was prudently continued during the reconquest, and, besides its secrecy, was further recommended by the fact that a special sanctity attaches to Arabic characters. But the peculiarity of aljamía is that it begot a literature of its own, though, naturally enough, a literature modelled on the Spanish. Its best production is the Poema de Yusuf; and it may be noted that this, like its much later fellow, La Alabanza de Mahoma (The Praise of Muhammad), is in the metre of the old Spanish "clerkly poems" (poesías de clerecía). So also the Aragonese Morisco, Muhammad Rabadán, writes his cyclic poem in Spanish octosyllabics; and in his successors there are hendecasyllabics manifestly imitated from a characteristic Galician measure (de gaita gallega). The subjects of the textos aljamiados are frankly conveyed from Western sources: the Compilation of Alexander, an orientalised version of the French; the History of the Loves of Paris and Viana, a translation from the Provençal; and the Maid of Arcayona, based on the Spanish poem Apolonio. In the Cancionero de Baena appears Mahomat-el-Xartosse, without his turban, as a full-fledged Spanish poet; and the old tradition of servility is continued by an anonymous refugee in Tunis, who shows himself an authority on the plays and the lyric verse of Lope de Vega.
It is therefore erroneous to suppose that the northern Spaniards on their southward march fell in with numerous kinsmen, of wider culture and of a higher civilisation, whose everyday speech was unintelligible to them, and who prayed to Christ in the tongue of Muhammad. Such cases may have occurred, but as the rarest exceptions. Not less unfounded is the theory that Castilian is a fusion of southern academic Arabic with barbarous northern Latin. In southern Spain Latin persisted, as Greek, Syriac, and Coptic persisted in other provinces of the Caliphate; and in the school founded at Córdoba by the Abbot Spera-in-Deo, Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Quintilian, and Demosthenes were read as assiduously as Sallust, Horace, and Terence were studied in the northern provinces. Granting that Latin was for a while so much neglected that it was necessary to translate the Bible into Arabic, it is also true that Arabic grew so forgotten that Peter the Venerable was forced to translate the Ku'rān for the benefit of clerks. Lastly, it must be borne in mind that the variety of Romance which finally prevailed in Spain was not the speech of the northern highlanders, but that of the Muzárabes of the south and the centre. Long before "the sword of Pelagius had been transformed into the sceptre of the Catholic kings," the linguistic triumph of the south was achieved. The hazard of war might have yielded another issue; and to adopt another celebrated phrase of Gibbon's, but for the Cid and his successors, the Ku'rān might now be taught in the schools of Salamanca, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad. As it chanced, Arabic was rebuffed, and the Latin speech (or Romance) survived in its principal varieties of Castilian, Galician, Catalan, and bable (Asturian).
Gallic Latin had already bifurcated into the langue d'oui and the langue d'oc, though these names were not applied to the varieties till near the close of the twelfth century. Two hundred years before Roderic's overthrow a Spanish horde raided the south-west of France, and, in the corner south of the Adour, reimposed a tongue which Latin had almost entirely supplanted, and which lingered solely in the Basque Provinces and in Navarre. In the eighth century this Basque invasion was avenged. The Spaniards, concentrating in the north, vacated the eastern provinces, which were thereupon occupied by the Roussillonais, who, spreading as far south as Valencia, and as far east as the Balearic Islands, gave eastern Spain a new language. Deriving from the langue d'oc, Catalan divides into plá Catalá and Lemosí—the common speech and the literary tongue. Vidal de Besalu calls his own Provençal language limosina or lemozi, and the name, taken from his popular treatise Dreita Maneira de Trobar, was at first limited to literary Provençal; but endless confusion arises from the fact that when Catalans took to composing, their poems were likewise said to be written in lengua lemosina.
