Spain and Her Colonies, Compiled from the Best Authorities

by Unknown

Concerning the first it may be noted that in the long reign of the last Abdur Rahman were the seeds of its dissolution. Brooking no rival during his lifetime, at his death he found no successor. Then upon the ruins of the great Caliphate twenty independent and hostile dynasties surged. Meanwhile Alfonso was eyeing them from his citadel. At the gates of Valencia was the Cid. For common safety the Moslem rivals looked for a common defender. In Africa that defender was found in Yusuf, the Berber chief of a tribe of religious soldiers known as the Almoravides.

Invited to Spain, he crossed over, and, meeting Alfonso at Zalaca, near Badajoz, on the 23d of October, 1086, he routed him with great and historic slaughter.

Yusuf [says Burke] had come as a Moslem defender, but he remained as a Moslem master. And once more in Spanish history, the over-powerful ally turned his victorious arms against those who had welcomed him to their shores. Yet Yusuf was no vulgar traitor. He had sworn to the envoys of the Spanish Moslems that he would return to Africa, in the event of victory, without the annexation to his African empire of a field or a city to the north of the Straits. And his vow was religiously kept. Retiring empty-handed to Mauritania, after the great battle at Zalaca, he returned once more to Spain, unfettered on this new expedition by any vow, and set to work with his usual vigor to make himself master of the Peninsula. Tarifa fell in December. The next year saw the capture of Seville, and of all of the principal cities of Andalusia. An army sent by Alfonso VI., under his famous captain, Alvar Fanez, was completely defeated, and all Southern Spain lay at the feet of the Berber, save only Valencia, which remained impregnable so long as the Cid lived to direct the defense. In 1102, after the hero’s death, Valencia succumbed, and all Spain to the south of the Tagus became a province of the great African empire of the Almoravides.

The rule of these hardy bigots was entirely unlike that of the Ommeyad Caliphs of the West. Moslem Spain had no longer even an independent existence. The sovereign resided not at Cordova, but at Morocco. The poets and musicians were banished from court. The beauties of Az Zahra were forgotten. Jews and Christians were alike persecuted. The kingdom was governed with an iron hand. But if the rule of the stranger was not generous, it was just, and for the moment it possessed the crowning merit that it was efficient. The laws were once more respected. The people once more dreamed of wealth and happiness. But it was little more than a dream.

On the death of Yusuf in 1107 the scepter passed into the hands of his son Ali, a more sympathetic but a far less powerful ruler. In 1118 the great city of Saragossa, the last bulwark of Islam in the north of the Peninsula, was taken by Alfonso I. of Aragon, who carried his victorious arms into Southern Spain, and fulfilled a rash vow by eating a dinner of fresh fish on the coast of Granada.

Yet it was by no Christian hand that the empire of the Almoravides was to be overthrown.

Mohammed Ibn Abdullah, a lamplighter in the mosque at Cordova, had made his way to remote Bagdad to study at the feet of Abu Hamid Algazali, a celebrated doctor of Moslem law. The strange adventures, so characteristic of his age and nation, by which the lowly student became a religious reformer—a Mahdi—and a conqueror in Africa, and at length overthrew the Almoravides, both to the north and the south of the Straits of Gibraltar, forms a most curious chapter in the history of Islam; but in a brief sketch of the fortunes of medieval Spain, it must suffice to say that having established his religious and military power among the Berber tribes of Africa, Ibn Abdullah, the Mahdi, landed at Algeciras in 1145, and possessed himself in less than four years of Malaga, Seville, Granada, and Cordova. The empire of the Almoravides was completely destroyed; and, before the close of the year 1149, all Moslem Spain acknowledged the supremacy of the Almohades.

These more sturdy fanatics were still African rather than Spanish sovereigns. Moslem Spain was administered by a Vali deputed from Morocco; and Cordova, shorn of much of its former splendor, was the occasional abode of a royal visitor from Barbary. For seventy years the Almohades retained their position in Spain. But their rule was not of glory but of decay. One high feat of arms indeed shed a dying luster on the name of the Berber prince who reigned for fifteen years (1184-99) under the auspicious title of Almanzor, and his great Moslem victory over Alfonso II. at Alarcon in 1195 revived for the time the drooping fortunes of the Almohades. But their empire was already doomed, decaying, disintegrated, wasting away. And at length the terrible defeat of the Moslem forces by the united armies of the three Christian kings at the Navas do Tolosa in 1212, at once the most crushing and the most authentic of all the Christian victories of medieval Spain, gave a final and deadly blow to the Moslem dominion of the Peninsula. Within a few years of that celebrated battle, Granada alone was subject to the rule of Islam.

It was in the year 1228 that a descendant of the old Moorish kings of Saragossa rebelled against the Almohades and succeeded in making himself master not merely of Granada, but of Cordova, Seville, Algeciras, and even of Ceuta, and, obtaining a confirmation of his rights from Bagdad, assumed the title of Amir ul Moslemin—Commander of the Moslems—and Al Mutawakal—the Protected of God.

But a rival was not slow to appear. Mohammed Al Ahmar, the Fair or the Ruddy, defeated, dethroned, and slew Al Mutawakal, and reigned in his stead in Andalusia. Despoiled in his turn of most of his possessions by St. Ferdinand of Castile, Al Ahmar was fain at length to content himself with the rich districts in the extreme south of the Peninsula, which are known to fame, wherever the Spanish or the English language is spoken, as the Kingdom of Granada. And thus it came to pass that the city on the banks of the Darro, the home of the proud and highly cultivated Syrians of Damascus, the flower of the early Arab invaders of Spain, became also the abiding place of the later Arab civilization, overmastered year after year, and destroyed, by the Christian armies ever pressing on to the southern sea. Yet, in the middle of the thirteenth century, the flood tide of reconquest had for the moment fairly spent itself. The Christians were not strong enough to conquer, and above all they were not numerous enough to occupy, the districts that were still peopled by the Moor; and for once a wise and highly cultivated Christian shared the supreme power in the Peninsula with a generous and honorable Moslem. Alfonso X. sought not to extend his frontiers, but to educate his people, not to slaughter his neighbors, but to give laws to his subjects, not to plunder frontier cities, but to make Castile into a kingdom, with a history, a civilization, and a language of her own. If the reputation of Alfonso is by no means commensurate with his true greatness, the statesmanship of Mohammed Al Ahmar, the founder of the ever famous Kingdom of Granada, is overshadowed by his undying fame as an architect. Yet is Al Ahmar worthy of remembrance as a king and the parent of kings in Spain. The loyal friend and ally of his Christian neighbor, the prudent administrator of his own dominions, he collected at his Arab court a great part of the wealth, the science, and the intelligence of Spain. His empire has long ago been broken up; the Moslem has been driven out; there is no king nor kingdom of Granada. But their memory lives in the great palace fortress whose red towers still rise over the sparkling Darro, and whose fairy chambers are still to be seen in what is, perhaps, the most celebrated of the wonder works of the master builders of the world.