near Cadiz. It is said that
Roderick, the degenerate successor of Alaric, went into battle in a
robe of white silk embroidered with gold, sitting on a car of ivory,
drawn by white mules. Tarik's men, who were fighting for victory or
Paradise, overwhelmed the Goths; Roderick, in his flight, was drowned
in the Guadalquivir, and his diadem of pearls and his embroidered robe
were sent to Damascus as trophies.

Count Julian urged that the victory be immediately followed up by Musa
before there was time for the Spaniards to rally. One after another
the cities of Toledo, Cordova, and Granada capitulated, the persecuted
Jews flocking to the new standard and aiding in the conquest of their
oppressors.

As well might one have held back the Atlantic from rushing through
that canal upon the isthmus, as to have stayed the inflowing of the
Saracens through the breach made by "the Traitor," Count Julian!
In less than two years Spain was a conquered province, rendering
allegiance to the Khalif at Damascus, and the _Moor_,--as the
followers of the Prophet in Morocco were called,--reigned in Toledo.

It was in the year 412 that Ataulfus, with his haughty bride Placidia,
had established his Court at Barcelona, and Romanized Spain became
Gothic Spain. In 711--just three centuries later--the Visigoth kingdom
had disappeared as utterly beneath the Saracen flood as had its
ill-fated King Roderick under the waters of the Guadalquivir; and
fastened upon Christian Europe was a Mahommedan empire; an empire
which all the combined powers of that continent have never since been
able entirely to dislodge. From that ill-omened day in 709, when Tarif
set foot on the Spanish coast, to this June of 1898, the Mahommedan
has been in Europe; and remains to-day, a scourge and a blight in the
territory upon which his cruel grasp still lingers.

CHAPTER IX.

Tarik and his twelve thousand Berbers,[A] or Moors, had at one stroke
won the Spanish Peninsula. The banner of the Prophet waved over every
one of the ancient and famous cities in Andalusia, and the turbaned
army had marched through the stubborn north as far as the Spanish
border. As Musa, intoxicated with success, stood at last upon the
Pyrenees, he saw before him a vision of a subjugated Europe. The
banner of the Prophet should wave from the Pyrenees to the Baltic! A
mosque should stand where St. Peter's now stands in Rome! So, step
by step, the Moslems pressed up into Gaul, and in 732 the