The Moors in Spain

by Stanley Lane-Poole

I.
THE LAST OF THE GOTHS.

WHEN the armies of Alexander the Great were trampling upon the ancient empires of the East, one country remained undisturbed and undismayed. The people of Arabia sent no humble embassies to the conqueror. Alexander resolved to bring the contemptuous Arabs to his feet: he was preparing to invade their land when death laid its hand upon him, and the Arabs remained unconquered.

This was more than three hundred years before Christ, and even then the Arabs had long been established in independence in their great desert peninsula. For nearly a thousand years more they continued to dwell there in a strange solitude. Great empires sprang up all around them; the successors of Alexander founded the Syrian kingdom of the Seleucids and the Egyptian dynasty of the Ptolemies; Augustus was crowned Imperator at Rome; Constantine became the first Christian emperor at Byzantium; the hordes of the barbarians bore down upon the wide-reaching provinces of the Cæsars—and still the Arabs remained undisturbed, unexplored, and unsubdued. Their frontier cities might pay homage to Chosroes or Cæsar, the legions of Rome might once and again flash across their highland wastes; but such impress was faint and transitory, and left the Arabs unmoved. Hemmed in as they were by lands ruled by historic dynasties, their deserts and their valour ever kept out the invader, and from the days of remote antiquity to the seventh century of the Christian era hardly anything was known of this secluded people save that they existed, and that no one attacked them with impunity.

Then suddenly a change came over the character of the Arabs. No longer courting seclusion, they came forth before the world, and proceeded in good earnest to conquer it. The change had been caused by one man. Mohammed the Arabian Prophet began to preach the religion of Islam in the beginning of the seventh century, and his doctrine, falling upon a people prone to quick impulses and susceptible of strong impressions, worked a revolution. What he taught was simple enough. He took the old faith of the Hebrews, which had its disciples in Arabia, and, making such additions and alterations as he thought needful, he preached the worship of One God as a new revelation to a nation of idolaters. It is difficult for us in the present time to understand the irresistible impulse which the simple and unemotional creed of Mohammed gave to the whole people of Arabia; but we know that such religious revolutions have been, and that there is always a mysterious and potent fascination in the personal influence of a true prophet. Mohammed was so far true, that he taught honestly and strenuously what he believed to be the only right faith, and there was enough of sublimity in the creed and of enthusiasm in the Prophet and his hearers to produce that wave of overmastering popular feeling which people call fanaticism. The Arabs before the time of Mohammed had been a collection of rival tribes or clans, excelling in the savage virtues of bravery, hospitality, and even chivalry, and devoted to the pursuit of booty. The Prophet turned the Arab tribes, for the nonce, into the Moslem people, filled them with the fervour of martyrs, and added to the greed of plunder the nobler ambition of bringing all mankind to the knowledge of the truth.

Before Mohammed died he was master of Arabia, and the united tribes who had embraced the Moslem or Mohammedan faith were already spreading over the neighbouring lands and subduing the astonished nations. Under his successors the Khalifs, the armies of the Mussulmans overran Persia and Egypt and North Africa as far as the Pillars of Hercules; and the Muezzins chanted the Call to Prayer to the Faithful over all the land from the river Oxus in Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

The Mohammedans, or Saracens (a word which means "Easterns"), were checked in Asia Minor by the forces of the Greek Emperor; and it was not till the fifteenth century that they at last obtained the long-coveted possession of Constantinople, by the valour of the Ottoman Turks. So, too, at the opposite extremity of the Mediterranean, it was an officer of the Greek Emperor who for a while held the Arab advance in check. The conquerors swept over the provinces of North Africa, and, after a long struggle, reduced the turbulent Berber tribes for a while to submission, till only the fortress of Ceuta held out against them. Like the rest of the southern shore of the Mediterranean, Ceuta belonged to the Greek Emperor; but it was so far removed from Constantinople that it was thrown upon the neighbouring kingdom of Spain for support, and, while still nominally under the authority of the Emperor, looked really to the King of Toledo for assistance and protection. It is not likely that all the aid that Spain could have given would have availed against the surging tide of Saracen invasion; but, as it happened, there was a quarrel at that time between Julian the governor of Ceuta and Roderick the King of Spain, which opened the door to the Arabs.

