The Almohades did much to embellish and to improve the city during their century of sovereignty. The only important Mohammedan work remaining to us in Seville belongs to that period, and illustrates the victory of the African or Berber over the Byzantine influences traceable in earlier Moorish architecture. The new conquerors of Andalusia were a virile, hardy race, and there is something vigorous and coarse in their handiwork. They developed an excessive fondness for ornamentation which mars much of their work, and were too much addicted to the use of painted stucco and gilding. To them we owe the stalactite roofing, afterwards developed with such success at the Alhambra. "It is certain," says Don Pedro de Madrazo, "that the innovations characteristic of Mussulman architecture in Spain during the eleventh and twelfth centuries cannot be explained as a natural modification of the Arabic art of the Khalifate, or as a prelude to the art of Granada, for there is very little similarity between the style called Secondary or Mauritanian, and the Arab-Byzantine and Andalusian; while on the other hand it is evident that the Saracenic monuments of Fez and Morocco, of the reigns of Yusuf Ben Tashfin, Abdul Ben Ali, Al Mansûr, and Nasr, partake of the character of the ornamentation introduced by the Almohades into Spain." [Illustration: SEVILLE--THE GIRALDA] The most important example of this style is the far-famed Giralda Tower, at the north-eastern corner of the Cathedral, the most renowned of minarets and one of the strongest buildings in the world. It was built in the reign of Yakûb al Mansûr by an architect whose name is variously written Gabir, Hever, and Yever. Quantities of Roman remains and statuary were used in making the foundations. The wall at the base is nine feet in thickness, which increases with the height. The lower part is of stone, the upper part of brick. For the first fifteen metres the four faces of the tower are plain; at that height begins a series of vertical windows, mostly of two lights, some with the horseshoe, others with the pointed arch; while on either side the masonry is carved into what seem panels of trellis work. There is much in the details of this decoration to interest the student of Moorish art, who will recognize in them the inception of many forms developed (and not always to advantage) at Granada. But the Giralda as we now see it is a third as high again as it was left by the Almohades. In their time it was crowned by a pinnacle to which were attached four balls of gilded copper--one of which was so large, we are told, that the city gate had to be widened that it might be brought hither. The iron bar supporting the balls weighed about ten hundredweights, and the whole was cast by a Sicilian Arab named Abu Leyth at a cost of about fifty thousand pounds of our money. The balls were thrown down by an earthquake in 1395, when their proportions were carefully ascertained.