A discreet envoy from Barbary to Andalusia made the most of his great opportunities; and in September, 755, the young prince, not only invited, but awaited with feverish anxiety, and welcomed with national acclamation, landed near the mouth of the great river,1 and proceeded to set up his new Government at Seville.

Of

In the early spring of the next year, he had established himself at Cordova, which continued for 400 years to be the splendid capital of the Amirs and Caliphs of Spain. the various battles and skirmishes between the Ommeyad prince and his various foes-Abbaside and Yemenite, Berber and Christian-no more need be said but that the Arab did not neglect the arts of war. A powerful and efficient navy was constructed by his orders, and the brave commander of the fleet, Taman ben Alkama, took the title of Amir el Mar, the first admiral of Spain.2

The uniform success that attended the arms of Abdur Rahman were marked by a single reverse, the loss of Narbonne, which, after forty years of Moslem domination, succumbed in 761 to the assault's of Pepin, the son of Charles Martel, and the father of Charlemagne. Thus was the last of the possessions of the Arab to the north of the Pyrenees re-occupied by the Christians in less than forty years after the first Berber had landed his troops on the southern coasts of Spain.

Thirty-two glorious years are included in the reign of the first Abdur Rahman at Cordova, and in this brief space of time were laid the foundations of the greatness of the Moorish Empire in Spain. When the great Amir died, in 788,3 the kingdom of Cordova was already one of the most powerful, and certainly by far the most enlightened Commonwealth in Europe.

Abdur Rahman was an autocrat, kind-hearted, judicious, merciful; quick of perception, but never hasty in action; generous in his approbation, refined in his tastes, stern in his anger, untiring in his labour for the State. Impatient of all opposition to his designs, easy of access to the poor and humble, a relentless judge of the rich and oppressive, and a munificent

1 Wady el Kebir = Guadalquivir.

The ships were built on the lines of vessels procured as models by Abdur Rahman from the Imperial court of Constantinople.

3 Abdur Rahman, though sometimes spoken of as King, as Caliph, and even as Commander of the Faithful (Amir al Mouminin), never assumed any more important title than that of Amir.

patron of all arts and sciences, especially of agriculture 1-he was the patron of a worthy tyrant; and as unlike the later Visigothic kings of Spain as it is possible to conceive or record. If in his royal and autocratic career are found alternate exhibitions of ferocity and of clemency, the noble assuredly predominates over the base. If heads are treacherously cut off, lives are chivalrously spared. If Moslems are massacred, Christians are protected by the impulsive Amir. The arts of peace were his chief delight, the magnificence of Cordova his ruling passion. The foundation of the great mosque, which he did not live to see completed, the building of the palace of Rissafah, the gardens that he laid out, and the aqueducts that he constructed; the luxury and the liberality of his court, the wit and refinement of his courtiers-of all these things we may read, and read with pleasure and advantage, in the glowing annals of the Moslems in Spain. Nay, more, the Christian writers have not failed to recognise his many virtues; and a medieval archbishop has not hesitated to speak of him as The Just.2

1 One of his great works was the embankment of the Guadalquivir for the purpose of irrigation.

The greatness of his contemporary Charlemagne, is, says Lafuente, perhaps inferior to that of this less known Arab Amir. Lafuente, iii., 154; Roderic, Hist. Arab., 18.

133

CHAPTER XIII.

THE KINGDOM OF ASTURIAS.

(711-788.)

I.-Covadonga.

RODERIC was so far from being "the last of the Goths" that within a few years after his death, we find not one, but two Gothic kings, one in the south-east, and the other in the north-west of Spain. Theodemir, who more immediately succeeded to the battered crown of Roderic, reigned by favour of the Arabs, as a vassal, or tributary king of Murcia, from 711 or 712 until 743, when he was succeeded by a Goth of the name of Athanagild, by whom the subject monarchy was maintained until 755, when on the arrival of the young Ommeyad Amir, Abdur Rahman, the petty and subject principality of the last Visigoth was incorporated in that of the first Arab king of Spain.

But the refuge and hiding place of the Gothic nobility, and the cradle of the future Spanish race, was in the unconquered Cantabrian provinces, where some seven or eight years after the death of Roderic, Pelayo, one of the early heroes of Spanish national story, "the saga-celebrated saviour of Christianity in the Peninsula," is found already reigning over the refugees, and making good his position in his mountain retreat. The rule of the Christians in the Asturias, unlike that of Theodemir in Murcia, was not by the favour of the Moslem, but in spite of their repeated attacks. Pelayo was the independent chieftain, not so much of what was left of the Visigoths on the northwestern coasts, as of that band of refugees, Gothic, Roman and Iberian, who, "drawing strength from weakness" and courage from affliction, kept the faith, and laid the foundations of the kingdom of Spain.

