Here are some excerpts from a book named 'Blood and Faith, The Purging of Muslim Spain 1492-1614'. From Page 7:
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In 589, the Gothic ruling caste in Spain had converted from Arian Christianity to Catholicism and established a pwoerful Iberian Christian kingdom with its capital in Toledo...........The Visigothic king Rodrigo was campaigning in the Basque country when he learned of the Muslim presence.....the two armies clashed somewhere near the Guadalete River.....the Visigoths were routed and Rodrigo himself was killed, together with most of his leading warriors.
Removed from the main centres of Muslim and Christian power, al-Andalus evolved from a remote frontier province of the Islamic empire into a unique Moorish-Iberian civilisation whose components included Syrian and Yemeni Arabs, North African Berbers, the Slavic "slave soldiers" known as Saqaliba, who came to Spain as servants of the caliphs and later formed their own fiefdoms, Visigothic and Hispano-Roman Christians, and the largest Jewish population of Europe.
Together with Muslim Sicily, al-Andalus became an intellectual conduit between European Christendom and the Arab world, which enabled Europe to reestablish its broken connections with its own classical heritage. Baggage trains from Baghdad and Damascus brought Arabic books and manuscripts from the libraries of Baghdad and Damascus into Spain, togethher with translations of classical Greek and Latin texts that had largely vanished from Europe since hte collapse of Roman power.........a transfer that arguably helped lay the basis for the European Renaissance.......
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