King, Georgiana Goddard: A brief account of the military orders in Spain (New York: The Hispanic Society of America, 1921)

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MILITARY ORDERS
Calatrava
was lost
render with his sons-in-law, leaving Feman
Ruiz de Castro to take all the consequences.
At any rate the Moors took Calatrava also,
and killed all the freyles there, and many
other Christians.
So the histories tell it, and, as Cervantes
once said, the story is so old it must be
true. It is a good story, both the tragedy
and the sorry part. But the Primera
Coronica General, the first complete history
of Spain, which is the book of el Rey Sabio,
does better. It incorporates some frag-
ments of elder poetry, like carved capitals
and corbels built into a house wall. This
is epical: it is one of the cantilenes that
French scholars used to postulate, though
I think myself it is the remnant, and not
the germ, of a great poetry.
The Battle
of Alarcos
Then Mazemut in his triremes set sail
from the African cove,
And his folk were beyond the telling, so
great was the throng thereof,
And like the sands of the seashore, as
they crossed by the Straits of
the South,
HISPANIC NOTES