The Reformation

by Will Durant

  Spanish painting followed a similar evolution, but developed tardily, perhaps because the Moors gave here no help or lead. The Catalan frescoes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are inferior in design to the Altamira cave paintings of prehistoric Spain. Yet by 1300 painting had become a craze in the Peninsula; a thousand artists painted immense murals, huge altarpieces; some of these, from as early as 1345, have survived much longer than they deserved. In 1428 Jan van Eyck visited Spain, importing a powerful Flemish influence. Three years later the King of Aragon sent Luis Dalmau to study in Bruges; returning, Luis painted an all-too-Flemish Virgin of the Councilors. Thereafter Spanish painters, though still preferring tempera, more and more mixed their colors in oil.

  The age of the Primitives in Spanish painting culminated in Bartolomé Bormejo (d. 1498). As early as 1447 he made a name for himself with the Santo Domingo that hangs in the Prado. The Santa Engracia bought by the Gardner Museum of Boston, and the gleaming St. Michael of Lady Ludlow’s collection are almost worthy of Raphael, who came a generation later. But best of all is the Pietà (1490) in the Barcelona Cathedral: a bald, bespectacled Jerome; a dark and Spanish Mary holding her limp, haggard, lifeless Son; in the background the towers of Jerusalem under a lowering sky; and on the right a ruthless portrait of the donor, Canon Despla, uncombed and unshaved, resembling a bandit penitent but condemned, and suggesting Bermejo’s “dour conception of humanity.”58 Here Italian grace is transformed into Spanish force, and realism celebrates its triumph in Spanish art.

  The Flemish influence continued in Fernando Gallegos, and it produced a startling masterpiece in A Knight of the Order of Calatrava, by Miguel Sithium, a Fleming in the service of Isabella; this is one of the finest portraits in the National Gallery in Washington. But then again the Italian influence rose when Pedro Berruguete returned to Spain after a long experience in Italy. There he studied with Piero della Francesca and Melozzo da Forli, and absorbed their quiet Umbrian style. When Federigo of Urbino sought painters to adorn his palace he chose Justus von Ghent and “Pietro Spagnolo.” After the Duke’s death (1582) Pedro brought the Umbrian art to Spain, and painted famous altarpieces at Toledo and Ávila. The pictures ascribed to him in the Louvre, the Brera, the Prado, and the Cleveland Museum hardly support his present réclame as the Velásquez of the Catholic sovereigns, but in drawing and composition they seem superior to anything produced in Spain before him.

  Slowly the foreign stimuli were blending with the native genius to prepare for the maturer works of Alonso Coello and El Greco under Philip II, and the triumphs of Velásquez, Zurbarán, and Murillo in the Golden Age of Spain’s seventeenth century. Genius is an individual endowment of force and will, hot it is also a social heredity of discipline and skills formed in time and absorbed m growth. Genius is born and made

  VIII. SPANISH LITERATURE

  In letters the Italian ascendancy had to wait while Spain exchanged influences with medieval France. It was probably from Moslem and Christian Spain that the troubadours of Provence had taken their poetic forms and conceits; nevertheless John I of Aragon sent an embassy to Charles VI of France (1388), asking for troubadours from Toulouse to come to Barcelona and organize there a branch of their fraternity, the Gay Saber or Joyful Wisdom. It was done. At Barcelona and Tortosa poetic contests were held in Provençal fashion, and the composition and recitation of verses became a passion among the literate minority in Aragon and Castile. Lyrics of love or faith or war were sung by wandering juglares to a simple accompaniment of strings.

