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CHAPTER XXVIII.

DOMESTIC DISCORD IN CASTILE.

(1284-1350.)

I.-The Bravos.

AFTER the enormous moral and material change that came over Christian Spain under Berengaria, St. Ferdinand and Alfonso X.-a change not merely in degree but in kind-it is mournful to find a recrudescence of barbarism under their

immediate successors. The honourable conquest and occupation of Cordova, so long the glory of the Caliphs, and of Seville, the fairest city in Andalusia, the wisdom of Berengaria, the learning of Alfonso; alliances with faithful Moors, aspirations after Imperial dominion, the pursuits of science, the respect for law all this came to an end at the death of Alfonso X., in 1284, with the accession of his son Sancho, surnamed, in contemptuous comparison with his gentle father, the Brave, or, rather, the Bravo.1

And under this bravo and his successors, for close on a century, Castile reverted to the civil wars and assassinations, and the ever-changing and ever-faithless alliances that disgraced the annals of the tenth century. There was plenty of war, but there was no accession of territory; plenty of judgment, but no justice; plenty of negotiation, but no peace; plenty of bravery, but no honour.2 According to a modern

1 La brava domada is the classic Castilian translation of "The Taming of the Shrew". Bravo would thus stand for a male shrew or bully. I have not ventured to use so homely a word. But Señor Vicente de Lafuente, in his Historia de las Sociedades secretas en España, p. 42, says that the word Bravo in this connection is itself only a copyist's error adopted and perpetuated by excessive loyalty, for Pravo, the depraved, Latin Pravus. Pravo is not a word used in modern Spain, but it is given in the Dict. of the Academy.

2 The brutality, the rapacity, the violence of this age, are even exceeded by the falseness, the trickery, the treason and the perfidy, which at this time are the distinguishing characteristics of Castile. P. Mérimée, Pèdre 1., etc., p. 39; Lafuente, vii., p. 19.

Spanish writer, every man lived at the mercy of the highway robber and the private assassin. Bold depredators possessed the land, which was abandoned by the peaceful and honest owners. The bravo was abroad in Castile. Robbery and rapine were publicly professed by gentle and simple. The corpses of murdered men lay unburied on every highway. Travelling was impossible save in armed caravans. There was no security for life or property outside the walls of the fortified towns; and not only the isolated farm-houses, but the hamlets and even the villages remained absolutely deserted throughout the country. Was it for this that Berengaria had created a great kingdom, and that Alfonso had endowed it with wise laws? Had it not been for the popular institution of the Hermandad, towards the close of the thirteenth century, there would hardly have been an honest man left alive in Castile.1

For eleven years (1284-1295) after the death of Alfonso the Learned did Sancho, the fourth of his name, reign over Castile; and from the day of his accession to the day of his death, there was nothing but trouble in the kingdom. Alfonso of Aragon refused to give up to him the persons of his nephews, the Infantes de Cerda.2 The Pope refused to sanction his marriage with his cousin, Doña Maria of Leon; Lope Diaz de Haro, Lord of Biscay, one of his rebel companions, whom he had raised to great honour, turned against him, after the good old fashion of his kind, and was only disposed of by assassination at the Council of Alfaro in 1288. Wars and treaties between Castile and Aragon; Don Juan, the elder Infante, in arms in Gallicia; the constant revolts of the Laras; the abandonment of Murcia at the instance of Philip of France;3 the continued hostility of Peter of Aragon, all these things characterise the

1 Cronica de Don Alfonso XI., c. lxxviii.

2 So called from their father, the Infante Ferdinand, the eldest son of Alfonso the Learned, who gained his nickname of La Cerda from the bristles which grew from a mole on his face -H.

3 It should be explained that most of these troubles really arose out of the urgent need in Castile, as elsewhere in Europe, for the limitation of the abusive power of the feudal nobles. James the Conqueror had after years of struggle only partially succeeded in this in Aragon, and King John had failed in England. The complaint of the Castilian nobles of the king's favour to Haro was a mere excuse, and, as is here pointed out, Haro's sons promptly joined the other members of their order to proclaim as king the rightful heir under the Roman law. Murcia was ceded to the King of France on his promise not to aid Alfonso de la Cerda, and to use his influence with the Pope to obtain a dispensation for Sancho's marriage with his cousin Maria de Molina.-H.

disturbed and disastrous reign of Sancho IV. The one great deed of arms, in ten years of wretched strife, was the taking of Tarifa in 1292. But the conquest of that celebrated town and the maintenance within its walls of the Castilian supremacy, is a glorious incident, not in the life of Sancho the Bravo, but of Guzman, more happily styled the Good.

Alonzo Perez de Guzman, an illegitimate son of the Adelantado Mayor of Andalusia, was born in Leon in 1255. Distinguished in war and tourney, a brave and honourable knight, he quitted the court to escape the insults of his legitimate brother, and took service, after the fashion of the day, with Yusuf, the king or emperor of Morocco, and fought under the Moorish standard with much distinction in Africa. It was by his influence at the court of Fez that, in 1280, the emperor was induced to send a subsidy and an army to Alfonso X., and this Berber contingent was commanded by Guzman in person. In course of time (1290) Yusuf of Morocco died; and the Christians finding no favour at the court of his bigoted son and successor Yacub, Guzman passed over to Seville in 1291, bringing back with him a rich treasure acquired during his foreign service. Finding King Sancho meditating an expedition against the Moors of Granada, he promptly offered his assistance. royal treasury was empty; Guzman provided the necessary funds. A fleet was equipped, an army was raised, and Tarifa was invested by sea and land. For six months the siege was prosecuted with the greatest vigour-Guzman was the most indefatigable of commanders-and at length the city was taken, and garrisoned by the Christian forces.

