At the head of a splendidly appointed army Yakub then passed into Spain. At his approach, all who had wavered in fidelity or had taken up arms hastened to solicit forgiveness and renew their obligations of fealty. The expedition, which was merely a reconnoissance, penetrated without difficulty as far as Lisbon. The degree of its success may be inferred from the fact that the booty is said to have exceeded in value any heretofore secured by any foreign invader in the Peninsula excepting Musa, and that the captives who followed in the train of the conqueror amounted to the respectable number of thirteen thousand.
The crusading spirit, then at its height in Europe, soon offered the King of Portugal an opportunity for retaliation. A large body of Flemish and English knights and men-at-arms, on their way to the Holy Land, disembarked at Lisbon to avoid, during the winter months, the inconveniences of a protracted voyage and the proverbial dangers of the Spanish coast. These adventurers accepted with avidity the tempting proposals of the Portuguese king. The Moorish territory was invaded by the crusaders, co-operating with a force of native troops; and the cities of Evora, Beja, and Silves became the prey of the most licentious soldiery in Europe. The latter place, which had surrendered under articles of capitulation to Sancho, King of Portugal, was, in violation of the laws of war and of every principle of justice, abandoned to the tender mercies of the foreigners. Out of a population of sixty thousand barely one-fifth escaped with life and liberty. The majority of these were Jews, whose commercial relations with the countries of Western Europe gave them influence with the Christian commanders, while the presence of numbers of their countrymen in the enemy’s camp contributed in no small degree to their security. This immunity was not obtained, however, without the payment of an exorbitant ransom; the city was pillaged amidst indescribable scenes of cruelty, and many of the crusaders, renouncing the pious cause in which they had embarked, remained in Silves as subjects of the King of Portugal.
Fortune did not suffer them long to retain the fruits of their bad faith and rapacity. Orders were issued from Morocco to retrieve the disgrace sustained by the Moslems, and Mohammed, governor of Cordova, having invaded the lost territory, stormed one after another the places which had tempted the avarice of the adventurous foreigners; the horrors of the previous capture were repeated and even surpassed, and the Christians in their turn experienced the bitterness of defeat and the calamities of servitude. Fourteen thousand male captives, chained together, were paraded through the streets of Cordova, and fifteen thousand women, distributed through the Moslem communities of Spain and Africa, attested the fearful retribution exacted by the lieutenant of the Sultan.
Three years after this event, Yakub, who in the midst of extensive projects for the amelioration of his people had never relinquished those plans of conquest which formed so important a feature in the policy of every active Moslem prince, prepared for a grand campaign against the Christians of Castile. The imperial forces, amounting to three hundred thousand men, were transported across the Strait without difficulty, and this mighty armament, for which the resources of the governors of Andalusia were greatly taxed to provide subsistence, began its march into the interior. Yakub, weary of unprofitable forays and of expeditions which inflicted no permanent injury upon the enemy, had resolved to attempt a most perilous and doubtful enterprise. The city of Toledo, whose geographical position, impregnable fortifications, and national prestige as the military centre of the Castilian monarchy made it the most important strategic point in the entire Peninsula, was the main object of his ambition. The political condition of the Christian kingdoms, whose princes, again influenced by mutual hatred, regarded with complacency the distress of their neighbors, was peculiarly favorable to the designs of the Moslems. Portugal and Leon were embroiled with the Holy See. Its interference with the royal prerogatives and its unsolicited participation in the religious disputes of those states were regarded with undisguised disapproval by a people which had never explicitly recognized the jurisdiction of the Supreme Pontiff. The jealousies of power and the hope of profiting by the discord of their rivals kept aloof from each other the kingdoms of Castile, Navarre, and Aragon. It was by the former of these, unaided and alone, that the shock of the impending tempest was to be sustained; while the other monarchies, removed from the seat of war, might await in temporary security the issue of the inevitable conflict. Alfonso VIII., who had aroused the ire and hastened the invasion of Yakub by a challenge couched in all the extravagant terms of Spanish rodomontade, now realized to the full the disastrous effects of his untimely insolence. In vain, in his extremity, he appealed to the piety, the patriotism, the martial spirit of the neighboring Christian princes. The King of Aragon returned no answer. Alarmed by the reports of the immense preparations of Yakub, the King of Navarre had not hesitated to open secret negotiations with him, with a view to preserving his possessions as a vassal of the Moslem. The sole auxiliaries who responded to the entreaties of Alfonso were a handful of French knights, with their retainers, from the districts of Provence and Gascony. With these, with the brethren of the military orders, and with his own forces, whose united number has not been mentioned in the chronicles, but which was greatly inferior to that of the Africans, Alfonso calmly awaited the approach of the enemy below the castle of Alarcos, not far from Calatrava.
