The Moslem power was now growing weaker under the incompetent Amirs that preceded the great Abdur Rahman an Nasir; and Alfonso III., taking advantage of every opportunity that presented itself, gradually extended and strengthened the Christian dominions in central Spain, and pushed his victorious arms as far south as Lusitania. After an unsuccessful siege of the celebrated border town of Zamora, a truce for three years was agreed upon between Alfonso and the Amir Al Mondhir, and when the fighting was renewed, a Moslem victory at Aybar was balanced by a successful foray of the Christians, who crossed the Guadiana below Merida, and penetrated as far south as the Sierra Morena. A second treaty or truce agreed upon between the king and the Amir in 883, is worthy of notice, if only on the account of the provision that the bodies of the Christian martyr saints Eulogius and Leocricia, should be brought with due respect from Cordova to Oviedo, a condition which was faithfully carried out.

The Christian kingdom of Oviedo by this time comprehended not only the modern province of Gallicia, including a part of the modern kingdom of Portugal as far south as the Douro, with Leon and the Asturias, but a part of what is now Old Castile, as far south as the lines of Zamora, Toro and Simancas. The county of Alava was in alliance with, if not in subjection to, the king at Oviedo, and Count Diego Rodriguez was encouraged and assisted by Alfonso to build the castle, and to found the city, which was afterwards so well known in Spanish history as Burgos, the first town in Castile.

On the frontier, meanwhile, the war went on with ever varying fortune. Zamora was taken and retaken times beyond number. Constant victories were claimed by Christians and by Moslems. But the issue of one particular battle in which the Christians were undoubtedly successful (901)-known as El dia de Zamora-inspired Alfonso with such confidence, that he proceeded to march on Toledo. The expedition was unsuccessful but Alfonso returned with no loss of honour to Oviedo in 902. To harry the infidel was at once the highest Christian duty, and the most profitable political practice of the kings of Leon. But it was not always, even against the infidel, that the Christians were united. For not only was Navarre jealous of Asturias, and Alava impatient of Castile; but intrigues and quarrels were scarcely less common at the sacred city of Oviedo than they were among the Moors and Arabs at Cordova. Alfonso

gained almost as much from the Moslems by judicious treaties as some of his predecessors had done by force of arms; and pre-eminent position that he occupied as a Christian sovereign enabled him to deal, with unusual success, with the ever-ready rebels at home.

Thus he contrived, almost alone of all the Christian sovereigns of the north, to live on good terms, at once with the bishops at Oviedo, and the Caliph at Cordova.1 If he sent his son to be educated at Saragossa under Ismael, he replaced the modest chapel of Alfonso the Chaste at Compostella, by the magnificent temple that was the admiration of Christendom, until it was destroyed by the mercenaries of Almanzor. If he forebore from forays against the Caliph at Cordova, he richly endowed the cathedral and the clergy of Oviedo. At length in 909, this prudent king, wearied out rather by family feuds than by foreign foes, abdicated in favour of his turbulent sons 2 among whom his inheritance was divided. Garcia took the governorship of Leon; Ordoño, of Gallicia and Christian Lusitania; Fruela, of the Asturias; Gonzalvo, a priest, was made bishop or archdean of Oviedo; while Ramiro, a child of tender years, had no part in the division. For himself, Alfonso kept only the city of Zamora, where, after a pious pilgrimage to the tomb of Santiago at Compostella, he died, within twelve months of his abdication, on the 19th of December, 910, after a long and worthy reign. of forty-four years-and was succeeded by his son, Garcia, as first King of Leon.

1"On good terms," that is, after the fashion of the day; which did not exclude a little bit of fighting from time to time.

2 His abdication was the result of a plot fomented by his wife and eldest son, Garcia, aided by Nuño Fernandez, the father-in-law of the latter, Count of Castile.--H.

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CHAPTER XVI.

THE CALIPHATE OF CORDOVA.

(852-1031.)

I.-Abdur Rahman an Nasir.

We have seen with how noble a liberality the Christian worship was tolerated and even encouraged by the early Arab rulers of the Peninsula,1 a liberality that was not to be attained in Christian Spain for 1150 years, and as yet undreamed of by the gentlest of Roman or Gothic Spaniards. Yet the Christian clergy were not content. The laity for the most part accepted the situation, with philosophy if not with satisfaction. They took advantage of the admirable schools provided by the Arabs. They aspired to important positions in the administration. They copied, as well as they could, the luxury of their new masters. But the priests had no love of knowledge; they despised culture, and they alone of the subject population hated the Moslem with a bitter and deadly hatred. Unwilling to accept with gratitude even the toleration of the Unbeliever, they spared no opportunity of reviling the great Prophet under whose benign laws they were permitted to exist.

