carried in triumph to Burgos, the Castilian capital, and was subsequently thrust into the Convent of Sahagun, and forced to assume the cowl. From this confinement the King of Leon escaped by the help of his sister Urraca, Queen of Zamora, and flying to Toledo, he obtained the protection of the powerful Emir, AlMamon, the ancient ally of his father.

The immediate result to Urraca of her favouring of the weaker brother was the siege of her capital Zamora by the offended Sancho--a leaguer as famous in song as it was important in history; for while the ballads recount the romantic prowess of the Cid, the chroniclers join with them in recording an event which led to a complete revolution in the affairs of northern Spain. A Zamoran knight, watching the hostile lines from the battlements of the city, saw King Sancho passing incautiously near to the walls, mounted his horse, set his spear in rest, and charged furiously upon the Castilian King. Sancho received a mortal wound, and the Zamoran knight returned unhurt into the city. The death of their leader disconcerted the besiegers. The siege was raised, and Queen Urraca lost no time in communicating with her favourite brother, and advising him to claim the vacant throne. Alonso, hurrying from the Court of his Saracen host, received at Zamora the renewed allegiance of his former Leonese subjects.

Alonso thus became, by his elder brother's death, King of Leon, of Castile, and-by the seizure of Garcia's kingdom--of Galicia, including, as this latter kingdom did, a large portion of northern Portugal. Almost the whole of his long reign was occupied with war against the Saracens. Dissensions among the Moslem rulers of Spain, quite as much perhaps as

their own warlike capacity, befriended the Christian soldiers and their chief. Toledo, the ancient seat of Visigoth rule, and now a centre of Moslem learning and government, fell into the King's hands, and became the capital of Leon and Castile. But that this ascendency of the Christians was not entirely due to the superiority of their arms, is proved clearly enough by the issue of the great battle of Zalaca, near Badajos. Here Alonso found himself opposed by the famous Almoravidian Emir Yusuf. Contemporary chroniclers, Moorish and Christian, have, no doubt as usual, immensely exaggerated the numbers engaged on each side, but it is certain that the whole fighting power of the Peninsula, Christian and Moslem, met on the field of Zalaca; and, what is significant of the curious state of the country, and is evidence that religion went for little in these early contests between men of the rival faiths, it is related that while bands of Christian knights had engaged themselves on the Emir's side, no less than thirty thousand Moslem troops fought under the banners of the Christian King.

The battle raged all day, and by nightfall the Leonese and Castilian lines had been broken, the rout became complete, and, by the admission even of Christian chroniclers, the slaughter was enormous. Fortune, however, which had befriended King Alonso before, did not wholly desert him now. Tidings from his African home, requiring the immediate presence of Yusuf in Africa, reached the Almoravidian chief in the very hour of his victory. The prosecution of the campaign was left to a lieutenant, and the opportunity of curbing and perhaps of completely crushing the power of the Christians in Spain was for the time lost to the Saracens.

The latter part of King Alonso's reign and life was passed without any further great change of fortune. With the internal affairs of the Leonese monarchy we have now to concern ourselves.

During the long wars of the eleventh century, the Christian Courts and camps of Spain had been attracting all that was adventurous in the chivalry of Europe. At the Court of King Alonso two French knights of the princely house of Burgundy had made their appearance. Count Raymond and Count Henry were first cousins, and both princes quickly obtained the favour of the Leonese King. To Raymond, the eldest, he gave in marriage Urraca, his daughter by Queen Constance; on Count Henry he bestowed another and illegitimate daughter, Tareja, the child of Ximena Nunes, a Spanish lady of noble birth. To Count Raymond he confided the important govern- . ment of Galicia and Portugal, but the hands of the young Burgundian Count were by no means strong enough to retain a firm grasp on this outlying dependency.

In the spring of 1095 Count Raymond marched southward towards the Saracen frontier, gathering to his standard a large army, the flower of the Galician and Portuguese chivalry. He reached the Tagus, and entrenched himself in the peninsula formed by the Atlantic on one side and the broad estuary of the Tagus on the other a spot which has since become memorable in military annals, as being that whereon Wellington formed the famous defensive lines of Torres Vedras.

The troops of Count Raymond, however, found no protection in the triple lines of hills which cross the neck of the peninsula. His troops were suddenly

surrounded, says the Compostellan chronicler, by an immense multitude of Saracen fighting men, Raymond's army was overthrown, and slaughter and captivity were the lot of the Christian warriors.

It was no doubt in consequence of this reverse that Count Henry, the husband of the bastard Tareja, was deemed fitter to hold the outlying province than his cousin; and while Raymond's viceroyalty was, shortly after his defeat, limited to the Galician province, Henry was made governor of the whole of Portugal between the Minho and the Tagus.

During the first years of Count Henry's reign the storms of Saracen conflict were sweeping over southern and eastern Spain; but the new ruler was probably engaged, to judge from the scanty mention of him by the chroniclers, rather in strengthening his own government than in any offensive action against the Moors.

Count Raymond died in 1107, and two years afterwards King Alonso also died, leaving his daughter Urraca, Raymond's widow, then about nineteen years of age, the successor to the crown. She had one son, Alonso Raimundes, a child of three, and with the common testamentary fatuity of absolute sovereigns, the succession to the crown was to devolve upon this infant in case of the re-marriage of Urraca. The young widow lost little time in effecting this contingent reversion in her child's favour, by contracting a marriage with the neighbouring sovereign, Alonso of Aragon, a young prince whose activity in war had already obtained for him the title of El Lidador-The Warrior. With the full consent of the nobles, who expected to find in so warlike a prince a successful leader in their constant warfare with the

Moors, Alonso El Lidador at once assumed the crown of Leon and Castile; but the clergy opposed the marriage on the ground of consanguinity, and the distant province of Galicia, whither Urraca had sent her child, broke into a rebellion, instigated by the hidalgos who composed the household of the infant prince. The revolt continued, notwithstanding the violence and cruelty of the Aragonese King, who is related to have killed with his hunting-spear a noble Galician while Urraca was in the act of interceding for his life. Baffled in his attempts to subdue the rebellion, the King retired to his own dominions.

The period of five years that followed is occupied by the dissensions and intrigues of the principal characters of the age. The brutality of the Aragonese King lost him almost immediately the love and the fidelity of Urraca, and the loyalty of his new subjects. Queen Urraca, possessing the inconstancy and capriciousness of her sex and her age, possessed also the ambition and disloyalty which were characteristic of most of the energetic sovereigns of the time. Her patent amours with a Castilian nobleman were probably the cause of the King's insulting her with a blow before the assembled Court, and imprisoning her at Castellar. The quarrel was appeased for the time by the nobles, but the Queen's treacherous nature, and her desire for further vengeance upon her husband, led her to send a message to the guardians of her child, still in Galicia, and to stir up a fresh revolt in that province.

Count Henry of Portugal had long before entered into a secret alliance with the King of Aragon against Urraca; but at the invitation of the infuriated Queen he readily abandoned the husband, to ally himself to