François-René de Chateaubriand: The Adventures of the Last Abencerraje. A. S. Kline translation. London: On-Demand Publishing, 2011.
Chateaubriand describes the Abencerrajes as a Moorish tribe that ruled the Emirate of Grenada, the last city ruled by Muslims in Spain, reconquered by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, uniting the two Christian Catholic kingdoms, gave the Spaniards the military heft they needed to complete the reconquest of their country, much of which had been taken by Sunni Muslims, beginning in the 700s. The Nasrid dynasty had ruled Grenada since the 1200s but had been weakened by factional struggles by the 1400s, with the Abencerrages facing off against the rival Zegris. After his surrender to the Spaniards, Grenada’s governor, Boabdil (Muhammed XII), departed for north Africa, stopping on Mount Padul, where he could see the Mediterranean and look back on the city and the tents of the Spanish army. As he wept, his mother, the Sultana Aixa, maintained the warrior spirit of Islam: “Thou weepest now like a woman for a kingdom thou wast unable to defend like a man.”
The Abencerrajes settled in the outskirts of Tunis, founding, “within sight of the ruins of Carthage, a colony that can still be distinguished today from the other Moorish colonies of Africa, by the elegance of its moeurs and the temperance of its laws.” So strong was their love of “their former homeland,” the exiled Abencerrajes prayed five times a day, facing not Mecca but Grenada. “Allah was invoked in order that he might render once more to his elect that land of delights,” which no longer “sounded to their cry to arms: ‘Love and Honor.'” Nevertheless, they turned to the practice not of war but of medicine; a “race of warriors, who had once inflicted wounds, now occupied themselves with the art of healing,” an art they had once practiced even during war, “tend[ing] the wounds of the enemy they had conquered.” The study of medicine was “a calling as esteemed among the Arabs as the profession of arms”—both satisfying the aristocratic passion for honor. Of the medicinal herbs they gathered, some relieved “the ills of the body,” some “the sorrows of the soul”; “the Abencerrajes especially valued those that served to calm vain regrets,” those “dispel[ling] those foolish illusions and hopes of happiness forever nascent, forever disappointed.” What religion perpetuated, futilely, medicine palliated. In the Islamic world, piety and philosophy once balanced each other.
Chateaubriand begins his story in 1516, a generation later, with young Aben-Hamet, a descendant of a man who was accused of seducing the Sultana by Ibrahim Benedin, leader of the rival Zegris, in Grenada. He determines to return to Grenada “to satisfy his heart’s desire, and to accomplish a purpose which he hid carefully from his mother,” a purpose Chateaubriand will not reveal quite yet. Under the guise of an herb-gathering Arab physician, he heads for Spain, and although pained by the sight of palm trees planted by his ancestors and by the sight of Moorish ruins, he acknowledges to himself that “since Allah had willed that the Moors of Spain should lose their beautiful homeland,” he “could not help but esteem its somber conquerors. “And the beauty of that homeland has its own influence, as climatologist Montesquieu would expect: “Enchanted skies, a clear and delightful atmosphere, plunge the mind into a secret languor, from which travelers, even mere passers-by, can scarcely defend themselves. It would seem that in this country the tender passions would quickly extinguish the heroic ones, if love, to appear valid, had not the need to be always occupied with glory.” As his guide identifies the great, partly ruined castles, one “where they claim the Abencerraje was surprised with the Sultana Alfaima,” “how cruel it was” to Aben-Hamet “that he must have recourse to strangers to identify the monuments of his ancestors and be told by those indifferent to them the history of his family and friends!” He lodges at a caravanserai which had been built by the Moors but, “too agitated to enjoy even a brief repose,” he wanders the streets, listening to the sound of flutes, playing songs of love, which have replaced the sound of the Arabic trumpet: “the victors rested on the bed of the vanquished.” By daybreak, he is lost.
He then sees a beautiful Spanish girl, accompanied by a duenna, walking toward a monastery for morning Mass. “Recovering from her initial astonishment” at the sight of a Moor in Grenada, guessing that he is lost, “she beckoned to the stranger to approach with the grace and freedom peculiar to the women of that country.” He responds with Arabic eloquence: “Sultana of the flowers, delight to the eyes of man, O Christian slave, more beautiful than the virgins of the mountains of Georgia, thou hast divined it!” Well. “The Moors are renowned for their gallantry,” she replies “with the sweetest of smiles,” but “I am neither a Sultana of the flowers, nor a slave, nor pleased to be commended to Mohammed.” She exhibits Christian charity, guiding him to the caravanserai, then disappearing. With this, Aben-Hamet forgets to gather medicinal flowers, as “the flower he now sought was the beautiful Christian.”