At dawn, on one of the most memorable days in the annals of the Reconquest, the hostile armies prepared for battle. The arrangement of the Moslems indicated a degree of military ability scarcely to be expected from the rude tacticians of the age. The Almohades formed the left wing, the right was held by the Andalusians, in the centre were placed the picked troops of the empire, veterans of many campaigns. Behind the first line were ranged the African volunteers, armed principally with missile weapons, whose solid mass was intended to aid the foremost ranks in repelling the charge of the Christian cavalry. The manœuvres were immediately directed by the generals of the Sultan; for Yakub, at the head of his guards and a reserve of several thousand of his bravest troops, remained in ambush within easy access of the field, equally ready at a moment’s notice to retrieve disaster or to burst unexpectedly and with crushing force upon the disordered ranks of a terrified and flying enemy. The position of the Christians had been most advantageously chosen. The gently ascending slope of a mountain, with a steep acclivity at the rear, its sides defended by the deeply worn channels of mountain torrents, was occupied by their camp. With characteristic disregard of prudence the Castilians began the fray. Eight thousand knights in complete armor charged with terrific force the centre of the Moslem line of battle. Twice they recoiled before the solid mass of the enemy, but the third effort was successful; his line was pierced, his ranks were thrown into confusion, and the Christians, elated by a temporary advantage which they thoughtlessly magnified into victory, indulged to the utmost their savage instincts, infuriated as they were by the unexpected resistance they had encountered. But the field was not yet won. As they rushed forward in their bloody course, the impetuous cavaliers were insensibly surrounded by the active Mauritanian cavalry and the archers, who had been drawn up on the flanks of the African army; and, their retreat cut off, they were at once overwhelmed by numbers. In the mean time, the skill and coolness of the Moslem general, Al-Senani, who commanded the broken line, had enabled him to consolidate its wings, not as yet engaged, and, rallying the stragglers, he made a determined attack upon the enemy’s camp. Thus, in different parts of the field two battles were in progress, in which a portion of each army constituted the assailants. Of the knights who had so boldly hurled themselves against the Moslem host, but few escaped the spears and arrows of the Almohades. Despite the strength of the Christian position, it was taken by Al-Senani and his Andalusians, and the picked Castilian troops, unable to withstand the shock of the Moslem charge, were utterly routed. The heavy armor of the chivalry of Alfonso impeded their movements and delayed their flight; their senses were bewildered by the din and tumult of battle, and the fierce Mauritanian horsemen, strangers to pity in the hour of triumph, were deaf to the supplications of a defeated and helpless foe. The manifest exaggerations of the ancient chronicles render it impossible to form even an approximately correct estimate of the Christian loss. It must, however, have been enormous; but the proximity of the mountains, inaccessible to the Moorish cavalry, undoubtedly preserved numbers who would otherwise have perished. Twenty thousand prisoners taken in Alarcos, which fortress was stormed immediately after the battle, were liberated without exchange or ransom, an act of unusual generosity, which, while acquiring for Yakub the unfavorable criticism of his subjects, was considered an evidence of weakness by the ungrateful recipients of his favor, incapable of understanding such indulgence in wars ordinarily waged with indescribable barbarity.
The fruits of this great victory were limited to the possession of a few thousand captives and the plunder of the Castilian camp. At no time had the Christian territory been more vulnerable to the attack of an invader than after the battle of Alarcos. The power of Castile was temporarily destroyed. Navarre, intimidated by the approach of the Moslems, was now ready for the oath of fealty and the humiliating rendition of tribute. Leon was also suspected of entertaining secret negotiations with Yakub, whose influence had not improbably contributed to the inimical relations generally existing between the Christian states of Northern Spain. Aragon, deprived of its sovereign and arrayed against its neighbors, was a prey to political intrigue as well as exposed to the danger of foreign conquest. Portugal alone, protected in a measure by her remoteness from the seat of war, resolutely upheld by her uncompromising attitude the sinking fortunes of the Christian arms.
