THE MOORS IN SPAIN.*

WHEN the Arabs spread themselves like a deluge over Spain, the only portion of the country that remained unassailed was the Basque provinces: Upper Navarre, Guipuscoa, and Biscay. Asturia, a great part of Galicia, and the northern frontier districts of Castille-in short, the whole country to the north of the chain of mountains which extends from the Pyrenees to the promontory of Finisterre-were regained within the space of forty years by Pelayo, his son Favila, and his successor, Alphonso the Catholic. The Arabs, who had not found sufficient time to settle themselves firmly in those provinces, disappeared again from them, without leaving a trace of their presence behind them; and although they returned on several occasions during the next centuries into these provinces, it was not in the character of conquerors, but of freebooters; and even if they were successful in various attacks-as, for instance, in carrying off the treasures of St. Jago di Compostella-they scarce ever made an attempt to maintain possession of the towns they had taken by surprise. A settled Arabic population only resided momentarily beyond the northern mountains; 50,000 Arabs, who had taken refuge in Leon, after an unsuccessful rebellion in Merida, in 830, were settled in Galicia by Alphonso the Modest, but soon afterwards killed to a man, through being suspected of traitorous designs. With the exception of this attempt at colonisation, no other Arabs made their appearance in these provinces, save nomade tribes of warriors and isolated slaves, who could leave no lasting impression on the soil, which they only transiently traversed.

The Arabs were entirely expelled at the commencement of the ninth century from the provinces they had held on the southern side of the Pyrenees, and from a greater portion of Catalonia. In these districts, when their rule had lasted near one hundred years, many traces of them could be found, of which some are recognisable at the present day, especially in topographical names; as, for instance, in that of the fortress of Barcelona-Atarazanas.

Although Alphonso the Catholic had, in the middle of the eighth century, undertaken successful expeditions far beyond the Duero, still nearly three hundred years elapsed before the country between this stream and the Asturian mountains was finally regained. In Leon and Old Castille the Arabic rule had, doubtlessly, taken deeper root in the course of so many generations, than it had done in the previously mentioned provinces; but the Mohammedan population, which had been raised under their protection, disappeared utterly before the Christian conquerors. They were either cut down or expelled; and wherever a few fragments remained they were speedily converted into slaves. It was not till the Spaniards had made enduring conquests on the southern bank of the Duero, in the middle of the eleventh century, that they commenced to spare the dense Mohammedan population they found there, and suffer them to remain in their abodes as taxable subjects. The town of Sena was the first whose inhabitants obtained a capitulation on these terms. This humanity, or, if we will, this wise policy, which the Arabs had settled as an established rule from their first landing in Spain, was, however, a rare excep

* Die Moriscos in Spanien. Von A. L. von Rochau. Williams and Norgate.

tion with the Spaniards of the eleventh century. The conquest of Portugal up to the Mondejo, and of the kingdoms of Castille and Leon as far as the Guadarrama mountains, speedily ensued; and before the end of the eleventh century the Tagus was the border of the Christian empire. While the Castilian dominions were being thus extended towards the south, the state of Arragon was being formed at the foot of the Pyrenees; and the first king of this new province, Sancho, was summoned, in 1076, to the throne of Navarre. With the united strength of these two principalities, the territory of the Ebro, which the Arabs had till then maintained, was gained for Arragon. Monzon, Huesca, and Barbastro fell, between 1089 and 1101, into the hands of the Arragonese, who immediately converted all the mosques into churches, and annihilated the whole Arabic population. Encouraged by this success, and by the capitulation of Zaragossa, Alphonso of Arragon determined on a crusade against Granada, which, however, ended in his defeat.

Arragon and Catalonia became united under one king, in the person of Raymond Berengarius; and he acquired sufficient strength thereby to drive the Arabs from the Lower Ebro. Tortosa, Mequinenza, Lerida, and Fraga were taken in 1148 and 1149, and the conquest of the present Catalonia was completed. About the same time the kingdom of Arragon was formed in its present extent, by the occupation of Albarracin and a few neighbouring districts.

The conquest of Portugal had not advanced so rapidly as that of Castille and Leon. While the upper part of the Tagus had been long in the occupation of the Christians, the lower, and the mouth of the river, were still held by the Arabs. In 1148 the Portuguese conquered Lisbon by the help of some German crusaders, and the Arabs were compelled to quit it, with the exception of a small body of the poorer class, who were confined to an especial quarter-an arrangement which was repeatedly imitated afterwards. After the capture of Lisbon, the rest of Portugal, to the north of the Tagus, was conquered within a short time, and, on the left bank of this river, Evora, Elvas, Albuquerque, and Ourique shared the fate of the capital, so that the Portuguese arms were not at all behind the Castilian in their victorious course towards the south.

