For three years the disorders which agitated the kingdom of Leon suspended hostilities between the Christians of the North and the khalifate. After many months of anarchy, defiled by horrible crimes,—crimes which recall the worst scenes that disgraced the revolutions of the Visigothic empire, assassinations, tortures, the blinding of some royal captives, the poisoning and starvation of others,—Ramiro II., a prince of great address and experience, ascended the throne. Through his intrigues with the governor of Saragossa, of the powerful family of the Beni-Haschim, he obtained the support, and at length received the allegiance, of the latter. Garcia, King of Navarre, was also induced to join the confederacy, which, thus including all the provinces of the North, both Christian and Moslem, offered an unbroken and formidable front to the power of the Khalif.
Once more the intrepid Abd-al-Rahman prepared for war. The issue of the campaign was everywhere favorable to his arms. Ramiro was worsted in a series of battles. Mohammed, the insurgent chief of the Beni-Haschim, was besieged in his capital, and either the fears or the clemency of his sovereign restored to him the trust he had so flagrantly betrayed. The monarch of Navarre and his mother, whose ambition had taken advantage of the youth and inexperience of her son, were compelled to sue for pardon at the feet of the Khalif, and to receive from his hands, as suzerain, the government of those states which had formerly been transmitted by Sancho the Great as an independent kingdom.
Elated beyond measure by his triumphs, Abd-al-Rahman conceived the idea of a grand expedition that might conquer the infidel states of the North and exterminate, or expel forever, those obstinate and dangerous enemies whose enterprise was a constant reproach to the zeal of the Mohammedans and a menace to the prosperity and safety of the khalifate. In accordance with this resolution the Djihad was proclaimed. A hundred thousand men rushed to arms. Volunteers came from Egypt, Syria, Mauritania, and the Libyan Desert to be present at the humiliation of the infidel, and to share in the plunder of his fields, his churches, his palaces. Great magazines of provisions and munitions of war were collected in suitable localities. Pack-trains composed of thousands of beasts of burden were assembled. No precaution was neglected to insure success. Surrounded by his splendid body-guard, the Khalif appeared in person at the head of this immense host, but, with a want of tact which did little credit to his knowledge of human nature, he bestowed the command upon Nadja, a Slave, to the exclusion of the nobles, who saw with inexpressible indignation their hereditary pretensions to command subordinated to the favor enjoyed by an officer of inferior rank and of more than plebeian extraction. The Moslems came upon the allied army of Leon and Navarre at the village of Alhandega, not far from Salamanca. Undaunted by the superior numbers of the enemy the Christians bravely sustained the attack. The treachery of the Arab officers, invested with important commands, aided the intrepidity of the Leonese; the aristocratic chieftains, preferring the gratification of their resentment and defeat at the hands of the infidel to victory under a general of base and ignoble lineage, withdrew, and the Moslems underwent a terrible defeat. The commander-in-chief was killed. Whole divisions were destroyed; many distinguished soldiers were dragged away to the dungeons of Leon and Pampeluna; and the Khalif himself, with only forty-nine survivors of his numerous escort, succeeded with the greatest difficulty in escaping the swords of the Christian cavalry. The imminent peril he had incurred, the sudden disappearance of his magnificent army, and, perhaps, the consciousness of the impolicy of his conduct or fear that fortune had averted her face from him, so affected Abd-al-Rahman that he never again exposed his person in the field of battle.
But the results of a victory which promised to be so advantageous to the cause of Christendom was, as usual, nullified by the personal quarrels and revolutionary proceedings of the conquerors. The County of Castile, a dependency of the Asturian crown, grown powerful through the signal abilities and eminent services of its present ruler, Ferdinand Gonzalez, a personage famous in mediæval history and fable, aspired to the name and privileges of an independent kingdom. Its governor was a vassal whose fief was hereditary, but who held his office at the pleasure of the monarch, and, so far as the scanty annals of the age afford information, no province of the Peninsula was more inclined to turbulence and sedition. To distract the attention and divert the aims of this dangerous population, the Kings of Leon subdivided the province into four portions; but the counts who subsequently ruled it found no difficulty in reconciling their pretensions when resistance to the central authority was involved. A new plan was then devised by Ordoño II. The four counts were decoyed, upon a specious pretext, to a conference at Tejiare, on the borders of Castile and Leon, and put to death. The county now remained without a recognized leader until the rise of Ferdinand, whom the admiring gratitude of the Spaniards has exalted to the station of a demigod, and to whose prowess is to be justly attributed the foundation of the famous monarchy of Castile.
