The Visigoths, or western Goths, overran Northern Italy, settled in Southern France and eventually passed over into Spain, where they established a dynasty that lasted over two centuries and until it was overthrown by the Saracens, A.D. 711. Roderick, the king of the Visigoths, went out to battle with the Saracens, arrayed in his most showy apparel, and mounted on his splendid chariot, made of ivory and set with precious stones. As the battle progressed he saw what he had good reason to believe was treachery on the part of one wing of his army and he alighted from his chariot, mounted his horse called Orelia and rode away while his soldiers were being butchered. He was the last of the Gothic dynasty. There had been a battle between the navies of the Saracens and the Goths, A.D. 680, fifty-one years earlier, in which the fleet of the Saracens had been entirely destroyed, and at that time the Saracens occupied the whole of the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The word “Moors,” as often used to designate the people of Northern Africa, is not well chosen, for it really belongs to but one of many different tribes of different names. The term “Saracen” anciently meant only an Arab born, but since the middle ages it has come to mean any and all adherents to the Mohammedan religion, in the usage of Christian people, and is particularly apposite when speaking of a number of tribes engaged in a common cause. The people of Northern Africa were not negroes as we understand the word, but a mixture of different races. When the Phœnicians settled among them they were nomadic barbarians, possessing a country of great riches without knowing it. Under the tuition of their new masters they made great advances in many of the arts of peace and in all the arts of war. The Phœnician blood was liberally commingled with that of the natives. The blood carried the brains, and hence the beautiful structures that came from their hands and heads. No purely bred nomad ever could have conceived or constructed the Alhambra. The Phœnicians were refined and educated idolaters, as refinement and education were understood in their day, while the native people were literally barbarians. The then recent and rapid spread of Mohammedanism among all the people of Northern Africa is, on its surface, one of the most remarkable facts in history. As a religion it served to unite, under the banner of the Crescent, all who accepted it, and guaranteed to all who fell in its defense immediate admission to paradise. All who did not accept it were enemies and only fit to perish by the sword of the Saracen. The founder of this religion died A.D. 632, and seventy-nine years afterward his followers, in Northern Africa alone, won their great victory over the Gothic dynasty of Spain. When once on Spanish soil they appeared to take root there and held possession of a large part of Spain for nearly nine hundred years.