Page:A General Sketch of Political History from the Earlist Times.djvu/154

 i 4 2 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES Meantime, however, the Saracens or Moors, as they came to be called, became lords of Spain; and set up a civilisation of The Moors their own, which was in many respects the most in Spain. advanced in Europe, although it nourished under the faith of Mohammed, not of Christ. The Moors, indeed, had hardly settled in Spain when they swept through the Pyrenees into France. There, however, they were checked, rolled back, and presently driven behind the river Ebro, which became the boundary of their domain. It was here, at Cordova, that the fugitive Ommayad Abdur Rahman set up the rival kaliphate when the Abbasides won the chieftainship of Islam in the east, in the middle of the eighth century. The Goths had overrun Italy under Alaric ; they had with- drawn again to the west under his successor. Attila the Hun 3. The na d burst into Italy and retired. Then the Papacy. peninsula had been dominated by Teutonic captains of various races at the head of Imperial legions composed of an almost entirely Teutonic soldiery : Ricimer the Sueve or Swabian, Odoacer the Herulian, and greatest of all, Theoderic the Ostrogoth. Then for a time Belisarius and Narses had restored the effective supremacy of the eastern empire. But the restoration was brief; again a Teutonic The Lorn- horde poured in, the Langobards, under their bards in chief Alboin. The Langobards, or Lombards, Italy. were a i ater an( } more barbarous wave of the tide than either Visigoths or Ostrogoths or even Franks ; and their dominion in Italy suffered from the common defect of the Teutonic races. It failed to establish central government. A Lombard, like a Gothic king, received only a temporary allegi- ance from a nobility, every member of which considered himself entitled to set up for himself a separate principality. Italy became practically a collection of petty states, habitually behav- ing as if they were independent, and only combining for some immediate common advantage. The Lombards dominated Italy, but they never mastered it. The Greek Empire still had an Italian capital, Ravenna, and a considerable hold on Southern Italy and Sicily. Rome had the prestige of the city which in