Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/476

458 and Portugal, we shall discover that historical causes alone have determined this curious linguistic distribution.

The three great languages in the Iberian Peninsula—Castilian or Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan—correspond respectively to the three political agencies which drove out the Moorish invaders from the ninth century onward from three different directions and from distinct geographical centers. The mountains of Galicia, in the extreme northwest, served as the nucleus of the resistant power which afterward merged itself in the Portuguese



monarchy. Castile in the central north was the asylum of the refugees, expelled from the south by the Saracens, who afterward reasserted themselves in force under the leadership of the kings of Castile. Aragon in the northeast, whose people were mainly of Catalan speech, which they had derived from the south of France, during their temporary forced sojourn in that country while the Moors were in active control of Spain, was a base of supplies for the third organized opposition to the invaders. Each of these political units, as it reconquered territory from the Moors,