The Galician, akin to Portuguese, though free from the nasal element grafted on the latter by Burgundians, is held by some for the oldest—though clearly not the most virile—form of Peninsular Romance. It was at least the first to ripen, and, under Provençal guidance, Galician verse acquired the flexibility needed for metrical effects long before Castilian; so that Castilian court-poets, ambitious of finer rhythmical results, were driven to use Galician, which is strongly represented in the Cancionero de Baena, and boasts an earlier masterpiece in Alfonso the Learned's Cantigas de Santa María, recently edited, as it deserved, after six centuries of waiting, by that admirable scholar the Marqués de Valmar. Galician, now little more than a simple dialect, is artificially kept alive by the efforts of patriotic minor poets; but its literary influence is extinct, and the distinguished figures of the province, as Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán, naturally seek a larger audience by writing in Castilian. So, too, bable is but another dialect of little account, though a poet of considerable charm, Teodoro Cuesta (1829–95), has written in it verses which his own loyal people will not willingly let die. The classification of other characteristic sub-genera—Andalucían, Aragonese, Leonese—belongs to philology, and would be, in any event, out of place in the history of a literature to which, unlike Catalan and unlike Galician, they have added nothing of importance. What befell in Italy and France befell in Spain. Partly through political causes, partly by force of superior culture, the language of a single centre ousted its rivals. As France takes its speech from Paris and the Île de France, as Florence dominates Italy, so Castile dictates her language to all the Spains. The dominant type, then, of Spanish is the Castilian, which, as the most potent form, has outlived its brethren, and, with trifling variations, now extends, not only over Spain, but as far west as Lima and Valparaiso, and as far east as the Philippine Islands: in effect, "from China to Peru." And the Castilian of to-day differs little from the Castilian of the earliest monuments.
The first allusion to any distinct variety of Romance is found in the life of a certain St. Mummolin who was Bishop of Noyen, succeeding St. Eloi in 659. A reference to the Spanish type of Romance is found as far back as 734; but the authenticity of the document is very doubtful. The breaking-up of Latin in Spain is certainly observable in Bishop Odoor's will under the date of 747. The celebrated Strasburg Oaths, the oldest of Romance instruments, belong to the year 842; and, in an edict of 844, Charles the Bald mentions, as a thing apart, "the customary language"—usitato vocabulo—of the Spaniards. There is, however, no existing Spanish manuscript so ancient, nor is there any monument as old, as the Italian Carta di Capua (960). The British Museum contains a curious codex from the Convent of Santo Domingo de Silos, on the margin of which a contemporary has written the vernacular equivalent of some four hundred Latin words; but this is no earlier than the eleventh century. The Charter called the Fuero de Avilés of 1155 (which is in bable or Asturian, not Castilian), has long passed for the oldest example of Spanish, on the joint and several authority of González Llanos, Ticknor, and Gayangos; but Fernández-Guerra y Orbe has proved it to be a forgery of much later date.
These intricate questions of authority and ascription may well be left unsettled, for legal documents are but the dry bones of letters. Castilian literature dates roughly from the twelfth century. Though no Castilian document of extent can be referred to that period, the Misterio de los Reyes Magos (The Mystery of the Magian Kings) and the group of cantares called the Poema del Cid can scarcely belong to any later time. These, probably, are the jetsam of a cargo of literature which has foundered. It is unlikely that the two most ancient compositions in Castilian verse should be precisely the two preserved to us, and it is manifest that the epic as set forth in the Poema del Cid could not have been a first effort. Doubtless there were other older, shorter songs or cantares on the Cid's prowess; there unquestionably were songs upon Bernaldo de Carpio and upon the Infantes de Lara which are rudely preserved in assonantic prose passages of the Crónica General. An ingenious, deceptive theory lays it down that the epic is but an amalgam of cantilenas, or short lyrics in the vulgar tongue. At most this is a pious opinion.
To judge by the analogy of other literatures, it is safe to say that as verse always precedes prose (just as man feels before he reasons), so the epic everywhere precedes the lyric form, with the possible exception of hymns. The Poema del Cid, for instance, shows no trace of lyrical descent; and it is far likelier that the many surviving romances or ballads on the Cid are detached fragments of an epic, than that the epic should be a pastiche