201 CHAPTER XIX. AVERROËS. I.-The Almoravides. (1086-1149.) FOR ninety years after the death of Almanzor, Andalus remained without a master. The Cid was the only national champion, Alfonso was the only national sovereign, in the Peninsula. The strong and generous hand of the Arab ruler no longer held together the discordant elements of Moslem Spain. The long reign of the last Abdur Rahman had been one of the most brilliant periods in Spanish, or, indeed, in European history. But the very completeness of the success of the greatest of the western Caliphs had in it the seeds of future dissolution. The strength and the weakness of the political system of Islam was alike made manifest under his government. So beneficial and so enlightened a despot-terrible from his absolute power, admirable from his noble designs, beloved from his personal liberality-could brook no rival near his throne in his lifetime, and could find no successor to carry on his splendid government at his death. An Nasir, moreover, who was rather the maker than the inheritor of the Caliphate, had but little confidence in the loyalty of the old Arab aristocracy, and he preferred, like Louis XI. of France, or Ferdinand of Aragon in later days, to select his agents from among men of humble birth, whose advancement should depend upon his royal favour alone. Thus, at the end of his fifty years of government, he had well-nigh destroyed the power of the old Saracen nobility. No great minister had been permitted to share with the sovereign the burden or the glory of the administration; and the Caliph had been served by irresponsible subordinates, by those Berbers who are usually spoken of as Moors from Africa, by renegades and slaves and foreigners of every nation, Franks, Gallicians, Lombards, Venetians, and even Greeks, who were known by the general name of Slavs. For a commonwealth thus administered, nothing was possible, on the death of the legitimate autocrat, Abdur Rahman, but the upstart autocrat, Almanzor and after Almanzor-anarchy. Twenty independent and hostile dynasties rose upon the ruins of the great Caliphate, and each one of them was vexed by rivals, by rebels and by pretenders." Had the Cid been born thirty years sooner, or had the Christian kings and nobles been less completely occupied in cutting one another's throats, the Arab might have been driven out of southern Spain before William of Normandy marched on London from Hastings. Yet as it was, by the year 1086, the Cid Campeador was at the gates of Valencia; Alfonso ruled in the citadel at Toledo; and the Moslem chiefs or kings of Andalusia, fearing for their common safety, were fain to turn their eyes once more across the Straits of Gibraltar to seek a common defender. Far away in the deserts of Africa, on the slopes of the Atlas Mountains, the defender was found in Yusuf, the bold leader of the Puritan soldiers of Islam, the Berber chief of the terrible Almoravides.3 Invited by Motamid of Seville to assist him in 1 Dozy, Histoire, iii., 58-60; S. Lane-Poole, op. cit., chap. vii. 2 Yet a great deal of the culture of Cordova was found at some of these little courts. C'est un spectacle charmant, says M. Renan (Mélanges, p. 284), celui de ces petites Cours d'Espagne qui succédèrent au démembrement du califat de Cordoue, vraies académies ou présidait une famille patricienne. And according to M. Dozy (Essai, etc., ed. 1879, pp. 357, 358), le morcellement de l'Espagne en béaucoup de petits royaumes aprés la chute des Ommiades fut très favorable à l'étude de la philosophie. La plupart des princes qui se rendirent maîtres des différentes provinces étaient fort avancés dans la civilisation: ils protégeaient les arts et les sciences et ne souffraient point qu'on opprimât la conscience. One of the last of the great pure-blooded Arabs of Spain was Ibn Abbas, the Grand Vizier of the accomplished Zohair of Almeria. At thirty years of age he is said to have accumulated a library of 400,000 MSS. He was killed by some rude and envious Berbers in 1038. See Dozy, Hist., tom. iv., 35. 3 Almoravides, or religious soldiers, is a word of similar origin to Marabout, which signifies, according to Littré (Dict. s.v.), one who is bound to a holy life, as in the Latin religio. From the Arabic root r.b.t., to bind, we have many words of this character, such as Rábit: = a hermitage or a convent; Rebáta monks; Murabit = one bound in a military sense. Thus the dual character of these religious warriors from Africa is fairly conveyed or suggested in the word Almoravides, whose exact meaning and origin appears to have puzzled many commentators and critics. See F. A. Müller, Der Islam im Morgen und Abendland, tom. ii., p. 614. The traditional Arab view of the etymology may be found in the work (Raudhal-Kartás) of the Arab historian, Ibn Abu Zar of Fez. See the edition with Latin translation by C. J. Tornberg (Annales regum Mauritania), Upsala, 1843, p. 107; also the French translation by A. Beaumier (Paris, 1860), p. 171. I am indebted for the reference to my friend, Mr. A. G. Ellis, of the British Museum. his struggle against the Christians, Yusuf crossed over into Spain, and meeting Alfonso VI. at Zalaca near Badajoz, on the 23rd of October, 1086, he routed him with great and historic slaughter. Alfonso escaped with his life, but his army was destroyed; and the victorious Berbers entered and garrisoned Cordova. Yusuf had come as a Moslem defender, but he remained as a Moslem master. And once more in Spanish history, the over-powerful ally turned his victorious arms against those who had welcomed him to their shores. Yet Yusuf was no vulgar traitor. He had sworn to the envoys of the Spanish Moslems that he would return to Africa, in the event of victory, without the annexation to his African empire of a field or a city to the north of the Straits. And his vow was religiously kept. Retiring