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Gonzalo himself, and apparently a son of his, followed Ferdinand III in the great campaign of 1236-48 that gave Cordova and Seville to Christian Spain and penned up the Moors in the kingdom of Granada, and his descendants intermarried with some of the noblest families of the Peninsula and numbered among them soldiers, magistrates, and Church dignitaries, including at least two cardinal-archbishops.
Sitting on the stone bench, which surrounds the outside walls of the mosque, were little groups of hale and hearty men, playing cards and smoking; while others, stretched at full length upon the ground, slept just where the dancing sunlight pierced the leaves and branches of the trees and mottled their faces with its shimmering rays. Idleness is the general business of Cordova.
Owing to the defiant attitude and desperate courage of the people, every one of these movements was unsuccessful, each failing in its own special purpose. Cordova was captured, but it had almost instantly to be abandoned. At once Napoleon changed his carefully studied but futile strategy, and determined to concentrate the scattered columns on the critical point, wherever it might be.
Cordova, the capital of the western caliphate, became also a great centre of learning and produced several great physicians. Among Avenzoar's discoveries was that of the cause of "itch" a little parasite, "so small that he is hardly visible."
"As to starving," laughed Alzura, "I would as soon starve here as elsewhere. I'm getting used to it." "And I don't know," remarked Cordova, "that forcing a fight will be so very brilliant for us. We have had one sample to-day." "Oh, go to sleep! You might be a raven as far as croaking's concerned. One would think we were in a hole and couldn't get out.
Where in his introductory chapters or elsewhere he ventures beyond his strict province, his writing is that of a half-educated man who has lost simplicity without acquiring skill. Among the innumerable rhetoricians of this age one only requires formal notice, Lucius Annaeus Seneca of Cordova, the father of the famous philosopher, and the grandfather of the poet Lucan.
But in Spain the racial antipathies of Moors and Christians were always aggravated by religious zeal. Several times it seemed as though Spanish Christianity was in danger of complete extinction. In the tenth century two great rulers of Cordova, Abderrahman III and Al Mansur, drove back the Castilians to the northern mountains and raided the inmost recesses of the Christian territories.
"The Mequinez family lives here, does it not?" demanded the lad anxiously. "They did live here," replied the young lady, pronouncing her Italian in Spanish fashion. "Now we, the Zeballos, live here." "And where have the Mequinez gone?" asked Marco, his heart palpitating. "They have gone to Cordova." "Cordova!" exclaimed Marco. "Where is Cordova? And the person whom they had in their service?
And it was destined to descend lower still when the fanatical hordes of the Almohades renewed the ancient motto of the early Mohammedan conquerors, "The Koran or the Sword." Maimonides was barely thirteen when his native city fell into the hands of the zealots from Morocco, and henceforth neither Jew nor Christian dared avow his faith openly in Cordova.
Thus meditating, he fell asleep again, and dreamed that he was in Cordova, and it was night, and that he heard cries from all the doors and all the windows: "She is not here! She is not here! She is not here!"
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