[395] I take, as in fairness I ought, the date of the appearance of Montalvo’s Spanish version, as the period of the first success of the Amadis in Spain, and not the date of the Portuguese original; the difference being about a century. This might, perhaps, have been, in some degree, expected in a country where the institutions and feelings of chivalry had struck such firm root as they had in Spain. For Spain, when the romances of chivalry first appeared, had long been peculiarly the land of knighthood. The Moorish wars, which had made every gentleman a soldier, necessarily tended to this result; and so did the free spirit of the communities, led on as they were, during the next period, by barons, who long continued almost as independent in their castles as the king was on his throne. Such a state of things, in fact, is to be recognized as far back as the thirteenth century, when the Partidas, by the most minute and painstaking legislation, provided for a condition of society not easily to be distinguished from that set forth in the Amadis or the Palmerin.[396] The poem and history of the Cid bear witness yet earlier, indirectly indeed, but very strongly, to a similar state of the country; and so do many of the old ballads and other records of the national feelings and traditions that had come from the fourteenth century. [396] See the very curious laws that constitute the twenty-first Title of the second of the Partidas, containing the most minute regulations; such as how a knight should be washed and dressed, etc. But in the fifteenth, the chronicles are full of it, and exhibit it in forms the most grave and imposing. Dangerous tournaments, in some of which the chief men of the time, and even the kings themselves, took part, occur constantly, and are recorded among the important events of the age.[397] At the passage of arms near Orbigo, in the reign of John the Second, eighty knights, as we have seen, were found ready to risk their lives for as fantastic a fiction of gallantry as is recorded in any of the romances of chivalry; a folly, of which this was by no means the only instance.[398] Nor did they confine their extravagances to their own country. In the same reign, two Spanish knights went as far as Burgundy, professedly in search of adventures, which they strangely mingled with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; seeming to regard both as religious exercises.[399] And as late as the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, Fernando del Pulgar, their wise secretary, gives us the names of several distinguished noblemen personally known to himself, who had gone into foreign countries, “in order,” as he says, “to try the fortune of arms with any cavalier that might be pleased to adventure it with them, and so gain honor for themselves, and the fame of valiant and bold knights for the gentlemen of Castile.”[400]