  In the next generation John II of Castile supported Italian models of poetry. Through Naples and Sicily, where Spaniards ruled, and through the University of Bologna, where Spanish youths like the Borgias studied, Italian moods and meters of verse swept into the Peninsula, and Dante and Petrarch found eager emulators in the Castilian tongue. Periodically the lyrics of the Spanish poets were collected in cancioneros, books of ballads chivalric in sentiment, Petrarchan in style. The Marqués de Santillana—statesman, scholar, patron, poet—imported the sonnet form from Italy, and compiled so soon a history of Spanish literature. Juan de Mena candidly imitated Dante in an epic poem, The Labyrinth, which did almost as much to establish Castilian as a literary language as The Divine Comedy had done for the Tuscan speech. Meanwhile Don Juan Manuel anticipated Boccaccio by writing dramatic tales, from one of which Shakespeare drew the quite incredible legend of Petruchio’s taming of a shrew.

  Romance continued to entrance all classes of readers. Amadis da Gaula was translated into Spanish (c. 1500) by García Ordóñez, who assured his readers that he had vastly improved upon the Portuguese original; and as this is lost we cannot gainsay him. Amadis, illegitimate son of an imaginary British princess, is exposed by her mother on the sea. He is rescued by a Scottish knight, and becomes a page to the queen of Scotland. Lisuarte, King of England, leaves his ten-year-old daughter Oriana at the Scottish court while he suppresses a usurper in his realm. The queen assigns the twelve-year-old Amadis as a page to Oriana, saying, “This is a child who shall serve you.“

  And she answered that it pleased her. And the child kept this word in his heart, in such wise that it never afterwards left it... and he was never, in all the days of his life, wearied with serving her. And this their love lasted as long as they lasted; but Amadis, who knew not at all how she loved him, held himself to be very bold in that he had placed his thoughts on her, considering both her greatness and her beauty, and never so much as dared to speak a word concerning it. And she too, though she loved him in her heart, took heed that she should not speak with him more than with another; but her eyes took great solace in showing to her heart what thing in the world she most loved.59

  It is a comfort to know that their love was triumphantly consummated, after tribulations as numerous before marriage in fiction as after it in life. There are many moments of tenderness, and some of nobility, in the long story; and Cervantes, vowing to destroy all such romances, spared this one as the best.

  Romance provided one source of the drama, which slowly evolved out of the mystery and morality plays, the popular farces, and the court masques. The oldest date in the history of the Spanish drama is 1492, when the dramatic dialogues of Juan del Encina were put upon the stage. Fernando de Rojas, a Converso, took a further step toward drama in La Celestina (1499), a story told throughout in dialogue, and divided into twenty-two acts; it was too long to be staged, but its vivid characterizations and sprightly dialogue prepared for the classic comedies of Spain.

  Scholarship was both hampered and fostered by the Church. While the Inquisition policed thought, leading ecclesiastics did much for learning and education. Italians like Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, coming to Spain in 1487, brought the news of the humanist movement, and Spaniards educated in Italy returned with the enthusiastic infection. At the Queen’s request Peter Martyr opened at her court, as Alcuin had done for Charlemagne seven centuries before, a school of classical languages and literatures; Princess Juana studied Latin dutifully on the way to insanity. Peter himself wrote the first history of the discoveries in America, under the title De rebus oceanis et novo orbe (1504 f.); the last two words shared with Vespucci’s earlier (1502?) use of the term to name the “New World.”

  Cardinal Ximenes, whose faith was as firm and sharp as steel, joined actively in the classical movement. In 1499 he founded the College of San Ildefonso, and in 1508 the University of Alcalá. There, in 1502, nine linguists under his supervision began one of the major achievements of Renaissance scholarship, the Biblia Polyglotta Compluti, or Complutensian Polyglot Bible,* the first complete edition of the Christian Scriptures in the original languages. To the Masoretic Hebrew text of the Old Testament and the Greek of the New the editors added, in parallel or subjoined columns, the Septuagint Greek translation, the Latin “Vulgate” version by Jerome, and a Syraic paraphrase of the Pentateuch. Leo X opened up for Ximenes’ staff the manuscripts of the Vatican Library; and three baptized Jews contributed their Hebraic learning.
The work of editing was completed in 1517, but the six volumes were not printed till 1522. Ximenes, anticipating death, urged on his savants. “Lose no time in the prosecution of our glorious task, lest, in the casualties of life, you lose your patron, or I have to lament the loss of those whose services are of greater price in my eyes than the wealth and honors of the world.”60 A few months before he died the final volume was presented to him with the compliments of his friends. Of all the acts of his administration, he told them, there was none better entitled than this to their congratulations. He projected an edition of Aristotle on the same scale, with a new Latin translation, but the brevity of his long life defeated him.

