As far as the vanquished were concerned, we have seen that the conquest of Andalusia by the Arabs was on the whole a benefit. It did away with the overgrown estates of the great nobles and churchmen, and converted them into small proprietorships; it removed the heavy burdens of the middle classes, and restricted the taxation to the test-tax per poll levied on unbelievers, and the land-tax levied equally on Moslem and Christian; and it induced a widespread emancipation of the slaves, and a radical improvement in the condition of the unemancipated, who now became almost independent farmers in the service of their non-agricultural Mohammedan masters.
It was otherwise with the victors. There is no greater mistake than to imagine that the Arabs, who spread with such astonishing rapidity over half the civilized world, were in any real sense a united people. So far was this from being the truth, that it demanded all Mohammed's diplomatic skill, and all his marvellous personal prestige, to keep up a semblance of unity even while he was alive. The Arabs were made up of a number of hostile tribes or clans, many of whom had been engaged in deadly blood-feuds for several generations, and all of whom were moved by a spirit of tribal jealousy which was never entirely extinguished. Had the newly-founded Mohammedan State been restrained within the borders of Arabia, there can be no doubt that it would speedily have collapsed in the rivalry of the several clans; as it was, the death of the Prophet was followed by a general rising of the tribes. Islam became a permanent and world-wide religion only when it clothed itself with armour and became a church militant. The career of conquest saved the faith. The Arabs laid aside for awhile their internecine jealousies, to join together in a grand chase for booty. There was of course a strong fanatical element in the enthusiasm of conquest. They fought partly because they were contending with the enemies of God and His Prophet, because a martyr's Benjamin's cup of happiness awaited those who fell in "the path of God," as they termed the religious war; but there is no denying that the riches of Cæsars and Chosroes, the fertile lands and prosperous cities of the neighbouring kingdoms, formed a very large element in the Moslems' zeal for the spread of the faith.
As soon as the career of conquest was exchanged for the quiet of settled possession, the various jealousies and dissensions which the tumult and profits of invasion had kept to some degree in abeyance broke forth into dangerous activity. The party spirit of the Arab tribes extended to all parts of the vast empire they had subdued, and influenced even the Khalif at Damascus; the nomination of the governors of the most distant provinces was actuated by mere factious motives. In Spain, where the "Emīr of Andalus," as he was styled, was appointed either by the Governor of Africa or by the Khalif of Damascus himself, these party differences worked havoc with the peace and order of the kingdom during the first fifty years of Moorish rule. Governors were appointed, deposed, or murdered, in deference to the mandates of some faction, who resented the government being entrusted to a man of the Medīna faction, or would not have a clansman of Kays, or objected to the nomination of a member of the Yemen party; and, throughout the history of the domination of the Moors in Spain, these baleful influences continued to work injury to the State.8
In Andalusia, moreover, there was another and very important party to be reckoned with, besides the various Arab factions. The conquest of the peninsula had been effected almost entirely by Tārik and his Berbers, and these Berbers (who are the Moors proper, though the word is conveniently employed to denote the mixture of Arabs and Berbers) formed a leading factor in the new state of things. They were not an effete nation like the Romanized Spaniards; but a people full of life and martial energy. In their mountain fastnesses, and ranging the plains from Egypt to the Atlantic, in their numerous and widely distinguished clans, the Berbers had offered to the Arabs a much more formidable resistance than the trained soldiers of Persia or Rome. In many ways they resembled their invaders: they were clansmen like the Arabs; their political ideas were democratic like theirs, with the same reverence for noble families, which took away the dangerous qualities of pure democracy among an ignorant people. Their very manner of warfare was almost Arab. For seventy years the two races of nomads fought together, and when at last the Arabs obtained the upper hand, it was rather by the acquiescence of their foes than by any distinct submission. The Berbers permitted the Arab governor to hold his court near the coast, but insisted on preserving their own tribal government among themselves, and demanded to be treated as brothers, not as servants, by their antagonists. This fraternal system worked fairly well for a time. The Berbers, always a marvellously credulous people, were quick to accept any new faith, and embraced Islam with a fervour far exceeding anything the more sceptical mind of the Arab could evoke. Very soon Barbary became the hotbed of religious nonconformity; the arid doctrines of Islam were supplemented by those more mystical and emotional elements which imaginative minds soon engraft upon any creed soever; and the Mohammedan dissenter, expelled from the more rigid regions of orthodoxy, found a singularly productive soil for his doctrines in the simple minds of the Berbers. The same susceptibility to religious emotion, which had produced so general a conversion that the conquest of Spain was effected by a Berber general and twelve thousand Berber troops, soon led to further movements. The Marabout—saint, missionary, or priest—came to exercise a more potent influence over this credulous people than tribal chief or Arab governor could ever acquire. It needed but a few mock miracles to bring a host of gaping devotees about the shrine of the marabout, and so clearly had an Arab general realized this condition of popularity that, when he perceived the influence which a priestess exercised over the people by her jugglery, the subtle Moslem set to work in the same manner, and soon became an adept at legerdemain or whatever corresponded to spirit-rapping in those days, with the very best results. But a people so easily influenced by such means, a priest-ridden nation, is always liable to sudden and violent revolutions, which its priests can stimulate by a single word. The marabouts among the Berbers were responsible for most of the later changes that took place in North Africa: they set up the Fatimites, sent the Almoravides victorious through Barbary and Spain, and then put them down by the Almohades. They began very early to work against the Arab governors, and when one of these had indulged his passion for luxury at the expense of a cruel oppression of his subjects, the priests set the Berbers in revolt, and in a moment the whole of the western half of the Mediterranean coast was up in arms, and the Arabs were terribly defeated. Thirty thousand fresh troops were sent from Syria to recover the provinces, but these, joined to the Arabs that still remained in Africa, were repulsed with great slaughter, and the remnant were cooped up in Ceuta, where they daily awaited famine and massacre.
The Berbers in Andalusia, always in intimate touch with their kinsmen over the water, were quick to feel the influence of such a revolution as was then (741) going forward in Africa. They had cause to grudge the Arabs their lion's share of the spoils of Spain, which had been the trophies of the Berbers' bow and spear. While the Arabs, who had only arrived in time to reap the advantages of the conquest, had appropriated all the most smiling provinces of the peninsula, the Berbers found themselves relegated to the most unlovely parts, to the dusty plains of Estremadura, or to the icy mountains of Leon, where they had to contend with a climate which severely tried natures brought up in African heats, and where, too, they had the doubtful privilege of forming a buffer between their Arab allies and the Christians of the North. Already there had been signs of disaffection. One of Tārik's Berber generals, Monousa, who had married a daughter of Eudes, Duke of Aquitaine, raised the standard of revolt when he heard of the oppression of his countrymen in Africa; and now, when the Berber cause was triumphant across the Straits, a general rising took place among the northern provinces; the Berbers of the borders, of Galicia, of Merida, Coria, and all the region round about, took up arms, and began to march south upon Toledo, Cordova, and Algeciras, whence they intended to take ship and go to join their compatriots in Barbary.
The situation was full of peril, and the Arab Emīr of Andalusia, Abd-el-Melik, who had sternly refused to lend any assistance to the Syrian Arabs shut up in Ceuta, now found himself in this dilemma, that either he must submit to his