C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Critical and Biographical Introduction
By Alfonso X of Castile (1221–1284)
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In the first year of his reign, however, he began debasing the coinage,—a favorite device of needy monarchs in his day,—and his people never forgave the injury. He coveted, naturally enough, the throne of the Empire, for which he was long a favorite candidate; and for twenty years he wasted time, money, and purpose, heart and hope, in pursuit of the vain bauble. His kingdom fell into confusion, his eldest son died, his second son Sancho rebelled against him and finally deposed him. Courageous and determined to the last, defying the league of Church and State against him, he appealed to the king of Morocco for men and money to reinstate his fortunes.
In Ticknor’s ‘History of Spanish Literature’ may be found his touching letter to De Guzman at the Moorish court. He is, like Lear, poor and discrowned, but not like him, weak. His prelates have stirred up strife, his nobles have betrayed him. If Heaven wills, he is ready to pay generously for help. If not, says the royal philosopher, still, generosity and loyalty exalt the soul that cherishes them.
In his “only loyal city” the broken man remained, until the Pope excommunicated Sancho, and till neighboring towns began to capitulate. But he had been wounded past healing. There was no medicine for a mind diseased, no charm to raze out the written troubles of the brain. “He fell ill in Seville, so that he drew nigh unto death…. And when the sickness had run its course, he said before them all: that he pardoned the Infante Don Sancho, his heir, all that out of malice he had done against him, and to his subjects the wrong they had wrought towards him, ordering that letters confirming the same should be written—sealed with his golden seal, so that all his subjects should be certain that he had put away his quarrel with them, and desired that no blame whatever should rest upon them. And when he had said this, he received the body of God with great devotion, and in a little while gave up his soul to God.”
This was in 1284, when he was fifty-eight years old. At this age, had a private lot been his,—that of a statesman, jurist, man of science, annalist, philosopher, troubadour, mathematician, historian, poet,—he would but have entered his golden prime, rich in promise, fruitful in performance. Yet Alfonso, uniting in himself all these vocations, seemed at his death to have left behind him a wide waste of opportunities, a dreary dearth of accomplishment. Looking back, however, it is seen that the balance swings even. While his kingdom was slipping away, he was conquering a wider domain. He was creating Spanish Law, protecting the followers of learning, cherishing the universities, restricting privilege, breaking up time-honored abuses. He prohibited the use of Latin in public acts. He adopted the native tongue in all his own works, and thus gave to Spanish an honorable eminence, while French and German struggled long for a learning from scholars, and English was to wait a hundred years for the advent of Dan Chaucer.
Greatest achievement of all, he codified the common law of Spain in ‘Las Siete Partidas’ (The Seven Parts). Still accepted as a legal authority in the kingdom, the work is much more valuable as a compendium of general knowledge than as an exposition of law. The studious king with astonishing catholicity examined alike both Christian and Arabic traditions, customs, and codes, paying a scholarly respect to the greatness of a hostile language and literature. This meditative monarch recognized that public office is a public trust, and wrote:—
Besides the ‘Siete Partidas,’ the royal philosopher was the author, or compiler, of a ‘Book of Hunting’; a treatise on Chess; a system of law, the ‘Fuero Castellano’ (Spanish Code),—an attempt to check the monstrous irregularities of municipal privilege; ‘La Gran Conquista d’Ultramar (The Great Conquest Beyond the Sea), an account of the wars of the Crusades, which is the earliest known specimen of Castilian prose; and several smaller works, now collected under the general title of ‘Opuscules Legales’ (Minor Legal Writings). It was long supposed that he wrote the ‘Tesoro’ (Thesaurus), a curious medley of ignorance and superstition, much of it silly, and all of it curiously inconsistent with the acknowledged character of the enlightened King. Modern scholarship, however, discards this petty treatise from the list of his productions.
His ‘Tablas Alfonsinas’ (Alfonsine Tables), to which Chaucer refers in the ‘Frankeleine’s Tale,’ though curiously mystical, yet were really scientific, and rank among the most famous of mediæval books. Alfonso had the courage and the wisdom to recall to Toledo the heirs and successors of the great Arabian philosophers and the learned Rabbis, who had been banished by religious fanaticism, and there to establish a permanent council—a mediæval Academy of Sciences—which devoted itself to the study of the heavens and the making of astronomical calculations. “This was the first time,” says the Spanish historian, “that in barbarous times the Republic of Letters was invited to contemplate a great school of learning,—men occupied through many years in rectifying the old planetary observations, in disputing about the most abstruse details of this science, in constructing new instruments, and observing, by means of them, the courses of the stars, their declensions, their ascensions, eclipses, longitudes, and latitudes.” It was the vision of Roger Bacon fulfilled.
At his own expense, for years together, the King entertained in his palace at Burgos, that their knowledge might enrich the nation, not only certain free-thinking followers of Averroës and Avicebron, but infidel disciples of the Koran, and learned Rabbis who denied the true faith. That creed must not interfere with deed, was an astonishing mental attitude for the thirteenth century, and invited a general suspicion of the King’s orthodoxy. His religious sense was really strong, however, and appears most impressively in the ‘Cantigas à la Vergen Maria’ (Songs to the Virgin), which were sung over his grave by priests and acolytes for hundreds of years. They are sometimes melancholy and sometimes joyous, always simple and genuine, and, written in Galician, reflect the trustful piety and happiness of his youth in remote hill provinces where the thought of empire had not penetrated. It was his keen intelligence that expressed itself in the saying popularly attributed to him, “Had I been present at the creation, I might have offered some useful suggestions.” It was his reverent spirit that made mention in his will of the sacred songs as the testimony to his faith. So lived and died Alfonso the Tenth, the father of Spanish literature, and the reviver of Spanish learning.