Alonzo with a handful more escapes into the field,
There like a lion, stands at bay, in vain besought to yield:
A thousand foes around are seen, but none draws near to fight,
Afar with bolt and javelin, they pierce the steadfast knight.
A hundred and a hundred darts are hissing round his head;
Had Aguilar a thousand hearts, their blood had all been shed;
Faint and more faint he staggers upon the slippery sod--
At last his back is to the earth, he gives his soul to God.
Another and more probable legend, however, tells how Aguilar was killed
in fair fight by the commander of the Moors. He was the fifth lord of
his line who died in combat with the infidels.
This temporary success, however, only aggravated the reprisals of the
now exasperated Christians. The Count of Tendilla stormed Guejar; the
Count of Serin "blew up the mosque in which the women and children of a
wide district had been placed for safety," and King Ferdinand himself
seized the key of the passes, the castle of Lanjaron. The remnant of the
rebels fled to Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey, where their skill as
artificers secured them a living. Thus the first revolt in the
Alpuxarras was suppressed.
Half a century of smouldering hatred ensued. The Moriscos grudgingly
fulfilled the minimum of the religious duties imposed on them by their
outward conversion; but they took care to wash off the holy water with
which their children were baptized as soon as they were out of the
priest's sight; they came home from their Christian weddings to be
married again after the Mohammedan rite; and they made the Barbary
corsair at home in their cities, and helped him to kidnap the children
of the Christians. A wise and honest government, respecting its pledges
given at the surrender of Granada, would have been spared the dangers of
this hidden disaffection; but the rulers of Spain were neither wise nor
honest in their dealings with the Moriscos, and as time went on they
became more and more cruel and false. The "infidels" were ordered to
abandon their native and picturesque costume, and to assume the hats and
breeches of the Christians; to give up bathing, and adopt the dirt of
their conquerors; to renounce their language, their customs and
ceremonies, even their very names, and to speak Spanish, behave
Spanishly, and re-name themselves Spaniards. The great Emperor Charles
V. sanctioned this monstrous decree in 1526, but he had the sense not to
enforce it; and his agents used it only as a means of extorting bribes
from the richer Moors as the price of official blindness. The
Inquisition was satisfied for the time with a "traffic in toleration"
which filled the treasury in a highly satisfactory way. It was reserved
for Philip II. to carry into practical effect the tyrannical law which
his father had prudently left alone. In 1567 he enforced the odious
regulations about language, customs, and the like, and, to secure the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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