Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Inventories have come down to us of what Carlos lugged out to Yuste: magnificent tapestries, choice furnishings, paintings by Titian and jeweled bric-a-brac. The cells of the monastery were for his entourage; for him a special house was built with a man-made lake under his window so that he could fish for trout from his living room. His kitchens were supervised by a Portuguese who had been with him for years, a cook much addicted to heavy German sauces which, when accompanied by gigantic quantities of alcohol, inflamed his gout. When an attack came, Carlos retreated for a few days to a salubrious diet, then gorged himself on slabs of red beef and fish, both bad for gout. He insisted upon hors d’oeuvres of jellied eel and stewed partridge and loved desserts of the richest and heaviest sort. Such a diet alone would have insured the return of his gout, but he was also insanely fond of anchovies; his staff saw to it that little kegs of them were sent ahead whenever he took a trip. Naturally, when he had eaten his quota of salted anchovies he generated a huge thirst, which he slaked with large bottles of beer kept in buckets of snow brought down from the mountains.

  When I read these new researches on Carlos the ascetic recluse of Yuste, I felt very close to him, for I too suffer from gout and I too crave anchovies above any other food; in this matter Spain has been a temptation to me, a kind of self-inflicted purgatory in which those marvelous little fish stare at me from every bar, in every salad, and I had real tears in my eyes when I read of how one day Carlos, after a long trip across the countryside, came to an inn where his keg of anchovies waited, only to find that they had been so jostled by horses coming across the mountains, they were reduced to a formless pulp. Today, thank heaven, Swedish research men have developed a simple pill which controls gout, and when I read the letters of Carlos and Felipe, for the latter inherited the disease in even more virulent form, and see how they hobbled about much of their time and developed the evil tempers which they vented on their underlings, I reflect that the history of Spain might have been much modified had the two kings been given not buckets of anchovies but a supply of Swedish pills.

  The strangest fact about Carlos was not his retirement, nor his lust for anchovies, nor his extended absence from Spain, but that he ruled the country from 1517 to 1555 without being legally king, for during these years his mother, Juana la Loca, lived hidden away in a filthy room that we shall visit later. She was unquestionably Queen of Spain, and legal documents during the period bear her name first, followed by that of Carlos as her executor. She died on April 11, 1555, and Carlos abdicated the Spanish part of his holdings on January 16, 1556, so that he did finally acquire the kingship—but for only nine months. Scholars in increasing numbers are turning up evidence which suggests that Juana was not really mad but that it was to her son’s advantage to keep her penned up, which he did.

  Carlos V, this little man called upon to wage vast struggles, this least of the quadrumvirate—Henry of England, Francis of France, Suleiman of Turkey, Carlos of Spain—seemed at the time to be victor by virtue of his obstinacy and his dedication to one religious principle. It required the passage of two centuries to prove how wrong his decisions had been, how hollow his victories. The ideas of Francis and Henry blossomed into great kingdoms and empires, whereas those of Carlos withered into national disaster. It is such thoughts that torment one at the monastery of Yuste.

  IV

  CORDOBA

  The traveler wishing to observe Islamic Spain has his choice of two cities, Granada with its Alhambra or Córdoba with its Great Mosque (in Spanish, Mezquita). Of the two the former is by a considerable degree the more exciting and also the easier to absorb, for its buildings, gardens and geographic setting are immediately recognizable as significant. It would take a dull man to miss the point of Granada, for its Alhambra is a museum of Islamic memories.

  But for three personal reasons I chose Córdoba. It was more prosaic and therefore showed its Islamic heritage with less hyperbole. It had been the intellectual center of Islam, so that its influence lasted long after the expulsion of the last Moors from Granada. And in Córdoba had lived four of the Spaniards who were most important to me and I wanted to see where these excellent men had lived and why they had been born here and not in some more congenial place. It is interesting but accidental that each gained his greatest fame after he had left Spain.

  Córdoba is a fine city laid out along the right bank of a bend in the Río Guadalquivir, and to reach the site of my first pilgrimage I had to walk down a pleasant avenue named after Generalísimo Franco and through a shady park, at the end of which I came to the limits of the old Jewish quarter, evacuated in 1492 but since occupied by working-class families. I followed an ancient Roman wall which had outlined the Jewish quarter and came to a Roman gate where a plaza had been built, providing a rustic vista marked by three reflecting pools lined with roses, cypresses and willows. At the end nearest the gate a series of low stone walls, handsomely proportioned, created a small plateau, in the middle of which rose a column of cream-colored granite on which stood the statue of a shortish, baldheaded man in a toga, bearing in his right hand a manuscript scroll of some sort, perhaps a tragedy in verse. His face was what I would have expected, that of a grave gentleman utterly unafraid of adversity or death or the persecution that might be visited upon him by the tyrant Nero. He stood looking away from the wall, away from Rome, and over the distant hills of Andalucía, his homeland.

