punic war (218-201 B. c); and for 
 forty years carried on one of the most deter- 
 mined and desperate struggles the world has 
 ever seen. 
 
 Saguntum was an old city in Valencia 
 which was said to have been founded by the 
 ancient Greeks before Homer sang of Troy, 
 or, indeed, before Helen brought ruin upon 
 that city. At all events its antiquity was 
 greater even than that of the Phenician cities 
 in Spain, and after being long forgotten by 
 the Greeks it had drifted under Roman pro- 
 tection. It was the only spot in Spain which 
 acknowledged allegiance to Rome; and for 
 that reason was marked for destruction as an 
 act of defiance. 
 
 The Saguntines sent an embassy to Rome. 
 These men made a pitiful and passionate ap- 
 peal in the Senate Chamber: '' Romans, allies, 
 friends! help! help! Hannibal is at the gates 
 of our city. Hannibal, the sworn enemy of 
 Rome. Hannibal the terrible. Hannibal 
 who fears not the gods, neither keeps faith 
 with men. ['' Punic faith" was a byword.] 
 O Romans, fathers, friends! help while there 
 is yet time." 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. i? 
 
 But they found they had a '' protector '' 
 who did not protect. The senators sent an 
 embassy to treat with Hannibal, but no sol- 
 diers. So, with desperate courage, the Sag- 
 untines defended their beleaguered city for 
 weeks, hurling javelins, thrusting their lances, 
 and beating down the besiegers from the 
 walls. They had no repeating rifles nor dyna- 
 mite guns, but they had the terrible falaric, 
 a shaft of fir with an iron head a yard long, at 
 the point of which was a mass of burning tow, 
 which had been dipped in pitch. When a 
 breach was made in the walls, the inflowing 
 army would be met by a rain of this deadly 
 falaric, which was hurled with telling power 
 and precision. Then, in the short interval of 
 rest this gave them, men, women, and chil- 
 dren swiftly repaired the broken walls before 
 the next assault. 
 
 But at last the resourceful Hannibal aban- 
 doned his battering rams, and with pickaxes 
 undermined the wall, which fell with a crash. 
 When asked to surrender, the chief men of the 
 city kindled a great fire in the market-place, 
 into which they then threw all the silver and 
 gold in the treasury, their own gold and silver 
 and garments and furniture, and then cast 
 
1 8 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 themselves headlong into the flames. This 
 was their answer. 
 
 Saguntum, w^hich for more than a thousand 
 years had looked from its elevation out upon 
 the sea, was no more, and its destruction was 
 one of the thrilling tragedies of ancient his- 
 tory. On its site there exists to-day a town 
 called Miir Viedro (old walls), and these old 
 walls are the last vestige of ancient Sagun- 
 tum. 
 
 In order to understand the indifference of 
 Rome to the Spanish Peninsula at this time, it 
 must be remembered that Spain was then the 
 uttermost verge of the known world, beyond 
 which was only a dread waste of waters and of 
 mystery. To the people of Tyre and of 
 Greece, the '' Pillars of Hercules " had 
 marked the limit beyond which there was 
 nothing; and those two columns, Gibraltar 
 and Ceuta, with the legend ne plus ultra en- 
 twined about them, still survive, as a symbol, 
 in the arms of Spain and upon the Spanish 
 coins; and what is still more interesting to 
 Americans, in the familiar mark ($) which rep- 
 resents a dollar. (The English name for the 
 Spanish peso is pillar-dollar.) 
 
 Now Rome was aroused from its apathy. 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 19 
 
 It sent an army into Spain, led by Scipio the 
 Elder, known as Scipio Africanus. When 
 he fell, his son, only twenty-four years old, 
 stood up in the Roman Forum and offered to 
 fill the undesired post; and, in 210 B.C., Scipio 
 '' the Younger " — and the greater — took the 
 command — as Livy eloquently says — '' be- 
 tween the tombs of his father and his uncle,'' 
 who had both perished in Spain within a 
 month. 
 
 The chief feature of Scipio's policy was, 
 while he was defeating Hannibal in battles, to 
 be undermining him with his native allies; 
 and to make that people realize to what hard 
 taskmasters they had bound themselves; and 
 by his own manliness and courtesy and jus- 
 tice to win them to his side. 
 
 He marched his army swiftly and unexpect- 
 edly upon New Carthage, the capital and cen- 
 ter of the whole Carthaginian movement, sent 
 his fleet to blockade the city, and planned 
 his moves with such precision that the 
 fleet for the blockade and the army for the 
 siege arrived before the city on the same 
 day. 
 
 Taken entirely by surprise, New Carthage 
 was captured without a siege. Not one of the 
 
20 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 inhabitants was spared, and spoil of fabulous 
 amounts fell to the victors. 
 
 It seems like a fairy tale — or like the story 
 of Mexico and Peru 1800 years later — to read 
 of 276 golden bowls which were brought 
 to Scipio's tent, countless vessels of silver, 
 and 18 tons of coined and wrought 
 silver. 
 
 But the richest part of the prize was the 750 
 Spanish hostages — high in rank of course — 
 whom the various tribes had given in pledge 
 of their fidelity to Carthage. Now Scipio held 
 these pledges, and they were a menace and a 
 promise. They were Roman slaves, but he 
 could by kindness, and by holding out the 
 hope of emancipation, placate and further 
 bind to him the native people. 
 
 By an exercise of tact and clemency Scipio 
 gained such an ascendancy over the inhabi- 
 tants, and so moved were they by this unex- 
 pected generosity and kindness, that many 
 would gladly have made him their king. 
 
 But he seems to have been the '' noblest 
 Roman of them all," and when saluted as king 
 on one occasion he said: '' Never call me king. 
 Other nations may revere that name, but 
 no Roman can endure it. My soldiers have 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 21 
 
 given me a more honorable title — that of 
 general/' 
 
 Such nobility, such a display of Roman 
 virtue, was a revelation to these barbarians; 
 and they felt the grandeur of the words, 
 though they could not quite understand them. 
 They were won tO' the cause of Rome, and 
 formed loyal alliances vv^ith Scipio which they 
 never broke. 
 
 In the year 206 b. c. Gades (Cadiz), the last 
 stronghold, was surrendered to the Romans, 
 and the entire Spanish Peninsula had been 
 wrenched from the Carthaginians. 
 
 Iberia was changed to Hispania, and fifteen 
 years later (197 b. c.) the whole of the Penin- 
 sula was organized intO' a Roman province, 
 thenceforth known, not as Iberia, nor yet His- 
 pania; but Spain, and its people as Spaniards. 
 
 At the end of the third Punic war (149-146 
 B. c), the ruin of the Carthaginians was com- 
 plete. Hannibal had died a fugitive and a 
 suicide. His nation had not a single ship upon 
 the seas, nor a foot of territory upon the earth, 
 and the great city of Carthage was plowed 
 and sowed with salt. History had made her 
 last record in the life of an ancient people — 
 *' Carthago est delenda,'' 
 
22 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 It was really only a limited portion of the 
 Peninsula; a fringe of provinces upon the 
 south and east coast, which had been under 
 Carthaginian and now acknowledged Roman 
 dominion. Beyond these the Keltiberian 
 tribes in the center formed a sort of confedera- 
 tion, and consented to certain alliances with 
 the Romans; while beyond them, intrenched 
 in their own impregnable monntain fastnesses, 
 were brave, warlike, independent tribes, which 
 had never known anything but freedom, 
 whose names even Rome had not yet heard. 
 The stern virtue and nobility of Scipio proved 
 a delusive promise. Rome had not an easy 
 task, and other and brutal methods were to be 
 employed in subduing stubborn tribes and 
 making of the whole a Latin nation. In one 
 of the defiles of the Pyrenees there may now be 
 seen the ruins of fortifications built by Cato 
 the Elder, not long after Scipio, which show- 
 how early those free people in the north were 
 made tO' feel the iron heel of the master and to 
 learn their lesson of submission. 
 
 The century which followed Scipio's con- 
 quest was one of dire experience for Spain. 
 A Roman army was trampling out every ves- 
 tige of freedom in provinces which had known 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 23 
 
 nothing else; and more than that, Roman 
 diplomacy was making of their new posses- 
 sion a fighting ground for the civil war which 
 was then raging at Rome; and partisans of 
 Marin s and of Sylla were using and slaugh- 
 tering the native tribes in their own desperate 
 struggle. Roman rule was arrogant and 
 oppressive, Roman governors cruel, arbitrary, 
 and rapacious, and the boasted '' Roman vir- 
 tue " seemed to have been left in Rome, when 
 treaties were made only to be violated at 
 pleasure. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 As nature delights in adorning the crevices 
 of crumbling ruins with mosses and graceful 
 lichens, so literature has busied itself with 
 these historic ruins; and Cervantes has made 
 the siege of Numantia (134 b. c.) — more ter- 
 rible even than that of Saguntum — the sub- 
 ject of a poem, in which he depicts the horrors 
 of the famine. 
 
 Lira, the heroine, answers her ardent lover 
 Mirando in high-flown Spanish phrase, which, 
 when summed up in plain English prose, 
 means that she cannot listen to his wooing, 
 because she is so hungry — which, in view of 
 the fact that she has not tasted food for weeks, 
 seems to us not surprising! 
 
 Sertorius, whose story is told by Plutarch, 
 afifords another picturesque subject for Cor- 
 neille in one of his most famous tragedies. 
 This Roman was an adherent of Marius in the 
 long struggle with Sylla, and while upholding 
 his cause in Spain he won to his side the peo- 
 
 24 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN: 25 
 
 pie of Lusitania (Portugal), who made him 
 their ruler, and helped him to fight the great 
 army of the opposing Roman faction, part of 
 which was led by Pompey. 
 
 Mithridates, in Asia Minor, was also in con- 
 flict with Sylla, and sent an embassy to Ser- 
 torius which led to a league between the two 
 for mutual aid, and for the defense of the cause 
 of Marius. But senators of his own party be- 
 came jealous of the great elevation of Ser- 
 torius, and conspired to assassinate him at a 
 feast to which he was invited. So ended (72 
 B. c.) one of the most picturesque characters 
 and interesting episodes in the difficult march 
 of barbarous Spain toward enlightenment and 
 civilization. 
 
 Sertorius seems to have been a great ad- 
 ministrator as well as fighter, and must also be 
 counted one of the civilizers of Spain. He 
 founded a school at Osca, — now Huesca, — 
 where he had Roman and Greek masters for 
 the Spanish youth. And it is interesting to 
 learn that there is to-day at that city a uni- 
 versity which bears the title '' University of 
 Sertorius." 
 
 But it is not the valor nor the sagacity of 
 Sertorius which made him the favorite of 
 
26 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 poets; but the story of the White Hind, which 
 he made to serve him so ingeniously in estab- 
 lishing his authority with the Lusitanians. 
 
 A milk-white fawn, on account of its rarity, 
 was given him by a peasant. He tamed her, 
 and she became his constant companion, un- 
 affrighted even in the tumult of battle. He 
 saw that the people began to invest the little 
 animal with supernatural qualities; so, finally, 
 he confided to them that she was sent to him 
 by the Goddess Diana, who spoke to him 
 through her, and revealed important secrets. 
 
 Such ^is the story which Corneille and 
 writers in other lands have found so fascinat- 
 ing, and which an English author has made 
 the subject of his poem '' The White Hind of 
 Sertorius." 
 
 Another Roman civil war, more pregnant 
 of great results, was to be fought out in Spain. 
 Julius Csesar's conspiracy against the Roman 
 Republic, and his desperate fight with Pom- 
 pey for the dictatorship, long drenched Span- 
 ish soil with blood, and had its final culmina- 
 tion (after Pompey's tragic death in Egypt) 
 in Caesar's victory over Pompey's sons at 
 Munda, in Spain, 45 B. c. 
 
 With this event, the military triumphs and 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 2^ 
 
 the intrigues of Caesar had accompUshed his 
 purpose. He was declared Imperator, per- 
 petual Dictator of Rome, and religious sacri- 
 fices were decreed to him as if he were a god. 
 Unconscious of the chasm which was yawning 
 at his feet he haughtily accepted the honors 
 and adulation of men who were at that very 
 moment conspiring for his death. On the 
 fatal '' Ides of March " (44 B. c.) he was 
 stricken in the Senate Chamber by the hands 
 of his friends, and the great C^esar lay dead at 
 the feet of Pompey's statue. 
 
 The world had reached a supreme crisis in 
 its existence. Two events^ — the most mo- 
 mentous it has ever known — were at hand: 
 the birth of a Roman Empire, which was to 
 perish in a few centuries, after a life of amaz- 
 ing splendor; and the birth of a spiritual king- 
 dom, which would never die! 
 
 Caesar's nephew, Octavius Augustus, by 
 gradual approaches reached the goal toward 
 which no doubt his greater uncle was moving. 
 After defeating Brutus and Cassius at Philippl 
 (42 B. c.) and then after destroying his only 
 competitor, Antony, at Actium (3 1 B. c.) he 
 assumed the imperial purple under the name 
 of Augustus. The title sounded harmless, 
 
28 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 but its wearer had founded the '' Roman Em- 
 pire." 
 
 At last there was peace. Spain was pacified, 
 and only here and there did she struggle in the 
 grasp of the Romans. Augustus, to make 
 sure of the permanence of this pacification, 
 himself went to the Peninsula. He built 
 cities in the plains, where he compelled the 
 stubborn mountaineers to reside, and estab- 
 lished military colonies in the places they had 
 occupied. 
 
 Saragossa was one of these cities in the 
 plains, and its name was '' Caesar Augusta," 
 and many others have wandered quite as far 
 from their original names, which may, how- 
 ever, still be traced. 
 
 It is said that '' the annals of the happy are 
 brief." Let us hope that poor Spain, so long 
 harried by fate, was happy in the next four 
 hundred years, for her story can be briefly 
 told. She seemed to have settled into a state 
 of eternal peace. It was a period not of 
 external events, but of a process — an internal 
 process of assimilation. Spain, in every de- 
 partment of its life, was becoming Latinized. 
 
 A people of rare intellectual activity had 
 be^n united to the life of Rome at the mo- 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 29 
 
 merit of her greatest intellectual elevation. 
 Was it strange that no Roman province ever 
 produced so long a list of historians, poets, 
 philosophers, as did Southern Spain after the 
 Augustan conquest? When we read the Hst 
 of great Roman authors who were born in 
 Spain — the three Senecas, one of whom, the 
 author and wit, opened his veins at the com- 
 mand of Nero (65 A. D.), and another, the 
 Gallio of the book of Acts; also Lucan, Mar- 
 tial, and Quintilian, when we read these 
 names native to Spain, it seems as if the 
 source of inspiration had removed from the 
 banks of the Tiber to the banks of the 
 Guadalquivir. 
 
 Nowhere can the student of Roman an- 
 tiquities find a richer field than in Spain. And 
 not only that, there is to-day in the manners 
 and customs, and in the habits of the peasan- 
 try, a pervading atmosphere of the classic land 
 which adopted them, which all that has oc- 
 curred since has been powerless to efface, 
 while the language of Spain is Latin to its 
 core. Nor is this strange when we reflect 
 that they were under this powerful influence 
 for a period as long as from Christopher 
 Columbus to the Spanish-American War! 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 In the history of nations there is one fact 
 which again and again with startUng uniform- 
 ity repeats itself. The rough, strong races 
 from the north menace, and at last rudely 
 dominate more highly civilized but less hardy 
 races at the South, to the ultimate benefit of 
 both, although with much present discom- 
 fort to the conquered race ! 
 
 In Greece it was first the rude Hellenes who 
 overran the Pelasgians. And again, long 
 after that, there was another descent of fierce 
 northern barbarians, — the Dorians from 
 Epirus, — who, when they took possession 
 of the Peloponnesus and became the Spar- 
 tans, infused that vigorous strain without 
 which the history of Greece might have been 
 a very tame affair. In the British Isles it was 
 the Picts and Scots, who would have done 
 the same thing with England, perhaps, if the 
 Angles and Saxons had not come to the res- 
 cue, while Spain had her own Picts and Scots 
 in the mountain tribes of the Pyrenees, But 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 31 
 
 in the fifth century there was the most stu- 
 pendous ilkistration of this tendency, when all 
 of Southern Europe was at last inundated by 
 that northern deluge, and the efifete Roman 
 Empire was efifaced. 
 
 The process had been a gradual one; had 
 commenced, in fact, two centuries before the 
 overthrow of the Roman Republic. But not 
 until the fourth century, after the wicked old 
 empire had espoused Christianity, did it be- 
 come obvious that its foundations were under- 
 mined by this flood of barbarians. In 410 
 A. D., when the West-Goths, under Alaric, 
 entered and sacked Rome, her power was 
 broken. The roots no longer nourished the 
 distant extremities in Britain and Gaul, and it 
 was only a question of time when these, too, 
 should succumb to the inflowing tide. 
 
 The Ostro-Goths — or East-Goths — in 
 Northern Italy, and the Visigoths — or West- 
 Goths — in Gaul, were setting up kingdoms of 
 their own, under a Roman protectorate. The 
 long period of peace in Spain was broken. 
 The Pyrenees, with their warlike tribes, de- 
 fended her for a time; but the Sueves and the 
 Vandals — the latter a companion tribe of the 
 Goths — had found an easier entrance by the 
 
32 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 sea on the east. They flowed down toward the 
 south, and from thence across to the north- 
 ern coast of Africa, which they colonized, 
 leaving a memorial in Spain, in the lovely 
 province of Andalusia, which was named after 
 them — Vandalusia, But before the sacking 
 of Rome a wave of the Gothic invasion had 
 overflowed the Pyrenees, and Northern Spain 
 had become a part of the Gothic kingdom in 
 Gaul, vv^ith the city of Toulouse as its head. 
 
 A century of contact with Roman civiliza- 
 tion had wrought great changes in this 
 conquering race. They were untamed in 
 strength, but realized the value of the civilities 
 of life, and of intellectual superiority; and 
 even strove to acquire some of the arts and 
 accomplishments of the race they were in- 
 vading. They were not yet acknowledged 
 entire masters of Gaul and northern Spain. 
 On condition of military service they had un- 
 disputed possession of their territory, with 
 their own king, laws, and customs, but were 
 nominally subjects of the Roman Emperor, 
 Honorius. 
 
 Their attitude toward the Romans at this 
 period cannot better be told than in the words 
 of Ataulf himself (or Ataulfus, or Adolphus), 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 33 
 
 whose interesting story will be briefly related. 
 He says: 
 
 '' It was my first wish to destroy the Roman 
 name and erect in its place a Gothic Empire, 
 taking to myself the place and the powers of 
 Caesar Augustus. But when experience 
 taught me that the untamable barbarism of 
 the Goths would not sufifer them to live under 
 the sway of law, and that the abolition of the 
 institutions on which the state rested would 
 involve the ruin of the state itself, I chose in- 
 stead the glory of renewing and maintaining 
 by Gothic strength the fame of Rome; pre- 
 ferring to go down to posterity as the restorer 
 of that Roman power which it was beyond my 
 power to replace." 
 
 These are not the words of a barbarian; 
 although by the corrupt and courtly nobles in 
 Rome he was considered one; but no doubt 
 he towered far above the barbarous host 
 whom he helped to lead into Rome in the 
 year 410 A. D. 
 
 Ataulf was the brother-in-law of Alaric, and 
 succeeded that great leader in authority after 
 his death (410 A. D.). 
 
