It would be so easy to adduce evidence that the Christian powers have done more harm to civilisation than the Moslem, that perhaps it would be wiser to omit bigoted self-gratulations on the failure of Arab ambitions in Europe, and be content with an impartial and non-dogmatic recital of a conflict in which Europeans and Africans fought with a common greed of power and masked primeval instincts under the names of religion and patriotism. The aims of both were checked as much by internal dissensions and treacheries as by any united opposition, and in neither Christian nor Arab politics is there much food for pride in humanity. Leaving the reader to find in the previously mentioned history of the Arabs the account of Moslem rule, misrule, and feud in the regions they conquered, we may turn to the equally sordid and selfish, and at times equally lofty and heroic story of the Christians, who found refuge in rocky fastnesses and there grew slowly and painfully to a new life and a large hope. They had much to complain of from Arab cruelty to those who would not accept the alternatives of “_Koran_ or tribute,” but war was especially brutal in the Middle Age, and the Christians did not fail to revenge their maltreated women and children on the non-combatants of the other side. The pity one instinctively feels at the sufferings of the Christians is somewhat stifled on realising that the same sufferings had been or would speedily be visited on the Mohammedans or on other Christians at the first opportunity. The examples of clemency which are now the commonplaces, the demands of warfare, were at that time so rare and amazing that they might almost be said to be always due to the eccentricity of the conqueror. But to take up the story of the Christian _Reconquista_: Roderic was miscalled “the last of the Goths,” for there were two Gothic rulers to succeed him. In the southeast Theodomir made peace with the Arabs; reigned as a vassal; and was succeeded in 743 by the Gothic Atanagild, whose realm was absorbed by Abd ar-Rahman in 755. In the northwest was Pelayo, who made a great name on small capital.[a] THE ASTURIAS AND LEON UNDER PELAYO (718 A.D.) [Sidenote: [718 A.D.]] The more zealous or more independent Christians, who, after the triumphs of Tarik and Musa, were dissatisfied with the submission of Theodomir, gradually forsook their habitations in the south to seek a more secure asylum amidst the northern mountains of their country. They knew that in the same hills the sacred fire of liberty had been preserved, in defiance of Carthaginian, or Roman, or Goth; and they felt that to them was now confided the duty of reviving its expiring embers.