Stanley Lane-Poole

“ In the devotion of countless unnoticed men and women during the piteous epoch of martyrdom at Cordova there was perhaps more real heroism than in the impetuous deeds of chivalry displayed by rude warriors on the battle-field. It is much easier to be brave in hot blood than to endure the alarms and sufferings of long imprisonment, to look forward with undaunted courage to the day of execution, and keep a firm heart through it all. The Christian martyrs were misguided, they threw away their lives without cause; but their courage is as worthy of admiration as their wisdom is to be pitied. ”

“ He gave Ferdinand the keys of Granada, and, turning his back upon his beloved city, passed on to the mountains. There, at Padul, on a spur of the Alpuxarras, Boabdil stood and gazed back upon the kingdom he had lost: the beautiful Vega, the towers of Alhambra, and the gardens of the Generalife; all the beauty and magnificence of his lost home. "Allahu Akbar," he said, "God is most great," as he burst into tears. His mother Ayesha stood beside him: "You may well weep like a woman," she said, "for what you could not defend like a man." ”

“ But Abd-er-Rahmān knew his countrymen, and his boldness was well founded. Nearly a generation had passed since Ibn-Hafsūn and the other rebels had raised the standard of insurrection, and every one had come to feel that there had been enough of it. The early zeal that had prompted the Spaniards, Moslem and Christian alike, to strike a blow for their national independence, had now cooled,—such movements never last unless they achieve a complete success at the first white heat of enthusiasm; the leaders were either dead or aged, and a calmer spirit had come over their followers. ”

“ The quiet flow of the Guadalquivir was a constant delight to the inhabitants; for the Eastern (and the Moors of Spain were Easterns in everything but longitude) loves nothing better than a view over a rippling stream. It was spanned by a noble bridge of seventeen arches, which still testifies to the engineering powers of the Arabs. The whole city was full of noble buildings, among which were counted more than fifty thousand houses of the aristocracy and official classes, more than a hundred thousand dwellings for the common people, seven hundred mosques, and nine hundred public baths. ”

“ Forty thousand Africans, whose devotion to their paymaster was equalled by their hatred of the whole population whom they repressed, formed the Sultan's protection against the people whom he ground under his heel. In his desolation he wrote a poem on a palm which he transplanted from the land of his ancestors—for, like most Andalusian Arabs, he was something of a poet—in which he compassionated the tree for its exile: "Like me, thou art separated from relations and friends; thou didst grow in a different soil, and now thou art far from the land of thy birth." ”

“ What had happened to the Romans and the Goths now happened to the Berbers. They came to Spain hardy rough warriors, unused to ease or luxuries, delighting in feats of strength and prowess, filled with a fierce but simple zeal for their religion. They had not been long in the enjoyment of the fruits of their victory when all the demoralization which the soft luxuries of Capua brought upon the soldiers of Hannibal came also upon them. ”

“ The Arabs before the time of Mohammed had been a collection of rival tribes or clans, excelling in the savage virtues of bravery, hospitality, and even chivalry, and devoted to the pursuit of booty. The Prophet turned the Arab tribes, for the nonce, into the Moslem people, filled them with the fervour of martyrs, and added to the greed of plunder the nobler ambition of bringing all mankind to the knowledge of the truth. ”

“ They were no longer the brave stern men who lived simple lives and left the ploughshare to wield the sword when a Scipio or a Cæsar summoned them to defend their country or to conquer a continent. In Spain the richer classes were given over to luxury and sensuality; they lived only for eating and drinking, gambling and all kinds of excitement. The mass of the people were either slaves, or, what was much the same thing, labourers bound to the soil, who could not be detached from the land they cultivated but passed with it from master to master. ”

“ From the tropical heat and luxuriance, the sugar-canes and the palm-trees, of the lower valleys and of the narrow plain which skirts the sea like a golden zone, it is but a step, through gardens, steep cornfields, and olive groves, to fresh Alpine pastures and woods of pine, above which vegetation expires on the rocks where snow lies long and deep, and is still found in nooks and hollows in the burning days of autumn. When thickly peopled with laborious Moors, the narrow glens, bottomed with rich soil, were terraced and irrigated with a careful industry which compensated for want of space. ”

