emperors, the price was the transformation of the Byzantine world into an impoverished, militarized society comparable with that of the early medieval west.
Meanwhile, the Islamic conquests continued for a time. Arab forces penetrated central Asia to the frontiers of India and China, and to the west swept through North Africa. In 695 they seized Carthage, the capital of a Byzantine province which had fallen on hard times as a result of Moorish raids, religious dissensions, and the encroachment of the desert. In 711 they turned their attention to Spain, and after a single battle the Visigothic kingdom lay at their feet.
Ironically the other Germanic kingdoms were strengthened by the Islamic onslaught. Byzantium was forced to turn in on itself, and any hopes it had of reasserting its authority in the west were dashed. The most obvious beneficiary was the Lombard kingdom, and by 643 an aggressively nationalist king, Rothari, rallied his people by issuing a code of Lombard law and overcoming Byzantine outposts in Liguria and the Veneto. By around 680 the empire was forced to make a treaty recognizing the Lombard kingdom, and the subsequent conversion of the Lombards to Catholicism helped to reconcile their Roman subjects to their rule.
The relief afforded by Byzantium's tribulations to Visigothic Spain proved shorter-lived. The Visigoths remained staunchly anti-Byzantine in spite of their imitation of imperial ceremonial and coinage and their conversion to Catholicism in 586. The Church was permitted to hold regular councils which legislated on a wide range of secular and religious matters and which strove to uphold the authority of the king as God-given ruler. One architect of this policy of co-operation was the great scholar-bishop, Isidore of Seville, whose historical works display a patriotic pride in Spain and an antagonism to the deceitful and unmanly Romani. The question remains why such a sophisticated monarchy, the only Germanic kingdom able to maintain a land-tax, crumbled so quickly in the face of Arab invasion. Factors such as succession problems and the alienation of the Jewish minority played their part but at the root of the fall of this 'despotism tempered by assassination' lay a weak-
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