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With the Moors went almost all their arts and industries; immense tracts of country became arid wastes: Castile and La Mancha barely raise crops every second year where the Moriscos reaped their teeming harvest, and Estremadura from a smiling garden became a waste where wandering flocks of sheep and pigs now find a bare subsistence. Nor was this all.
Born in Estremadura in 1485, of an ancient and respectable family, he was like many others who have distinguished themselves as great soldiers while at school and college remarkable rather for mischievous freaks, and disregard of authority, than for love of learning.
Soon after the ceremony, Charles embarked from Zealand on his voyage to Spain. He retired to the monastery of St. Justus, near the town of Placentia, in Estremadura. He entered this retreat in February, 1556, and died there on the 21st of September, 1558, in the fifty-ninth year of his age.
But, as the man proposed and necessity disposed it so, for she needed a husband very badly, she was compelled to content herself with a poor man, who had been driven by necessity to leave the Province of Estremadura in Spain.
Although the vast plains of Estremadura and Castile produce the finest wheat known to commerce, the quantity, owing to the want of water, is so small in relation to the acreage under cultivation, that it does not suffice for home consumption, except in very favourable years; while the utilisation of the magnificent rivers, which now roll their waters uselessly to the sea, would make the land what it once was when the thrifty Moor held it a thickly populated and flourishing grain-producing district.
His descendants, bearing the same title of nobility, are still to be found, it is said, at Truxillo, in the ancient province of Estremadura, the original birthplace of the Pizarros.21 Pizarro's person has been already described. He was tall in stature, well- proportioned, and with a countenance not unpleasing.
The old Spanish province of Estremadura, though distant from the sea, shut in by mountain-chains, furnished numerous adventurers for the expeditions of discovery, conquest, and plunder that followed Columbus to the New World; two of whom achieved astonishing renown. One was the conqueror of Mexico; the other, the conqueror of Peru.
The sentiment of self-esteem, always a national characteristic, assumed an almost ludicrous shape. Not a ragged Biscayan muleteer, not a swineherd of Estremadura, that did not imagine himself a nobleman because he was not of African descent.
The inhabitants of this borderland are, to judge by appearance, superior to the people of the plains, who certainly strike the casual observer as being dirty and somewhat dull. The Castilian and Aragonese, however, may be said to constitute the heart of the nation. Leon and Estremadura form a part of the same raised plateau, but their people are very different.
But the Cid was undaunted, and had soon laid his enemy low. Great praise then was given to the Cid so great that the knights of Castile were jealous and plotted to kill him. But the Moorish kings whom he had captured and released warned him in time to avert the danger. Then the Cid aided Ferdinand in defeating the hostile Moors in Estremadura, after a siege of Coimbra lasting seven months.
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