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

He supports the opinion of Justin, that Gallegan arms were alone found worthy to be used by the great Hannibal, whom the Spaniards presented with a complete suit of armour ornamented with tiny pictures of Dido and Æneas, of which each piece had been tempered by the waters of the Calybe and decorated with gold from the sands of the Tagus.

      The river Calybe now bears the name of Cabe: it rises in the hills of Cebrero and flows into the Sil at the foot of the vine-clad mountain on which stands the ruined monastery of San Esteban. St. Isidore thought that this river gave the name of Calybis to iron, but the ancient Calybes of the east (afterwards called Chaldeans, according to Strabo) are said to have been the first people to employ iron; so the Gallegan river must surely have derived its name from them.

      Another important river is the Eo, which, rising in Galicia above Salvatierra, divides this province from that of Asturias, and is the natural boundary line between Lugo and Oviedo. Galicia has upon her coast some of the finest harbours in Europe. Vigo, for one, has often been described as the finest natural harbour in the world; while Ferrol, once so famous as the Arsenal of Spain, is likely to become ere long, in the hands of English shipbuilders, one of the world’s greatest dockyards, and to supply ironclads to all the nations. One of the ships with which Columbus set sail to discover America was called La Gallega, and a book has been written to prove that not only did the great discoverer set sail from the harbour of Pontevedra, but his ship, La Gallega, was built in her dockyards with the wood of Gallegan pines.[38]

      Many of the beautiful trees and shrubs that help to make Galicia’s gardens so beautiful in our day were imported by Jesuits who had gone as missionaries to the New World. In

      THE RIVER SIL, ORENSE

      short, if the traveller really wishes to understand and appreciate Galicia or any other part of Spain, it is imperative that, side by side with the objects of interest that present themselves to his view, he should become acquainted with the story of Spain’s glorious past. All who have studied Galicia are unanimous in their opinion that she contains more relics of that past and more trophies of antiquity than any other part of the Peninsula.

CHAPTER III

       THE FIRST GOLDEN AGE

       Table of Contents

      Galicia’s first golden age—From Galicia to Palestine—The father of Spanish historians—His birthplace—Civitas Limicorum—An amusing story—Early life of Idatius—Arianism—St. Jerome—Paul Orosius—King Alfred’s translation—St. Augustine and Orosius—Orosius travels to Jerusalem—Roman pilgrims—Etheria—A plucky abbess—Her visit to the holy places—Gamurrini discovers the manuscript—Not Silvia but Etheria—A curious coincidence—Unpublished manuscripts

      IT was in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries of the Christian era that Galicia reached her first zenith as a centre of learning and literary fame. During this period her intellectual development and culture far exceeded that of the whole of the rest of Spain: she was freely acknowledged to be the Magistra Litterarum. The writings of the men who made her famous are many of them preserved intact to this day; they are all, without exception, the work of monks or church dignitaries. Outside the Church learning was practically non-existent. But the monks and bishops of those days were anything but mere bookworms, mystics, or recluses; they were men who helped to make history as well as to chronicle and record it. Many a Spanish bishop had earned a name for bravery on the field of battle before his elevation to a See, and was, as Lopez Ferreiro has remarked, a soldier at heart, and, what is also worthy of notice, a married man—with a large family. Many a monk in those days was a bold and fearless traveller, who had seen many peoples and many lands, and enlarged his mental horizon by much and wide observation. We moderns are apt to think that travelling for purposes of education is a comparatively recent invention, but that is not the case. From Galicia in the fourth century young men of spirit and religious zeal—ay, and even young women—started forth to visit far-distant lands and gather for themselves the flowers of learning and piety from their native meadows.

      Jerusalem was a great meeting-place for leaders of religious thought at that date, so that it had a double attraction for young Gallegans fired with spiritual ambition and a Celtic love of enterprise. Many found their way thither, and each on his return to Galicia became in himself an influence of culture in his diocese or monastery as the case might be. The journey from Galicia to Palestine, in spite of its difficulties and dangers, seems to have been undertaken by the pious as readily in those days as a journey from London to Rome is in our own. Monasteries, which were in reality schools of higher culture, had already become numerous throughout the province. Most of the parochial churches had already been established before the end of the first half of the fourth century; they were almost all dedicated to martyrs, and erected over some spot sanctified by the presence of holy relics.[39] Young men of noble family invariably took up the profession of arms or entered the Church; consequently, clergy and monks abounded in the land. “Fifteen centuries separate us from that epoch,” says Ferreiro, “and twice has the chain which connects with our own time been broken, first by the invasion of barbarians, and then by that of the Saracens. Yet the stars of that period still shine.” Perhaps the brightest of these stars is Idatius, the father of Spanish historians.

      Bishop Idatius, the celebrated author of the earliest chronicles of Spanish history, was born in Galicia, in a town, now non-existent, which took its name from the river Limia, and was called civitas Limicorum, or “the city of the Limicos.” Very little was known about this city till an eminent local archæologist, Dr. Marcelo Macias, began to devote time and study to the deciphering of some inscriptions that had been found upon certain stones on the shores of the lake of Antela close to the spot where the Limia rises. Dr. Macias has recently found the site of the city, and is now convinced that it was once populous and wealthy, not a Roman but a Gallegan town, and the birthplace of eminent men—a city respected and feared during the later centuries of the Roman Empire.[40] Until Dr. Macias discovered the site, the Portuguese were in the habit of claiming that Portuguese soil had given birth to the famous Idatius, who in his youth had visited Jerusalem and knew St. Jerome, and who in his old age wrote the famous Chronicles—a priceless treasure as regards the early history not only of Spain but also of Spanish Catholicism. Ptolemy mentions this city as φορος λιμιχῶν, and the Ravenate calls it Limia or Limæa, and mentions it as the first halting-place on the road leading from Braga to Lugo, by way of Tuy. Dr. Macias has satisfactorily proved that this city once stood in the province of Orense, near what are now the little towns of Lodoselo and Nocela de Pena, two miles to the south-east of Ginzo de Limia; he has proved this from inscriptions discovered in that neighbourhood in the middle of the eighteenth century, which are dedications, the one to Hadrian and the other to Antoninus Pius, by the city of the Limicos (Civitas Limicorum). Till now, most Spanish writers, confounding the Forum Limicorum of Ptolemy with the Limia of the Itinerary, have asserted erroneously that it was the Ponte de Lima in the neighbouring kingdom of Portugal. Florez and Hübner both helped to make the inscriptions known, but it was left to Dr. Macias to interpret their significance to students of Spanish history. They now stand in the museum of local antiquities at Orense.

      The story of their arrival there is amusing. These stones had been employed in the building of a hermitage erected on the spot where they had been found[41] in honour of St. Peter; they had been built into the porch in such a manner that their inscriptions could be read by those who entered the church, and it was here that a neighbouring abbot noticed them, and, about the year 1775, drew the attention of Florez to them. In 1835, at the taking down of the hermitage, another abbot brought them into the town with several other Roman tablets. He had a stone cross made of them and placed in the open space before the church. As time went on the ignorant peasants got the idea that the cross protected them and their cattle from hailstones, and so strong was their superstition that they did not like strangers to approach the cross even to copy the inscription. The stones were at length presented to the Orense