[711-755 A.D.]
The story of the Moslem conquest has been already told in the fifth chapter of the history of the Arabs, in the eighth volume of this work. To that the reader is referred for the details of the invasion. The original Spanish people who had been regarded by the Goths as an inferior race unworthy of marriage, though the restriction was withdrawn shortly before the Moslems came, and the Jews, treated by the Goths as a cursed pest whom it was a virtue to torment—both welcomed the new-comers. They were rewarded with a gentleness of tolerance and a growth of intellectuality and commerce that lead one to question if the Arab domination of Europe would have been indeed the horror it is usually imagined; and if the repulse Charles Martel gave the Saracens at Tours in 732 were really the benefit to civilisation that we are wont to imagine it.
A Mohammedan Chief
The chapter on Arab civilisation in the eighth volume argues that the Arabians gave to Spain a glory and a culture of the most brilliant type, extending from the restoration of Greek letters to the awakening of modern science and commerce of the most splendid sort. When at length they were cast out of Spain, the reaction against them was itself the effort of an intolerant, tyrannous, and blood-thirsty religious system, which even in its triumph at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella distinguished itself by the greatest blot on human civilisation, the Inquisition, and by cruelties that spread zealously round the world to the enslavement and torture, often the annihilation of remote and innocent races.
It would be so easy to adduce evidence that the Christian powers have done more harm to civilisation than the Moslem, that perhaps it would be wiser to omit bigoted self-gratulations on the failure of Arab ambitions in Europe, and be content with an impartial and non-dogmatic recital of a conflict in which Europeans and Africans fought with a common greed of power and masked primeval instincts under the names of religion and patriotism. The aims of both were checked as much by internal dissensions and treacheries as by any united opposition, and in neither Christian nor Arab politics is there much food for pride in humanity. Leaving the reader to find in the previously mentioned history of the Arabs the account of Moslem rule, misrule, and feud in the regions they conquered, we may turn to the equally sordid and selfish, and at times equally lofty and heroic story of the Christians, who found refuge in rocky fastnesses and there grew slowly and painfully to a new life and a large hope.
They had much to complain of from Arab cruelty to those who would not accept the alternatives of “Koran or tribute,” but war was especially brutal in the Middle Age, and the Christians did not fail to revenge their maltreated women and children on the non-combatants of the other side. The pity one instinctively feels at the sufferings of the Christians is somewhat stifled on realising that the same sufferings had been or would speedily be visited on the Mohammedans or on other Christians at the first opportunity. The examples of clemency which are now the commonplaces, the demands of warfare, were at that time so rare and amazing that they might almost be said to be always due to the eccentricity of the conqueror. But to take up the story of the Christian Reconquista:
Roderic was miscalled “the last of the Goths,” for there were two Gothic rulers to succeed him. In the southeast Theodomir made peace with the Arabs; reigned as a vassal; and was succeeded in 743 by the Gothic Atanagild, whose realm was absorbed by Abd ar-Rahman in 755. In the northwest was Pelayo, who made a great name on small capital.[a]