This enchanting moment preceded bloodshed, for on the next day the two uncles of Lembrot were killed by Sacarus, thus proclaiming the innocence of the Duchess to whom Lorraine was then restored, and, along with other fallen knights, lay the King of Africa. The dead were buried with great pomp at the expense of their splendid host, and thus ended a tournament surely without equal as a spectacle in history. The chronicle of Don Rodrigo devotes nearly a hundred pages to this picturesque event.
The most prominent episode in the life of the legendary Rodrigo is his famous intrigue with Florinda. We are told that Count Julian, Governor of Ceuta, sent his daughter to be brought up at Court, where she was in a sense the King's ward. Nothing remains in history to support this tradition, for it is now asserted it was never the Gothic habit to have the daughters of absent noblemen brought up at court as the sovereign's wards. Then we hear of the Cava's baths, where Rodrigo, from his palace windows, overhanging the river outside the Puenta de San Martin, beheld her bathing. Inspection proves these ruins to be the old foundation of a bridge, nothing more. The story of the Cava dates from the fourteenth century, when an Arabian writer, Aben-en-Noguairi, in a volume called _El Limita de la prudencia en las reglas de la prudencia_, gives the legend. The historian Gamero thus defines the word _Cava_ as applied to Florinda in explanation of her condition of violated maiden. Caba proceeds from Caat, an Arabian tribe that came to Spain in Wamba's reign, descended from Heber of Jewish origin. When the Jews at the seventeenth Council of Toledo, under Egica, were ordered to be destituted and sold as slaves, while their children were to be taken from them and forcibly brought up as Christians, the saying was that the _Caba was violated_, that is, that this entire tribe, forced to become Christian in preservation of its wealth and property, had prostituted itself. From the current phrase, the historians applied the word to a particular woman, and poetically named her Florinda. From Eve downward all her daughters have had to share her fate in supporting all the blame of human disasters. Neither war, defeat, nor blunder nor wreckage of nations or of individuals is accepted by man as properly and adequately explained, if some woman is not the man's or the nation's evil genius. Unprompted by woman, man is a serene and prudent animal, and but for Florinda, who never existed (though the historians gravely reproduce a touching and eloquent letter of hers to her father recording in fine and dignified phrases the story of her wrongs, and beseeching her father to vindicate her outraged honour and punish the unworthy King), the last of the Toledan sovereigns might have ended his days in his bed, and, undesirable fate for Spain! the Moors might never have crossed the narrow strait. As Gamero says: "Ultimately the story of Rodrigo's guilty love for a lady of the palace was created." A lady's name once introduced, it followed a fatal and romantic legend should be invented, and what prettier than conversion of the broken bridge on the enchanting marge of yellow Tagus into a syren's bath, with Rodrigo, the inflammable warrior, fresh from his encounter with dethroned gods and their emissaries in an enchanted palace, looking down on the maiden as she disported in the water from the windows of his luxurious Gothic palace? The legend once started, it is inevitable that the traitor should follow, and hence the elusive and mysterious figure of Count Julian, who advances into the picture on a mission of paternal vengeance, and treacherously opens the gates of Spain to the predatory Berbers. The Turks had entered Spain, and it needed some other explanation than national pluck, enterprise and determination to account for their almost unopposed approach towards Toledo; and what so likely an instrument of misfortune as the mythical father of the fabulous Florinda? So history was written, in all faith in those naïve days. Don Faustina de Bourbon remarks that this fable was not heard of before the dominion of the Asturian monarchs in southern Spain; not until the Cid took Valencia, and Alonzo basely seized Toledo, the kingdom of his Moorish protector and host. Such fables accord with the childish, superstitious yearning and need to associate the land's misfortunes with the personal iniquities of those who rule it. Roderick may have been no saint, and small blame to him in those grossly immoral times, but we need not attach to his shoulders the packet of national sins and disorders.