 At the time of the sacking of Rome this 
 Gothic prince fell in love with Placidia, the 
 
34 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 sister of the Emperor Honorius; and after the 
 fashion of his people, carried her away as his 
 captive; not an unwilHng one, we suspect, for 
 we learn of her great devotion to her brave, 
 strong wooer, with blond hair and blue eyes. 
 Ataulf took his fair prize to the city of Nar- 
 bonne in southern France, and made her his 
 Queen. But when Constantius, a disap- 
 pointed Roman lover of Placidia's, instigated 
 Honorius to send an army against him and 
 his Goths, he withdrew into Spain, and estab- 
 lished his court with its rude splendor in the 
 ancient city of Barcelona. 
 
 He seems to have had not an easy task be- 
 tween the desire to please his haughty Roman 
 bride and, at the same time, to repel the 
 charge of his people that he was becoming 
 effeminate and Romanized; and, finally, so 
 jealous did they become of her influence that 
 Ataulf was assassinated in the presence of his 
 wife, all his children butchered, and the 
 proud Placidia compelled to walk barefoot 
 through the streets of Barcelona. 
 
 Constantius, the faithful Roman lover, 
 came with an army and carried back to Rome 
 the royal widow, who married him and became 
 the mother of Valentinian HI., who succeeded 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 35 
 
 his uncle Honorius as Emperor of Rome in 
 425 A. D., under the regency of Placidia dur- 
 ing his infancy. 
 
 This romance, lying at the very root of a 
 Gothic dynasty in Spain, marks the earliest 
 beginnings of a line of Visigoth kings. 
 Atatilf s successor removed his court tO' Tou- 
 louse in France, and Spain for many years 
 remained only an outlying province of the 
 Gothic kingdom; her turbulent northern 
 tribes refusing to accept or to mingle with 
 the strange intruders. When driven by the 
 Romans ftom their mountain fastnesses 
 the Basques, many of them, were at that 
 time dispersed through southern and cen- 
 tral France; which accounts for the pres- 
 ence of that race in France, before alluded to. 
 
 In the second half of the fifth century At- 
 tila, '' the Scourge of God," swept down upon 
 Europe with his Huns, — mysterious, terrible, 
 as a fire out of heaven, and more like an army 
 of demons than men, — destroying city after 
 city, and driving the people before them, until 
 they came to Orleans. There they met the 
 combined Roman and Gothic armies. The- 
 odoric, the Visigoth king, was killed on the 
 battlefield. But to him, and to the Roman 
 
3^ A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 general ^tius, belongs the glory of the defeat 
 of the Huns (451 A. D.). 
 
 It was Evaric, the son of this Theodoric, 
 who finally completed the conquest of the 
 Spanish Peninsula, and with him really com- 
 mences the line of Visigoth kings in Spain, 
 and the conversion of that country into a 
 Gothic empire,* entirely independent of 
 Rome. 
 
 The German Franks, under Clovis, estab- 
 lished their kingdom in Gaul 481 A. D. 
 The Angles and Saxons in 446 a. d. did 
 the same in Britain. The Ostrogoths had 
 their own kingdom in northern Italy and 
 southern Gaul (Burgundy). So, with the 
 Visigoths ruling in Spain, the '' northern del- 
 uge " had in the fifth century practically sub- 
 merged the whole of Europe, and above its 
 dark waters showed only the somber wreck of 
 a Roman empire. 
 
 From this fusing of Roman and Teutonic 
 races there were to arise two types of civiliza- 
 tion, utterly different in kind, the Anglo- 
 Saxon and the Latin. In one the prevailing 
 element, after the fusing was complete, was 
 
 * The famous Gothic code established by him still linger 
 in much of Spanish jurisprudence. 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 31 
 
 to be the Teutonic; in the other, the Roman. 
 Herein Hes the difference between these two 
 great divisions of the human family, and this 
 is the germinal fact in the war raging to-day 
 between Spain and the United States. It is 
 a difference created not by the mastery of 
 arms, but by the more efficient mastery of 
 ideas. 
 
 When the Angles and Saxons conquered 
 Britain, after a Roman occupation of over 
 three hundred years, they swept it clean of 
 Roman laws, literature, and civilization. 
 Untamed pagan barbarians though they 
 were, they had fine instincts and simple ideals 
 of society and government, and they cast out 
 the corrupt old empire, root and branch. 
 
 The Visigoths in Spain, more enlightened 
 than they, already Christianized, and, perhaps, 
 even superior in intelligence, were content in 
 the words of Ataulf — '' to renew and maintain 
 by Gothic strength the fame of Rome." So 
 they built upon the ruins of decaying institu- 
 tions of a corrupt civilization, a kingdom 
 which flourished with the enormous vitality 
 drawn from the conquering race, which race 
 was in turn conquered by Roman ideals. 
 
 So, in the conflict now existing between 
 
33 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 Spain and the United States, we see the Span- 
 iard, the child of the Romans; valorous, pic- 
 turesque, cruel, versed in strategic arts, and 
 with a savor of archaic wickedness which be- 
 longs to a corrupt old age. In the American 
 we see the child of the simple Angles and Sax- 
 ons, no less brave, but just, and with an 
 enthusiasm and confiding integrity which 
 seems to endow him with an imperishable 
 youth. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The story of Ulfilas, who Christianized the 
 pagan Goths in the last half of the fourth cen- 
 tury, is really the first chapter not alone in the 
 history of Gothic civilization but in that of 
 the German and English literatures; which, 
 with their vast riches, had their origin in the 
 strange achievement of Ulfilas. He had, 
 while a boy, been captured by some Goths off 
 the coast of Asia Minor, and was called by 
 them " WuM-ilas " (little wolf). In his de- 
 sire tO' translate the Bible to his captors 
 *' Wulf-ilas reduced the Gothic language to 
 writing. He had first to create an alpha- 
 bet; taking twenty-two' Roman letters, and 
 inventing two more: the letter w, and still 
 another for th. So while, after Constantine, 
 the Christian religion was being adopted by 
 the Roman Empire, and while its simple dog- 
 mas were being discussed and refined into a 
 complicated and intricate system by men 
 versed in Greek philosophy, and then formu- 
 
 39 
 
40 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN'. 
 
 lated by minds trained in logic and rhetoric, 
 the same religion was being spelled out in 
 simple fashion by the Goths in central Europe 
 from the book translated for them by Ulfilas. 
 
 All they found was that Jesus Christ was 
 the beloved son of God and the Saviour of the 
 world; that he was the long-promised 
 Messiah, and to believe in him and to follow 
 his teachings was salvation. They knew 
 nothing of the Trinity nor of any theologic 
 subtleties, and this was the simple faith which 
 the Goths carried with them into the lands 
 they conquered. 
 
 The Romans, who had spent three centuries 
 in burning Christians and trying to obliterate 
 the religion of Christ, were now its jealous 
 guardians. They considered this '' Arian- 
 ism," as it was called, a blasphemous heresy, 
 so shocking that they refused to call it Chris- 
 tianity at all. The history of the first century 
 of the Gothic kingdom in Spain was therefore 
 mainly that of the deadly strife between Arian- 
 ism and Catholicism, or orthodoxy. The 
 Goths could not discuss, for they were utterly 
 unable to understand even the terms under 
 discussion ; but they could fight and lay down 
 their lives for the faith which had done so 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 41 
 
 much for them; and this they did freely and 
 fiercely. 
 
 So the simple Gothic people were bewil- 
 dered by finding themselves in the presence of 
 a Christianity incomprehensible to them; a 
 complicated, highly organized social order, 
 equally incomprehensible; and a science and a 
 literature of which they knew nothing. They 
 might struggle for a while against this tide of 
 superiority, but one by one they entered the 
 fascinating portals of learning and of art, ac- 
 cepted the dogmas of learned prelates, and a 
 few generations were sufficient to make them 
 meek disciples of the older civilization. 
 
 The Spanish language fairly illustrates the 
 result from this incongruous mingling of 
 Roman and Gothic. It is said to be a lan- 
 guage of Latin roots with a Teutonic gram- 
 mar. 
 
 The Goths laid rough hands on the speech 
 they consented to use, and the smooth, 
 sonorous Latin was strangely broken and 
 mixed with Gothic words and idioms; yet it 
 became one of the most copious, flexible, and 
 picturesque of languages, with a literature sec- 
 ond tO' none. 
 
 In precisely the same way was the classic 
 
42 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 old ruin of a Roman state re-enforced with a 
 rough Gothic framework, and after centuries 
 have hidden the joints and the scars with 
 mosses and verdure, we have a picturesque 
 and beautiful Spain! 
 
 But barbarous kings were fighting other 
 things besides heresy. There were rebellions 
 to put down; there were remnants of Sueves 
 and of Roman power to drive out, and there 
 were always the fierce mountain tribes who 
 never mingled with any conquerors, nor had 
 ever surrendered to anything but the Catholic 
 faith. 
 
 There were intermarriages between the 
 three Gothic kingdoms, in Burgundy, Gaul, 
 and Spain, and the history of some of these 
 royal families shows what wild passions still 
 raged among the Goths, and what atrocities 
 were strangely mingled with ambitious proj- 
 ects and religion. 
 
 Athanagild, one of the Visigoth kings, gave 
 his daughter Brunhilde in marriage to the 
 King of the Franks in Gaul. The story of 
 this terrible Queen, stained with every crime, 
 and accused of the death of no less than ten 
 kings, comes tO' a fitting end when, we are 
 told, that in her wicked old age she was tied 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 43 
 
 to the tail of an unbroken horse and dragged 
 over the stones of Paris (600 A. D.). 
 
 At this time Leovigild (570-587), the Visi- 
 goth King, was ruHng Spain . with a strong 
 hand. He had assumed more splendor than 
 any of his predecessors. He had erected a 
 magnificent throne in his palace at Toledo, 
 and his head, wearing the royal diadem, was 
 placed on Spanish coins, which may still be 
 seen. A daughter of the terrible Brunhilde, 
 the Princess Ingunda, came over from France 
 to become the wife of Ermingild, the son of 
 the great King Leovigild, and heir to his 
 throne. 
 
 All went smoothly until it was discovered 
 that this fair Princess was a Catholic, and was 
 artfully plotting to win her husband over to 
 her faith from the faith of his fathers — 
 Arianism. 
 
 Although Catholicism had made great in- 
 roads among their people, never before had it 
 invaded the royal household. And when his 
 son declared his intention to desert their an- 
 cient creed there commenced a terrible conflict 
 between father and son, which finally led to 
 Ermingild's open rebellion, and at last to his 
 being beheaded by his father's order. But this 
 
44 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 crime against nature was in vain. Arianism 
 had reached the Hmit of its Hfe in Spain. 
 Upon the death of Leovigild, his second son, 
 Recared (587-601), succeeded to the throne, 
 and one of his first acts was to abjure the old 
 faith of the Gothic people, and Catholicism be- 
 camxe the established religion of Spain. 
 
CHAPTER VIL 
 
 Toledo, the capital of the Visigoth Kings, is 
 the city about which ckister the richest memo- 
 ries of Spain in her heroic age. When Leo- 
 vigild removed his capital there from Seville 
 in the sixth century, it was already an ancient 
 Jewish city, about which tradition had long 
 busied itself. To-day, as it sits on the sum- 
 mit of a barren hill, one looks in vain for traces 
 of its ancient Gothic splendor. But the spot 
 where now stands a beautiful cathedral is hal- 
 lowed by a wonderful legend, which Murillo 
 made the subject of one of his great paintings. 
 It is said that the Apostle St. James founded 
 on that very spot the Church of Santa Maria; 
 and that the Virgin, in recognition of the 
 dedication to her, descended from heaven to 
 present its Bishop, Ildofonso, with a mar- 
 velous chasuble. In proof of this miracle, 
 doubting visitors are still shown the marks of 
 Mary's footprint upon a stair in the chapel! 
 However this may be, it is on this very spot 
 
46 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 that King Recared formally abjured Arianism; 
 and preserved in a cloister of the cathedral 
 may still be seen the '' Consecration Stone," 
 which reads: that the Church of Santa Maria, 
 — built probably on the foundation of the 
 older church, — was consecrated under '' King 
 Recared the Catholic, 587 A. d/' It also tells 
 of the councils of the Spanish Church held 
 there— at one of which councils was the 
 famous canon which decreed that all future 
 Kings must swear they would show no mercy 
 to '' that accursed people " — meaning the 
 Jews. It was these very Jews who had 
 brought commercial success and created the 
 enormous wealth of the city, from which it 
 was now the duty of the pious Visigoth Kings 
 to harry and hunt them as if they were fright- 
 ened deer. 
 
 The Visigoth monarchy, although in many 
 cases hereditary, was in fact elective. And 
 the student of Spanish history will not find an 
 orderly royal succession as in England and 
 France. Disputes regarding the succession 
 were not infrequent, and sometimes there will 
 occur an interval with apparently no king at 
 all, followed by another period when there are 
 two — one ruling in the north and another in 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 47 
 
 the south. *' The King is dead — long live the 
 King! " might do for France, but not for 
 Spain. 
 
 During one of these periods of uncertainty, 
 in the latter half of the seventh century, it is 
 said that Leo, a holy man (afterward Pope), 
 was told in a dream that the man who must 
 Wear the crown was then a laborer, living in 
 the west, and that his name was Wamba. 
 They traveled in search of this man almost 
 to the borders of Portugal, and there they 
 found the future candidate for the throne 
 plowing in the field. The messengers, bow- 
 ing before the plowman, informed him that 
 he had been selected as King of Spain. 
 
 Wamba laughed, and said, '' Yes, I shall be 
 King of Spain when my pole puts forth 
 leaves." 
 
 Instantly the bare pole began to bud, and 
 in a few moments was covered with verdure! 
 
 In vain did Wamba protest. What could a 
 poor man do in the face of such a miracle, 
 and with a Spanish Duke pressing a poniard 
 against his breast, and telling him to choose 
 on the instant between a throne and a tomb! 
 
 The unhappy Wamba suffered himself to 
 be borne in triumph to Toledo, and there to 
 
48 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 be crowned. And a very wise and excellent 
 King did he make. He seemed fully equal 
 to the difficult demands of his new position. 
 A rebellion, fomented by an ambitious Duke 
 Paul, who gathered about his standard all the 
 banished Jews, was a very formidable affair. 
 But Wamba put it down with a firm hand, and 
 then, when it was over, treated the conspira- 
 tors and rebels with marvelous clemency. 
 When his reign was concluded he left a record 
 of wisdom and sagacity rare in those days, in 
 any land. 
 
 His taking ofif the stage was as remarkable 
 as his coming on. He fell into a trance 
 (October 14, 680), and after long insensibility 
 it was concluded that the King was dying. 
 According to a custom of the period Wamba's 
 head was shaved, and he was clothed in the 
 habit of a monk. The meaning of this was 
 that if he died, he would, as was fitting, pass 
 into the Divine presence in penitential garb. 
 But if, peradventure, the patient survived, he 
 was pledged to spend the rest of his life in 
 that holy vocation, renouncing every worldly 
 advantage. 
 
 So when, after a few hours, Wamba, in per- 
 fect health, opened his eyes, he found that in- 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 49 
 
 stead of a King he was transformed into a 
 Monk! 
 
 Whether this was a cunning device of this 
 philosophic King to lay down the burdens 
 which w^earied him, and spend the rest of his 
 days in tranquilHty; or whether it was the work 
 of the Royal Prince, who joyfully assumed the 
 diadem which he had so unwillingly worn, 
 nobody knows. But AVamba passed the re- 
 mainder of his days in a monastery near 
 Burgos, and the ambitious Ervigius reigned 
 as his successor, 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 • The Visigoth kingdom, which had stood 
 for three centuries, had passed its meridian. 
 It had created a magnificent background for 
 historic Spain, and a heritage which would be 
 the pride and glory of the proudest nation in 
 Europe. The Goths had come as only rude 
 intruders into that country; but to be 
 descended from the Visigoth Kings was here- 
 after to be the proudest boast of the Spaniard. 
 And the man who could make good such 
 claim to distinction was a Hidalgo; or in its 
 original form, hijo-de-algo — son of somebody. 
 But many generations of peace had im- 
 paired the rugged strength and softened the 
 sinews of the nation. It was the beginning of 
 the end when, at the close of the seventh cen- 
 tury, there were two rival claimants to the 
 throne; and while the vicious and cruel 
 Witiza reigned at Toledo, Roderick, the son 
 of Theodofred, also reigned in Andalusia. 
 There had been a long struggle, during which 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. Si 
 
 it is said that Theodofred's eyes had been put 
 out by his victorious rival, and his son Rod- 
 erick had obtained assistance from the Greek 
 Emperor at Byzantium in asserting his own 
 claims. He succeeded in driving Witiza out 
 of the country; and in 709, — '' the last of the 
 Goths/' — was crowned at Toledo, King of 
 all Spain. 
 
 But the struggle was not over; and it was 
 about to lead to a result which is one of the 
 most momentous in the history, not alone of 
 Spain, — nor yet of Europe, — but of Christen- 
 dom. Witiza was dead, but his two sons, with 
 a formidable following, were still trying to 
 work the ruin of Roderick. A certain Count 
 Julian, who, on account of his daughter Flo- 
 rinda, had his own wrongs to avenge, accepted 
 the leadership of these rebels. The power of 
 the Visigoths had extended across the nar- 
 row strait (cut by the Phenicians) over to the 
 opposite shore, where Morocco seems to be 
 reaching out in vain endeavor to touch the 
 land from which she was long ago severed; 
 and there, at Tangiers, this arch-traitor laid 
 his plans and matured the scheme of revenge 
 and treachery which had such tremendous re- 
 sults for Europe. With an appearance of per- 
 
52 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 feet loyalty he parted from Roderick, who 
 unsuspectingly asked him to bring him some 
 hawks from Africa when he returned. Bow- 
 ing, he said: ''Sire, I will bring you such 
 hawks as never were seen in Spain before." 
 
 For one hundred years an unprecedented 
 wave of conquest had been moving from Asia 
 toward the west. Mahommedanism, which 
 was destined to become the scourge of Chris- 
 tendom, had subjected Syria, Mesopotamia, 
 Egypt, and northern Africa, until it reached 
 Ceuta — the companion Pillar to Gibraltar on 
 the African coast. 
 
 At this point the Goths had stood, as a pro- 
 tecting wall beyond which the Asiatic deluge 
 could not flow. 
 
 Count Julian was the trusted military 
 commander of the Gothic garrisons in Mo- 
 rocco, as Musa, the oft-defeated Saracen 
 leader, knew to his cost. As this Musa 
 was one day looking with covetous eyes 
 across at the Spanish Peninsula, he was 
 suddenly surprised by a visit from Count 
 Julian; and still more astonished when that 
 commander ofi^ered to surrender to him the 
 Gothic strongholds Tangier, Arsilla, and 
 Ceuta in return for the assistance of the Sara- 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 53 
 
 cen army in the cause of Witiza's sons against 
 Roderick. 
 
 Amazed at such colossal treason, Musa re- 
 ferred Count Julian to his master the Khalif, 
 at Damascus, who at once accepted his infa- 
 mous proposition. In Spanish legend and 
 history this man is always designated as The. 
 Traitor, as if standing alone and o.i a pin- 
 nacle among the men who have betrayed their 
 countries. 
 
 Musa, half doubting, sent a preliminary 
 force of about five hundred Moors under a 
 chief named Tarif, to the opposite coast; and 
 the Moors found, as was promised, that they 
 might range at their own will and pleasure in 
 that earthly paradise of Andalusia. The 
 name of this Mussulman chief, Tarif, was 
 given to the spot first touched by the feet of 
 the Mahommedan, which was called Tarif a; 
 and as Tarifa was afterward the place where 
 customs were collected, the word tariff is an 
 imperishable memorial of that event. In like 
 manner Gibraltar was named Gebel-al-Tarik, 
 (Mountain of Tarik) after the leader bearing 
 that name, who was sent later by Musa with a 
 larger force; which name has been gradually 
 changed to its present form — Gibraltar. 
 
