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Updated: June 20, 2025
The rivalry of Ghibelline and Guelf in Germany and Italy, and the rivalry of the houses of Capet and Plantagenet in France, forbade any concerted action on the part of Christendom, whether against pagans on the eastern frontier of Germany or against Mohammedans in Spain or Syria. Hungary and Poland were both in a state of ferment; in Spain the Almohades from Morocco were making serious advances.
To the Almohades, the Merias coming from Sahara in Algeria, but in dying out each of these dynasties left each time a little more ground under the hands of the Christians, who, since the time in Telage, when they were tracked into the caverns of Covadonga, had not ceased, in spite of ill fortune of all sorts, to follow the work of deliverance.
Nevertheless, two kings of the race of the Almohades, both named Joseph, passed the Mediterranean more than once with numerous armies.
He took every advantage in his power of the discord which reigned at the Castilian court, and of the ineffectual voyages undertaken by Alphonso in the hope of being elected emperor. Finally, during the absence of his enemy, Mohammed formed an offensive league with Jacob, the king of Morocco, a prince of the race of the Merines, the conquerors and successors of the Almohades.
The Moorish power reached its height in the tenth century, and gradually declined in the eleventh, when it broke up into petty and short-lived kingdoms. The Almoravides from Africa began their rule in Spain about 1090. This dynasty was overthrown by the Almohades in 1145, and the latter became extinct in Spain in 1257.
At last Mohammed El Nazir, the fourth prince of the dynasty of the Almohades, to whom the Spaniards gave the name of the Green, from the colour of his turban, finding himself in quiet possession of the Moorish empire of Africa, resolved to assemble all his forces, to lead them into Spain, and to renew in that country the ancient conquests of Tarik and Moussa.
The Almohades possessed a large and capacious fleet, in which they transported their armies to Spain, and their successors in North Africa, though less powerful, were generally able to keep up a number of vessels for offensive as well as commercial purposes.
The result would have been to stifle those free manifestations of the literary art under a rigorous piety which was almost always but the thin varnish of hypocrisy. To the Almoravides succeeded the Almohades coming from the Atlas of Morocco.
The reasons why the former did not permanently extend their territories, were their internal dissensions; while Leon was at war with Castile, or Castile with Leon, or either with Aragon, we need not wonder that the united Almoravides, or their successors the Almohades, should sometimes triumph; but those triumphs were sure to be followed by reverses whenever not all, but any one, of the Christian states was at liberty to assail its natural enemy.
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.
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