Mohammed retained his vigour to an advanced age. In his seventy-ninth year he took the field on horseback, accompanied by the flower of his chivalry, to resist an invasion. As the army sallied forth from Granada, one of the _adalides_, or guides, who rode in the advance, accidentally shivered his lance against the arch of the gate. The counsellors of the king, alarmed by the circumstance, which was considered an evil omen, entreated him to return. The king persisted, and at noontide the omen, say the Moorish chroniclers, was fatally fulfilled. Mohammed was suddenly seen to fall from his horse. He was placed on a litter and borne towards Granada, but his illness increased to such a degree that they were obliged to pitch his tent on the _Vega_. His physicians were filled with consternation, and in a few hours he died; the Castilian prince, Don Philip, brother of Alonzo X., being by his side when he expired. His body was embalmed, enclosed in a silver coffin, and buried in the Alhambra, in a sepulchre of precious marble, amidst the unfeigned lamentations of his subjects, who bewailed him as a parent.
Such was the enlightened prince who founded the Alhambra, whose name remains emblazoned amongst its most delicate and graceful ornaments, and whose memory is calculated to inspire the loftiest associations in those who tread these fading scenes of his magnificence and glory.
Abu-el-Hejaj (Yúsuf I.), King of Granada, 1333-1354, who completed the Alhambra.
In the royal Mosque, where the escutcheons of the Moorish kings hang side by side with those of the Castilian sovereigns--for the Mosque was, after the subjugation, consecrated as a Catholic chapel--perished the illustrious Yúsuf Abu-el-Hejaj, the high-minded prince who completed the Alhambra, and who, for his virtues and endowments, deserves almost equal renown with its magnanimous founder. Washington Irving was, perhaps, the first to draw forth, from the obscurity in which it had too long remained, the name of another of those princes of a departed and almost forgotten race, who reigned in elegance and splendour in Andalusia, when all Europe was in comparative barbarism.
To Yúsuf I. the Alhambra owes much of its splendour; he not only constructed the _Gate of Justice_ and the _Wine Gate_, leading into the Palace, as appears from the inscriptions over their respective archways; but he must also have built, or decorated, many of the interior apartments, for his name appears frequently in _The Hall of the Two Sisters_, in that of the _Baños_, in the _Court of the Fish-pond_, and in the _Hall of the Ambassadors_.