The ‘Mustard Seed’ That Liberated Spanish Christians from Islamic Rule

Way back when, a solitary Spaniard stood against the Islamic invasion:

Exactly 1,300 years ago, in the year 718, a little-remembered kingdom was born in Spain. It soon led to the liberation of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic occupation. To appreciate the significance of that development, we must travel back seven years earlier, to 711, when Arabs and Africans, both under the banner of Islam, “godlessly invaded Spain to destroy it,” to quote from the Chronicle of 754. Once on European soil, they “ruined beautiful cities, burning them with fire; condemned lords and powerful men to the cross; and butchered youths and infants with the sword.”....

“I will not associate with the Arabs in friendship nor will I submit to their authority,” Pelayo responded [to the dhimmi bishop]. Then the rebel made a prophecy that would be fulfilled over the course of nearly eight centuries: “Have you not read in the divine scriptures [e.g., Mark 4:30-21] that the church of God is compared to a mustard seed and that it will be raised up again through divine mercy?”....

(Here, in the Chronicle of Alfonso III, we have possibly the oldest record of the two sorts of Christians that developed under Muslim-occupied Spain: those who defied Islam and fled to the Asturian wilds, and those who accepted their lot and maneuvered within the system as subjugated dhimmis — and grumbled against their northern coreligionists for bringing Islam’s ire against them. The two will meet and compete again in centuries to come.)

National Review.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- Spaniard George Santayana.