Historic Girls Part 11

Courteous and stately still, but with a shrewd and critical eye, the amba.s.sador of Cyprus slowly pa.s.sed from candidate to candidate, with here a pleasant word and there a look of admiration; to this one a honeyed compliment upon her beauty, to that one a bit of praise for her elegance of dress.

How oddly this all sounds to us with our modern ideas of propriety and good taste! It seems a sort of Prize Girl Show, does it not? Or, it is like a compet.i.tive examination for a royal bride.

But, like too many such examinations, this one had already been settled beforehand. The King had decided to whom the prize of his crown should go, and so, at the proper time, the critical amba.s.sador stopped before a slight girl of fourteen, dressed in a robe of simple white.

"Donzella mia," he said courteously, but in a low tone; "are not you the daughter of Messer. Marco Cornaro, the n.o.ble merchant of the Via Merceria?"

"I am, my lord," the girl replied.

"My royal master greets you through me," he said. "He recalls the day when you did give him shelter, and he invites you to share with him the throne of Cyprus. Shall this be as he wishes?"

And the girl, with a deep courtesy in acknowledgment of the stately obeisance of the amba.s.sador, said simply, "That shall be, my lord, as my father and his Excellency shall say."

The amba.s.sador of Cyprus took the young girl's hand, and, conducting her through all that splendid company, presented her before the doge's throne.

"Excellency," he said, "Cyprus hath made her choice. We present to you, if so it shall please your grace, our future queen, this fair young maid, Catarina, the daughter of the n.o.ble Marco Cornaro, merchant and senator of the Republic."

What the seventy-one disappointed young ladies thought of the King's choice, or what they said about it when they were safely at home once more, history does not record. But history does record the splendors and display of the ceremonial with which the gray-haired old doge, Cristofero Moro, in the great hall of the palace, surrounded by the senators of the Republic and all the rank and power of the State of Venice, formally adopted Catarina as a "daughter of the Republic." Thus to the dignity of her father's house was added the majesty of the great Republic. Her marriage portion was placed at one hundred thousand ducats, and Cyprus was granted, on behalf of this "daughter of the Republic," the alliance and protection of Venice.

The amba.s.sador of Cyprus standing before the altar of St. Mark's as the personal representative of his master, King Giacomo was married "by proxy" to the young Venetian girl; while the doge, representing her new father, the republic, gave her away in marriage, and Catarina Cornaro, amid the blessings of the priests, the shouts of the people, and the demonstrations of clas.h.i.+ng music and waving banners, was solemnly proclaimed Queen of Cyprus, of Jerusalem, and of Armenia.

But the gorgeous display, before which even the fabled wonders of the "Arabian Nights" were but poor affairs, did not conclude here. Following the splendors of the marriage ceremony and the wedding-feast, came the pageant of departure. The Grand Ca.n.a.l was ablaze with gorgeous colors and decorations. The broad water-steps of the Piazza of St. Mark was soft with carpets of tapestry, and at the foot of the stairs floated the most beautiful boat in the world, the Bucentaur or state gondola, of Venice. Its high, carved prow and framework were one ma.s.s of golden decorations. White statues of the saints, carved heads of the lion of St. Mark, the doge's cap, and the emblems of the Republic adorned it throughout. Silken streamers of blue and scarlet floated from its standards; and its sides were draped in velvet hangings of crimson and royal purple. The long oars were scarlet and gold, and the rowers were resplendent in suits of blue and silver. A great velvet-covered throne stood on the upper deck, and at its right was a chair of state, glistening with gold.

Down the tapestried stairway came the Doge of Venice, and, resting upon his arm, in a white bridal dress covered with pearls, walked the girl queen Catarina. Doge and daughter seated themselves upon their sumptuous thrones, their glittering retinue filled the beautiful boat, the scarlet oars dipped into the water; and then, with music playing, banners streaming, and a grand escort of boats of every conceivable shape, flas.h.i.+ng in decoration and gorgeous in mingled colors, the bridal train floated down the Grand Ca.n.a.l, on past the outlying islands, and between the great fortresses to where, upon the broad Adriatic, the galleys were waiting to take the new Queen to her island kingdom off the sh.o.r.es of Greece. And there, in his queer old town of Famagusta, built with a curious commingling of Saracen, Grecian, and Norman ideas, King Giacomo met his bride.

So they were married, and for five happy years all went well with the young King and Queen. Then came troubles. King Giacomo died suddenly from a cold caught while hunting, so it was said; though some averred that he had been poisoned, either by his half-sister Carlotta, with whom he had contended for his throne, or by some mercenary of Venice, who desired his realm for that voracious Republic.

But if this latter was the case, the voracious Republic of Venice was not to find an easy prey. The young Queen Catarina proclaimed her baby boy King of Cyprus, and defied the Great Republic. Venice, surprised at this rebellion of its adopted "daughter," dispatched emba.s.sy after emba.s.sy to demand submission. But the young mother was brave and stood boldly up for the rights of her son.

