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Anbessa, however, received a fatal wound in one of his engagements, and the Saracens, being thus checked from further advance, retired to Narbonne. In 732 the Saracens again invaded France under Abdalrahman, advanced rapidly to the banks of the Garonne, and laid siege to Bordeaux. The city was taken by assault and delivered up to the soldiery.
Abdalrahman, the first of the great Spanish caliphs of Cordova, was engaged in putting down the rebellious chiefs who had refused to own their allegiance to the new caliphate. The frontier was therefore comparatively unprotected.
The Moslems, who dreamed only of new conquests, made no considerable efforts against Pelagius: they were confident of checking his rebellion with the utmost ease when they should have accomplished the subjugation of the French dominions; and that desire alone fired the ardent soul of the new governor Abdalrahman, or, as he is commonly called, Abderamus.
It may therefore be of some use to borrow the experience of the same Abdalrahman, whose magnificence has perhaps excited our admiration and envy, and to transcribe an authentic memorial which was found in the closet of the deceased caliph. "I have now reigned above fifty years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies.
But the heavy line of the Northern warriors remained like a rock, and the Saracens, during nearly the whole day, expended their strength in vain attempts to make any impression upon them. At length, about four o'clock in the afternoon, when Abdalrahman was preparing for a new and desperate attempt to break the line of the Franks, a terrible clamor was heard in the rear of the Saracens.
Abdalrahman was advancing toward Tours, when intelligence of the approach of Charles, at the head of an army of Franks, compelled him to fall back upon Poitiers, in order to seize an advantageous field of battle.
In the proscription of the Ommiades, a royal youth of the name of Abdalrahman alone escaped the rage of his enemies, who hunted the wandering exile from the banks of the Euphrates to the valleys of Mount Atlas. His presence in the neighborhood of Spain revived the zeal of the white faction.
No man could have been more successful than Goethe possessed of splendid health, honour, power, and sufficiency of this world's goods and yet he confessed that he had not, in the course of his life, enjoyed five weeks of genuine pleasure. So the Caliph Abdalrahman, in surveying his successful reign of fifty years, found that he had enjoyed only fourteen days of pure and genuine happiness.
Abdalrahman III. placed a statue of his favourite mistress over the palace he erected for her abode. Music was ardently cultivated. At first, in the desert, its strains were rude and simple; subsequently, the professors of the art were as much cherished, honoured, and rewarded, as were the poets in the courts of the Arab sovereigns.
After them Almansoor, Hairoun Alraschid, and their successors, who patronised the Nestorian Christians, obtained from them translations of the philosophic, medical, and astronomical Greek works; while the last of the Omniades, Abdalrahman, had introduced the same literary taste into Spain, where, in the thirteenth century, Averroes and Maimonides rivalled the fame of Avicenna, who had flourished at Bagdad a century before.
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