essors. Coming into possession, like the Israelites of
old, "of a land for which they did not labour, of cities which they
built not, of vineyards and olive-yards which they planted not," the
Spaniards not merely contemned, but persecuted with the fiercest
bigotry, all that was left in the peninsula of the genius and learning
of their predecessors. Eighty thousand volumes were publicly burned in
one fatal _auto-da-fe_ at Granada by order of Cardinal Ximenes, in
whom the literature of his own language yet found a munificent patron;
and so meritorious, did the deed appear in the eyes of his
contemporaries, that the number has been magnified to an incredible
amount by his biographers, in their zeal for the renown of their hero!
So complete was the destruction or deportation[4] of the seventy
public libraries, which, a century and a half before the subjugation
of the Moors, were open in different cities of Spain, that the
valuable collection now in the Escurial owes its origin to the
accidental capture, early in the seventeenth century, of three ships
laden with books belonging to Muley Zidan, emperor of Morocco--and
even of this casual prize so little was the value appreciated, that it
was not till more than a hundred years later, and after three-fourths
of the books had been consumed by fire in 1671, that the learned and
diligent Casiri was commissioned to make a catalogue of the remainder.
The result was the well-known _Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana
Escurialensis_, which appeared in 1760-70; and which, in the words of
the present learned translator, "though hasty and superficial, and
containing frequent unaccountable blunders, must, with all its
imperfections, ever be valuable as affording palpable proof of the
literary cultivation of the Spanish Arabs, and as containing the first
glimpses of historical truth." Up to this time the only authority on
Spanish history purporting to be drawn from Mohammedan sources, was
the work of a Morisco named Miguel de Luna, written by command of the
Inquisition; which was first printed at Granada in 1592, and has
passed through many editions. Its value may be estimated from its
placing the Mohammedan conquest of Spain in the time of Yakub
Al-mansor, the actual date of whose reign was from A.D. 1184 to 1199;
insomuch that Senor de Gayangos suggests, as a possible explanation of
its glaring inaccuracies, that it was the writer's intention to hoax
his employers. Casiri had, however, opened th