Galicia, the Switzerland of Spain. Annette M. B. Meakin

noticing a sentence that occurs in three of the catalogues of the manuscripts of St. Martial, J. Limoges (thirteenth century). I found that mention was made of a journey made by the Abbess Etheria, Itinerarium Egeriae Abbatissae, the identification of which with that of the account above mentioned is beyond all doubt.” Father Férotin published the whole of the letter at the close of his article, that his readers might see for themselves how two persons quite unknown to one another had made the discovery simultaneously.

      Etheria wrote, as we have seen, the story of her travels for the religious edification of the nuns of her convent. It was of quite a private nature, and this probably accounts for the fact that no other writer besides Valerius seems to have had his attention drawn to it.[58] The archives of Spain’s convents and churches teem with unread and unpublished manuscripts which await the student of the future. Among them may perhaps, some day, be discovered the lost part of Etheria’s Journey to Jerusalem, or possibly it may lie hidden in some dusty parchment roll at Florence, or in the Vatican.

CHAPTER IV

       THE SALVE REGINA

       Table of Contents

      Avitus I. and Avitus II.—St. Isidore—The story of St. Fructuosus—The origin of duplex monasteries in Spain—One of the favourite saints of Galicia—Almanzor comes to Santiago de Compostela—San Pedro de Mezonzo—Almanzor returns to Cordova—The Salve Regina—Who wrote the Salve Regina?—Alfonso el Sabio—His Cantiga—The Mariner’s prayer—St. Gregory—Foreign authorities—How the Salve reached France and Italy—Dr. Oviedo’s Thesis—A startling article—The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception—De Consolatione Rationis—An allegory—Eadmer and Pedro Compostelano

      IN our cursory survey of Galicia’s first golden age we have not attempted to give a full and complete account of all the strong souls who helped to make that age a golden one; we have been obliged to content ourselves with giving a few meagre particulars about those whose life and work have impressed us the most, and refer briefly often only to the names of those who loom less distinctly out of that distant past; such men, for instance, as the monk Bacchiarius, as Avitus I., and Avitus II., as the poet Prudentius and the saint Fructuosus. Of these we know for certain that the first three visited the East. Florez tells very fully the story of Bacchiarius, and how he came to wander forth from his monastery in search of that knowledge which he could not extract from books alone. As for the two Aviti, they were both in Jerusalem when Orosius was there, and one of them has been charged with having become infected with gnostic errors during his stay in Palestine, and having disseminated them in Galicia on his return thither. As for the poet Prudentius, he is to-day known to Spanish writers as “the Horace of the fourth century.” He was born in Galicia, in or near the town of Braga, about the year 368, during the reign of Constantine the Great. Two volumes of his lyric poetry have come down to us, both bearing Greek names, Kathemerion (Songs for Every Day) and Peristephanon (The Book of Garlands). Critics tell us that the lyrics contained in the former bear distinct traces of the literary influence of St. Ambrose; those contained in the latter, fourteen in number, are dedicated to the glorious sufferings of the early martyrs. Boissier calls Prudentius “un véritable Espagnol,” a poet who expressed the thoughts and feelings of his own people, and he adds, “c’est là le principal verité de la poèsie lyrique: jamais elle n’est plus grande que quand elle traduit ainsi les sentiments populaires.”

      St. Isidore, bishop of Seville, who was the most illustrious representative of intellectual Spain at the close of Galicia’s first golden age, and who earned for himself the title of “the oracle of the Spanish Church,” died in 636. “God created at this time,” says a contemporary monk, “two great suns to light these western shores with the rays of that flaming truth which shone from the Apostolic See; the one, Isidore of Seville, relighted among us, by his eloquence, his writings, his wisdom, and active industry, the great light of dogmatic truth issued by the Supreme Chair of Rome; the other, Fructuosus, by the immaculate innocence of his life, by the spiritual fire of his contemplations, made the virtues of the first fathers of the desert and the prodigies of the Thebaid shine into our hearts.”[59]

      St. Fructuosus was a son of a general of the Gothic army. We read that when, as a boy, he was taken by his father into one of his estates upon the frontiers of Galicia, to number his flocks, “he secretly noted in his soul a site for a future monastery in that wild country.” Later on, when he had become his own master, he retired to the spot he had chosen as a child, and built a monastery, which he endowed with all he had. Montalembert tells us how he was shortly joined by a numerous band of monks, but that he himself, flying from the renown of his virtue, took refuge in the woods and most precipitous rocks, that he might be forgotten by all. One day, while he was at prayer in the forest, a labourer passing by took him for a fugitive slave, questioned him, and, dissatisfied with his answers, overwhelmed him with blows and led him with a rope round his neck to a place where he was recognised. Another time, like St. Bernard, he was taken for a wild beast. A hunter, seeing him covered merely with a goat-skin, and prostrated upon the summit of a rock, had aimed an arrow at him, when he perceived, by seeing him lift his hands to heaven, that it was a man occupied in prayer.[60]

      

      Eventually the example of Fructuosus became so contagious that he had to build other monasteries to shelter his crowds of followers. Their number became so great that the duke of one of the provinces wrote to the king to warn him that if some obstacle were not interposed the country would be so depopulated that there would be no men to fill up the ranks of the army. The women imitated the men. A young girl of noble family, who was about to be married to an officer of the Visigothic Court, fled from her father’s house and hid in the woods near the monastery of Fructuosus, to whom she wrote, begging him to have pity upon her as upon a sheep which he must snatch from the fangs of the wolf. He received her, and built her a little cell in the forest, which soon became the centre of a community of eighty nuns. The officer endeavoured in vain to recover his betrothed. He compelled the superior of the new monastery to bring her to him; she came, but refused to look at him, and he remained mute in her presence. Then the royal judge said: “Leave her to serve the Lord, and find for yourself another wife.” Thus it was that Fructuosus originated the system of duplex monasteries in Spain.

      Fructuosus cultivated literature sedulously, and led his monks to do likewise. He also wrote poetry, some of which is still extant; it is quoted by Florez. His monks kept great flocks of sheep, the profit of which they spent in charity. Some years before his death he was made archbishop of Braga, but he did not cease to practise the rule of monastic life, and he built many new monasteries. He surveyed all the coasts of Spain from Cape Finisterre to Cape St. Vincent, crossed the rivers Duero and Guadalquivir, reaching the promontories and islands, even to the spot where Cadiz now stands, and seeking everywhere asylums for prayer and solitude. “Thanks to him,” continues Montalembert, in a prophetic strain, “the extreme frontiers of the West become guarded by a line of monastic garrisons. The great waves of the ocean rushing from the shores of another hemisphere, from that half of the world still unknown to Christians, is met by the gaze and the prayers of the monks from the lofty cliffs of the Iberian Peninsula. There they stand firm, awaiting the Mohammedan invasion; there they endure and survive it; there they preserve a nucleus of faith and Christian virtue, for those incomparable days, when, from those shores freed by unwearied heroism, Spain and Portugal shall spring forth to discover a new world and to plant the Cross in Africa, in Asia, and in America.”

      St. Fructuosus is still one of the favourite saints of Galicia. The cathedral of Santiago has a chapel dedicated to him, built in 1696,[61] and his day is honoured by every peasant in the land.

      Galicia has some valuable archæological monuments of the eighth century, to which we shall refer in a later chapter, but she produced no great literary character whose history need detain us here. It was in this century that the Moors first invaded the Peninsula; and Galicia, though not then invaded, began from this time to send the flower of her youth to fight the Saracens. In the ninth century there took place the discovery of the tomb of