But he, too, died. Then Catarina, true to the memory of her husband and her boy, strove to retain the throne intact. For years she ruled as Queen of Cyprus, despite the threatenings of her home Republic and the conspiracies of her enemies. Her one answer to the demands of Venice was:

"Tell the Republic I have determined never to remarry. When I am dead, the throne of Cyprus shall go to the State, my heir. But until that day I am Queen of Cyprus!"

Then her brother Giorgio, the same who in earlier days had looked down with her from the Cornaro Palace upon the outcast Prince of Cyprus, came to her as amba.s.sador of the Republic. His entreaties and his a.s.surance that, unless she complied with the senate's demand, the protection of Venice would be withdrawn, and the island kingdom left a prey to Saracen pirates and African robbers, at last carried the day. Worn out with long contending, fearful, not for herself but for her subjects of Cyprus,--she yielded to the demands of the senate, and abdicated in favor of the Republic.

Then she returned to Venice. The same wealth of display and ceremonial that had attended her departure welcomed the return of this obedient daughter of the Republic, now no longer a light-hearted young girl, but a dethroned queen, a widowed and childless woman.

She was allowed to retain her royal t.i.tle of Queen of Cypus, and a n.o.ble domain was given her for a home in the town of Asola, up among the northern mountains. Here, in a ma.s.sive castle, she held her court. It was a bright and happy company, the home of poetry and music, the arts, and all the culture and refinement of that age, when learning belonged to the few and the people were sunk in densest ignorance.

Here t.i.tian, the great artist, painted the portrait of the exiled queen that has come down to us. Here she lived for years, sad in her memories of the past, but happy in her helpfulness of others until, on her way to visit her brother Giorgio in Venice, she was stricken with a sudden fever, and died in the palace in which she had played as a child.

With pomp and display, as was the wont of the Great Republic, with a city hung with emblems of mourning, and with the solemn strains of dirge and ma.s.s filling the air, out from the great hall of the Palazzo Cornaro, on, across the heavily draped bridge that spanned the Grand Ca.n.a.l from the water-gate of the palace, along the broad piazza crowded with a silent throng, and into the Church of the Holy Apostles, the funeral procession slowly pa.s.sed. The service closed, and in the great Cornaro tomb in the family chapel, at last was laid to rest the body of one who had enjoyed much but suffered more--the sorrowful Queen of Cyprus, the once bright and beautiful Daughter of the Republic.

Venice to-day is mouldy and wasting. The palace in which Catarina Cornaro spent her girlhood is now a p.a.w.nbroker's shop. The last living representative of the haughty house of Lusignan--Kings, in their day, of Cyprus, of Jerusalem, and of Armenia--is said to be a waiter in a French cafe. So royalty withers and power fades. There is no t.i.tle to n.o.bility save character, and no family pride so unfading as a spotless name. But, though palace and family have both decayed, the beautiful girl who was once the glory of Venice and whom great artists loved to paint, sends us across the ages, in a flash of regal splendor, a lesson of loyalty and helpfulness. This, indeed, will outlive all their queenly t.i.tles, and shows her to us as the bright-hearted girl who, in spite of sorrow, of trouble, and of loss, developed into the strong and self-reliant woman.

THERESA OF AVILA: THE GIRL OF THE SPANISH SIERRAS.

(Afterward known as St. Theresa of Avila.) A.D. 1525.

It is a stern and gray old city that the sun looks down upon, when once he does show his jolly face above the saw-like ridges of the grim Guadarrama Mountains in Central Spain; a stern and gray old city as well it may be, for it is one of the very old towns of Western Europe--Avila, said by some to have been built by Albula, the mother of Hercules nearly four thousand years ago.

Whether or not it was the place in which that baby gymnast strangled the serpents who sought to kill him in his cradle, it is indeed ancient enough to suit any boy or girl who likes to dig among the relics of the past. For more than eight centuries the same granite walls that now surround it have lifted their gray ramparts out of the vast and granite-covered plains that make the country so wild and lonesome, while its eighty-six towers and gateways, still unbroken and complete, tell of its strength and importance in those far-off days, when the Cross was battling with the Crescent, and Christian Spain, step by step, was forcing Mohammedan Spain back to the blue Mediterranean and the arid wastes of Africa, from which, centuries before, the followers of the Arabian Prophet had come.

At the time of our story, in the year 1525, this forcing process was about over. Under the relentless measures of Ferdinand and Isabella, with whose story all American children, at least, should be familiar, the last Moorish stronghold had fallen, in the very year in which Columbus discovered America, and Spain, from the Pyrenees to the Straits of Gibraltar, acknowledged the masters.h.i.+p of its Christian sovereigns.

But the centuries of warfare that had made the Spaniards a fierce and warlike race, had also filled Spain with frowning castles and embattled towns. And such an embattled town was this same city of Avila, in which, in 1525, lived the stern and pious old grandee, Don Alphonso Sanchez de Cepeda, his sentimental and romance-loving wife, the Donna Beatrix, and their twelve st.u.r.dy and healthy children.

