Charlemagne, wisely no doubt, made no attempt to avenge the loss of his chivalry or of his treasure: but that he left the bodies of his dead Palladins to be buried by the Basques, made good his most inglorious retreat, and scarce drew bridle until he had reached Auxerre.1

1 Eginhard, Vita, &c., cap. xv., and Annales, p. 200-5 and 240; Cf. Sismondi, Hist. de France, ii., 257, 265. Sismondi considers that Roland-if such a person ever existed-was never in the army of Charlemagne at all; but may have dis. tinguished himself under Charles Martel. Archbishop Turpin and Ariosto are not of course authorities for historical facts. As to the Spanish invention of a second rout at Roncesvalles in 812, see authorities collected by Sismondi, Hist. de France, ii., p. 265. It is sufficiently amusing, and very characteristic of the accuracy of such traditions, that Roland, whose very existence in the army of Charlemagne is so doubtful, is invested with the special office and dignity of Commander of the Frontier, or Marquis of Brittany.

I

CHAPTER XIV.

ISLAM.

(787-852)

I.-The Mezquita.

ABDUR RAHMAN I. was succeeded in 787 by his favourite son, Hisham, surnamed the Just, an amiable and virtuous sovereign.1 A student rather than a warrior, Hisham, in the early part of his reign, showed considerable vigour and even military skill. He valiantly conquered and generously pardoned his brothers, Abdullah and Suleiman, both of whom had taken up arms against him, and he proclaimed a Holy War for the subjugation of the Asturias, which was attended, however, with very poor results. Another expedition, against the Franks of Septimania, was both directly and indirectly more successful, for if it brought no accession of territory to the Moslem, it led to the acquisition of a vast amount of Christian treasure which was devoted to the completion of the great Mosque at Cordova. The captives taken at Narbonne were employed in the actual work of the building, and many of the Roman pillars which support the immense roof of the Mezquita were brought at the same time from the Narbonensis. But in spite of these military and architectural interests, the mind of Hisham was so much affected, in the sixth year of his useful reign, by an astrological forecast of his early death, that he was led to abandon the cares of State, and to devote himself entirely to good works and religious exercises. And thus on his death, some few months before the expected period, after a reign of only eight years, the kingdom of Cordova was almost as much dominated by sacerdotal or theological influences, as was once the kingdom of Toledo.

Unlike the Gothic kings, however, in peace or in war, Hisham did much to add to the beauties of his capital, and to develop the resources of his country. The bridge that spans the great river, the Wády el Kebir, over which the Spanish peasant still drives the produce of his fields to the market at Cordova, was constructed by his liberality: and if the founda

Al Ahdil the Just: and Al Rahdi the affable.

tion of the mosque, in which the Christian of modern Cordova still carries on his splendid worship, is due to the magnificence of Abdur Rahman, the completed work is a monument of the piety of Hisham. If the cry of the Muezzin is heard from the towers of Aya Sofia, on the shores of the Bosphorus, the Te Deum is sung amid yet more splendid surroundings in the Mezquita, on the banks of the Guadalquivir.

Within a few months after the conquest in 711, the new masters of Spain, considerate as we have seen in matters of religion from the very day of their arrival, had entered into a friendly arrangement with the conquered people by which one half of the Christian Basilica at Cordova was used for the worship of the Moslem. For some seventy years this mutual toleration was continued, until the time came when Abdur Rahman I. determined to build on the site so long hallowed by tradition, a mosque for Moslem worshippers, which should compete with the finest temples in the East. He accordingly purchased from the Christians that portion of the Basilica which they had hitherto used for their worship, and then pulling down the whole, he commenced his new and magnificent edifice in 786.

The building as designed by Abdur Rahman and completed by his son Hisham was some three hundred and sixty feet long by two hundred and seventy feet in width. The general plan was that of the mosque of most sacred Kairwan in Morocco. The walls, of immense thickness, are low, and the roof was probably not raised more than thirty feet above the floor of the mosque. Nor is the height without the building, even where the buttressed towers break the long line of walls, ever greater than sixty feet. Eleven aisles ran north and south within the building of 786, and were formed by long rows of low marble pillars, in number not less than twelve hundred, the pride of the contemporary Arab, and the spoil of the more ancient Roman.2 The central aisle, an alley wider than the rest, led to the Mihráb3 or Holy Place, which

1 This arrangement had already been made in the Basilica of St. John, afterwards converted into the great mosque of Damascus, which was destroyed by fire, alas, long after this note was first written, on the 1st of December, 1893.

2 The number of pillars still standing are nine hundred and twenty, of which eight hundred and thirty-four are of a fine red marble from Cabra, near Cordova; the remainder may have been brought, as tradition relates, from Narbonne, from Italy, from Mauritania, from Egypt, and from the furthest eastern provinces of the Roman world. Of these columns, twenty-one are said by Ford to be of "marino bigio (dappled gray), ten of cipollino, ten of fluted or channelled white, probably Greek, three of plain white, eight of gray Egyptian granite, and over thirty of uncertain, but foreign origin." Ford (1888), pp. 309-10.

