It was he who dealt the first serious blow to the invaders. From that time they grew cautious in their approaches to the north. Again the Goths became a name in the old kingdom. At Oviedo, south of Gijon, the new dynasty took root, concealed at first in the obscure reigns of Friula, Orelio, Ramiro, and Ordoño, calling themselves Kings of Galicia and Oviedo, up to Alonso the Second, surnamed “the Chaste,” 791, when Leon came to be both the court and capital of the kingdom of the Goths. CHAPTER XVI Bernardo del Carpio The city of Leon is a very ancient place, old even in the days of the Romans. Around it circles the line of walls spared by Witica when he levelled the defences throughout Spain. It is entered by four gates opening into four wide streets, crossing each other at right angles. Many have been the changes, but there still stand the city walls, substantially the same, the huge stones worked into coarse rubble, capped by frequent towers with _tapia_ turrets from which the eye ranges over the leafy plains of mountain-bound Galicia. The houses are low-roofed and homely, as befits the rough climate of the north; the streets narrow and grey. Red-brown and sepia is the colouring against the sky, with whiffs of chill air from the mountains and the scent of fields and flowers, the shelter of green thickets and verdant banks, sown with tall poplars, beside purling streams. A homelike and pleasant place, despised by the Moors after the African fantasies of the south, but absolute luxury to the Spaniards, as so much larger and nobler than their late capital, Oviedo. Alonso, surnamed “the Chaste,” second of that name, passing to the conclusion of a long and prosperous reign, finds much that is congenial to his monkish prejudices and austere life in the simplicity of the nature around. That Alonso’s habits are more of a friar than of a king may be explained by the aspect of the times. As successor to the pious “_Il Diacono_,” and as a protest against Mauregato, his kinsman, who, for the assistance given him by the Moors, agreed to pay them what is often mentioned in history as the “Maiden Tribute,” a hundred Christian maidens to be sent to the Caliph at Cordoba for his harem, fifty rich and fifty poor, a shameful agreement faithfully fulfilled until the reign of Ramiro in 866. This specially develops in Alonso a sentiment of religious protest in the form of a rigid chastity, not only enforced in his own person, but in all those about him. As he grows older these ideas take more and more hold upon him, and increase to such a degree as actually to pervert his judgment. Obviously it is the interest of the Church to encourage them, and for this reason he seeks his companions among priests and monks.