The story will proceed from there, sometimes but if not always predictably. But why does Chateaubriand choose to tell it?
Early in his career, Chateaubriand took upon himself the task of vindicating Christianity in the wake of the Enlightenment. In The Genius of Christianity, published in 1802, he showed that pre-modern, Christian Europe had made substantial advances in science, without the materialism of modern science. Yet, there was another charge the Enlightenment made against Christianity, and against religion generally. Religion had sparked uncompromising wars not between Christians and Muslims but among Christians themselves. These wars saw priests urging warlike aristocrats to fight heretics. Chateaubriand’s source for his story, Ginis Bérez de Hitas’s Guerras civil de Grenada, would have provided him with a forceful reminder of this. Was religious toleration founded upon a turn to ‘secularization’ and ‘democratization’ (especially rule by the commercial middle classes) not more favorable to real peace than the Religion of Peace—a claim fought over by both Christians and Muslims? Yet had not the Enlightenment issued in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, embarrassments to Enlightenment pacifiers? What Chateaubriand offers might be called a thought experiment, one showing how religious fidelity and aristocracy might overcome the urge to fight, how chivalry might not deserve to die. It is noteworthy that Christopher Columbus was likely present at the conquest of Grenada; he would set sail for what would turn out to be an unknown continent later that year. If Columbus’s voyage might be considered the beginning, or at least the harbinger, of European modernity, inaugurating the ‘Age of Exploration,’ might this hinge between religious and aristocratic feudalism and irreligious and ‘bourgeois’ modernity not strike Chateaubriand as a point of considerable interest?
As the months wear on, the lonely Abencerraje returns to gathering herbs. One day he hears his beloved’s voice singing a Castilian song “which traced the history of the Abencerrajes and the Zegris.” Once again, his greeting is gallant: “I cast at thy feet the heart the heart of Aben-Hamet.” This time, she won’t disappear, as her song was a song in remembrance of him, and their encounter. But she doesn’t know that he himself is “the last of the Abencerrajes,” and “a vestige of prudence restrained him” from telling her so, as that news might prove dangerous if related to the rulers: “The Moorish Wars were scarcely over, and the presence of an Abencerraje at that moment might justly inspire fear among the Spaniards.” For his part, he fears not the danger of combat but the danger of separation from Dona Blanca.
Who is she? She descends from Roderigo Diaz de Bivar, the famous El Cid, who conquered Valencia and ruled it in the years before his death in 1099. During a period of exile from the Castilian court, he had fought with the Muslims, and as ruler of Valencia he found support among both Christians and Muslims. Although his line fell into “extreme poverty,” Blanca’s grandfather revived their fortunes, becoming “well known less for his true titles than for the brilliance of his valor”—that is, by means of virtue, of nature, not of convention. Ferdinand made him Duke of Santa Fé as reward for his battlefield prowess. His son, Don Rodrigo, was named for El Cid, who has two children, eighteen-year-old Blanca and her valorous older, also Don Rodrigo but called Don Carlos to distinguish him from him from his now elderly father. Don Carlos accompanied Cortez in his expedition to Mexico in 1519 the continuation of European voyages of discovery and conquest; “endur[ing] every danger, he had witnessed all the horrors of that astonishing venture,” witnessing “the fall of the last king of a world till then unknown.” A few years later, he fought among the Spanish forces allied with the House of Hapsburg, defeating the French at the Battle of Pavia, an event that led to the imprisonment of the French king. “The aspects of the new world, the long voyages over as yet unknown seas, the spectacle of revolutions and vicissitudes of fate, had badly shaken the religious and melancholy mind of Don Carlos,” who renounced marriage, giving his possessions to his sister and joining the Order of Calatrava. That is significant because the Order of Calatrava was founded in the twelfth century by warrior aristocrats and Catholic monks who had joined in defending a Spanish fortress; it valorizes the Church-aristocracy alliance of Spanish and indeed of European feudalism.
