To the Almoravides succeeded the Almohades coming from the Atlas of Morocco. To the Almohades, the Merias coming from Sahara in Algeria, but in dying out each of these dynasties left each time a little more ground under the hands of the Christians, who, since the time in Telage, when they were tracked into the caverns of Covadonga, had not ceased, in spite of ill fortune of all sorts, to follow the work of deliverance. It would have been accomplished centuries before if the internal struggle in Christian Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had not accorded some years of respite to the kingdom which was being founded at Granada, and revived, although with less brilliancy, the splendor of the times before the twelfth century. In the course of the long struggle the independent Christians had not been able to avoid feeling in a certain measure something of the influence of their neighbors, now their most civilized subjects. They translated into prose imitations of the tales such as those of the book of Patronis, borrowing from the general chronicles or in translations like the "Kalila and traditions, legendary or historic, as they found them in the Dimna," or the book of "The Ruses of Women," in verse. In their oldest romances--for instance, that of the "Children of Sara,"[5] and in those to which they have given the name of _romances fronterizos_, or romances of the frontier--they give the facts of the war between the Mussulmans and the Christians. [5 ] T. Ramon Manendez Pidal. La legende de les Infantes de Sara. Madrid, 1896. 8vo. But they gave the name of Mauresques to another and different class of romances, of which the heroes are chevaliers, who have nothing of the Mussulman but the name. The talent of certain _littérateurs_ of the sixteenth century exercised itself in that class where the persons are all conventional, or the descriptions are all imaginative, and made a portrait of the Mussulman society so exact that the romances of Esplandian, Amadis de Gaul, and others, which evoked the delicious knight-errantry of Don Quixote, can present a picture of the veritable chivalry of the Middle Ages. We possess but few verses of the Mussulmans of Granada. Argot de Moll preserved them in Arabic, transcribed in Latin characters, one piece being attributed to Mouley Abou Abdallah: "The charming Alhambra and its palaces weep Over their loss, Muley Boabdil (Bon Abdallah), Bring me my horse and my white buckler, That I may fight to retake the Alhambra; Bring me my horse and my buckler blue, That I may go to fight to retake my children. "My children are at Guadia, my wife at Jolfata; Thou hast caused my ruin, O Setti Omm el Fata. My children are at Guadia, my wife at Jolfata, Thou hast caused my ruin, O Setti Omm el Fata!"[6] [6] A. de Circourt. Histoire des Moors mudijares et des Moresques. Paris, 1846.