With the death of Alfonso VII of Castile, and that of Raymond of Aragon and Catalonia, which followed five years later, the Christian kingdoms of the Spanish peninsula again entered on evil times. Whilst the Mohammedan world, united and strengthened under the rule of the Almohades, acquired fresh power in the south and southeast, and won back much of its ancient possessions, in the north the vigour of the attack and resistance was broken by divisions and civil contentions. Although the kingdom of Aragon and Catalonia passed undivided to the young King Alfonso II, and his suzerainty extended over a great part of Languedoc and the country of Provence which was governed by a relative of the royal family, on the other hand, under the sons and successors of Alfonso VII the Castilian kingdom was dismembered; for Leon with Galicia and Asturias, and Navarre with the Basque provinces seceded from it and started an independent political existence under their own princes, without paying any further attention to the feudal superiority of Castile. The results of these partitions were intestine disputes and family quarrels which stood the Moslem in good stead. [Sidenote: [1157-1197 A.D.]] The divisions and weakness of Spanish Christendom would have gained a still greater ascendency, had not the clergy admonished the knighthood to the struggle against the infidels as a religious duty and kept alive their zeal for the faith. They encouraged the formation of the Spanish orders of knighthood to which the preservation of the Christian kingdoms and the final overthrow of the Mohammedans was principally owing. Besides the order of Calatrava which Raymond, abbot of the monastery of St. Mary at Fitero, founded in 1158 on the model of the Templars and according to the Cistercian rule, another brotherhood of the faith had come into existence in the year 1156. This was subsequently called the order of Alcantara, after its chief fortress. In Galicia the priesthood enrolled a number of warlike robber knights in the order of St. James of Compostella (1175), for the protection of the church of the tomb of St. James (St. Iago) in that city, and laid on them as their most sacred duty the obligation of escorting pilgrims thither. It was principally the courage and religious enthusiasm of these armed brotherhoods that prevented the Moslem from again bearing the banner of Islam across the Ebro and Douro in the second half of the twelfth century, when Castile was distracted by internal strife, due to the enmity and jealousy of the two princely houses of Lara and Castro, when the Christian kings of the various states turned their arms against each other, when in Catalonia the confusion mounted to such a height that two archbishops of Tarragona were murdered and Portugal and Leon lay under ban and interdict on account of a marriage between near relatives, and anarchy and the right of the strong hand ruled unchecked.