  IX. SOVEREIGN DEATH

  Isabella had preceded her energetic minister in the culminating adventure. With all her severity she was a woman of deep sensitivity, who bore bereavements more heavily than wars. In 1496 she buried her mother. Of her ten children five were stillborn or died in infancy, and two others died in early youth. In 1497 she lost her only son, her sole hope for an orderly succession, and in 1498 her best-beloved daughter, the Queen of Portugal, who might have united the Peninsula in peace. Amid these blows she suffered the daily tragedy of seeing her daughter Juana, now heiress-apparent to the throne, slowly going insane.

  Juana had married Philip the Handsome, Duke of Burgundy and son of the Emperor Maximilian I (1496). By him she bore two future emperors, Charles V and Ferdinand I. Whether because of a fickle temperament, or because Juana was already incompetent, Philip neglected her, and carried on a liaison with a lady of her court at Brussels. Juana had the charmer’s hair cut off, whereupon Philip swore he would never cohabit with his wife again. Hearing of all this, Isabella fell ill. On October 12, 1504, she wrote her will, directing that she should receive the plainest funeral, that the money so saved should be given to the poor, and that she should be buried in a Franciscan monastery within the Alhambra; “but,” she added, “should the King my Lord prefer his sepulcher in some other place, then my will is that my body should be transported and laid by his side, that the union which we have enjoyed in this world, and, through the mercy of God, may hope again for our souls in heaven, may be represented by our bodies in the earth.”61 She died November 24, 1504, and was buried as she had directed; but after Ferdinand’s death her remains were placed beside his in the cathedral of Granada. “The world,” wrote Peter Martyr, “has lost its noblest ornament.... I know none of her sex, in ancient or modern times, who in my judgment is at all worthy to be named with this incomparable woman.”62 (Margaret of Sweden had been too remote from Peter’s ken, and Elizabeth of England was still to be.)

  Isabella’s will had named Ferdinand as regent in Castile for a Philip absorbed in the Netherlands and a Juana moving ever more deeply into a consoling lunacy. Hoping to keep the Spanish throne from falling to the Hapsburgs in the person of Philip’s son Charles, the fifty-three-year-old Ferdinand hurriedly married (1505) Germaine de Foix, the seventeen-year-old niece of Louis XII; but the marriage increased the distaste of the Castilian nobles for their Aragonese master, and its only offspring died in infancy. Philip now claimed the crown of Castile, arrived in Spain, and was welcomed by the nobility (1506), while Ferdinand retired to his role as King of Aragon. Three months later Philip died, and Ferdinand resumed the regency of Castile in the name of his mad daughter. Juana la Loca remained technically Queen; she lived till 1555, but never, after 1507, left her royal palace at Tordesillas; she refused to wash or be dressed; and day after day she gazed through a window at the cemetery that held the remains of the unfaithful husband whom she had never ceased to love.

  Ferdinand ruled more absolutely as regent than before as king. Freed from the tempering influence of Isabella, the hard and vindictive elements in his character came to sharp dominance. He had already recovered Roussillon and Cerdagne (1493), and Gonzalo de Córdoba had conquered Naples for him in 1503. This violated an agreement signed by Philip with Louis XII at Lyons for the division of the Kingdom of Naples between Spain and France; Ferdinand assured the world that Philip had exceeded his instructions. He sailed to Naples, and took personal possession of the Neapolitan throne (1506). He suspected that Gonzalo wanted this seat for himself; when he returned to Spain (1507) he brought the Gran Capitan with him, and consigned him to a retirement that most of Spain considered an unmerited humiliation.

