he had left at important posts in Africa, were also numbered with the dead.

Still, despite the ingratitude and cruelty of the Califas, able generals were found to carry on the war for Islam, until even the Pyrenees were leaped and the Moslem hosts invaded France. It seemed as though all Europe would become subject to the bonds of the Arabs, and soon be brought to acknowledge the "one God and Mohammed his prophet." But in the year 732, twenty-one years after the invasion of Spain, the tide was turned at Tours, when Charles Martel slew thirty thousand Moslems and turned back the remainder, eventually to retreat to the land whence they had come. No other country suited them so well, and here they lived, they and their descendants, from first to last, more than eight hundred years.

WITHIN three years after their first appearance in Spain the Moors had subjected nearly the entire territory, save only a restricted region in the north and west. For about fifty years thereafter they were governed by emirs sent from the califate of Damascus, and the last of some twenty emirs was one Yusef, an Abbasside. To understand the Arab terms which we are now compelled to use in relating this portion of Spain's history, we must transport ourselves once again to the Orient, and glance at the line of califs, or caliphs, successors to Mahomet, or Mohammed, which had carried on his conquests for many years.

The Prophet left no direct heirs, and this led to continual wrangling among the various tribes; even the succession of Abu-bekr, fa

ther of Mohammed's favourite wife Ayeshah, did not settle anything, for at his death the question was reopened. Not right, but might, however, prevailed with the Arabs, and about the year 661 the first calif of the Ommiades seated himself at Damascus. One of this line was in power when Spain was invaded, but about the middle of the eighth century three brothers came forward to dispute his rights. The calif was killed, and eighty Ommiades of influence, invited to a feast at Damascus, were murdered in cold blood. Thus arose the line of Abbassides, so called from alleged descent from Abbas, uncle of Mohammed. Like most of the Arab rulers, the Abbassides signalled their rise to power by deeds of blood, their first effort being toward the entire obliteration of the house of Ommiades. But two of this noble house escaped: one fled to Arabia, where his descendants ruled a while; and the other to Africa, where, among the devoted adherents of his line, the Bedouins and the Berbers, he passed several years under their protection.

It happened that most of the Moslem. chiefs in Spain were also allied to the house of Ommiades, and when they learned that the young Syrian Abderrahman was wandering in Africa a fugitive, with a price upon his head, they earnestly entreated him to come

over and become their ruler.

Yusef, the last

emir of the Abbassides, was routed in battle and sent away, and Spain at last made independent of Eastern influence under a king of her own the first of a line which governed, in the main wisely, for nearly three hundred years.

Prince Abderrahman made the city of Cordova the seat of the Western califate, and under him it became a centre of learning as well as prosperity, rivalling all other cities of the peninsula. Magnificent palaces were built, hospitals and mosques, one of the last named being the glorious mosque of Cordova, its site four acres in extent, renowned throughout the world for its beauty. This was begun by Abderrahman in the year 786, and has lasted to our time, with its unrivalled mosaics, tiles, and arabesques, and its thousand columns of porphyry and alabaster.

Then were begun those vast irrigation works which reclaimed the desert plains of the country and made them flourish with vegetation; the the immense aqueducts, the bridges, towers, and walls of defence. And yet the reign of Abderrahman was by no means a peaceful one, as he had to placate the many different sects and tribes of his own countrymen on the one hand, and the Jews and Christians on the other. In the north

was a turbulent Christian population, ever at war; in the south, a Mohammedan population always quarrelling over the division of spoils, and particularly of the conquered territory.

Toward the last of his reign there appeared in the north a mightier than he—no less than the magnificent Charlemagne, Emperor of the French, who, about the year 778, having been invited thither by a disaffected Arab captain, crossed the Pyrenees and captured several towns. He did not stay long, however, for a rising of the Saxons called him back, after he had taken Saragossa and razed the walls of Pampeluna. Perhaps his brief campaign in Spain might never have been chronicled had it not been for his disastrous rout in the Pyrenean Pass of Roncesvalles, and the death of that hero of early song, the gallant Roland, a semi-mythical figure in history. It was for a long time believed that they were infidel Saracens who attacked and destroyed Charlemagne's rear guard in the Pass of Roncesvalles; but later investigations show them to have been Basques, descendants of the primitive Iberians, who resented this invasion of their territory, even by a grandson of the great Charles Martel, who had beaten back the Moslems in 732 and 737.

Abderrahman died in 788, and was suc