and me!" While cordially detesting the successful Sultan of Cordova, his Abbāside foe was forced to render homage to his skill and courage. He called Abd-er-Rahmān "the hawk of the Koreysh," the falcon of the Prophet's own tribe. "Wonderful," he would exclaim, "is the daring, wisdom, and prudence, he has shown! To enter the paths of destruction, throw himself into a distant land, hard to approach, and well defended; there to profit by the jealousies of the rival parties, to make them turn their arms against one another instead of against himself; to win the homage and obedience of his subjects; and, having overcome every difficulty, to rule supreme lord of all! Of a truth, no man before him has done this!" The defeat of the Abbāside invasion was followed by other successes on the part of the new Sultan. He induced the people of Toledo, who had long held out against him, to consent to a peace and deliver up their chiefs; and the leaders were grossly humiliated and then crucified. The chief of the Yemenite faction proving dangerous, Abd-er-Rahmān gave him a safe-conduct, and thus enticed him into his palace, where he tried to stab him with his own hand, but finding the Arab too vigorous, called in the guard and had him assassinated. Almost immediately, a great revolt of the Berbers of the northern borders occurred. Ten years were occupied in reducing them to obedience, and meanwhile the Yemenites, burning with vengeance for the murder of their chief, took advantage of the Sultan's absence in the north to rise. They had not yet realized the energy or the astuteness of the man. He had already set the revolted Berbers by the ears by playing upon their petty jealousies; and he now exerted his diplomacy to breed discord among the Yemenites. He tampered with the Berbers who formed a large part of their army, so that they deserted in the midst of the fray, and Abd-er-Rahmān's soldiers fell upon the flying multitude, until thirty thousand bodies lay on the field: their huge grave long remained a sight to be seen by the curious. Then followed that formidable coalition between three disaffected Arab chiefs and Charlemagne, which was so near destroying the fabric that Abd-er-Rahmān had painfully built up, but collapsed before Zaragoza and at Roncesvalles without a single blow from the very person they had assembled to destroy.