54 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 Poor King Roderick, while still fighting to 
 maintain his own right to the crown he wore, 
 learned with dismay that his country was in- 
 vaded by a horde of people from the African 
 coast. Theodemir wrote to him: ''So 
 strange is their appearance that we might take 
 them for inhabitants of the sky. Send me all 
 the troops you can collect, without delay." 
 The hawks promised by Count Julian had 
 arrived ! 
 
 The hour of doom had sounded for the last 
 King of the Visigoths, and for his kingdom. 
 There is a legend that a mysterious tower ex- 
 isted near Toledo, which was built by Hercu- 
 les, soon after Adam, with the command that 
 no king or lord of Spain should ever seek to 
 know what it contained; instead of that it was 
 the duty of each King to put a new lock upon 
 its mysterious portal. 
 
 It is said that Roderick, perhaps in his ex- 
 tremity, resolved to disobey the command, 
 and to discover the secret hidden in the En- 
 chanted Tower. In a jeweled shrine in the 
 very heart of the structure he came at last to 
 a coffer of silver, '' right subtly wrought,'' and 
 far inside of that he reached the final mystery, 
 — only this, — a white cloth folded between 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 55 
 
 two pieces of copper. With trembling eager- 
 ness Roderick opened and found painted 
 thereon men with turbans, carrying banners, 
 with swords strung around their necks, and 
 bows behind them, slung at the saddle-bow. 
 Over these figures was written: ''When this 
 cloth shall be opened, men appareled like 
 these shall conquer Spain, and be the lords 
 thereof.'' 
 
 Such is the picturesque legend. Men with 
 '' turbans and banners and swords slung about 
 their necks," were assuredly now in Andalusia, 
 led by Tarik, who had literally burned his 
 ships behind him, and then told his followers 
 to choose between victory or death. 
 
 The twO' armies faced each other at a spot 
 near Cadiz. It is said that Roderick, the de- 
 generate successor of Alaric, weni into battfe 
 in a robe of white silk embroidered with gold, 
 sitting on a car of ivory, drawn by white 
 mules. Tarik's men, who were fighting for 
 victory or Paradise, overwhelmed the Goths; 
 Roderick, in his flight, was drowned in the 
 Guadalquivir, and his diadem of pearls and his 
 embroidered robe were sent to Damascus as 
 trophies. 
 
 Count Julian urged that the victory be im- 
 
56 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 mediately followed up by Musa before there 
 was time for the Spaniards to rally. One 
 after another the cities of Toledo, Cordova, 
 and Granada capitulated, the persecuted Jews 
 flocking to the new standard and aiding in the 
 conquest of their oppressors. 
 
 As well might one have held back the At- 
 lantic from rushing through that canal upon 
 the isthmus, as to have stayed the inflowing of 
 the Saracens through the breach made by 
 ''the Traitor," Count Julian! In less than 
 two years Spain was a conquered province, 
 rendering allegiance to the Khalif at Damas- 
 cus, and the Moor, — as the followers of the 
 Prophet in Morocco were called, — reigned in 
 Toledo. 
 
 It was in the year 412 that Ataulfus, with 
 His haughty. bride Placidia, had established his 
 Court at Barcelona, and Romanized Spain 
 became Gothic Spain. In 711 — just three 
 centuries later — the Visigoth kingdom had 
 disappeared as utterly beneath the Saracen 
 flood as had its ill-fated King Roderick under 
 the waters of the Guadalquivir; and fastened 
 upon Christian Europe was a Mahommedan 
 empire; an empire v/hich all the combined 
 powers of that continent have never since been 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 57 
 
 able entirely to dislodge. From that ill- 
 omened day in 709, when Tarif set foot on the 
 Spanish coast, to this June of 1898, the 
 Mahommedan has been in Europe; and re- 
 mains to-day, a scourge and a blight in the 
 territory upon which his cruel grasp still 
 lingers. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Tartk and his twelve thousand Berbers,* 
 or Moors, had at one stroke won the Spanish 
 Peninsula. The banner of the Prophet waved 
 over every one of the ancient and famous 
 cities in Andalusia, and the turbaned army 
 had marched through the stubborn north as 
 far as the Spanish border. As Musa, intoxi- 
 cated with success, stood at last upon the 
 Pyrenees, he saw before him a vision of a sub- 
 jugated Europe. The banner of the Prophet 
 should wave from the Pyrenees to the Baltic ! 
 A mosque should stand where St. Peter's now 
 stands in Rome! So, step by step, the 
 Moslems pressed up into Gaul, and in 732 
 their army had reached Tours. 
 
 It was a moment of supreme peril for Chris- 
 tendom. But, happily, the Franks had what 
 the Goths had not — r great leader. Charles 
 Martel, — then Maire du Palais, and virtually 
 King of France, instead of the feeble Lothair^ 
 
 * The old Phenician name for the North African tribes, and 
 plural of Iberia. 
 
 s8 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIiV. 59 
 
 — led his Franks into what was to be one of 
 the most decisive of the world's battles; a bat- 
 tle which would determine whether Europe 
 should be Christian or Mahommedan. 
 
 The tide of infidel invasion had reached its 
 limits. The strong right arm of Charles dealt 
 such ponderous blows that the Moslems broke 
 in confusion, and this savior of Christendom 
 was thenceforth known as Charles Martel: 
 ''Karl of the Hammer." 
 
 After this crushing disaster at Tours the 
 Moors realized that they were not invincible. 
 Their vaulting ambition did not again try to 
 overleap the Pyrenees; and they addressed 
 themselves to setthng affairs in their new 
 territory. 
 
 It has been wisely said that if the Mahom- 
 medan state had been confined within the 
 borders of Arabia, it would speedily have col- 
 lapsed. Islam became a world-wide religion 
 when it clothed itself with armor, and became 
 a church militant. It was conquest which 
 saved the faith of the Prophet. In its home 
 in Asia the Empire of Mahommed was com- 
 posed of hostile tribes and clans, and as it 
 moved westward it gathered up Syrians, 
 Egyptians, and the Berbers on the African 
 
6o A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 coast, who, when Morocco was reached, were 
 known as Moors. This strange, heteroge- 
 neous mass of humanity, all nourished from 
 Arabia, was held together by two things: the 
 Koran and the szvord. 
 
 When conquest was exchanged for peace- 
 ful possession, all the internecine jealousies, 
 the tribal feuds, and old hatreds burst forth, 
 and the first fifty years of Moorish rule in 
 Spain was a period of internal strife and dis- 
 order — Arabs and Moors were jealously try- 
 ing to undermine each other; while the Arabs 
 themselves were torn by factions representing 
 rival clans in Damascus. 
 
 But a singular clemency was shown toward 
 the conquered Spaniards. They were per- 
 mitted to retain their own law and judges, and 
 their own governors administered the affairs 
 of the districts and collected the taxes. The 
 rule of the conquering race bore upon the peo- 
 ple actually less heavily than had the old 
 Gothic rule. Jews and Christians alike were 
 free tO' worship whom or what they pleased; 
 but, at the same time, great benefits were be- 
 stowed upon those who would accept the 
 religion of the Prophet. The slave class, 
 which was very large and had suflfered terrible 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 6i 
 
 cruelties under its old masters, was treated 
 with especial mildness and humanity. There 
 was a simple road to freedom opened to every 
 man. He had only to say, '' There is one 
 God, and Mahommed is his Prophet/' and on 
 the instant he became a freeman ! 
 
 Such gentle proselytizing as this speedily 
 won converts, not alone among slaves but 
 from all classes. The pacification of Spain by 
 the Romans had required centuries; while 
 only a few years sufficed to make of the van- 
 quished in the southern provinces, a contented 
 and almost happy people; not only reconciled, 
 but even glad of the change of masters. 
 Never was Andalusia sO' mildly, justly, and 
 wisely governed as by her Arab conquerors. 
 
 The most delicate of all problems is that of 
 dealing with a conquered race in its own land. 
 That this should have been so wisely and so 
 skillfully handled would be incomprehensible 
 if this had been really, what it is always 
 called, a Moorish conquest. But to be accu- 
 rate, it was a Moorish invasion and a Saracen 
 conquest ! 
 
 The fierce Berber Moor contributed the 
 brute force, which was wielded by Saracen 
 intelligence. 
 
62 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 The Saracens were the leaven which pene- 
 trated the whole sodden mass of Mahommed- 
 anism. With a civilization which had been 
 ripening for centuries under Oriental skies, — 
 rich in wisdom, learning, culture, science, and 
 in art, — they had come into Europe, infidels 
 though they were, to build up and not to 
 destroy. 
 
 The Roman conquest of Spain had civil- 
 ized a barbarous race. The Gothic con- 
 quest of Romanized Spain had converted 
 an effete civilization into a strong semi- 
 barbarism. Now again the Saracen had 
 come from the East to convert a semi- 
 barbarism into a civilization richer than 
 any Spain had yet known, and, more 
 than that, to hold up a torch of learning 
 and enlightenment which should illumine 
 Europe in the days of darkness which were 
 at hand. Although this difference between 
 Arab and Moor primarily existed, they be- 
 came fused, and we shall speak of them only 
 as Moors. But we should not lose sight of 
 the fact that the superior intelligence which 
 made the Moorish kingdom magnificent was 
 from the land of the Prophet. 
 
 The Saracen dealt gently with the con- 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 63 
 
 quered Spaniard, not because his heart was 
 tender and kind, but because he was crafty and 
 wise, and knew when not to use force, in order 
 to accomplish his ends. For the same reason 
 he refrained from trying to break the spirit of 
 the independent northern provinces, where 
 the descendants of the old Visigoths — the 
 Hidalgos (''sons-of-somebody'') — proudly in- 
 trenched themselves in an attitude of defiance, 
 making in time a clearly defined Christian 
 north and Moslem south, with a mountain 
 range (the Sierra Guadarrama) and a river 
 (the Ebro) as the natural boundary line of the 
 two territories. The Moor was a child of the 
 sun. If the stubborn Goth chose to sulk, up 
 among the chilly heights and on the bleak 
 plains of the north, he might do so, and it was 
 little matter if one Alfonso called himself 
 *' King of the Asturians," in that mountain- 
 defended and sea-girt province. The fertile 
 plains of Andalusia, and the banks of the 
 Tagus and Guadalquivir, w^ere all of Spain the 
 Moor wanted for the wonderful kingdom 
 which was to be the marvel of the Middle 
 Ages. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 But, at the early period we are considering, 
 the '' Christian kingdom '' was composed of a 
 handful of men and women who had fled from 
 the Moslems to the mountains of the 
 Asturias. Its one stronghold was the cave of 
 Covadonga, where Pelagius, or Pelayo, had 
 gathered thirty men and ten women. Here, 
 in the dark recesses of this cave, — which was 
 approached through a long and narrow moun- 
 tain pass, and entered by a ladder of ninety 
 steps, — was the germ of the future kingdoms 
 of Castile and Aragon, and also of the down- 
 fall of the Moor. An Arab historian said 
 later: ''Would to God the Moslems had ex- 
 tinguished that spark which was destined to 
 consume the dominion of Islam in the north " 
 and, he might have added, '' in Spain'' 
 
 When Alfonso of Cantabria married the 
 daughter of Pelayo in 751, the cave of Cova- 
 donga no longer held the insurgent band. He 
 roused all the northern provinces against the 
 Moors and gathered an army which drove 
 
 64 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 65 
 
 them step by step further south, until he had 
 pushed the Christian frontier as far as the 
 great Sierra, so that the one-time Visigoth 
 capital of Toledo marked the line of the Mos- 
 lem border fortresses. Too scanty in num- 
 bers and too poor in purse to occupy the 
 territory, Alfonso and his army then retreated 
 to their mountains, there to enjoy the empty 
 satisfaction of their conquest. 
 
 But the Moors in Andalusia had too many 
 troubles of their own at that time to give 
 much heed to Alfonso I. and his rebellious 
 band hiding in the mountains. The Berbers 
 and the Arabs on the African coast were jeal- 
 ous and antagonistic; the one was devout, 
 credulous, and emotional; the other cool, 
 crafty, and diplomatic. Suddenly the long- 
 slumbering hatred burst into open revolt, and 
 the Khalif sent thirty thousand Syrians to put 
 down a formidable revolution in his African 
 dominions. 
 
 In full sympathy with their kinsmen across 
 the sea, the Moors in Spain began to reahze 
 that while that land had been won by twelve 
 thousand Berbers, led by one Berber general 
 that the lion's share of the spoils had gone to 
 the Arabs, who were carrying things with a 
 
66 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 high hand ! There were signs of a general up- 
 rising, in concert with the revolution in 
 Africa; and it looked as if the new territory 
 was to be given up to anarchy; when suddenly 
 all was changed. 
 
 The Khalif, who was the head of all the 
 Mahommedan empire, was supposed to be the 
 supreme ruler in spiritual and temporal 
 afifairs. But as his empire extended to such 
 vast dimensions, he was obliged to delegate 
 much of his temporal authority to others; so 
 gradually it had become somewhat like that of 
 the Pope. He was the supreme spiritual 
 head, and only nominally supreme in affairs of 
 state. 
 
 The family of Omeyyad had given fourteen 
 Khalifs to the Mahommedan empire from 66 1 
 to 750; at which time the then reigning 
 Omeyyad was deposed, and the, second 
 dynasty of Khalifs commenced, called Abba- 
 side, after Abbas, an uncle of the Prophet. 
 
 Abd-er-Rahman was a Prince belonging to 
 the deposed family of the Omeyyads. He 
 was the only one of his family who escaped the 
 exterminating fury of the Abbasides. There 
 was no future for him in the east, so the 
 thoughts of the ambitious youth turned to 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIiV. 67 
 
 the west — to the newly won territory of 
 Spain. 
 
 The coming of this last survivor of the 
 Omeyyads to Andalusia is one of the ro- 
 mances of history, and . was not unlike the 
 coming of another young Pretender to Scot- 
 land, one thousand years later. It aroused 
 the same wild enthusiasm, and as if by magic 
 an army gathered about him, to meet the 
 army of the Governor, Yusuf, which would 
 resist him. Victory declared itself for the 
 Prince, and he entered Cordova in triumph. 
 Before the year had expired the dynasty of the 
 Omeyyads — which was to stand for three 
 centuries — was finally established, and its first 
 king— Abd-er-Rahman — reigned at Cordova. 
 
 His hereditary enemies the Abbasides fol- 
 lowed him to Spain, and found supporters 
 among the disaffected. But it was in vain. 
 The Abbaside army of invasion was utterly 
 annihilated; and the qualities slumbering in 
 this son of the Khalifs may be judged when 
 we relate that the heads of the Abbaside 
 leaders were put into a bag with descriptive 
 labels attached to their ears, and sent to the 
 reigning Khalif as a present. 
 
 This little incident does not seem to have 
 
68 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 injured him in the estimation of Mansur, the 
 new Khalif, who said to him: ''Wonder- 
 ful is this man! Such daring, wisdom, pru- 
 dence! To throw himself into a distant land; 
 to profit by the jealousies of the people; 
 to turn their arms against one another instead 
 of against himself; to win homage and obedi- 
 ence through such difficulties; and to rule 
 supreme — lord of all! Of a truth there is not 
 such another man!'' Abd-er-Rahman (the 
 Sultan, as he was called) merited this praise. 
 He knew when to be cruel and when to show 
 mercy; and how to hold scheming Arab chiefs, 
 fierce, jealous Berbers, and vanquished Chris- 
 tians, and would placate or crucify as the con- 
 ditions required. 
 
CHAPTER XL 
 
 Charlemagne was at this time building 
 up his colossal empire. His Christian soul was 
 mightily stirred by seeing an infidel kingdom 
 set up in Andalusia; and when, in yy^j, the 
 Saracen governor and two other Arab chiefs 
 appealed to him for aid against the Omeyyad 
 usurper, Abd-er-Rahman, he eagerly re- 
 sponded. His grandfather Charles Martel 
 had driven these infidels back over the Pyren- 
 ees; now he would drive them out of Spain, 
 and reclaim that land for Christianity! 
 
 His army never reached farther than Sara- 
 gossa. He was recalled to France by a revolt 
 of the recently conquered Saxons, and the 
 '' Battle of Roncesvalles '' is the historic 
 monument of the ill-starred attempt. The 
 battle in itself was insignificant. No action 
 of such small importance has ever been in- 
 vested with such a glamour of romance, 
 nor the theme of so much legend and 
 poetry. It has been called the Ther- 
 
 69 
 
70 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 mopylae of the Pyrenees, because of the 
 personal valor displayed, and the tragic 
 death of the two great Paladins (as the 
 twelve Peers of Charlemagne were called) 
 Roland and Olivier. The Chanson de Roland 
 was one of the famous ballads in the early 
 literature of Europe, and Roland and Olivier 
 were to French and Spanish minstrelsy what 
 the knights of King Arthur vv^ere to the Eng- 
 lish. 
 
 The simple story about which so much has 
 been written and sung is this: As the retreat- 
 ing army of Charlemagne was crossing the 
 Pyrenees, the rear of the army under Roland 
 and Olivier was ambuscaded in the narrow 
 pass of Roncesvalles by the Basques and ex- 
 terminated to a man. 
 
 These Basques were the unconquerable 
 mountain tribe of which we heard so much in 
 the early history of Spain. They had been on 
 guard for centuries, keeping the Franks back 
 from the Pyrenees. They may have been act- 
 ing under Saracenic influence when they ex- 
 terminated the rear-guard of Charlemagne's 
 army. But it was done, not because they 
 loved the Saracen, but because they had a 
 hereditary hatred for the Franks. 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 11 
 
 Mediaeval Europe never tired of hearing of 
 the Great Charles' lament over his Roland: 
 ^' O thou right arm of my kingdom, — de- 
 fender of the Christians, — scourge of the 
 Saracens! How can I behold thee dead, and 
 not die myself! Thou art exalted to the 
 heavenly kingdom, — and I am left alone, a 
 poor miserable King! " 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 The tide which had flowed over southern 
 Spain was a singular mixture of reHgious fer- 
 vor, of brutish humanity, and refinements of 
 wisdom and wickedness. No stranger and 
 more composite elements were ever thrown 
 together. Permanence and peace were im- 
 possible. Nothing but force could hold to- 
 gether elements so incongruous and antago- 
 nistic. As soon as the hand of Abd-er-Rah- 
 man I. was removed disintegration began. 
 Clashing races, clans, and political parties had 
 in a few years made such havoc that it seemed 
 as if the Omeyyad dynasty was crumbling. 
 
 It might have been an Arab who said '' he 
 cared not w^ho made the laws of his country, 
 so he could write its songs.'' Learning, litera- 
 ture, refinements of luxury and of art had 
 taken possession of the land, which seemed 
 given up to the muses. When in 822 Abd- 
 er-Rahman II. reigned, he did not trouble 
 himself about the laws of his crumbling em- 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 73 
 
 pire. The one man in whom he delighted was 
 Ziryab, What Petronius was to Nero,"^ and 
 Beau Brummel to George IV., that was 
 Ziryab to the Sultan Abd-er-Rahman 11. , the 
 elegant arbiter in matters of taste. From the 
 dishes which should be eaten to the clothes 
 which should be worn, he was the supreme 
 judge; while at the same time he knew by 
 heart and could '' like an angel sing '' one 
 thousand songs to his adoring Sultan. 
 
