helpless in their confined situation, with enemies swarming on every side and the air darkened with clouds of missiles, their army was soon annihilated. The situation, which forbade alike successful defence or orderly retreat; the bewildering sensations produced by the unexpected apparition of myriads of ferocious warriors; the repeated charges which by sheer force of numbers overpowered at once the foremost ranks of the Aragonese; the countless stones and arrows which poured down from crag and hillside, soon decided the bloody and unequal contest. Scarcely an hour elapsed before the Christians succumbed to the superior numbers and equal valor of their foes. One after another the bravest knights of Aragon, together with the flower of the French and English chivalry, whom crusading ambition and the love of adventure had allured to the standard of Alfonso, were killed while protecting their king and their commanders. With them were not a few of the highest dignitaries of the church, who, exchanging the mitre for the helmet and the crosier for the sword, had been accustomed, since the Visigothic domination, to share the fortunes of the most arduous campaigns, and to unite in the field and in the camp the duties of their peaceful profession with the stern and merciless demands of war. These martial prelates nobly sustained upon this occasion the reputation for courage which had for centuries distinguished their order above that of any other country in Europe. The bishops of Rosas, of Jaca, and of Urgel fell side by side, sword in hand. The King, supported by fifty devoted followers, resisted with desperate courage and hopeless firmness the assaults of the Moslems, exasperated by the valor of a handful of determined men. His fate, like that of Roderick the Goth, is unknown. The ecclesiastical legends of the time have celebrated, as the most glorious events of his life, his abandonment of the throne and his retirement to the cloisters of a monastery in expiation of the sins for which his defeat was assumed to be a token of divine displeasure. But the monkish annals of the Middle Ages are notoriously unreliable; the minds of their authors were clouded with ignorance and warped by prejudice; the critical faculty, so indispensable to the correctness of historical narration, was unfamiliar to them; and, to accomplish the degradation of an enemy or the exaltation of a friend, they were capable of the most disreputable inventions and the most extravagant perversions of the truth.