[182]Chronicle, i. 20.
[183]Chronicle, i. 1.
[184]The circumstances about this marriage are so contradictory to modern usages, that the whole story has been regarded as a fable. Abundant evidence, however, of the marriage exists; and as that competent judge of Spanish manners, Mr. Southey, observes, “The circumstances of the marriage are not to be disbelieved for their singularity: had such circumstances appeared incredible or repugnant to common feeling, they would not have been invented;—whether they be true or false, they are equally characteristic of the state of manners.”
[185]Chronicle, i. 13.
[186]Chronicle, ii. 1.
[187]Chronicle, ii. 17.
[188]These last few words are judiciously placed in the Chronicle of the Cid by Mr. Southey. They are not contained in the ancient chronicles and ballads, but they are referred to by some, and implied in all.
[189]Chronicle, iii. 10, 11.
[190]Chronicle, iii. 13-16.
[191]Chronicle, iii. 17-22. Müller, in his Dissertation on the Cid, speaks as positively that the money was repaid, as if the receipt in full for all demands, authenticated by the city of Burgos, were lying on his table. There is no evidence of the repayment in the ancient writers; and when we consider that the Jews were always treated in Spain far worse than the Musulmans, we cannot conclude that the Cid would consider men whom he had cheated as entitled to justice.
[192]I borrow from Mr. Frere’s translation of part of the Cid.
[193]Chronicle, iv. 1-11.
[194]Chronicle, iv. 14-17.
[195]Chronicle, v. 17-20.
[196]Chronicle, vi. 29. The old Spanish writers observe that the Cid knew how to make a good knight, as a good groom knows how to make a good horse.
[197]Chronicle, vii. 19. Ximena was like the famous Oriana in Amadis of Gaul, who was always affrayed at military preparations.
[198]He had let it grow out of respect to Alfonso; and he intended it should be a matter of admiration both with Moors and Christians. Poema del Cid, v. 1230, &c.
[199]Chronicle, books 9 and 10. Every reader of Spanish history knows how fiercely the story of the Infantes has been discussed. I shall not burden my pages with a statement of the arguments, but I think that the balance is very much in favour of the truth of the story. Mr. Southey’s remark is judicious. “The conduct of the Infantes of Carrion is certainly improbable. There are instances enough of such cruelty, but none of such folly. Yet nothing can be so improbable as that such a story should be invented and related so soon after their death; of persons who had really existed, and were of such rank: and that it should be accredited and repeated by all the historians who lived nearest the time.”
[200]Hallam’s Middle Ages, iii. 482. 2d edit.
[201]The world has generally been acquainted with the fall of Grenada by the work of Genez Perez de Hita, which was translated into French, and acquired popularity when Florian made it the foundation of his Gonsalvo de Cordova. There is very little historical truth in the volume, and the value of the pictures of manners it contains has been much overrated: those pictures, moreover, are Moorish rather than chivalric, and therefore not of service to the present work.
[202]Warton on the Gesta Romanorum, in the first volume of his History of English Poetry.
[203]De Marca, Marca Hispanica, p. 1428.
[204]Con razon (dize) nos quitais las armas del linage, pues las ponemos à tan graves peligros, y traucos: vos las mereceis mejor, que como mas recatado, les teneis mejor guardados.
Mariana, Hist. de Espana, xiii. 7.
[205]Mariana, xiii. 7. This last story of Garcia Perez de Vargas is the subject of a beautiful ballad, which Mr. Lockhart has translated. The stanzas regarding the scarf are particularly pleasing.
“He look’d around, and saw the scarf, for still the Moors were near,And they had pick’d it from the sward, and loop’d it on a spear.‘These Moors,’ quoth Garci Perez, ‘uncourteous Moors they be—Now, by my soul, the scarf they stole, yet durst not question me!“‘Now reach once more my helmet.’ The esquire said him nay,‘For a silken string why should you fling, perchance, your life away?’—‘I had it from my lady,’ quoth Garci, ‘long ago,And never Moor that scarf, be sure, in proud Seville shall show.’—“But when the Moslems saw him, they stood in firm array:—He rode among their armed throng, he rode right furiously.—‘Stand, stand, ye thieves and robbers, lay down my lady’s pledge,’He cried, and ever as he cried, they felt his faulchion’s edge.“That day when the lord of Vargas came to the camp alone,The scarf, his lady’s largess, around his breast was thrown:Bare was his head, his sword was red, and from his pommel strungSeven turbans green, sore hack’d I ween, before Garci Perez hung.”Lockhart’s Ancient Spanish Ballads, p. 75.
