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

200
MILITARY ORDERS
A golden
fleece
Though
anti-semi-
tism is
commercial,
invasion is
personal
markets of Europe. “There sheep were
sheared with fleece of gold,” says the
poem. It caught the last wave of invasion
just as it broke, and thereafter Spain
never lay in real danger, and the wars
of Granada were for a sort of gallant play,
and then for conquest and profit. There
is but little difference, in truth, between
the expulsion of the last Moors by the
Catholic Kings and the expulsion of the
Jews and Moriscoes thereafter: both were
explosions of anti-semitism commercially
accounted for. But at the river Salada the
danger was real, and the struggle had still
the consecration of self-defence and the
aureole of a crusade. The Poem of Alfonso
XI is the chanson de geste of that battle:
it leads up to it and away again but the
battle is the life and reason of the poem.
Very gallant, in its short ballad-beat, is
the account of the mustering:
Gentry in great guise,
From Castile the royal,
Princes of Galicia
And knights of Portugal.
HISPANIC NOTES