There is still one region of Europe at which we have cast no glance for a hundred years. But the fortunes of Spain lie far apart from those of the Frankish empire, and during the ninth and tenth centuries form no part of the general history of Christendom. We have had occasion to mention, however, History of that the Moslem conquerors of the peninsula Spain, 700-918. paid for forty years a wavering allegiance to the Ommeyad caliphs, and were ruled for a time by a series of ephemeral viceroys, most of whom came to violent ends. Of the fate of those of them who ventured to attack the Frankish empire, we have spoken while dealing with the annals of Charles Martel and Pippin the Short.

In 756 Spain became separated from the caliphate of Bagdad. After the massacre of the Ommeyad house by their Abbasside successor, one member of the older family escaped to Spain. The young Abderahman, after long struggles, put down all those who opposed him, and became an independent sovereign. He ruled at Cordova for more than thirty years, and not unprosperously, though he was vexed all through his life by incessant rebellions, such as that of the chiefs who in 778 called in Charles the Great against him, and led the Franks to the gates of Saragossa.

But while Abderahman was ruling in great state at Toledo and Cordova, and winning the admiration of all the Moslem world by his courage, his wisdom, and his magnificence, a little cloud was arising in the west, which was in later days to overshadow all Mohammedan Spain.

After the destruction of the Visigothic kingdom in 711-12, the viceroys of Spain had overrun well-nigh the whole land, and planted it thickly with colonists from Arabia, Syria, and Africa. But they had never completely subdued the extreme north-west of the peninsula. The Cantabrian and Asturian highlands had always been the last refuge of broken tribes. from the first dawn of Spanish history. There the Galaeci and Astures had long withstood the Roman legions: there, in a later age, the Suevi had resisted the Visigoths for more than

a century. And now, in the same rugged hills, the last of the Visigoths took refuge from the advancing Pelagius in Saracen. The annals of this rugged region are

Asturia.

very scanty, but we learn that a certain count Pelagius, a chief with a Roman name, and perhaps, therefore, of native Spanish rather than Gothic blood, maintained himself with success against the Moslems. The narrow rocky tract between the Bay of the Biscay and the Cantabrian mountains presented few attractions to the Saracens, who preferred to settle in the fertile plains of Andalusia and Valencia, and they paid no heed to Pelagius when he drove their scattered garrisons out of the Asturias, and built up for himself a little kingdom in the hills. He is said to have reigned for eighteen years (718-36) over the Asturians. On his death his son Favila and his son-in-law Hildefuns (Aldefonsus, Alfonso) followed him on the throne. The last-named, whose pure Visigothic name recalls that of the sainted archbishop of Toledo, was the founder of the greatness of the new kingdom. Taking advantage of the civil wars of the Saracens, he issued from his hills, and threw himself upon the neighbouring province of Galicia, where a few Berber chiefs held down a discontented population of Christians. The natives rose to aid him, and the Mohammedan settlers were driven out of the land, and chased down into the plains of northern Spain (751).

Alfonso followed the flying foe, and made himself a lodgement on the southern slope of the Cantabrian hills, occupying the towns of Astorga and Leon, and pushing his incursions as far as the north bank of the Douro. He is said to Conquests of have driven the Saracens completely out of the Alfonso I. broad Tierra de Campos, the plain of Leon, and to have left it behind him an uninhabited desert, when he drew back to his fastnesses in the mountains. He laid Oporto, Zamora, and Salamanca in ruins, but was not strong enough to occupy them and add them to his kingdom.

Alfonso died in 757, just at the moment when the peninsula was falling into the hands of Abderahman the Ommeyad. The

kings of Cordova proved more formidable foes to the new Christian state than the old viceroys of Spain had been, and for some generations its growth was comparatively slow. For fifty years the kings of Asturias and Galicia are mere names to us: it would appear that they were often constrained to pay tribute to the Ommeyad princes, and that they found their chief safety in the civil wars with which the Moslems were so continually vexed.

Alfonso II. (791-842) successfully repelled the last Moslem attempt to reconquer Galicia. He appears once in Frankish history as sending ambassadors to Charles the Great, to say that he considered himself the 'man' of the great king, and to offer his homage. But the Franks did not acquire any real suzerainty over Asturias, or come into any contact with its borders. The reign of Charles, however, left its mark on Peninsular history in another quarter: it was he who conquered from the Saracen the 'march of Spain,' which, under its later name of the county of Barcelona, became the second great Christian state beyond the Pyrenees. At first the 'Spanish March' was a dependency of the duchy of Septimania, but ere The County long they were separated, and the count of Barof Barcelona. celona became as free from any active interference on the part of the Frankish kings as were his neighbours, the counts of Aquitaine.

