Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/153

 THE WEST: FROM CLOVIS TO CHARLEMAGNE 141 In fact the inclination of the Teutons was to accept a war leader, but to pay very small respect to the authority of a king in time of peace. Their tribes consisted of freemen and nobles. The king was not much more than the principal noble; and the noble who wished his own rights to be respected, respected the rights of the freemen who were attached to his person. On the other hand the nobles were not too scrupulous in their dealings with each other, while they were ready to resent any claim to superiority on the part of a neighbour. The result was that in Spain every powerful noble became a petty prince on his own account, and no national organisation was achieved. There was neither a strong monarchy, nor, as at Rome, a solid oligarchical body working together for the common welfare subject to the interests of the ruling order. The nobles maintained established law and custom each in his own territory, but they made war on each other as the fancy took them. In Spain they had no common enemy to resist, and the disintegration steadily increased. But by the beginning of the eighth century the Saracens on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar were establishing their dominion. They turned greedy eyes towards 2. The Sara- Spain; in 710 a.d. they landed a great host on cens. the Spanish shores. The Gothic army had gathered to meet them, but no longer had the character of the mighty warriors who had followed Alaric to Rome. At Guadalete for seven whole days a desperate battle raged ; it ended in the total overthrow of the Goths. The Saracen flood swept over the whole Spanish peninsula, and the remnant of the Goths were penned up in the north-western corner and the mountains of the north. Thence in after time they issued again, and won back the land fragment by fragment as the centuries rolled by ; until at last, in the days of our King Henry vil, the last Moorish kingdom in Spain, Granada, was overthrown, and the Crescent was driven out of Western Europe. It is to be remembered that in later days the highest nobility of Spain claimed descent from Gothic ancestors, not from Celts or Iberians or Latins.