The claims of Ferdinand Gonzalez to the affection and confidence of his people had been established by many gallant deeds in war and by noble acts of private munificence in peace. In the numerous campaigns of Ramiro II. his voice had always been heard in the thickest of the fray. The spoil he collected from the enemies of Christ he bestowed in the erection of religious houses, in whose charters the name of the founder’s suzerain was ostentatiously omitted. His influence was so great that the sovereign was forced to overlook these insults to his dignity, and to even seek to gain the support or secure the neutrality of his formidable vassal by the marriage of his own daughter to the son of Ferdinand. The attention of the count had been, of late, engrossed by the expeditions of the Moslems which ravaged his territory, but the rout of Alhandega gave him an advantage; and, formally revoking his allegiance, he declared war against the King of Leon. Ramiro, however, soon proved too strong for his rebellious vassal. Ferdinand was thrown into prison, his estates were confiscated, and the government of his dominions transferred to a stranger. But neither the promises nor the threats of the sovereign could shake the fidelity of the Castilians. In public acts and proclamations they defiantly effaced the name of Ramiro and inserted that of Ferdinand. Their devotion carried them to the verge of idolatry. They made a statue, arrayed in the habiliments of the illustrious exile, and, on bended knee, proffered to the senseless marble their unfaltering and reverent homage. Finally, their enthusiasm impelled them to march in a great body to the capital and demand the release of their lord, a request which the King of Leon saw proper to grant, but only under conditions that deprived the Count of Castile of much of his political influence and power.
The death of Ramiro was the signal for a bitter contest between his sons, Ordoño and Sancho, for the possession of the throne of Leon. The assistance of Ferdinand Gonzalez was invoked by the younger son Sancho, and the Count of Castile, perceiving the advantages that he would enjoy in the rôle of king-maker and which must eventually lead to his entire independence, seized without hesitation the golden opportunity. A bloody civil war ensued, in which Navarre also became involved, and hatred of the infidel was forgotten in the furious encounters of domestic strife. In the meantime, the armies of Abd-al-Rahman ravaged at will the Christian frontier. Raid followed raid with the assurance derived from constant impunity. The market-places of the Andalusian cities were heaped up with the significant trophies of victory,—crosses and crucifixes, embroidered vestments and jewelled censers, side by side with ghastly pyramids of heads, the number of the latter in one instance reaching five thousand. Distracted by the double peril of Castilian revolt and Moslem invasion, Ordoño III. sent ambassadors to Cordova to solicit peace. A treaty was drawn up by which the Leonese King agreed to surrender a number of the castles which protected the frontier; but before this condition could be fulfilled Ordoño died, and his brother Sancho, who succeeded him, peremptorily refused to execute the treaty. Hostilities were thereupon renewed; an Arab force invaded Leon; and a decisive victory gained by the general of the Khalif, Abu-Ibn-Yila, taught the imprudent Sancho the folly of resisting, without adequate resources and preparation, the growing power of the Moorish sovereign.
Sancho appears to have been a prince of ability and resolution, but his ideas of the royal prerogative were too decided for his age. Ambitious to enjoy the arbitrary rights which had been conferred by the ancient Visigothic system, he bent all his efforts to the suppression of the aristocracy, and, what was more dangerous still, neglected to conciliate the ecclesiastical order, whose wealth, and the veneration with which it was regarded, would have made it a dangerous antagonist for any monarch. The experiment, always a hazardous one, was doubly so in the case of Sancho, to whom fortune had denied those personal characteristics which elicit the applause or captivate the attention of mankind. An excessive and increasing obesity rendered him incapable of locomotion without assistance, and he had long since found it impossible to mount a horse. Among an active and athletic people whose trade was war, whose pastimes were found in the chase and the field, and with whom all martial exercises were at once a pleasure and a necessity, the spectacle of a helpless monarch, like Sancho the Fat, was one calculated to excite only sentiments of the deepest contempt. But when to this physical disadvantage were added an arrogant and despotic bearing and an ill-concealed intention to retrench the privileges of the nobility, whose members considered themselves, by reason of the theoretically elective character of the crown, almost equal in dignity, as many of them were superior in prowess, to the princes of the reigning house, the disdain of the subjects of Sancho was changed into apprehension lest the unwieldy monarch who excited their ridicule might ultimately develop into a merciless tyrant. A plot, to which Ferdinand Gonzalez, the professional agitator of the time, was a party, was formed; Sancho was compelled to take refuge in Navarre; and Ordoño IV., a hunchback, whose base and servile nature corresponded with the deformity of his person, was raised to the Leonese throne. Received with every demonstration of sympathy by his grandmother, the martial Tota,—the virtual ruler of Navarre