Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/416

 3O2 General History of Europe intellectual leadership which it had enjoyed since the revival of interest in Latin and Greek literature the so-called Renaissance, spoken of above (454, 485). 507. Francis I. Francis I, who came to the French throne in 1515, at the age of twenty, is one of the most famous of the French kings. He was gracious and chivalrous in his ideas of conduct, and his proudest title was "the gentleman king." Like his contemporaries Pope Leo X, son of Lorenzo de' Medici, and Henry VIII of England, he helped artists and men of letters and was interested in fine buildings, of which a striking example is shown on the preceding page. II. How SPAIN BECAME A GREAT EUROPEAN POWER 508. Arab Civilization in Spain. The Mohammedan conquest served to make the history of Spain very different from that of the other states of Europe ( 306-307). One of its first and most important results was the conversion of a great part of the inhabitants to Mohammedanism. During the tenth century, which was so dark a period in the rest of Europe, the Arab civilization in Spain reached its highest development and exercised its in- fluence on Christian Europe to the north. Cordova, with its half million of inhabitants, its stately palaces, its university, its three thousand mosques, and its three hundred public baths, was perhaps unrivaled at that period in the whole world. 509. The Rise of New Christian Kingdoms in Spain. But the Christians were destined to reconquer the peninsula. As early as the year 1000 (see map, p. 220) several small Christian king- doms Castile, Aragon, and Navarre had come into existence in the northern part of Spain. Castile, in particular, began to push back the Mohammedans and, in 1085, reconquered Toledo from them. By 1250, the long war of the Christians against the Mohammedans, which fills the medieval annals of Spain, had been so successfully prosecuted that Castile extended to the south coast and included the great towns of Cordova and Seville. The Christian kingdom of Portugal was already as large as it is today.