The romantic legends of a later generation tell a lurid tale of the wickedness of king Roderic, how he violated the daughter of count Julian, the governor of Ceuta, and how the outraged father betrayed his fortress, the key of the straits, to the Moors, and guided them over to the shores of Andalusia. All this is purely unhistoric. There is no reason for believing that Roderic was better or worse than his predecessors; of his character we know nothing: his very existence is only vouched for by a name and date in the list of Gothic kings, and by a few very rare coins. This much we know, that ere he had been eighteen months on the throne the Moors landed in force at Calpe, thenceforth to be known as Jebel-Tarik (Gibraltar), from the name of their leader. They began to lay waste Andalusia, and Roderic came out against them at the head of the whole host of Visigothic Spain, which must now have been composed—as the laws of Wamba show us—of a few wealthy counts and bishops heading a great multitude of their serfs and dependants. The levy of the Visigoths proved far less able to resist the Moslems than had been the troops of Byzantium. [Sidenote: Battle of the Guadelete, 711.] On the banks of the Guadelete, near Medina Sidonia, Tarik gained a decisive victory. Roderic was slain or drowned in the pursuit, the Gothic army dispersed, and without having to fight any second battle the invaders mastered Spain. In less than two years (711-13) Tarik and his superior officer Musa, the governor of Africa, subdued the whole country; a few places, such as Cordova, Merida, and Saragossa, held out for a short space, but the Goths did not choose a new king or rally for any general effort of resistance. By 713 the only corner of Spain which had not submitted was the mountainous coast of the Bay of Biscay, where the untameable Basques and the inhabitants of the Asturias maintained a precarious liberty, preserved rather by their obscurity and the ruggedness of their homes than by the inability of the Moslems to complete their conquest. [Sidenote: Causes of the fall of the Visigoths.] So fell Visigothic Spain. The reasons are not far to seek: the kings—chosen from no single royal stock, but creatures of a chance election—had become powerless, the mere slaves of their clergy; the great nobles were disloyal and turbulent; the smaller freeholders had disappeared; the great mass of serfs had no heart to fight for their tyrannical masters. The State combined the weakness of a land under ecclesiastical governance with the turbulence of extreme feudalism. It would have fallen before the first strong invader in any case; if the Moor had not crossed the straits, Spain would probably have become an appanage of the Frankish realm under the mighty Mayors of the Palace, or the still mightier Charles the Great. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XIV