 Even the Gothic Christians were seduced 
 by these alluring refinements. They felt con- 
 tempt for their old Latin speech and for their 
 literature, with the tiresome asceticism it 
 eternally preached. The Christian ideal had 
 grown to be one of penance and mortification 
 of the flesh, and to a few ardent souls these 
 sensuous delights were an open highway to 
 death eternal. Evilogms became the leader of 
 this band of zealots. In lamenting the deca- 
 dence of his people, he wrote, '' hardly one in 
 a thousand can write a decent Latin letter, and 
 yet they indite excellent Arabic verse!" 
 Filled with despairing ardor this man aroused 
 a few kindred spirits to join him in a desper- 
 
 ^See "QuoVadis?" 
 
74 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 ate attempt to awaken the benumbed con- 
 science of the Christians. They could not get 
 the Moslems to persecute them, but they 
 might attain martyrdom by cursing the 
 Prophet; then the infidels, however reluctant, 
 w^ould be compelled to behead them. This 
 they did, and one by one perished, to no pur- 
 pose. The Gothic Christians were not con- 
 science-stricken as Eulogius supposed they 
 would be, and there was no general uprising 
 for the Christian faith. 
 
 In 912 the threatened ruin of the dynasty 
 was arrested by the coming of another Abd- 
 er-Rahman, third Sultan of that name. Rebel- 
 lion was put down, and fifty years of wise and 
 just administration gave solidity to the king- 
 dom, which also then became a Khalifate. 
 
 The Abbaside Khalifs, after the deposition 
 of the Omeyyads, had removed the Khalifate 
 from Damascus to Baghdad. But the empire 
 had extended too far west to revolve about 
 that distant pivot. Abd-er-Rahman — perhaps 
 remembering the old feud between his fam- 
 ily and the Abbasides — determined to as- 
 sume the spiritual headship of the western part 
 of the empire. And thereafter, the Mahom- 
 medan empire — like the Roman — had two 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 75 
 
 heads, an Eastern Khalif at Baghdad, and a 
 Western Khalif at Cordova. 
 
 While thus extending his own power the 
 Khalif was extinguishing every spark of re- 
 bellion in the south and driving the rebellious 
 Christians back in the north, and at the same 
 time he was clothing Cordova with a splendor 
 which amazed and dazzled even the Eastern 
 Princes who came to pay court to the great 
 Khalif. His emissaries were everywhere col- 
 lecting books for his library and treasure for 
 his palaces. Cordova became the abode of 
 learning, and the nursery for science, philoso- 
 phy, and art, transplanted from Asia. The im- 
 agination and the pen of an arab poet could 
 not have overdrawn this wonderful city on the 
 Guadalquivir, — with its palaces, its gardens, 
 and fountains, — its 50,000 houses of the aris- 
 tocracy, — its 700 mosques, — and 900 public 
 baths, — all adorned with color and carvings 
 and tracery beautiful as a dream of Paradise. 
 One hears with amazement of the great 
 mosque, with its 19 arcades, its pavings of 
 silver and rich mosaics, its 1293 clustered 
 columns, inlaid with gold and lapis-lazuli, the 
 clusters reaching up to the slender arches 
 which supported the roof; the whole of this 
 
76 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 marvelous scene lighted by countless brazen 
 lamps made from Christian Sells, while 
 hundreds of attendants swung censers, filling 
 the air with perfume. 
 
 After the ravages of a thousand years trav- 
 elers stand amazed to-day before the forest of 
 columns which open out in endless vistas in 
 the splendid ruin, calling up visions of 
 the vanished glories of Cordova and the Great 
 Khalif. 
 
 There is not time to tell of the city this 
 Spanish Khalif built for his favorite wife, 
 " The Fairest," and which he called " Hill of 
 the Bride,'' upon which for fifteen years ten 
 thousand men worked daily; nor of the four 
 thousand columns which adorned its palaces, 
 presents from emperors and potentates in 
 Constantinople, Rome, and far-ofif Eastern 
 states; nor of the ivory and ebony doors, 
 studded with jewels, through which shone the 
 sun, the light then falling on the lake of quick- 
 silver, which sent back blinding, quivering 
 flashes into dazzled eyes. And we are told of 
 the thirteen thousand male servants who min- 
 istered in this palace of delight. All this, too, 
 at a time when our Saxon ancestors were liv- 
 ing in dwellings without chimneys, and cast- 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 77 
 
 ing the bones from the table at which they 
 feasted into the foul straw which covered their 
 floors; when a Gothic night had settled 
 upon Europe, and blotted out civilization so 
 completely that only in a part of Italy, and 
 around Constantinople, did there remain a 
 vestige of refinement! 
 
 It is said that when the embassy from Con- 
 stantinople came bearing a letter to the Kha- 
 lif, the courtier whose duty it was to read it 
 was so awed by all this splendor that he 
 fainted ! 
 
 And yet the owner and creator of this fabu- 
 lous luxury, — Sultan and Khalif of a dominion 
 the greatest of his time, and with '' The Fair- 
 est '' for his adored wife, — when he came to 
 die, left a paper upon which he had wTitten 
 that he could only recall fourteen days in 
 which he had been happy. 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 In the north there was developing another 
 and very different power. The descendants 
 of the Visigoth Kings, making common cause 
 with the rough mountaineers, had shared all 
 their hardships and rigors in the mountains of 
 the Asturias. Inured to privation and suf- 
 fering, entirely unacquainted with luxury or 
 even with the comforts of living, they had 
 grown strong, and in a century after Alfonso 
 I. had emerged from their mountain shelter 
 and removed their court and capital from 
 Oviedo to Leon, where Alfonso III. held sway 
 over a group of barren kingdoms, poor, 
 proud, but with Hidalgo and Dons, who were 
 keeping alive the sacred fires of patriotism and 
 of religion. This was the rough cradle of a 
 Spanish nationality. 
 
 They had their own jealousies and fierce 
 conflicts, but all united in a common hatred 
 of the Moor. Though they did not yet 
 dream of driving him out of their land, their 
 
 78 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 79 
 
 brave leaders, Ramiro I. and Ordono I. 
 had been for years steadily defying and tor- 
 menting him with the kind of warfare to 
 which they give its name — guerrilla — meaning 
 " little wars/' 
 
 While the Great Khalif was consolidating 
 his Moorish kingdom and driving the Chris- 
 tians back into their mountains, the power of 
 that people was being weakened by internal 
 strifes existing between the three adjacent 
 kingdoms — Leon, Castile, and Navarre. The 
 headship of Leon was for years disputed by 
 her ambitious neighbor Castile (so called be- 
 cause of the numerous fortified castles with 
 which it was studded), under the leadership 
 of one Fernando, Count of Castile. 
 
 There had been the usual lapse into anarchy 
 and weakness after the Great Khalif's death. 
 Andalusia always needed a master, and this 
 she found in Almanzor, who was Prime Min- 
 ister to one of the Khalif's feeble descendants. 
 It was a sad day for the struggling kingdom 
 in the north when this all-subduing man took 
 the reins in his own hands, and left his young 
 master to amuse himself in collecting rare 
 manuscripts and making Cordova more beau- 
 tiful. 
 
8o A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 This Almanzor, the mightiest of the sol- 
 diers of the Crescent since Tarik and Musa, 
 proclaimed a war of faith against the Chris- 
 tians, who were obliged to forget their local 
 dissensions and to try with their com- 
 bined strength to save their kingdom from ex- 
 termination. These were the darkest days to 
 which they had yet been subjected. But for 
 the death of Almanzor the ruin of the Chris- 
 tian state would have been complete. A 
 monkish historian thus records this wel- 
 come event: '' In 1002 died Almanzor, and 
 was buried in hell." 
 
 The death of Almanzor was the turning 
 point in the fortunes of the two kingdoms — 
 that of the Moors and of the Christians. 
 
 Never again would Cordova be called the 
 '' Bride of Andalusia.'' The magnificence 
 and the glory of the kingdom faded like the 
 mist before the morning sun. Eight years 
 after the death of Almanzor anarchy and ruin 
 reigned in Cordova. The gentle, studious 
 youth who was Khalif, was dragged with his 
 only child to a dismal vault attached to the 
 great mosque; and here, in darkness and cold 
 and damp, sat the grandson of the first Great 
 Khalif, his child clinging to his breast and 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 8 1 
 
 begging in vain for food, his wretched father 
 pathetically pleading with his jailers for just 
 a crust of bread, and a candle to relieve the 
 awful darkness. 
 
 The brutal Berbers now had their turn. The 
 library, with its four hundred thousand price- 
 less books, was in ashes. They were in the 
 '' City of the Fairest." Palace after palace 
 was ransacked, and in a few days all that 
 remained of its exquisite treasures of art 
 was a heap of blackened stones (loio). The 
 Christians drew their broken state closer to- 
 gether, and gathered themselves for a more 
 aggressive warfare than any yet undertaken. 
 The time when the Moors were in the throes 
 of civil war was favorable. The three king- 
 doms of Asturias, Leon, and Castile were in 
 1073 united into one '' kingdom of Castile," 
 under Alfonso VI., who had already made 
 great inroads upon the Moslem territory and 
 laid many cities under tribute. With this 
 event, the name Castilian comes into Spanish 
 history, and from thenceforth that name rep- 
 resents all that is proudest, bravest, and most 
 characteristic of the part of the race which 
 traces a direct lineage from the ancient Visi- 
 goth Kings. 
 
32 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 Alfonso had not misjudged his opportunity. 
 He had traversed Spain with his army, and 
 bathed in the ocean in sight of the '' Pillars of 
 Hercules." His great general Rodrigo Diaz, 
 known as '' My Cid, the Challenger," had cut 
 another path all the way to Valencia, where 
 he reigned as a sort of uncrowned king; and 
 he will forever reign as crowned king in the 
 realm of romance and poetry; the perfect em- 
 bodiment of the knightly idea — the '' Chal- 
 lenger," w^ho, in defense of the faith, would 
 stand before great armies and defy them to 
 single combat! Whether ''My Cid" ever 
 did such mighty deeds as are ascribed to him, 
 no one knows. But he stands for the highest 
 ideal of his time. He was the '' King Ar- 
 thur " of Spanish history; and so valiantly did 
 he serve the Christian cause that the Moors 
 were driven to a most disastrous step. With 
 the Cid in Valencia, with Alfonso VI. march- 
 ing a victorious army through the Moslem 
 territory, and with Toledo, the city of the 
 ancient Visigoth Kings, repossessed, it looked 
 as if, after almost four hundred years, the 
 Christians were about to recover their 
 land. 
 
 The Moors, thoroughly frightened, realiz- 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 83 
 
 ing how helpless they had grown, resolved 
 upon a desperate measure. 
 
 There was, on the opposite African coast, 
 a sect of Berber fanatics, fierce and devout, 
 known as '' saints," but which the Moors 
 called Almoravides. Fighting for the faith 
 was their occupation. What more fitting 
 than to use them as a means of driving the in- 
 fidel Christians out of Moslem territory! 
 
 They came, like a cloud of locusts, and set- 
 tled upon the land. Yusuf, their general, led 
 his men against Alfonso's Castilians October 
 23, 1086. Near Badajos the attack was made 
 simultaneously in front and rear, crushing 
 them utterly; Alfonso barely escaping with 
 five hundred men. This was only the first of 
 many other crushing defeats; the most dis- 
 heartening of which was the one in 1099, when 
 the Cid, fighting in allianc^ with Pedro, King 
 of Aragon, was defeated near Gardia, on the 
 seacoast. Then the great warrior's heart 
 broke, and he died; and we are told he was 
 clothed cap-a-pie in shining armor and placed 
 upright on his good steed Bavieca, his trusty 
 sword in his hand — and so he passed to his 
 burial; his banner borne and guarded by five 
 hundred knights. And we are also told the 
 
34 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 Moors wonderingly watched his departure 
 with his knights, not suspecting that he was 
 dead. 
 
 The object of the Moors in inviting the 
 odious Almoravides had been accomphshed; 
 the Christians had been driven out of Anda- 
 kisia back into their own territory; but their 
 African auxiharies were too well pleased with 
 their new abode to think of leaving it. One 
 by one the Moorish Princes were subdued by 
 the men whose aid they had invoked, until a 
 dynasty of the Almoravides was fastened upon 
 Spain. To the refined Spanish Arabs con- 
 tact with these savages from the desert w^as a 
 terrible scourge, and so far as they were able 
 they withdrew into communities by them- 
 selves, leaving these African locusts to devour 
 their substance and dim their glory. 
 
 But luxury was not favorable to the invad- 
 ers. In another generation their martial 
 spirit was gone and they had become only 
 ignorant, sodden voluptuaries; and when the 
 Christians once more renewed their attacks, 
 they failed to repel them as Yusuf had done 
 thirty years before. 
 
 There was another fanatical sect, be- 
 yond the Atlas range in Africa, which had 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 85 
 
 long been looking for a coming Messiah, 
 whom they called the Mahdi. They were 
 known as the Alhomades. A son of a lamp- 
 lighter in the Mosque of Cordova one day pre- 
 sented himself before the Alhomades, and an- 
 nounced that he was the great Mahdi, who was 
 divinely appointed to lead them, and to bring 
 happiness to all the earth. 
 
 The path this Mahdi desired to lead them 
 was first to Morocco, there to subdue the Al- 
 moravides in their own land, and thence to 
 Spain. In a short time this entire plan was 
 realized. The Mahdi's successor was Emperor 
 of Morocco, and by the year 11 50 included in 
 his dominion was all of Mahommedan Spain! 
 The Spanish Arabs, when they were fighting 
 Alfonso 11. and the '' Cid," did not antici- 
 pate this disgraceful downfall from people of 
 their own faith. They abhorred these Ma- 
 hommedan savages, and drew together still 
 closer for a century more in and about their 
 chosen refuge of Granada. 
 
 In the early part of the thirteenth century 
 the Emperor of Morocco made such enor- 
 mous preparations for the occupation of Spain 
 that a larger design upon Europe became 
 manifest. Once more Christendom was 
 
86 4 SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 alarmed; not since Charles Martel had the 
 danger appeared so great. The Pope pro- 
 claimed a Crusade, this time not into Pales- 
 tine, but Spain. 
 
 An army of volunteers from the kingdom of 
 Portugal and from southern France re-en- 
 forced the great armies of the Kings of Cas- 
 tile/ Aragon, and Navarre. The Crusaders, as 
 they called themselves, assembled at Toledo 
 July 12, 1212, under the command of Alfonso 
 IX., King of Castile. The power of the Al- 
 homades was broken, and they were driven 
 out of Spain. The once great Mahommedan 
 Empire in that country was reduced to the 
 single province of Granada, v/here the Moors 
 intrenched themselves in their last stronghold. 
 For nearly three centuries the Crescent was 
 going to wave over the kingdom of Granada; 
 but it was to shine in only the pale light of a 
 waning crescent, until its final extinction in 
 the full light of a Christian day. 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 A GREAT change had been wrought in 
 Europe. The Crusades had opened a channel 
 through which flowed from the East reviving 
 streams of ancient knowledge and culture 
 over the arid waste of mediaevalism. France 
 and England had awakened from their long 
 mental torpor, Paris was become the center of 
 an intellectual revival. In England, Roger 
 Bacon, in his '' Opus Majus," was system- 
 atizing all existing knowledge and laying a 
 foundation for a more advanced science and 
 philosophy for the people, who had only 
 recently extorted from their wicked King 
 John the great charter of their liberties. 
 
 It was just at this period, when the door had 
 suddenly opened ushering Europe into a new 
 life, that the Christian cause in Spain tri- 
 umphed; and, excepting in the little kingdom 
 of Granada, the Cross waved from the Pyre- 
 nees to the sea. After more than four cen- 
 turies of steadfast devotion to that object, the 
 
 87 
 
SS A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 descendants of the Visigoth Kings had come 
 once more into their inheritance. 
 
 They found it enriched, and clothed with a 
 beauty of which their ancestors could never 
 have dreamed. These Spaniards had learned 
 their lesson of valor in the north, and they 
 had learned it well. Now in the land of the 
 Moor, dwelling in the palaces they had built, 
 and gazing upon masterpieces of Arabic art 
 and architecture which they had left, they 
 were to learn the subtle charm of form and 
 color, and the fascination which music and 
 poetry and beauty and knowledge may lend 
 to life. As they drank from these Moorish 
 fountains the rugged warriors found them 
 very sweet; and they discovered that there 
 were other pleasures in life beside fighting the 
 Moors and nursing memories of the Cid and 
 their vanished heroes. 
 
 The territory of Ferdinand III., King of Cas- 
 tile (1230-52), extended now from the Bay of 
 Biscay to the Guadalquivir. The ancient city 
 of Seville was chosen as his capital. It was a 
 far cry from the '' Cave of Covadonga " 
 to the Moorish palace of the '' Alcazar," where 
 dwelt the pious descendant of Pelayo! The 
 first act of Fernando III. was to convert the 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 89 
 
 Mosque at Seville into a cathedral, which 
 still stands with its Moorish bell-tower, the 
 beautiful *' Giralda." There may also be seen 
 to-day over one of its portals a stuffed croco- 
 dile, which was sent alive to King Ferdinand 
 by the Sultan of Egypt. And within the 
 cathedral, in a silver urn with glass sides, the 
 traveler may also gaze to-day upon the re- 
 mains of this '' Saint Ferdinand " clothed in 
 royal robes, and with a crown upon his head. 
 Spain had begun to lift up her head among 
 the other nations of Europe. To defeat the 
 Crescent was the highest ideal of that chival- 
 ric age. Spain, longer than any other nation, 
 had fought the Mahommedan. It had been 
 her sole occupation for four centuries, and 
 now she had vanquished him, and driven 
 him into the mountains of one of her 
 smallest provinces, there to hide from the 
 Spaniards as they had once hidden from the 
 Moors in the North. This was a pass- 
 port to the honor and respect of other Chris- 
 tian nations. She was Spain '' the Catholic " 
 — the loved and favorite child of the 
 Church — and great monarchs in England, 
 France, and Germany bestowed their sons and 
 daughters upon her kings and princes. Poor 
 
90 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 though she was in purse, and somewhat rude 
 yet in manners, she held up her head high in 
 proud consciousness of her aristocratic Hne- 
 age, and her unmatched championship of 
 Christianity. 
 
 We reahze how close had become the tie 
 binding her to other nations when we learn 
 that King Ferdinand III. was the grandson 
 of Queen Eleanor of England (daughter of 
 Henry II.), and that Louis IX. of France, that 
 other royal saint, was his own cousin; and also 
 that his wife Beatrix, whom he brought with 
 him to Seville, was daughter of the Emperor 
 of Germany. 
 
 The deep hold which Arabic life and 
 thought had taken upon their conquerors was 
 shown when Alfonso X., son of Ferdinand, 
 came to the throne. So in love was he with 
 learning and science that he let his kingdom 
 fall into utter confusion while he busied him- 
 self with a set of astronomical tables upon 
 which his heart was set and in holding up to 
 ridicule the Ptolemaic theory. If he had 
 givei. less thought to the stars, and more to 
 the humble question as to who was to be his 
 successor, it would have saved much strife and 
 suffering to those who came after him. 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 91 
 
 While the Moslems were building up their 
 kingdom and making of their capital city a 
 second and even more beautiful Cordova, there 
 was a partial truce with the Moors in Granada. 
 Moors and Christians were enemies still; the 
 hereditary hatreds were only lulled into tem- 
 porary repose. But Christian knights who 
 were handsome and gallant might love and 
 woo Moorish maidens who were beautiful; 
 and, as a writer has intimated, love became 
 the business and war the pastime of the Span- 
 iard in Andalusia. Spain was unconsciously 
 inbibing the soft, sensuous charm of the civili- 
 zation she was exterminating; and the peculiar 
 rhythm of Spanish music, and the subtle 
 picturesqueness which makes the Spanish peo- 
 ple unique among the other Latin nations of 
 Europe, came, not from her Gothic, nor her 
 Roman, nor her Phenician ancestry, but from 
 the plains of Arabia; and the guitar and the 
 dance and the castanet, and the charm and 
 the coquetry of her women, are echoes from 
 that far-off land of poetry and romance. Not 
 so the bull-fight! Would you trace to its 
 source that pleasant pastime, you must not 
 go to the East; the Oriental was cruel to man, 
 but not to beast. He would have abhorred 
 
92 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 such a form of amusement, for the origin of 
 which we must look to the barbarous Kelt; 
 or perhaps, as is more probable, to the mys- 
 terious Iberians, since among the Latin peo- 
 ples of Europe bull-fighting is found in Spain 
 alone. Well was it for Spain that her rough, 
 untutored ancestors were kept hiding in the 
 mountains for centuries, while that brilliant 
 Oriental race planted their Peninsula thick 
 with the germs of high thinking and beau- 
 tiful living. 
 
