The narrow, tortuous streets of the old towns once occupied by the invaders take one back across the straits, and the whole country is covered with spots which, apart from any remains of note, are associated by record or legend with anecdotes from that page of Spanish history. Here it is the "Sigh of the Moor," the spot from which the last Ameer of Andalucia gazed in sorrow on the capital that he had lost; there it is a cave (at Criptana) where the Moors found refuge when their power in Castile was broken; elsewhere are the chains (in Toledo) with which the devotees of Islám chained their Christian captives.
In addition to this, the hills of a great part of Spain are dotted with fortresses of "tabia" (rammed earth concrete) precisely such as are occupied still by the country kaïds of Morocco; and by the wayside are traces of the skill exercised in bringing water underground from the hills beyond Marrákesh. How many church towers in Spain were built for the call of the muédhdhin, and how many houses had their foundations laid for hareems! In the south especially such are conspicuous from their design. To crown all stand the palaces and mosques of Córdova, Sevílle, and Granáda, not to mention minor specimens.
When we talk of the Moors in Spain, we often forget how nearly we were enabled to speak also of the Moors in France. Their brave attempts to pass that natural barrier, the Pyrenees, find a suitable monument in the perpetual independence of the wee republic of Andorra, whose inhabitants so successfully stemmed the tide of invasion. The story of Charles Martel, too, the "Hammer" who broke the Muslim power in that direction, is one of the most important in the history of Europe. What if the people who were already levying taxes in the districts of Narbonne and Nîmes had found as easy a victory over the vineyards of southern France, as they had over those of Spain? Where would they have stopped? Would they ever have been driven out, or would St. Paul's have been a second Kûtûbîya, and Westminster a Karûeeïn? God knows!
The earliest notable monument of Moorish dominion in Andalucia still existing is the famous mosque of Córdova, now deformed into a cathedral. Its erection occupied the period from 786 to 796 of the Christian era, and it is said that it stands on the site of a Gothic church erected on the ruins of a still earlier temple dedicated to Janus. Portions, however, have been added since that date, as inscriptions on the walls record, and the European additions date from 1521, when, notwithstanding the protests of the people of Córdova, the bishops obtained permission from Charles V. to rear the present quasi-Gothic structure in its central court. The disgust and anger which the lover of Moorish architecture--or art of any sort--feels for the name of "_Carlos quinto_," as at point after point hideous additions to the Moorish remains are ascribed to that conceited monarch, are somewhat tempered for once by the record that even he repented when he saw the result of his permission in this instance. "You have built here," he said, "what you might have built anywhere, and in doing so you have spoiled what was unique in the world!" In each of the three great centres of Moorish rule, Sevílle, Granáda and Córdova, the same hand is responsible for outrageous modern erections in the midst of hoary monuments of eastern art, carefully inscribed with their author's name, as "Cæsar the Emperor, Charles the Fifth."