[!-- Note Anchor 39 --][Footnote 39: The Arabian account says that the Andalusians were the first to flee.]
[!-- Note Anchor 40 --][Footnote 40: Of this great battle we have an account by four eye-witnesses: 1, By King Alfonso, in a letter to the Pope; 2, by the historian Rodrigo of Toledo; 3, by Arnaud, Archbishop of Narbonne; 4, by the author of the Annals of Toledo.]
The reduction of several towns, from Tolosa to Baeza, immediately followed this glorious victory—a victory in which Don Alfonso nobly redeemed his failure in the field of Zalaca—and which, in its immediate consequences, involved the ruin of the Mahometan empire in Spain. After an unsuccessful attempt on Ubeda, as the hot season was raging, the allies returned to Toledo, satisfied that the power of Mahomet was forever broken. That Emperor, indeed, did not long survive his disaster. Having precipitately fled to Morocco, he abandoned himself to licentious pleasures, left the cares of government to his son, or rather his ministers, and died on the 10th day of the moon Shaffan, A.H. 610 (A.D. 1214), not without suspicion of poison.
By recent writers of Spain the number of slain on the part of the Africans was two hundred thousand; on that of the Christians, twenty-five individuals only. Of course the whole campaign is represented as miraculous; and, indeed, actual miracles are recorded—which we have neither space nor inclination to notice.]
THE FIRST CRUSADE
A.D. 1096-1099
SIR GEORGE W. COX
Religious feeling in the eleventh century rose to a great pitch of enthusiasm, and led men of various nations, with still more various motives and aims in worldly affairs, to pursue one common end with their whole heart. Between the years 1096 and 1270 these attempts of Christian nations to rescue the Holy Land from the "Infidels," as the Mahometans were called, added a wholly new character of human enterprise to the world's history.