Religious warfare, as it is the most bitter and relentless of strifes, is also the most brutal. It turns the natures of men and women into quite a different channel from the one in which the truths they are fighting for would seek to lead them; and of all relentless and brutal religious wars, few have been more bitter than the one that for fully five hundred years had wasted the land of Spain.

To battle for the Cross, to gain renown in fights against the Infidels--as the Moors were then called,--to "obtain martyrdom" among the followers of Mohammed--these were reckoned by the Christians of crusading days as the highest honor that life could bring or death bestow. It is no wonder, therefore, that in a family, the father of which had been himself a fighter of Infidels, and the mother a reader and dreamer of all the romantic stories that such conflicts create, the children also should be full of that spirit of hatred toward a conquered foe that came from so bitter and long-continuing a warfare.

Don Alphonso's religion had little in it of cheerfulness and love.

It was of the stern and pitiless kind that called for sacrifice and penance, and all those uncomfortable and unnecessary forms by which too many good people, even in this more enlightened day, think to ease their troubled consciences, or to satisfy the fancied demands of the Good Father, who really requires none of these foolish and most unpleasant self-punishments.

But such a belief was the rule in Don Alphonso's day, and when it could lay so strong a hold upon grown men and women, it would, of course, be likely to work in peculiar ways with thoughtful and conscientious children, who, understanding little of the real meaning of sacrifice and penance, felt it their duty to do something as proof of their belief.

So it came about that little ten-year-old Theresa, one of the numerous girls of the Cepeda family, thought as deeply of these things as her small mind was capable. She was of a peculiarly sympathetic, romantic, and conscientious nature, and she felt it her duty to do something to show her devotion to the faith for which her father had fought so valiantly, and which the nuns and priests, who were her teachers, so vigorously impressed upon her.

She had been taught that alike the punishment or the glory that must follow her life on earth were to last forever. Forever! this was a word that even a thoughtful little maiden like Theresa could not comprehend.

So she sought her mother.

"Forever? how long is forever, mother mine?" she asked.

But the Donna Beatrix was just then too deeply interested in the tragic story of the two lovers, Calixto and Melibea, in the Senor Fernando de Rojas' tear-compelling story, to be able to enter into the discussion of so deep a question.

"Forever," she said, looking up from the thick and crabbed black-letter pages, "why forever is forever, child--always. Pray do not trouble me with such questions; just as I am in the midst of this beautiful death-scene too."

The little girl found she could gain no knowledge from this source, and she feared to question her stern and bigoted old father. So she sought her favorite brother Pedro--a bright little fellow of seven, who adored and thoroughly believed in his sister Theresa.

To Pedro, then, Theresa confided her belief that, if forever was so long a time as "always," it would be most unpleasant to suffer "always," if by any chance they should do any thing wrong. It would be far better, so argued this little logician, to die now and end the problem, than to live and run so great a risk. She told him, too, that, as they knew from their mother's tales, the most beautiful, the most glorious way to die was as a martyr among the infidel Moors. So she proposed to Pedro that she and he should not say a word to any one, but just start off at once as crusaders on their own accounts, and lose their lives but save their souls as martyrs among the Moors.

The suggestion had all the effect of novelty to the little Pedro, and while he did not altogether relish the idea of losing his life among the Moors, still the possibility of a change presented itself with all the attractions that the thought of trying something new always has for children. Besides, he had great respect for his sister's judgment.

"Well, let us be crusaders," he said, "and perhaps we need not be martyrs, sister. I don't think that would be so very pleasant, do you? Who knows; perhaps we may be victorious crusaders and conquer the Infidels just as did Ruy Diaz the Cid.(1) See here, Theresa; I have my sword and you can take your cross, and we can have such a nice crusade, and may be the infidel Moors will run away from us just as they did from the Cid and leave us their cities and their gold and treasure? Don't you remember what mother read us, how the Cid won Castelon, with its silver and its gold?"

(1) The Cid was the great hero of Spanish romance. The stories of his valor have been the joy of Spaniards, old and young, for centuries. Cid is a corruption of the Moorish word seyd or said, and means master.

And the little fellow spouted most valiantly this portion of the famous poem of the exploits of the Cid (the Poema del Cid), with the martial spirit of which stirring rhyme his romantic mother had filled her children:

"Smite, smite, my knights, for mercy's sake--on boldly to the war; I am Ruy Diaz of Bivar, the Cid Campeador!

Three hundred lances then were couched, with pennons streaming gay; Three hundred s.h.i.+elds were pierced through--no steel the shock might stay;-- Three hundred hauberks were torn off in that encounter sore; Three hundred snow-white pennons were crimson-dyed in gore; Three hundred chargers wandered loose--their lords were overthrown; The Christians cry 'St. James for Spain!' the Moormen cry 'Mahoun!'"

Theresa applauded her little brother's eloquent recitation, and thought him a very smart boy; but she said rather sadly: "I fear me it will not be that way, my Pedro; for martyrdom means, as mother has told us, the giving up of our life rather than bow to the false faith of the Infidel, and thus to save our souls and have a crown of glory."