It is much easier to realize heroic character in a person than in a whole people or even a city; and we are now coming to the career of a man who approached as few have ever done the high ideal of kingly greatness. A great king is the result of a great need. When the nation is sore beset, when the times are full of presage of disaster, and ruin hangs ominously on the horizon; then the great king comes to rescue his people from danger, to restore order and well-being, and to reign over a realm once more made happy and prosperous by his efforts. The need of such a ruler was anxiously felt at the beginning of the tenth century in Spain. The excited conduct of the Christians of Cordova had been followed by a still more dangerous and widespread rebellion in the provinces. The throne was occupied by incapable sovereigns; for the energetic policy of Mundhir, who had succeeded his father Mohammed in 886, was arrested by his assassination in 888, and his brother Abdallah, who had instigated the murder, was incapable of dealing courageously with the numerous sources of danger which then menaced the kingdom. His policy was shifty and temporizing; he alternately tried the effects of force and conciliation, with the usual consequence that both policies failed; and he was personally so despicable, cruel, and vile, that all parties in his dominions seemed for once to be agreed in their detestation of him, and their resolve to cast off his rule. He had hardly been reigning three years when the greater part of Andalusia was virtually independent. All the various factions of the State were now again in active opposition to the central power. Every nobleman or chief, were he Arab, Berber, or Spaniard, seized the opportunity of a bad and weak sovereign, and general anarchy, to appropriate a portion of the land for his own exclusive benefit, and from behind his ramparts to defy the Sultan. The old Arab aristocracy, the descendants of the Arab tribes who completed the conquest of Spain, were few and greatly outnumbered by the other races; but though their weakness should have kept them loyal to the Arab kingdom of Cordova, they too turned against it, and established themselves in independent princedoms, especially at Seville, which now became a formidable rival to Cordova. In other cities, though the Arabs were not strong enough to break openly with the Sultan, they gave him but a nominal homage; and the governors of Lorca and Zaragoza were really quite independent of their feeble king. In no place, outside Cordova, where the mercenary guards of the Sultan compelled a certain outward submission, were the Arabs to be counted upon for the defence of the Omeyyad power. [Illustration: THE GOLDEN TOWER, SEVILLE.]