  He was Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–A.D. 65), whom many consider to have been the foremost Spaniard who ever lived; more consider him the representative Spaniard. Philosopher, orator, essayist, playwright and poet, he not only had a distinguished literary career that marked him as the leading intelligence of his time, but he also became a political leader, serving as consul of Rome. He had been appointed tutor to the boy Nero, whose counselor he later became and whose excesses he modified. He was a Stoic by nature, a city man by preference and a manipulator of political forces by design. In all that he tried he succeeded and he was both a perfect Roman and the ideal Spaniard. In the end his flexible principles proved not elastic enough to keep up with Nero, and the emperor commanded him to commit suicide, which he performed with the noble stoicism he had recommended to others.

  Most Spanish intellectuals, especially those with a mordant cast of mind, consider themselves the children of Seneca; his ideas are as vital today as they were when he first propounded them, and I have known one politician, one novelist and one bullfighter who have assured me that the principles by which they live and practice their art derive from Seneca. His capacity to see the world cynically but with wit endears him to the Spaniard; his exaggerated sense of pundonor was one of the foundations of that philosophy; and his skillful use of words served as a prototype for Spanish verbosity. I suppose that the best single thing I did to prepare myself for intercourse with Spaniards was to read Seneca again; he seemed as contemporary as a man lounging in a café, as thoroughly Spanish as anyone I was to meet. The more I reread his prosaic and often pedantic works, the more Spanish they have seemed, and I imagine that the two pole stars of Spanish thought are Seneca and Cervantes; at least they are the Spaniards who speak most directly to me.

  To catch the flavor of Seneca’s message it is necessary to hear him speaking at some banquet in Rome, where he was often in the company of the empire leaders. One recurring principle was stoicism and to this he constantly returned:

  Anyone may take life from man, but no one death: a thousand gates stand open to it.

  Behold a spectacle to which God may worthily turn his attention; behold a match worthy of God, a brave man hand-in-hand with adverse fortune.

  Fire tries gold; misery tries brave men.

  It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare to attempt them, but they are difficult because we do not dare to do so.

  The fear of war is worse than war itself.

  Life, if you know how to use it, is long enough.

  Seneca was constantly concerned with the application of philosophy to d
aily life, and some of his best writings are his sententious prose essays on the virtues and limitations of moral judgment. His plays, which deal with the same problem, are apt to be pompous if not ridiculous, for in them he sounds as if he were orating old-fashioned opinions to which he himself did not subscribe (a common fault of Spanish writing), but elsewhere some of his conclusions carry a striking sense of modernity:

  As wool imbibes at once certain colors and others it does not, unless it has been frequently soaked and doubly-dyed: so there are certain kinds of learning which, on being acquired, are thoroughly mastered; but philosophy, unless she sinks deeply into the soul and has long dwelt there, and has not given a mere coloring but a deep dye, performs none of the things which she had promised.

  Human affairs are not so happily arranged that the best things please the most men. It is the proof of a bad cause when it is applauded by the mob.

  A large library is apt to distract rather than to instruct the learner; it is much better to confine yourself to a few authors than to wander at random over many.

  Truth will never be tedious to him that travels through the nature of things; it is falsehood that gluts us.

  From the time that money began to be regarded with honor, the real value of things was forgotten.

  A recurring theme of Spanish history is the failure of Spaniards, no matter in what part of the world they find themselves, to develop a workable system of self-government. It is strange, therefore, that the first great Spanish thinker directed himself repeatedly to this problem. I suppose Seneca said more on this topic than on any other, and to call him primarily a Stoic is misleading; primarily he was a speculator on what the role and forms of government should be:

  He who dreads hatred too much, knows not how to reign. Terror is the proper guard of a kingdom.

  That government is ill conducted, when the mob rules its leaders.

  Life is like a school of gladiators, where men live and fight with each other.

  He who has committed a fault is to be corrected both by advice and by force, kindly and harshly, and to be made better for himself as well as for another, not without chastisement, but without passion.

  Man is a social animal, and born to live together so as to regard the world as one house.

  The society of man is like a vault of stones, which would fall if the stones did not rest on another; in this way it is sustained.

  In view of the fact that Spain was to become the champion of religion and today considers herself the nation most deeply committed to the defense of Catholicism, it was appropriate that her premier philosopher should have concerned himself with this matter. Spaniards are proud of the fact that certain of Seneca’s writings are sufficiently ambiguous to permit him to be called the first important classical figure to have embraced Christianity, but whether he did so remains a subject of controversy. The following quotations echo with curious overtones:

  Live with men as if God saw you; converse with God as if men heard you.

  God is nigh to you, he is with you, he is in you: I tell you, Lucilius, a holy spirit resides within us, an observer and guardian of our good and our bad doings, who, as he has been dealt with by us, so he deals with us; no man is good without God.

  A great sacred spirit talks indeed within us, but cleaves to its divine original.

