In the north there was developing another and very different power. The descendants of the Visigoth Kings, making common cause with the rough mountaineers, had shared all their hardships and rigors in the mountains of the Asturias. Inured to privation and suffering, entirely unacquainted with luxury or even with the comforts of living, they had grown strong, and in a century after Alfonso I. had emerged from their mountain shelter and removed their court and capital from Oviedo to Leon, where Alfonso III. held sway over a group of barren kingdoms, poor, proud, but with Hidalgos and Dons, who were keeping alive the sacred fires of patriotism and of religion. This was the rough cradle of a Spanish nationality.

They had their own jealousies and fierce conflicts, but all united in a common hatred of the Moor. Though they did not yet dream of driving him out of their land, their brave leaders, Ramiro I. and OrdoÑo I. had been for years steadily defying and tormenting him with the kind of warfare to which they gave its name—guerrilla—meaning "little wars."

While the Great Khalif was consolidating his Moorish kingdom and driving the Christians back into their mountains, the power of that people was being weakened by internal strifes existing between the three adjacent kingdoms—Leon, Castile, and Navarre. The headship of Leon was for years disputed by her ambitious neighbor Castile (so called because of the numerous fortified castles with which it was studded), under the leadership of one Fernando, Count of Castile.

There had been the usual lapse into anarchy and weakness after the Great Khalif's death. Andalusia always needed a master, and this she found in Almanzor, who was Prime Minister to one of the Khalif's feeble descendants. It was a sad day for the struggling kingdom in the north when this all-subduing man took the reins in his own hands, and left his young master to amuse himself in collecting rare manuscripts and making Cordova more beautiful.

This Almanzor, the mightiest of the soldiers of the Crescent since Tarik and Musa, proclaimed a war of faith against the Christians, who were obliged to forget their local dissensions and to try with their combined strength to save their kingdom from extermination. These were the darkest days to which they had yet been subjected. But for the death of Almanzor the ruin of the Christian state would have been complete. A monkish historian thus records this welcome event: "In 1002 died Almanzor, and was buried in hell."

The death of Almanzor was the turning point in the fortunes of the two kingdoms—that of the Moors and of the Christians.

The magnificence and the glory of the kingdom faded like the mist before the morning sun. Never again would Cordova be called the "Bride of Andalusia." Eight years after the death of Almanzor anarchy and ruin reigned in that city. The gentle, studious youth who was Khalif, was dragged with his only child to a dismal vault attached to the great mosque; and here, in darkness and cold and damp, sat the grandson of the first Great Khalif, his child clinging to his breast and begging in vain for food, his wretched father pathetically pleading with his jailers for just a crust of bread, and a candle to relieve the awful darkness.

The brutal Berbers now had their turn. The priceless library, with its six hundred thousand volumes, was in ashes. They were in the "City of the Fairest." Palace after palace was ransacked, and in a few days all that remained of its exquisite treasures of art was a heap of blackened stones (1010). The Christians drew their broken state closer together, and gathered themselves for a more aggressive warfare than any yet undertaken. The time when the Moors were in the throes of civil war was favorable. The three kingdoms of Asturias, Leon, and Castile were in 1073 united into one "kingdom of Castile," under Alfonso VI., who had already made great inroads upon the Moslem territory and laid many cities under tribute. With this event, the name Castilian comes into Spanish history, and from thenceforth that name represents all that is proudest, bravest, and most characteristic of the part of the race which traces a direct lineage from the ancient Visigoth Kings.

Alfonso had not misjudged his opportunity. He had traversed Spain with his army, and bathed in the ocean in sight of the "Pillars of Hercules." His great general Rodrigo Diaz, known as "My Cid, the Challenger," had cut another path all the way to Valencia, where he reigned as a sort of uncrowned king; and he will forever reign as crowned king in the realm of romance and poetry; the perfect embodiment of the knightly idea—the "Challenger," who, in defense of the faith, would stand before great armies and defy them to single combat! Whether "My Cid" ever did such mighty deeds as are ascribed to him, no one knows. But he stands for the highest ideal of his time. He was the "King Arthur" of Spanish history; and so valiantly did he serve the Christian cause that the Moors were driven to a most disastrous step. With the Cid in Valencia, with Alfonso VI. marching a victorious army through the Moslem territory, and with Toledo, the city of the ancient Visigoth Kings, repossessed, it looked as if, after almost four hundred years, the Christians were about to recover their land.

