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CHAPTER XXV.

ALFONSO X. OF CASTILE.

(1252-1284.)

I.-El Sabio.

FOR nigh on five centuries all that was learned and all that was refined in Spain was found among the Arabs of Andalus. But on the taking of Seville by St. Ferdinand, the centre of gravity was completely changed; and SPAIN came into existencecivilised if not yet united-a -as a Christian kingdom. Aragon and Castile, it is true, were not yet one. The Moslem ruled, and ruled gloriously, in Granada. Yet these were but accidents by which the general position was scarcely affected. The Catalans ruled in Sicily under Peter III. of Aragon, and stretched out their hands to the Bosphorus and the Ægean. The most skilful artificers of the West had yet to construct the most beautiful palace that still remains to tell of Arab culture and Moorish magnificence in Spain. But Castile was the great power in the Peninsula, and the Castilian was the new language of a new and a noble kingdom.

The first man in Castile in the middle of the thirteenth century was Alfonso, the eldest son of St. Ferdinand, who is known and honoured in European history as Alfonso X. From the death of Averroes, and the dispersal of his student companions at Cordova, science had been well nigh dead among the Moslems. Among the Christians it had not yet come into existence. Their mathematical attainments did not go beyond the multiplication table. Their medical skill 1 did not go beyond

1 Pope John XXI., indeed, is said to have been a Spanish physician, who afterwards took Holy Orders, and was raised to the Papacy; but the identity of the Pope and the obscure writer of the thirteenth century, known as Petrus Hispanus, is doubtful; and the works of Petrus Hispanus are certainly worthless. Dunham, iv., 259, 260.

the exhibition of relics. Their historical criticism did not go beyond a belief in the prowess of St. James at the battle of Clavijo, and the destruction of Paris by the Cid. Of astronomy, of physics, of natural philosophy, they knew nothing; and for science, moreover, of any kind, they cared nothing. They had no aspirations beyond the slaughter of Moors; no amusements but fighting; no occupation but intrigue. The Spanish chivalry, unlike that of every other country in western Europe, had never joined in the crusades; they had their own unbelievers close at hand; and thus, while the knights and lords of France and of England, of Italy and of Germany, were ever bringing back to their feudal castles some of the refinement and some of the science and some of the luxury of Oriental civilisation, and recognised at least the greatness of the world beyond the frontiers of their Fatherland, the Castilian nobles, as a rule, had never left Spain. They knew nothing of the Imperial traditions of Byzantium, of the material glories of Damascus, of the wisdom, of the splendour, and of the greatness of the East. Thus the Castilian knight differed from his fellows in France or England much as a Somersetshire squire in the eighteenth century may have differed from his brother who had fought under Clive at Plassey, or his cousin who had visited half a dozen European cities as the envoy of His Most Gracious Majesty King George. The Castilian nobleman, like the English squire, may have had all the sturdy good qualities of a homekeeping hero, but he scorned to learn anything from the hated Moslem, whom he regarded, not as a more civilised neighbour, but as an odious and contemptible pagan.

But from the time of St. Ferdinand, Moors in Castile became as scarce as foxes in Middlesex. Christian castles became dwelling-places rather than fortresses; and, worn out with the weariness of unaccustomed peace, the knights and nobles were glad to welcome the minstrels and the ballad-singers to their halls. They may have even themselves learned to read. They had at least time to look around them, to cast their eyes abroad; and they woke up to new interests in life, to notions, at least, of refinement, of comfort and of civilisation. Their king in Castile was aspiring to Imperial dominion in Germany. Their neighbours in Aragon had actually acquired new kingdom across the great sea. The occupation of Cordova and of Seville displayed new wonders of art and architecture, of skill and of science to their astonished gaze. The world, indeed, contained greater things than the cave at Covadonga.

In the thirteenth century, Spain was passing through a great social and intellectual revolution; and the first man of intellectual Spain was Alfonso of Castile, who, at the death of his father St. Ferdinand, in June 1252, succeeded, at the mature age of thirty-one, without opposition, to his crown. Gallicia and the Asturias, Leon and Castile, Murcia and the the greater part of Andalusia, cheerfully accepted his sway; and Al Ahmar, the sovereign of the last remaining Moslem kingdom in the Peninsula, sent envoys to assure the new monarch of the respectful alliance of Granada. Nor were these assurances a mere empty ceremonial. Less than twelve months after the Christian king's accession, the Moslem fortresses of Jerez, Arcos and Medina Sidonia opened their gates to the united forces of Granada and Castile.

