It was a sweeping which was not perfectly accomplished at the first passage of the broom. The heresy continued to linger on in secret places until the Church, by the use of that most cruel institution called the Inquisition, finally destroyed it. But it was an immediate result of the Crusade that the independence of the lords of the south of France was lost. Their demesnes were gathered in under the sovereignty of {174} the King of France, and all that graceful and picturesque and highly cultivated life in which the troubadours had taken so very large a part came to an end. Their music was silenced: their poems were composed no more. You may read in your history books that the "era of the Crusades" comes to an end in 1270. You will also find the Crusades divided up into first, second, third, and so on. But, as we have seen, there was a continual going to and from Palestine. There was, too, one European country in which we may say that a perpetual Crusade, or war for the Cross against the Crescent, went on without ceasing for close on 800 years. That country is Spain, from its first invasion by the Moslems, which was early in the eighth century, until their final expulsion at the end of the fifteenth. [Sidenote: The Moorish "conquest"] The Mahommedans, you may remember, even pressed on over the Pyrenees, those mountains dividing France from Spain, after they had helped in breaking up the kingdom of the Visigoths in Spain itself; but they were defeated and driven, back as soon as they came up against a strong opposition. They were able to overrun Spain just because there was no strong opposition there. But these Moslems themselves did not form any durable government in Spain. They had none of the ability for governing and organising that the Romans had shown. They had no sooner swept over the Spanish peninsula, as they did, than a Christian kingdom independent of them was proclaimed in that region of Spain which you may still see marked on the map as Asturias. But it extended much beyond the bounds of the present province so-called, reaching from the Pyrenees away to the western extremity of the peninsula. The story of Spain all this while was cut off and separated from the whole great story and did not enter {175} intimately into its making, rather as that peninsula itself is cut off from the rest by the Pyrenees. It is a story, however, which we cannot afford to neglect because there came a time, a little later, that is to say in the sixteenth century, when Spain was very masterful all over the world and played the leading role in the story. But during all these eight centuries of her crusade with the Moslem she took but little part.