Spain was then under the rule of the Visigoths, or West Goths, a tribe of barbarians, like the many others who overran the provinces of the Roman Empire in its decline. The Ostrogoths had occupied Italy; and their kinsmen the Visigoths, displacing or subduing the Suevi (or Swabians) and other rude German tribes, established themselves in the Roman province of Iberia (Spain) in the fifth century after Christ. They found the country in the same condition of effeminate luxury and degeneracy that had proved the ruin of other parts of the empire. Like many warlike peoples, the Romans, when their work was accomplished and the world was at their feet, had rested contentedly from their labours, and abandoned themselves to the pleasures that wealth and security permit. They were no longer the brave stern men who lived simple lives and left the ploughshare to wield the sword when a Scipio or a Cæsar summoned them to defend their country or to conquer a continent. In Spain the richer classes were given over to luxury and sensuality; they lived only for eating and drinking, gambling and all kinds of excitement. The mass of the people were either slaves, or, what was much the same thing, labourers bound to the soil, who could not be detached from the land they cultivated but passed with it from master to master. Between the rich and the slaves was a middle class of burghers, who were perhaps even worse off: for on their shoulders lay all the burden of supporting the State; they paid the taxes, performed the civil and municipal functions, and supplied the money which the rich squandered upon their luxuries. In a society so demoralized there were no elements of opposition to a resolute invader. The wealthy nobles were too deeply absorbed in their pleasures to be easily roused by rumours of an enemy; their swords were rusty with being too long laid aside. The slaves felt little interest in a change of masters, which could hardly make them more miserable than they already were; and the burghers were discontented with the arrangement of the burdens of the State, by which they had to bear most of the cost while they reaped none of the advantages.

Out of such men as these a strong and resolute army could not be formed; and the Goths therefore entered Spain with little trouble; the cities willingly opened their gates, and the diseased civilization of Roman Spain yielded with hardly a blow. The truth was that the road of the Goths had been too well prepared by previous hordes of barbarians—Alans, Vandals, and Suevi—to need much exertion on their own part. The Romanized Spaniards had fully learned what a barbarian invasion entailed; they had seen their cities burnt, their wives and children carried captives, those few leaders who showed any manly resistance massacred; they had seen the consequences of the barbarian scourge—plague and famine, wasted lands, starving inhabitants, and everywhere savage anarchy. They had learned their lesson, and meekly admitted the Goths.

In the beginning of the eighth century, when the Saracens had reached the African shore of the Atlantic and were looking across the Straits of Hercules to the sunny provinces of Andalusia, the Goths had been in possession of Spain for more than two hundred years. There had been time enough to reform the corrupt condition of the kingdom and to infuse the fresh vigour of youth which an old civilization sometimes gains by the introduction of barbarous but masculine races. There were special reasons why the Goths should improve the state of Spain. They were not only bold, strong, and uncorrupted by ease of life; they were Christians, and, in their way, very earnest Christians. Spain was but nominally converted at the time of their arrival: Constantine had indeed promulgated Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire, but it had taken very little root in the Western provinces. The advent of an ignorant but devout race like the Goths might probably arouse a more earnest faith in the new religion amid the worn-out paganism of the kingdom, and the Catholic priests were full of hope for the future of their church. The result did not in any way justify the anticipation. The Goths remained devout indeed, but they regarded their acts of religion chiefly as reparation for their vices; they compounded for exceptionally bad sins by an added amount of repentance, and then they sinned again without compunction. They were quite as corrupt and immoral as the Roman nobles who had preceded them, and their style of Christianity did not lead them to endeavour to improve the condition of their subjects. The serfs were in an even more pitiable state than before. Not only were they tied to the land or master, but they could not marry without his consent, and if slaves of neighbouring estates intermarried, their children were distributed between the owners of the several properties. The middle classes bore, as in Roman times, the burden of taxation, and were consequently bankrupt and ruined: the land was still in the hands of the few, and the large estates were indifferently cultivated by crowds of miserable slaves, whose dreary lives were brightened by no hope of improvement or dream of release before death. The very clergy, who preached about the brotherhood of Christians, now that they had become rich and owned great estates, joined in the traditional policy and treated their slaves and serfs as badly as any Roman noble. The rich were sunk in the same slough of sensuality that had proved the ruin of the Romans, and the vices of the Christian Goths rivalled, if they did not exceed, the polished wickedness of the pagans. "King Witiza," says the chronicler, anxious to find some reason for the overthrow of the Christians by the Saracens, "taught all Spain to sin." Spain, indeed, knew only too well how to sin before, and Witiza may have been no worse than his predecessors; but the Goths gave a fresh license to the general corruption. The vices of barbarians show often a close resemblance to those of decayed civilization, and in this instance the change of rulers brought no amelioration of morals.[1]

Such was the condition of Spain when the Mussulman approached her borders. A corrupt aristocracy divided the land among themselves; the great estates were tilled by a wretched and hopeless race of serfs; the citizen classes were ruined. On the other side of the straits of Gibraltar were the soldiers of Islam, all hardy warriors, fired with the fervour of a new faith, bred to arms from their childhood, simple and rude in their life, and eager to plunder the rich lands of the infidels. Between two such peoples there could be no doubt as to the issue of the fight; but to remove the possibility of doubt, treachery came to the aid of the invaders.