Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/410

 720–4] Al-Ḥajjāj as governor; and he, practising the harsh tactics he had learned of his master against the converted Berbers, roused an insurrection which, ending in his death, relaxed the bonds of discipline and attachment to the Court.

Spain, as a dependency of Africa, was in an even less satisfactory relation to the Caliphate. Its authority being mediate and intermittent, the governing hand, strong elsewhere, was for this great conquest changeful and often weak; while the leaders, though valiant in the field, were in the civil branch intent chiefly on their own aggrandisement. The Pyrenees had already been crossed by the Amir al-Ḥorr, perhaps under Suleiman, and in the year 100 the Muslim troops, attracted by the weakness of France, which was at the moment torn by internal discord, and by the hatred of the native race to their new masters from the north, made an inroad into its southern provinces. Ravaging the land as far as Nismes, they returned to Spain laden with booty. Tempted by this success, two or three years after, they again crossed the Pyrenees, stormed Narbonne, and garrisoned its fortress as their permanent headquarters. Under Samḥ ibn Mālik, ʿOmar's governor of Spain, they laid siege to Toulouse, but were forced to raise it on the approach of the enemy under Count Eudo, by whom they were put disastrously to flight. The scattered fragments rallied under the banner of the famous ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān ibn ʿAbdallah, and found a safe retreat in Narbonne. But the reverse, bruited far and wide, emboldened the northern Spaniards, who had already in the Asturias thrown off the yoke, to fresh efforts against the Muslims, on whom about this time they inflicted a serious defeat. The mountainous region was a source of strength to them; and there the seeds of a new power were being sown, which in the fulness of time brought Muslim rule to an end in Spain.

In a reign so weak and so unpopular, it is no wonder that intrigue on the part of the ʿAlids, and now also amongst the descendants of Al-ʿAbbās (of whose designs mention is now for the first time made), gained ground