text:  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