In the north there was developing another and very different power.
The descendants of the Visigoth Kings, making common cause with the
rough mountaineers, had shared all their hardships and rigors in the
mountains of the Asturias. Inured to privation and suffering, entirely
unacquainted with luxury or even with the comforts of living, they had
grown strong, and in a century after Alfonso I. had emerged from their
mountain shelter and removed their court and capital from Oviedo to
Leon, where Alfonso III. held sway over a group of barren kingdoms,
poor, proud, but with Hidalgos and Dons, who were keeping
alive the sacred fires of patriotism and of religion. This was the
rough cradle of a Spanish nationality.
They had their own jealousies and fierce conflicts, but all united
in a common hatred of the Moor. Though they did not yet dream of
driving him out of their land, their brave leaders, Ramiro I. and
Ordoño I. had been for years steadily defying and tormenting him with
the kind of warfare to which they gave its name—guerrilla
—meaning “little wars.”
While the Great Khalif was consolidating his Moorish kingdom and
driving the Christians back into their mountains, the power of that
people was being weakened by internal strifes existing between the
three adjacent kingdoms—Leon, Castile, and Navarre. The headship of
Leon was for years disputed by her ambitious neighbor Castile (so
called because of the numerous fortified castles with which it was
studded), under the leadership of one Fernando, Count of Castile.
There had been the usual lapse into anarchy and weakness after the
Great Khalif's death. Andalusia always needed a master, and this she
found in Almanzor, who was Prime Minister to one of the Khalif's
feeble descendants. It was a sad day for the struggling kingdom in the
north when this all-subduing man took the reins in his own hands, and
left his young master to amuse himself in collecting rare manuscripts
and making Cordova more beautiful.
This Almanzor, the mightiest of the soldiers of the Crescent since
Tarik and Musa, proclaimed a war of faith against the Christians, who
were obliged to forget their local dissensions and to try with their
combined strength to save their kingdom from extermination. These were
the darkest days to which they had yet been subjected. But for the
death of Almanzor the ruin of the Christian state would have been
complete. A monkish historian thus records this welcome event: “In 1002
died Almanzor, and was buried in hell.”
The death of Almanzor was the turning point in the fortunes of the
two kingdoms—that of the Moors and of the Christians.
The magnificence and the glory of the kingdom faded like the mist
before the morning sun. Never again would Cordova be called the “Bride
of Andalusia.” Eight years after the death of Almanzor anarchy and ruin
reigned in that city. The gentle, studious youth who was Khalif, was
dragged with his only child to a dismal vault attached to the great
mosque; and here, in darkness and cold and damp, sat the grandson of
the first Great Khalif, his child clinging to his breast and begging in
vain for food, his wretched father pathetically pleading with his
jailers for just a crust of bread, and a candle to relieve the awful
darkness.
The brutal Berbers now had their turn. The priceless library, with
its six hundred thousand volumes, was in ashes. They were in the “City
of the Fairest.” Palace after palace was ransacked, and in a few days
all that remained of its exquisite treasures of art was a heap of
blackened stones (1010). The Christians drew their broken state closer
together, and gathered themselves for a more aggressive warfare than
any yet undertaken. The time when the Moors were in the throes of civil
war was favorable. The three kingdoms of Asturias, Leon, and Castile
were in 1073 united into one “kingdom of Castile,” under Alfonso VI.,
who had already made great inroads upon the Moslem territory and laid
many cities under tribute. With this event, the name Castilian
comes into Spanish history, and from thenceforth that name represents
all that is proudest, bravest, and most characteristic of the part of
the race which traces a direct lineage from the ancient Visigoth Kings.
Alfonso had not misjudged his opportunity. He had traversed Spain
with his army, and bathed in the ocean in sight of the “Pillars of
Hercules.” His great general Rodrigo Diaz, known as “My Cid, the
Challenger,” had cut another path all the way to Valencia, where he
reigned as a sort of uncrowned king; and he will forever reign as
crowned king in the realm of romance and poetry; the perfect embodiment
of the knightly idea—the “Challenger,” who, in defense of the faith,
would stand before great armies and defy them to single combat! Whether
“My Cid” ever did such mighty deeds as are ascribed to him, no one
knows. But he stands for the highest ideal of his time. He was the
“King Arthur” of Spanish history; and so valiantly did he serve the
Christian cause that the Moors were driven to a most disastrous step.
