Less than fourteen months sufficed for the complete and irrevocable overthrow of the Visigothic empire. Within two years, the authority of the Moslem was firmly established from the Mediterranean to the Pyrenees. History presents no similar instance of the celerity, the completeness, the permanence of conquest. Political discord, social disintegration, the uncertainty of government, the insubordination of the noble, the rapacity of the priest, the despair of the slave, were among the most important aids to Mohammedan success. The aspirations of all not included in the privileged orders were repressed by the inexorable tyranny of caste. The middle class, from whose exertion and industry is necessarily derived the prosperity of a nation, had long been absorbed by the vast body of serfs whose labors contributed to the wealth, and whose numbers swelled the retinues, of the palatine and the bishop. The same conditions prevailed which had three centuries before heralded the fall of the Roman Empire. Force dominated everything. The spirit of individual freedom, the most prominent feature of the Teutonic constitution, had become extinct. The royal prerogative was subordinated to the claims of the nobility, the latter--not, however, without protest--had fallen under the dominion of the priesthood. The prospect of affluence, the enjoyment of power, the indulgence of luxury, were most easily obtained through the avenues of ecclesiastical preferment. A long peace, attributable largely to geographical isolation, had removed alike the necessity for martial exercises and the incentives to military distinction. Concentration of power, in spite of apparent anarchy, in the end tending to the exercise of absolute despotism, had become the controlling principle of government. Yet all of these evidences of national decadence are scarcely adequate to explain the sudden collapse of a great monarchy. Disappointed ambition, organized treason, the wholesale defection of the Jews, contributed their weighty influence to hasten and complete the catastrophe. Among the Visigoths, patriotism, a quality necessarily dependent upon individual attachment to one’s country, was unknown. Public spirit had been supplanted by a thirst for authority, in the gratification of which all moral considerations were ignored. The facility with which the Peninsula was won offers a suggestive contrast to the enormous difficulties which attended its reconquest. The fate of the Visigothic domination was determined in a week. After two short years, nothing remained of its greatness but the melancholy souvenirs of an enslaved people. The conquerors, in their turn, underwent the same experience. The irreconcilable elements of which they were composed, from the very beginning disclosed the defects of their polity which portended inevitable destruction. These elements were far more active and dangerous than those that had undermined the strength of the Gothic state.