The effect of this capture of Cordova was decisive. Not many years later another important and strong city of the Mahommedans, Seville, was also taken from {179} them, and it is a remarkable fact in this capture of Seville that the Christians had the assistance of ships belonging to the Moorish King of Granada. The King of Granada had done homage to Ferdinand for his kingdom. Even before the middle of the previous century Alphonso VII. had been crowned as "Emperor in Spain and King of the Men of the Two Religions." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- {178} [Illustration: SEVILLE. The Giralda.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- It is a singular title. There is not the slightest doubt that it claimed a great deal more than the possessor of the title could enforce, but still it shows the direction in which events even then were moving. They had gone very far when a king of Castile could have the only remaining Moslem potentate in the land as his vassal, and could have the help of his Moslem ships in the assault on a Moslem city. But still Spain was far from a united kingdom. Portugal was independent and has retained that independence ever since. There was the small independent Kingdom of Navarre, up against the Pyrenees, and in the south-east, with a long stretch of sea-coast on the Mediterranean, was Aragon, also an independent kingdom. Aragon entered more into the course of the great story than any other of the kingdoms in Spain before 1500; because her kings had some claim to the throne of Naples and Sicily; but it was no very large part in the story that even Aragon played. Our England came near to being drawn into the story of Spain herself, or rather, of Castile--I say rather of Castile, because the name of Spain, to include the whole country which we now so call, was hardly in use then. This happened because John of Gaunt, who was son of our King Edward III., had married, as his second wife, a daughter of Pedro the Cruel, as he was styled, the King of Castile. Pedro, for his cruelties, had been hunted off the throne by his own brother, {180} and our Edward the Black Prince, eldest brother of John of Gaunt, went down from France into Castile and helped to put Pedro back. John of Gaunt's claim was settled by the marriage of the son of John I., who had succeeded Pedro on the throne of Castile, to John of Gaunt's daughter. We may think that England was fortunate in thus escaping all the complications in which this claim might have involved her.