The compulsory evacuation of Cordova struck a blow at its prosperity from which it never recovered. With natural advantages enjoyed by few communities, it remains to this day the most poverty-stricken and stagnant of the great cities of Spain. Its vitality is preserved by the wealth and resources of its ecclesiastical establishment alone. Its markets are deserted, its thoroughfares grass-grown and silent. A grotesque and tawdry church rises in the very centre of the mosque of Abd-al-Rahman, impairing its symmetry, and furnishing an eternal monument to the folly and prejudices of a fanatical priesthood. The banished population carried with it a thrift and an industry which centuries have not been able to replace. Many arts, brought to a high degree of perfection, disappeared with its expulsion. The walls begun by the Cæsars, and greatly extended by the princes of the House of Ommeyah, embraced within their circumference the original area of the once populous Moslem capital. Time, however, had dealt severely with that far-famed city. Entire quarters had been depopulated by the fury of rebellion, the vicissitudes of political fortune, the ravages of conquest. Streets, formerly crowded with merchants and brokers of every clime, were impassable from the accumulated rubbish of demolished houses. The alcazar, which adjoined the mosque, was a dismantled ruin. The rage of the populace and the vandalism of African invaders had swept away the palaces whose number and elegance had awakened the admiration of every beholder. The villas of the suburbs had disappeared. The lovely gardens, in whose culture and preservation had been exhibited the utmost perfection of horticultural art, were now impenetrable thickets, from whose tangled depths, here and there, rose a heap of fallen columns or a broken horseshoe arch. Under the khalifate, the Valley of the Guadalquivir was so thickly settled as to present the appearance of one vast community, and from Cordova to Andujar countless villages attested the fertility of the soil and the thoroughness of its cultivation. At the time of the Christian occupation this region had become a desert, and a desert it has since remained. For the intelligence and energy of the Moslem were substituted the sloth and ignorance of the monk; ecclesiastical councils, in which were solemnly discussed the alleged inspired origin of absurd dogmas, usurped the place of the literary assemblies of the khalifs; and the monastery and the episcopal palace, with their secret crimes and open vices, rose upon the ruins of institutions of learning whose instruction had developed the greatest minds of Europe, and whose influence and principles had dignified even the papal throne.