When Fernando (Ferdinand III.), the conqueror of Andalusia, died in 1252, he was indeed the king of the two, or even the three, religions. The Jews and the Mahommedans formed a The Jews and the Mahommedans. very large part of his subjects. We have no means of estimating their numbers, but there is much probability that together they formed not much less than a half of the population. The Jews, who had suffered cruelly from the brutal fanaticism of the Almohades, had done a great deal to forward the conquest of Andalusia. They were repaid by the confidence of the king, and the period which includes the reign of Fernando and lasts till the end of the 14th century was the golden age of their history in Spain. In 1391 the preaching of a priest of Seville, Fernando Martinez, led to the first general massacre of the Jews, who were envied for their prosperity and hated because they were the king’s tax collectors. But the history of the persecution and expulsion of the Jews is the same everywhere except in date. The story of the Mudejares and Moriscoes is peculiarly Spanish. In the Christian advance they were from the beginning first subjected and then incorporated. As far north as Astorga there is still a population known as the Maragatos, and familiar to all Spain as carters and muleteers. This marked type of the Leonese of modern times represents a Berber colony cut off among the Christians, and christianized at an early date, who went on using Arab and Berber names long after their conversion. They are only the most conspicuous example of a process which was common to all the Peninsula. As the Christians worked down to the south they found an existing Mahommedan population. To reduce them to pure slavery would, in the case of Castile at least, have been dangerous, and would also have been offensive to the Christians, who were themselves fighting for emancipation. To expel them would have been to have the soil untilled. Therefore the king, the nobles, the Church and the military orders combined to give them protection. For them, as for the Jews, the 13th and 14th centuries were a golden age. By the end of the 14th the persecutions began. Forced conversion prepared the way for expulsion, which came in the reign of Philip III. (1598–1621). But Expulsion before the end was reached all had been persuaded or forced into Christianity, had ceased to be Mudejares, Expulsion of the Moriscoes. and had become Moriscoes. In the majority of cases the conversion had occurred so long ago that the memory of the time when they were Mahommedans was lost, and multitudes of the children of Mudejares remained. The Mozárabes again—the Christians who had always lived under The Mahommedan rule—were an element of importance The Mozárabes. in medieval Spain. They had learnt to write in Arabic, and used Arabic letters even when writing Latin, or the corrupt dialect of Latin which they spoke. The conquest of Toledo by Alphonso Vi. first brought the Christians into contact with a large body of these Arabized Spaniards, and their influence was considerable. By Alphonso they were favoured. He stamped his name on his coins in Arabic letters. It is said with probability that one of the early kings of Aragon, Peter I., could write no other letters than the Arabic. The Mozarabes were treated under the kings of the reconquest as separate bodies with their own judges and law, which they had been allowed to keep by the Moslem rulers. That code was the forum judicum of the Visigoths, the fuero juzgo, as it was called in the “romance” of later times and in Castilian. The Mozarabes brought in the large Arabic element, which is one of the features of the Castilian language. A part of the work of christianizing the Spain of the 13th century, and not the least part, was done by the monks of Cluny introduced by the French wife of Alphonso VI. To them was due the impulse given to the reform of the church, and to education. The foundation of the studium generale of Palencia in 1212 by Alphonso IX. was an outcome of the movement. It fell in the troubles following his death, but Fernando III. revived it by the foundation of the university of Salamanca, which dates from 1245. The church and the university were the great promoters of the effort to secure religious unity which began in the 14th and produced its full effects in the 17th century. How far the character, habits and morality of the Christian Spaniards were affected by Oriental influences is not a question which it is easy to answer. To some extent they no doubt were coloured. Such a social institution as the form of marriage known by the name of barragania shows visible traces of Eastern influence. In so far as it was a mere agreement of a man and woman to live together as husband and wife, it had precedents both Roman and Teutonic. There was also Roman and Teutonic example for recognizing the children of such a union as having rights of inheritance. On the other hand the name is Arabic, and so is the term applied to the children, hijos de ganancia, sons of the strange woman. Moreover the Oriental character of this union, be its origin what it may, is visible from the fact that it was polygamous. The only insuperable barrier to a barragania was the previous marriage “with the blessing,” the full religious marriage, of the woman to another man. A married man might be united in barragania to a woman other than his lawful wife, and the children of that connexion, though not fully legitimate, were not bastards. The most signal example among many which could be quoted is that of Peter the Cruel (1350–1367), who, though married to Blanche of Bourbon, was abarraganado to Maria de Padilla. He left his kingdom to the daughters she bore him, and their quasi legitimacy was recognized not only by the Cortes during King Peter’s life, but abroad. John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, married the elder of the daughters of Maria de Padilla, and claimed the crown of Castile by right of his wife. The clergy, who were debarred from the religious marriage by the discipline of the church, were commonly abarraganado all through the middle ages. The sumptuary laws, which required the barraganas of priests to wear a red border to their dresses, recognized them as a known and tolerated class.
