On more than one occasion a sovereign, the moral effect of whose capture would have been almost equivalent to a great victory, was suffered to escape from the very hands of the enemy. In a few weeks a force which had been apparently destroyed confronted the victor as defiantly as ever. The defenceless condition of the Moslem states had been thoroughly established. Their territory had been penetrated in every direction by squadrons of Christian cavalry, whose numbers, when compared with the inhabitants of the provinces they despoiled, were insignificant. The invaders dispersed with ease large bodies of the effeminate Andalusian horsemen. They encamped with impunity in the vicinity of populous cities. But these expeditions accomplished but little more than the destruction of a few harvests and the burning of a few villages. The campaigns on both sides were ordinarily distinguished by fraternal discord, military incapacity, and fatal indecision. The correctness of these observations may be established by recurring to the consequences of the battle of Fraga. The rout of the Christians and the death of their king would certainly seem to have demanded a vigorous prosecution of hostilities by the victors before the popular demoralization resulting from such a catastrophe subsided. But nothing of the kind took place. The few survivors of the defeat which had wrecked the hopes of a nation spread dismay through the realms of the Christians. In Aragon, part of whose territory had recently been ceded by a degenerate prince to his hereditary enemies, and none of which was in sympathy with the usurpation of their detested masters, the people expected, with eager but fallacious hopes, the appearance of the deliverer. The merchants lounged idly in their shops. The peasantry, with sullen patience, submitted to the extortions of the Jewish farmers of the revenue. Saragossa was still, in all but name and government, a Moslem city. The muezzin still announced from her minarets the hour of prayer. The imam still read the Koran from the pulpits of her mosques. Her occupation by the Aragonese had only served to intensify the hatred entertained by her citizens against those who had profited by their betrayal. The noble recalled with mingled sorrow and exultation the military fame and intellectual pursuits of the royal House of Ibn-Hud; the husbandman viewed with unconcealed resentment the encroachments of the Church and the Crown upon his small but valuable inheritance. The valley of the Ebro still possessed many fortresses defended by natural impediments and Moslem valor. All these considerations invited the intervention of the victors, but the Moorish commander, satisfied with the barren laurels acquired at Fraga, neglected an opportunity which might have restored to the Almoravide Sultan one of the most important provinces of his empire. For several years the frontier was wasted by implacable partisan warfare; the Moslems carried into