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

Rationale Divinorum Officeorum. The second is Ricobaldo de Ferrara, canon of the cathedral of Ravenna, who was a contemporary of Durando, and who is best known as the author of a Universal History. Both these writers clearly affirm that St. Pedro de Mezonzo was the author of the Salve Regina. Dr. Oviedo has copied out their words on the subject with full contexts. I have them before me as I write. “If anyone should ask,” says Dr. Oviedo, “how it comes that the Salve was known in France and Italy in those remote times, I reply that it was from Provence in the eleventh and twelfth centuries that the greater number of the pilgrims who visited Galicia came. Thence also there came those pious caravans who, attracted by the throngs of French, Belgians, Germans, Hungarians, Poles, juglares and troubadours, who animated the streets and palaces of Compostela, the Holy City of the West, the emporium and centre of a powerful movement which carried multitudes of clever men from Galicia to occupy the professional chairs of the most celebrated schools of the Middle Ages, and multitudes of inspired Gallegan poets to sing before the most splendid courts of Europe. Who doubts that by means of these troubadours, of these scholars, the glorious traditions which join the name of Salve to that of St. Pedro de Mezonzo should have been spread far and wide?”

      The Salve Regina made its first appearance in history as the product of Galician soil. We have seen that that royal troubadour of the thirteenth century, King Alfonso el Sabio, introduced a legend of the origin of the Salve into his Cantigas.[69] “Where,” asks Dr. Oviedo, “did he get that legend?” It is precisely those of his cantigas which have to do with this legend that give us the most difficulty, and whose source we are to-day unable to trace.[70] The fact is, that the source of all Canciones of the Salve, no matter whose name they bear, is popular tradition, which had its rise in Santiago, at the tomb of St. James, at the sepulchre of St. Pedro de Mezonzo. From this source the story spread, first all over Galicia and then all over Spain. In the last decade of the eleventh century the Salve—carried by the pilgrims—was being intoned in countries far from the land of its birth. But it gained such an early popularity in Spain as to be reflected in Spanish lyric poetry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, at which time it had not yet begun to influence the poetry of France.

      The reader cannot fail to be struck, while perusing the pages of Dr. Oviedo’s thesis, with the patient perseverance and the stubborn determination with which these battles over the authorship of the Salve has been carried on by French, German, and Spanish patriots wishing to claim the glory for their own respective lands. But now, if fresh combatants enter the lists, their efforts will have to be superhuman indeed if they are to refute the proofs brought forward by this valiant Gallegan to show that Galicia rightfully claims the authorship of the Salve Regina.

      In the summer of 1906 there appeared a startling article in the newspapers of Galicia,[71] entitled “The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception.” It began with the question, “Who was the first Western Theologian to Defend the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception?” “Dr. Eladio Oviedo,” it continued, “has brought about quite a revolution in history by affirming that before Eadmer must be mentioned Pedro de Compostela.” “Eadmer,” wrote Dr. Oviedo, “was an English monk of the twelfth century, educated under the rule of St. Anselm in the celebrated school of philosophy at Canterbury. He wrote about the year 1151 De Conceptione Sanctae Mariae—in which he argued, against all the most learned doctors of his time, that the Virgin Mary was born immaculate. Not only England, but France, Belgium, Germany, and even Spain believed till now that Eadmer was the first to defend this theory. But they were all wrong. About the year 1140, Pedro Compostelano (Petrus Micha, according to Lopez Ferreiro) wrote a treatise entitled De Consolatione Rationis, of which a manuscript, possibly the original, is still preserved in the Escurial Library, but, alas, unpublished. In this treatise Pedro presents, in the form of an allegory to Catholic Reason, the questions which occupied his mind, and, among them, that of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. It is in the form of a dialogue, and begins thus—

      “Compostellanus.—One doubt occupies my mind. Tell me, Was she who merited the honour of becoming the mother of Christ conceived without original sin, or with it? Truly, the former appears the most likely, because I think that to the glorious Virgin Mother of our Lord were granted all the virtues it was possible for Her to have; from this I infer that Mary was sanctified in Her conception, and thus immune from original sin.

      “Reason.—No one can deny that the Virgin was given every virtue, and this is a sufficient answer to thy question. Further, it is evident that before life she could not be sanctified, as she was not yet a rational being, which alone is capable of receiving Divine grace, but I do not vacillate an inch in affirming the fortunate Mary was enriched with the plenitude of sanctity in the precise instant that her soul had its birth, in ipsa animae infusione omnium gratiarum plenitudine Eam beari non ambigo.”

      “It was the seed sown,” wrote Dr. Oviedo, “by Pedro Compostelano, of the Galician school of the twelfth century, that produced Cantiga 5 of the Festas de Sancta Maria, which begins thus—

      “E logo que foi viva (Maria),

       no corpo de sa madre

       foi quida do pecado,

      lines which appear to be a romanced version of part of the book De Consolatione Rationis, which was written in Galicia by Pedro before he became a priest, and at least ten years before Eadmer in England took up his pen to defend an opinion which was subsequently upheld by a host of eminent Catholic writers, including Feijoó, and which has since been incorporated among the unalterable dogmas of the Catholic Church.”

CHAPTER V

       THE LANGUAGE OF GALICIA

       Table of Contents

      A Romance language—The universal language of Spain—A provincial dialect—George Ticknor—The Cantigas of Alfonso el Sabio—Comparison between the languages of Galicia and Portugal—A Celtic trait—The wing of the tongue—The native poets of Galicia—Trovadors—The Marquis de Valmar—Latinised forms—Amador de los Rios—The young Italian language—French takes the precedence—Romance poetry in England—The troubadours of Aquitaine—Alfonso the royal trovador—The poet of true love—The martyr to Cupid—The story of Macias—His tragic end

      WITH the production of the Salve Regina, and with the origination of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Galicia may be said to have entered triumphantly upon her second golden age, an age which extended from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, and in which is comprised the period which witnessed the most glorious triumphs of lyric poetry in Spain.

      It must be remembered that for a hundred and seventy years previous to the year 585, when the Visigoths became the sole masters of Spain, the present province of Galicia, united to what is now the northern half of Portugal, had formed one united kingdom—that of the Sueves. As an independent nation, this portion of Spain, with a language of its own, and kings of its own, had more pronounced characteristics and traditions than any other part of Spain. Its language, originally Latin, had become, under the Sueves, a distinct Romance language, just as the Latin of central Spain became by degrees a Romance tongue, and finally developed into the Spanish language, as it is spoken in Madrid to-day. The language of Galicia during its second age of gold, the language of its lyric poetry was, like the Spanish language, a child of the Latin tongue; they were, we may say, twin branches from the same stem. But while the one became the universal language of Spain, the other split into two smaller branches, of which one became the national language of Portugal,[72] and the other—while it remained the purest of all the Latin dialects except the Italian—eventually sank to the level of a provincial dialect—that spoken by the peasants of Galicia to-day, a dialect which not even the historians of Spain and Portugal professed to understand till the close of the nineteenth century.

      It was as recently as the last decade of the nineteenth century that students of Spanish history became conscious of the fact that a true knowledge of the history of Spanish civilisation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries could only