Don Pelayo en tres tragedias neoclasicas / Pelayo and his sister. Alexander Selimov University of Delaware When we consider the personages in the Dark Ages who changed the face of Spain, by imprinting an indelible mark on its history, culture and national identity, several names come to mind: Rodrigo, the king of Goths, whose lasciviousness cost him his crown and destroyed his realm; Florinda, Rodrigo’s last victim; her father, Count Julian, who invited the Moorish invasion in order to avenge the affront to his honor, and Pelayo, a hero to whom, it is believed, Christian Spain owes its very existence. Neither legend nor history records the existence of Pelayo's sister. Nevertheless, the fictitious representation of such a creature assumes enormous importance in Neoclassic tragedy, where she becomes the instrument to test and to prove Pelayo's worthiness. Louise Mirrer develops the thesis that the Spaniards feminized the Moorish "other" in medieval literature.1 In Pelayo's case this activity was undertaken not by the medieval writers but in their imitation by the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century tragedians. In both periods the feminine role is associated with sexuality, emotionality and moral weakness, ultimately with victimization, and is employed as counter to the masculine essence of the Spanish hero. At the beginning of the eighth century, when the Moorish invasion put a violent end to four centuries of Visigothic rule on the Iberian Peninsula, Pelayo organized one of the main resistance groups in the mountains of Asturias.2 A nobleman and possibly a son of Duke Fávila, according to the Medieval chronicles, Pelayo served in King Rodrigo’s royal guard, and fought in the battle of Guadalete that ended in a disaster for the Goths. Under his leadership a relatively small army of Christians stopped the advancement of the Muslims at the place called Covadonga, and gave a jump start to the lengthy process of the restoration of Christian rule. Pelayo was acclaimed as a new king, and following his death in 737, his son Fávila succeeded him to the throne. The information about Pelayo is scarce and sometimes contradictory. Even though different sources confirm his historical protagonism as a first monarch of a new kingdom, they do not provide enough reliable information as to the exact events that led to the beginning of the Reconquista. It was literary imagination that filled the gaps. It projected anachronistically contemporary thought, interests and goals upon the Dark Ages, contaminating the history with fiction, and creating a modernized image of that period. Given the opportunity to perpetuate his glorious deeds in repeated performances on the Spanish stage, it was only logical for Pelayo to become a legendary hero and a national myth. The theater, because of its capacity to reach out to all levels of society, including the vast illiterate majority of the Spanish population, played an important role in popularizing the theme in the seventh decade of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth. The interest of the Spanish Neoclassic dramatists in the Middle Ages as a source of inspiration for literary creation was prompted in part by the search for national symbols. Motivated by the desire of order, progress and harmony, they staged plays with the objective of conveying moral examples to the Spanish public and reaffirming national identity in the period marked by the beginning of the demise of the Spanish Empire. The figure of Pelayo was more than adequate to fulfill that purpose. His military victory over the Muslims, could be easily presented as a triumph of virtue over vice, and that perspective would have fit perfectly within the ethics and aesthetics of the Spanish Enlightenment. It only remained to extend that paradigm to include the triumph of masculine strength and reason against feminine weakness and emotion.