Spain

Development of the Christian Kingdoms.—The funda mental difference between the Muslim, 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 be tween 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, of ter much fratricidal strife, to the f ounda tion of a kingdom and of institutions. The interval between the death of Ramiro II. in 95o and the establishment of the kingdom of Castile by Fernando I. in 1037 is on the surface as anarchical as the Mohammedan 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 tortes. The coun cil 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 be came 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 Fer nando (Ferdinand I.), with the title of king, and taking the name of "king of the Spains" for himself. 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 Galicia. 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 supe riority over his brothers. When he had united his kingdom, he took the field against the Mohammedans; and the period of the great, reconquest began.

Beginning of the Christian Reconquest.—The Christians 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 reached 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 Galicia. The reign of Alphonso VI., which lasted till 1109, is one of the fullest in the annals of Spain. His marriage with Constance, daughter of Robert, duke of Burgundy, brought a powerful foreign influ ence into play in Castile. Constance favoured the monks of Cluny, and obtained her husband's favour for them. Under their leader ship measures were taken to reform the Church. Castile ceased to be an isolated kingdom, and became an advance guard of Europe in not the least_ vital part of the crusades. Alphonso, who during his exile owed some good services to the Moham medan king of Toledo, spared that city while his friend lived.

In 1082 he swept all through the valley of the Guadalquivir to Tarifa, where he rode his horse into the sea and claimed possession of the "last land in Spain." In 1086, his friend being dead, he made himself master of Toledo. The fall of the city resounded throughout Islam, and the Mohammedan princes of Andalusia began to look to Africa, where Yusuf ben Techufin was ruling the newly founded empire of the Almoravides. Al-Motamid, amir of Seville, a brilliant cavalier, an accomplished Arab poet, and one of the most amiably spendthrift of princes, thought it better to lead camels in Africa than to tend pigs in Castile. Yusuf came, and in 1086 inflicted a terrible defeat on Alphonso VI. at Zalaca near Badajoz. The immediate results of the stricken field were, however, but small. Yusuf was called back to Africa, and in his absence the Christians resumed the advance. When he returned he was chiefly employed in suppressing the Mohammedan princes. Alphonso was compelled to withdraw a garrison he had placed in Murcia, and Valencia was, by his decision, given up by the widow of the Cid (q.v.). But he kept his hold on Toledo, and though his last days were darkened by the death of his only son in the lost battle of Ucles (1108), he died in 1109 with the security that his work would last.

The Almoravides.

The Almoravides, who were Berbers and were largely mingled with pure negroes, added to corruption a dull bigotry and a hatred of thought and knowledge from which the Arab, anarchical and politically incapable as he was, was free. In Aragon the successors of Ramiro Sanchez had begun to press close on Saragossa when the Almoravide invasion took place. The battle of Zalaca gave pause to the Aragonese, as it did for a short space to the Castilians. The interval of advance in the re conquest would have been shorter than it was but for the results of a most unfortunate attempt on the part of Alphonso VI. to unite the Crowns of Aragon and Castile by the marriage of Al phonso I. (1104-34) of Aragon with his daughter Urraca. Urraca (the name is a form of Maria) was dissolute and Alphonso was arbitrary. They came to open war, in which he claimed to be king of Castile by right of his marriage and his election by the nobles. The confusion was increased by the fact that Alphonso, Urraca's son by her first marriage with Raymond of Burgundy, was recog nized as king in Galicia, was bred up there by the able bishop Diego Gelmirez, and took an active part in the feuds of his mother and stepfather. The death of Urraca in 1126 allowed her son to reunite the dominions of his grandfather. In the meantime his quarrels with Urraca had not deterred Alphonso, who is surnamed the Battler in Aragonese history, from taking Saragossa in 1118, and from defeating the Almoravides at the decisive battle of Cutanda in 1120. In 1125 he carried out a great raid through Mohammedan Spain, camping in its midst for months, and return ing with many thousands of the Christian rayahs, who, under the name of Mozarabes, had hitherto continued to live under Muslim rule. After his death his brother, Ramiro, having been first ex claustrated by the pope, married Agnes of Aquitaine, and on the birth of his daughter Petronilla affianced her to Ramon Berenguer (Raymond Berenger), count of Barcelona, and then retired to his cell at Narbonne. This marriage united Aragon and Catalonia for ever, and marks a great step forward in the constitution of a national unity in Spain. Navarre, indeed, which had been united with Aragon since the fratricidal murder of its king Sancho in 1076, preferred to remain independent under a new ruler of its choice. It was henceforth a small State lying across the Pyrenees, dependent on France, and doomed inevitably to be partitioned between its great neighbours to north and south.