The Count of Tendilla, and Gonsalvo de Cordova, who happened at this time to be in Granada, marched against them; and, although the enemy flooded the deep furrows of the ploughland across which the troops must ride until they floundered up to their horses’ girths, yet the Christians succeeded in storming the important stronghold of Guejar. The arrival of Ferdinand and his army led to the reduction of other fortresses, conquests stained by sanguinary deeds of vengeance, as when the Count of Lerin blew up with gunpowder a mosque, in which a number of Moors had taken refuge with their wives and children. The rebels, realizing at length the futility of resistance, sued for peace; and by the mediation of Gonsalvo de Cordova conditions were arranged, and Ferdinand departed to Seville. He and the Queen were now convinced that Southern Spain would never be quiet or secure so long as its inhabitants remained Mahometans, and were thus more closely allied in sympathy with the tribes of Africa than with Castilians or Aragonese. They therefore sent Franciscan missionaries to Baeza, Guadix, Almeria, and the Alpujarras, arming them with the alternative weapons of concessions or threats; a provision so efficacious that by the close of the year the friars could boast of a wholesale conversion of their flock. In the meantime the disaffection that had died down or been smothered in the south-east broke out with greater violence in Western Granada, where the Berber race that inhabited Ronda and its mountainous environs suddenly raised the standard of revolt. Washington Irving, in his legend of _The Death of Don Alonso de Aguilar_, has left a graphic account of the punitive expedition commanded by that famous warrior. He took with him Don Pedro his son; and, as they rode out of Cordova in March, 1504, the people, punning on the family name so closely resembling the Spanish word for eagle, cried aloud: “Behold the eagle teaching her young to fly! Long live the valiant line of Aguilar!”