  God is not to be worshiped with sacrifices and blood: for what pleasure can He have in the slaughter of the innocent? But with a pure mind, a good and honest purpose. Temples are not to be built for Him with stones piled on high: God is to be consecrated in the breast of each.

  The same being whom we call Jupiter, the wisest men regard as the keeper and protector of the universe, a spirit and a mind, the Lord and Maker of this lower world, to whom all names are suitable. Will you call him Destiny? You will not err. On him depend all things, and all the causes of causes are from him. Will you call him Providence? You will say well. For it is his wisdom that provides for this world that it be without confusion and proceed on its course without change. Will you call him Nature? You will not commit a mistake. For all things have had their beginning from him, in whom we live and move and have our being. Will you call him the World? You will not be deceived. For he is all that you see wholly infused into his parts and sustaining himself by his own power.

  As in many Spanish cities the central plaza, serving as a kind of huge open-air bus terminal, is named after José Antonio, and not far away is the statue of my second favorite Córdoban, Bishop Hosius (in Spanish Osio, c. 255–c. 358), whom I first met in Nicaea in Asia Minor when I was studying the Church council at which the Nicene Creed was promulgated as the normative theological guide for all Christians. Hosius was a man of enormous conviction who battled to establish the trinitarian definition of God under which Christianity would prosper; his archenemy was Arius of Constantinople, father of the Arian heresy subscribed to by the German tribes, including the Visigoths who ruled Spain, which taught that Jesus could not logically be coexistent with God but must be of lesser nature. Even before I knew that Hosius was a Spaniard, I was much attracted to him; he was a furious man, a terrible warrior for his interpretation of God and a fearsome enemy of those who did not agree with him. He ranged from Cordoba to Rome to Asia Minor to Constantinople, and wherever he went he brought reason and devotion. Repeatedly he was anathematized, abused, arrested and persecuted, but he continued to wage his war against Arianism even offering his life to prove the rightness of his beliefs. He was a very human prelate, for when nearly a century old he lost his old fire and succumbed to pressures, publicly turning his back on all he had previously believed, accepting Arianism and paving the way for a conciliation that helped make Spain temporarily Arian. At a hundred and two the old renegade died—and I find something quite Spanish in his behavior, both his stern advocacy of an idea and his ultimate betrayal of it when conditions changed. Hosius is a complex and fascinating figure, one of the greatest churchmen and probably Spain’s principal contribution to Church history.

  Today in the quiet square facing the church of the Capuchins in Córdoba the old bishop stands tall and baldheaded in marble toga and sandals. In his left hand he carries a staff ending in a gilded bronze eagle perched on a cross which rises from a globe. Not even in death is he serene, for he seems eager to leap forward to the next brawl. At the base appear three good bas-reliefs showing the old man bared to the waist being flogged by Roman soldiers; defending the Trinity before one of the Holy Roman emperors; supported by three other churchmen wearing crosses as he expels a figure who must be Arius, author of the heresy. On the back stands the plaque: ‘To Hosius, Bishop Confessor of Christ in Torment. Counselor of Constantine the Great. On the sixteenth centennial of the Council of Nicaea over which he presided, the citizens of Córdoba dedicated this monument, under the initiative of their prelate. December 31, 1925.’

  Mosque.

  In a corner of the Jewish section, opposite to the one where Seneca presides, appears one of the gentlest and most attractive statues in Europe. The courtyard which it dominates is paved in small pebbles set in cement; the walls are whitewashed and plain; brick archways form beautiful short vistas, and flowers bloom about the base of the statue and in the nearby windowboxes. The base consists of a series of random-sized brown rocks fitted into an attractive cube on which rests a plain marble bench containing the sitting figure of a man wearing the robes and twisted turban of the desert. In his lap he holds a book kept open by his right thumb; his face and bearing are those of a philosopher who is resting here in the quiet prior to meeting with his students.

  It is Córdoba’s memorial to a brilliant man whom the city treated shabbily, the Jew Moses Maimonides (in Spanish Moisés de Maimón, 1135–1204), a worthy partner to Seneca and Hosius. I suppose that intellectually he is the most brilliant man that Spain produced, a medical doctor of wide reputation who wrote basic treatises on such subjects as asthma, living healthily without medicine, and the principles of sexual intercourse. In fact, his medical kn
owledge was so comprehensive and his skill so highly regarded that he spent the last years of his life as personal doctor to Saladin in Cairo.

  His chief fame, however, was as a religious philosopher, in which capacity he helped establish the norms of Judaism. He wrote brilliantly, argued persuasively, and laid down a body of principles which had much effect on non-Jews like Thomas Aquinas, Herbert Spencer and Gottfried von Leibniz. If one wants to savor medieval thought at its best, I recommend Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed, in which he takes a bewildered applicant step by step through the religious process, providing rational explanations for the existence of God and for lesser theological problems. It is a beautifully composed work and explains why Jews consider him the foremost Jewish intelligence since the time of Moses: ‘Between Moses and Moses, there was no one like unto Moses.’