His sister sings, dances, rides a horse: “Athens would have taken her for Aspasia and Paris for Diane de Poitiers.” “But allied to the charms of a French woman, she had the passion of a Spaniard, and her natural coquetry stole nothing from the steadiness, constancy, force, and elevation of the sentiments of her heart.” When her father rushes to discover what the commotion is, she nonetheless lies, telling him that the Moor “entered the garden to thank me for having shown him the way” to the caravanserai. She has already chosen to leave her father and to cleave to him, which would be an act of Christian if not filial fidelity. That will prove easier to think than to do. Chateaubriand pauses, however, to elaborate on the ethos and the moeurs of the Spanish regime: “The Duke of Santa Fé received the Abencerraje with the grave and yet simple politeness of the Spaniards. There is nothing of a servile manner to be seen in that nation, none of those turns of phrase that denote abjection of thought or degradation of spirit. The language of the great lord and of the peasant is one, greetings, compliments, habits, customs, all are one. Both their trust in and the generosity of that people towards, foreigners are boundless, just as their vengeance is terrible when betrayed. Heroic in their courage, unfailing in their patience, incapable of yielding to evil fortune, they must overcome it or be crushed. They have little of what we call wit, but the exalted passions take the place of that enlightenment that comes from subtlety and abundance of ideas. A Spaniard who spends the day without speaking, who has seen nothing, who cares to see nothing, who has read nothing; studied nothing; compared nothing, still finds in the grandeur of his resolutions that resources required to face the hour of adversity.” That is, in terms of modernity’s democracy, the Spanish were and remain democratic in the uniformity of their moeurs but aristocratic in their moeurs, and so in reality, by their nature as improved by their regime, not by convention, as established by the false nature-philosophy of the Enlightenment philosophes. Spaniards remain outside of the Enlightenment but suffer nothing on account of that, thanks to their grandeur, their greatness, of soul. For Chateaubriand, then, they are models of what other Europeans might be.
At a birthday celebration for her father, Blanca, worried that her beloved might be distracted by the other women, dances a Zambra, “an expressive dance the Spaniards had borrowed from the Moors.” The music and her dance “settled the fate of the last Abencerraje irrevocably: they would have sufficed to disrupt a heart less afflicted than his.” As for Blanca, although “to love an Infidel, a Moor, a foreigner, seemed so strange a thing to her,” she accepted “that malaise like a true woman of Spain,” foreseeing “dangers and sorrows” calmly. “Let Aben-Hamet become a Christian, let him love me, and I will follow him to the ends of the earth.” That, of course, is the dilemma, as for his part Aben-Hamet thinks, “Let Blanca become a Muslim, let her love me, and I will serve her till my dying breath.” “Fixed in their resolutions,” the lovers “only awaited the moment to reveal their feelings to one another.”
He has disclosed this much, that his family originated in Granada. She invites him to walk through the Alhambra, surely a site of interest. They enter at the Gate of Justice, where “all the charms of his homeland, all his regrets, mingled with the glamor of love, seized the heart of the Last Abencerraje,” in this place where “something sensual, religious, and yet warlike” pervaded this “kind of cloister of love, a mysterious retreat in which the Moorish kings tasted all the delights, and forgot all the duties, of life.” He sheds “ears of fidelity, loyalty, and honor” at the sight of King Boabdil’s name inscribed in the mosaics. When she leads him to the Room of the Abencerrajes, Blanca points out their bloodstains, caused by their slaughter as punishment for the seduction of the Sultana. “That is the manner in which they treat men who seduce credulous women in your country,” she observes, doubtless intending this as a cautionary monition. Aben-Hamet responds nobly, swearing “by the blood of these knights, to love thee with the constancy fidelity, and ardor of an Abencerraje.” He has not yet quite disclosed that he is an Abencerraje, but the religious impasse remains: she would have him to convert; he, her. Having resisted the temptation to forsake religious fidelity for romantic love, they “emerged from that place of danger,” but not before Blanca asks him how he would love her, if he was indeed an Abencerraje. “More than glory and less than honor,” the Moorish aristocrat answers, confirming that his natural virtue overrides conventional opinion. Given both the impasse and their strength of character, they agree never to love anyone else, to wait with patience until one or the other converts. He vows to return every year “to see if thou hast kept faith with me, and whether thou wishest to renounce thy errors,” that is, Christianity.
He does return the following year, bringing with him the gift of a gazelle, “almost as light-footed as thou,” on whose collar “she read with tender gaze her own name.” Both lovers would have known that the gazelle symbolizes the soul and is often depicted as being attacked by a lion symbolizing the passions. This living gazelle has survived the hunt. Having tested each other’s fidelity in love and in religion, “they separated again without succumbing to the passion that drew them to one another.” The next year proves more eventful, and fateful. Having returned “like one of those birds of passage that love brings back to us when it is spring in our climate,” in France, it transpires that Blanca’s brother has also arrived, accompanied by a French prisoner, captured at the Battle of Pavia, whom he has befriended. Perhaps borrowing from the custom of the Abencerrajes, or simply out of Christian charity, Don Carlos, “who witnessed Lautrec’s bravery” on the battlefield, “cared for the young Frenchman’s wounds, and between them one of those heroic friendships” in which “esteem and virtue form the foundation.” Aben-Hamet “felt his hear sink,” seeing that Don Carlo’s intends this man, Thomas de Lautrec, to court Blanca. And Don Carlo “nourished in his heart that hatred against the infidels which he had inherited from El Cid.” Introduced by his sister to the Moor, Don Carlos chivalrously acknowledges him as a man of “noble race and brave”; in the coming war of Spain against Tunisia, “I trust we will see you take the field.” Aristocratic courtesy tempers religious animosity, without abandoning religious animosity. To his grave disappointment, Blanca “made no attempt to hide the secret of her heart” and, having one the love battle before taking the field in any war, Aben-Hamet gracefully takes his leave.
