Around 409 A.D., the Roman presence in the area began to gradually contract back toward Rome, and after a transitional stage in which various provinces of Spain were substantially independent of each other, the Goths consolidated a sort of monarchy. Important to note is the diversity of the Iberian Peninsula at this point: Christians and Jews lived peaceably in the same towns.
This would end with the invasion of ruthless Muslim armies. In 711 A.D., they landed in Spain and would control, over the next several centuries, varying sections of Spain. They probably never controlled all of the Iberian Peninsula at one time; pockets of resistance often remained in the northwest.
The occupying Islamic armies made life difficult: they destroyed the synagogues of the Jews, and the churches of the Christians, and forbade the construction of any new synagogues or churches. Jews and Christians had to rise in the presence of Muslims, were not allowed to be on horseback in the presence of Muslims, and were required to wear special identifying markings on their clothing. Officially, these oppressions were recorded by the Muslims as the 'Pact of Umar' or the 'Code of Umar' ('Omar' is also a variant transliteration). Unofficially, Islamic troops assigned to occupational duty in Spain plundered and raped.
A bit of sarcastic propaganda circulated by the Muslims, and trustingly adopted by some later historians, was that the Islamic occupational armies ushered in a 'golden era of tolerance' in Spain. Historian William Chester Jordan writes:
Spain, except for a few relatively small Christian principalities in the Pyrenean north, was completely under Muslim domination from 711. The conquerors imposed their rule on a vast population of Christians and a substantial number of Jews. It is sometimes said that under Muslim rule, at least until the wars of Christian reconquest began in earnest, Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in a state of convivencia. Though always a minority throughout the period of their domination of the peninsula, the number of Muslims was steadily increasing from conversion and immigration. Confident of their continued hegemony, the argument goes, they lived amicably with Christians and Jews, even while denying them full rights. Yet all enjoyed freedom of religion, even if the religions of the conquered peoples were considered inferior to Islam. Architecture, poetry and other forms of cultural and intellectual expression in the subject communities borrowed freely from and adapted Arabic and Islamic motifs and tropes.
Thus, according to this cynically produced disinformation, the era was one of peaceful coexistence, religious freedom, and reciprocal artistic inspiration. In reality, the Jews and Christians of Spain were robbed and exploited:
Recently this picture has been criticized as idealized or even as a more or less deliberate distortion imposed on the narrative of pre-Reconquest Spanish history by liberal and anti-clerical scholars writing in the modern period. Hating what Spain was perceived to have become - a priest-ridden, racialist, and economically and politically backward society when elsewhere in Europe 'Enlightenment' came to prevail - many nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars imagined a time when the Church had little power, pureness of Christian blood or lineage was irrelevant and work and play among people of all faiths made for a prosperous and forward-looking society. But if convivencia of this sort is a myth, it remains true that the
Islamic occupational armies stationed in Spain possessed an ideology which justified violence against Jew and Christians, which sought the eventual extinguishing of "infidel" religion, and which sought the establishment of a permanent caliphate over not only the Iberian Peninsula, but over all of Europe. The Muslim vision was a Europe free of Christians and Jews and under Islamic military government. Having conquered Spain, the Muslims hoped to use it as one base from which to launch the final attacks which would destroy the rest of Europe; Italy and various Mediterranean islands would be other bases for these planned invasions. As historian Will Durant writes:
Having established their position in the Peninsula, the Moslems scaled the Pyrenees and entered Gaul, intent upon making Europe a province of Damascus. Between Tours and Poitiers, a thousand miles north of Gibraltar, they were met by the united forces of Eudes, Duke of Aquintaine, and Charles Duke of Austrasia. After seven days of fighting, the Moslems were defeated in one of the most crucial battles of history (732); again the faith of countless millions was determined by the chances of war. Thenceforth Charles was Carolus Martellus, or Martel, Charles the Hammer. In 735 the Moslems tried again, and captured Aries; in 737 they took Avignon, and ravaged the valley of the Rhone to Lyons. In 759 Pepin the Short finally expelled them from the south of France.
