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This stuff makes me vomit.

Southern Spain was a very advanced area, Rome’s leading colony, and one that even provided a number of “Roman” writers, philosophers and emperors. After the collapse of Rome and the invasion of the barbarians, it remained an intellectual center, although beleaguered. When the barbarians converted and accepted orthodox Catholic beliefs (as opposed to Arianism), it resumed this position, and shortly before the Muslim invasion, St. Isidore of Sevilla wrote a compendium of “all human knowledge,” including Classical sources.

The Muslims who invaded, or at any rate, the ones who settled there were recently converted (at sword point) Baghdadis and Persians, both groups with very advanced pre-Islamic cultures. These cultures withered and died within about 100 years under the dead hand of Islam, but during a brief period, these rulers remained interested in Western and Asian, particularly Indian, learning. (India is the source for the concept of zero.)

Originally, they even permitted figurative art. However, these groups were considered heretical and were themselves driven out by orthodox North African Muslims.

Regardless of the ruler, Jews and Christians were enslaved and had to pay a special tax; Jews actually came out a little ahead, because most of Spain was Christian and the Muslims had need for slaves, which they took from the Christian areas rather than the smaller but wealthier Jewish communities, which they taxed heavily.

Both Jews and Christians, however, lived in a situation where the “tolerance” of Islam could be revoked at any moment and often was. The Muslims continued to make incursions throughout Spain from their southern territories, regularly collecting “protection” in the form of payments in money and young women and boys from the northern kingdoms.

Islam stifled and destroyed intellectual life. After the rather brief period where the Muslim rulers were running on their pre-Islamic cultures, things fell silent. The intellectual life of Spain was actually conducted from Toledo, under the hand of Alfonso XIII, who established the famous School of Translators, where Christian, Jewish and Arab-speaking translators worked at translating works ranging from Scripture to Aristotle to pre-Islamic Farsi and Arabic works.

The Muslim rulers lived in opulence and did whatever they wanted; the majority of the Muslim faithful who had been brought from Arab lands were impoverished peasants for whom Ferdinand and Isabel felt so sorry that they did not expel them. They were repaid by the fomenting of rebellion and attacks on Christian villages on the Mediterranean which finally resulted in all Muslims being expelled a few decades later.