The Spanish people; their origin, growth, and influence

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Introduction

An attempt is made in this book to trace the evolution of a highly composite people from its various racial units, and to seek in the peculiarities of its origin and the circumstances of its development the explanation of its character and institutions, and of the principal vicissitudes that have befallen it as a nation.

There are several reasons which render this process less difficult and more interesting in the case of the Spaniards than in that of any other of the epoch-making races of Europe. Situated at the extreme western point of the conti^ nent, the Iberian peninsula received in each case the last wave! sent out at the highest point of vigour by the successive influences which pervaded Europe from the ancient East.' Each race, each civilization, which in turn reached this ulti^ mate peninsula could get no farther, and there had, of necessity, to stand, fight, and finally to fall, before the dispensationj that supplanted it. Spain consequently became, not only/ the battle ground upon which was decided the form into! which modern civilization should be moulded — whether Aryan or Semite, Christian or Moslem — but also the spot where the traces and traditions of each succeeding system lingered long after its onward impetus was spent. The country thus

Vlll became the preserver and transmitter to the modem world of many survivals of vanished ancient systems, and the culture of Spain itself was, in some sense, an epitome of the various rival systems that in historic times have divided the world.

The physical conformation of the country aided this process of conservation. Shut in from the rest of Europe, "except at two points, by an almost inaccessible barrier of mountains, and scored over the greater part of its face by isolated valleys, difficult of access one from another, the separate regions into which Spain is geographically divided remained ethnologically distinct to an extent unknown in any of the other larger nations, and retained characteristic features of ancient races ages after they had disappeared elsewhere. Celts, Afro-Semites, Greeks, Phoenicians, Car- I thaginians, Romans, Teutons, Franks, Goths, and the mingled hordes of Islam, in turn flooded the land, and in the countless valleys, hidden deep amid the savage spurs and ranges, there remained when the flood subsided a residuum of each inundation. The extent to which each invasion dominated a given region, is therefore easily traceable in the character and features of the inhabitants to-day; and the influence of race traditions upon historical events can be followed by the development of institutions in the various parts of the country. For the philosophical historian the study of the origin and progress of the Spanish people, therefore, provides an invaluable object lesson, by which the concatenation of cause and effect in the life of nations may be demonstrated, and the development of other European nations the better understood.

Introduction ix

Although at first sight the early history of the Spanish people may appear hopelessly complicated, as presenting the form of a number of concurrent histories of different peoples possessing .but little in common with each other, a close . consideration of the aggregate national movement will showthat there are certain characteristics more or less conspicu- • ous in the whole of the Iberian peoples, and that these com-, mon characteristics, derived from the numerically predomi-' nant root races, have invariably been appealed to on the/ comparatively few occasions when the whole nation has been ' moved by one united inspiration.

On the other hand, the progress of the Spanish people generally — and especially in the matter of their institutions — assumed a regional character. This has aided the geograph-J ical causes in preventing the complete fusion of the peoples, and has retarded the organization of the nation on the usual modern lines of unity of race and soil ; because the separate regional units have retained traditions of their primitive institutions and have resisted political absorption, as strongly as their circumstances have run counter to ethnological amalgamation. This explains the strong centrifugal tendency of some of the regions of the peninsula, a tendency which provides a key to many historical events which would otherwise be incomprehensible.

This want of unity between the component parts of the> nation would, in ordinary cases, have prevented Spain from* exercising a controlling political influence in the world ; but' there are reasons peculiar to the race which made it possible' for this group of antagonistic little p_eo£les, to bulk before ' the world as a very Colossus, and to wield an imperial sway'

•which, for a time, reduced all other modern powers to -pigmies. It is the business of this book to portray the origin and development of these special racial qualities, and to show how this disunited people were able by virtue of ' them to be swayed to great united action, and then, when . the common inspiration had passed, to fall again into disin-

• tegration and impotence.

