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He was doubtless the most important factor in the formation of the Spanish nation. It is probable that the Church called him over the Straits of Gibraltar as an aid against Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king, who lost his throne and his life because too deeply in love with his beautiful Tolesian mistress. Legends explain the Moor's landing differently. Sohail, as powerfully narrated by Mr.
Nothing is, however, less true. The noblemen and monarchs of Galicia, Leon, and Oviedo later of Castile, Navarra, and Aragon were so many petty lords who, fighting continually among themselves, ruled over fragments of the defeated Visigothic kingdom.
When the Romans conquered Gaul and Iberia they did not in any place drive out the ancient owners of the soil; they simply Romanized them, and left them as the base of the population. By the Frankish and Visigothic invasions another strain of blood was added, to be speedily absorbed; while the invaders took the language of the conquered people, and established themselves as the ruling class.
But in mountain-locked Roussillon and Asturias remnants of slavery persisted from Visigothic times to the seventeenth century; and in other parts of the peninsula the intermittent wars against the Moors of Granada supplied captives and to some extent reinvigorated slavery among the Christian states from Aragon to Portugal.
Whewell used to say than any to be seen now in Italy; and the old capital, Narbonne itself, was a complete museum of Roman antiquities ere Francis I. destroyed it, in order to fortify the city upon a modern system against the invading armies of Charles V. There must be much Visigothic blood likewise in Languedoc: for the Visigothic Kings held their courts there from the fifth century, until the time that they were crushed by the invading Moors.
Let us approach the city by rail. The train leaves Venta de Baños, a junction station with a village about two miles away possessing a seventh-century Visigothic church which offers the great peculiarity of horseshoe arches in its structure, dating from before the Arab invasion.
The first period reaches from before the Roman Conquest to the Visigothic domination. Originally inhabited by the Vacceos, a Celtiberian tribe, it was one of the last fortresses to succumb to Roman arms, having joined Numantia in the terrible war waged by Spaniards and which has become both legendary and universal.
On receipt of the quaestor's report a Council was held to determine the policy of the Empire towards the Visigothic king.... The empire did not feel strong enough to support Auvergne and it was decided to cede the whole territory to Euric, apparently without condition.
In Burgundy, in the northeast, in Visigothic Aquitaine the slight admixture of foreign blood had not changed the people, it was absorbed; the slight admixture of Scandinavian blood, coming so much later, in a time so degraded in government and therefore so open to natural influence, did change the Gallo-Romans of the Second Lyonesse.
After the defeat of the Huns at Chalons, and the founding of the Visigothic, Burgundian, and Frankish kingdoms in Gaul, that movement had been, if not arrested, at any rate modified, and for the moment suspended.
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