Sophia’s Visions · Other lives · Asturias, 711–737 · B2–C1
Pelayo: the King of the Mountains
Sophia’s Visions: seven centuries from now, a great kingdom will fall in a single battle, and in the mountains of the north a handful of men will refuse to surrender. Speculating about the past (they must have…, it can’t have been…, the chronicler may have…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight I saw a cave, