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