Perfectus, a priest at Cordova, having publicly insulted the faith and founder of Islam, was condemned, according to the Mohammedan law, to death; and his execution, in the month of Ramadan 852, was the signal for new ecclesiastical insults. Isaac, a fanatical monk, sought and found martyrdom by his extravagant public abuse of Mohammed. Martyrdom became the fashion. In two months, eleven ecclesiastics trod boldly in the footsteps of Perfectus and of Isaac.

1 By the laws of Islam, liberty of conscience and freedom of worship were allowed to all under Moslem dominion. The passage in the Koran, "Let there be no compulsion in religion," testifies to the principle of toleration and charity inculcated by Islam. "What wilt thou force men to believe, when belief can come only from God?"-Syed Amir Ali, Spirit of Islam, p. 303.

Abdur Rahman was infinitely distressed at the progress of this fatal frenzy; and anxious to avoid further bloodshed, he determined to convoke a Christian Council, to stay, if possible, the tide of religious folly. The Council of Cordova, constituted for the most part, like the Councils of the Visigoths, of Christian bishops, assembled under the presidency of Reccafred, Metropolitan of Seville; and Abdur Rahman, who could hardly have attended in person, was formally represented by a Christian Palatine of the name of Gomez, who laid before the assembled prelates the circumstances that had led to their Convocation. Saul, Bishop of Cordova, who undertook the defence of the martyrs, was unable to approve of any further persistence in conduct which amounted to suicide; and the Council formulated a decree in accordance with this prudent opinion. But the fanatics heeded not the monition of the Council; and they denounced their own bishops as freely as they reviled the Prophet of Arabia. The leading spirit in all these religious suicides was Eulogius, an enthusiastic young priest of Cordova, who, in 851, was found to be implicated in the conversion and flight of two young Moslem ladies. These fair proselytes, after the utmost indulgence on the part of the Cadi, persisted in a bold denunciation of the faith which they had abjured, and were condemned to death on the scaffold. Eulogius, unwilling himself to come forward, was not molested by the authorities. But the mania reached its height when, in September, 852, two monks forced their way into the great mosque at Cordova, at a time when it was full of worshippers, and cried aloud, until they were mercifully arrested: "The Kingdom of Heaven is reserved for the Christians; for you miscreants is prepared the fire of Hell!" The ecclesiastical madmen were saved by the Cadi from the fury of the populace, and after a deliberate and regular trial they were executed with many others according to law.

Abdur Rahman died in September, 852, and was succeeded by Mohammed I., a far less liberal sovereign; and Eulogius, who had about the same time been elected Metropolitan Bishop of Toledo, was convicted once more of participation in the flight and conversion of a Moslem lady, who had adopted the name of Leocritia, under which she was afterwards canonised; and he suffered death, together with his proselyte, in 859. But the force of the folly would seem at length to have spent itself; and the death of Eulogius put an end to the voluntary martyrdoms, although under the cruel and narrow-minded Mohammed,

the Christians were far from enjoying that complete toleration that had distinguished the rule of the first and of the second Abdur Rahman.

But if the Christians were less favoured under the new Amir, the Moslems were no whit more contented. For the rule of Mohammed I. was as inglorious as it was illiberal. If the Christians were ill-treated in the south, the Arab possessions were curtailed in the north, and the power of Cordova was everywhere suffered to decline. The rebellion of the Moslem Musa in the central provinces was even more disastrous than the forays of the Christian Ordoño in the north-west; while throughout the south, rival chiefs and rival tribes acquired an authority, independent of, and even hostile to, that of the Amir at Cordova, which reduced the power of the central government to a phantom. A strange and terrible foe moreover added to the general disorder, for the Vikings once more descending upon the coasts from the savage northern seas, plundered the rich and ill-defended provinces of southern Spain

But the revolt of Ibn Merwan, in 875, was, perhaps, the most serious to which the Government of the Amir was at any time exposed. For this Ibn Merwan, a renegade captain of the Guards at Cordova, had fled into Gallicia on some palace affront, and assembling a large band of supporters, he had concluded an alliance with Alfonso III. of Leon, and made vigorous war against his former sovereign. Victorious in an important battle, he took prisoner and held to ransom the Amir's favourite general, Hisham, and he inspired the feeble court of Cordova with such terror of his arms that he was actually permitted to harry entire districts in the south-west of the Peninsula without let or hindrance at the hands of the nominal rulers of the country. Nor did some passing successes of the Amir's forces in the north-east of Spain make up for these serious reverses.

But within as well as without, the condition of the Caliphate was most critical. The old Arab aristocracy, the descendants of the heroes of the conquest, were by this time greatly outnumbered by the other Moslem races in the Peninsula, and established as they were, for the most part, at Seville, they owed a very half-hearted allegiance to the supreme Government at Cordova. The Berbers or Moors-the wild, unculti

My authority for these pages is very largely the second volume of Dozy's, Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne.