CHAP. X. MIDDLE AGES. 



elevated plain of this district," says Bowles, 

 " are pierced as full of holes as a sieve by the 

 mines which the Moors worked ; for it must 

 have been done by them, since the Romans 

 could never have worked in a manner so bar- 

 barous V Those Mahometan princes who ruled 

 in Jaen seem to have struggled hard to 

 support their revenues by extracting from the 

 bowels of the earth that wealth which its mi- 

 serable surface could only yield by excessive 

 toil. 



It is probable they supplied their neigh- 

 bouring states with silver, copper, and lead 

 some of which minerals are everywhere to be 

 found, and frequently all of them together. The 

 number of shafts in these hills is very surprising. 

 They are formed about five paces from each 

 other; arid according to Bowles there were more 

 than five thousand of them 2 . 



These pits may, and probably were, dug in 

 succession during the time of the Moorish do- 

 mination, which terminated in Jaen two cen- 

 turies before the final conquest of Granada. If 

 these pits were the work of five hundred years, 

 each year yielding ten excavations, and those 

 exhausted, as they appear to have been, as soon 

 as they could be robbed of their minerals, we 



1 Bowles, page 416. 

 * Idem, page 416. 



