Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/500

478 THE DECLINE AND FALL with their effects ; seven churches were appropriated to the Christian worship ; the archbishop and his clergy were at Hberty to exercise their functions, the monks to practise or neglect their penance ; and the Goths and Romans were left in all civil and criminal cases to the subordinate jurisdiction of their own laws and magistrates. But, if the justice of Tarik protected the Christians, his gratitude and policy rewarded the Jews, to whose secret or open aid he was indebted for his most important acqui- sitions. Persecuted by the kings and synods of Spain, who had often pressed the alternative of banishment or baptism, that out- cast nation embraced the moment of revenge ; the comparison of their past and present state was the pledge of their fidelity ; and the alliance between the disciples of Moses and of Mahomet was maintained till the final aera of their common expulsion. From the royal seat of Toledo, the Arabian leader spread his conquests to the north, over the modern realms of Castille and Leon ; but it is needless to enumerate the cities that yielded on his appi'oach, or again to describe the table of emerald,-^^ trans- ported from the East by the Romans, acquired by the Goths among the spoils of Rome, and presented by the Arabs to the throne of Damascus. Beyond the Asturian mountains, the mari- time town of Gijon was the term -^- of the lieutenant of Musa, who had performed, with the speed of a traveller, his victorious inarch, of seven hundred miles, from the rock of Gibraltar to the bay of Biscay. The failure of land compelled him to retreat ; and he was recalled to Toledo, to excuse his presumption of sub- duing a kingdom in the absence of his general. Spain, which, in a more savage and disorderly state, had resisted, two hundred years, the arms of the Romans, was overrun in a few months by those of the Saracens ; and such was the eagerness of submission and treat}^ that the governor of Cordova is recorded as the only chief who fell, without conditions, a prisoner into their hands. The cause of the Goths had been irrevocably judged in the field -11 In the Historia Arabum (c. 9, p. 17, ad calcem Elmacin) Roderic of Toledo describes the emerald tables, and inserts the name of Medinat Almeyda in Arabic words and letters. He appears to be conversant with Mahometan writers ; but I cannot agree with M. de Guignes (Hist, des Huns, torn. i. p. 350), that he had read and transcribed Xovairi ; because he was dead an hundred years before Novairi composed his history. This mistake is founded on a still grosser error. M. de Guignes confounds the historian Roderic Ximenes, archbishop of Toledo in the .iiith century, with cardinal Ximenes, who governed Spain in the beginning of the xvith, and was the subject, not the author, of historical compositions. 21- Tarik might have inscribed on the last rock the boast of Regnard and his companions in their Lapland journey, " Hie tandem stetimus, nobis ubi defuit orbis ".