The Cid’s ‘luck’, or perhaps it would be truer to say his admirable discretion, carried him triumphantly through many campaigns--at times reconciled with the Christian king and fighting under his banner, at others laying waste his lands as a Moorish ally. At length he reached the summit of his fortunes and carved himself a principality out of the Moorish province of Valencia; and as ruler of this state made little pretence of being any one’s vassal, but boasted that he, a Rodrigo, would free Andalusia as another Rodrigo had let her fall into bondage. This kingly achievement was denied him, for even heroes fail; so that a time came when he fell ill, and the Moors invaded his land, and because he could no longer fight against them he turned his face to the wall and died. Yet his last victory was still to come; for his followers, who had served him so faithfully, embalmed his body, and they set him on his war-horse and bound ‘Tizona’ in his hand, and so they led him out of the city against his foes. Instead of weeping and lamentations the Cid’s widow had ordered the church bells to be rung and war trumpets to be blown so that the Moors did not know their great enemy was dead; but imagining that he charged amongst them, terrible in his wrath as of old, they broke and fled. In spite of this victory Valencia fell back under the rule of the Moors, but she never forgot ‘Ruy Diaz’, and is proud to this day to be called ‘Valencia of the Cid’. The second period of the reconquest of Spain by the Christians may be called the crusading period, and continued until the fall of Granada in 1492. It began not at any fixed date, but in the gradual realization by the Christian states during the twelfth century that their war with the Moors was something quite distinct and ever so much more important than their almost fraternal feuds with one another. This dawning conviction was intensified into a faith, when the Moorish kingdom, that, owing to the feebleness and corruption of its government, had almost ceased to be a kingdom and split up into a number of warring states, was towards the end of the twelfth century overrun and temporarily welded together by a fierce Berber tribe from North Africa, the Almohades. The Almohades, like earlier followers of Mahomet, were definitely hostile to both Christians and Jews, and so the feeling of religious bitterness grew; and the war that at first was a series of victories for the infidel developed its character of a crusade.