How about Christian Asia Minor (Byzantine Empire), the Levantine states, North Africa (home of St augustine), Armenia etc. etc.??....rogator
Constantinople, now called Istanbul....WaterDragon
As I noted in my prior posts, "Visigothic Spain" was a blend of the much larger Hispano-Roman civilization (that had grown militarily soft over the course of 900 years) with the small military ruling elite of the Visigoths (that took a much shorter time to become militarilly soft in comparison to the invading Moors).
When the Moors invaded in 711 A.D., they swiftly conquered the Iberian peninsular except for northern regions of Galicia and Asturias where the Christian remnants hunkered down behind their Cantabrian mountain strongholds. These two regions were also the last regions in Spain to be conquered by the Romans. Although the Roman conquest of Spain began during the Second Punic War that ended in 202 B.C., the regions of Galicia and Asturias were not subdued until the Cantabrian Wars during the reign of Augustus.
So, the Moors did not "destroy Visigothic Spain". They failed to destroy Galicia and Asturias and that ultimately proved fatal for them. From these two remnants of Visogothic Christian Spain, the slow Reconquista of Iberia began to progress southwards.
By necessity, the descendants of the once soft and decadent late Roman Empire and the once soft and decadent Visigothic Kingdom in Spain became quite warlike in their Crusade to reconquer the land of their ancestors.
The Reconquista south of Galicia became the future Portugal. The Galician language is the mother tongue of modern Portuguese. The Reconquista south of Asturias became the future Castile.
As to the Visigoths, they were bred into oblivion by the much larger Hispano-Roman society they had once militarily defeated. They survived only as a few linguistic quirks and by the fact that future Spanish Kings had the affection of claiming descent from them as the origin of their kingly rights.
Although it took until 1492, the Reconquista that began with unconquered Galicia and Asturias eventually reconquered every square inch of Spanish soil from the Moors.
Such was not the case in the Islamic conquests of Asia minor. The Christian lands of Anatolia, Egypt and the Holy Land itself fell to the Muslim sword. European Crusades to bring these lands back into Christendom ultimately ended in failure. After the failure of the Crusades, the Muslim invasions spread to Europe itself destroying the Byzantine Empire and eventually reaching the gates of Vienna. Although the tide was eventually turned, to this very day, the ancient Christian city of Constantinople still has it's European side under the Turkish flag.
"Visigothic Spain" was never destroyed. It survived in Galicia and Asturias and evolved itself out of the Visigothic label and simply into Christian Spain. After surving a knock down and a nine-count, Christian Spain picked itself back up and then fought back for 781 years to eventually achieve a knockout victory over Islam in the Iberian Peninsula.
Far from being a destroyed failure, Spain succeeded in waging the only European Crusade against the Muslim invasions that was totally successful.