The civil system of the infant monarchy was no further advanced. The exiled subjects of Roderick still retained, in some measure, the maxims and traditions of government. The people, among whom their lot was cast and who greatly outnumbered them, had, however, little knowledge of, and no reverence for, the Visigothic Code. The duchy of Cantabria, to which the latter mainly belonged, was never more than a nominal fief of the kingdom of Toledo. The fueros, or laws, by which they had been governed through successive foreign dominations of the Peninsula were of immemorial antiquity. Their long-preserved independence had nourished in their minds sentiments of arrogance and assumed superiority which were often carried to a ridiculous extreme. These influences had no small share in the subsequent formation of the Spanish constitution. Thus, in a desolate and barren region; insignificant in numbers; destitute of resources; ignorant of the arts of civilization; without military system or civil polity; with neither court, hierarchy, nor capital; animated by the incentives of religious zeal and inherited love of freedom, a handful of barbarians laid the foundations of the renowned empire of Spain and the Indies. The bustle which necessarily attended the warlike preparations of Pelayus was not long in attracting the attention of the government of Cordova. Information was conveyed to Anbasah-Ibn-Sohim, the representative of the Khalif, concerning the league that had been formed between the fugitive Goths and the denizens of the Asturias, as well as of the objects of the expedition which was organizing in the northern wilderness. The Emir, whose contempt for his enemies, added to a profound ignorance of the character of the country they inhabited, induced him to underestimate the difficulties to be encountered in their subjection, did not deem it worth his while to attack them in person. He naturally thought little was to be apprehended from the irregular hostilities of a few refugees who had retired with precipitation at the approach of the Moorish cavalry, united with a horde of vagabond shepherds and hunters unaccustomed to discipline and inexperienced in warfare. In his blind depreciation of the prowess of his adversaries, Anbasah-Ibn-Sohim left out of consideration many circumstances which influenced, in a marked degree, the subsequent fortunes of the Moslem domination in Spain. Their numerical inferiority was of trifling moment in a country thoroughly familiar to its inhabitants, but hitherto unexplored by the Saracens, and whose steep and tortuous pathways afforded such facilities for resisting an intruder that points might readily be selected where a score of men could, with little effort, successfully withstand a thousand. The Emir took no account of the mists which always enshrouding the sierra often entirely obscured the landscape; of the dense forests which might so effectually conceal the ambuscade; of the sudden and destructive rise