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
Administration
of Mansur.
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 Mansur (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. Abdurrahman Sanchol. 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
End of the Empire
of Abdurrahman III. 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 Development of the Christian Kingdom. 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 the Great
of Navarre.
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 Ferdinand I.
of Castile, “Emperor of the Spains.”
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 Council of
Coyanza, 1050.
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 Beginning of the Christian Reconquest.
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 Alphonso VI.,
1065–1109.
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