[206]This is another and singular proof of the generally acknowledged excellence of Italian armour.
[207]Libro del paso honroso, defendido por el excelente caballero Sueno de Quinones, copilado de un libro antiquo de mano, por Juan de Pineda. 1588. Reprinted, Madrid, 1783.
[208]Paston, Letters, vol. i. p. 6.
[209]Monstrelet, vol. vii. c. 82.
[210]Sismondi. Hist. des Rep. Ital. vii. 439. The Germans were more observant of the forms than of the spirit of chivalry. The reader remembers that the spur, the golden spur, was the great mark of knighthood; and every ancient church in this country, or a copy of its antique monumental effigies, will inform him of the custom of placing a spur over or upon a knight’s tomb. This was also a custom among the Germans, who, besides, reposited spurs in churches, when age, infirmity, or other causes, unnerved the arm of the knight: moreover, they reposited spurs in churches as memorials of victory. In the fourteenth century five hundred pair of them, which had been taken in a victory over the French, were hung round the walls of the church at Gröningen. Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen, p. 212.
[211]Olaus. Hist. Septent. lib. xiv. c. 7.
[212]Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, from the Teutonic and Scandinavian Romances, p. 76.
[213]Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen, vol. i. p. 59.
[214]Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen, vol. i. p. 60.
[215]Ibid. p. 71.
[216]Froissart, vol. i. c. 433.
[217]Froissart, liv. ii. c. 125.
[218]Schmidt, iv. 492.
[219]Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen, p. 108.
[220]Ibid. vol. i. p. 7.
[221]Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen, vol. ii. p. 61.
[222]Ibid. vol. ii. p. 272.
[223]Ottokar v. Hornek, c. 268, &c. in his Annals of Austria.
[224]Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen, vol. ii. last chapter.
[225]Muratori, Dissert. 29.
[226]Ibid. 23.
[227]Giannone, lib. i.
[228]Muratori, Annali d’Italia, vol. v. part 2. p. 171, &c. Even the Modenese librarian throws aside his dust and parchments, and warms himself into a humanised being at this story; while Sismondi passes it over with frigid indifference.
[229]Muratori, Dissert. 49.
[230]See in the twenty-seventh Dissertation of Muratori (Della Milizia de secoli rozzi in Italia) for a minute account of the armour of these different classes. I observe that Mr. Perceval, in his History of Italy, vol. i. p. 197., holds a different opinion from that which I have expressed in the text. Instead of thinking that the change in the military art formed one of the causes which hastened the overthrow of the Lombard liberties, he contends that, perhaps, it might be more correctly numbered among the circumstances which, after that overthrow had been accomplished, perpetuated the work of slavery.
[231]Perceval’s History of Italy, vol. i. chap. 5. part 1.
[232]Monstrelet, vol. xi. p. 328.
[233]Muratori, Dissert. 23. Muratori describes from a contemporary chronicle the entrance of Charles. The carriage of the Queen seems to have excited great astonishment, as carriages were in those days seldom used by ladies, and seldomer by men.
[234]Giannone, Istoria Civile di Napoli, lib. xx. c. 3. s. 1.
[235]When that political coxcomb, Cola de Rienzi, thought fit to be knighted, he would not bathe in the ordinary way, but made use of the vase wherein, according to tradition, Constantine had been baptised. Vita di Cola Rienzi, c. 25.
[236]Muratori, Dissert. 29. 53.
[237]Sacchetti, Novelle, c. 153.
[238]Muratori, Dissert. 53. Thus, when Hildebrand Guatasca, in 1260, was made a knight at the expence of the city of Arezzo, he swore fidelity to his lord, or, as grammarians would have it, his lady, the good city that had knighted him.
[239]Muratori, Dissert. vol. ii. c. 29. p. 16.
[240]Muratori, Scriptores Rerum Italicarum, vol. xii. p. 535.
[241]Non ferro sed vino; non lanceis sed caseis; non ensibus sed utribus; non hastibus sed verubus onerantur.
[242]Polycraticus, p. 181.
[243]Lansdowne Manuscripts, British Museum, No. 285. Article 41. The manuscript breaks off here; but the result of the joust is of no importance to my argument.
[244]Brantome, Œuvres, les Vies des Dames illustres, vol. i. p. 410, &c. Brantome relates this story on the authority of an old-Italian book on Duels, written by one Paris de Puteo.
[245]Gesta Stephan. p. 962., cited in Turner’s England, vol. i. p. 461. 8vo.