General Conditions and Physical Features of the Spanish Peninsula--Various Classes of the Population--Supremacy of the Church--Tyranny of the Visigothic Kings--Fatal Policy of Witiza--Accession of Roderick--Count Julian--Invasion of Tarik--Battle of the Guadalete--Its Momentous Results--Progress of the Moslems--Arrival of Musa--His Success--Immense Booty secured by the Victors--Quarrel of Tarik and Musa--Interference of the Khalif--Submission of the Goths--Musa’s Vast Scheme of Conquest--The Two Generals ordered to Damascus--The Triumphal Procession through Africa--Fate of Musa--Causes and Effects of the Moslem Occupation of Spain. The encroaching spirit of Islam, dominated by the potent motives of avarice, ambition, and fanaticism, was not content with its marvellous achievements and the possession of two continents, it aspired to universal conquest. The submission of Africa was now complete. The sovereignty of the Byzantine Empire had vanished forever from the southern coast of the Mediterranean. The tact and military skill of Musa had won the confidence, and inspired the respect, of the treacherous, warlike, and hitherto intractable, tribes of Mauritania. A large number of the latter had embraced Mohammedanism. A still greater proportion who, either from association, policy, or conviction, professed attachment to the law of Moses, maintained an intimate correspondence with their oppressed brethren of the Spanish Peninsula. The latter in secret brooded over the accumulated wrongs of centuries, and, under an appearance of resignation, harbored designs that boded ill to the temporal and ecclesiastical tyrants of the Visigothic monarchy. The restless glance of the Arabian general had long contemplated with envy, mingled with an insatiable desire for plunder, the rich and splendid cities of ancient Bætica; its teeming mines; its pastures, with their myriads of cattle; its plains, traversed by innumerable canals and rivers; where even a careless and incomplete system of cultivation produced harvests almost rivalling in luxuriance those of the famous valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile. A strait, of less than eight miles in width in its narrowest part, now presented the sole physical impediment to the further progress of the conqueror. It was defended upon the African side by the fortress of Ceuta, whose governor was a vassal or tributary of the Visigothic king, and whose valor had rendered nugatory the efforts of the bravest Moslem captains, who, fully appreciating the strategic importance of this stronghold, had made repeated and desperate attempts to capture it. This promontory, which formed one side of the channel, familiar for ages to the Phœnicians, and supposed by the ignorant to be the end of the world, was protected from foreign intrusion by the portentous fables and prodigies invented by Tyrian artifice. Facing it, on the Spanish shore, stood the Temple of Hercules, with its dome