So it came about that the common people exchanged the life
of the peaceful and prosperous artisan or husbandman for that of the
hand-to-mouth pirate, and the case of knight and noble among them was no
better--perhaps rather worse--than the meanest among those who had been
expropriated.
Those who know the region in which these unhappy folk lived are aware of
the material monuments which still exist and testify to the glorious past;
and, seeing what they have seen, it is no great stretch of the imagination
to picture to themselves the comfort, the elegance, and the luxury with
which the inhabitants of Granada and Cordoba lived surrounded. Over there,
away across some few leagues of shining blue water, were the ruined homes
of which many of the banished people still possessed the keys, awaiting the
day when Allah and the Prophet should vouchsafe to them that return which
they so naturally and ardently desired. To this day the key of the great
Mosque at Cordoba is preserved at Rabat as a sacred relic of former dignity
and power--a symbol to the Moslem of his perpetual banishment. If Cordoba
with its mosque--still one of the wonders of the world, with its eleven
hundred marble columns--were the principal shrine and holy of holies to
these people, there were in addition hundreds of other temples of their
faith now for ever desecrated in their eyes by the misfortune which had
placed them in Christian hands. In Andalusia were the dishonoured graves of
their kinsfolk, and, last and worst of all, in this land still dwelt
thousands upon thousands of their co-religionists held in a degrading
bondage by their implacable enemies.
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