What Is Certain
Is, That The Old Phoenician Name Of Hispalis Outlived The Roman Name Of
Julia Romula And Reappeared In The Arabic As Ishbiliya (I Know It From
My Baedeker) And Is Now Permanently Established As Seville.
Under the Moors the city was subordinate to Cordova, though I can
hardly bear to think so in my far greater love of Seville.
But it was
the seat of schools of science, art, and agriculture, and after the
Christians had got it back, Alfonso the Learned founded other schools
there for the study of Latin and Arabic. But her greatest prosperity and
glory came to Seville with the discovery of America. Not Columbus only,
but all his most famous contemporaries, sailed from the ports of her
coasts; she was the capital of the commerce with the new world, ruling
and regulating it by the oldest mercantile tribunal in the world, and
becoming the richest city of Spain. Then riches flowered in the letters
and arts, especially the arts, and Herrera, Pacheco, Velasquez, Murillo,
and Zurburan were born and flourished in Seville. In modern times she
has taken a prominent part in political events. She led in the patriotic
war to drive out the armies of Napoleon, and she seems to have been on
both sides in the struggle for liberal and absolutist principles, the
establishment of the brief republic of 1868, and the restoration of the
present monarchy.
Through all the many changes from better to Worse, from richer to
poorer, Seville continued faithful to the ideal of religious unity which
the wise Isabel and the shrewd Ferdinand divined was the only means of
consolidating the intensely provincial kingdoms of Spain into one nation
of Spaniards.
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