PLATE XXXVI.
Bands, Side of Arches.
of the greatest beauty. Thou wert chosen for the place where the feasts should be celebrated. He is the support and the rule for all good, source of benefits, and food of courage! For thee....”
We left the story of Seville somewhat abruptly to deal in detail with the alcazar. Under Almohade rule, and while the alcazar and the mosque were in course of construction, the city knew peace, and its commerce flourished. But the days of its security were limited; the end of the Moslem domination in Seville was drawing to its close. The revived prosperity of the Mohammedans spurred the Christian Spaniards to renewed efforts to encompass the overthrow of the infidels. Pope Innocent III. declared a crusade, and numbers of adventurous French and English free-lances travelled to Spain in answer to the call. But in 1195 the Christians were defeated at Alarcos, near Badajoz, and again the ambitious projects of San Fernando were temporarily frustrated. In 1212 the Almohade army, it is said to the number of 600,000 men, was almost destroyed on the disastrous field of Las Navas, and the work of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain was begun. City after city was captured by the soldiers of Fernando III., Cordova fell in 1235, and the conqueror, with the help of the King of Granada, who had sworn allegiance to the Christian monarch, marched against Seville.
The army brought by the holy king to Seville was the most brilliant and numerous ever seen in Christian or Mohammedan Spain. No smaller force would have been sufficient for the taking of a city which contained 12,000 Mussulman families divided into twenty-four tribes, and which had been in the hands of the followers of Islam for more than five centuries. In the spring of the year 1235 the army was moved from Cordova and divided into two parts, one under the command of the Prince of Molina and the Master of Santiago, which was to march to the Ajarafe; and the other under the direction of the King of Granada and the Master of Calatrava, which was to harass the country near Jerez. The attack on Seville and its territories commenced immediately, and a series of uninterrupted victories prefaced the happy termination which was to crown the constant and generous efforts of the Christian warriors.
Seville, at this period the court and seat of the Islamite empire, was a city calculated to defy the strategy of the most skilful generals, the valour of the most devoted men at arms. In form it would resemble a shield, stretching from north-east to south-west. Its head and right side were formed by the walls with its towers, defended by a barbican and a moat, with eight gates and a narrow side entrance. These gates were veritable fortresses. They were defended by towers and bastions. Their exits were narrow, and never in front; the exterior passages to the city had angles and turnings, and very often the first turning opened into a square armed place, with narrow doorways at both sides. “The gates of Seville,” says Morgado, “were constructed of planks of iron, fastened on to strong hides with steel bolts. And because it was best defended on its west side by the river Guadalquivir, which protected more than half the city, with the six gates in that side, it was thought well to place the strongest walls and the best fortified towers, with as many barbicans, and the widest and deepest moats on the other side.”
The left side of the shield boasted the majestic curve of the river, the arsenal, and another series of walls and gates; but at this part, there were no moats nor false entrances, because it had the strong towers of the Ajarafe opposite to defend it. There were four gates on this side, not counting