received the tonsure that he might die as a monk: when he recovered he
refused to return to the world and abdicated the throne. His
successors were equally strict, it would seem, in obedience to the
Church's laws, often unintelligently interpreted.

[Sidenote: Persecution of the Jews.]

To these days, too, belongs one of the first and darkest blots on the
popular Christianity of the Middle Age--the persecution of Jews. The
Jews of Spain had long been restless under a government which was so
strongly ecclesiastical in its sympathies: persecuting laws oppressed
them, and they could hardly even in secret practise their religion.
Plots were constant and natural, and at last it is said that the Jews
incited the Saracens, who had overthrown the imperial power in Africa,
to cross the sea and strip from the weak Wisigoths of Spain the last
remains of their power. In 695 a Council at Toledo (the sixteenth)
determined when the plot was discovered wholly to destroy the Judaic
faith in their land. It was ordered that all grown-up Jews should be
made slaves, and all children brought up as Christians. This was the
very year of the storming of Carthage.[3] It is not to be wondered at
that the Jews gave every help they could to the infidels who, before
long, attacked the kingdom of the Wisigoths. Within twenty years
Spain, up to the very mountains of the {78} Basque land and of the
Asturias, was conquered by the followers of Muhammad, and silence fell
upon the country which had appeared to be the home of an abiding Church.

The splendid edifice which had seemed to be reared on the solid
foundations of religion and law was shattered by the repeated blows of
the Arab invasion. Why was this? The chroniclers gave answer without
hesitation--"Peccatis exigentibus, victi sunt Christiani." The Goths
(as they proudly called themselves) "have so offended Thee, O Lord, by
their pride, that they deserved a fall by the sword of the Saracen."
It was, in truth, as the great Sancho of Navarre declared in his
charter of foundation to the abbey of Albelda, "Our ancestors sinned
without scruple; they daily transgressed the commandments of the Lord,
and so to punish them as they had deserved and to make them turn to
Him, the Most Just of Judges delivered them to a barbarous people." In
truth, the mass of the land had never been converted to Catholic
Christianity at all, and a heretical society was powerless against
Moslem sincerity and swor