Aragon

“ The land of Aragon is so poor and barren, that perchance her sons and daughters might all long since have forsaken their churlish, niggard-handed mother, and finally renounced her, but that she gives them liberty. Even in our oath of allegiance we tender no slaves' submission to oppression. ”

“ From under the glowing shadows of the golden portal, a band of armed men rush forth, who drag him forward through tapestried doorways to dimly gorgeous ante-chambers with deeply sunk cedar ceilings overhead, into suites of halls lined with painted panels and azulejo tiles darkly resplendent in escutcheons of castle, lion, bar, tower, and that mysterious nodo which clasps Aragon with Spain,—into the precincts of the great Patio de las Doncellas, so purely beautiful in the whiteness of its lacy arcades. ”

“ Nobly born I am—ay, and from a stock to whose long descent from the patricians of ancient Rome the high line of Aragon itself would be of yesterday. Nay, I would not offend you, Monsignore; your greatness is not borrowed from pedigrees and tombstones—your greatness is your own achieving: would you speak honestly, my Lord, you would own that you are proud only of your own laurels, and that, in your heart, you laugh at the stately fools who trick themselves out in the mouldering finery of the dead! ”

“ Valencia had been in Christian hands before: El Cid had won it rather by treachery than arms. But after the great freebooter’s death, the Moors came back. Now that Aragon sits down within its valleys, Valencia is Christian forever. It loses even its name of tributary kingdom. It becomes simply part of Aragon. Catalan blood has helped win it—for Aragon. Now Catalan, Valencian, and Castilian, led by the Great Captain of Córdoba, win Sicily and Naples—in the name of Aragon again. ”

“ Fernando, king of Aragon, before Granada lies,
With dukes and barons many a one, and champions of emprise;
With all the captains of Castile that serve his lady’s crown,
He drives Boabdil from his gates, and plucks the Crescent down.
The Cross is rear’d upon the towers, for our Redeemer’s sake!
The king assembles all his powers, his triumph to partake ”

“ The tragic music of Spain is lightened, aerated and then, by the ultimate twist of Aragon, it is once more sicklied with a haunting gloom. But the gloom is pagan, not Christian. It is empiric. Its fluidity is of the east, but its will is a release come from the north.
The dance of the jota is a diluting, a quickening, above all a flattening of the sheer pure figures of the southern dance. The body loses all relationship with sculpture. It is given up to that easy dynamism whose language is the leap, the skip, the pirouette. ”

“ Sere towns lie in the sere waste. The houses are clay. There are wooden doors, but windows of glass are still rare. The peasant chooses the desert bottom for his house. South and north rise the walls of the Sierras, naked as flint: and the winds sweep through his narrow passage, bringing the rigor of the rocks into the air he breathes.
This low tier of the world of Aragon has no clement weather. It has no spring and no autumn. Winter is a rigid siege: summer is fire. When the weather shifts between the seasons, the winds make a runway of the valleys. Frost, flame, storm are the angry cycle. ”

“ In the city swarms a hungry, ragged people, more often than not without shoes, yet one and all with the proverbial haughty pride and somber mood of Aragon in face and bearing, stiff-shouldered, bristling with a touch-me-not-with-a-pole expression. Here, too, may still be found, especially among the peasants from the further districts, the old provincial costume,--knee breeches, a jacket reaching barely to the waist, and a red cloth wound about the head. ”

“ THE Crown of Aragon comprised the so-called kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, the principality of Catalonia, the counties of Rosellon and Cerdana, and the Balearic Isles, with the outlying dependencies of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica. Although marriage had united the sovereigns of Castile and Aragon, the particularism born of centuries of rivalry and frequent war kept the lands jealously apart as separate nations and Ferdinand ruled individually his ancestral dominions. ”

“ Intellectual Culture.
The political institutions of Aragon, although bearing a general resemblance to those of Castile, were sufficiently dissimilar to stamp a peculiar physiognomy on the character of the nation, which still continued after it had been incorporated with the great mass of the Spanish monarchy.—It was not until the expiration of nearly five centuries after the Saracen invasion, that the little district of Aragon, growing up under the shelter of the Pyrenees, was expanded into the dimensions of the province which now bears that name. ”

