Spanish Life in Town and Country | Page 6

of such
lunatics as Felipe II. and the following Austrian monarchs, each
becoming more and more effete and more and more mad. The very
doubtful "glory" of the reign of the Catholic Kings in having driven out
the Moors after eight centuries of conflict and effort, proved, in fact, no
advantage to the country; but twenty thousand Christian captives were
freed, and every reader of history must, for the moment, sympathise
with the people who effected this freeing of their country from a
foreign yoke.
Looking at the marvellous tracery of the church of San Juan de los
Reyes at Toledo, picked out by the actual chains broken off the
miserable Christian captives, and hanging there unrusted in the fine air
and sunshine of the country for over four hundred years, one's heart
beats in sympathy with the pride of the Spaniards in their Catholic
Kings. But Toledo, alas! is dead; the centre of light and learning is
mouldering in the very slough of ignorance, and Christianity compares
badly enough with the rule of Arab and Jew.
Nevertheless, it must be said that, had matters been left as Isabella and
Ferdinand left them, Spain might have benefited by the example of her
conquerors, as other countries have done, and as she herself did during
the Roman occupation. Philip II. was too wise to expel the richest and
most industrious of his subjects so long as they paid his taxes and, at
least, professed to be Christians. It was not until the reign of Philip III.
and his disgraceful favourite Lerma, himself the most bigoted of
Valencian "Christians," that, by the advice of Ribera, the Archbishop of
Valencia, these industrious, thrifty, and harmless people were
ruthlessly driven out. They had turned Valencia into a prolific
garden,--even to-day it is called the huerta,--their silk manufactures
were known and valued throughout the world; their industry and
frugality were, in fact, their worst crimes; they were able to draw
wealth from the sterile lands which "Christians" found wholly
unproductive. "Since it is impossible to kill them all," said Ribera, the
representative of Christ, he again and again urged on the King their
expulsion.

The nobles and landowners protested in vain. September 22, 1609, is
one of the blackest--perhaps, in fact, the blackest--of all days in the
disastrous annals of Spain. The Marqués de Caracena, Viceroy of
Valencia, issued the terrible edict of expulsion. Six of the oldest and
"most Christian" Moriscos in each community of a hundred souls were
to remain to teach their modes of cultivation and their industries, and
only three days were allowed for the carrying out of this most wicked
and suicidal law. In the following six months one hundred and fifty
thousand Moors were hounded out of the land which their ancestors
had possessed and enriched for centuries. Murcia, Andalucia, Aragon,
Cataluña, Castile, La Mancha, and Estremadura were next taken in
hand. In these latter provinces the cruel blunder was all the worse, since
the Moors had intermarried with the Iberian inhabitants, and had really
embraced the Christian religion, so called.
Half a million souls, according to Father Bleda, in his _Defensio Fidei_,
were thrust out, with every aggravation of cruelty and robbery. No
nation can commit crimes like this without suffering more than its
victims. Spain has never to this day recovered from the blow to her
own prosperity, to her commerce, her manufactures, and her
civilisation dealt by the narrow-minded and ignorant King, led by a
despicable favourite, and the fanatical bigot, Ribera. With the Moors
went almost all their arts and industries; immense tracts of country
became arid wastes: Castile and La Mancha barely raise crops every
second year where the Moriscos reaped their teeming harvest, and
Estremadura from a smiling garden became a waste where wandering
flocks of sheep and pigs now find a bare subsistence. Nor was this all.
Science and learning were also driven out with the Arab and Jew;
Córdoba, like Toledo, vanished, as the centre of intellectual life. In
place of enlightened agriculture, irrigation of the dry land, and the
planting of trees, the peasant was taught to take for his example San
Isidro, the patron saint of the labourer, who spent his days in prayer,
and left his fields to plough and sow themselves; the forests were cut
down for fuel, until the shadeless wastes became less and less
productive, and the whole land on the elevated plains, which the Moors
had irrigated and planted, became little better than a desert.

It was not only in the mother country that frightful acts of bigotry and
lust for wealth were enacted. In Peru the Spaniards found a splendid
civilisation among the strange races of the Incas, a condition of order
which many modern states might envy, a religion absolutely free from
fetish worship,