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"Abdurrahman," as Al-Makkari sums up his character, "has been described as the mildest and most enlightened of sovereigns. His meekness, generosity, and love of justice, became proverbial: none of his ancestors surpased him in courage, zeal for religion, and other virtues which constitute an able and beloved monarch.
Al-Makkari devotes an entire chapter to the wonders of this celebrated temple, which was finished A.D. 794, nine years after its commencement, and received additions from almost every successive sovereign of the house of Umeyyah.
Al-Makkari, however, does not fail to inform us, that predictions had been rife from long past ages, which foretold the invasion and conquest of the country by a fierce people from Africa; and potent were the spells and talismans constructed to ward off the danger, "by the Greek kings who reigned in old times."
"Would to God," piously subjoins Al-Makkari, "that the Moslems had then extinguished at once the sparkles of a fire destined to consume their whole dominion in those parts!
Nearly all the tribes of Arabia are enumerated by Al-Makkari as represented in Spain; and the feuds of the two great divisions, the Beni-Modhar or race of Adnan, and the Beni-Kahttan or Arabs of Yemen, gave rise to most of the civil wars which subsequently desolated Andalus. He is called by the Arabic writers Ludherik a name afterwards applied as a general designation to the kings of Castile.
We do not find this division mentioned by the authors cited by Al-Makkari; but it is stated by Condé, and appears to have prevailed as long as the kingdom retained its unity. The six provincial capitals were Saragossa, Toledo, Merida, Valencia, Murcia, and Granada.
Ahmed Al-Makkari, the author or compiler of the present work, derived his surname from a village near Telemsan called Makkarah, where his family had been established since the conquest of Africa by the Arabs.
The work of Al-Makkari, which has been taken as a text-book, is not so much an original history as a collection of extracts, sometimes abridged, and sometimes transcribed in full, from more ancient historians; and frequently giving two or three versions of the same event from different authorities so that, though it can claim but little merit as a composition, it is of extreme value as a repository of fragments of authors in many cases now lost; and further, as the only "uninterrupted narrative of the conquests, wars, and settlements of the Spanish Moslems, from their first invasion of the Peninsula to their final expulsion."
It is principally from Ibn Hayyan that Al-Makkari has copied the details of this marvellous structure, with its "15,000 doors, counting each flap or fold as one," all covered either with plates of iron, or sheets of polished brass; and its 4000 columns, great and small, 140 of which were presented by the Emperor of Constantinople, and 1013, mostly of green and rose-coloured marble, were brought from various parts of Africa.
Such was the depression produced among the Christians by these repeated disasters, that, if we may believe Al-Makkari, "one of Al-mansur's soldiers having left his banner fixed in the earth on a mountain before a Christian town, the garrison dared not come out for several days after the retreat of the Moslem army, not knowing what troops might be behind it."
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