“ All the English archers and the guard and porters about the Prince wore the flaming colours of Aragon, and the Spanish attendants and courtiers looked on with jealous rage at the attendance on him of English servants. ”

“ The bleak pride of the Castillano, the flint and steel of Aragon, the languor which veils Andalusian fire—travelling the lands which gave them birth, you find them scored in large over mountain and plain and riverbed, and bitten deep into the hearts of the indwellers. They are as seasonable there as the flowers of waste places, and will charm you as much. So Spanish travel is one of the restful relaxations, because nothing jars upon you. You feel that you are assisting a destiny, not breaking it. Not discovery is before you so much as realisation. ”

“ Some rolled over with their armoured riders in the mire; others, stuck fast in the stiff bog, stood still, in the picturesque phrase of the Byzantine historian, “like equestrian statues,” powerless to move. The shouts of “Aragon! Aragon!” from the Catalans increased the panic of the horses; showers of arrows hailed upon the helpless Franks; and the Turkish auxiliaries of the Catalans rushed forward and completed the deadly work. ”

“ The little kingdom of Navarre was founded by Garcia Jimenes as early as 758, and Louis, the son of Charlemagne, drove the Moors out of Barcelona and established a Christian country there about fifty years afterwards. At length the kingdom of Aragon was founded by Ramiro I., a son of the King of Navarre, and Buesca was taken from the Moors and became the first capital of Aragon. Then the great Alonso, surnamed ‘El Batallador,’ having firmly established his power in the plains, drove the Moors out of Zaragoza in 1118, which was thenceforth the capital of Aragon. ”

“ As it would be fruitless to investigate the peculiarities of their respective institutions, which bear a very close affinity to one another, we may confine ourselves to those of Aragon, which exhibit a more perfect model than those either of Catalonia or Valencia, and have been far more copiously illustrated by her writers. ”

“ Courting an alegra señorita, whether of Aragon, Catalonia, or Valencia, was the duty of every lad, albeit the fair one jokingly called it “pelando la pava” (plucking the turkey) . The royal romance was a charming example for all and sundry, and many an amorous French troubadour had his wings cut by Prince Cupid and never went home again at all, and many a glee-maiden, to boot, plucked a “turkey” of Aragon!
King Juan threw himself unreservedly into the arms of his merry Minerva-Venus Queen: no doubt she “plucked” him thoroughly! A “Court of Love” was established at Zaragoza. ”

“ ARAGON, or Arragon (in Span. Aragón) , a captaincy-general, and formerly a kingdom of Spain; bounded on the N. by the Pyrenees, which separate it from France, on the E. by Catalonia and Valencia, S. by Valencia, and W. by the two Castiles and Navarre. Pop. (1900) 912,711; area, 18,294 sq. m. Aragon was divided in 1833 into the provinces of Huesca, Teruel and Saragossa; an account of its modern condition is therefore given under these names, which have not, however, superseded the older designation in popular usage.
Aragon consists of a central plain, edged by mountain ranges. ”

“ You know the ancient privileges enjoyed by Aragon, privileges of which the Aragonese are so jealous that a King of Castile may not assume the title of King of Aragon until, bareheaded, he shall have received from the Grand Justiciary of Aragon the following admonition: “We, who are of equal worth and greater power than you, constitute you our king on the condition that you respect our privileges, and not otherwise.” ”

“ In reality it was perfectly safe and might have stood for centuries.
But when all is said and done, it is in its side streets, narrow, tortuous and gloomy, that the interest of Zaragoza chiefly lies.
Many of the houses are ancient and enormous palaces, once inhabited by the old aristocracy of Aragon. They are so solidly built that they not only defy time, but almost the destructive hand of man. Some of them have wonderfully interesting facades: roofs with overhanging eaves and Gothic windows guarded by wrought ironwork; features that can never tire. ”