 As the spider, after his gHstening habitation 
 has been destroyed by some ruthless footstep, 
 goes patiently to work to rebuild it, so the 
 Moor in Granada, with his imperishable in- 
 stinct for beauty, was making of his little king- 
 dom the most beautiful spot in Europe. The 
 city of Granada was lovelier than Cordova; 
 its Alhambra more enchanting than had been 
 the palaces in the '' City of the Fairest." 
 This citadel, which is fortress and palace in 
 one, still stands like the Acropolis, looking 
 out upon the plain from its lofty elevation. 
 Volumes have been written about its laby- 
 rinthine halls and corridors and courts, and 
 the amazing richness of decoration, which still 
 survives — an inexhaustible mine for artists 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 93 
 
 and a shrine for lovers of the beautiful. But 
 Granada cultivated other things besides the 
 art of beauty. Nowhere in Europe was there 
 in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries such 
 advanced thinking, and a knowledge so akin 
 to our own to-day, as within the borders of 
 that Moorish kingdom. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 There were other reasons beside the grow- 
 ing peacefulness of the Spaniards why Gra- 
 nada was left to develop in comparative secu- 
 rity for two centuries. It was impossible that 
 adjacent ambitious kingdoms, such as Na- 
 varre, Castile, Aragon, Leon, and Portugal, 
 with indefinite and disputed boundaries, and, 
 on account of intermarriages between the 
 kingdoms, with indefinite and disputed suc- 
 cessions, should ever be at peace. In the 
 perpetual strife and warfare which prevailed 
 on account of royal European alliances, the 
 fate of foreign princes and princesses were 
 often involved, and hence European states 
 stood ready to take a hand. 
 
 Castile and Aragon had gradually absorbed 
 the smaller states, excepting Portugal on the 
 one side and Navarre on the other. The his- 
 tory of Spain at this time is a history of the 
 struggles of these two states for supremacy. 
 The most eventful as well as the most lurid 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 95 
 
 period of this prolonged civil war was while 
 Pedro the Cruel was king of Castile, 1350- 
 69. This Spanish Nero, when sixteen years 
 old, commenced his reign by the murder of 
 his mother. A catalogue of his crimes is im- 
 possible. Enough to say that assassination 
 was his remedy, and means of escape, from 
 every entanglement in which his treacheries 
 involved him. It was the unhappy fate of 
 Blanche de Bourbon, sister of Charles V., 
 King of France, to marry this King of Castile, 
 and when he refused to live with her and had 
 her removed from his palace the Alcazar to a 
 fortress, and finally poisoned her, the French 
 King determined to avenge the insult to his 
 royal house. He allied himself with the King 
 of Aragon to destroy Pedro, with whom the 
 King of Aragon was of course at war. 
 
 Edward, the '' Black Prince,'' was then 
 brilliantly invading France and extending the 
 kingdom of his father Edward III. He was 
 the kinsman of Pedro, and when appealed to 
 by his cousin for aid in protecting his king- 
 dom from the King of Aragon and his French 
 allies, Edward gallantly consented to help 
 him ; and in the spring of 1 367, for the second 
 time, a splendid army advanced through the 
 
96 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 Pass at Roncesvalles, and a great battle, 
 worthy of a better cause, was fought and 
 won. 
 
 So this most atrocious king — perhaps ex- 
 cepting Richard III. of England, whom he 
 resembled — had for his champion the victor of 
 Cressy and Poictiers. He was restored to his 
 throne, which had been usurped by his brother 
 Enrique (or Henry), but in a personal en- 
 counter with Enrique soon after (which was 
 artfully brought about by the famous Breton 
 knight, Bertrand du Guesclin), he met a de- 
 served fate (1369). 
 
 Constanza, the daughter of Pedro the Cruel, 
 had been married to John of Gaunt (Duke of 
 Lancester), brother of the Black Prince and 
 son of Edward HI. As Constanza was the 
 great-grandmother of Isabella I. of Spain, so 
 in the veins of that revered Queen there 
 flowed the blood of the Plantagenets, as well 
 as that of Pedro.the Cruel! 
 
 Because of the number of doubtful pretend- 
 ers always existing in Spain, disputes about 
 the royal succession also always existed. 
 Such a dispute now led to a long war with 
 Portugal, where King Fernando had really the 
 most valid hereditary claim to the throne 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN-, 97 
 
 made vacant by Pedro's death. If his right 
 had been acknowledged, Portugal and Spain 
 would now be united; Isabella would have re- 
 mained only a poor and devout princess, and 
 would never have had the power to win a con- 
 tinent for the world. So impossible is it to 
 remove one of the links forged by fate, that 
 we dare not regret even sO' monstrous a reign 
 as that of Pedro the Cruel! 
 
 Enrique's right to the vacant throne of his 
 brother had two disputants. Besides the 
 King of Portugal, John of Gaunt, who had 
 married the lady Constanza, — by virtue of her 
 rights as daughter of Pedro, — claimed the 
 crown of Castile. This Plantagenet was actu- 
 ally proclaimed King of Castile and Leon 
 (1386). For twenty-five years he vainly 
 strove to come into his kingdom as sovereign ; 
 but finally compromised by giving his young 
 daughter Catherine to the boy '^ Prince of 
 Asturias," the heir to the throne. He was 
 obliged to content himself by thus securing to 
 his child the long-coveted prize. And it was 
 this Catherine, who at fourteen was betrothed 
 to a boy of nine, who was the grandmother of 
 Isabella, Queen of Castile. 
 
 When such was the private history of those 
 
98 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 highest in the land we can only imagine 
 what must have been that of the rest. Feud- 
 alism, which was a part of Spain's Gothic in- 
 heritance, had always made that country one 
 of its strongholds, and chivalry had nowhere 
 else found so congenial a soil. There was no 
 great artisan class, as in France, creating a 
 powerful '' bourgeoisie ''; no " guilds," or sim- 
 ple '' burghers,'' as in Germany, stubbornly 
 standing for their rights; no '' boroughs " and 
 '' town meetings," where the people were 
 sternly guarding their liberties, as in England. 
 The history of other nations is that of the 
 struggles of the common people against the 
 tyranny of kings and rulers. If there were 
 any " common people " in Spain, they were 
 so efifaced that history makes no mention of 
 them. We hear only of kings and great 
 barons and glorious knights; and their won- 
 derful deeds and their valor and prowess — ex- 
 cepting in the wars with the Moors — were 
 always over boundary-lines and successions, 
 or personal quarrels more or less disgraceful, 
 with never a single high purpose or a principle 
 involved. It was all a gay, ambitious pageant, 
 adorned by a mantle of chivalry, and made 
 sacred by the banner of the Cross. In the 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 99 
 
 history of no other European country do we 
 see a great state develop under despotism so 
 unredeemed by wholesome ideals, and so un- 
 mitigated and unrestrained by gentle human 
 impulses. 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 Juan IL, the son of the young Catherine and 
 the boy prince of the Asturias, died in 1454, 
 and his son Enrique (or Henry) IV. was King 
 of Castile. When, after some years, Henry 
 was without children, and with health very in- 
 firm, his young sister Isabella unexpectedly 
 found herself the acknowledged heir to the 
 throne of Castile. She suddenly became a 
 very important young person. The old King 
 of Portugal was a suitor for her hand, 
 and a brother of the King of Eng- 
 land, and also a brother of the King of 
 France, were striving for the same honor. 
 But Isabella had very decided views of her 
 own. Her hero was the young Ferdinand of 
 Aragon, and heir to that throne. She resisted 
 all her brother's efforts to coerce her, and 
 finally took the matter into her own hands by 
 sending an envoy to her handsome young 
 lover to come to her at Valladolid, with a 
 letter telling him they had better be married 
 at once. 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, loi 
 
 Accompanied by a few knights disguised as 
 merchants, Ferdinand, pretending to be their 
 servant, during the entire journey waited 
 on them at table and took care of their mules. 
 He entered Valladolid, where he was received 
 by the Archbishop of Toledo, who was in the 
 conspiracy, and was by him conveyed to Isa- 
 bella's apartments. We are told that when he 
 entered someone exclaimed: Ese-es, Ese-es 
 (that is he) ; and the escutcheon of that knight 
 has ever since borne a double 5". 5., which 
 sounds like this exclamation. 
 
 The marriage was arranged to take place in 
 four days. An embarrassment then occurred 
 of which no one had before thought. Neither 
 of them had any money. But someone was 
 found who would lend them enough for the 
 wedding expenses, and so on the 19th of 
 October, 1469, the most important marriage 
 ever yet consummated in Spain took place — a 
 marriage which would forever set at rest the 
 rivalries between Castile and Aragon, and 
 bring honors undreamed of to a united Spain. 
 
 Isabella was fair, intelligent, accomplished, 
 and lovely. She was eighteen and her boy 
 husband was a year younger. Of course her 
 royal brother stormed and raged. But, of 
 
I02 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 course, it did no good. In five years from 
 that time (1474) he died, and Isabella, royally 
 attired, and seated on a white palfrey, pro- 
 ceeded to the throne prepared for her, and 
 was there proclaimed '* Queen of Castile." 
 At the end of another five years, Ferdinand 
 came into his inheritance. His old father, 
 Juan II., King of Aragon and Navarre, died 
 in 1479, and Castile, Aragon, and Navarre — 
 all of Spain except Portugal and Granada — 
 had come under the double crown of Ferdi- 
 nand and Isabella. 
 
 The war with Portugal still existed, and 
 their reign began in the midst of confusion 
 and trouble, but it was brilliant from the out- 
 set. Ferdinand had great abilities and an 
 ambition which matched his abilities. Isa- 
 bella, no less ambitious than he, was more far- 
 reaching in her plans, and always saw more 
 clearly than Ferdinand what was for the true 
 glory of Spain. With infinite tact she soft- 
 ened his asperities, and disarmed his jeal- 
 ousy, and ruled her '' dear lord," by making 
 him believe he ruled her. 
 
 A joint sovereignty, with a man so grasping 
 of power and so jealous of his own rights, re- 
 quired self-control and tact in no ordinary 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 103 
 
 measure. It was agreed at last that in all pub- 
 lic acts Ferdinand's name should precede hers; 
 and although her sanction was necessary, his 
 indignation at this was abated by her promise 
 of submission to his will. The court of the 
 new sovereigns w^as established at Seville, and 
 they took up their abode in that palace so 
 filled with associations both Moorish and 
 Castilian — the Alcazar. From the very first 
 Isabella's powerful mind grappled every pub- 
 lic question, and she gave herself heart and 
 soul to what she believed was her divine mis- 
 sion — the building up of a great Catholic state. 
 Isabella's devout soul was sorely troubled 
 by the prevalence of Judaism in her king- 
 dom. She took counsel wdth her confessor, 
 and also with the Pope, and by their advice a 
 religious tribunal was established at Seville in 
 1483, the object of which was to inquire of 
 heretics whether they were willing to re- 
 nounce their faith and accept Christianity. 
 The head of this tribunal, w^hich was soon fol- 
 lowed by others in all the large cites, was a 
 Dominican friar called Torqucmada. He was 
 known as the '^ Inquisitor General." Inac- 
 cessible to pity, mild in manners, humble in 
 demeanor, yet swayed openly by a sense of 
 
I04 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN'. 
 
 duty, this strange being was so cruel that he 
 seems like an incarnation of the evil principle. 
 At the tribunal in Seville alone it is said that 
 in thirty-six years four thousand victims were 
 consigned to the flames, besides the thousands 
 more who endured living deaths by torture, 
 mutilation, and nameless sufferings. 
 
 Humanity shudders at the recital! And 
 yet this monstrous tribunal was the creation of 
 one of the wisest and gentlest of women, who 
 believed no rigors could be too great to save 
 people from eternal death! And, in her mis- 
 guided zeal, she emptied her kingdom of a peo- 
 ple who had helped to create its prosperity, 
 and drove the most valuable part of her popu- 
 lation into France, Italy, and England, there 
 to disseminate the seeds of a higher culture 
 and intelligence which they had imbibed from 
 contact with the Moors, who had treated them 
 with such uniform tolerance and gentleness. 
 
 The kingdom of Granada was now at the 
 height of its splendor. Its capital city was 
 larger and richer than any city in Spain. Its 
 army was the best equipped of any in Europe. 
 The Moorish king, a man of fiery temper, 
 thought the time had come when he 
 might defy his enemy by refusing to 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 105 
 
 pay an annual tribute to which his father 
 had ten years before consented. When 
 Ferdinand's messenger, in 1476, came to 
 demand the accustomed tribute, he said, 
 '' Go tell your master the kings who 
 pay tribute in Granada are all dead. Our 
 mints coin nothing but sword-blades 
 now.'' 
 
 The cool and crafty Ferdinand prepared his 
 own answer to this challenge. The infatuated 
 King Abdul-Hassan followed up his insult 
 by capturing the Christian fortress of Zahara. 
 His temper was not at the best at this time on 
 account of a war raging in his own household. 
 His wife Ayesha was fiercely jealous of a 
 Christian captive whom he had also made his 
 wife. She had become his favorite Sultana, 
 and was conspirmg to have her own son sup- 
 plant Boabdil, the son of Ayesha, the heir to 
 the throne. In his championship of Zoraya 
 and her son, Abdul-Hassan imprisoned Aye- 
 sha and Boabdil, v/hom he threatened to disin- 
 herit. We are shown to-day the window in 
 the Alhambra from which Ayesha lowered 
 Boabdil in a basket, telling him to come back 
 with an army and assert his rights. Sud- 
 denly, while absorbed by this smaller war, 
 
lo6 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 news came that Alhama, their most im- 
 pregnable fortress, only six leagues from the 
 city of Granada, had been captured by 
 Ferdinand's army. It was the key to Gra- 
 nada. Despair was in every soul. The air was 
 filled with wailing and lamentation. " Woe, 
 woe is me, Alhama! '' '' Ay de mi, Alhama! '' 
 Indignant with their old king, who had 
 brought destruction upon them, when Boab- 
 dil came with his army of followers, they 
 flocked about him— " El Rey Chico!'' (the 
 boy king) as they called him. Abdul Hassan 
 was forced to fly, and Boabdil reigned over 
 the expiring kingdom. It was a brief and 
 troubled reign. 
 
 In the famous '' Court of the Lions '' in the 
 Alhambra, visitors are shown to-day the 
 blood-stains left by the celebrated massacre 
 of the '' Abencerrages." The Abencerrages 
 had supported the claim of Ayesha's rival, 
 Zoraya; and it is said that Boabdil invited the 
 Princes of this clan, some thirty in number, 
 to a friendly conference in the Alhambra, and 
 there had them treacherously beheaded ^t the 
 fountain. 
 
 But whether this blood-stain upon his 
 memory is as doubtful as those upon the 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 107 
 
 stones at the fountain, seems an open 
 question. 
 
 So stubborn was the defense, it appeared 
 sometimes as if the reduction of Granada 
 would have to be abandoned. Isabella's 
 courage and faith were sorely tried. But the 
 brave Queen infused her own courage 
 into the flagging spirits of her hus- 
 band, and kept alive the enthusiasm of the 
 people; and at last, — on the 2d of January, 
 1492, — the proud city capitulated. Boabdil 
 surrendered the keys of the Alhambra to 
 Ferdinand — the silver cross which had pre- 
 ceded the King throughout the war gleamed 
 from a high tower; and from the loftiest pin- 
 nacle of the Alhambra waved the banners of 
 Castile and Aragon. 
 
 The conflict which had lasted for 781 years 
 was over. The death of Roderick and the fall 
 of the Goths was avenged, and Christendom, 
 still weeping for the loss of Constantinople, 
 was consoled and took heart again. 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 The reduction of Granada had required 
 eleven years, and had drained the kingdom of 
 all its resources. It is not strange that Isa- 
 bella should have had no time to listen seri- 
 ously to a threadbare enthusiast asking for 
 money and ships for a strange adventure! To 
 have grown old and haggard in pressing an 
 unsuccessful project is not a passport to the 
 confidence of Princes. But the gracious 
 Queen had promised to listen to him when the 
 war with the Moors was concluded. So 
 now Columbus soug'ht her out at Granada; 
 and it is a strange scene which the imagination 
 pictures — a shabby old man pleading with a 
 Queen in the halls of the Alhambra for permis- 
 sion to lift the veil from an unsuspected Hemi- 
 sphere; artfully dwelling upon the glory of 
 planting the Cross in the dominions of the 
 Great Khan! The cool, unimaginative Ferdi- 
 nand listened contemptuously; but Isabella, 
 for once opposing the will of her '' dear lord," 
 
 io8 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF $PAIN, 109 
 
 arose and said, '' The enterprise is mine. I 
 undertake it for Castile." And on the 3d of 
 August, 1492, the little fleet of caravels sailed 
 from the mouth of the same river whence had 
 once sailed the '' ships of Tarshish,'' laden 
 with treasure for King Solomon and '' Hiram, 
 King of Tyre.'' A union with Portugal — the 
 land of the Lusitanians and of Sertorius — was 
 all that was now required to make of the Span- 
 ish Peninsula one kingdom. This Isabella 
 planned to accomplish by the marriage of her 
 oldest daughter, Isabella, with the King of 
 Portugal. Her son John, heir to the Spanish 
 throne, had died suddenly just after his mar- 
 riage with the daughter of Maximilian, Em- 
 peror of Germany. 
 
 This terrible blow was swiftly followed by 
 another, the death of her daughter Isabella, 
 and also that of the infant which was expected 
 to unite the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain. 
 The succession of Castile and Aragon now 
 passed to Joanna, her second daughter, who 
 had married Philip, Archduke of Austria and 
 son of Maximilian, an unfortunate child who 
 seemed on the verge of madness. 
 
 Isabella's youngest daughter, Catherine, be- 
 came the wife of Henry VIII. of England. 
 
no A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 Happily the mother did not live to witness this 
 child's unhappiness; but her heart-breaking 
 losses and domestic griefs were greater than 
 she could bear. The unbalanced condition of 
 Joanna, upon whom rested all hopes, w^as un- 
 dermining her health. The results of the 
 expedition of Columbus had exceeded the 
 wildest dreams of romance. Gold was pour- 
 ing in from the West enough to pay for the 
 war with the Moors many times over, and for 
 all wars to come. Spain, from being the 
 poorest, had suddenly become the richest 
 country in Europe; richest in .wealth, in terri- 
 tory, and in the imperishable glory of its dis- 
 covery. But Isabella, — who had been the in- 
 strument in this transformation, — who had 
 built up a firm united kingdom and swept it 
 clean of heretics, Jews, and Moors, — was still 
 a sad and disappointed woman, thwarted in 
 her dearest hopes; and on the 26th of Novem- 
 ber, 1504, she died leaving the fruits of her 
 triumphs to a grandson six years old. 
 