The long reign of Alfonso II. was a period of rapid growth and extension for the kingdom of Asturias. He pushed his arms forward as far as the Tagus, and in one expedition he took and sacked Lisbon. But he drew the line of his garrisons at the Douro, which remained for some time the limit of the occupation of the Asturians. They were engaged for a whole generation in repeopling the deserted plains of Leon, which had long been a waste march between the Christian and the Moslem.

Another Alfonso, third of the name, who ascended the throne in 866, was the next prince who pushed forward the Asturian border. To the kingdom that he inherited he added

Old Castille, northern Portugal, and the land beyond the Douro, the extrema Durii, which keeps its name of Estremadura till this day. Mohammed king of Cordova could make no head against him, for a rising under a chief named Successes of Omar-ben-Hafs had torn his northern dominions Alfonso III. from his grasp, and while endeavouring to subdue the rebel, he had to leave the king of Asturias to press forward unopposed.

In Alfonso's time the county of Castille and the kingdom of Navarre took their rise. The former was a border march against the Moor, intrusted by the king to the bravest of his vassals. The latter was founded by a Gascon count Sancho, who though a vassal of the Frankish crown made conquests on his own account beyond the Pyrenees, and obtained the aid of the king of Asturias by doing him homage.

Alfonso strengthened his realm by building the great frontier fortresses of Zamora, Simancas, and Osma, to protect his new acquisitions from the raids of the Moslems. In 910 his son Garcia removed his residence from the Asturian town of Oviedo to Leon, south of the hills, as if to mark the advance of his borders into the plains of northern Spain.

The progress of the Christians southward and eastward was never to be checked, though it was often delayed for a space when strong rulers sat on the throne of Cordova. Three centuries before, it was the Goths who had been a turbulent unruly aristocracy, ruling a nation of serfs, and the Saracen had swept their monarchy off the face of the earth in two years. Now the Moslem had become even as his Gothic prede- The Spanish cessor, luxurious, proud, untrue to his king, a Moors. hard master to the peasantry who paid him toll and tribute. Religious persecution was not rare, and Andalusia could count many martyrs; the accusation of having blasphemed the name of Mohammed always stirred the Moslem crowd to sudden cruelty, and victims of all ages and conditions, from an archbishop of Toledo down to obscure monks and trades folk, suffered on that charge. While the conquerors were losing their

ancient strength, the new Christian kingdom in the north-west was breeding an iron-handed race of men in its rugged mountains, a race whose life was one constant crusade against the Infidel. They had lost in their common danger all memory of the ancient grudges that separated Visigoth and Roman,1 and had become a perfectly homogeneous people, welded completely together by the day of adversity. The stubborn Spanish nation, poor, proud, warlike, and fanatically orthodox, was the natural product of the time when Christianity and freedom could only be preserved by accepting exile in the Cantabrian hills, and a life of constant struggle against the Saracen. The Mohammedan aristocracy, cultured, wealthy, luxurious, turbulent, and selfish, could not in the end resist such enemies. Though brave and numerous, they were divided by countless local, family and national feuds-the Arab hated the Syrian and the Berber, while all three despised the Spanish-born Moslem. Their monarch at Cordova only existed by playing off one faction against another, and was often deprived for whole years of his control over an important town or province.

It is small wonder then that the Asturian kingdom waxed, while the caliphate of Cordova waned. Perhaps we ought rather to marvel that the Moslems ruled in Spain so long and with so much splendour, in spite of all their feuds and civil wars. It is strange that in the midst of so much turbulent disorder they should have been able to found a very flourishing literature, and to leave their mark on the face of the land in the shape of such triumphs of architecture as the great Mosque of Cordova, or the Alcazar of Seville. Certainly the Saracen was seen at his best in Spain; in the other lands that he conquered, decay and decline came on him much more rapidly. The Abbassides of Bagdad had sunk into decrepitude some

1 It is noteworthy to mark how Roman and Gothic names are found side by side in the lists of kings of Asturias. Roman names like Pelagius, Aurelius, Mauricatus, alternate with Gothic names like Hildefuns (Alfonso), Beremud (Bermudo), and Favila.