its gardens enclosed a vast area beautified by every resource of art and luxury. The inventive genius of skilful foreign artisans had provided both palace and mosque with many appliances of wonderful ingenuity,--doors which opened and closed apparently without human agency; pulpits and tribunes which, acting automatically, moved to and fro impelled by hidden mechanism; fountains whose jets, mysteriously controlled by valves and springs, were the perpetual delight and wonder of the people. Under his administration hundreds of vessels were constructed; the navy-yards were enlarged and increased in number, and powerful fleets bearing the white standard of the Almohades maintained the dignity of the Sultan of Africa and Spain in every quarter of the Mediterranean. The long reign of Abd-al-Mumen, who governed Spain entirely through his viceroys, was not less injurious to the interests of that country than the domination of the Almoravides had been. The plague of civil war, the menace of Christian conquest, the evils of revolution and anarchy, the ferocity of the remorseless conqueror, with whom resistance was an offence only to be expiated by death or slavery, were conditions fatal to agricultural and commercial prosperity. Moorish Spain, once the proud mistress of the Occident, the seat of learning and the arts, now the sport of fortune and the prey of savage hordes nurtured amidst the African deserts, was, with the passage of each decade, rapidly descending in the scale of civilization. Her political influence and the prestige of her name had disappeared. The wealth accumulated under the beneficent rule of the Ommeyade dynasty had either been dissipated in luxury or been borne away by barbarian invaders. The time was almost at hand when a religious tyranny, more grievous in its burdens, more cruel in the inexorable severity of its decrees, than the worst examples of African despotism, was to be imposed on the descendants of a people which had made the Western Khalifate the seat of the most opulent, the most intellectual, the most powerful of nations.