Gifted with a vehement vividness__of imagination and

• floridness of word surpassing that of the Italians of the south, >and derived from similar sources, the Spaniards, nevertheless . are endowed with certain characteristics of their Afro- . Semitic root race, which, except in times of vmcontrollable

excitement and social decadence, keep in check the bubbling

• vivacity of the southern Latin. The keynote of this primitive 1^ racial character is overwhelming individuality ; and all that •j the Spaniards have done in the world, their transient imperial

I greatness, and their permanent tenacity, is owing to this qual-

. ity in its various manifestations.

For the Spaniard, until historically recent times, Spain was no fatherland; it is only so in a very limited sense to this day. The real fatherland of the Spaniard was his town, or the particular fold in the hills that formed his world. His countrymen were not those who spoke a similar tongue on the other side of the mountains, but those who made common cause with him on this side. The central thought of

• each man was his own independence of his fellows, and

• there was no subject in common to melt their personal pride

• into one mass. Then came the Roman, and infused during the centuries of his domination a glowing pride into each Spaniard's heart that he — the individual — was a part of the

Introduction xi

splendid empire whose eagles he carried in triumph from the Danube to far Caledonia. Under this impetus Spaniards became great — not as Spaniards, but as individual citizens of mighty Rome. Marcus Aurelius, Trajan, and Hadrian, the best of Roman emperors, were men of Spanish blood and birth. Martial, QuintilHan, Seneca, Lucan, and other Spaniards were as illustrious in Latin letters as their countrymen were as commanders of armies and organizers of states. But Rome fell, and Spain fell with her, for there was no cohesion apart from the common pride in the mother-state which had formed the temporary bond.

When later the Goth infused fresh vigour for a time^ in decadent Roman Spain, fervid Christianity knitted the men of Spain together, and again personal pride was the adhesive. To belong to the equal brotherhood before the' divine throne made the Iberian slave equal to the proudest- Gothic noble. Each man became great in his own eyes be- ' cause he formed part of the elect whom God regarded - with special individual care ; and again all Spaniards looked to one governing power. But this time the governors were priests. A theocracy with a puppet king was a bad organiA zation to defend a nation from the inrush of a conquering! people, and the theocracy was pushed back by the Moors j to the extreme corner of the kingdom, thence during eight; centuries of struggle gradually to reconquer by a continued crusade the land which theocracy had lost. Greatest of all the national uprisings of the Spanish people, was that which owed its strength to the mystic spiritual exaltation founded on individual pride, which swayed all Spain in the sixteenth century, and carried the race through far South America, xli The Spanish People

facing dangers and hardships beyond human thought. Carrying in one hand the cross and in the other the reeking sword, these conquerors of heretics in Europe, and of infidels in the distant unknown West, were saints especially chosen by the Lord to do His work. Murder and rapine -were not murder and rapine to them, for to them all things were licit, because each individual was set apart under the divine inspection, and was himself distinguished by the Lord. There was no withstanding such a feeling as this ; and it was the moral greatness born of spiritual exaltation, which gave Spain a predominance far greater than was warranted by her material resources or her real national standing at any time.

The feeling of individuality, upon which the sentiment was based, lay deep down in the root of the race, but cunning politicians deliberately turned it to the advantage of their ambitions. The bigotry inspired by the persecution of minorities, the cruelty of the Inquisition, which sickened the heart of the world and shamed hurnanity, were only so many means to an end. They inflamed the individual pride of each Spaniard of the majority in his own orthodoxy and his superiority over heretics, Jews, and Moors, and they welded the nation into a solid weapon, which might be used by the artful hand of the king or Caesar for his own ends. But the bond was a temporary one, for human thought cannot be enchained for ever; and Spain fell back into atoms, once more to begin the work of consolidation on more permanent bases.

