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It was said that a red cross, like that of Calatrava, appeared in the sky, inspiriting the Christians and dismaying their foes; and that the sight of the Virgin banner borne by the king’s standard-bearer struck the Moslems with terror. It was a credulous age, one in which reputed miracles could be woven out of the most homely and every-day material. Death soon came to the leaders in the war.
Certain of the Christian cavaliers, among whom were the count de Urena, Don Alonso Aguilar, his brother Gonsalvo of Cordova, Diego Castrillo, commander of Calatrava, and others to the number of fifty, remained in ambush near Armilla, expecting the Moors would sally forth at night to visit the scene of battle and to bury their dead.
In the long lists by the Garonne on the landward side of the northern gate there had been many a strange combat, when the Teutonic knight, fresh from the conquest of the Prussian heathen, ran a course against the knight of Calatrava, hardened by continual struggle against the Moors, or cavaliers from Portugal broke a lance with Scandinavian warriors from the further shore of the great Northern Ocean.
He had served fifteen years in the war with the Moors as page or shield-bearer to Pedro Nuñez de Guzman, knight commander of the order of Calatráva, and he had joined Columbus like the rest to seek his fortune in the western hemisphere.
Many of the Christians, disabled by wounds or exhausted by fatigue, turned aside and endeavored to conceal themselves among rocks and thickets, but never more rejoined their companions, being slain or captured by the Moors or perishing in their wretched retreats. The arrival of the troops led by the master of Calatrava and the bishop of Jaen put an end to the rout.
These were founded in imitation of the Templars and Hospitallers for similar work against the Saracens of the Peninsula. The Order of Calatrava, founded by a Cistercian abbot when that city was threatened by the Saracens in 1158, and the Order of St.
These careless cavaliers were in fact the knights of Calatrava returning from their foray. A part of their force had passed on with the cavalgada; ninety of the principal cavaliers had halted to refresh themselves in this valley. El Zagal smiled with ferocious joy when he heard of their negligent security. "Here will be trophies," said he, "to grace our entrance into Granada."
While the ghosts of these long dead men and women, ladies in voluminous brocaded skirts and diamond-covered bosoms, bursting out of the lace and jewels of their stiff bodices, cardinals in trailing scarlet robes and bishops with well-powdered hair contrasting curiously with their Dominican or Franciscan dress, Roman nobles all in the strange old-world costumes, with ruffs and trunk hose and emblazoned mantles, of the Pope's household and of the military orders of Malta and Calatrava, secular dandies in elaborately-embroidered silk coats and waistcoats, ecclesiastical dandies to the full as dapper with their heavy lace, and abundant fob jewels and inevitable two watches on the sober black of their clothes; while these ghosts whom we have evoked in all their finery (long since gone to the bric-
The wary and calculating merchants accustomed to supply the army shrank from engaging at their own risk in so hazardous an undertaking. The queen therefore hired fourteen thousand beasts of burden, and ordered all the wheat and barley to be brought up in Andalusia and in the domains of the knights of Santiago and Calatrava.
There actually lived a Comendador de Calatrava who was killed by Don Juan after the abduction of his daughter. The perfect amorist, according to the Cronica de Sevilla, was then inveigled into the church where lay his enemy and assassinated by the Franciscans, who spread the pious fiction that the image of his victim, descending from its pedestal, had itself exacted vengeance.
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