“ It will challenge the world....
The valley of the Ebro—Nile of Spain and historic artery of all her bloods—is still below. The way from Jaca down is short but steep. The wall of the Pyrenees,{95} in a few miles, drops seven thousand feet: but drops, not as northward upon smiling France—drops to desolation. Aragon which began as mountain wall becomes a yellow waste: and save for the narrow corridor of the Ebro, all Aragon is this. It is the bottom of what was once a sea. The rocks of the Pyrenees, of Catalonia, of Valencia and Castile are the rim of the dry bowl through which the Ebro trickles. ”

“ The good King of Aragon whom men call Jaime, was wondrous brave. Day and night he bethought him by what new means he could increase the glory of the Christian faith, and lay low the power of the usurping Moor.
He called together the nobles of every degree belonging to his kingdom, the archbishops and prelates, and all the orders of knights, and summoned them to meet him in his good town of Zaragoza on a certain day. ”

“ The greater part of Catalonia, much of Aragon, Navarre, the north of Leon, Galicia, and the Asturias, are all full of lovely scenery, and even in other districts, where the country is not interesting, there seem always to be ranges of mountains in sight, which, with the singular purity of the atmosphere through which they are seen, never fail of leaving pleasant recollections in one’s mind. ”

“ Above, at the top of the portal, there opened out like a gigantic flower covered with wire netting, the coloured rose-window which admitted light to the church; and on the lower part the stone along the base of the columns adorned with the shields of Aragon, was worn, the corners and foliage having become indistinct through the rubbing of innumerable generations.
By this erosion of the portals the passing of riot and revolt might be divined. A whole people had met and mingled beside these stones ”

“ In institutions, Aragon proper must be distinguished, throughout this period, from the Catalonian region of the greater kingdom of Aragon. Social differences were much more marked than in León and Castile, for there was an excessively privileged feudal nobility, which had a despotic power over the servile classes; the movement for emancipation from slavery and serfdom belongs to a much later time. Lords had a right even to kill their serfs. ”

“ Aragon is only beginning; Portugal has not even begun. ♦History of Castile and Aragon.♦ Of these three, Castile was fated to play the same part that was played by Wessex in England and by France in Gaul, to become the leading power of the peninsula. Aragon, when her growth had brought her to the Mediterranean, was to fill for a long time a greater place in general European politics than any other Spanish power. The union of Castile and Aragon was to form that great Spanish monarchy which became the terror of Europe. ”

“ Probably only a few fragments of this old palace are older than the Cathedral of La Seo.{147} This is the name commonly given in Aragon to the cathedral church, and comes, of course, from the Latin sedes, like our own word ‘See.’ Zaragoza became the metropolitan city of Aragon in 1318, and the archiepiscopal dignity was reserved as far as possible to the illegitimate sons of the kings. ”

“ We had expected a great deal of Zaragoza; hoped to find a city of great antiquity, with nothing but gabled houses and ancient outlines worthy the fair capital of the fair kingdom of Aragon. These we found the exception. Its antiquity is undoubted, but too much of the town has been modernised and rebuilt. Still, the exceptions are so striking that when one's first disillusion is over, it is followed by something very like delight and amazement.
The hotel was a large rambling building which might have existed for centuries; and as comfortable as most of the Spanish provincial inns. ”

“ It has been already noted that eastern Spain was feudal. Therefore the distinction of classes was far sharper in Aragon than in non-feudal Castile and Leon. Predial slavery, which had disappeared in Castile and Leon in the 13th century, existed unmodified in Aragon, and in its worst form, down to the Bourbon dynasty. When we are told of the freedom of Aragon, it is well to remember that it was enjoyed only by the small minority who were personally free and also privileged: by the citizens of the towns which had charters—called in Aragon the Universidades—the nobles, the gentry and the Church. ”

“ The union of Aragon with Castile, and the resulting predominance of Castilian throughout Spain, inflicted a death-blow on Catalan literature, especially on its artistic poetry, a kind of composition more ready than any other to avail itself of the triumphant idiom which soon came to be regarded by men of letters as the only noble one, and alone fit to be the vehicle of elevated or refined thoughts. ”