  Ferdinand had mastered everything but time. Gradually the wells of will and energy in him sank. His hours of rest grew longer, fatigue came sooner; he neglected the government; he became impatient and restless, morbidly suspicious of his most loyal servitors. Dropsy and asthma weakened him; he could hardly breathe in cities. In January 1516, he fled south to Andalusia, where he hoped to spend the winter in the open country. He fell ill on the way, and was at last persuaded to prepare for death. He named Ximenes regent for Castile, and his own illegitimate son, the Archbishop of Saragossa, regent for Aragon. He died January 23, 1516, in the sixty-fourth year of his life, the forty-second of his reign.

  No wonder Machiavelli admired him: here was a king who acted The Prince before its author thought of writing it. Ferdinand made religion a tool of national and military policy, filled his documents with pious phrases, but never allowed considerations of morality to overcome motives of expediency or gain. No one could doubt his ability, his competent supervision of the government, his discerning choice of ministers and generals, his invariable success in diplomacy, persecution, and war. Personally he was neither greedy nor extravagant; his appetite was for power rather than for luxury, and his greed was for his country, to make it one and strong. He had no belief in democracy; under him local liberties languished and died; he was readily convinced that the old communal institutions could not be expanded to govern successfully a nation of so many states, faiths, and tongues. His achievement, and Isabella’s, was to replace anarchy with monarchy, weakness with strength. He paved the way for Charles V to maintain the royal supremacy despite long absences, and for Philip II to concentrate ill the government in one inadequate head. To accomplish this he was guilty of what to our time seems barbarous intolerance and inhuman cruelty, but seemed to his contemporaries a glorious victory for Christ.

  Ximenes as regent zealously preserved the absolutism of the throne, perhaps as an alternative to a relapse into feudal fragmentation. Though now eighty years old, he ruled Castile with inflexible will, and defeated every effort of the feudality or the municipalities to regain their former powers. When some nobles asked by what right he curbed their privileges, he pointed not to the insignia of office on his person but to the artillery in the courtyard of the palace. Yet his will to power was subordinated to his sense of duty, for he repeatedly urged the young King Charles to leave Flanders and come to Spain to assume the royal authority. When Charles came (September 17, 1517), Ximenes hurried north to meet him. But Charles’s Flemish counselors had seconded the Castilian nobles in giving him so unfavorable a report of the Cardinal’s administration and character that the King, still an immature youth of seventeen, dispatched a letter to Ximenes thanking him for his services, deferring an interview, and bidding him retire to his see at Toledo for a merited rest. Another letter, dismissing the old zealot from all political office, reached him too late to deepen his humiliation; he had died on November 8, 1517, aged eighty-one. People wondered how, though apparently incorruptible, he had amassed the great personal fortune that his will left to the University of Alcalá.

  He ended for Spain an age rich in honors, horrors, and forceful men. The aftermath suggests that the victory of the crown over Cortes and communes removed the medium through which the Spanish character might have expressed and maintained independence and variety; that the unification of faith was secured at the cost of riveting upon Spain a machine for the suppression of original thought on first and last things; that the expulsion of unconverted Jews and Moors undermanned Spanish commerce and industry just when the opening of the New World called for economic expansion and improvement; that the progressive invo
lvement of Spain in the politics and wars of France and Italy (later of Flanders, Germany, and England), instead of turning policy and enterprise toward the development of the Americas, laid unbearable burdens upon the nation’s resources in money and men. This, however, is hindsight, and judges the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella in terms that no European people of their time would have understood. All religious groups except for a few Moslems and Anabaptists persecuted religious dissent; all governments—Catholic France and Italy, Protestant Germany and England—used force to unify religious faith; all countries hungered for the gold of the “Indies,” East or West; all used war and diplomatic deceit to ensure their survival, extend their boundaries, or increase their wealth. To all Christian governments Christianity was not a rule of means but a means of rule; Christ was for the people, Machiavelli was preferred by the kings. The state in some measure had civilized man, but who would civilize the state?