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HISTORY] conflicts between Leon and Castile, rendered the only formidable Christian kingdom powerless. Even on Hakam's death the power of the caliphate was exercised for some thirty years with great vigour. In his old age, one of his wives Sobh (the Daybreak), a Basque, bore him the first son born in his harem. To this son Hisham II. (976–?) he left the crown. The rule went to the sultana, and her trusted agent Ibn Abi 'Amir Mahommed ben Abdallah—an Arab of noble descent, who in his early life was a scribe, and who rose by making himself useful first to the ministers and to the favourite wife. By them he was promoted, and in time he brought their ruin. By her he was made hajib—lord chamberlain, prime minister, great domestic, alter ego, in short, of the puppet caliph—for Hisham II. in

all his long life was nothing else—and in due time he reduced the sultana to insignificance. The administration of Mahommed ben Abdallah, who took the royal name al-Mansur Billah (“the victorious through God”) and is generally known as (q.v.), is also counted among the glories of the caliphate of Cordova. It was the rule of a strong man who made, and kept under his own control, a janissary army of slaves from all nations, Christian mercenaries from the north, Berbers and negroes from Africa. With that host he made fifty invasions into the Christian territory. A more statesmanlike conqueror leading a people capable of real civilization would have made five, and his work would have lasted. Mansur made raids, and left his enemies in a position to regain all they had lost. It mattered little that he desolated the shrine of St James at Compostella, the monastery of Cardeña in Castile, took Leon, Pamplona and Barcelona, if at the end he left the roots of the Christian states firm in the soil, and to his son and successor as hajib only a mercenary army without patriotism or loyalty. In later times Christian ecclesiastical writers, finding it difficult to justify the unbroken prosperity of the wicked to an age which believed in the judgment of God and trial by combat, invented a final defeat for Mansur at Calatañaxor. He died in 1002 undefeated, but racked by anxiety for the permanence of the prosperity of his house. His son Mozaffar, kept the authority as hajib, always in the name of Hisham II., who was hidden away in a second palace suburb of Cordova, Zahira. But Mozaffar lasted for a short time, and then died, poisoned, as it was said, by his brother Abdurrahman, called Sanchol, the son of Mansur by one of the Christian ladies whom he extorted for his harem from the fears of the Christian princes. Abdurrahman Sanchol was vain and feather-headed. He extorted from the feeble caliph the title of successor, thereby deeply offending the princes of the Omayyad house and the populace of Cordova. He lost his hold on his slaves and mercenaries, whose chiefs had begun to think it would be more to their interest to divide the country among themselves. A palace revolution, headed by Mahommed, of the Omayyad family, who called himself Al Mahdi Billah (guided by God), and a street riot, upset the power of the hajib at Cordova while he was absent on a raid against Castile. His soldiers deserted him, and he was speedily slaughtered. Then in the twinkling of an eye the whole edifice went into ruin. The end of Hisham II. is unknown, and the other princes perished in a frantic scramble for the throne in which they were the puppets of military adventurers. A score of shifting principalities, each ready to help the Christians to destroy the others, took the place of the caliphate.

The fundamental difference between the Moslem, who know only the despot and the Koran, and a Christian people who have the Church, a body of law and a Latin speech, was well seen in the contrast between the end of the greatness of Mansur, and the end of the weakness

of his Christian contemporaries. The first left no trace. The second attained, after much fratricidal strife, to the foundation of a kingdom and of institutions. The interval between the death of Ramiro II. in 950 and the establishment of the kingdom of Castile by Fernando I. in 1037 is on the surface as anarchical as the Mahommedan confusion of any time.

The personages are not anywise heroic, even when like Alphonso V. (999–1027) they were loyal to their duty. Sancho the Fat, and Bermudo II. the Gouty, with their shameless feuds in the presence of the common enemy, and their appeals to the caliph, were miserable enough. But the emancipation of the serfs made progress. Charters began to be given to the towns, and a class of burghers, endowed with rights and armed to defend them, was formed; while the council of the magnates was beginning to develop into a Cortes. The council over which Alphonso V. of Leon and his wife Geloria (i.e. Elvira) presided in 1020, conferred the great model charter of Leon, and passed laws for the whole kingdom. The monarchy became thoroughly hereditary, and one main source of anarchy was closed. By the beginning of the 11th century the leading place among the Christian kings had been taken by Sancho El Mayor (the Great) of Navarre. He was married to a sister of Garcia, the last count of Castile. Garcia was murdered by the sons of Count Vela of Alava whom he had despoiled, and Sancho took possession of Castile, giving the government of it to his son Fernando, (Ferdinand I.), with the title of king, and taking the name of “king of the Spains” for himself. It was the beginning of attempts, which continued to be made till far into the 12th century, to obtain the unity of the Christians by setting up an emperor, or king of "Emperor kings, to whom the lesser crowns should be subject. Fernando was married to a daughter of Alphonso V. of Leon. Her brother Bermudo, the last of his line, could not live in peace with the new king, and lost his life in the battle of Tamaron, in a war which he had himself provoked. Fernando now united all the north-west of Spain into the kingdom of Castile and Leon with Gallicia. Navarre was left by Sancho to another son, Garcia, while the small Christian states of the central Pyrenees, Aragon and Sobrarbe with the Ribagorza went to his other sons, Ramiro Sanchez and Gonzalo. Fernando, as the elder, called himself emperor, and asserted a general superiority over his brothers. That he took his position of king of kings seriously would seem to be proved by the fact that when his brother Garcia attacked him in 1054, and was defeated and slain at Atapuerca, he did not annex Navarre, but left his nephew, Garcia's son, on the throne as vassal. The Council of Coyanza, now Valencia de Don Juan (1050), at which he confirmed the charters of Alphonso V., is a leading date in the constitutional history of Spain. When he had united his kingdom, he took the field against the Mahommedans; and the period of the great reconquest began. So far the Christians had not gone much beyond the limits of the territory left to them at the end of the 8th century. They had only developed and organized within it. Under Fernando, they advanced to the banks of the Tagus in the south, and into Valencia on the south-east. They began to close round Toledo, the shield of Andalusia. The feeble Andalusian princes were terrified into paying tribute, and Fernando advanced to the very gates of Seville without finding an enemy to meet him in the field. His death in 1065 brought about a pause for a time. He left his three kingdoms to his three sons Sancho, Alphonso and Garcia. Alphonso, to whom Leon had fallen as his share, remained master after the murder of Sancho at Zamora, which he was endeavouring to take from his sister, and the imprisonment of Garcia of Gallicia. The reign, of Alphonso VI., which lasted till 1109, is one of the fullest in the annals of Spain. He took up the work of his father, with less of the crusading spirit than was in Fernando, but with conspicuous ability. His marriage with Constance, daughter of Robert, duke of Burgundy, brought a powerful foreign influence into play in Castile. Constance favoured the monks of Cluny, and obtained her husband's favour for them. Under their leadership measures were taken to reform the Church, from which hitherto little influence had been expected save that it should be zealous and martial. The adoption of the Roman instead of the Gothic