Jefferson's War Read Online Free PDF

west inexorably. Many Berbers converted to Islam and became staunch Arab allies who assisted in later conquests. By 707, the invaders and their auxiliaries occupied coastal North Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic.
    During one expedition into the wild, barren land, Arab General Hassan ibn al-Nu‘man al-Ghassani happened upon what remained of Carthage, the Phoenicians’ once-mighty outpost and, later, the capital of the Carthaginian Empire. In 698, it was little more than ruins, occupied by ragged, starving bands living in squalor beside a large gulf. Hassan, a practical, energetic man, envisioned a new city closer to the head of the gulf; it would be better protected from the sea and from the rovers hunting easy plunder. It also would be perfectly situated for a shipyard. The city that he built became Tunis. Even as it went up, shipwrights began building a fleet of galleys, the oared ships that had carried merchants, adventurers, and conquerors along the Mediterranean shores for millennia. As the eighth century began, the first Barbary corsairs weighed anchor in Tunis to capture the merchant vessels of European Christians and sack Mediterranean coastal towns.
    Before long, the Moslem conquerors were eyeing the towering landmass across the narrow straits from Morocco. The Moslem general, Tarik, gathered an invasion fleet to carry his assault troops across the short stretch of open water to Iberia, the onetime western province of the empires of Phoenicia, Carthage, and Rome. Iberia was a fabled land of silver and gold mines, fertile farmland and rich cities. For nearly 200 years, the Visigoths, one of the German warrior tribes that had overrun the crumbling
Roman Empire and its far-flung provinces, had prospered there, but now the Islamic juggernaut was at their door.
    In 711, Tarik and 7,000 Moslem Berbers alighted from troop transports onto the rock that would bear Tarik’s name—Gebal-Tarik, or Gibraltar. King Roderick summoned his Visigoth warriors to defend their land. The Moslems crushed the larger German army in one day, at Guadalete.
    The Moors, as the amalgam of invading Moslem Berbers and later Arab arrivals would become known, prospered in Spain as no people had before or has since. Seville, Cordova, and Granada blossomed into densely populated, prosperous cities where Moslems, Christians, and Jews lived together in harmony. Women enjoyed more freedom and opportunity than they would anywhere else in Europe or the Islamic world for 500 years. As did Moorish males, they attended primary schools, where they learned to read, write, and recite the Koran before being instructed in a trade. Some went on to the universities to study mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, botany, medicine, and law. Literacy soared. Cordova alone boasted seventy libraries that held more than 500,000 books. (In 1800, U.S. libraries held only one tenth that number.) Advanced Moorish trade and agriculture practices created massive wealth and a food surplus that fed a growing urban populace. The Moors filled the cities with marble palaces, graced with their trademark double-horseshoe arches, and with gilded ceilings and doors inlaid with precious jewels.
    But Christian power, formerly confined to the northern mountain fastnesses, expanded in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Moors’ territories contracted. Isabella and Ferdinand’s marriage united Castile and Aragon. The Moors retreated to Andalusia.

    In 1491, at the urging of Catholic clergy, Ferdinand and Isabella laid siege to Granada, Andalusia’s capital. It fell on November 25. The cardinals and bishops beseeched the monarchs to expel the infidel Moors from Spain altogether. The Moors had tolerated Christendom when they were ascendant, but the Christian Inquisition harbored no reciprocal emotion. Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros and his bishops and monsignors soon convinced Isabella to take a hard line and give the defeated Moors of Granada a choice: