Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [42]
Over time both Christian and Muslim accounts of this event became tales replete with prophetic utterance, spiced with suggestions of lust and betrayal. The myths provided an explanation of how it was that Tariq, with no more than a few thousand men at his disposal, could have defeated “all the Christian fighting men of Spain,” numbered by some at 100,0. Why had God turned against his people?8 The answer was found in moral depravity that had occasioned divine wrath. The easy victory of the Berbers and their Arab commanders was partly put down by Christian writers to malign fate. But God had abandoned his people because the Visigothic rulers’ moral failures had brought them low. The theme of mordant lust leading to betrayal permeated the account. “In the royal court in Seville, they began to talk, among other things, about the beauty of women. One of those present intervened to say that no woman in the whole world was more lovely than the daughter of Count Julian,” a shadowy character, supposedly the commander of Ceuta, a Byzantine enclave in North Africa. On hearing this, the king asked his chief adviser how he “might secretly send a messenger to her so he might see her.” This man advised, “Send for Julian to come here and spend some days with him eating and drinking.” While Julian was being entertained, the king wrote a letter in Count Julian’s name, accompanied by the count’s personal seal ring, commanding the countess to come to court with her daughter Oliva. When they arrived the king seduced Oliva and “illicitly had intercourse with the girl over several days.”9
The story of the Visigothic king echoed the biblical King David brought low by his passion for Bathsheba.10 The downfall of David in the second book of Samuel began with a prophecy: “The sword shall never depart from thy house; because thou hast despised me and taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be thy wife.” The Hebrew king’s lust brought down punishment upon himself and upon his people. In Spain, all the participants in the catastrophe were equally deep in sin. But the sins of the Christians had allowed an even greater evil—the Muslim invasion—to triumph. The conquest became an elaborate metaphor.
Spain … Her songs were forgotten and her language is changed into foreign and strange words. The Moors of the host wore silks and colourful cloths which they had taken as booty, their horses’ reins were like fire, their faces were as black as pitch, the handsomest among them was as black as the cooking-pot, and their eyes blazed like fire; their horses were as swift as leopards, their horsemen more cruel and hurtful than the wolf that comes by night to the flock of sheep.11
The chronicler’s commination grew more intense and dramatic as he warmed to his task. This physical, moral, and intellectual obliteration of a whole nation, he declared, grew from the inherent evil of Islam. The chronicler was specific: no depravity was beyond these enemies of Christ.12
This was also a history confected to provide a pedigree for the future monarchs of Christian Spain.13 Within these narratives the inborn depravity of the Moors elided with the moral failures of the Visigoths, and they become as one. King Roderick was no longer a true Christian, but became like a Moor in his uncontrollable lust.14 The supreme villain was Bishop Oppa, of the tainted royal line. Oppa had allied himself with the infidels, and sought to persuade a Christian hero leading a small band of patriots—King Pelayo—to submit to the Islamic horde. In the Chronicle of Alfonso III of the Asturias, written in the late ninth century, Oppa came to Pelayo in an icy cave at Covadonga, high in the northwestern mountains. The bishop tried to persuade him to yield. To this Pelayo replied scornfully.
“Have you not read in holy scripture that the church of God can become as small as a grain of mustard and can then, by the grace of God, be made to grow again larger?” The bishop answered: “It is so written.” Pelayo said: “Christ is our hope, that by this tiny hillock which you see, Spain