“ The forays of the Christians were a terrible curse to their victims; they were rude, unlettered people, and few of them could even read; their manners were on a par with their education; and their fanaticism and cruelty were what might be expected from such uncouth barbarians. Seldom did the soldiery of Leon give quarter to a defenceless foe, and we may look in vain for the fine chivalry and toleration of the Arabs; where the latter spared nobly, the rough robbers of Leon and Castile massacred whole garrisons, cities full of inhabitants, and those whom they did not slaughter they made slaves. ”

“ Never was a general so constantly victorious. Supported by his hardy foreigners, and also by many Christians who were attracted by his pay and the sure prospect of booty, he carried fire and sword through the lands of the north. He captured Leon, and razed its massive walls and towers to the ground; he seized Barcelona; and, worst of all, he even ventured into the passes of Galicia, and levelled to the ground the splendid church of Santiago de Campostella, which was the focus of countless pilgrimages and almost formed the Kaaba of Europe. ”

“ For eighty years Andalusia was torn to pieces by jealous chiefs, aggressive and quarrelsome tyrants, Moors, Arabs, Slavs, and Spaniards; and though many of the old roots of dissension had been plucked up by time, and the jealousies that arose from memories of tribal glories were sometimes forgotten because men had lost their pedigrees, there were enough rivalries, personal, racial, and religious, to make Andalusia as much a hell upon earth as even the monkish chronicler could have desired for a burial-place for Almanzor. ”

“ Nine out of ten of the heroes of antiquity committed a host of acts which we moderns, with our superfine sensibilities, call cruel, ungenerous, even dastardly. It is a pure perversion of history to apply latter-day codes of morality to the heroes of bygone ages. Let us admit that they are not all gold; and then let us delight in their great deeds, the mighty swing of their sword-arm, the crushing shock of their onset, their tall stature and flashing eyes as they ride to meet their foes. We do not expect them to be philosophers or strict advocates of the theories of political economy. ”

“ He had accomplished the object which he had set before himself in the days of his young ambition, when he came a stranger and alone to subdue a kingdom: he had brought the Arabs and Berbers into subjection, and restored order and peace in the land; but he had done it all at the expense of his subjects' hearts. The handsome youth who had come like "the young chevalier" to win the homage and devotion of the Spanish Arabs, after thirty-two years went down to his grave a detested tyrant, upheld in his blood-stained throne only by the swords of mercenaries whose loyalty was purchased by gold. ”

“ Twelve hundred years ago, Tarik the Moor added the land of the Visigoths to the long catalogue of kingdoms subdued by the Moslems. For nearly eight centuries, under her Mohammedan rulers, Spain set to all Europe a shining example of a civilized and enlightened State. Her fertile provinces, rendered doubly prolific by the industry and engineering skill of her conquerors, bore fruit an hundredfold. Cities innumerable sprang up in the rich valleys of the Guadalquivir and the Guadiana, whose names, and names only, still commemorate the vanished glories of their past. ”

“ The history of Andalusia, so far as we have told it, has been a series of ups and downs. First we saw a magnificent raid, led by born soldiers, ending in an unexpected conquest. Hardly was the peninsula won, when the jealousies and divisions of the various elements that made up the invading host bade fair to destroy the harvest just reaped by the sword. Then the strong man, the born king, appeared in the person of the first Abd-er-Rahmān, and Andalusia once more became, outwardly, one dominion. "O King, live for ever!" ”

“ For centuries Spain had been the centre of civilization, the seat of arts and sciences, of learning, and every form of refined enlightenment. No other country in Europe had so far approached the cultivated dominion of the Moors. The brief brilliancy of Ferdinand and Isabella, and of the empire of Charles V., could found no such enduring preëminence. ”

“ He was no very orthodox champion of the faith, for he fought as well for the Moors as for the Christians, and would as dispassionately rob a church as a mosque. But all this is clear enough to any one who reads the Chronicle, and it does not make the Cid anything but what he always was—a hero of the rude days of yore. If we are to limit our definition of heroism to characters that display all Christian virtues, long-suffering, gentleness, and pity, we shall have to dismiss most of our old friends. ”