For one hundred and twenty-five years the Tagus, and the chain of mountains running along its left bank, remained the frontier of the kingdoms of Leon and Castille. Although the Spaniards made a few conquests to the southward of this line, still these aggrandisements, and even the later fall of Badajoz, were of short duration; the Spaniards were always driven back on the Sierra di Toledo and the Tagus, and the Arabs even advanced in their predatory forays as far as the Duero, without, however, being able to maintain their ground to the north of the Tagus.

Through the great victory at Las Navas de Tolosa in the year 1212, the Arabs were driven for ever beyond the Sierra Morena. The Mohammedan population gave way en masse before the victors, who desolated the conquered land with fire and sword, cut down the garrisons of the fortresses, burned the sick and wounded of the Moorish army in Baeza, and murdered or made slaves of 60,000 in Ubeda, after a first capitulation had been broken, by the persuasion of the ecclesiastics in the Christian army, as contradicting the commands of God and the canon law.

Hunger and pestilence, the consequences of their own passion for destruction, rendered it impossible for the Christians to maintain their ground to the south of the Sierra Morena. While, however, compelled to give

up Andalusia again, they succeeded in making a few conquests in Spanish Estremadura, which had remained for the greater part in the possession of the Arabs. Alcantara, on the Tagus, was taken in 1213; but the Spaniards did not obtain firm ground on the Guadiana till seventeen years after, by capturing Merida and Badajoz.

About the same date, Baeza was taken for the second time. The whole population fled to Granada, and founded there the suburb of Albaycin, which plays a very important part in the later history of Granada.

From 1229 the Arragonese employed six years in subjugating the Balearic islands, then exclusively held by the Arabs. The system of desolation carried on by the Christians must have been excessive, for no trace of the old population can be found in history after the fourteenth century.

After the Arragonese had established themselves firmly in Majorca and Minorca, they turned their arms against the kingdom of Valencia, which had been left in peace during the short reign of the Cid. Within seven years Valencia was conquered from the fortress of Morella as far as the Xucar. The capital was surrendered in 1238, on the condition that the inhabitants might have permission to emigrate. The majority-nearly 50,000 persons-removed from the city with their property, and the king, Don Jayme, had great difficulty in restraining his troops from plundering them. Two leaders of the Arragonese army, however, Count de Cardano and Don Artal de Alagon, lay in ambush for the emigrants at Villena, and robbed them of nearly all they had saved from the shipwreck of their property. In the course of the next fifteen years the Arragonese acquired the remainder of Valencia, and afterwards a part of Murcia. The Moorish population, however, obtained more favourable terms than usual, for had they been expelled, the conquered territory would have been almost entirely depopulated.

The Castilians had, in the meanwhile, made such progress in Estremadura, that they were enabled to take Cordova in 1236 by a coup de main. The entire population of this great city was driven to emigrate. In the year 1241 the Castilians obtained possession of all Murcia, through a treaty, in which King Mohammed Åben Hud declared himself a vassal of Ferdinand the Saint, and delivered up to him the most important fortresses. In 1246 Mohammed Al-hamar, King of Granada, also recognised Ferdinand as his liege lord, and bound himself to the payment of tribute and appearing at the Cortes. In the ensuing war against the province of Seville, Mohammed Al-hamar was forced to take part, and in 1248 this most important city capitulated. The inhabitants emigrated, and their property and estates were distributed among the Christian leaders of the army.

After the fall of Seville, the only Arabic state existing in Spain, with the exception of the pseudo-kingdom of Murcia, was Granada. This principality, though small in extent, was powerful through its position, its immense population, its riches, and warlike equipments, and formed a very dangerous rival to Castille, whose sovereignty it had recognised in a moment of need, only to prepare the way with greater security to a more independent future. The extensive conquests Ferdinand had made during the last twenty-five years were so far advantageous to the Moorish king, that thousands of the inhabitants of Jaen, Cordova, and Seville, had migrated to Granada, and materially increased its strength.

Although the power of the Castilian crown had been so augmented

by the conquests during the first half of the thirteenth century, still it could only gain isolated and transient advantages over Granada till late in the following century. Tarifa was taken by storm in 1292, Alcaudete and Gibraltar in 1309, though the latter was again lost in 1330. after the great victory at Rio Salado in 1340, Alphonso XI., the last of this illustrious name, succeeded in wresting from the Arabs several larger strips of territory, with the towns of Alcala de Real and Algeziras. The kingdom of Granada, from this time confined to a territory, corresponding nearly with that of the present province, was enabled to defend its frontiers with great success against the attacks of the Spaniards for more than 100 years. From the capture of Algeciras, in 1344, to the year 1482, the Arabs suffered no material loss, with the exception of Antequera, which, in 1410, and Gibraltar for the second time in 1462, fell into the hands of the Spaniards.

After Queen Isabella had removed her niece Johanna from the throne of Castille, she sought to strengthen her usurpation by the renewal of the long-slumbering national war against the Moors. The struggle commenced in 1482, by a daring attack on Alhama. In the course of the next few years the strong fortresses of Ronda, Marbella, Velez-Malaga, Loja, and Malaga, were taken by storm. The inhabitants of Malaga were sold as slaves, those of the other towns were permitted to emigrate, while the rural population was left in peace. At length Ferdinand and Isabella appeared beneath the walls of Granada, a city which, through its strong natural position at the foot of the impregnable Alpuxarras, protected by immense walls, and defended by 100,000 warriors, seemed able to offer a lasting resistance to the Spaniards, who were weakened by the effects of war and pestilence. The wretched King Abu Abdilehi (Boabdil), however, was destined to ruin the powerful capital of his glorious kingdom which he had already irretrievably injured. For two months the King of Granada carried on negotiations with Ferdinand and Isabella, which resulted in two treaties, one affecting the royal family, the other the population of Granada.

By the first, Abu Abdilehi received from the Catholic monarchs, and as their vassal, a present of a number of villages in the Alpuxarras, further the domains he had inherited from his father, and 30,000 pieces of gold. The princesses of the royal house also received their own possessions as gifts.

By the second treaty, the citizens received guarantees that their religion should not be assailed, that their property should be respected, and that all might emigrate who pleased. We shall see presently how these promises were kept.

From the earliest ages of Christian domination all the means and appliances of the most odious tyranny were employed to convert the subjugated Arabs. Religious persecutions practised by Mahommedans on the Christians are, on the other hand, among the rarest events in Spanish history, and when they occurred they were almost exclusively the result of the most brutal provocation. Fanatic priests forced their way into the mosques of Cordova to preach the Gospel; monks, thirsting for martyrdom, proclaimed on the square of Granada that Mohammed was an impostor. The author of the "Memoriæ Sanctorum," who gained the name of a saint exclusively by similar provocation and gasconade-the priest Eulogius himself gives his testimony about the Moors: "We live among them without any insult to our faith."

In one word, as the Arabs were superior to the Spaniards in knowledge and education, they were equally so in toleration, true religious feelings, real humanity, chivalrous manners, and faith in their plighted word. In every page, not only of the Arab historians but also of the Spanish chroniclers and annalists, the impartial reader can judge for himself, that the Arabs were the nobler race, and their cause was the better one; and any one who has any recognition of the holy and the beautiful, will join in the feelings of pain and horror, when the Arabic annalists relate the sufferings to which they were exposed in the name of religion. But "so it was written." Islamism sank in Spain through its one single contradiction of the laws of morality; without polygamy it would, probably, have now been the master of the whole German world, in which it would have certainly found a more fertile soil, and have produced very different fruits, than it has done in the exhausted East.

Nothing was more frequent than the jesuitical explanation or open rupture of the capitulations granted to the Moors. Even the best and most honourable of the Spanish kings practised the most shameful treachery towards the conquered and defenceless Arabs. Such was the way in which Ferdinand the Catholic behaved to Malaga. The inhabitants had been bound to ransom themselves at the rate of thirty-six ducats per man, within eight months. This immense sum of nearly half a million ducats was raised within a few hundred or thousand ducats, in the specified time. Ferdinand took the money, and compensated himself for the loss of the residue, by selling the whole population of Malaga, in number 12,000, as slaves. Peter the Terrible murdered with his own hand an Arab prince who had sought refuge with him. Finally, the Cid, the flower of Spanish chivalry, is represented in the naïve accounts of the highly patriotic "Cronica General” as a pattern of faithlessness and cruelty.

Slavery was as perfect in Spain until the seventeenth century as the word itself allows an interpretation. A slave could not possess any property, he could not claim the protection of the laws, his wife and child could be separated from him, his master could kill him without subjecting himself to any punishment.

The Moorish rural population, who had been originally assured the most widely-extended privileges and concessions, were gradually brought into a more or less oppressive state of vassalism. In Arragon, where the knights had divided the land among themselves, in order to have it cultivated by the Arabs for their own profit, the latter found some little protection from their owners-at least against useless ill-treatment. The law forbade the Arabs having mosques, but custom continued to permit them, especially in those places where they were the property of the nobility. In the few towns, however, where free Arabs were tolerated, they were excluded from so many offices and branches of trade, and subjected to so many restrictions, that they required to exert their utmost energies in order not to fall a prey to the extremities of poverty. Still their position in the towns was, in some respects, more favourable than that of the even more hated Jews, and some time elapsed before they were compelled to wear distinguishing marks on their clothes, and expose themselves to insult and contempt on their appearance in public.

The civil condition of the Moors grew worse, however, in the same ratio as the Christian domination extended and became firmer. Emigration, which at first was not merely allowed_but even promoted, was later