The

Among the many bad men of a bad age was the Infante John, a brother of Sancho the king, and it seemed good to him about this time, after one of his many unsuccessful attempts at rebellion, to pass over to Tangiers, and to enter into an alliance with Yacub, the hostile sovereign of Morocco. The first care of these new allies was the recovery of Tarifa from the Christians. Guzman, who had been appointed governor of the fortress, upon its incorporation into the Castilian territories, held the city for Castile; and he refused the bribes and despised the attacks of the invaders (1294). But in the hands of the Christian commander of the allied forces was unhappily found the only son of the gallant defender; and Prince John led the young Guzman forward under the walls of Tarifa, threatening to murder the boy under the eyes of his father, if the father remained true to his trust, and refused to

give up the city to the besiegers. But love proved less powerful than honour in the heart of the Castilian Alcaide. Guzman not only defied the cowardly assailants without the battlements, but he flung down his own knife at the feet of the tempter. Prince John, with a barbarity unsurpassed even in those barbarous days, slew the youth on the spot. But Tarifa remained untaken. The Moors returned to Africa. Guzman, heirless, but full of glory, was gratified with the admiration of his country, and the strange title, granted under the sign manual of the king, of El bueno-the Good.1

Sancho IV. died at Toledo on the 25th of April, 1295, and was succeeded by his son Ferdinand, a boy of nine years of age and confusion became worse confounded in Castile. The king's uncle-the ever odious Don John-his great uncle, Don Henry, who arrived from Italy, his neighbours Dionysius of Portugal and Mohammed of Granada, and his vassal Don Diego Lopez de Haro, all rose against Ferdinand IV. James II. of Aragon took possession of Murcia, and Don Juan de Lara, entrusted by the bold but over-confiding queen-regent with a large sum of money for the defence of his sovereign and her dominions, appropriated the supplies to his own use, and joined the ranks of the enemy. Yet was his treachery of no avail. For Doña Maria, mainly by the assistance of the good Guzman, and partly by her own virtue and vigour, was able to prevail over invaders and rebels in Castile. The loyalty of this noble Castilian and the heroic conduct of the queen-regent, worthy at least of comparison with the great Berengaria, are almost the only bright features of this dreary period of treachery and disorder. The patience of Doña Maria, her vigour, her discretion, her maternal devotion, are all admirable. She was not only a diplomatist but a politician. The Hermandad, or association of free citizens who had bound themselves together in this historic brotherhood, in 1295, to defend themselves from the depreda

1 Of the family of this Guzman the Good was Leonora, the mistress of Alfonso XI., and mother of Henry II. So too was that incapable or unfortunate Duke of Medina Sidonia, who assumed so unwillingly the chief command of the great Empresa de Inglaterra in 1588. See Mérimée, Pèdre I., etc., 1876, p. 273.

The Cronica de los Duques de Medina Sidonia, compiled in the sixteenth century by Pedro de Medina is printed in vol. xxxix. of the Documentos ineditos, pp. 1-397, and will be found the best authority for the rise and progress of the most noble family of the Guzmans.

2 This queen is the heroine of one of Tirso de Molina's dramas, La prudencia de la mujer, and of a play by a more modern author, Roca de Togores, Marques de Molins, entitled Dona Maria de Molina. Her noble ally, Guzman the Good, was unhappily killed in a skirmish in the mountains of Granada in 1309.

tions of the nobles, was protected by her prudent policy;1 nor was a single year of her regency suffered to pass without a regular session of the Cortes. Thus she prevailed over the enemies of Castile abroad, and withstood traitors within the realm, not by assassination and tyranny, but by encouraging the party of order, and promoting good government at home.

II.-The Hermandad.

The early Hermandades or brotherhoods must not be con founded with the royal police that was established by Isabella -under the name of the Santa Hermandad, or holy brotherhood -nearly a century later. The earlier institution had nothing royal either in its origin or in its character. The brotherhoods were simply associations or Unions of cities or citizens to protect themselves against the attacks of knights and nobles who, unchecked by any semblance of royal or national authority, plundered and burned, robbed and ravished throughout the length and breadth of Castile.

By the end of the reign of Sancho IV. the condition of the kingdom had become so inconceivably disastrous that the ordinary law and the ordinary executive proved completely powerless to cope with the general disorganisation; and under his youthful successor it became apparent that if society was to be saved, it was to be saved, not by the court, but by the commons. No privilege of union was asked of the infant king. A confederacy of classes would hardly have been possible at the end of the thirteenth century. A confederacy of burgesses, united among themselves, and of their own free will, had in it nothing inconsistent with the royal supremacy. And these free Spaniards spoke of their unwonted union as a brotherhood: the Hermandad or Brotherhood of Castile. The formal act of incorporation-for if the Hermandad possessed no royal charter, it was far from being a secret society 2-is one of the most remarkable protests in history. It recites in due legal form the hurts and harms, the deaths and dishonours, e otras cosas sin

1 Sancho IV. in his struggle with feudalism had not had the wit to make use of the middle and trading classes, as James of Aragon and the later Plantagenet kings in England did. Instead of strengthening the towns, he set them against him by a wholesale abolition of their privileges. It was not until his death that the middle classes on their own account entered actively into the struggle, and the foundation of the Hermandad is the first strong manifestation of this.-H.

2 Yet see Don V. de Lafuente, Sociedades Secretas en España, cap. i.