~T'^~r''m»^ STORY OF r>.e N ATJONS^rrrr: >' *•=• ?(¥**''' ^'i^^J^^^^'^'^^rP'.'fiS- «* j; *!v'---v-^^'--: "'I'l "i .'^l^lllL""ll'h i' [i^lLl^lA^AiiJ rr^^Tf iii Di ii i m im wmV' W M»\immmtmme>mmmm>timmms6 Digitized by the Internet Arciiive in 2008 witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.arcliive.org/details/cliristianrecoverOOwattricli THE STORY OF THE NATIONS 2MO, ILLUSTRATED. PER VOL., $1.50 THE EARLIER VOLUMES ARE THE STORY OF GREECE. By Prof. Jas. A. Harrison THE STORY OF ROME. By Arthur Oilman THE STORY OF THE JEWS. By Prof. Jas. K. Hosmer THE STORY OF CHALDEA. By Z. A. Ragozin THE STORY OF GERMANY. By S. Baring-Gould THE STORY OF NORWAY. By Prof. H. H. Bovesen THE STORY OF SPAIN. By E. E. and Susan Hale THE STORY OF HUNGARY. By Prof. A. V.^MBfiRY THE STORY OF CARTHAGE. By Prof. Alfred J. Church THE STORY OF THE SARACENS. By Arthur Oilman THE STORY OF THE MOORS IN SPAIN. By Stanley Lane-Poole THE STORY OF THE NORMANS. By Sarah O. Jewett THE STORY OF PERSIA. By S. G. W. Benjamin THE STORY OF ANCIENT EGYPT. By Geo. Rawlinson THE STORY OF ALEXANDER'S EMPIRE. By Prof. J. P. Mahaffy THE STORY OF ASSYRIA. By Z. A. Ragozin THE STORY OF IRELAND. By Hon. Emilv Lawless THE STORY OF THE GOTHS. By Henry Bradley THE STORY OF TURKEY. By Stanley Lane-Poole THE STORY OF MEDIA, BABYLON, AND PERSIA. By Z. A. Ragozin THE STORY OF MEDIEVAL FRANCE. By Gustave Masson THE STORY OF MEXICO. By Susan Hale THE STORY OF HOLLAND. By James E. Thoroi.d Rogers THE STORY OF PHCENICIA. By George Rawlinson THE STORY OF THE HANSA TOWNS. By Helen Zimmern THE STORY OF EARLY BRITAIN. By Prof. Alfred J. Church THE STORY OF THE BARBARY CORSAIRS. By Stanley Lane-Poole THE STORY OF RUSSIA. By W. R. Morfill THE STORY OF THE JEWS UNDER ROME. By W. D. Morrison THE STORY OF SCOTLAND. By John Mackintosh THE STORY OF SWITZERL.\ND. By R. Stead and Mrs. A. Hug THE STORY OF PORTUGAL. By H. Morse Stephens THE STORY OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE. By C. W. C. Oman. THE STORY OE SICILY. By E. A. Freeman THE STORY OF THE TUSCAN REPUBLICS. By Bella Duffy THE STORY OF POLAND. By W. R. Morfill For prospectus of the series see end of this volume G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, NEW YORK AND LONDON PORTRAIT OF QUEEN ISABEL THE CATHOLIC. {From the picture in the Museo Nacional.) |l|E |lorg of the |Jations THE CHRISTIAN RECOVERY OF SPAIN BEING THE STORY OF SPAIN FROM THE MOORISH CONQUEST TO THE FALL OF GRANADA (711-1492 A.D.) HENRY EDWARD WATTS NEW YORK G. p. PUTNAM'S SONS LONDON : T. FISHER UNWIN 1894 /5^ "7 ' FJEPUCING 3 ^ J "^ / COPYRIGHT, 1893 BY G. r. Putnam's Sons Entered at Stationers' Hall. London By T. Fisher Unwin Electrotyped, Printed and Bound by Ubc Tknicherbocftcr press, IRcw L'orh G. P. Putnam's Sons PREFACE. If only on the score of its novelty, seeing that I attempt what to my knowledge has never been done before, I may claim some indulgence for the present work. The object is to give the general student a sketch of the process by which the Spanish nation was formed. The story of early Spain, from its loss to Christendom to its recovery, is really the story of some four or five nations, which, though springing from the same root, followed each its separate law of develop- ment, blending finally into one nation rather through the accidents of war and policy than by deliberate choice or any natural process of concretion. Their unity, when finally achieved, was thus rather an agglutina- tion than an association—which, indeed, remains true of the Spain, or Spains, of the present day. Leon has in Castile Catalonia in Aragon become merged — ; but each of the great provinces composing the Spanish nationality has had its independent history, and each retains its individual character, formed by its own struggle for existence and developed by its peculiar natural conditions. ivilJi??54 — VIU PREFACE. To follow the course of that struggle as a whole, and to weave into one connected story the tangled threads of that diverse and confused life, is a task which needs some hardihood to undertake, in which I do not know that I have any predecessor. The only history of Spain in English is the general one, em- bracing the whole Peninsula, from the earliest times to the close of the Eighteenth century, by Dr. Dunham, which was published sixty years ago, in five volumes of Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Of this learned and laborious historian I would desire to speak with all respect ; but his work is certainly too much flattered by Buckle when he declares it to be " the best history in the English language of a foreign modern country." Writing without the light which recent Arabic scholars have turned upon the early annals of Spain, with no authority better than the frail one of Conde, and Conde only in