With the Cid in Valencia, with Alfonso VI. marching a victorious army
through the Moslem territory, and with Toledo, the city of the ancient
Visigoth Kings, repossessed, it looked as if, after almost four hundred
years, the Christians were about to recover their land.
The Moors, thoroughly frightened, realizing how helpless they had
grown, resolved upon a desperate measure.
There was, on the opposite African coast, a sect of Berber fanatics,
fierce and devout, known as “saints,” but which the Moors called
Almoravides. Fighting for the faith was their occupation. What more
fitting than to use them as a means of driving the infidel Christians
out of Moslem territory!
They came, like a cloud of locusts, and settled upon the land.
Yusuf, their general, led his men against Alfonso's Castilians October
23, 1086. Near Badajos the attack was made simultaneously in front and
rear, crushing them utterly; Alfonso barely escaping with five hundred
men. This was only the first of many other crushing defeats; the most
disheartening of which was the one in 1099, when the Cid, fighting in
alliance with Pedro, King of Aragon, was defeated near Gardia, on the
seacoast. Then the great warrior's heart broke, and he died; and we are
told he was clothed cap-à-pie in shining armor and placed upright on
his good steed Bavieca, his trusty sword in his hand—and so he passed
to his burial; his banner borne and guarded by five hundred knights.
And we are also told the Moors wonderingly watched his departure with
his knights, not suspecting that he was dead.
The object of the Moors in inviting the odious Almoravides had been
accomplished; the Christians had been driven out of Andalusia back into
their own territory; but their African auxiliaries were too well
pleased with their new abode to think of leaving it. One by one the
Moorish Princes were subdued by the men whose aid they had invoked,
until a dynasty of the Almoravides was fastened upon Spain. To the
refined Spanish Arabs contact with these savages from the desert was a
terrible scourge, and so far as they were able they withdrew into
communities by themselves, leaving these African locusts to devour
their substance and dim their glory.
But luxury was not favorable to the invaders. In another generation
their martial spirit was gone and they had become only ignorant, sodden
voluptuaries; and when the Christians once more renewed their attacks,
they failed to repel them as Yusuf had done thirty years before.
There was another fanatical sect, beyond the Atlas range in Africa,
which had long been looking for a coming Messiah, whom they called the
Mahdi. They were known as the Alhomades. A son of a
lamp-lighter in the Mosque of Cordova one day presented himself before
the Alhomades, and announced that he was the great Mahdi, who
was divinely appointed to lead them, and to bring happiness to all the
earth.
The path this Mahdi desired to lead them was first to
Morocco, there to subdue the Almoravides in their own land, and thence
to Spain. In a short time this entire plan was realized. The Mahdi's
successor was Emperor of Morocco, and by the year 1150 included in his
dominion was all of Mahommedan Spain! The Spanish Arabs, when they were
fighting Alfonso VI. and the “Cid,” did not anticipate this disgraceful
downfall from people of their own faith. They abhorred these Mahommedan
savages, and drew together still closer for a century more in and about
their chosen refuge of Granada.
In the early part of the thirteenth century the Emperor of Morocco
made such enormous preparations for the occupation of Spain that a
larger design upon Europe became manifest. Once more Christendom was
alarmed; not since Charles Martel had the danger appeared so great. The
Pope proclaimed a Crusade, this time not into Palestine, but Spain.
An army of volunteers from the kingdom of Portugal and from southern
France re-enforced the great armies of the Kings of Castile, Aragon,
and Navarre. The Crusaders, as they called themselves, assembled at
Toledo July 12, 1212, under the command of Alfonso IX., King of
Castile. The power of the Alhomades was broken, and they were driven
out of Spain. The once great Mahommedan Empire in that country was
reduced to the single province of Granada, where the Moors intrenched
themselves in their last stronghold. For nearly three centuries the
Crescent was yet to wave over the kingdom of Granada; but it was to
shine in only the pale light of a waning crescent, until its final
extinction in the full light of a Christian day.