In the year 1210 the news was spread throughout all Christendom that four hundred thousand Almohads had crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. Though deeply engaged in the war against the Albigenses, Pope Innocent III could not contemplate the danger thus announced without calling upon all Europe to succour Spain. Public prayers were ordered and indulgence promised to all who would volunteer to fight in the peninsula. The five Christian kings of Leon and Castile, temporarily separated at the time, joined their forces and marched against Muhammed, the fanatical leader of the Almohads. The encounter took place at Alacab, on the plateau of the Sierra Morena, according to the Arabs; at Las Navas de Tolosa, according to the Christians. After an obstinately contested battle the flight of the Andalusians decided the day in favour of the Christians. Muhammed, who had stationed himself on a height amid the serried ranks of his African guard, holding the Koran in one hand and his sword in the other, looked on in undisturbed passivity while his followers suffered the most terrible defeat. “God alone,” he said, “is just and powerful, the demon is without truth or greatness.” Muhammed was at last compelled to take flight on a swift courser of the desert, which carried him far from his enemies. This battle was decisive in the struggles between the Christians and the infidels. The Almoravids and Almohads once definitely repulsed, there rose up in Africa no more defenders of the Moslem faith sufficiently powerful to restore its dominion in Spain.
During the whole of the thirteenth century the Christians reaped the fruits of their victory, which was rendered the more complete by the anarchy that prevailed among all ranks of the Almohads. Cordova (1236), Seville (1266), and many other places fell into the hands of the king of Castile, while James I, king of Aragon, brought the Balearic Isles under subjection, and at the head of eighty thousand French and Spanish troops retook Valencia (1238). Portugal reached its limit of expansion when in 1270 it united the provinces of Algarve, and the outlines it then assumed have never since been changed. The Moors now possessed only the little kingdom of Granada, that was hemmed in on all sides by the sea and the domains of the king of Castile. Yet even in this confined space, their numbers swelled by the refugees that fled to them from the cities captured by the Christians, they contrived to maintain a power that staved off their ultimate downfall for a period of two hundred years. Save to repel certain incursions on the part of the Merinids of Maghreb which never seriously endangered their conquered possessions, the Christians had now no military operations to carry on; hence the crusade in Spain was practically suspended until a later date, 1492.
COMPARISON OF THE TWO CRUSADES
The crusade to Jerusalem had undoubtedly brought forth general results to civilisation, but its particular aim had not been accomplished. It founded no important institutions in the Orient; it did not even succeed in delivering the Holy Sepulchre, and millions of men had left their bones along its route. The crusade in Spain, on the other hand, while it bore no consequences to the social conditions of Europe in the Middle Ages, changed the whole face of Spain and reacted powerfully upon the Europe of modern times. It took the peninsula away from the Moors and gave it to the Christians; it brought into being the little kingdom of Portugal which, carrying on a crusade of its own beyond seas, discovered the Cape of Good Hope; and it made great states of Aragon and Castile, whose kings were inspired with European ambitions by their victories in Spain, and whose inhabitants gained, in the eight centuries of warfare, military customs and knowledge which made of them the condottieri of Charles V and Philip II, not the peaceful and industrious heirs of the commerce and brilliant civilisation of the Moors.
There was still another point. What was the cause of this difference between the two crusades? Jerusalem, situated far from the centre of Catholic denomination, remained in the hands of the Moslems, by whom it was surrounded, for precisely the same reason that Toledo, situated at the limit of their zone of occupation, escaped them to become the possession of the nearby Christians. The whole matter was simply a question of distance. Palestine bordered on the territory of Mecca, as Spain lay in full view of Rome. Geographical relationship is a powerful factor, even in matters that seem to come the least under its influence—the theories and doctrines of religion.[e]
FOOTNOTES
[73] It was very seldom that the Christians thought of converting the Mussulmans. When the sword failed, then they resorted to arguments. The occasion will excuse us from departing from chronological order, and saying, that in the year 1285, Pope Honorius IV in his design to convert the Saracens to Christianity, wished to establish schools at Paris for the tuition of people in the Arabic and other oriental languages, agreeably to the intentions of his predecessors. In every subsequent project for a crusade, it was always proposed to instruct the Saracens sword in hand. The Council of Vienne in 1312 recommended the conversion of the infidels, and the re-establishment of schools, as the way to recover the Holy Land. It was accordingly ordered that there should be professors of the Hebrew, Chaldaic, and Arabic tongues in Rome, Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca; and that the learned should translate into Latin the best Arabic books. It was not till the time of Francis I that this decree was acted upon. He founded the royal college, and sent even into the East for books.
[74] The oriental chronicle says that the French lost in this defeat, besides the brother of the king, fourteen hundred knights.
[75] De Joinville[f] quotes the Saracens as saying that “if Mohammed had allowed them to suffer the manifold evils that God had caused the king to undergo, they would never have had any confidence in him, nor paid him their adorations.”