These were the spacious days of Ferdinand of Castile and James of Aragon, when province after province, city after city, were wrested from the Moor, and the defeat of Roderick was wiped out on the very spot where he had endured it five hundred years before. Cordova, Valencia, Murcia, Seville, fell in turn before the Christian arms. The armourer-sergeants, wandering through the bazaars of the captured Moorish cities, and curiously examining the products of their dusky fellow-craftsmen, must doubtless have gleaned many new ideas and scraps of useful knowledge. Ibn-Said, born at Granada in 1214, has left it on record that in his time Murcia was renowned for its coats of mail, its cuirasses, and for every description of iron armour incrusted with gold; it was likewise celebrated for its saddles and harness richly gilt. In fact, continues the Moorish chronicler, for all articles of military equipment, such as bucklers, swords, quivers, arrows, and so forth, the workshops of Andalus surpassed those of any other country. He boasts the beautiful inlaid swords of Seville, which were not inferior to those of the Indies.[B] Cordova, the great centre of industry and refinement in the Peninsula, never achieved fame for its steel manufactures, but its oval leather shields (adargas) were known as early as the tenth century, and used all over Europe, but more particularly in Spain, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Some interesting relics of Saint Ferdinand are enshrined in the Royal Armoury. The remains of the cloak in which the saintly King was buried (N9) are thus described in the Catalogue (see plate 1). “Its texture is of silk and gold, made like an Oriental tapestry, checkered, the first of the squares being crimson and a dirty white, with gold castles, and the second with red lions rampant, like those of the Spanish arms, but turned to the left of the shield. The border is woven in horizontal bands, a wide one in the centre, composed of graceful floral designs, blue and red, on a gold ground; two narrow ones, yellow, on the outer edges of the former, and outside these other two bands of Arab lacework of gold on a crimson ground.”
The _azicates_ (long-necked Moorish spurs) of St. Ferdinand (F189 and 160) are of easily-worked iron. What remains of the incrustation of gold is adorned with little silver castles, similar heraldic devices in gilt being distinguishable on the springs of the straps.