alliance of the Berbers and also of the Andalusian Arabs against his
late allies.[2] But the latter proved too strong for the Ameer, who was
defeated and killed by the Yemenite followers of Balj.

[1] Cardonne, i. p. 135.

[2] The Syrian Arabs seem to have borne a bad character away
from home. The Sultan Muawiyah warned his son that they altered
for the worse when abroad. See Ockley's "Saracens."

These feuds of Yemenites against Modharites, complicated by the
accession of Berbers now to one side, now to the other, continued
without intermission till the first Khalif of Cordova, Abdurrahman ibn
Muawiyah, established his power all over Spain.

The successor of Balj and Thaleba ibn Salamah did indeed try to break up
the Syrian faction by separating them. He placed those of Damascus in
Elvira; of Emesa in Seville; of Kenesrin in Jaen; of Alurdan[1] in
Malaga and Regio; of Palestine in Sidonia or Xeres; of Egypt in Murcia;
of Wasit in Cabra; and they thus became merged into the body of
Andalusian Arabs.

These Berber wars had an important influence on the future of Spain;
for, since the Berbers had settled on all the Northern and Western
marches, when they were decimated by civil war, and many of the
survivors compelled to return to Africa,[2] owing to the famine which
afflicted the country from 750 to 755, the frontiers of the Arab
dominion were left practically denuded of defenders,[3] and the
Christians at once advanced their boundaries to the Douro, leaving
however a strip of desert land as a barrier between them and the