 This infant Charles was proclaimed King of 
 Castile under the regency of his ambitious 
 father, the Archduke of Austria, and his in- 
 sane mother. The death of the Archduke 
 and the incapacity of Joanna in a few years 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, m 
 
 gave to Ferdinand the control of the two king- 
 doms for which he had contended and 
 schemed, until his own death in 1516, when 
 the crowns of Castile and Aragon passed to 
 his grandson, who was proclaimed Charles I., 
 King of Spain. 
 
 A plain, sedate youth of sixteen was called 
 from his home in Flanders to assume the 
 crowns of Castile and Aragon. Silent, re- 
 served, and speaking the Spanish language 
 very imperfectly, the impression produced by 
 the young King was very unpromising. No 
 one suspected the designs which were matur- 
 ing under that mask; nor that this boy was 
 planning to grasp all the threads of diplomacy 
 in Europe, and to be the master of kings. 
 
 In 1 5 17 Maximilian died, leaving a vacant 
 throne in Germany to be contended for by the 
 ambitious Francis I. of France and Maxi- 
 milian's grandson, Charles. 
 
 It was a question of supremacy in Europe. 
 So the successful aspirant must win to himself 
 Leo X., Henry VIII. and his great minister 
 Wolsey, and after that the Electors of Ger- 
 many. It required consummate skill. Fran- 
 cis I. was an able player. The astute Wolsey 
 made the moves for his master Henry VIII., 
 
112 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 keeping a watchful eye on Charles, '' that 
 young man who looks so modest, and soars so 
 high "; while Leo X., unconscious of the com- 
 ing Reformation, was craftily aiding this side 
 or that as benefit to the Church seemed to be 
 promised. 
 
 But that '' modest young man '' played the 
 strongest game. Charles was, by the unani- 
 mous vote of the Electors, raised to the im- 
 perial throne; and the grandson of Isabella, 
 as Charles I. of Spain and Charles V. of Ger- 
 many, possessed more power than had been 
 exercised by any one man since the reign of 
 Augustus. The territory over which he had 
 dominion in the New World was practically 
 without limit. Mexico surrendered to Cortez 
 (1521) and Peru to Pizarro (1532); Ponce de 
 Leon was in Florida and de Soto on the banks 
 of the Mississippi; while wealth, fabulous in 
 amount, was pouring into Spain, and from 
 thence into Flanders. 
 
 The history of Charles belongs, in fact, 
 more to Europe than to Spain. No sHghtest 
 tenderness seems to have existed in his cold 
 heart for the land of Isabella, which he seemed 
 to regard simply as a treasury from which to 
 draw money for the objects to which he was 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 113 
 
 really devoted. So, in fact, Spain was gov- 
 erned by an absolute despot whO' was Em- 
 peror of Germany, where he resided, and she 
 visibly declined from the strength and pros- 
 perity which had been created by the wise and 
 personal administration of Ferdinand and 
 Isabella. 
 
 The Cortes, where the deputies had never 
 been allowed the privilege of debate, had 
 been at its best a very imperfect expression of 
 popular sentiment; and now was reduced to a 
 mere empty form. Abuses which had been 
 corrected under the vigilant personal ad- 
 ministration of two able and patriotic sov- 
 ereigns returned in aggravated form. Mis- 
 rule and disorder prevailed, while their King 
 was absorbed in the larger field of European 
 politics and diplomacy. 
 
 The light in which Spain shines in this, 
 which is always accounted her most glorious 
 period, was that of Discovery and Conquest, 
 and the enormous wealth coming therefrom; 
 all of which was bestowed by that shabby ad- 
 venturer and suppliant at the Alhambra, in 
 whom Isabella alone believed, and who, after 
 enriching Spain beyond its wildest expecta- 
 tions, was permitted to die in poverty and neg- 
 
114 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN-. 
 
 lect at Valladolid in 1506! History has writ- 
 ten its verdict: imperishable renown to Co- 
 lumbus, Balboa, Magellan, and the navigators 
 who dared such perils and won so much; and 
 eternal infamy to the men who planted a 
 bloodstained Cross in those distant lands. 
 The history of the West Indies, of Mexico, 
 and Peru is unmatched for cruelty in the an- 
 nals of the world; and Isabella's is the only 
 voice that was ever raised in defense of the 
 gentle, helpless race which was found in those 
 lands. 
 
 - The Reformation, which had commenced in 
 Germany with the reign of Charles V., had 
 assumed enormous proportions. Charles, 
 who was a bigot with '' heart as hard as ham- 
 mered iron," was using with unsparing hand 
 the Inquisition, that engine of cruelty created 
 by his grandmother. And while his captains, 
 the '' conquistadors,'' were burning and tor- 
 turing in the West, he was burning and tortur- 
 ing in the East. His entire reign was occu- 
 pied in a struggle with his ambitious rival 
 Francis L, and another and vain struggle with 
 the followers of Luther. 
 
 He had married Isabel, the daughter of the 
 King of Portugal. Philip, his son and heir, 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 115 
 
 was born in 1527. The desire of his heart 
 was to secure for this son the succession to 
 the imperial throne of Germany. To this the 
 electors would not consent. He was defeated 
 in the two objects dearest to his heart: the 
 power to bequeath this imperial possession to 
 Philip, and the destruction of Protestantism. 
 So this most powerful sovereign since the day 
 of Charlemagne felt himself ill-used by Fate. 
 Weary and sick at heart, in the year 1556 he 
 abdicated in favor of Philip. The Nether- 
 lands was his own to bestbw upon his son, as 
 that was an inheritance from his father, the 
 Archduke of Austria. So the fate of Philip 
 does not seem to us so very heart-breaking, 
 as, upon the abdication of his father, he was 
 King of Spain, of Naples, and of Sicily; Duke 
 of Milan; Lord of the Netherlands and of the 
 Indies, and of a vast portion of the American 
 continent stretching from the Atlantic to the 
 iPacific! 
 
 Such was the inheritance left to his son by 
 the disappointed man who carried his sorrows 
 to the monastery at St. Yuste, where the 
 austerities and severities he practiced finally 
 cost him his life (1558). But let no one sup- 
 pose that these penances were on account of 
 
Ii6 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 cruelties practiced upon his Protestant sub- 
 jects! From his cloister he wrote to the 
 inquisitors adjuring them to shoAv no mercy; 
 to deliver all to the flames, even if they should 
 recant; and the only regret of the dying peni- 
 tent was that he had not executed Luther! 
 
CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 Philip established his capital at Madrid, 
 and commenced the Palace of the Escurial, 
 nineteen miles distant, which stands to-day as 
 his monument. His coronation was celebrated 
 by an auto-da-fe at Valladolid, which it is said 
 '' he attended with much devotion/' One of 
 the victims, an officer of distinction, while 
 awaiting his turn said to him: '' Sire, how can 
 you witness such tortures? '' ^^ Were my own 
 son in your place I should witness it,'' was the 
 reply; which was a key to the character of the 
 man. 
 
 He asserted his claim through his mother, 
 the Princess Isabel of Portugal, to the throne 
 of that country, and after a stubborn contest 
 with the Lusitanians, the long-desired union 
 of Spain and Portugal was accomplished. 
 This event was celebrated by Cervantes in a 
 poem which extravagantly lauds his sover- 
 ereign. Henry VHI. had been succeeded in 
 England by Mary, daughter of his unhappy 
 
Il8 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 Queen, Catherine of Aragon, who, it will be 
 remembered, was the daughter of Ferdinand 
 and Isabella. Mary had inherited the intense 
 religious fervor and perhaps the cruel in- 
 stincts of her mother's family, and she quickly 
 set about restoring Protestant England to the 
 Catholic faith. Philip saw in a union with 
 Mary and a joint sovereignty over England, 
 such as he hoped would follow, an immense 
 opportunity for Spain. The marriage took 
 place with great splendor, and in the desire to 
 please her handsome husband, of whom she 
 was very fond, she commenced the work 
 which has given her the title, " Bloody Mary.'' 
 In vain were human torches lighted to lure 
 Philip from Spain, where he lingered. She 
 did not win his love, nor did Philip reign 
 conjointly with his royal consort in England. 
 Mary died in 1558, and her Protestant sister 
 Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, was 
 Queen of England. 
 
 Philip had made up his mind that Protest- 
 antism should be exterminated in his king- 
 dom of the Netherlands. He could not go 
 there himself, so he looked about for a suita- 
 ble instrument for his purpose. The Duke of 
 Alva was the man chosen. He was ap- 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 119 
 
 pointed Viceroy, with full authority to carry 
 out the pious design. Heresy must cease to 
 exist in the Netherlands. The arrival of Alva, 
 clothed with such despotic powers, and the 
 atrocities committed by him, caused the 
 greatest indignation in the Netherlands. The 
 Prince of Orange, aided by the Counts 
 Egmont and Horn, organized a party to re- 
 sist him, and a revolution was commenced 
 which lasted for forty years, affording one of 
 the blackest chapters in the history of Europe. 
 The name of Alva stands at the head of the 
 list of men who have wrought desolation and 
 suffering in the name of religon. The other 
 European states protested, and EHzabeth, in 
 hot indignation, gave aid to the persecuted 
 states. 
 
 Philip had contracted a marriage, after 
 Mary's death, with the daughter of that ter- 
 rible woman Catherine de Medici, widow of 
 Henry H. of France, and there is every rea- 
 son to believe that it was this Duke of Alva 
 who planned the Massacre of St. Bartholo- 
 mew. There were sinister conferences be- 
 tween Catherine, Philip, and Alva, and little 
 doubt exists that the hideous tragedy which 
 occurred in Paris on the night of August 24, 
 
I20 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 1572, was arranged in Madrid, and had its first 
 inception in the cruel breast of Alva. 
 
 There had not been much love existing be- 
 fore between Philip and Elizabeth, who it is 
 said had refused the hand of her Spanish 
 brother-in-law. But after her interference in 
 the Netherlands, and when her ships were in- 
 tercepting and waylaying Spanish ships 
 returning with treasure from the West, and 
 when at last the one was the accepted cham- 
 pion of the Protestant, and the other of the 
 Catholic cause, they became avowed enemies. 
 Philip resolved to prepare a mighty armament 
 for the invasion of England. 
 
 In 1587 Elizabeth sent Sir Francis Drake 
 to reconnoiter and find out what Philip was 
 doing. He appeared with twenty-five ves- 
 sels before Cadiz. Having learned all he 
 wanted, and burned a fleet of merchant ves- 
 sels, he returned to his Queen. 
 
 In May, 1588, a fleet of one hundred and 
 thirty ships, some '' the largest that ever 
 plowed the deep," sailed from Lisbon for the 
 English coast. We may form some idea to- 
 day of what must have been the feeling in 
 England when this Armada, unparalleled in 
 size, appeared in the English Channel. If 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 121 
 
 Sir Francis Drake's ships were fewer and 
 smaller, he could match the Spaniards in au- 
 dacity. He sent eight fireships right in 
 among the close-lying vessels. Then, in the 
 confusion Vv^hich followed, while they were 
 obstructed and entangled with their own 
 fleet, he swiftly attacked them with such vigor 
 that ten ships were sunk or disabled, and the 
 entire fleet was demoralized. Then a storm 
 overtook the fleeing vessels, and the winds and 
 the waves completed the victory. As in the 
 Spanish report of the disaster thirty-five is the 
 number of ships acknowledged to be lost, we 
 may imagine how great was the destruction. 
 So ended Philip's invasion of England, and 
 the great Spanish '' Armada." 
 
 Philip IL died, 1598, in the Palace of the 
 Escurial which he had built, and with that 
 event ends the story of Spain's greatness. 
 The period of one hundred and twenty-five 
 years, including the reigns of Ferdinand and 
 Isabella, of Charles V., and of Philip II. , is, in 
 a way, one of unmatched splendor. Spain 
 had not like England by slow degrees ex- 
 panded into great proportions, but through 
 strange and perfectly fortuitous circum- 
 stances, she had, from a proud obscurity, sud- 
 
122 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 denly leaped into a position of commanding 
 power and magnificence. Fortune threw into 
 her lap the greatest prize she ever had to be- 
 stow, and at the same time gave her two 
 sovereigns of exceptional qualities and abili- 
 ties. The story of this double reign is the 
 romance, the fairy tale of history. Then 
 came the magnificent reign of Charles V. with 
 more gifts from fortune-^the imperial crown, 
 if not a substantial benefit to Spain, still bring- 
 ing dignity and eclat. But under this glitter- 
 ing surface there had commenced even then 
 a decline. Under Philip 11. she was still mag- 
 nificent, Europe was bowing down to her, but 
 the decline was growing more manifest; and 
 with the accession of his puny son, Philip III., 
 there was little left but a brilHant past, which 
 a proud and retrospective nation was going to 
 feed upon for over three centuries. But it 
 takes some time for such dazzling effulgence 
 to disappear. The glamour of the Spanish 
 name was going to last a long time and pic- 
 turesquely veil her decay. The memory of 
 such an ascendancy in Europe nourished the 
 intense national pride of her people. The 
 name Castilian took on a new significance. 
 Nor can we wonder at their pride in the 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 123 
 
 name '' Castilian/' Its glory was not the 
 capricious gift of fortune, but won by a devo- 
 tion, a constancy, and a fidelity of purpose 
 which are unique in the history of the world. 
 For seven hundred years the race for which 
 that name stands had kept alive the national 
 spirit, while their land was occupied by an 
 alien civilization. These were centuries of 
 privation and suffering and hardship; but 
 never wavering in their purpose, and by 
 brave deeds which have filled volumes, they 
 reclaimed their land and drove out the 
 Moors. 
 
 This is what gives to the name '' Castilian," 
 its proud significance. But when degenerate 
 Hidalgos and Grandees, debauched by wealth 
 and luxury, gloried in the name; when by 
 rapacity and cruelty they destroyed the lands 
 their valor had won; and when the Inquisition 
 became their pastime and the rack and the 
 wheel their toys — then the name Castilian be- 
 gan to take on a sinister meaning. Spain's 
 most glorious period was not when she was 
 converting the Indies and Mexico and Peru 
 into a hell, not when Charles V. was playing 
 his great game of diplomacy in Europe, but 
 in that pre-Colitmbian era when a brave and 
 
124 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 rugged people were keeping alive their na- 
 tional life in the mountains of the Asturias. 
 Well may Spain do honor to that time by call- 
 ing the heir to her throne the '' Prince of the 
 Asturias!" 
 
CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 The history of the century after the 
 death of Philip 11. is one of rapid de- 
 cline; with no longer a powerful master- 
 mind to hold the state together. Every 
 year saw the court at Madrid more splen- 
 did, and the people, — that insignificant 
 factor, — more wretched, and sinking deeper 
 and deeper into poverty. In fact, in spite 
 of the fabulous wealth which fortune had 
 poured upon her, Spain was becoming poor. 
 But nowhere in Europe was royalty invested 
 with such dignity and splendor of ceremonial, 
 and the ambitious Marie de Medici, widow of 
 Henry IV., was glad to form alliances for her 
 children with those of Philip HI. The 
 '' Prince of the Asturias," who was soon to 
 become Philip IV., married her daughter, Isa- 
 bella de Bourbon, and the Infanta, his sister, 
 was at the same time married to the young 
 Louis XIII. , King of France. 
 
 The remnant of the Moors who still 
 
 ^25 
 
126 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 lingered in the land were called Moriscos; 
 and under a very thin surface of sub- 
 mission to Christian Spain, they nursed 
 bitter memories and even hopes that some 
 miracle would some day restore them to what 
 was really the land of their fathers. A very 
 severe edict, promulgated by Philip IL, com- 
 pelling conformity in all respects with Chris- 
 tian living, and — as if that were not a part of 
 Christian living — forbidding ablutions, led to 
 a serious revolt. And this again led to the 
 forcible expulsion of every Morisco in Spain. 
 
 In 1609, by order of PhiHp III., the last of 
 the Moors were conveyed in galleys to the 
 African coast whence they had come just nine 
 hundred years before. 
 
 In a narrative so drenched with tears, it is 
 pleasant to hear of light-hearted laughter. 
 We are told that when the young King Philip 
 III. saw from his window a man striking his 
 forehead and laughing immoderately he said: 
 '' That man is either mad, or he is reading 
 ' Don Quixote ' " — which latter was the case. 
 But the story written by Cervantes did more 
 than entertain. Chivalry had lingered in the 
 congenial soil of Spain long after it had disap- 
 peared in every other part of Europe; but 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 127 
 
 when in the person of Don Quixote it was 
 made to appear so utterly ridiculous, it was 
 heard of no more. 
 
 Philip III., who died in 1621, was succeeded 
 by his son Philip IV. As in the reign of his 
 father worthless favorites ruled, while a profli- 
 gate king squandered the money of the people 
 in lavish entertainments and luxuries. Much 
 has been written about the visit of Charles, 
 Prin<:e of Wales (afterward Charles I.), accom- 
 panied by the Duke of Buckingham, at his 
 court; whither the young Prince had come 
 disguised, to see the Infanta, Philip's sister, 
 whom he thought of making his queen. 
 Probably she did not please him, or perhaps 
 the alliance with Protestant England was not 
 acceptable to the pious Catholic family of 
 Philip. At all events, Henrietta, sister of 
 Louis XIII. of France, was his final choice, 
 and shared his terrible misfortunes a few years 
 later. 
 
 A revolt of the Catalonians on the French 
 frontier led to a difficulty with France, which 
 was finally adjusted by the celebrated '' treaty 
 of the Pyrenees.'' In this treaty was inckided 
 the marriage of the young King Louis XIV. 
 and Maria Theresa, daughter of Philip IV., 
 
128 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 the King of Spain. The European Powers 
 would only consent to this union upon con- 
 dition that Louis should solemnly renounce 
 all claim to the Spanish cro\vn for himself and 
 his heirs; which promise had later a somewhat 
 eventful history. 
 
 Seven of the United Provinces had achieved 
 their independence dunng the reign of the 
 third Philip, who had also driven out of his 
 kingdom six hundred thousand Moriscos; by 
 far the most skilled and industrious portion of 
 the community. And now, at the close of the 
 reign of Philip IV., the kingdom was further 
 dimnished by the loss of Portugal; which, in 
 1664, the Lusitanians recovered, and pro- 
 claimed the Duke of Braganza King. When 
 we add to this the loss of much of the Nether- 
 lands, and of the island of Jamaica, and con- 
 cessions here and there to France and to Italy, 
 it will be obvious that a process of contraction 
 had soon followed that of Spain's phenome- 
 nal expansion! 
 
 During the reign of Charles II., who suc- 
 ceeded his father (1665), Spain was still fur- 
 ther diminished by the cession to Louis XIV., 
 in 1678, of more provinces in the Low Coun- 
 tries, which included the region now known 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 129 
 
 as Alsace and Lorraine; which, it will be re- 
 membered, have in our own time passed from 
 the keeping of France to that of victorious 
 Germany. 
 
 There is one more incident in this reign 
 which deserves at this time a passing notice. 
 It was between the years 1670 and 1686 that 
 the Spaniard and the Anglo-Saxon had their 
 first collision in America. St. Augustine had 
 been founded in 1565, and the old Spanish 
 colony was much disturbed in 1663, when 
 Charles II. of England planted an English 
 colony in their near neighborhood (the Caro- 
 linas). During a war between Spain and 
 England at the time above mentioned, feeling 
 ran high between Florida and the Carolinas, 
 and houses were burned and blood was shed. 
 Spain had felt no concern about the little Eng- 
 lish colony planted on the bleak New England 
 coast in 1620. Death by exposure and star- 
 vation promised speedily to remove that. But 
 the settlement on the Carolinas was more seri- 
 ous, and at the same time the French were 
 planting a colony of their own at the mouth 
 of the Mississippi. The '' lords of America " 
 began to feel anxious about their control of 
 the Gulf of Mexico. The cloud was a very 
 
130 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 small one, but it was not to be the last which 
 would dim their skies in the West. 
 