The Moors, thoroughly frightened, realizing how helpless they had grown, resolved upon a desperate measure.

There was, on the opposite African coast, a sect of Berber fanatics, fierce and devout, known as "saints," but which the Moors called Almoravides. Fighting for the faith was their occupation. What more fitting than to use them as a means of driving the infidel Christians out of Moslem territory!

They came, like a cloud of locusts, and settled upon the land. Yusuf, their general, led his men against Alfonso's Castilians October 23, 1086. Near Badajos the attack was made simultaneously in front and rear, crushing them utterly; Alfonso barely escaping with five hundred men. This was only the first of many other crushing defeats; the most disheartening of which was the one in 1099, when the Cid, fighting in alliance with Pedro, King of Aragon, was defeated near Gardia, on the seacoast. Then the great warrior's heart broke, and he died; and we are told he was clothed cap-À-pie in shining armor and placed upright on his good steed Bavieca, his trusty sword in his hand—and so he passed to his burial; his banner borne and guarded by five hundred knights. And we are also told the Moors wonderingly watched his departure with his knights, not suspecting that he was dead.

The object of the Moors in inviting the odious Almoravides had been accomplished; the Christians had been driven out of Andalusia back into their own territory; but their African auxiliaries were too well pleased with their new abode to think of leaving it. One by one the Moorish Princes were subdued by the men whose aid they had invoked, until a dynasty of the Almoravides was fastened upon Spain. To the refined Spanish Arabs contact with these savages from the desert was a terrible scourge, and so far as they were able they withdrew into communities by themselves, leaving these African locusts to devour their substance and dim their glory.

But luxury was not favorable to the invaders. In another generation their martial spirit was gone and they had become only ignorant, sodden voluptuaries; and when the Christians once more renewed their attacks, they failed to repel them as Yusuf had done thirty years before.

There was another fanatical sect, beyond the Atlas range in Africa, which had long been looking for a coming Messiah, whom they called the Mahdi. They were known as the Alhomades. A son of a lamp-lighter in the Mosque of Cordova one day presented himself before the Alhomades, and announced that he was the great Mahdi, who was divinely appointed to lead them, and to bring happiness to all the earth.

The path this Mahdi desired to lead them was first to Morocco, there to subdue the Almoravides in their own land, and thence to Spain. In a short time this entire plan was realized. The Mahdi's successor was Emperor of Morocco, and by the year 1150 included in his dominion was all of Mahommedan Spain! The Spanish Arabs, when they were fighting Alfonso VI. and the "Cid," did not anticipate this disgraceful downfall from people of their own faith. They abhorred these Mahommedan savages, and drew together still closer for a century more in and about their chosen refuge of Granada.

In the early part of the thirteenth century the Emperor of Morocco made such enormous preparations for the occupation of Spain that a larger design upon Europe became manifest. Once more Christendom was alarmed; not since Charles Martel had the danger appeared so great. The Pope proclaimed a Crusade, this time not into Palestine, but Spain.

An army of volunteers from the kingdom of Portugal and from southern France re-enforced the great armies of the Kings of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre. The Crusaders, as they called themselves, assembled at Toledo July 12, 1212, under the command of Alfonso IX., King of Castile. The power of the Alhomades was broken, and they were driven out of Spain. The once great Mahommedan Empire in that country was reduced to the single province of Granada, where the Moors intrenched themselves in their last stronghold. For nearly three centuries the Crescent was yet to wave over the kingdom of Granada; but it was to shine in only the pale light of a waning crescent, until its final extinction in the full light of a Christian day.