Consequently when, after an interval of fourteen years, Muhammed renewed the struggle and took the field with vast hosts from Africa and Andalusia, he met with a powerful resistance (1211). It was not merely that the whole Spanish chivalry, headed by the members of the orders of every description, thronged to the standards of the kings of Aragon and Castile; many _ultramontanes_ from the provinces of southern France and other districts were to be found there, who, fired by itinerant preachers, had travelled across the Pyrenees to earn a heavenly reward and earthly possessions as soldiers of God. By an ordinance of the pope, the assistance of heaven had been invoked throughout Christendom by fasts and processions. The religious excitement which at that time had gained possession of all minds, furthered the enterprise. Never before had such great hosts of warriors encountered one another in the peninsula. In numbers, orders, and military discipline the Moslems were superior to the Christians; like the crusaders in the Holy Land, the Christian warriors in Spain, especially the free companies who had flocked thither from abroad, sullied the cause of faith by savage crimes and robbery and persecutions of the Jews in and about Toledo; and when the Saracens, having wasted their best strength during eight months before the mountain fortresses of Salvatierra, saw themselves compelled to agree to deliver up to the king of Castile the beleaguered city of Calatrava with the treasures collected there, in return for a free passage, the majority of the ultramontanes withdrew in anger, because the Spanish princes would not allow the retreating enemy to be waylaid in defiance of the promise given. Fanaticism had hardened their hearts and stifled the sentiments of honour and humanity. But in spite of the defection of the foreign soldiers, the Spanish Christians won a glorious victory in the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, in the Sierra Morena, when the rule of the Africans in Spain received its death-blow (1212), as described in the history of the Arabs. More than a hundred thousand corpses, amongst them that of Muhammed’s first-born, strewed the battle-field, and for long after the 16th of July was celebrated in Toledo by a great thanksgiving festival, called “the triumph of the cross.” The spoil was enormous, but the brilliant victory was stained by cruelty and rapine at the capture of the surrounding cities.[o] FOOTNOTES