 The one thing which gives historic impor- 
 tance to the reign of Carlos II. is that it marks 
 the close — the ignominious close — of the great 
 Hapsburg dynasty in Spain. And if the death 
 of Carlos, in 1700, was a melancholy event, it 
 is because with it the scepter so magnificently 
 wielded by Ferdinand and Isabella passed to 
 the keeping of the House of Bourbon, whose 
 Spanish descendants have ruled Spain ever 
 since. 
 
CHAPTER XX. 
 
 The last century had wrought great changes 
 in European conditions. '' The Holy Roman 
 Empire/' after a thirty-years' war with 
 Protestantism, was shattered, and the Em- 
 peror of Germany was no longer the head of 
 Europe. Protestant England had sternly 
 executed Charles I., and then in the person of 
 James H. had swept the last of the Catholic 
 House of Stuart out of her kingdom. France, 
 on the foundation laid by Richelieu, had de- 
 veloped into a powerful despotism:, which her 
 King, Louis XIV., was making magnificent 
 at home and feared abroad. 
 
 For Spain it had been a century of steady 
 decline, with loss of territory, power, and pres- 
 tige. No longer great in herself, she was 
 regarded by her ambitious neighbor, Louis 
 XIV., as only a make-weight in the supremacy 
 in Europe upon which he was determined. 
 He had been ravaging the enfeebled German 
 Empire, and now a friendly fate opened a 
 
132 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 peaceful door through which he might make 
 Spain contribute to his greatness. 
 
 Carlos 11. died (1700) without an heir. 
 There was a vacant throne in Spain to which 
 — on account of Louis' marriage, years before, 
 with the Spanish Princess Maria Theresa — 
 his grandson Philip had now the most 
 valid claim. The other claimant, Archduke 
 Karl, son of Leopold, Emperor of Germany, 
 in addition to having a less direct hereditary 
 descent, was unacceptable to the Spanish peo- 
 ple, w^ho had no desire to be ruled again 
 by an occupant of the Imperial throne of 
 Germany. 
 
 So, as Louis wished it, and the Spanish peo- 
 ple also wished it, there w^as only one obstacle 
 to his design; that was a promise made at the 
 time of his marriage that he would never claim 
 that throne for himself or his heirs. But 
 when the Pope, after '' prayerful deliberation," 
 absolved him from that promise the way was 
 clear. This grandson, just seventeen years 
 old, w^as proclaimed Philip V., King of Spain, 
 and Louis in the fullness of his heart ex- 
 claimed, '' The Pyrenees have ceased to 
 exist!" 
 
 Perhaps it would have been better for the 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 133 
 
 King if he had not made that dramatic 
 exclamation. A man who could remove 
 mountains to make a path for his ambitions 
 might also drain seas! England took warn- 
 ing. She had been quietly bearing his insults 
 for a long time, and not till he had imperti- 
 nently threatened to place upon her throne 
 the Pretender, an illegitimate son of James 11. , 
 had she joined the coalition against the 
 French King. But now she sent more 
 armies, and a great captain to re-enforce 
 Prince Eugene, who was fighting this battle 
 for the Archduke Karl and for Europe. 
 
 But Louis had reached the summit. He 
 was to go no higher than he had climbed when 
 he uttered that vain boast. Philip V. was 
 acknowledged King in 1702, and in 1704 
 Blenheim had been fought and won by Marl- 
 borough, and the decline of the Grand 
 Monarqtie had commenced. 
 
 The war against him by a combined Europe 
 now became the war of the ''Spanish Suc- 
 cession.'^ England and Holland united with 
 Emperor Leopold to curb his limitless am- 
 bition. The purpose of the war of the '' Span- 
 ish Succession " was, ostensibly, to place the 
 Austrian Archduke upon the throne of Spain ; 
 
134 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 its real purpose was to check the alarming 
 ascendancy of Louis XIV. in Europe. 
 
 It lasted for years, the poor young King 
 and Queen being driven from one city to an- 
 other, while the Austrian Archduke was at 
 Madrid striving to reign over a people wljo 
 would not recognize him. 
 
 Spain was being made the sport of three 
 nations in pursuance of their own ambitious 
 ends. Her land was being ravaged by foreign 
 armies, recruited from three of her own dis- 
 affected provinces; while a young King with 
 whom she was well satisfied was peremptorily 
 ordered to make way for one Austria, Eng- 
 land, and Holland preferred. It was a 
 humiliating proof of the decline in national 
 spirit, and the old Castilian pride must have 
 sorely degenerated for such things to be pos- 
 sible. 
 
 Finally, after Louis XIV. had once more 
 given solemn oath that the crowns of France 
 and Spain should never be united, the '' Peace 
 of Utrecht '' was signed (171 3). But the pro- 
 visions of the treaty were momentous for 
 Spain. She was at one stroke of the pen 
 stripped of half her possessions in Europe. 
 Philip V. w^as acknowledged King of Spain 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 135 
 
 and the Indies. But Sicily, with its regal 
 title, was ceded to the Duke of Savoy; Milan, 
 Naples, Sardinia, and the Netherlands went 
 to Karl, now Emperor Charles VI. of Ger- 
 many; while Minorca and Gibraltar passed to 
 the keeping of England. 
 
 No one felt unmixed satisfaction, except 
 perhaps England. The Archduke had failed 
 to get his throne, and to wear the double 
 crown like Charles V. Louis had carried his 
 point. He had succeeded in keeping the 
 kingdom for his grandson. But that king- 
 dom was dismembered, and had shrunk to in- 
 significant proportions in Europe, while Eng- 
 land, most fortunate of all, had carried off the 
 key to the Mediterranean. That little rocky 
 promontory of Gibraltar was potentially of 
 more value than all the rest! 
 
 Such was the beginning of the dynasty of 
 the Bourbon in Spain. Philip was succeeded, 
 upon his death in 1746, by his son Ferdinand 
 VI., who also died, in 1759, ^^^ was succeeded 
 by his brother, Philip's second son, who was 
 known as Carlos III. When we try to praise 
 these princes of the wretched Bourbon line, it 
 is by mention of the evil they have refrained 
 from doing rather than the good they have 
 
136 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 done. So Carlos III. is said to have done 
 less harm to Spain than his predecessors. He 
 established libraries and academies of science 
 and of arts, and ruled like a kind-hearted gen- 
 tleman, without the vices of his recent prede- 
 cessors. His severity toward the Jesuits and 
 their forcible expulsion from Spain, in 1767, 
 are said to have been caused by personal re- 
 sentment on account of some slanderous 
 rumors regarding his birth, which were traced 
 to them. 
 
CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 But the fate of Spain was not now in the 
 hands of her Kings. Be they good or evil 
 she was destined henceforth to drift in the 
 currents of circumstance, that sternest of 
 masters, to whom her Kings as well as her 
 people would be obliged helplessly to bow. 
 All that she now possessed outside the bor- 
 ders of her own kingdom was the West In- 
 dies, her colonies in America, North and 
 South, and the Philippines, that archipelago 
 of a thousand isles in the southern Pacific, 
 where Magellan was slain by the savage in- 
 habitants after he had discovered it (1520). 
 
 Mexico and Peru had proved to be inex- 
 haustible sources of wealth, and when the gold 
 and silver diminished, the Viceroys in these and 
 the other colonies could compel the people to 
 wring rich products out of the soil, enough to 
 supply Spain's necessities. The inhabitants 
 of these colonies, who were Spanish with a 
 slight admixture of the aboriginal races, had 
 
 137 
 
138 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 been treated as slaves and drudges for so many 
 centuries that they never dreamed of resist- 
 ance, nor questioned the justice of a fate which 
 condemned them always to toil for Spain. 
 
 In the North the feeble colony planted in 
 1620 had expanded into thirteen vigorous 
 English colonies. France, too, had been 
 colonizing in America, and had drawn her 
 frontier line from the mouth of the Mississippi 
 to Canada. In 1755 a colHsion occurred be- 
 tween England and France over their Ameri- 
 can boundaries. By the year 1759, France 
 had lost Quebec and every one of her strong- 
 holds, and she formed an alliance with Spain 
 in a last effort to save her vanishing posses- 
 sions in America. 
 
 Spain's punishment for this interference 
 was swift. England dispatched ships, and 
 promptly captured several West India islands, 
 and the city of Havana, on this side of the 
 globe; and Manila on the other. When we 
 read of the Anglo-Saxon capturing Manila, 
 and bombarding and capturing the city of 
 Havana in the midsummer of 1762, we realize 
 that history does sometimes repeat itself! 
 And an interesting side-light is thrown upon 
 ^'jingoism." We learn that when this war 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 139 
 
 upon Spanish territory was contemplated, the 
 boys in London were singing: 
 
 ** We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do, 
 We've got the ships, we've got the men, and weVe got the 
 money, too ! " 
 
 In the treaty which followed these victories, 
 upon condition of England's returning Ha- 
 vana, and all the conquered territory except- 
 ing a portion of the West India Islands, Spain 
 ceded to her the peninsula of Florida; while 
 France, who was obliged to give to England 
 all her territory east of the Mississippi, gave 
 to Spain in return for her services the city of 
 New^ Orleans, and all her territory west of the 
 great river. This territory was retroceded 
 to France by Spain in the year 1800, by the 
 '' Treaty of Madrid,'' and in 1803 was pur- 
 chased by America from Napoleon, under the 
 title of '' Louisiana." 
 
 There was a growing irritation in the Span- 
 ish heart against England. She was crowding 
 Spain out of North America, had insinuated 
 herself into the West India Islands, and she 
 was mistress of Gibraltar. So it was with no 
 little satisfaction that they saw her involved in 
 a serious quarrel with her American colonies, 
 
I40 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 at a time when a stubborn and incompetent 
 Hanoverian King was doing his best to de- 
 stroy her. The hour seemed auspicious for 
 recovering Gibraltar, and also to drive Eng- 
 land out of the West Indies. The alliance 
 with France had become a permanent one, 
 and was known as a family compact between 
 the Bourbon cousins Louis XV. and Carlos 
 III. France had at this time rather distract- 
 ing conditions at home; but she was thirsting 
 for revenge at the loss of her rich American 
 possessions, and besides, a sentimental inter- 
 est in the brave people who had proclaimed 
 their independence from the mother coun- 
 try, and were fighting to maintain it, began to 
 manifest itself. It was fanned, no doubt, by 
 a desire for England's humiliation; but it 
 assumed a form too chivalric and too generous 
 for Americans ever to discredit by unfriendly 
 analysis of motive. Spain cared little for the 
 cause of the colonies; but she was quite will- 
 ing to help them by worrying and diverting 
 the energies of England. So she invested 
 Gibraltar. A garrison of only a handful of 
 men astonished Europe by the bravery of its 
 defense. Gibraltar was not taken by the 
 Bourbon allies, neither were the English 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 141 
 
 driven out of the West Indies. But it was a 
 satisfaction to Spain to see her humbled by 
 her victorious colonies! 
 
 So Carlos III. had indirectly assisted in the 
 establishment of a republic on the confines of 
 his Mexican Empire; apparently unconscious 
 of the contagion in the word independence. 
 But he quickly learned this to his sorrow. 
 The story of the revolted and freed colonies 
 sped on the wings of the wind. And in Peru 
 . a brave descendant of the Incas arose as a De- 
 liverer. He led sixty thousand men into a 
 vain fight for liberty. Of course the effort 
 failed, but a spirit had been awakened which 
 might be smothered, but never extinguished. 
 
 Carlos III. died in 1788 and was succeeded 
 by his son Carlos IV. 
 
 During the miserable reign of this miser- 
 able King, France caught the infection from 
 the free institutions in America. The Repub- 
 lic she had helped to create was fatal to mon- 
 archy in her own land. A revolution ac- 
 companied by unparalleled horrors swept 
 away the whole tyrannous system of centuries 
 and left the country a trembling wreck — but 
 free. The dream of a republic was brief. 
 Napoleon gathered the imperfectly organized 
 
142 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 government into his own hands, then by suc- 
 cessive and rapid steps arose to Imperial 
 power. France was an Empire, and adoringly 
 submitted to the man who swiftly made her 
 great and feared in Europe. She had another 
 Charlemagne, who was bringing to his feet 
 Kings and Princes, and annexing half of 
 Europe to his empire! 
 
 It was an easy matter for this man to sweep 
 away the poor, helpless Spanish Bourbon 
 King, Carlos IV., and place on the throne of 
 Spain his brother Joseph. So swiftly was it 
 done, that Spain made no resistance, and she 
 found herself fighting side by side with 
 Napoleon in his battles for universal domin- 
 ion. Perhaps she thought this invincible man 
 might help her to get back Gibraltar and to 
 drive the English out of the West Indies. 
 
 Napoleon hated England no less heartily 
 than Spain, and in 1804, the French and Span- 
 ish fleets started out in pursuit of the Eng- 
 lish fleet under Nelson. For two years the 
 two squadrons sailed back and forth from the 
 Spanish coast to the West Indies, but failed to 
 find each other. But at last, at Trafalgar, the 
 long-expected meeting came. Nelson, on his 
 flagship Victory, led twenty-seven ships of the 
 
A SHORl^ HISTORY OF SPAIN. 143 
 
 line and four frigates. The allied fleet had 
 thirty-four ships and seven frigates. The 
 victory of the English was complete, but it 
 cost them their great Admiral. Nelson 
 was struck by a ball and died on the deck of 
 his ship. 
 
 Gibraltar was not taken, the English were 
 not defeated, and the Spanish people began to 
 realize the humiliation they were under in the 
 usurpation of the Spanish crown by Joseph 
 Bonaparte, only recently an obscure French- 
 man; a man destitute of ability, and only the 
 obedient servant of the French Emperor. 
 
 But they had embarked in this Napoleonic 
 campaign, and they must go on. And so, 
 when Arthur Wellesley (Lord Wellington) 
 came with a great army, battle after battle was 
 fought, success leaning more and more to the 
 English side, until a final rout of the allied 
 armies proved the death knell of the reign 
 of Joseph, who, it is said, ignominiously fled 
 from the kingdom with one gold-piece in his 
 pocket. 
 
CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 The decade between 1804 and 1814 was 
 very barren in external benefits to Spain, 
 with her King held in '' honorable cap- 
 tivity " in France, and the obscure Joseph 
 abjectly striving to please not his subjects, but 
 his august brother Napoleon. But in the brief 
 period after Joseph's flight, when there was no 
 King, no despotic government to stifle popu- 
 lar sentiment, the unsuspected fact developed 
 that Spain had caught the infection of free- 
 dom! 
 
 In the absence of a King, the government 
 devolved upon the Cortes. In 181 2, this body 
 drew up a new Constitution for Spain. So 
 completely did this remodel the whole ad- 
 ministration that the most despotic monarchy 
 in Europe was transformed into the one most 
 severely limited. 
 
 Great was the surprise of Ferdinand VI. 
 when, in 1814, he came to the throne of his 
 ejected father Carlos III., to find himself 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. HS 
 
 called upon to reign under a Constitution 
 which made Spain almost as free as a republic. 
 He promulgated a decree declaring the Cortes 
 illegal and rescinding all its acts, the Consti- 
 tution of 1812 included. Then when he had 
 re-established the Inquisition, which had 
 been abolished by the Cortes, when he had 
 publicly burned the impertinent Constitution, 
 and quenched conspiracies here and there, he 
 settled himself for a comfortable reign, after 
 the good old arbitrary fashion. 
 
 The Napoleonic empire having been efifaced 
 by a combined Europe, Ferdinand's Bourbon 
 cousins were in the same way restoring the 
 excellent methods of their fathers in France. 
 
 But there was a spirit in the air which was 
 not favorable to the peace of Kings. On the 
 American coast there stood '' Liberty Enlight- 
 ening the World!'' A growing, prosperous 
 republic was a shining example of what might 
 be done by a brave resistance to oppression 
 and a determined spirit of independence. 
 
 The pestilential leaven of freedom had been 
 at work while monarchies slept in security. 
 Ferdinand discovered that not only was there 
 a seditious sentiment in his own kingdom, but 
 every one of his American colonies was in 
 
14^ A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 Open rebellion, and some were even daring to 
 set up free governments in imitation of the 
 United States. 
 
 Not only was Ferdinand's sovereignty 
 threatened, but the very principle of monarchy 
 itself was endangered. 
 
 Russia, Austria, and Prussia formed them- 
 selves into a league for the preservation of 
 what they were pleased to call '' The Divine 
 Right of Kings." It was the attack upon this 
 sacred principle, which was the germ of all 
 this mischievous talk about freedom. They 
 called their league '' The Holy Alliance," and 
 what they proposed to do was to stamp out 
 free institutions in the germ. 
 
 In pursuance of this purpose, in 1819 there 
 appeared at Cadiz a large fleet, assembled for 
 the subjugation of Spanish America. 
 
 But there was an Anglo-Saxon America, 
 which had a preponderating influence in that 
 land now; and there was also an Anglo-Saxon 
 race in Europe which had its own views 
 about the '' Divine Right of Kings," and also 
 concerning the mission of the '' Holy Alli- 
 ance." 
 
 The right of three European Powers to re- 
 store to Spain her revolted colonies in America 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIM, 147 
 
 was denied by President Monroe; not upon 
 the ground of Spain's inhumanity, and the in- 
 herent right of the colonies to an independ- 
 ence which they might achieve. Such was 
 the nature of England's protest, through her 
 Minister Canning. But President Monroe's 
 contention rested on a much broader ground. 
 In a message delivered in 1823 he uttered 
 these words: '' European Powers must not ex- 
 tend their political systems to any portion of 
 the American continent." The meaning of 
 this was that America has been won for free- 
 dom; and no European Power will be per- 
 mitted to establish a monarchy, nor to coerce 
 in any way, nor to suppress inclinations to- 
 ward freedom, in any part of the Western 
 Hemisphere. This is the '' Monroe Doc- 
 trine"; a doctrine which, although so start- 
 ling in 1832, had in 1896 become so firmly im- 
 bedded in the minds of the people, that 
 Congress decided it to be a vital principle of 
 American policy. 
 
 But there was another and more serious 
 obstacle in the way of the proposed plan for 
 subjugating the Spanish-American colonies. 
 The army assembled by the Holy Alliance at 
 Cadiz was an offense to the people who had 
 
148 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 seen their Constitution burned and their hopes 
 of a freer gfovernment destroyed. Officers 
 and troops refused to embark, and joined a 
 concourse of disaffected people at Cadiz. A 
 smothered popular sentiment burst forth into 
 a series of insurrections throughout Spain, 
 and the astonished Ferdinand was compelled, 
 in 1820, to acknowledge the Constitution of 
 1812. This was not upholding the principle 
 of the '' Divine Right of Kings "! So, under 
 the direction of the Holy Alliance, a French 
 army of one hundred thousand men moved 
 into Spain, took possession of her capital, and 
 for two years administered her affairs under a 
 regency, and then reinstated Ferdinand, leav- 
 ing a French army of occupation. 
 
 In this contest two distinct political parties 
 had developed — the Liberal party and the 
 party of Absolutism. As Ferdinand VI. be- 
 came the choice of the Liberals, and his 
 brother Don Carlos of the party of Absolut- 
 ism, we must infer either that it was a Liberal- 
 ism of a very mild type, or that Ferdinand's 
 views had been modified since the " Holy 
 Alliance '' took his kingdom into its own 
 keeping. But his brother Carlos was the 
 adored of the Absolutists, and a plot was made 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 149 
 
 to compel Ferdinand to abdicate in his favor. 
 This was the first of the Carlist plots, which, 
 with little intermission, and always in the in- 
 terest of despotism and bigotry, have 
 menaced the safety and well-being of Spain 
 ever since. From the year 1825 to 1898 there 
 has been always a Don Carlos to trouble the 
 political waters in that land. 
 