The contributions of Spaniards to the mass of the civilization of the world have been great. Their share in the civilizing mission of the Roman Empire, and their serv-

Introduction xiii

ice to the Latin literature, which in the progress of their decadence they corrupted and degraded, were in the best days of Rome immense. Tlie aid lent by Spanish soldiers, and especially by Spanish weapons, both to the Punic hosts and the Roman legions, contributed no small part to the heroic] battles which finally insured the triumph of the Roman and' the Aryan in Europe. The preservation and continuance inl operation of the Roman system of jurisdiction in Spain, after the final disappearance of the Roman dominion, kept alive for the subsequent benefit of other nations, the principles upon which the civilized codes of to-day are based ; whilst ~| the fostering in Moslem Spain of the learning of the Greeks ,' and the science of the Eastern peoples, preserved for later i ages priceless treasures, which otherwise would have been lost to the world. And again, in the later days, evil as wasi the use to which rulers turned it, the mystic devotional chiv- ji airy of Spaniards of the middle ages, the idea of eager " sacrifice for Christ, infused into Europe generally a purer * and more altruistic ideal of religious duty than was becoming '• prevalent under the sensuous and beauty-seeking influence of : the Italian Renaissance. For this the world is Spain's debtor ; and the debt is increased when we turn to the literary contributions of Spaniards to the world's wealth. The modern 1 stage to a great extent owes its renaissance to Spanish genius, i just as the modern novel of adventure may be traced to Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes. These, and many other contributions of Spaniards to the civilization of modern Europe, are set forth in detail in the pages of this book ; but the main object has been to describe the development of a whole people, and to trace their vicissitudes to primitive xiv The Spanish People

causes. The book has been written with no idea of superseding or displacing ordinary histories, but only with the desire of supplementing and explaining them ; and although in some portions of the work more space has been given to dynastic and political events than was desired, it has been found necessary, in order to make the events that followed intelligible. I can only beg for indulgent judgment of a book so full of detail and of controversial points as this must necessarily be, and I trust that this story of the progressive evolution of a sympathetic and epoch-making people may commend itself to the student as well as to the general reader.

Martin A. S. Hume.

London.

INTRODUCTION. xv

Of all the kind friends who have in various ways assisted and encouraged me in the course of my work, it would be impossible to speak. Yet must I set down a word of the gratitude that I feel to Mr. Cecil Bendall — but for whom the work might never have been written ; and Mr. John Bury — but for whom it might never have been published, for their constant and practical help, counsel and criticism ; to Mr. John Ormsby, for many valuable suggestions, conveyed in most delightful letters ; and to Don Juan Riano, for suggestions no less valuable, and conveyed by word of mouth during my last visit to Madrid, where the genial hospitality of Sir Henry Drrmimond and Lady Wolff has added to the many agreeable recollections that I treasure of that much abused but to me ever sympathetic city. Among the many friends whom I have to thank for help in the preparation of my chapter on Spanish Music — a chapter which, I am not ashamed to confess, I have re-written four times — I cannot pass over the name of Dr. Culwick ,- and in the final revision of the pages dealing with Architecture as well as Music, and of other chapters in my second volume, I have been greatly and most kindly assisted by Dr. Mahaffy. To the librarians and bookmen, great and small, in Bhomshury, in St. James's Square, in Kildare Street, in Trinity College, Dublin, and in other public and private libraries at home and abroad, I am under a substantial debt of gratitude, of which so general an acknowledgment is very far from being an adequate requital.

I have, finally, to acknowledge with much gratitude, and not, I confess, without some pride, the liberality of the Boai-d of Trinity College in making a pecuniary grant to me in aid of the expenses of publication, a compliment whose value is enhanced by the manner in which the offer was conveyed to me, and the unconditional nature of the gift.

Christmas Eve, 1894.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. — Rival civilizations— Punic and Roman Republican Spain i

The Phoenicians in Spain — The Iberians — Primitive civilization— The influence of the Greeks — The Carthaginians — The Punic wars in Spain — The Romans — Rising of the Celtiberians — Viriatus — Numancia — The revolt of Sertorius — Spain under the Roman Empire — Primitive institutions of Spain — The municipality.

Chapter I Rival Civilizations Punic And Roman Republican

SPAIN

The Phoenicians in Spain — The Iberians — Primitive civilization — The influence of the Greeks— The Carthaginians — ^The Punic wars in Spain — The Romans — Rising of the Celtiberians — Viriatus — Numancia — The revolt of Sertorius — Spain under the Roman Empire — Primitive institutions of Spain — The municipality.

