Guzman), Ibn el Goutya (son of Gothe), Ibn Loyon (son of Leon), Ibn er
Roumaye (son of the Greek), Ibn Konbaret (son of Comparatus), Ibn
Baschkoual (son of Paschal), and all have left a name among letters.

One magnificent period in literature unfolded itself in the eleventh
century A.D., in the little courts of Seville, of Murcie, of Malaga,
Valence, Toledo, and Badajos. The kings, like El Nis Sasim, El Mo'hadhid,
El Mishamed, Hbn Razin, rank among the best poets, and even the women
answered with talent to the verses which they inspired. They have preserved
the names and the pieces of some of them: Aicha, Rhadia, Fatima, Maryam,
Touna, and the Princess Ouallada. Greek antiquity has not left us more
elegant verses, nor elegies more passionate, than these, of which but a
small portion has been saved from forgetfulness in the anthologies of Hbn
Khayan, Hbn el Abbar, Hbn Bassam de Turad-eddin, and Ibn el Khatib el
Maggari. They needed the arrival of the Berbers to turn them into Almoran.
Those Berbers hastened there from the middle of Sahara and the borders of
Senegal to help the cause of Islamism against Spanish rule, as it was
menaced through the victories of Alfonso of Castile. The result would have
been to stifle those free manifestations of the literary art under a
rigorous piety which was almost always but the thin varnish of hypocrisy.

To the Almoravides succeeded the Almohades coming from the Atlas of
Morocco. To the Almohades, the Merias coming from Sahara in Algeria, but in
dying out each of these dynasties left each time a little more ground under
the hands of the Christians, who, since the time in Telage, when they were
tracked into the caverns of Covadonga, had not ceased, in spite of ill
fortune of all sorts, to follow the work of deliverance. It would have been
accomplished centuries before if the internal struggle in Christian Spain
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had not accorded some years of
respite to the kingdom which was being founded at Granada, and revived,