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Updated: June 6, 2025
Some of them carried the swords and shields they had wielded in the battle of the Guadalete, others brought the rude weapons of the mountaineers. But among them were strong hands and stout hearts, summoned by the drums of Pelayo to the reconquest of Spain.
The great Castilian heroes, the Cid, Bernardo del Carpio, and Pelayo, are even now an essential portion of the faith and poetry of the common people of Spain, and are still honored as they were centuries ago.
Pelayo was moved at the words of the simple maiden, and at the touch of her fair hand, and at her beauty, as she stood thus trembling and in tears before him; but as yet he knew nothing of woman, and his heart was free from the snares of love.
The heart of the gentle donzella, says the ancient chronicler, was kind and yielding; and had Pelayo thought fit to ask the greatest boon that love and beauty could bestow doubtless meaning her fair hand she could not have had the cruelty to say him nay.
Pelayo then rushed forth, and struck one of the robbers dead: the others, beholding several huntsmen advancing, took to flight, but were pursued, and several of them taken. The good merchant of Bordeaux and his family beheld this scene with trembling and amazement, for never had they looked upon such feats of arms.
At length she raised her eyes, which were filled with tears, and looked timidly at Pelayo, and her bosom throbbed; and after a violent struggle between strong affection and virgin modesty, her heart relieved itself by words.
The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on "Don Quixote." A man who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errant extending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada was likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of the romances.
And she composed a book which treated of love and chivalry, and the temptations of this mortal life; and one part discoursed of celestial matters, and it was called "The Contemplations of Love;" because at the time she wrote it, she thought of Pelayo, and of his having accepted her jewel and called her by the gentle appellation of "Amiga."
All the men under his control were taught to bear arms, fortifications were built, the ground was planted, and industry revived. Territory which the Moslems had abandoned was occupied, and from a group of soldiers in a mountain cavern a new nation began to emerge. Pelayo died at Caggas de Onis in the year 737, twenty years after his great victory.
Led by one Garret Van Horne, a valorous and gigantic Dutchman, they crossed the bay and buried themselves among the marshes and cabbage gardens of Communipaw, as did Pelayo and his followers among the mountains of Asturias.
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