he.html

Carmen Ferreiro Esteban . Com
History of Earth

History and Legend

On Earth: Roderic, The Last Visigothic King

According to Earth records, in the year 711 of our era, King Roderic was defeated by the Arabs in the Battle of Guadalete. His crown and his clothes were found by the river bank, but his body was never recovered. Lost forever to history, that day he became legend.

But who was Roderic?

Roderic, History tells us, was the last Visigothic king. He ruled thirteen hundred years ago, in the land the Romans called Hispania and today is called Spain, a peninsula, shaped as a pentagon that hangs from the Southwestern corner of Europe into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Visigoths, a Germanic tribe from northern Europe, had come to Spain after the Fall of the Roman Empire around the year 450 A.D. The Romans called them Barbarians because they dressed in animal skins, and their men wore their hair long and didn't shave their beards. But having lived on the verge of the Empire for hundreds of years, by the time the Visigoths descended into Spain they had assimilated much of the culture of their former enemies and wanted nothing more than live like them.

The Visigoths took the Roman language (Latin), customs and laws??. But their king, unlike the Roman emperor, was only a chieftain, slightly more powerful than the council of nobles that had elected him, and to whom he had to constantly prove his worth.

The king being foremost a warrior, the Visigothic monarchy was not hereditary. But by the year 710 when King Witiza died it had become a tradition to elect the son of the previous king, if he were of fighting age. And yet, in this occasion, the nobles chose Roderic over Attika, the son of the former king. This was most unexpected as Roderic and Witiza were enemies. Several years past, Witiza had killed Roderic's father and sent Roderic into exile.

Roderic had not been king for more than a year when the Arabs and their allies the Berbers crossed into Spain from North Africa.

Although three centuries had passed since the Visigoths had come into Spain, they had remained a minority, an elite of nobles ruling over a motley population of Romans and other ethnic groups (Iberos, Celts, Vasques, Suavos, Cantabros, Astures . . .). Some of these tribes living in the northern mountains had never been totally submitted either by the Romans, or the Visigoths. And so it was that at the moment of the Arab invasion, Roderic was fighting in the high mountains of northern Spain.

Upon hearing of the invasion, Roderic came south with his army, and engaged the invaders in battle. But despite the Visigothic army being far more numerous than the Arab’s, Roderic was defeated.

The reason for the Arab’s unexpected and swift victory over the Visigoths is not clear. But legend claims that Witiza's son, Attika, and his followers defected during the battle and joined the Arab’s forces. Thus creating chaos in the Visigothic army and causing Roderic’s defeat.

One month later, the whole country had fallen to the invaders. And so in a single battle, the fate of a nation was decided and Spain became a part of the Arabian world.

Seven years after Roderic’s defeat in Guadalete, a man named Pelayo, thought by some historians to be a Visigothic noble, rebelled against the Arab’s rule in the northern mountains of Asturias and, against all odds, won a small victory in Covadonga.

This victory started the process known as Reconquista, the Spanish slow conquest of their land from the Arabs. The Reconquista lasted seven hundred years and changed the history of Spain, Europe and the whole world in unpredictable ways.

The Reconquista ended in 1492 when the King and Queen of Spain took the city of Granada, the last Arabian stronghold in the peninsula.

In that same year the Spanish supported expedition of Cristobal Colón reached the New World.

Soon the Conquistadores, the descendants of the Spaniards that had fought in the Reconquista, poured into the New World bringing in their wake the padres, the religious friars that established the Missions along the California coast. The same missions Andrea visits with her uncle, Tío Ramiro, when she first arrives in California.

Two Moon Princess