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ke prince, who had been engaged in more than one successful encounter with the Christians, set on foot an expedition against the territories of Oran and Mazarquivir. The government of these places was intrusted, at that time, to Don Alonzo de Cordova, count of Alcaudete. In this post he had succeeded his father, a gallant soldier, who, five years before, had been slain in battle by this very Hassem, the lord of Algiers. Eight thousand Spaniards had fallen with him on the field, or had been made prisoners of war.[1278] Such were the sad auspices under which the reign of Philip the Second began, in his wars with the Moslems.[1279] Oran, at this time, was garrisoned by seventeen hundred men; and twenty-seven pieces of artillery were mounted on its walls. Its fortifications were in good repair; but it was in no condition to stand a siege by so formidable a force as that which Hassem was mustering in Algiers. The count of Alcaudete, the governor, a soldier worthy of the illustrious stock from which he sprang, lost no time in placing both Oran and Mazarquivir in the best state of defence which his means allowed, and in acquainting Philip with the peril in which he stood. Meanwhile, the Algerine chief was going briskly forward with his preparations. Besides his own vassals, he summoned to his aid the petty princes of the neighboring country; and in a short time he had assembled a host in which Moors, Arabs, and Turks were promiscuously mingled, and which, in the various estimates of the Spaniards, rose from fifty to a hundred thousand men. Little reliance can be placed on the numerical estimates of the Spaniards in their wars with the infidel. The gross exaggeration of the numbers brought by the enemy into the field, and the numbers he was sure to leave there, with the corresponding diminution of their own in both particulars, would seem to infer that, in these religious wars, they thought some miracle was necessary to show that Heaven was on their side, and the greater the miracle the greater the glory. This hyperbolical tone, characteristic of the old Spaniards, and said to have been imported from the East, is particularly visible in the accounts of their struggles with the Spanish Arabs, where large masses were brought into the field on both sides, and where the reports of a battle took indeed the coloring of an Arabian tale. The same taint of exaggeration, though somewhat mitigated, continued to a much later period, a
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