The amazing, almost miraculous power with which _Mohammed the Promised_ had inspired the Arabian race led them forth to conquer and convert. They went east and they went west, until they stretched along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and reached the Pillars of Hercules.
Could the narrow strait stop their way? They passed over it like dry land, and spread their victorious bands over the southern part of the peninsula, and possessed themselves of the lovely lands of Andalusia, Estremadura, Castile, and even penetrated to the cold and savage mountains of Navarre.
What were these Moors? Were they savage beasts, cruel robbers?
They appear to have brought into Spain not only Art, but the arts, sciences, learning, literature. Under the strong and able rule of Abderrahman III. (912 to 961), agriculture, science, trade, and decent living, throve as they never yet had done in Spain. During the five or six centuries in which the Moors held the land, it is easy to believe that Spain enjoyed a greater measure of worldly prosperity than before or since. In this time Cordova, the seat of the caliphate, grew to have a population of a million souls; it had three hundred mosques and nine hundred baths. Its greatest mosque, begun in 786, shone with four thousand silver lamps, and its dome was raised aloft on twelve hundred slender pillars.
The city of Granada was built, and upon the sides of its mountain sprang into being the fairy fortress and palace of the _Alhambra_. Its halls, its courts, its galleries, its arabesques, its fretwork, its fountains, even in their ruin, tell us of the power of this singular people.
In Seville, too, the _Alcazar_ and the _Giralda_ even now bear beautiful witness to their art, their skill, their industry.
There seems little question now that the Moorish potters brought with them into Spain the arts which the Persian or Arabian potters knew, not only for the preparing the clays, but that they also had the secret for making the _stanniferous enamel_, or glaze, into which the use of tin enters. They also applied to the decoration of their wares certain _lustres_, which Demmin says were produced by the fumes of bismuth, of antimony, or of arsenic. It is not probable that gold was a component part of these lustres.