AFRICAN RULE IN SPAIN 6i pearls in a necklace united by the thread." The break-up of their empire was as the cutting of the string. As the Ommeyades are the objects of his panegyric, so the Africans are of his disdain. Yusuf Tachefin, the founder of the Almoravides, owed his fame, he says, wholly to Al Mutammed, King of Seville. ''Otherwise, I ask you, would he have been known, ignorant and rude Bedowi as he was ? " Among the limitations of Yusuf it is recounted that on various occasions he jeered at the poets and their fine metaphors, declaring that he understood nothing of their writings except that the writers wanted bread 1 But Ash-shakandi proceeds: ''Since Africa dares to dispute the superiority in the sciences, can you produce such men as these ? " He then gives a list of scholars eminent in the ranks of science, philosophy, and literature, which is now valuable for the service it renders in rescuing the names of great men from oblivion and preserving a record of their works. This list contains geometers, philosophers, theologians, historians, men distinguished in philology, literature, geography, medicine, and all the natural sciences, also grammarians, musicians, poets, and orators. Ashshakandi also distinguishes the scholar kings of the lesser courts of Spain, men who could still devote their minds with ardour to the study of science in the midst of all the tumult of civil war.

He proceeds to the description of Spain itself, its principal towns and monuments. Much that was said of Cordova in a previous chapter was taken from this epistle Though himself a native of Cordova, he says of Seville, where the later court of the Almoravides and Almohades was fixed, that it was one of the finest cities of Spain, and praises at great length its magnificent buildings, — especially the famous mosque — its good streets, its spacious dwellinghouses, — of which the courtyards were planted with orange, citron, lemon, and other fruit-trees — and its generally excellent arrangements. The river at Seville was navigable for large vessels, and was always filled with pleasure boats kept by the inhabitants of the town, "who were