Many causes conspired to render the campaigns of the Moslems indecisive. Their armies, composed of many nations and commanded by numerous generals, were incapable of thorough organization and discipline. The powers of high officials claiming equal authority, undefined by law and unconfirmed by precedent, were subject to constant and vexatious interference. Prolonged operations were viewed with disfavor by soldiers accustomed to the independent movements and rapidly shifting scenes of partisan warfare. A victory was, to the morale of such a force, almost as detrimental as a defeat. The ordinarily powerful incentives to conquest—the propagation of the Faith, the hope of martial renown, the prospect of territorial acquisition—were forgotten in the desire to enjoy without delay the fruits of activity and courage. Wholesale desertions were the inevitable consequences of success. Military expeditions in the Peninsula were not, since it had become a dependency of Africa, carried on with the systematic regularity which aimed at permanent occupancy. Towns were usually pillaged and burnt. The country was desolated, the population enslaved. But it was rare that a garrison was placed in a captured city, and new fortresses were no longer erected to guard the security of the frontier. The frontier, indeed, had become the uncertain boundary of a debatable land, a region which the constant incursions of enemies had transformed into a waste, whose limits, ever shifting, were yet steadily encroaching on the Moslem domain. The fortunes of a mere province, however valuable and extensive it might be, could excite but a languid and transitory interest amidst the plots and revolutions of a distant and turbulent capital. After a foray into Castile directed by Christian refugees and renegades with real or fictitious grievances to avenge, the Moslems retired from the campaign, and the opportunity afforded by the battle of Alarcos was irretrievably lost. The next spring was passed in unprofitable excursions into Castile and Estremadura. Calatrava and Guadalajara were taken, and Salamanca was stormed and burnt to the ground after having submitted to the utmost excesses of a barbarian enemy. The absence of organized resistance, the general consternation which prevailed in every Christian community, the craven behavior of great princes, who solicited with abject humility the protection of the Almohade Sultan; the extraordinary facility with which one fortress after another was occupied by the Moslems, indicate the universal demoralization consequent upon the rout of Alarcos. A campaign conducted with energy and determination must have resulted in the complete overthrow of the Christian monarchies of the North. But Yakub, destitute of the most eminent qualifications of a commander, wasted his time and consumed the strength of his soldiers in predatory enterprises which yielded neither military distinction nor political advantage, while his enemies expected in constant terror the appearance of the squadrons which had annihilated the knights of the monastic orders, the pride of Christian Spain, and had trampled under foot the Castilian chivalry, already illustrious for endurance and prowess among the famous warriors of Europe. An attempt, indeed, was made upon Toledo, the original object of the invasion, behind whose walls the fugitives of Alarcos had taken refuge; but the old Visigothic capital, which had issued victorious from a hundred sieges, was not to be hastily reduced by an enemy ignorant as yet of the destructive force of gunpowder. A few days demonstrated the futility of an attack where the deficiencies of military engineering could not be compensated by superiority in numbers, and the King of Castile was fortunate enough to negotiate a truce with the Sultan, now alarmed by reports of sedition in his own dominions. The return of the latter preceded only a short time his sudden and unexpected death. He was a prince who, of all the descendants of African dynasties, was most worthy of the honors of imperial greatness, and it was not without propriety that he assumed the title of Al-Mansur, The Victorious. Under his reign his countrymen probably attained to the highest degree of civilization and intellectual development of which their race is capable. Experience had repeatedly proven that the innate savagery of the Berber was incorrigible. The benefits of education, habitual association with the learned and the polite, familiarity with the finest literary productions of preceding ages, the daily presence of architectural monuments of unrivalled splendor, were unable to efface the barbarous instincts inherited through unnumbered generations of roving banditti. Like the Arab, a freebooter by birth and inclination, the Berber abandoned with reluctance and resumed with delight the unsettled and precarious existence of his forefathers. No political affinity existed between the various divisions of the African race. Of such components an enduring empire could not be constructed. When temporarily united, they were held together solely by the unnatural and artificial influences of force and fear; the principles of mutual co-operation, of national pride, of devoted loyalty, which constitute at once the security and the glory of a nation, were absent. The first three princes of the Almohade line were pre-eminently conspicuous for their talents, their firmness, their political sagacity. Their reigns, while characterized by more or less severity, the consequence of peculiar political conditions, were neither oppressive nor unjust. No restrictions were laid on commerce. The burdens of taxation were lightened and illegal impositions abolished. Many internal improvements were planned and perfected. The administration of justice was purified and corrupt magistrates punished. The religious sentiment, dominant in the minds of an ignorant people, was gratified by the erection of sumptuous temples. The prosecution of extensive military operations, the enslavement of entire tribes, the sack of opulent cities, the achievement of sweeping victories, the extermination of armies, were calculated to secure the attachment and confirm the allegiance of a people passionately devoted to the stirring excitements of war. But so capricious and disloyal was the African, that neither the enjoyment of present favor nor the expectation of future benefit could insure his fidelity. He was wholly careless of the advantages of civilization. His superstition made him the facile dupe of every impostor. The Almohade sovereigns lived in constant apprehension of dethronement. If they left Africa for Spain, the desert tribes were certain to rebel. As soon as they had recrossed the Strait, Andalusia rose in arms. The death of an ignorant charlatan, who in a short time had restricted the empire of Abd-al-Mumen to two cities, alone saved that monarch and his dynasty from destruction. The annals of his son and grandson are a bloody chronicle of insurrections, massacres, executions. The Berber element, while abhorred by the Arabs, had yet so permeated the society of the Peninsula that every department of government, every rank and profession of men, had been infected with its poison. Under such conditions political regeneration was impossible. No reformer, no conqueror, could avert the final catastrophe,—a catastrophe inevitable in the decadence of nations,—subjection to a foreign enemy actuated by religious fanaticism, military ambition, and inflexibility of purpose. The victory of Alarcos was the closing triumph of Islam in the Peninsula, and with the reign of Yakub disappeared the last opportunity for the restoration of Moslem power.
