[Footnote 40: Of this great battle we have an account by four eye-witnesses: 1, By King Alfonso, in a letter to the Pope; 2, by the historian Rodrigo of Toledo; 3, by Arnaud, Archbishop of Narbonne; 4, by the author of the _Annals of Toledo_. The reduction of several towns, from Tolosa to Baeza, immediately followed this glorious victory--a victory in which Don Alfonso nobly redeemed his failure in the field of Zalaca--and which, in its immediate consequences, involved the ruin of the Mahometan empire in Spain. After an unsuccessful attempt on Ubeda, as the hot season was raging, the allies returned to Toledo, satisfied that the power of Mahomet was forever broken. That Emperor, indeed, did not long survive his disaster. Having precipitately fled to Morocco, he abandoned himself to licentious pleasures, left the cares of government to his son, or rather his ministers, and died on the 10th day of the moon Shaffan, A.H. 610 (A.D. 1214), not without suspicion of poison. By recent writers of Spain the number of slain on the part of the Africans was two hundred thousand; on that of the Christians, twenty-five individuals only. Of course the whole campaign is represented as miraculous; and, indeed, actual miracles are recorded--which we have neither space nor inclination to notice.] THE FIRST CRUSADE A.D. 1096-1099 SIR GEORGE W. COX (Religious feeling in the eleventh century rose to a great pitch of enthusiasm, and led men of various nations, with still more various motives and aims in worldly affairs, to pursue one common end with their whole heart. Between the years 1096 and 1270 these attempts of Christian nations to rescue the Holy Land from the "Infidels," as the Mahometans were called, added a wholly new character of human enterprise to the world's history. At the time--in the middle of the eleventh century--when the Seljuks, a Turkish tribe of Western Asia, had overrun Syria and Asia Minor, throwing the East into a state of anarchy, Europe was beginning to adopt modes of settled order. Through the Byzantine empire great numbers of pilgrims for centuries had passed to visit Palestine. With the improved condition of the western nations, which led to an extension of commerce in the East, the pilgrimage to that part of the world acquired a new importance. As early as 1064 a caravan of seven thousand pilgrims made their way to the neighborhood of Jerusalem, where they narrowly escaped destruction by the Bedouins, their rescue being effected by a Saracen emir. In 1070 the Seljuks took possession of Jerusalem, inflicting hardships on the pilgrims by intolerable exactions, insult, and plunder. Besides outraging Christian sentiment, they ruined the commerce of the western nations. Throughout Europe arose the cry for vengeance, and men's minds were fully prepared for an attempt to conquer Palestine when their leaders began to preach the sacred duty of delivering the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the infidels.