sidered Christians, certainly continued attached to their earlier beliefs and customs. Among these the worship of megalithic monuments was conspicuous, for as we have seen it was still in vogue in the seventh century. At the first Council of Toledo in 681 the ecclesiastics admonished "cultores idolorum, venerator es lapidum, accensores facularum, excolentes sacra fontium vel arborum," and another Council, held there in 692, repeats the admonition in almost identical terms.[1]
Towards the close of the seventh century, then, the peasants of Spain were to all intents and purposes pagans, worshipping idols and megalithic monuments, and this is likely to have been specially true for Galicia. Suddenly a great change occurred. The Saracens, starting out from Arabia to spread Islam throughout the world at the point of the sword, had passed rapidly along the North African coast, and threatened the peninsula from the south. In 710 Tarif, one of their leaders, made a raid across the narrow straits and landed with 500 men on the rock which still bears the corrupted name of Gebel-Tarifa, and the following year the Saracens from Morocco came to stay and to set up the rule of the Moors in Spain. Neither Roman governor nor Visigothic nobles could stem the tide of their advance, and before twenty years were out they had virtually conquered the whole peninsula, and would have brought France also beneath Moorish sway had they not been repulsed at Tours in 733 by Charles Martel. The Visigothic nobles fought hard and were all but exterminated, the peasants exchanged a nominal Christianity for a nominal Mohammedanism, and doubtless continued as before to worship their megalithic monuments, free from admonishment from their new masters, who held the Kaaba sacred. The few Visigoths who survived retreated to the mountains, and eventually settled in the north-west, where they kept alive the tra-
- ↑ Fergusson (J.), op. cit. 24, fn. 5.
