Note 350 — Chapter X

To learn through what curious transformations the same ideas can be made to pass, it may be worth while to compare, in the “Crónica General,” 1604, (Parte III. f. 6,) the original account of the famous battle of Covadonga, where the Archbishop Orpas is represented picturesquely coming upon his mule to the cave in which Pelayo and his people lay, with the tame and elaborate account evidently taken from it in this Chronicle of Roderic (Parte II. c. 196); then with the account in Mariana, (Historia, Lib. VII. c. 2,) where it is polished down into a sort of dramatized history; and, finally, with Southey’s “Roderic, the Last of the Goths,” (Canto XXIII.,) where it is again wrought up to poetry and romance. It is an admirable scene both for chronicling narrative and for poetical fiction to deal with; but Alfonso the Wise and Southey have much the best of it, while a comparison of the four will at once give the poor “Chronicle of Roderic or the Destruction of Spain” its true place.

Another work, something like this Chronicle, but still more worthless, was published, in two parts, in 1592-1600, and seven or eight times afterwards; thus giving proof that it long enjoyed a degree of favor to which it was little entitled. It was written by Miguel de Luna, in 1589, as appears by a note to the first part, and is called “Verdadera Historia del Rey Rodrigo, con la Perdida de España, y Vida del Rey Jacob Almanzor, traduzida de Lengua Arábiga,” etc., my copy being printed at Valencia, 1606, 4to. Southey, in his notes to his “Roderic,” (Canto IV.,) is disposed to regard this work as an authentic history of the invasion and conquest of Spain, coming down to the year of Christ 761, and written in the original Arabic only two years later. But this is a mistake. It is a bold and scandalous forgery, with even less merit in its style than the elder Chronicle on the same subject, and without any of the really romantic adventures that sometimes give an interest to that singular work, half monkish, half chivalrous. How Miguel de Luna, who, though a Christian, was of an old Moorish family in Granada, and an interpreter of Philip II., should have shown a great ignorance of the Arabic language and history of Spain, or, showing it, should yet have succeeded in passing off his miserable stories as authentic, is certainly a singular circumstance. That such, however, is the fact, Conde, in his “Historia de la Dominacion de los Arabes,” (Preface, p. x.,) and Gayangos, in his “Mohammedan Dynasties of Spain,” (Vol. I. p. viii.,) leave no doubt,—the latter citing it as a proof of the utter contempt and neglect into which the study of Arabic literature had fallen in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.