More than eleven hundred 3'ears before the birth of Christ the ships of Tyre and Sidon, groping their way from headland to headland along the north African coast, came to the gates of the world that led out of the Mediterranean into the immeasurable unknown. The vessels themselves were little better than' frail open boats propelled by oar and sail, but the crews were of the indomitable race of Shem, whose function in the world it was to carry ever farther west the ancient civilizations of the East, and to bring back, from the farthermost corners of the known earth the raw material for the luxury and splendour of the Pharaohs.

The poorness of their own cramped little land of Phoenicia had driven them to the sea for a livelihood and had made them, as they were, traders, mariners, and middlemen, whose commercial colonies were dotted all over the Mediterranean coasts and islands. From the sea, too, they had wrung the secret which provided them with their own special article of barter, whose beauty enabled them to cajole from the primitive peoples with whom they dealt the natural products and precious metals for which the Egyptians and Assyrians yearned. The spiky sea snails, whose crushed bodies dyed their cloth the rich Tyrian purple which added to the magnificence of emperors and dazzled the eyes of savages, had made the Phoenicians wealthy; but new markets and new supplies were ever needed ; and, pushing through the straits into the ocean, they set up in iioo b. c. their first peaceful^ Spanish colony, which they called Gadeira or Gadir (Cadiz), under the special protection of Melkarth (Hercules), the favourite god of the Tyrians, who had now supplanted the Sidonians as leaders of the Phoenician federation.

They found in possession of the land a people of strongly marked character, the impress of whose peculiarities is still deeply stamped upon the Spanish race after three thousand years of such varied intermixture as no other population in Europe has undergone. Whence the Iberians came has always been, and must remain, a matter of dispute. That they, like the Celts, were a branch of the great Indo-European family, and had spread along the south of Europe from the slopes of the Caucasus, was long held as an article of faith by scholars whose opinions were worthy of respect ; but more recent ■ investigations tend somewhat to shake belief in this theory. That they were a dolichocephalic (long-headed) race of short stature and very dark complexion, with plentiful curly black hair,* is certain, and they probably inhabited the whole of Spain in the neolithic age, either as successors of a still earlier race — of which it is possible that the Basques, who still form a separate people in the north of Spain and southwest of France may be the survivors — or as the primitive inhabitants dating from the prehistoric times when Africa and Europe, and possibly also America, were joined by land. In any case, what is known of their physique seems to negative the supposition that they were of Indo-Euro-

The Iberians 3

pean or Aryan origin; and to find their counterpart at the present time, it is only necessary to seek the Kabyl tribes of the Atlas, the original inhabitants of the African coast opposite Spain, who were driven back into the mountains by successive waves of invasion. Not alone in physique do these tribes resemble what the early Iberian must have been, but in the more unchanging peculiarities of character and institutions the likeness is easily traceable to the Spaniard of to-day. The organization of the Iberians, like that of the Atlas peoples, was clannish and tribal, and their chief characteristic, was their indomitable local independence. Warlike and brave, sober and light-hearted, the Kabyl tribesman has for thousands of years stubbornly resisted all attempts to weld him into a nation or subject him to a uniform dominion, while the Iberian, starting probably from the same stock, was blended with Aryan races possessing other qualities, and was submitted for six centuries to the unifying organization of the greatest governing race the world ever saw — the Romans ; and yet, withal, even at the present day, the main characteristic of the Spanish nation, like that of the Kabyl tribes, is lack of solidarity.

