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Updated: June 17, 2025
Although the Moors held Spain for over seven hundred and fifty years, they never had possession of the entire country. In the North, fragments of the Visigothic Christian kingdoms survived, and at length these grew into a strong power destined to drive out the Arabs, who had so long made the Spanish peninsula a seat of Mahometan civilization.
After that they had no overt opposition to fear. To the Italians there was little difference between Odoacer and Theodoric. Nor was submission inconsistent with the loyalty demanded by the Eastern Empire; since for the moment it suited imperial policy to accept the Visigothic King as the successor of Odoacer.
One of the most ancient existing specimens of this mode of caligraphy in the fourth century, the Codex Argenteus of Ulphilas, the inventor of the Visigothic alphabet, was discovered in the library of Wolfenbüttel, and is now at Upsal, Sweden.
He blockaded him in the plain of Pholoe, but for some reason, not easily comprehensible, he did not press his advantage, and set free the hordes of the Visigothic land pirates to resume their career of devastation.
The Asturica Augusta of the Romans was the capital of the northern provinces of Asturias and the central point of four military roads which led to Braga, Aquitania, Saragosse, and Tarragon. During the Visigothic domination, and especially under the reign of Witiza, Astorga as well as Leon, Toledo, and Tuy were the only four cities allowed to retain their walls.
In the south, on the two banks of the Rhone and the Garonne, along the Mediterranean, and by the Pyrenees, it had encountered all manner of institutions, traditions, religions, and disbeliefs, Greek, Roman, African, Oriental, Pagan, and Mussulman; the frequent invasions and long stay of the Saracens in those countries had mingled Arab blood with the Gallic, Roman, Asiatic, and Visigothic, and this mixture of so many different races, tongues, creeds, and ideas had resulted in a civilization more developed, more elegant, more humane, and more liberal, but far less coherent, simple, and strong, morally as well as politically, than the warlike, feudal civilization of Germanic France.
The Visigothic raids, which were in fact decisive, succeeded because the military defences of the Western Empire were already strained to breaking-point; and because the Roman armies were not only outnumbered, but also paralysed by the jealousies of rival statesmen, and divided by the mutinies of generals aspiring to the purple.
It was not to be wondered at that, when the Saracen invasion took place, the Jews did whatever they could to promote its success. They, like the Arabs, were an Oriental people, both traced their lineage to Abraham, their common ancestor; both were believers in the unity of God. It was their defense of that doctrine that had brought upon them the hatred of their Visigothic masters.
Apart from which cause, we see that the fine old Visigothic races in Spain found them full employment up to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, which reign first created a kingdom of Spain; in that reign the whole fabric of their power thawed away, and was confounded with forgotten things.
The black pig was probably the original, prehistoric Iberian pig, or of an Italian strain imported by the Romans; but I do not offer this as more than a guess. The Visigothic or Arabic pig showed himself an animal of great energy and alertness wherever we saw him, and able to live upon the lean of the land where it was leanest.
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