the faithless French version of Maries—Dunham is now entirely out of date. Nor was Dunham gifted with the instinct of history to guide him through the mists and mazes of the early Spanish chronicles. He is obstinate and credulous — over-fond of parading his authorities, which are like a stage army, formidable rather by repetition than by weight or multitude—strangely partial in some of his judgments, especially of the kings of the Bourbon dynasty— with prejudices and passions, which blind him to some of the ugliest fea- tures of the political condition —tedious and obscure in his narrative, feeble and platitudinous in his too frequent moralisations. The best part of Dunham the part which doubtless captured the judgment of — PREFACE. IX Buckle— is his accountof the civil and social institutions of the early Spaniards. The worst feature of Dunham is the unfortunate scheme of arrangement, according to which the history of one nation is taken separately for a chapter or two, and then left suspended for the history of another. With all his faults, however, it would be ungrateful in me not to acknowledge my indebtedness to Dr. Dunham for much of the know- ledge which I have endeavoured to use in this simpler and more condensed narrative, where the growth of all the Christian kingdoms is told as one story. The sources of Spanish history are twofold Christian and Arabic. The bald, scanty chronicles of the early Christian writers, who were all ecclesias- tics, are supplemented by the fuller and more ornate narratives of the Moorish historians, of which latter by far the most valuable are those in the collection translated and published by Don Pascual de Gayan- gos in his " Mahommedan Dynasties," which may be said to be the beginning of all our real knowledge of early Spanish history from the Moorish side. The work of comparing the two and gleaning the truth from the rival utterances has never been thoroughly done. The late Professor Dozy of Leyden, in his " Recherches sur I'histoire et la litterature de I'Espagne " and other works, displayed an excellent acumen and a true historical sense. Dozy is dis- cursive and pugnacious, who will stop in the middle of an important research to fight with some rival Arabist, and in the ardour of battle is apt to forget his reader. But for what the Le}-den professor has X PREFACE. done in interpreting the old monkish legends by the h'ght of learning and common sense Ke is entitled to the gratitude of all students of Spanish history. The authorities from the Christian side are the monkish chroniclers, who wrote in Latin, of whom Isidorus Pacensis, wrongly termed Bishop of Beja, who dates from 754, is the first. Next to him, who does not seem to have been acquainted with his pre- decessor's work, was Sebastian, a monk of Salamanca, who composed his chronicles in the reign of Alfonso III. (866-910). The Monks of Silos and Albelda wrote about 881-3. The works of these, with other fragments of contemporary and later chroniclers, are preserved in some of the many volumes of Florez, his " Espafia Sagrada "—a monumental work, entitling the learned author to be called the Muratori and the Montfaucon of Spain, in which is enshrined all that remains of old Spanish history. The " Espafia Sagrada" has been brought down from 1754 to 1850 by successive continuations, and now extends to forty- seven volumes, containing a mine of history which has hardly yet been thoroughly explored. For the dark period of the Tenth and F^leventh centuries the record is imperfect, the chief light being furnished by the Arabic historians, Ibn Haiyan, who wrote in the Eleventh, and Ibn Khaldoun in the Thirteenth, cen- turies. For the special history of the Cid the documents, from the Christian side, are, first, a fragment of a Latin Chronicle written in 1141, together with the contract of the hero's marriage with Ximena, originally published in 1601 ; secondly, some brief notices in the Latin annals of Toledo and Compostella of the PREFACE. XI " Thirteenth century ; thirdly, the Gesta Roderici Campidocti," discovered by Risco in the convent of S. Isidore at Leon, bearing internal evidence of having " been written before 1238 ; fourthly, the Poema del Cid," which is as much history as poetry, to which " Dozy assigns the date of 1207 ; fifthly, the Chronica Rimada," a fragment in rude verse, in which certain of the deeds of the Campeador are recited, obviously from living tradition and popular song ; lastly, the so-called " Chronica del Cid," to which an exaggerated historical value has been attributed by Southey and others, which is clearly proved to be only the fourth chapter of the General Chronicle of Alfonso X., retouched and with the Christian character of the hero revised and corrected by some ignorant monk of the Fourteenth century.