When Don Carlos demands an explanation from his sister, she unhesitatingly declares her love for the Moor: “Nobility, honor, chivalry, are his; I will worship him till my last breath,” and you, brother, should “keep thy vows of knighthood as I will keep my vows of love,” refusing to marry unless he converts to Christianity. When Don Carlos complains that “our family will vanish from the earth,” Blanca ripostes, “It is for thou to revive it.” “Besides, what use are descendants thou wilt never see, and who will lapse from thy virtue? Don Carlos, I feel that we are the last of our race; we are too far out of the common order for our race to flourish after us: the Cid was our ancestor, he will be our posterity.” Spanish aristocrats are the Christian equivalents of the last of the Abencerrajes. Blanca will “worship” her beloved but not at the expense of relinquishing her worship of Christ. And although she worships the man of chivalry, she also suspects that chivalry is dead, at least in her family, knowing that genuine aristocracy, what Chateaubriand’s older contemporary, Thomas Jefferson, called the natural aristocracy of virtue and talent, is no matter of inheritance. Shining in a few generations, it eventually must disappear.
Frustrated by his sister, Don Carlos challenges Aben-Hamet to a duel. Once satisfied that Blanca has not sent him (“she loves thee more than ever,” the knight tells him), the Moor declines the challenge; he is not a knight, and Don Carlos would betray his superior rank if he were to fight him. Don Carlos promptly grants him a knighthood, “gird[ing] him with the very sword that the Abencerraje might well be about to plunge into his chest: such was the former idea of chivalry.” He also offers Aben-Hamet baptism, which the Moor faithfully refuses. In the fight, Don Carlo proves the better swordsman, but Aben-Hamet’s Arabian horse is more agile, his Arab-forged sword stronger. With the Christian at his mercy, the Muslim refuses to kill him. “Thou wert free to kill me, but I have never thought to do you the least injury; I wished only to prove to thee that I was worthy of being thy brother, and to prevent thee from despising me.” The principle of warrior aristocracy, across religious lines, is honor; at the same time, both Christianity and Islam add grace, grace in imitation of God, to honor. That is “the former idea of chivalry.”
Despite Blanca’s efforts, the three men will not reconcile, as Don Carlos continues to “loathe” Aben-Hamet, Lautrec to “envy” him. As for the Muslim, “I esteem Don Carlos, and I pity Lautrec, but I cannot love them.” Blanca can only counsel patience.
Her patience is nearly rewarded. “It came to [Aben-Hamet’s] mind to enter the temple of Blanca’s God, and seek advice from the Lord of Creation.” In “an ancient mosque converted into a church by the faithful,” his heart is “seized by sorrow and religion” in this “temple that was once of his God and his homeland.” “The airy architecture of the Arabs was married to the Gothic, and without losing its elegance had acquired the gravity appropriate to meditation.” Married, indeed, but human beings are not buildings. “Aben-Hamet was about to throw himself headlong onto the marble floor” and give himself to Christ, “when he saw, in the lamplight, an Arabic verse from the Koran, which appeared beneath the half-ruined plaster of the wall. Remorse awoke in his heart, and he hastened to leave the building where he had considered renouncing his loyalty to his religion and country.” Upon leaving the church, he meets Blanca, who worries that, now weakened by passion, she will die if he does not “adopt my faith before the Christian altar.” This moves him to “renounce the error of his religion,” as “the fear of seeing Blanca’s death outweighed all other feelings” in his heart. “After all, he told himself, the God of the Christian may well be the true God,” a “God of noble souls, since He is worshipped by Blanca, Don Carlos and Lautrec.” It seems that love and honor overcome the aristocrat’s religious fidelity. Chateaubriand appears to prepare what indeed would be a ‘Romantic’ conclusion to his tale, one that his sentimental readers would expect and delight in.
