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 484 THE DECLINE AND FALL Prosperity of Spain under the Arabs count Julian was rewarded with the death which he deserved indeed, though not from the hands of the Saracens ; but the tale of their ingratitude to the sons of Witiza is disproved by the most unquestionable evidence. The two royal youths were rein- stated in the private patrimony of their father ; but on the decease of Eba the elder, his daughter was unjustly despoiled of her portion by the violence of her uncle Sigebut. The Gothic maid pleaded her cause before the caliph Hashem, and obtained the restitution of her inheritance ; but she was given in marriage to a noble Arabian, and their two sons, Isaac and Ibrahim, were received in Spain with the consideration that was due to their origin and riches. A province is assimilated to the victorious state by the intro- duction of strangers and the imitative spirit of the natives ; and Spain, which had been successively tinctured with Punic, and Roman, and Gothic blood, imbibed, in a few generations, the name and manners of the Arabs. The first conquerors, and the twenty successive lieutenants of the caliphs, were attended by a numer- ous train of civil and military followers, who preferred a distant fortune to a narrow home ; the private and public interest was promoted by the establishment of faithful colonies ; and the cities of Spain were proud to commemorate the tribe or country of their Eastern progenitors. The victorious though motley bands of Tarik and Musa asserted, by the name o{ Spaniards, their original claim of conquest ; yet they allowed their brethren of Egypt to share their establishments of Murcia and Lisbon. The royal legion of Damascus was planted at Cordova ; that of Emesa at Seville ; that of Kinnisrin or Chalcis at Jaen ; that of Pales- tine at Algezire and Medina Sidonia. The natives of Yemen and Persia were scattered round Toledo and the inland coun- try ; and the fertile seats of Grenada were bestowed on ten thousand horsemen of Syria and Irak, the children of the purest and most noble of the Arabian tribes.^-^ A spirit of the massacre of his kindred ; the latter by the Vizir of the first Abdalrahman, caliph of Spain, who might have conversed with some of the veterans of the conqueror (Bibliot. Arabico-Hispana, torn. ii. p. 36, 139). [The account, in the text, of the punishment and fate of Musa is legendary ; and is refuted by the fact, attested by Biladhuri, that Musa enjoyed the protection of Yezld, the powerful favourite of Sulaiman. See Dozy, Hist, des Musulmans d'Espagne, i. p. 217.] 222 Bibliot. Arab. Hispana, torn. ii. p. 32, 252. The former of these quotations is taken from a Biographia Hispanica, by an Arabian of Valentia (see the copious Extracts of Casiri, torn. ii. p. 30-121); and the latter from a general Chronology of the Caliphs, and of the African and Spanish Dynasties, with a particular History of the Kingdom of Grenada, of which Casiri has given almost an entire version, Bibliot. Arabico-Hispana (torn. ii. p. 177-319). The author Ebn Khateb, a native of