“ Never was Cordova so rich and prosperous as under his rule; never was Andalusia so well cultivated, so teeming with the gifts of nature, brought to perfection by the skill and industry of man; never was the State so triumphant over disorder, or the power of the law more widely felt and respected. Ambassadors came to pay him court from the Emperor of Constantinople, from the kings of France, of Germany, of Italy. His power, wisdom, and opulence, were a byword over Europe and Africa, and had even reached to the furthest limits of the Moslem empire in Asia. ”

“ Especially hateful to these earnest people was the open gaiety and sensuous refinement of the Moors; their enjoyment of life and all its pleasure, their music and singing, their very learning and science, were abhorrent to these ascetics. Life, to the true believer, meant only scourges and fasts, penances and confessions, purification through suffering, the mortifying of the flesh and sanctifying of the spirit. ”

“ There is no greater mistake than to imagine that the Arabs, who spread with such astonishing rapidity over half the civilized world, were in any real sense a united people. So far was this from being the truth, that it demanded all Mohammed's diplomatic skill, and all his marvellous personal prestige, to keep up a semblance of unity even while he was alive. The Arabs were made up of a number of hostile tribes or clans, many of whom had been engaged in deadly blood-feuds for several generations, and all of whom were moved by a spirit of tribal jealousy which was never entirely extinguished. ”

“ Almanzor, who had been a judge and an inspector, was no more a soldier than the chamberlain; but he came of a sound old stock, and his ancestor had been one of the few Arabs who had accompanied Tārik and his Berbers in the first invasion of Spain. Without a moment's hesitation or self-distrust, he volunteered to lead the army against the Christians; and so successful was the raid he made upon Leon, and so liberal was his largesse to the soldiery, that he returned to Cordova, not only triumphant—a civilian general—but also the idol of the army. ”

“ The suicides of Andalusia were really no whit more reasonable or truly religious than the sufferings of the priests of Baal who cut themselves with knives, or of the Indian ascetics who let their nails grow through the palms of their hands. The fact that the Spanish "martyrs" were mad in a better cause does not make them less insane. Christianity does not teach its disciples to fling away their lives wantonly, out of mere joy in being tortured and killed. It was not as if the Christians were persecuted or hindered in the exercise of their faith ”

“ THE WAVE OF CONQUEST.
"O COMMANDER of the Faithful, these are not common conquests; they are like the meeting of the nations on the Day of Judgment." Thus wrote Mūsa, the Governor of Africa, to the Khalif Welīd, describing the victory of the Guadalete. There is little wonder that the Saracens stood amazed at the completeness of their triumph. Leaving the regions of myth, with which the Spanish chroniclers have surrounded the fall of Roderick, it is matter of sober history that the victory of the Guadalete gave all Spain into the hands of the Moors. ”

“ The Spaniards, who formed after all the bulk of the population in which they were merged, loved to be ruled by a king; they liked a dynasty, and were proud of the memories of the great Omeyyad house. The rule of a minister, however just and good, was not their idea of government; the king must rule by himself. So they rebelled against the authority of a second son of Almanzor, who had provoked them by publicly putting in his claim to succeed to the throne, and they insisted on the Khalif taking the reins of State into his own weak hands. ”

“ While the Arabs, who had only arrived in time to reap the advantages of the conquest, had appropriated all the most smiling provinces of the peninsula, the Berbers found themselves relegated to the most unlovely parts, to the dusty plains of Estremadura, or to the icy mountains of Leon, where they had to contend with a climate which severely tried natures brought up in African heats, and where, too, they had the doubtful privilege of forming a buffer between their Arab allies and the Christians of the North. ”

“ In the two-thirds of the peninsula thus marked off by nature for their habitation, which the Arabs always called "Andalus," and we shall call Andalusia, to distinguish it from the entire peninsula, the Moors organized that wonderful kingdom of Cordova which was the marvel of the Middle Ages, and which, when all Europe was plunged in barbaric ignorance and strife, alone held the torch of learning and civilization bright and shining before the Western world. It must not be supposed that the Moors, like the barbarian hordes who preceded them, brought desolation and tyranny in their wake. ”