But not so. At a gathering arranged by Lautrec, who had also been present in the church, praying for guidance, the three men tell stories of victory: Don Carlos, the conquest of Mexico; Aben-Hamet, the founding of the Ottoman Empire, “newly established on the ruins of Constantinople” (conquest can cut both ways); Lautrec the glories of the French royal court and “the rebirth of the arts from the barbaric womb,” uniting Christian France with ancient Greece. Each man then sings a ballad: the captive Lautrec longing for his homeland; Aben-Hamet longing for the lost Grenada, “lost to an accursed Christian,” but “so it is written” by the will of Allah; Don Carlos of “his illustrious ancestor El Cid,” who “preferred his God, his King, his Ximena, to life itself, and above all: his honor.” Until now, Aben-Hamet had no thought that Don Carlos and Blanca were descendants of El Cid, “whom Christians call the Flower of Battles” while having “a name among us for his cruelty,” that this family was Blanca’s grandfather, the one who killed his grandfather during the conquest of Grenada. Like Boabdil before him, Aben-Hamet weeps, first confessing that “yesterday, the sight of this French knight at prayer” and the sound of “thy words in the cemetery of the temple, made me resolve to know thy God, and sacrifice my faith for thee.” He had come to Grenada in order to revenge his family for the death of his grandfather. Now, he absolves Blanca of her vows to him and “to fulfill by my eternal absence, and my death, what we both owe to the enmity between our gods, our homelands, and our families.” He forfeits Blanca to the French knight, who chivalrously refuses the offer: “Thou shalt not carry into exile the fatal idea that Lautrec, insensitive to thy virtue, seeks to profit from thy misfortunes.” For his part, Don Carlo tells them both, “I expected nothing less from your illustrious origins.” He then offers to meet Aben-Hamet once again in combat; “If I am vanquished, all my good, once yours, will be faithfully restore to you,” and if you refuse combat, “become a Christian and receive the hand of my sister, which Lautrec has requested on your behalf.”
Although “the temptation was great,” it “was not beyond the self-rule of Aben-Hamet,” not beyond the virtue of his nature. “He could not think without horror of any idea of uniting the blood of the persecutors to that of the persecutors” in “so unholy an alliance,” as his grandfather would have deemed it. “Let Blanca pronounce my fate,” which she does: “Return to the desert!” At this, Aben-Hamet “offered his adoration to Blanca even more than to Heaven,” leaves Grenada and soon undertakes a pilgrimage to Mecca, perhaps to repent of that impious adoration. Blanca will pass “the rest of her days among the ruins of the Alhambra,” the palace of love. “She did not complain; she did not weep; she never spoke of Aben-Hamet: a stranger might have thought her happy,” the sole survivor in her family after her father dies of grief and Don Carlos is killed in a duel.
Chateaubriand breaks in with his own memory. In Tunisia he had been shown, in a cemetery near the ruins of Carthage, where Dido mourned the absence of her lover, Aeneas, a tomb called “The Tomb of the Last of the Abencerraje.” “The rainwater collects at the bottom of this funeral basin and serves, in that hot climate, to quench the thirst of birds of passage,” emblems of lovers. There Chateaubriand leaves his story, but his readers, familiar with Virgil’s epic, know that Aeneas left Dido, not only the queen but the founder of Carthage, even as Blanca’s people were the founders of reconquered Grenada; he left her not at her command but at the command of Jupiter, who intended the exile from conquered Troy to become the founder of Rome. Unlike Christian Blanca, pagan Dido cursed the Trojans and committed suicide, prefiguring the brutal wars between Carthage and Rome, and their outcome. Rome would conquer Europe, including Spain, providing the political framework within which Christians could evangelize, despite persecution—or because of it, since the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church. The Spanish reconquest of Spain, ending in Grenada, reprises both the Roman conquest of Europe and the Christian conquest of Rome.
The religio-political settlement Chateaubriand arranges in The Adventures of the Last of the Abencerrajes thus amounts to a thought experiment vindicating both Christian and Muslim aristocracies while acknowledging their demise. The settlement depends primarily upon the character of aristocracy itself—the genuine aristocracy of virtue, and especially of warrior virtues, not the conventional aristocracy of titled oligarchs. This requires upholding honor by means of self-sacrifice. Religion inflects this conduct, but it is noteworthy that no priest and no imam ever appears in the course of the story. Chateaubriand keeps his thought experiment centered on the conduct of aristocrats as aristocrats, across religious frontiers. Aristocrats can settle peace between rival religions, at the cost of exile and loving sacrifice. Chateaubriand’s much younger distant cousin, Alexis de Tocqueville, would find a different role for aristocrats, one consonant with their decline in the wake of civil-social equality, a role consistent with the maintenance of honor.
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