Within two years another and a more splendid alliance was cemented by the marriage of Eleanor, the king's sister-great grand-daughter of Henry II. of England-to Prince Edward, the eldest son of Henry III., lord of the neighbouring province of Gascony, and heir to the crown of England. The marriage was celebrated with great pomp at Burgos, in October, 1254, after the young prince had received the honour of knighthood at the hands of the King of Castile. But the domestic enemy

was ever at the gate. Don Diego Lopez de Haro, intriguing against his sovereign, was welcomed and encouraged in his rebellion at the court of his sovereign's son-in-law, James of Aragon, at the very moment when that prince was renewing his protestations of friendship to Alfonso of Castile, Alfonso, meanwhile, was looking further afield. A claimant, in right of his mother Beatrix, to the vacant Duchy of Suabia, he aspired to the greater dignity of the Imperial crown; and he divided the suffrages of the electors at the Diet of Frankfort (in 1257) with Richard, Earl of Cornwall, brother of Henry III. of England. Neither candidate was duly elected, and the fruitless endeavours of Alfonso to secure his final elevation, his embassies to Germany and to Rome, his largess to the electors, his solicitation of the Popes, drew his attention overmuch from the affairs of Spain, and offended his Spanish subjects. Nor was his ad

ministration by any means successful at home. An attempt to increase his revenues by the debasing of the coinage, and to cheapen produce by the fixing of arbitrary prices, was neither very wise nor very learned, and brought nothing but distress and dishonour. An outbreak of the Moors of southern Spain proved too strong for the fidelity of Al Ahmar of Granada, who

consented to accept the leadership of the revolt, and who, in more than one important battle in the course of the year 1262, remained victorious over the Christians. The happy intervention of James of Aragon in Murcia, and the jealousy of some of the subordinate Moslem leaders, broke up the confederacy; but the treaty of peace in 1265, which left the contending parties much in the same position as they had occupied before the war, brought no honour to Castile.1

A Christian rebellion in 1270 against the authority of Alfonso X., if not more serious at the time, is at least more interesting to the historian. Philip, the king's brother, and Nuñez Gonzalez de Lara, the actual chief of his ever turbulent house, at the head of a number of disaffected nobles, assembled at Palencia, and formulated demands for certain administrative reforms, and for the redress of a long list of grievances, under which they alleged that they suffered. The king consented to hear them. The chroniclers are unanimous in considering that he would have done better if he had cut their throats. And the rebels, as much surprised as the chroniclers, increased their demands, ever more and more, even as their demands were granted. They required, in fine, remission of taxation; compensation for their losses in war; the maintenance of their special fueros, or privileges of nobility; an abatement of their burden of military service, and exemption from the jurisdiction of the royal courts. It was a formidable list; but on every point the king gave way; and a Cortes was summoned at Burgos to confirm the new privileges. Alfonso presided.

The armed petitioners took their places in the peaceful assembly, and the royal concessions were incorporated in the law of the land. Astounded rather than gratified at the success of their remonstrance, and possibly suspecting some treachery in this new and strange mode of dealing with aggrieved subjects, the rebels fled to Granada, where they were hospitably received (1272) by Al Ahmar, and on his death by his son Mohammed II., until after two years' residence on the banks of the Xenil, they returned unmolested to their homes in Christian Spain.

During the absence of Alfonso on a fruitless visit to

1 The conspirators of course secured the assistance of Al Ahmar, the Moslem King of Granada.

2 Rosseeuw St. Hilaire, Hist d'Espagne, tom. v., p. 448.

3 The first cause of their discontent was the King's surrender to Portugal of his feudatory rights over the kingdom of Algarve, on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter Beatrice with the King of Portugal.-H.

Beaucaire, in Languedoc, to solicit the intervention of Pope Gregory in the vexed question of the election of an emperor, the Infante Ferdinand, Alfonso's eldest son, died at Ciudad Real (25th July, 1275). Whether his son, according to the Roman law, or his younger brother, according to the Visigothic code, should be treated as his successor and heir to the crown of Castile, was a question hotly debated, and was finally referred by Alfonso to the Cortes at Segovia in 1276. By the king's own code of the Siete Partidas, the claims of his grandson were paramount. Yet the assembly decided according to the Visigothic law, in favour of his son Sancho; and Sancho was immediately proclaimed heir to the throne of Spain.

Philip IV. of France, however, whose sister Blanche, the widow of Ferdinand, was the mother of the disinherited Infantes, took umbrage at this legislative decision, and promptly declared war against Castile. No invasion actually took place; but the threatened appearance of the foe on the frontier was the signal for domestic trouble. The young princes with their mother, and Alfonso's own queen, Violante, fled to Aragon, where they were kindly received at the court of Peter III. Don Fadrique, a younger brother of the king, who was supposed to have connived at the escape, was executed or assassinated in his own palace at Burgos. Pope Nicholas III. menaced Philip of France with excommunication if he interfered in the family quarrel. But while Sancho, the recognised heir to Castile, with the assistance of his own mother, a refugee at Saragossa, was making a treaty with Peter of Aragon (1281), for the conquest and division of French Navarre, Alfonso was at Bayonne making a treaty with Philip of France for the partial disinheritance of the same Sancho in favour of the Înfantes, his grandsons. And the result of the several negotiations was war between the father and son, between Alfonso the King, and Sancho the Prince Royal of Castile, quite after the good old fashion of their royal ancestors.

The nobles, of course, took the part of the rebel son, who allied himself with Peter of Aragon and Dionysius of Portugal, and having obtained the support of the grand masters of Santiago and Calatrava, was able to treat the king his father with becoming insolence and contempt, He assumed the royal style and title, and even summoned a Cortes to meet at Valladolid, which pronounced Alfonso deposed, even while Alfonso was presiding over a Cortes at Seville, where the rebel prince was formally disinherited; and the French Pope, Martin