The work of political unification was essentially more difficult than the christianization of Spain. The great common institution of the church, common enthusiasms, prejudices and Problem of the Unification of Spain. envies, were available for the second. The first had to contend with deeply rooted differences of national character and of class. The Galician who spoke, and Soala still speaks, a language of his own, was profoundly separated from the Andalusian. The Basque, who till much later times practically included the Navarrese, was a man of another nationality and another speech from the Castilian. And what is true of Castile and Leon applies equally to Aragon. Aragonese, Catalans and Valencians were National Differences. as different as Galicians, Basques, Castilians and Andalusians. Aragon spoke a dialect of Castilian. Catalpnia and Valencia, together with the Balearic Islands, spoke, and speak, dialects of the southern French, the so-called Limose, though it was not the language of the Limousin. And the causes of division did not end here. The word “commonwealth” had no meaning either east or west of the Iberian range. Every one of the kingdoms grouped round the two sovereigns who shared modern Spain was itself a loose conglomeration of classes. Mention has already been made of the Jew and the Mudejar. These were more or less forcibly absorbed or brutally expelled. But the distinctions between class Class Distinctions. noble and not noble, between town and country, were in the very fibre of all the Spanish peoples. Expulsion was impossible and combination only attainable by mutual agreement, and that was never secured. High mountain barriers and deep river courses had separated the Spaniards locally. They were more subtly and incurably separated by traditional and legal status. Speaking generally, and with the proviso that though names might differ from region to region, the facts did not; it may be said that Spain could be classified as follows: Under the crown of Castile all the territory was either abadengo, realingo, salariego, behetria, or it belonged to some town, big or little, which had its carta pueblo or town charter, its own fuero Systems of Land Tenure. (forum) or law. Abadengo was land of the church, realingo domain of the crown, salariego land of the nobles. Behetria is less easy to translate. The word is the romance form of benefactoria. Behetrias, called “plebeian lordships,” were districts and townships of peasants who were bound to have a lord, and to make him payments in money or in kind, but who had a varying freedom of choice in electing their lord. Some were described as “from sea to sea, and seven times a day,” that is to say they could take him anywhere in the king’s dominions from the Bey of Biscay to the Straits of Gibraltar, and change him as often as they pleased. Others were de linage, that is to say, bound to take their lord from certain lineages. Their origin must probably be sought in the action of communities of Mozarabes, Christians living under Moslem rule as rayahs, who put themselves under Christian chiefs of the early days of the reconquest for The Towns. the benefice of their protection. They were mainly in old Castile. By the end of the middle ages they had disappeared. The chartered towns, in Spain east and west, were practically republics living under their own carta pueblo with their own fuero or law. All charters were not granted by the king. Many of them were given by nobles or ecclesiastics, but required the confirmation of the king. And in this country, where all was local law usage and privilege, where uniformity was unknown, all charters were not held by towns. In many cases the serfs in the course of their struggle for freedom extorted charters and fueros. The greater chartered towns had their surrounding comarcas, answering to the “county” of an Italian city, over which they exercised jurisdiction. In time the villages dependent on a chartered city, as they grew to be towns themselves, fought for, and in many cases won, emancipation, which they then sought to have confirmed by the king and proceeded to symbolize by setting up their own gallows in the market-place. The church had won exemption from the payment of taxes by no general law, but by The clergy particular privilege to this or that chapter, bishopric The Clergy and the Nobles. or monastery. The nobles claimed, and were allowed, exemption from taxation. Church and nobles alike were for ever extending their borders by purchase, or trying to do so by force. They conferred their exemptions on the land they acquired, thus throwing the burden of taxation on the towns and the non-nobles with increasing weight. But in this land, where nothing was consistent, there was in reality no sharp division except in the smaller and feudal portion—called Aragon for convenience—and save as between Christian and non-Christian, noble and non-noble. The necessities of the reconquest made it obligatory that all the dwellers