 So the mission of the '' Holy Alliance '' had 
 failed. Instead of rehabilitating the sacred 
 principle of the '' Divine Right of Kings," 
 they saw a powerful liberal party established 
 in a kingdom which was the very stronghold 
 of despotism. And instead of stamping out 
 free institutions, six Spanish-American colo- 
 nies had been recognized as free and inde- 
 pendent states (1826). Spain had for three 
 centuries ruled the richest and the fairest land 
 on the earth. She had shown herself utterly 
 undeserving of the opportunity, and unfit for 
 the responsibilities imposed by a great colonial 
 empire. She had sown the wind and now she 
 reaped the whirlwind. She did not own a 
 foot of territory on the continent she had dis- 
 covered ! 
 
CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 In 1833 King Ferdinand VI. died, leaving 
 one child, the Princess Isabella, who was 
 three years old. Here was the opportunity 
 for the adherents of Don Carlos. 
 
 The '' Salic law " had been one of the 
 Gothic traditions of ancient Spain, and had 
 with few exceptions been in force until 1789; 
 when Charles IV. issued a '' Pragmatic Sanc- 
 tion," establishing the succession through the 
 female as well as the male line; and on April 
 6, 1830, King Ferdinand confirmed this de- 
 cree; so, when Isabella was born, October 10, 
 1830, she was heiress to the throne, unless her 
 ambitious uncle, Don Carlos, could set aside 
 the decree abrogating the old Salic law, and 
 reign as Carlos IV. 
 
 In the three years before his brother's death 
 he had laid his plans for the coming crisis. 
 Isabella was proclaimed Queen under the 
 regency of her depraved mother Christina. 
 The extreme of the Catholic party, and of the 
 reactionary or absolutist party, flocked about 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN-. 151 
 
 the Carlist standard; while the party of the in- 
 fant Queen was the rallying point for the lib- 
 eral and progressive sentiment in the king- 
 dom; and her cause had the support of the 
 new reform government of Louis Philippe in 
 France, and of lovers of freedom elsewhere. 
 
 The party of the Queen triumphed. But 
 the Carlists survived; and, like the Bourbons 
 in France, have ever since in times of political 
 peril been a serious element to be reckoned 
 wdth. 
 
 During the infancy of the Queen, Spain was 
 the prey of unceasing party dissensions; Don 
 Carlos again and again trying to overthrow 
 her government, and again and again being 
 driven a fugitive over the Pyrenees; while 
 the Queen Regent, who was secretly married 
 to her Chamberlain, the son of a tobacconist 
 in Madrid, was bringing disgrace and odium 
 upon the Liberal party which she was sup- 
 posed to lead. 
 
 In 1843 the Cortes declared that the Queen 
 had attained her majority. Her disgraced 
 mother was driven out of the country and Isa- 
 bella II. ascended her throne. Isabella had a 
 younger sister, Maria Louisa, and in 1846 the 
 double marriage of these two children was 
 
152 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 celebrated with great splendor at Madrid. 
 The Queen was married to her cousin Don 
 Francisco d'Assisi, and her sister to the Duke 
 de Montpensier, fifth son of Louis Philippe. 
 
 If, upon the birth of Liberalism in Spain, 
 that kingdom could have been governed by a 
 wise and competent sovereign, the conclud- 
 ing chapters of this narrative might have been 
 very different. No time could have been less 
 favorable for a radical change in policy than 
 the period during which Isabella II. was 
 Queen of Spain. Personally she was all that 
 a woman and a Queen should not be. With 
 apparently not an exalted desire or ambition 
 for her country, this depraved daughter of a 
 depraved mother pursued her downward 
 course until 1868, when the nation would bear 
 no more. A revolution broke out. Isabella, 
 with her three children, fled to France and 
 there was once more a vacant throne in Spain. 
 
 The hopes of the Carlists ran high. But 
 the Cortes came to an unexpected decision. 
 They would have no Spanish Bourbon, be he 
 Carlist or Liberal. The reigning dynasty in 
 Italy was at this moment the adored of the 
 Liberals in Europe. So they offered the 
 Crown to Amadeo, second son of Humbert, 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 153 
 
 King of Italy (1870). Three years were quite 
 sufficient for this experiment. The young 
 Amadeo was as glad to take ofif his crown and 
 to leave his kingdom, as the people were to 
 have him do so. He abdicated in 1873. 
 
 The Liberal party had been regretting their 
 loss of opportunity in 1870. France had 
 passed through many political phases in the 
 last few years, and the present French Repub- 
 lic had just come into existence. Again 
 Spain caught the contagion from her neigh- 
 bor, and Spanish Liberalism became Republic- 
 anism. 
 
 When Castelar, that patriotic and saga- 
 cious statesman, friend of Garibaldi, of Maz- 
 zini, and of Kossuth, led this movement, many 
 hopefully believed the political millennium 
 was at hand, when Spain was about to join the 
 brotherhool of Republics! But something 
 more than a great leader is needed to create a 
 Republic. The magic of Castelar's eloquence, 
 the purity of his character, and the force of 
 his convictions were powerless to hold in 
 stable union the conflicting elements with 
 which he had to deal. The Carlists were 
 scheming, and the Cortes was driven to an 
 immediate decision. 
 
154 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 The fugitive Queen Isabella had with her in 
 exile a young son Alfonso, seventeen years of 
 age. Alfonso was invited to return upon the 
 sole condition that his mother should be ex- 
 cluded from his kingdom. An insurrection 
 which was being fomented by Don Carlos 11. 
 led to this action of the Cortes, which was per- 
 haps the wisest possible under the circum- 
 stances. The young Prince of the legitimate 
 Bourbon line was proclaimed King Alfonso 
 XII. in 1874. 
 
 A romantic marriage with his cousin Mer- 
 cedes, daughter of the Duke de Montpensier, 
 to whom he was deeply attached, speedily 
 took place. Only five months later Mercedes 
 died and was laid in the gloomy Escurial. A 
 marriage was then arranged with Christina, 
 an Austrian Archduchess, who was brought to 
 Madrid, and there was another marriage cele- 
 brated with much splendor. The infant 
 daughter, who was born a few years later, was 
 named Mercedes; a loving tribute to the 
 adored young Queen he had lost, which did 
 credit as much to Christina as to Alfonso. 
 
 The hard school of exile had, no doubt, 
 been an advantage to Alfonso ; and at the out- 
 set of his reign he won the confidence of the 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 155 
 
 Liberals by saying '' he wished them to un- 
 derstand he was the first RepubHcan in 
 Europe ; and when they were tired of him they 
 had only to tell him so, and he would leave as 
 quickly as Amadeo had done." There was 
 not time to test the sincerity of these assur- 
 ances. Alfonso XII. died in 1885, and joined 
 Mercedes and his long line of predecessors in 
 the Escurial. Five months later his son was 
 born, and the throne which had been filled by 
 the little Mercedes passed to the boy who was 
 proclaimed Alfonso XIII. of Spain, under the 
 Regency of his mother Queen Christina. 
 
 
CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 At the beginning of the nineteenth century 
 the foreign dominions of Spain, ahhough re- 
 duced, were still a vast and imperial posses- 
 sion. The colonial territory over which Al- 
 fonso XIII. was to have sovereignty at the 
 close of that century, consisted of the Philip- 
 pines, the richest of the East Indies; Cuba, the 
 richest of the West Indies; Porto Rico, and a 
 few outlying groups of islands of no great 
 value. 
 
 Nowhere had the Constitution of 1812 
 awakened more hope than in Cuba; and from 
 the setting aside of that instrument by 
 Ferdinand VI. dates the existence of an in- 
 surgent party in that beautiful but most 
 unhappy island. Ages of spoHation and 
 cruelty and wrong had done their work. The 
 iron of oppression had entered into the soul 
 of the Cuban. There was a deep exaspera- 
 tion which refused to be calmed. From 
 thenceforth annexation to the United States, 
 or else a '' Cuba Libre,'' was the determined, 
 and even desperate aim. 
 
 156 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 157 
 
 After a ten-years' war, 1868-78, the people 
 yielded to what proved a delusive promise of 
 home-rule. How could Spain bestow upon 
 her colony what she did not possess herself? 
 When in 1881 she tried to pacify Cuba by per- 
 mitting that island to send six Senators to sit 
 in the Spanish Cortes, it was a phantom of a 
 phantom. There was no outlet for the na- 
 tional will in Spain itself. Her Cortes was 
 not a national assembly, and its members were 
 not the choice of the people. How much less 
 must they be so then in Cuba, where they 
 were only men of straw selected by the home 
 government, for the purpose of defeating — 
 not expressing — the popular will? The emp- 
 tiness of this gift was soon discovered. Then 
 came a shorter conflict, which was only a pre- 
 lude to the last. 
 
 A handful of ragged revolutionists, igno- 
 rant of the arts of war, commenced the final 
 struggle for liberty on February 24, 1895, 
 under the leadership of Jose Marti. At the 
 end of two years a poorly armed band of guer- 
 rilla soldiers had waged a successful contest 
 against 235,000 well-equipped troops, sup- 
 ported by a militia and a navy, and maintained 
 by supplies from Spain; had adopted a Con- 
 
15^ A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. 
 
 stitution, and were asking for recognition as 
 a free Republic. The Spanish commander 
 Martinez Campos was superseded by General 
 Weyler (1895), ^^^ a new and severer method 
 was inaugurated in dealing with the stubborn 
 revolutionists, but with no better success than 
 before. In August, 1897, an insurrection 
 broke out in the Philippines, and Spain was in 
 despair. 
 
 America calmly resisted all appeals for an- 
 nexation or for intervention in Cuba. Sym- 
 pathy for Cuban patriots was strong in the 
 hearts of the people, but the American Gov- 
 ernment steadfastly maintained an attitude of 
 strict neutrality and impartiality, and with un- 
 exampled patience saw a commerce amount- 
 ing annually to one hundred millions of dollars 
 wiped out of existence, her citizens reduced to 
 want by the destruction of their property, — 
 some of them lying in Spanish dungeons 
 subjected to barbarities which were worthy of 
 the Turkish Janizaries; our fleets used as a 
 coastguard and a police, in the protection of 
 Spanish interests, and more intolerable than 
 all else, our hearts wrung by cries of anguish 
 at our very doors ! 
 
 But when General Weyler inaugurated a 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 159 
 
 system for the deliberate starvation of thirty 
 thousand '' Reconcentrados/' an innocent 
 peasantry driven from their homes and herded 
 in cities, there to perish, the Hmit of patience 
 was reached. It was this touch of human 
 pity — this last and intolerable strain upon our 
 sympathies — which turned the scale. 
 
 While a profound feeling of indignation was 
 prevailing on account of these revolting 
 crimes against humanity, the battleship Maine 
 was, by request of Consul General Lee at that 
 place, dispatched to the harbor of Havana to 
 guard American citizens and interests. The 
 sullen reception of the Maine was followed on 
 February 15,. 1898, by a tragedy which 
 shocked the world. Whether the destruc- 
 tion of that ship and the death of 266 brave 
 men was from internal or external causes was 
 a very critical question. It was submitted to 
 a court of inquiry which, after long delibera- 
 tion, rendered the decision that the cause was 
 — externaL 
 
 It looked dark for lovers of peace! Presi- 
 dent McKinley exhausted all the resources of 
 diplomacy before he abandoned hope of a 
 peaceful adjustment which would at the same 
 time compel justice to the Cuban people. 
 
l6o A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 But on April 25, 1898, it was declared that 
 war existed between Spain and America. 
 
 On May i Commodore Dewey achieved a 
 victory over the Spanish fleet at Manila un- 
 matched in the history of naval warfare. 
 With Admiral Dewey virtual master of the 
 PhiHppines, and Admiral Sampson investing 
 the island of Cuba, there seems little doubt 
 that the colonial empire of Spain is at an end, 
 and centuries of cruelty are avenged. 
 
 The ancient kingdom over which Alfonso 
 XIII. expects to rule is tending to its fall. It 
 requires small prophetic vision to see that 
 Turkey in the eas^t of Europe, and Spain in 
 the west must soon give way to the advancing 
 tide of modern civilization. A people whose 
 national festival is a bull-fight, is as much of 
 an anachronism in this closing century as is 
 one whose most revered institution is a 
 harem. 
 
 Cruelty is not in favor with the world to- 
 day; and whether in Bulgaria, or Armenia, or 
 in Havana, it will not be borne. A nation which 
 converts the fairest island on earth into a 
 human shambles has put herself beyond the 
 pale of the family of other Christian nations. 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN. i6i 
 
 Spain is mediaeval in her methods and ideals. 
 In the time of her opulence and splendor these 
 methods and ideals were hers. So she be- 
 lieves in them and clings to them still. She 
 is the victim of a vicious political system, to 
 which an intensely proud, patriotic, and brave 
 people believe they must be loyal. 
 
 In no other land— as we have seen — is the 
 national spirit so strong. Certainly nowhere 
 else has it ever been subjected to such strain 
 and survived. And this intense loyalty, this 
 overwhelming pride of race, this magnificent 
 valor, are all summoned to uphold a poor, 
 perishing, vicious political system, which has 
 not one heart-beat in harmony with the world 
 in which it lingers. 
 
 We believe there are warm and generous 
 hearts, and men good and true in Spain to- 
 day. Nowhere has liberal sentiment found a 
 leader more exalted than is Castelar. So how 
 paralyzing must be the existing political con- 
 ditions, when a man such as he finds his 
 path of duty in upholding such a government 
 and such enormities ! 
 
 For the redemption of Turkey there is no 
 hope. That is a mass of corruption which 
 vultures and natural processes will ere long 
 
i62 A SHORT HISTORY OF SPAIN, 
 
 remove. But for Spain — beautiful but erring 
 Spain — there may still be a future. 
 
 *'What doth the Lord require of thee 
 but to do justly, — to love mercy, — and to 
 v^alk humbly before thy god/' 
 
 THE END, 
 
LIST OF VISIGOTH KINGS. 
 
 Ataulfus, 
 
 Wallia, 
 
 Theodored, .... 
 
 Thorismund, 
 
 Theodoric I. (Defeated Attila), 
 
 Evaric (Completed Gothic Conquest 
 
 Alaric, 
 
 Gesaleic, 
 
 Theodoric II 
 
 Amalaric, 
 
 Theudis, 
 
 Theudisel, 
 
 Agilan, 
 
 Athanagild 
 
 Liuva I., 
 
 Leovigild, 
 
 Recared I., 
 
 Liuva II., 
 
 Witteric, 
 
 Gundemar, 
 
 Sisebert, 
 
 Recared II. (3 months) 
 
 Swintila, 
 
 Sisenand, 
 
 Chintila, 
 
 Tulga, 
 
 163 
 
 in Spain) 
 
 A. D. 
 
 411-415 
 415-420 
 420-451 
 451-452 
 452-466 
 466-483 
 483-506 
 506-511 
 511-522 
 522-531 
 531-548 
 548-549 
 549-554 
 554-567 
 567-570 
 570-587 
 587-601 
 601-603 
 603-610 
 610-612 
 612-621 
 
 621-631 
 631-636 
 636-640 
 640-642 
 
1 64 LIST OF VISIGOTH KINGS. 
 
 A. D. 
 
 Chindaswind, 642-649 
 
 Receswind, , 649-672 
 
 Wamba, . 672-680 
 
 Ervigius, 680-687 
 
 Egica (son of Wamba), 687-701 
 
 Witiza, 701-709 
 
 Roderick 709-711 
 
 Theodomir I Kings without a kingdom 1 ' 7*1-743 
 
 Athanagild II., ) ( . 743-755 
 
KINGS OF THE ASTURIAS AND 
 LEON. 
 
 A. D. 
 
 Pelayo (of Royal Gothic birth), .... 718 
 
 Favila (son of above), 737 
 
 Alfonso I. (son-in-law of Pelayo), .... 739 
 Fruela L (son of Alfonso), . . . . .757 
 
 Aurelio, 768 
 
 Mauregato, 774 
 
 Bermudo I., 788 
 
 Alfonso II., . . . . . . . . 791 
 
 Ramiro I., 842 
 
 Ordono I., 850 
 
 Alfonso III., 866 
 
 Garcia, 910 
 
 Ordono II., 914 
 
 Fruela II., 923 
 
 Alfonso IV., 925 
 
 Ramiro II., 930 
 
 Ordono III., 950 
 
 Sancho I., 955 
 
 Ramiro III., . 967 
 
 Bermudo II., 982 
 
 Alfonso v., 999 
 
 Bermudo III., 1027 
 
 Fernando I. (also King of Castile), . . . 1037 
 
 Alfonso VI., 1065 
 
 Urraca 1109 
 
 Alfonso VII. (also King of Castile), . . . 1126 
 
 165 
 
l66 KINGS OF THE ASTURIAS AND LEON. 
 
 A. D. 
 
 Fernando II., 1157 
 
 Alfonso IX. (Aided Conquest of Moors), . . ii88 
 
 Fernando III., . 1230 
 
 LEON AND CASTILE UNITED. 
 
 Alfonso X, {el sabio), ...... 1252 
 
 Sancho IV., 1284 
 
 Fernando IV,, 1295 
 
 Alfonso XI., 1312 
 
 Pedro I. {el cruel)^ 1350 
 
 Enrique II., 1369 
 
 Juan I., 1379 
 
 Enrique IV., 1454 
 
 Isabel I. (married to Fernando 11. of Aragon), . 1474 
 
 CASTILE AND ARAGON UNITED. 
 
 Carlos I. (Charles I 
 
 many, 1519), 
 Philip II., 
 Philip III., 
 Philip IV., 
 Carlos II., 
 
 Elected Charles V. of Ger- 
 
 1516 
 1556 
 1593 
 1621 
 1665 
 
 HOUSE OF BOURBON. 
 
 Philip v., . . 
 
 Fernando VI., . 
 
 Carlos III., 
 
 Ferdinand VII., 
 
 Joseph Bonaparte 
 
 Ferdinand VII. (reinstated), 
 
 Isabella II. (She was dethroned, 1868), 
 
 Alfonso XII., . 
 
 Alfonso XIIL, . 
 
 1700 
 1746 
 
 1759 
 1799 
 1806 
 1814 
 1833 
 1874 
 1885 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR SPAIN. 
 
 1. Ginn's "Ancienf Atlas." 
 
 2. Myers* "Ancient History." 
 
 3. Myers' " Mediaeval History." 
 
 4. Gibbon's *' Rome." 
 
 5. Morris' ** The Beginnings of the Middle Ages." 
 
 6. Brinton's ** Races and Peoples." 
 
 7. Johnson's ** Cyclopedia." 
 
 8. " Encyclopaedia Britannica." 
 
 9. Prescott's " Peru and Mexico." 
 
 10. Prescott and Robertson's *' Charles V." 
 
 11. Prescott and Robertson's '* Philip II." 
 
 12. Motley's '* Dutch Republic." 
 
 13. Hale's ** History of Spain." 
 
 14. Lane-Poole's " Moors in Spain." 
 
 15. Watt's *' Recovery of Spain." 
 
 16. Irving's '* Conquest of Granada." 
 
 17. Chart of Civilization, ''Who, When, and What." 
 
 18. A History of Spain in less than 40 pages, by 
 
 Mary Piatt Parmele. 
 
 167 
 
H 62 90 
 
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