Mary Platt Parmele

“ The quickness with which cordial relations have been re-established between Spain and the United States is most gratifying; and too much praise cannot be bestowed upon that proud, high-spirited people, who have accepted the results of the war in a spirit so admirable. In the loss of her American colonies, Spain has been paying a debt contracted in the days of her dazzling splendor—the time of the great Charles and of Philip II.,—a kind of indebtedness which in the case of nations is never forgiven, but must be paid to the uttermost farthing. ”

“ Gold was pouring 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 territory, and in the imperishable glory of its discovery. But Isabella,—who had been the instrument 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 ”

“ Feudalism, which was a part of Spain's Gothic inheritance, 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 simple "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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ After the ravages of a thousand years travelers 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-off Eastern states ”

“ Tarik and his twelve thousand Berbers,A 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, intoxicated with success, stood at last upon the Pyrenees, he saw before him a vision of a subjugated 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! ”

“ 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 sought 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 permission to lift the veil from an unsuspected Hemisphere; artfully dwelling upon the glory of planting the Cross in the dominions of the Great Khan! The cool, unimaginative Ferdinand listened contemptuously ”

“ If there were any "common people" in Spain, they were so effaced that history makes no mention of them. We hear only of kings and great barons and glorious knights; and their wonderful deeds and their valor and prowess—excepting 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. ”

“ And, in her misguided zeal, she emptied her kingdom of a people who had helped to create its prosperity, and drove the most valuable part of her population 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. ”

“ If his right had been acknowledged, Portugal and Spain would now be united; Isabella would have remained only a poor and devout princess, and would never have had the power to win a continent 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. ”

“ Then came the magnificent reign of Charles V. with more gifts from fortune—the imperial crown, if not a substantial benefit to Spain, still bringing dignity and éclat. But under this glittering surface there had commenced even then a decline. Under Philip II. she was still magnificent, 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 brilliant past, which a proud and retrospective nation was going to feed upon for over three centuries. ”

“ Amazed at such colossal treason, Musa referred Count Julian to his master the Khalif, at Damascus, who at once accepted his infamous proposition. In Spanish legend and history this man is always designated as The Traitor, as if standing alone and on a pinnacle 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 language of the Basques bears no resemblance to any of the Indo-European, nor indeed to any known tongue. It is so difficult, so intricate in construction, that only those who learn it in infancy can ever master it. It is said that, in Basque, "you spell Solomon, 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! ”

“ With trembling eagerness 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. ”

“ A revolution accompanied 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 [pg 142] government into his own hands, then by successive 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, with the city of Toulouse as its head.
A century of contact with Roman civilization 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 invading. They were not yet acknowledged entire masters of Gaul and northern Spain. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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 Egyptian, hoary with age and steeped in wisdom and in wickedness ”

“ Even the Gothic Christians were seduced by these alluring refinements. They felt contempt 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. Eulogius became the leader of this band of zealots. In lamenting the decadence of his people, he wrote, "hardly one in a thousand can write a decent Latin letter, and yet they indite excellent Arabic verse!" ”

“ 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 colonies had been recognized as free and independent 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. ”

“ Behind the rocky ramparts of the Pyrenees they may have remained for centuries unconscious of the Aryan torrent which was flooding 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, lingering 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. ”

“ 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 Spaniard in Andalusia. Spain was unconsciously inbibing the soft, sensuous charm of the civilization she was exterminating; and the peculiar rhythm of Spanish music, and the subtle picturesqueness which makes the Spanish people 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 ”

“ 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 Deliverer. He led sixty thousand men into a vain fight for liberty. ”

“ If history teaches anything, it is that the nations which have been cruel and unjust sooner or later must "drink the cup of the Lord's fury," just as surely as did the Assyrians of old. Another thing which is quite as obvious is that the nations of the earth to-day must accept the ideals of the advancing tide of modern civilization, or perish! A people whose national festival is a bull-fight, has still something to learn. Much of mediævalism still lingers in the methods and [pg 162] ideals of Spain. In the time of her opulence and splendor these methods and ideals were hers. ”

“ 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 projects and religion. ”