(2) The modern system of breeding and training the fighting bull.
(3) The "Miura question"--an incident of to-day.
As a Spanish institution, bull-fighting dates back to the Reconquest or shortly thereafter. When that abounding vigour and virility that had animated and sustained Spanish explorers and warriors--the sailors and adventurers who, following in the wake of the caravels of Columbus, opened up a new world to Spain and carried the purple banner of Castile to the ends of the earth--when that vigour had spent its fiery force and grown anæmic, there still remained (as always) a residue of bold spirits who, scorning decadent circumstance, turned intuitively to that virile and dangerous exercise left them as a heritage by the vanished Moors.
For it was the Arab conquerors, the so-called Moors, who first practised this form of vicarious warfare. It was, however, in no sense as a sport--far less as a popular pastime--that the fierce Arab had risked equal chances with the fiercest wild beast of the Spanish plain. No, it was strictly as a substitute and a preparation for the sterner realities of war that, during the intervals of peace, the Moors "kept their hands in" by fighting bulls.
The object was to keep themselves and their chargers fit, their eyesight true, and muscles toughened for the further struggles that all knew must follow. But during those intervals of peace, the rival knights, Christian and Moslem, met in keen competition with lance and sword on the enclosed arena of the bull-ring. The conclusion of a truce was frequently celebrated by holding a joint _fiesta de toros_.
No trace, however, exists in Arab writings to show that these people possessed any innate love of bull-fighting as a sport, or ever practised it save only as an accessory to the art of war.
No other people of ancient race have had exhibitions of this kind--that is, where the skill of man was invoked to incite a beast to attack in certain desired modes; while the performer escaped the onset, and finally slew his adversary, by preconceived forms of defence governed by set rules--a spectacle wherein the assembled crowd could, each according to his light, estimate both the skill of the man and the fighting quality of the beast. That the blood of many a gladiator dyed the Roman arena at the horns of bulls is certain: but no artistic embellishments of attack or defence added to the joy of the Roman holiday. The mere mechanical instinct of self-preservation may inadvertently have suggested to individual combatants certain combinations in the conflict that in later days have been utilised by modern matadors; but it seems hardly possible to suppose that Roman gladiators saved themselves by methods of prescribed art. Contemporary records, together with the scenes depicted on coinage, represent rather a mere massacre of men by brute force; and such cannot bear any relation to the conditions that govern the national _fiesta_ of Spain to-day.