The legend of the heroic defence that was made by Pelayo and his little band in the rock-cut cave at Covadonga, has at

least the independent authority of an Arab historian 1 to support it; and although we may find some difficulty in be lieving every Christian detail, such as that the hero and his thirty followers actually destroyed the entire Moslem army of 400,000 men, the position of Covadonga,2 a natural fastness, no doubt enabled the small band of refugees to inflict severe loss on the unprotected invaders. The good fortune of Pelayo did much to kindle the national spirit, by which, and not by numbers, either of slayers or of the slain, Spain was conquered for the Spaniards: and thus the legend, like many other legends of the past, if critically false, is actually true. If, as we are told, the presence of a great commander may be worth 40,000 men, the prestige of a great victory may well be worth 400,000. What actually took place at Covadonga was probably that the tribesmen and refugees, with every advantage of an inaccessible position and of local knowledge, opposed the advance of the Moslems, much as the Afghans resisted the British army in the Khyber Pass; and that by hurling huge stones and trunks of trees from their rocky vantage ground upon the confused ranks of the Arabs, these early guerilleros were able to destroy the hosts of the invaders, and thus to maintain their independence in their mountain refuge.

Nor do the Arabs seem to have made any attempt to retrieve or avenge the fortunes of the day. Well satisfied, no doubt, with their unopposed dominion over the rich plains of the genial south country, they were willing to abandon the bleak and inhospitable mountains to their wild inhabitants and the emboldened refugees whom they sheltered.3 Be the reason what it may, Pelayo seems to have had peace all the days of his life after his victory at Covadonga in 718. Prudently confining his attention to the development of his little kingdom, he reigned, it is said, for nineteen years at Cangas, and dying in 737, he was peacefully succeeded by his son Favila.

4

1Ibn Hayyan; See Gayangos, ii., 34; Mariana, lib. vii., and Lafuente, iii., 68. Esp. Sag., xxxvii., 79.

2 Near Cangas de Onis in Asturias. For a graphic description of Covadonga and the neighbourhood, see an article by John Ormsby, Cornhill Magazine, 1870, p. 431; and Ford, Spain (ed. 1878), 225-7.

3 The Moorish commander, Al Khama, is said to have been accompanied by Oppas, Bishop of Seville (see ante, p. 113), who endeavoured to persuade Pelayo to submit to the superior forces of the invader. Mariana, lib. vii., I. The bishop is supposed to have been slain, as well as Al Khama, in the destruction of the Moslem army.

4 Cangas, the modern Cangas de Onis. The etymology of the word according to Ford is Canicas = conchas the shell-like valley. The town lies about a mile

Pelayo, no doubt, was but a robber chieftain, a petty mountain prince, and the legends of his royal descent are of later date, and of obviously spurious manufacture; but Pelayo needs no tinsel to adorn his crown. He was the founder of the Spanish monarchy. His successor Favila was no hero, but a royal sportsman, whose hands, like those of Gratian, were stained only with the blood of animals, and who was ingloriously killed by a bear when hunting near Covadonga. After his brief reign of only two years, Favila was succeeded in 739, not by his son, but by his brother-in-law Alfonso, who had married Hermesinda, a daughter of Pelayo, and had been named by the elder king as his successor in case of the death of Favila.2

Alfonso, in 742, felt himself already strong enough to assume the offensive against the Moslems, and crossing over the mountains that divide the Asturias from Gallicia, he made himself master of Lugo, Orense, Tuy, Braga, Chaves, and other cities of the north-west, now included in the kingdom of Portugal.3 Emboldened by the success of his arms, he further extended his operations to the south and east, and ravaged many towns and cities, which the weakness of his forces did not permit him to hold, and the smallness of his population did not enable him to occupy. It would seem probable, moreover, that until a national and patriotic spirit was aroused in new Spain, the Christians as well as the Moslems preferred, in many cases, the rule of the Moor to that of the Asturian. Constant forays were the fashion of the day, and Ledesma, Salamanca, Zamora, Astorga, Leon, Simancas, Avila, Segovia, and many less important towns are said to have been harried and sacked by militant Christians. The peaceful inhabitants of both religions must have slept more soundly to the south of the Tagus, than within striking distance of the king at Cangas.

from Villanueva, on the high road from Oviedo to Santander, and was adopted by Pelayo as his capital, and so continued, until it was abandoned for the more important town of Oviedo. Ford (1878), p. 224.

1 There is a quaint representation of the king's inglorious death over the doorway of the church of San Pedro at Villanueva, said to have been founded by Alfonso I. in 750.

2 Lafuente, iii., 74, note

3 It must be remembered that the northern boundary of the modern kingdom of Portugal is the Minho; while that of the old province of Lusitania was the Douro, sixty miles further to the south. But if Lusitania was shorter, it was also broader than modern Portugal; its eastern boundary extended beyond the cities of Salamanca and Avila, and reached almost as far as Segovia.