But it was in the midst of this desolating contest, and at a period, too, when the Christians were hardly less distracted by divisions among themselves than worn out and exasperated by the common warfare against the common enemy, that the elements of the Spanish language and poetry, as they have substantially existed ever since, were first developed. For it is precisely between the capture of Saragossa, which insured to the Christians the possession of all the eastern part of Spain, and their great victory on the plains of Tolosa, which so broke the power of the Moors, that they never afterwards recovered the full measure of their former strength,[4]--it is precisely in this century of confusion and violence, when the Christian population of the country may be said, with the old chronicle, to have been kept constantly in battle array, that we hear the first notes of their wild, national poetry, which come to us mingled with their war-shouts, and breathing the very spirit of their victories.[5] [4] Speaking of this decisive battle, and following, as he always does, only Arabic authorities, Conde says, “This fearful rout happened on Monday, the fifteenth day of the month Safer, in the year 609 [A. D. 1212]; and with it fell the power of the Moslems in Spain, for nothing turned out well with them after it.” (Historia de la Dominacion de los Árabes en España, Madrid, 1820, 4to, Tom. II. p. 425.) Gayangos, in his more learned and yet more entirely Arabic “Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain,” (London, 1843, 4to, Vol. II. p. 323,) gives a similar account. The purely Spanish historians, of course, state the matter still more strongly;--Mariana, for instance, looking upon the result of the battle as quite superhuman. Historia General de España, 14a impresion, Madrid, 1780, fol., Lib. XI. c. 24. [5] “And in that time,” we are told in the old “Crónica General de España,” (Zamora, 1541, fol., f. 275,) “was the war of the Moors very grievous; so that the kings, and counts, and nobles, and all the knights that took pride in arms, stabled their horses in the rooms where they slept with their wives; to the end that, when they heard the war-cry, they might find their horses and arms at hand, and mount instantly at its summons.” “A hard and rude training,” says Martinez de la Rosa, in his graceful romance of “Isabel de Solís,” recollecting, I suspect, this very passage,--“a hard and rude training, the prelude to so many glories and to the conquest of the world, when our forefathers, weighed down with harness, and their swords always in hand, slept at ease no single night for eight centuries.” Doña Isabel de Solís, Reyna de Granada, Novela Histórica, Madrid, 1839, 8vo, Parte II. c. 15. CHAPTER II.