From the earliest dawn of history the centre of Spanish life, the unit of government, the birthplace of tradition, and the focus of patriotism have been the town. A Spaniard's pueblo means infinitely more to him than his town means to an Englishman or a Frenchman. With the Spaniard the idea of the state — of the nation — is superposed upon his more ancient traditions ; in the Iberian heart of him his pueblo comes first, and then, far after, his province, and, last of all, Spain. It may be argued that much of this dominant regional feeling, which lies at the root of all Spanish political problems, has been caused by the physical conformation of the country; split up by numerous mountain ranges into small divisions, by which intercommunication has been rendered diflScult, local jealousies perpetuated, and the fusion of races retarded; and this, it may be admitted, has produced its effect. But the Atlas tribes, with whom no Aryan ideas of state government have interfered, maintain in full vigour the same feeling as the Spaniard toward the town. Centuries of Roman administration broke up the tribal organization of the Iberians, which the Kabyls still retain, and substituted for it the idea of a centralized state, but on both sides of the Mediterranean the smallest unit of local government remains practically untouched from prehistoric times. The djemda and the pueblo, respectively, are the centres around which life revolves; the elected amin and the elected alcalde remain, as they always have been, the first and ever-present unit of authority. No master race has succeeded in welding the Kabyls, Touaregs, and Berbers into a state, as the Romans did with the mixed Iberians and Celts ; and in Spain to the present day, with its numberless paper constitutions and its feverish political experiments, the pueblo keeps its practical independence of a centralized government, which has federated pueblos into provinces, but has never absorbed or entirely destroyed the primitive germ of local administration. The village granary (posito) still stands in the Spanish village, as its counterpart does in the Atlas regions ; the town pasture and communal tillage land continue on both sides of the straits to testify to the close relationship of the early Iberians with the Afro- Semitic races, which included the Egyptian or Copt, the Kabyl, the Touareg, and the Berber. The language of the Iberians has been lost, but enough of it remains on coins of the later Celtiberian period to prove that it had a common root with Egyptian and the Saharan tongues, which extend from Senegal to Nubia on the hither side of the negro zone * With all this evidence before us we may be forgiven for doubting the correctness of the theory which ascribes a Caucasian origin to the primitive Iberian people.

* The original idea of the written character was apparently moulded upon the Phoenician, though little can now be deciphered.

The Coming of the Celts 5

Long before the dawn of recorded history, while mankind was hardly emerging from the neolithic stage, a vast incursion of Celts had come from the north and poured over the western Pyrenees into Spain.* Finding the first provinces they reached occupied by the Iberians — or perhaps even by the remains of a still earlier race whose descendants still inhabit them — the Celtic invaders directed their course to the west, and took possession of the whole of what now is Portugal and Galicia, where their blood is still dominant. The newcomers were fair in complexion, very tall and strong, and much more advanced in knowledge than were the Iberians ; while the need of obtaining food in their peregrinations had made them a pastoral and, to some extent, an agricultural people.

Through long unrecorded ages of tribal and local struggles these semi-savage peoples lived, fought, and died. On •the great elevated table-land which occupies the centre of Spain the races came together, and gradually amalgamated; the northwest and west of the country still remaining mainly Celtic, while in the south and east the Iberian blood predominated. By the time that the Phcenicians established their

*

* I am led to this conclusion by a most interesting series of discoveries recently made in an ancient copper mine excavated on the side of Mount Aramo, near Oviedo, in Asturias. The workings are very extensive, and a considerable number of polished stone hammers and needles, horn picks, etc., have been found,' but no iron or metal instruments. Sixteen skeletons have come to light, and from the great difference in the size of the bones and the shape of the skulls, it is evident that they belong to two different races, which have .worked the mine in succession; .a fact also proved by the smelting in one case being much more perfect than the other, and the pottery and wooden instruments near the larger skeletons being superior to those found in the workings of the smaller folk. Both races appear simply to have picked out the nodules of native copper for use, and to have been ignorant of the process of. reducing the ore. I am led by these facts to the conclusion that the Celts must have arrived in Asturias in the transition period between the stone and bronze ages, when the knowledge of mining was confined to the picking out and melting of soft native copper.

colony at Cadiz the Celtiberians on the Mediterranean coasts had attained a considerable knowledge of agriculture, and were adepts at smelting iron and other metals, while the tribes in the inaccessible interior were still to all intents and purposes barbarians, constantly engaged in tribal warfare, in which, in cases of emergency, the women fought by the side of the men. The admixture of Celt and Iberian was an ideal one for the production of a fighting race. The Celtic love of home and kindred, the powerful frames hardened by long sojourn in cold climates, and the highly strung poetic imagination engendered by a previous pastoral nomadic life made the Celts fierce and fervent protectors of their own ; while the Iberians, agile, daring, active, and enduring, with an overwhelming sense of individuality and independence, infused into the amalgamated race the element of personal pride in struggle and the conquest of an opponent, apart from the object of the contest.