It is not, however, by his conquests, the extent of his dominions, or the splendor of his court that Yakub-al-Mansur is best known to us. The Giralda, or minaret, which towered over the mosque of Seville, and now, for the most part intact, is the principal ornament of its cathedral, is the greatest monument to his fame. The stately temple to which it was attached, founded by Yusuf, and almost a quarter of a century in building, was at last finished by his son. The spoils of many a foray, the wealth of many a conquered city, the plunder of many a Christian sanctuary, were devoted to its construction. Gold and silver obtained from the sacramental vessels of violated altars glittered upon its walls. Its masonry had been laid by the painful labor of hundreds of captives. Its foundations stand upon a base composed of busts, statues, bas-reliefs, and carvings taken from the Roman structures abounding in the vicinity, and many of which represented the finest efforts of classic taste and imperial magnificence. To strict observers of Moslem law,—and none adhered more closely to the letter of its provisions than the Almohades,—every representation of the human form was classed as idolatrous, and the effigies of the emperors, statesmen, and orators of antiquity were buried far beneath the walls of the Giralda, that the eyes of the Faithful might no longer be offended by what were ignorantly presumed to be objects of Pagan adoration; and that the spiritual as well as the material supremacy of Islam might be symbolized by the erection over these infidel memorials of the most imposing and beautiful edifice of its kind that has ever been devised by the genius of man.
Its base is a square of fifty feet; its original height was three hundred. For eighty-seven feet from the foundation the walls are of stone blocks fitted with the greatest nicety, and once polished to the smoothness of glass. The superstructure is of brick, and almost covered with graceful arabesque patterns in terra-cotta. Each side is divided into six panels with the designs in bas-relief, the panels resting upon ogival arches sustained by marble columns sunk into the masonry. In the central panels are a series of ajimezes, or Moorish windows, whose compartments are separated by miniature columns of alabaster. A charming variety and elegance exist in their arrangement and decoration; the openings are symmetrical but unequally disposed, and the terra-cotta patterns, while they exhibit a general similarity, are unlike in detail, no two faces of the tower exactly resembling each other. The minaret as originally designed was crowned with battlements, and was surmounted by another tower eight cubits in height, of similar plan but of much more elaborate ornamentation. Above the latter structure rose a bar sustaining four bronze balls of different sizes, placed one above the other. The general color of the building was a brilliant red, due to the bricks of which it was principally composed. Within this bright setting the sunken arabesques glowed with all the splendor of the richest damask. The interstitial portions of the designs were painted with scarlet, azure, green, and purple, the parts in relief were gilded. The maze of gold and color was at once tempered and defined by the duller framing and by the white, translucent, alabaster columns of the central panels. Around the summit of the principal tower was a mosaic of intricate pattern and many colors. The beauty of the gorgeous tints that under the sunlight of Southern Spain exhibited the refulgence of the rainbow was heightened by the use of tiles covered with gold leaf, whose enamelled covering imparted a brilliancy not even exceeded by the burnished metal itself. Upon the superstructure had been lavished all the exquisite taste and skill of the Moorish and the Byzantine artisan. Its sides presented a complicated and elegant mosaic of white, blue, and gold. Its parapet blazed with that precious metal, and above ascended, in regular gradation, the row of immense gilded globes, visible to the approaching or to the departing caravan for the space of more than a day’s journey. The largest of these was nearly twenty feet in diameter; the surfaces of all were deeply grooved, the better to reflect the light; and the iron bar which sustained them, and which was also plated with gold, weighed nearly a thousand pounds.
The interior of the famous minaret presents some extraordinary, not to say unique, architectural features. Its walls are nine feet in thickness at the base, and, instead of decreasing in dimensions, become still more solid as they rise, until the capacity of the structure near the summit is but little more than half what it is at the bottom. The ascent is made by thirty-five ramps, or inclined planes, resting upon vaults and arches, and supported by a shaft of masonry built in the centre of the tower.