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Updated: June 6, 2025
Die they did not, that feeble relic of Spain on the mountain-side, though long their only care was for shelter and safety. Here Pelayo cheered them, doing his utmost to implant new courage in their fearful hearts.
His daughter, however, could not eat: her eyes were ever and anon stealing to gaze on Pelayo, whom she regarded with gratitude for his protection, and admiration for his valor; and now that he had laid aside his helmet, and she beheld his lofty countenance, glowing with manly beauty, she thought him something more than mortal.
And often thinking of him in tender sadness, and of her never having beheld him more, she would take the book and would read it as if in his stead; and while she repeated the words of love which it contained, she would endeavor to fancy them uttered by Pelayo, and that he stood before her.
It is all very well for the "chivalrous classes" at the South, whoever they may happen to be, to talk about "dying in the last ditch," and of imitating the action of Pelayo and his friends; but common folk like to die in their beds, and to receive the inevitable visitant with decorum, to an exhibition of which ditches are decidedly unfavorable.
Spain completes in the expulsion of the Moors the warfare, the Crusade, which began with Pelayo and the remnant of the Visigoths. Spain, as Spain, could not act otherwise, could not act as Germany acted, as England acted.
Ibun Hayyan, an Arabian chronicler, gives the following fanciful account of Pelayo and his feeble band. "The commencement of the rebellion happened thus: there remained no city, town, or village in Galicia but what was in the hands of the Moslems with the exception of a steep mountain, on which this Pelayo took refuge with a handful of men.
Suddenly ahead of the two hundred thousand a high sheet of rock rose perpendicularly skywards; on a platform Pelayo and his three hundred warriors, who somehow or other had managed to emerge from a miraculous cave where they had found an effigy of the Virgin of Battles, made a last stand for their lives and liberties.
The Spaniards fired, the French replied. The other Spanish ships had imitated the movement of the "San Pelayo;" "but," writes the chaplain, Mendoza, "these devils are such adroit sailors, and maneuvred so well, that we did not catch one of them." Pursuers and pursued ran out to sea, firing useless volleys at each other.
Here they halted, for their roads were widely different. When they came to part, the merchant and his wife were loud in thanks and benedictions, and the good burgher would fain have given Pelayo the largest of his sacks of gold; but the young man put it aside with a smile.
The panic was complete. From every side the Christians rushed upon the foe. Pelayo, bearing a cross of oak and crying that the Lord was fighting for his people, leaped downward from the cave, followed by his men, who fell with irresistible fury on the foe, forcing them backward under the brow of Mount Auseva, where Al Kamah strove to make a stand.
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