Chapter LXI: Section 3: The Church of Spain and Portugal

[Sidenote: Conquest of Spain by the Moors.]

Before the end of the sixth century, the Visigoths, who had settled in what is now Spain and Portugal, had been converted from Arianism to the Catholic Faith. In A.D. 711 the Mahometan Moors crossed over from Africa to the South of Spain, and in A.D. 713 all the Peninsula, except the small mountain district of Asturias, had fallen into their hands. The more independent and hardy amongst the Spanish Christians took refuge in this inaccessible portion of the country, whilst others dwelt amongst the Moors, and appear for a time to have been allowed the exercise of their religion unmolested by any systematic persecution. [Sidenote: Persecution of the Spanish Church.] About A.D. 830, however, the policy of the Moorish conquerors underwent a change, and during the next hundred years multitudes of Christians in Spain suffered martyrdom for their faith. [Sidenote: The re-conquest of Spain by the Spaniards.] After the death of Hachem, the last Caliph of Cordova (A.D. 1031), and the subdivision of his dominions, the Christians of Asturias succeeded in making head against their oppressors, and gradually won back from them district after district, until Ferdinand III. (A.D. 1214-A.D. 1252) succeeded in reducing the Moorish possessions to the single province {127} of Grenada. This last remnant of Mahometan dominion was wrested from the Moors A.D. 1492, and Spain, as well as the separate kingdom of Portugal, was once more entirely Christian. [Sidenote: Effect of national circumstances on Spanish Christianity.] It is perhaps hardly to be wondered at, that the continual state of religious warfare in which Spain was so long plunged should have given a somewhat stern character to Spanish Christianity. The Inquisition, when introduced into Spain by the mistaken zeal of the good Queen Isabella towards the end of the fifteenth century, found a readier welcome than elsewhere, and gained an additional tinge of severity in a country which had been brought into such close contact with one of the deadliest forms of unbelief.

[Sidenote: The Spanish Liturgy.]

The original Liturgy of Spain was, like the ancient Liturgy of France, a form of that used at Ephesus. It received the name of Mozarabic, from having been in use by Christians living _in the midst of Arabs_, or Moors, and was not discontinued in the Church of Spain until A.D. 1080, when after much resistance on the part of the Spaniards it was abolished by order of Alphonso VI., King of Castille and Leon, under the influence of Pope Gregory VII., and the Roman rite substituted throughout the country.