empty-handed to Mauretania, after the great battle at Zalaca, he returned once more to Spain, unfettered on this new expedition by any vow, and set to work with his usual vigour to make himself master of the Peninsula.2 Tarifa fell in December. The next year saw the capture of Seville, and of all of the principal cities of Andalusia. An army sent by Alfonso VI., under his famous captain, Alvar Fanez, was completely defeated, and all southern Spain lay at the feet of the Berber, save only Valencia, which remained impregnable so long as the Cid lived to direct the defence. In 1102, after the hero's death, Valencia succumbed, and all Spain to the south 3 of the Tagus became a province of the great African empire of the Almoravides. The rule of these hardy bigots was entirely unlike that of the Ommeyad Caliphs of the West. Moslem Spain had no longer even an independent existence. The sovereign resided not at Cordova, but at Morocco. The poets and musicians were banished from court. The beauties of Az Zahra were forgotten. Jews and Christians were alike persecuted. The kingdom was governed with an iron hand. But if the rule of the stranger was not generous, it was just, and for the moment it possessed the crowning merit that it was efficient. The laws were once more respected. The people once more dreamed of wealth and happiness. But it was little more than a dream. 1 Gayangos, vol. ii., lib. iii., chap. vi. 2 Ibid., ii., lib. vii. But see Lafuente, iv., 373, and Stanley Lane-Poole, op. cit., p. 181. 3 And in the north-east as far as Saragossa. Yet Toledo defied their attacks. On the death of Yusuf in 1107, the sceptre passed into the hands of his son Ali, a more sympathetic but a far less powerful ruler. In 1118 the great city of Saragossa, the last bulwark of Islam in the north of the Peninsula, was taken by Alfonso I. of Aragon, who carried his victorious arms into southern Spain, and fulfilled a rash vow by eating a dinner of fresh fish on the coast of Granada. II.-The Almohades. (1149-1235.) Yet it was by no Christian hand that the Empire of the Almoravides was to be overthrown. Mohammed Ibn Abdullah, a lamplighter in the mosque at Cordova, had made his way to remote Bagdad to study at the feet of Abu Hamid Algazali, a celebrated doctor of Moslem law. The strange adventures, so characteristic of his age and nation, by which the lowly student became a religious reformer -a Mahdi—and a conqueror in Africa, and at length overthrew the Almoravides, both to the north and the south of the Straits of Gibraltar, forms a most curious chapter in the history of Islam; but in a brief sketch of the fortunes of medieval Spain, it must suffice to say that having established his religious and military power among the Berber tribes of Africa, Ibn Abdullah,1 the Mahdi, landed at Algeciras in 1145, and possessed himself in less than four years of Malaga, Seville, Granada and Cordova. The Empire of the Almoravides was completely destroyed; and before the close of the year 1149, all Moslem Spain acknowledged the supremacy of the Almohades.2 These more sturdy fanatics were still African rather than Spanish sovereigns. Moslem Spain was administered by a Vali deputed from Morocco; and Cordova, shorn of much of its former splendour, was the occasional abode of a royal visitor from Barbary. For seventy years the Almohades retained their position in Spain. But their rule was not of glory but of decay. One high feat of arms indeed shed a dying lustre on the name of the Berber prince who reigned for fifteen years [1184-1199] under the auspicious title of Almanzor, and his 1 Gayangos, vol. ii., p. 521. = 2 Almohades Unitarians; from Wahid = One, i.e., the people of the One (God). great Moslem victory over Alfonso III. at Alarcon in 1195, revived for the time the drooping fortunes of the Almohades. But their empire was already doomed, decaying, disintegrated, wasting away. And at length the terrible defeat of the Moslem forces by the united armies of the three Christian kings1 at the Navas de Tolosa in 1212, at once the most crushing and the most authentic of all the Christian victories of mediæval Spain, gave a final and deadly blow to the Mohammedan dominion in the Peninsula. Within a few years of that celebrated battle, one province alone was subject to the rule of Islam. And the history of the kingdom of GRANADA, the noble remnant of a yet more noble empire, is all that remains to be written of the glorious and romantic annals of the Moslem in Spain. The Almohades were not actually driven out of the Peninsula until 1235, and then not by the Christians, but by the Moslem rulers of the various cities and districts of southern Spain. From 1235 to 1238 an Arab leader, Ibn Hud by name, maintained a doubtful empire in the Peninsula; but in the latter year he too was driven out, to join the Almohades in their native Africa; and the most important Moslem chief left in Andalusia was Mohammed al Ahmar of Granada. Between 1238 and 1260, Ferdinand III. of Castile, and James I. of Aragon, conquered the cities and districts of Valencia, Murcia, Seville and Cordova, as is more particularly set forth in the history of those Christian kings; and Granada was content to purchase peace and independence at the price of an annual tribute. III.—The Learning of Cordova. (820-1200.) If the annals of the Spanish Almohades are undistinguished by territorial acquisitions, or noble feats of arms, they are illumined by one great name, the last and the most celebrated of the Arab philosophers of the West. From the time of Archimedes to the time of Roger Bacon, full 1500 years, science slumbered in Europe. And if the English friar was, perhaps, the greatest and boldest speculator among the scientific pioneers of the thirteenth century, the names of Raymond Lull in 1 Alfonso of Castile; Sancho of Navarre; and boldest perhaps of all, Peter II. of Aragon. |