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The great mosques of Islam are all built in the form of a parallelogram, of which the longer sides run from north to south. At the north end is a great court or Patio, surrounded by cloisters with a fountain in the middle, for the

was rebuilt by the Caliph Hakam in 965, and remains to this day one of the most beautiful and elaborate specimens of the best age of Saracenic architecture in Spain. The fine mosaics that still decorate the façade―admirable specimens of Roman Byzantine art-were placed there, according to Adzari, a contemporary author, in 965, and were sent by the Emperor Leo, from Constantinople, with a Greek artist, who instructed and superintended the Moslem workmen employed by Hakam.1 Abdur Rahman III. added a Minar or tower which has since been destroyed, as well as the beautiful Fountain of the Court of Oranges which still remains. The mosque was enlarged by Almanzor, seeking popularity, at the end of the tenth century, by the addition of eight new aisles to the east of the then existing building, which was thus increased to a parallelogram of four hundred and twenty feet by three hundred and seventyfive; and the beautiful Maksurah or seat of the Caliph, now converted into a Christian shrine known as the Chapel of Villa Viciosa 2 was probably added at the same time.

The new choir, an immensely lofty Gothic church, built within the Mezquita, and for which no less than two hundred of the ancient columns were swept away, is the work of Bishop Alfonso Manrique in 1523. Such pious destructiveness might well fill us with indignation; but let us rather marvel that the Inquisition did not consume the whole of the Moslem edifice by fire-and rejoice at their inconsequent apathy. Even the exquisite carving of the stalls hardly assuages the wrath of the artistic visitor, shocked at the incongruous vandalism which has so sadly marred a building unique among the art treasures of Europe. Yet as it stands to-day in mouldering Cordova, the great Cathedral which perpetuates

purpose of the prescribed ablutions. Within the building itself, and at the end furthest from the Patio, is the Mihráb, the most sacred and the most highly ornamented part of the temple, indicating also the Kiblah or direction of the Kaaba at Mecca, towards which every good Moslem must turn his face in the act of prayer. Near the Mihrab is the Minbar or pulpit from which the Imam leads the prayers of the assembled people. See Girault de Prangey, Architecture des Mores et des Arabes, pp. 21-49.

1 See Madrazo, Cordova; and Fergusson's Modern Architecture, p. 395. During the reign of Alfonso the Learned, in 1275, permission was granted to the dean and chapter of the cathedral to have at all times free of taxes four Moorish workmen, two of them masons, and two carpenters, who were to be employed exclusively for repairs in the cathedral, with the other artists. This circumstance has undoubtedly contributed to the good preservation of the Moorish remains. See Don J. F. Riaño, Discurso, &c., 1869; and Fergusson, ubi supra.

2 Mr. Fergusson places the chapel of Villa Viciosa, circ. 1200. He can hardly have realised the character of the Almohades. Neither Yacub ben Yussuf (1187-1199), Mohammed ben Yacúb (1199-1213), nor Abu Yacúb (1213-1223), were likely men to have beautified a church, still less to have developed the chapel of Villa Viciosa.

the glory of the Moslem in Spain, and which is still familiarly known as La Mezquita or the Mosque,1 is one of the most interesting of the Temple structures of the world.

Covering nigh upon four acres of ground, it ranks second as regards area among the churches of Christendom, being surpassed only by the vastness of St. Peter's at Rome;2 and the pillars that still remain, the glorious wreck of the twelve hundred that once supported the roof, are suggestive of an immense forest of marble, in which the visitor may wander in ever increasing admiration and amazement, at once at the variety and the regularity of the display.

But the Mezquita is far from being remarkable only for its vast size, or even for its artistic beauty. Built upon the site of the old Roman temple of Janus, pulled down centuries before the birth of Mohammed, to give place to a Christian church, the forerunner of that in which the Moslem was first permitted to worship God at Cordova, it perpetuates the memory of many religions and varying traditions of sanctity for over two thousand years. The only place of worship in Europe that may be compared with it both in antiquity and in similarity of interest is Aya Sofía at Constantinople, of which the first stone was laid by Justinian in 532, on the site of the great Christian Temple that had been erected by Constantine, two hundred years before.

Constructed like the Mezquita of the architectural spoils of a more antient world, St. Sofia passed unharmed by time or siege into the hands of the Moslem in 1453, two hundred years after the Mosque on the Guadalquivir had been converted into a Christian cathedral. It is strange, indeed, and suggestive of much that may not be here set down, that the oldest of all the Mosques of Islam was built as a Christian church, and that the oldest of the great Christian churches of the world was built as a Mosque at Cordova; that five hundred years before St. Peter's was commenced, four hundred years before Milan was completed, the Mezquita stood as now it stands, consecrated to the worship of God.

1 As a holy place of devotion, it ranked as the third among the temples of Islám, equal it may be to Al Aksa at Jerusalem, and inferior only to the Caaba of Mecca itself. The mosque was called Zeca, "the house of purification"-the old Egyptian Sekos. A pilgrimage to it was held to be equivalent, in the Spanish Moslem, to that of Mecca. There is a well-known Spanish Proverb, andar de Ceca en Mecca, quoted by Cervantes in Don Quixote, i., 18., and in Garay's Collection, fo. 399, To go from Ceca to Mecca, i.e., to go from one pilgrimage to anotherto saunter, (a word itself derived from Sainte terre). The meaning of A Mint, which is sometimes attributable to Ceca, has caused me to err on this point, in a note to Sancho Panza's Proverbs, (Ed, 1892) p. 8.

2 The remaining pillars are more than nine hundred in number. The church even as it now stands, is about four hundred and twenty feet long by three hundred and seventy feet broad, and covers one hundred and fifty seven thousand