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The only one recognised before the invention of the telescope was that in the girdle of Andromeda, certainly familiar in the middle of the tenth century to the Persian astronomer Abdurrahman Al-Sûfi; and marked with dots on Spanish and Dutch constellation-charts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
His immediate successors, Al-hakem I., and Abdurrahman II., were almost constantly engaged in warfare, either against their own rebellious relatives and revolted subjects, or against the Christians of Galicia, who, by the middle of the ninth century, had advanced their frontier to the Douro and repeatedly repulsed the armies sent against them from Cordova; but we find no mention in the writers cited by Al-Makkari, either of the annual tribute of a hundred virgins, popularly said to have been exacted by the Moslems, or of the great victory in 846, by which King Ramiro redeemed his country from this degrading badge of vassalage.
The mission found the attitude of Abdurrahman scarcely so satisfactory as had been reported by Surwar, and its members were virtual prisoners, their tents surrounded by sentries.
The uninterrupted hereditary succession for ten generations, and the long average duration of the reign of each monarch, from the arrival in Spain of Abdurrahman I. in 756, to the death or disappearance of Hisham II. in 1009, are without a parallel it any other Moslem dynasty, with the single exception of the Ottoman line; and though, on pursuing the comparison, the Umeyyan princes cannot vie with the last-named race in extent of conquest and splendour of martial achievement, they far surpass not only the Ottomans, but almost every sovereign family in the annals of Islam, in the cultivation of kingly virtues and arts of peace, and the refinement and love of literature, which they introduced and fostered in their dominions.
He and the soldiers and the wazir, Abdullah bin Abdurrahman, rode at some distance to our left, between us and the dangerous Yafei towers. The Goddam or Kadam range, which separates the Wadi Yeramis from the Abyan, is a mass of arid peaks, none reaching to more than 2,000 feet. A road leads from Al Ma'a across the mountains to the sea at Asala.
One of the Muwallad chiefs, named Omar Ibn Hafssun, maintained for years a sort of semi-independence in the Alpuxarras. Al-mundhir fell in a skirmish against him in 888, only two years after his accession; and the insurrection, after continuing through the whole reign of Abdullah, was only finally suppressed under Abdurrahman III.
So precarious was the position of my hero and my heroine, that my first impulse was to stop and buy something, since the man had been called. I made some small purchases, and a conversation began about Abdurrahman, the Russians, she English, and the Frontier Policy. As he was about to leave, he asked: "And where is the little girl, sir?"
And I desire that you yourself attend me at the palace three times a week at least, that I may have the benefit of your conversation and counsel." The blind fisherman, now a rich Emir and a prime favourite with the Caliph, saluted his sovereign and was silent. The Caliph and Abdurrahman.
The pursuers reached the banks when the fugitives were nearly half-way across, Abdurrahman supporting his son, four years of age, and Bedr, a servant, aiding his thirteen-year-old brother. The agents of the caliph called them back, saying that they would not harm them, and the boy, whose strength was giving out, turned back in spite of his brother’s warning.
It was Abdurrahman II. who, in a love quarrel with a beautiful inmate of his harem, caused the door of her chamber to be blocked up with bags of silver coin, to be removed on her relenting "and she threw herself on her knees and kissed his feet; but," naïvely adds the Arab historian, "the money she kept, and no portion of it ever returned to the treasury."
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