This was the race, still imperfectly fused, that the Phoenician merchant-mariners found in possession of the Peninsula when they first set up their permanent establishment on the coast. But it was not the race that brought the men of Tyre flocking over to Spain after their brethren, to found other colonies besides Cadiz all along the south and east coast of the Peninsula. The vast fertile alluvial valleys of the Guadiana and the Guadalquivir, in the estuaries of which the first Phcenician settlements were made, gave rich pasture to flocks of sheep whose wool was the finest the newcomers had ever seen ; the dwarf oaks on the hillsides within view of the sea, abounded with those curious and mysterious little black, shining excrescences, of which the Persians made the splendid scarlet dye that ran the Tyrian purple so hard in the markets of the East; the Bay of Cadiz swarmed with tunny fish of a delicacy and size unknown before, and the salted tunny of Gadeira thenceforward for centuries shared with the pickled eels of Tartessus, at the mouth of the Gua-

The Products of Iberia 7

dalquivir, the admiring suffrages of the Greek and Syrian gourmets.

Nor was this all, for the Phoenicians found in the soil of Iberia vast stores of precious metals which made the Tyrians of Spain the richest people in the world. The quicksilver and cinnabar of Almaden, the silver, the gold, the copper and tin which served to provide the all-pervading bronze, the pearls, the corals, and the precious stones of the favoured land enabled the Phoenician colonies of Spain to vie in wealth, if not in power, with the mighty Carthage, their brother and rival on the opposite coast.* But if the Phoenicians took much wealth from Spain, they brought to it what was worth more than wealth — the science of writing in letters, which, like all Semitic people, they wrote from right to left, and in this were followed by the Celtiberians. Other things they taught the receptive barbarians among whom they lived. Lighthouses and landmarks, like the tower of Hercules at Corunna, were erected by them on the coast ; the art of working, refining, and manufacturing metals spread from the colonists to the native tribes ; and, in the course of time, the fine wools of Betica were manufactured by busy weavers in Spain itself, and sent, already dyed with the brilliant scarlet of the Iberian kermes, to Greece and Syria, to Rome and Carthage, and even to far-off Gaul and the " Tin Isles " beyond.

Thus for six hundred years the isolated Phoenician factories on the Iberian coast gradually and insensibly introduced the first germs of wealth and refinement into the life

* Some of the Greek writers seem to exaggerate the wealth of the Spanish mines to the extent of saying that the Phpenicians of Iberia cast their anchors of gold, and that the Carthaginians when they arrived in Andalusia were surprised to find the mangers and household vessels made of the same precious metal (see Antigiiedades de Espaiia, by Ambrosio de Morales, Alcala, 1577). But several large dishes, bowls, etc., in gold and silver of Phoenician and Carthaginian times have been found in Spain, and are described in " Spanish Industrial Art " by J. F. Riaiio.

of the people. The Greeks had simultaneously established themselves in colonies in the northeast of Spain, at Rhodas (now Rosas), the Balearic Isles, and later at Emporium (Ampurias), Denia, and Sagunto, and brought their share to the infant civilization of Spain. In neither case did the colonists come in the form of warriors or conquerors. The factories were protected by strong walls and stockade defences, and no attempt was made for centuries to subdue or govern the inland tribes. The Celtiberians of the coast in the course^ of time adapted their modes of life to those of the Phoenicians and Greeks who had settled in their midst, but a vast difiference existed in the influence exerted respectively by the two colonizing nations. The Phoenicians, simply traders and in constant touch with their mother country, and in later times, with Carthage, rarely identified themselves permanently with the country of their abode ; while the Greeks, who were driven to form colonies, not primarily by greed of gain, but by political convulsions, frequently broke off all dependence on their mother country, except in religious afifairs, and went their own way as self-governed communities in the new land of their choice. The influence, therefore, of the Phoenicians over the Celtiberians was mainly material, while the Greeks, who were much more sympathetic to the natives, in course of time infused into the latter political, religious, and moral ideas * which took root and produced important fruit.