aurus), a curious medley of ignorance and
superstition, much of it silly, and all of it curiously inconsistent
with the acknowledged character of the enlightened King. Modern
scholarship, however, discards this petty treatise from the list of his
productions.

His 'Tablas Alfonsinas' (Alfonsine Tables), to which Chaucer refers in
the 'Frankeleine's Tale,' though curiously mystical, yet were really
scientific, and rank among the most famous of mediaeval books. Alfonso
had the courage and the wisdom to recall to Toledo the heirs and
successors of the great Arabian philosophers and the learned Rabbis, who
had been banished by religious fanaticism, and there to establish a
permanent council--a mediaeval Academy of Sciences--which devoted itself
to the study of the heavens and the making of astronomical calculations.
"This was the first time," says the Spanish historian, "that in
barbarous times the Republic of Letters was invited to contemplate a
great school of learning,--men occupied through many years in rectifying
the old planetary observations, in disputing about the most abstruse
details of this science, in constructing new instruments, and observing,
by means of them, the courses of the stars, their declensions, their
ascensions, eclipses, longitudes, and latitudes." It was the vision of
Roger Bacon fulfilled.

At his own expense, for years together, the King entertained in his
palace at Burgos, that their knowledge might enrich the nation, not only
certain free-thinking followers of Averroes and Avicebron, but infidel
disciples of the Koran, and learned Rabbis who denied the true faith.
That creed must not interfere with deed, was an astonishing mental
attitude for the thirteenth century, and invited a general suspicion of
the King's orthodoxy. His religious sense was really strong, however,
and appears most impressively in the 'Cantigas a la Vergen Maria' (Songs
to the Virgin), which were sung over his grave by priests and acolytes
for hundreds of years. They are sometimes melancholy and sometimes
joyous, always simple and genuine, and, written in Galician, reflect the
trustful piety and happiness of his youth in remote hill provinces where
the thought of empire had not penetrated. It was his keen intelligence
that expressed itself in the saying popularly attributed to him, "Had I
been present at the creation, I might have offered some useful
suggestions." It was his reverent spirit that made mention in his will