These facts were well known to the Spanish Jews who had, amidst the multiplied catastrophes afflicting their race, survived the effects of Visigothic tyranny. Notwithstanding the successive persecutions of which they had been the object, they were still numerous in the Peninsula. The phenomenal vitality of a people which, from time immemorial, has preserved its integrity under the most adverse conditions, enabled it to defy the malice of courts and the edicts of councils whose office and pastime was the pitiless extirpation of heresy. The Jews flourished in defiance of bloodthirsty laws. In many ways they evaded the effects of proscription. Thousands apostatized. Multitudes secretly purchased immunity by means of the arts of corruption. Of those who had gone into exile, the majority quickly returned and took up their residence in other provinces, where, unknown to the populace, and often with the venal connivance of civil officials and prelates, they were permitted to pursue their avocations in comparative security. The Israelitish element was so preponderant in Toledo, Lucena, and Granada, at the time of the Moorish invasion, that they were known as Jewish cities. This large population formed a separate state, an _imperium in imperio_, whose members, exasperated by the memory of intolerable suffering and sustained by the hope of retribution, were ready to embrace the first opportunity to avenge the oppression of centuries. Thus the fatal policy of the Visigoths--weak, violent, and corrupt--had introduced an organized, powerful, unscrupulous, and vindictive enemy into every province and city of their tottering empire. With their African brethren the Jews of Spain maintained an intimate and frequent correspondence. Numbers of the latter had sought a refuge beyond the sea, as their descendants did, under similar circumstances, seven centuries afterwards. The settlements of the Mauritanian coast swarmed with indigenous or exiled Hebrews, attracted thither by the superior facilities they offered to commercial pursuits. All of these shrewd and intelligent traders were perfectly familiar with the condition of the Visigothic monarchy; with its apparent splendor and actual decay; with the political and social disorganization pervading every department of the state and every rank of society; with the tyranny of the King; with the universal disaffection of the nobles; with the grasping avarice of the clergy, whose exactions spared neither the plenty of the rich nor the starving wretchedness of the poor; with the weakness of the army, whose soldiers, subsisting by pillage, had neither weapons to arm nor officers to command them; with the abject misery of the people, who, protected by none and plundered by all, insecure in the pursuit of every employment, a constant prey to licensed brigandage, with no recollection of the past but the bitter reminiscence of unprovoked and repeated injury, with no hope of the future save in the intervention of