Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 342, April, 1844. Various
must be imputed, it is not our purpose to decide; but that it did not arise from the original tendency of the negroes to sickness seems evident—the fact being, that of the fifty who were taken on board the frigate, but one had died at sea and one on shore. Within a few days the liberated negroes had acquired a more cheerful look, their first conception having been that they were to be devoured by the people of the country, and they were reluctant to eat, fearing that it was intended to fatten them for the purpose. However, the negroes in the colonies soon freed them from this apprehension.
We shall be rejoiced if the publicity given to this little but intelligent pamphlet by our means, may assist in drawing the attention of the influential classes to the subject. We fully believe that, if we were to look for the deepest misery that was ever inflicted in this world, and the greatest mass of it, we should find it in the slave-trade. It is the misery, not as in civilized life, of scattered individuals, but of multitudes, and a misery comprehending every other; sudden separation from every tie of the human heart, parent, child, spouse, and country; the misery of bodily affliction, disease, famine, storms, shipwreck, and ultimately slavery, with all its wretchedness of toil and tyranny for life. We certainly do not think it our duty to go to war for the object of teaching humanity to other nations. We must not attempt to heal the calamity of the African by the greatest of all calamities and crimes—an unnecessary war. But England has only to persevere sincerely and steadily, however calmly, and she will, by the blessing of that supreme Disposer of the ways of men, who desires the happiness of all his creatures, succeed in the extinction of a traffic which has brought a curse, and brings it at this hour, and will bring it deeper still, upon every nation which insults the laws of humanity and the dictates of religion, by dealing in the flesh and blood of man.
MOSLEM HISTORIES OF SPAIN. 3
THE ARABS OF CORDOVA
"The second day was that when Martel broke
The Mussulmen, delivering France opprest,
And in one mighty conflict, from the yoke
Of unbelieving Mecca saved the West."
The Arab domination in Spain is the grand romance of European history. The splendid but mysterious fabric of Asiatic power and science is seen for age after age, like the fairy castle of St John, exalted far above the rugged plain of Frank semi-barbarism—till the spell is at last broken by the iron prowess of Christian chivalry; and the glittering edifice vanishes from the land as though it had never been, leaving, like the fabled structure of the poet, only a wreath of laurel to bind the brows of the victor. Yet though replete with gorgeous materials both for history and fiction, and stored not only with the recondite lore of Asia and Egypt, but with the borrowed treasures of ancient Greece, (long known to Christendom only by versions through an Arabic medium,) the language and literature of this marvellous people, and even their history, except so far as it related to their never-ceasing warfare with their Christian foes, remained, up to the middle of the last century, a sealed book to their Spanish successors. Coming into possession, like the Israelites of old, "of a land for which they did not labour, of cities which they built not, of vineyards and olive-yards which they planted not," the Spaniards not merely contemned, but persecuted with the fiercest bigotry, all that was left in the peninsula of the genius and learning of their predecessors. Eighty thousand volumes were publicly burned in one fatal auto-da-fé at Granada by order of Cardinal Ximenes, in whom the literature of his own language yet found a munificent patron; and so meritorious, did the deed appear in the eyes of his contemporaries, that the number has been magnified to an incredible amount by his biographers, in their zeal for the renown of their hero! So complete was the destruction or deportation4 of the seventy public libraries, which, a century and a half before the subjugation of the Moors, were open in different cities of Spain, that the valuable collection now in the Escurial owes its origin to the accidental capture, early in the seventeenth century, of three ships laden with books belonging to Muley Zidan, emperor of Morocco—and even of this casual prize so little was the value appreciated, that it was not till more than a hundred years later, and after three-fourths of the books had been consumed by fire in 1671, that the learned and diligent Casiri was commissioned to make a catalogue of the remainder. The result was the well-known Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana Escurialensis, which appeared in 1760-70; and which, in the words of the present learned translator, "though hasty and superficial, and containing frequent unaccountable blunders, must, with all its imperfections, ever be valuable as affording palpable proof of the literary cultivation of the Spanish Arabs, and as containing the first glimpses of historical truth." Up to this time the only authority on Spanish history purporting to be drawn from Mohammedan sources, was the work of a Morisco named Miguel de Luna, written by command of the Inquisition; which was first printed at Granada in 1592, and has passed through many editions. Its value may be estimated from its placing the Mohammedan conquest of Spain in the time of Yakub Al-mansor, the actual date of whose reign was from A.D. 1184 to 1199; insomuch that Señor de Gayangos suggests, as a possible explanation of its glaring inaccuracies, that it was the writer's intention to hoax his employers. Casiri had, however, opened the door for further researches; and he was followed in the same path by Don Faustino de Borbon, whose works, valuable rather from the erudition which they display than from their judgment or critical acumen, have now become extremely scarce—and next by Don Antonio José Condé, one of the most zealous and laborious, if not the most accurate, of Spanish orientalists. His "History of the Domination of the Arabs and Moors in Spain," has been generally regarded as of high authority, and is in truth the first work on the subject drawn wholly from Arab sources; but it receives summary condemnation from Señor de Gayangos, for "the uncouth arrangement of the materials, the entire want of critical or explanatory notes, the unaccountable neglect to cite authorities, the numerous repetitions, blunders, and contradictions." These charges are certainly not without foundation; but they are in some measure accounted for by the trouble and penury in which the author's last years were spent, and the unfinished state in which the work was left at his death in 1820.
An authentic and comprehensive view of the Arab period, as described by their own writers, was therefore still a desideratum in European literature, which the publication before us may be considered as the first step towards supplying. The work of Al-Makkari, which has been taken as a text-book, is not so much an original history as a collection of extracts, sometimes abridged, and sometimes transcribed in full, from more ancient historians; and frequently giving two or three versions of the same event from different authorities—so that, though it can claim but little merit as a composition, it is of extreme value as a repository of fragments of authors in many cases now lost; and further, as the only "uninterrupted narrative of the conquests, wars, and settlements of the Spanish Moslems, from their first invasion of the Peninsula to their final expulsion." In the arrangement of his materials, the translator has departed considerably, and with advantage, from the original; giving the historical books in the form of a continuous narrative, and omitting several sections relating to matters of little interest—while the deficiencies and omissions of the author are supplied by an appendix, containing, in addition to a valuable body of original notes, copious extracts from numerous unpublished Arabic MSS. relating to Spain, which afford ample proof of the extent and diligence of his researches among the Oriental treasures of Paris and London. To those in the Escurial, however, he was denied access during his labours—an almost incredible measure of illiberality, which, if he be correct in ascribing it to his known intention of publishing in England, "ill suits a country" (as he justly remarks in the preface) "which has lately seen its archives and monastic libraries reduced to cinders, and scattered or sold in foreign markets, without the least struggle to rescue or secure them."
Ahmed Al-Makkari, the author or compiler of the present work, derived his surname from a village near Telemsan called Makkarah, where his family had been established since the conquest of Africa by the Arabs. He was born at Telemsan some time in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and educated by his uncle, who held the office of Mufti in that city; but having quitted his native country
The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain. By AHMED IBN MOHAMMED AL-MAKKARI of Telemsan. Translated and illustrated with Critical Notes by Pascual de Gayangos, late Professor of Arabic in the Athenæum of Madrid.—Printed for the Oriental Translation Fund. 2 vols. 4to. 1840-43.
The Almoravide and Almohade princes, who ruled both in Spain and Africa, often inserted a clause in their treaties with the Christians for the restoration of the libraries captured in the towns taken from the Moslems; and Ibn Khaldun mentions, that Yakob Al-mansor destined a college at Fez for the reception of the books thus recovered.