who, for thirty years, had tried with various success the fortune of war with the emirs of Cordova,—Sancho experienced little difficulty in obtaining the promise of her aid in the recovery of his crown. But Navarre, a mountainous and thinly peopled region, was now exhausted by continued hostilities, and, indeed, had never been strong enough to cope unaided with the more extensive kingdom of Leon. An alliance with some foreign power was therefore an indispensable requisite for the successful prosecution of the design. In the formation of this alliance no choice was possible. One monarch alone, the Ommeyade Khalif, whose resources were sufficient to accomplish the desired end, could be approached, and that monarch was separated from the Navarrese queen by the remembrance of all the outrages of incessant warfare, of the enslavement and decapitation of thousands of her subjects, as well as by the barrier of a hostile faith, whose ill-comprehended and purposely distorted tenets were the abomination of every Christian. Other considerations rendered the present concession to the demands of a detested adversary even more galling. The warlike princess had commanded the Navarrese at the rout of Alhandega. She had seen the pride of the Ommeyades abased. She had trailed their banner in the dust. Multitudes of captives and incalculable spoil had attested the prowess of her subjects. The greatest of the Moslem sovereigns had fled before her arms. The emergency, however, admitted of no alternative, and demanded the sacrifice of pride and the oblivion of past injuries, which, in the eyes of Tota, were eclipsed by the present outrage upon her family. Another motive impelled her to have recourse to Abd-al-Rahman. The infirmity of Sancho was certainly not constitutional, and perhaps was not incurable. The reputation of the Jewish and Arab physicians for learning and skill was unequalled in the world, and the most eminent practitioners of that calling were residents of Cordova. It was evident from the experience of Sancho that the recovery of his health was an indispensable condition of his restoration to power. Sacrificing her prejudices to imperative necessity, and with a reluctance she could ill conceal, Tota despatched a formal embassy to the capital of the khalifate.
Abd-al-Rahman received the envoys of the Queen of Navarre with distinguished courtesy, and directed them to announce to their royal mistress that he would at once send an ambassador to her court, who would prescribe the conditions under which he would accede to her requests.
The Jew Hasdai was the agent designated by the Khalif to discharge the duties incident to this important mission. One of the most adroit and experienced negotiators of the time, the versatile genius of Hasdai had enabled him to attain to almost as exalted a rank in the profession of medicine as he had reached in the arts of diplomacy. He was further qualified for the post by his enjoyment of the confidence of his sovereign; by his thorough acquaintance with foreign tongues, including the idiom of the Christians; and by his vast erudition and elegant manners, which fascinated all with whom he came in contact. The occasion was one that required an emissary of more than ordinary ability. The instructions of Hasdai included a demand for the cession of ten fortresses in the territory of Leon, to be made as soon as the usurper had been expelled; and that Sancho himself, his uncle Garcia,—the nominal King of Navarre, in whose name Tota exercised the royal authority,—and the Queen should come in person to Cordova and sign the treaty. While no material objection was interposed to the first condition, in the discussion of the second it required all the address of Hasdai to overcome the repugnance of Tota to the humiliation that such a step implied. Finally, however, the eloquence and craft of the envoy prevailed, and, attended by a numerous company of ecclesiastics and nobles, the three Christian monarchs began their tedious journey. Their passage through the Moslem dominions was attended with every manifestation of public curiosity that such an extraordinary circumstance could excite. Immense crowds lined the highways. Cities and villages were emptied of their population, whose dense masses often seriously interfered with the progress of the escort. The arrival of the sovereigns at Cordova was signalized by a magnificent reception, more appropriate to victorious allies than to petitioners for the recovery of a throne. But the tact of the Khalif led him to disguise, as far as possible, the humiliating character he had compelled his guests to assume; and his dignity was at the same time enhanced by the exhibition of that opulence and grandeur which the occasion enabled him to display. The treaty was duly signed, and it was concerted between the parties that the power of the khalifate should be directed against Leon, while the forces of Navarre made simultaneously a diversion towards Castile, to prevent the co-operation of Count Ferdinand with the enemy.
No event of his long and brilliant reign did more to increase the prestige and strengthen the authority of the famous Moslem ruler than this stroke of profound policy. The enthusiasm of the people was unbounded. The feuds of centuries were, for the moment, forgotten in the indulgence of the feelings of national pride and exultation. The Jewish and Moslem poets contended with each other in celebrating a triumph without parallel in the annals of Islam, and lauded the fortune and the glory of a prince whose achievements had humbled the pride of the common enemy of their respective sects.