Having failed in their attempt to subjugate all of Europe, the Muslims contented themselves with oppressing Spain.
The emirs and caliphs of Spain were as cruel as Machiavelli thought necessary to the stability of a government; sometimes they were barbarously and callously cruel, as when Mutadid grew flowers in the skulls of his dead foes, or as when the poetic Mutamid hacked to pieces the lifelong friend who had at last betrayed and insulted him.
The physical violence of the Islamic occupiers was paralleled by intellectual violence;
philosophy was silenced, or professed the most respectable conclusions. Apostasy from Islam was punishable with death.
Despite the official propaganda concerning religious tolerance,
many churches had been destroyed, and new ones were prohibited.
To ensure that any remaining Christians did not raise skepticism toward Islam, and to nudge any remaining Christianity toward extinction, the Muslim invaders reserved for themselves
the right to appoint and depose bishops, even to summon ecclesiastical councils. The emirs sold bishoprics to the highest bidder, thought he might be a skeptic or libertine. Christian priests were liable to abuse by Moslems in the streets. Moslem theologians commented freely on what seemed to them absurdities in Christian theology, but it was dangerous for Christians to reply in kind.
Given the ruthless abuse dished out by the Islamic garrisons, the inhabitants of Spain found that even
a minor incident could lead to a major tragedy. A pretty girl of Cordova, known to us only as Flora, was the child of a mixed marriage. When her Mohammedan father died she resolved to become a Christian. She fled from her brother´s guardianship to a Christian home, was caught and beaten by him, persisted in apostasy, and was turned over to a Moslem court. The qadi, who might have condemned her to death, ordered her flogged. She escaped again to a Christian home, and there met a young priest, Eulogius, who conceived for her a passionate spiritual attachment. While she hid in a convent another priest, Perfectus, achieved martyrdom by telling some Moslems what he thought of Muhammed; they promised not to betray him, but the vigor of his exposition so shocked them that they denounced him to the authorities.
For Flora and for Perfectus, merely stating one's beliefs was enough to cause one to fear for one's life - if those beliefs were Christian. In the case of Perfectus,
the judge remanded him to jail for some months, hoping for a change of mood; none came and Perfectus was condemned to death. He marched to the scaffold cursing the Prophet as "an impostor, an adulterer, a child of hell." The Moslems gloated over his decapitation, the Christians of Cordova buried him with pomp as a saint (850).
During the year 850 A.D., and for several years following, Muslims in Spain executed many Christians, whose only crime was having stated that they were Christians. Amid such intolerance, it follows logically that intellectual life declined further, especially because some types of philosophy and astronomy were associated with Christian Europe.
Science and philosophy, in Moslem Spain, were largely frustrated by the fear that they would damage the people's faith.
The languishing of the intellect in Muslim Spain was part of a broader trend, in which Islam academically crippled itself, and left Europe's Jews and Christians to make major advancements in astronomy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and philosophy. As Spain continued to endure abuse, Muslims achieved similar invasions onto various Mediterranean islands, and occupied the southern end of the Italian peninsula for several decades in the 800's and 900's. Islamic armies also advanced westward across Asia Minor, obliterating the Byzantine culture and people along the way.
This ongoing pressure - continued military incursions into Europe's southwestern, southern, and southeastern frontiers, lasting through the 700's, 800's, 900's, past the year 1000 A.D. - would finally provoke a backlash from Europe. As historian Harold Lamb writes, "a warlike Berber dynasty," the Muslims of northern Africa, continued to dominate "in Spain, and the Christians there were enduring persecutions." Travelers who left the continent were not safe:
the few pilgrims who had penetrated to Jerusalem in the last years brought back tales of hardship and insult. There also a barbarous race, the Seljuk Turks out of central Asia, had driven
into the areas around Syria and Asia Minor. Europe was attacked, if not on all side, certainly on most of them: "So in the west and the east, Moslems were crossing the once-quiescent frontier." Europe's response to several centuries of threat - centuries in which each decade contained military raids and invasions by Muslims - would be an attempt to stop this nearly ceaseless series of attacks by launching a counteroffensive or counterattack, called the Crusades.
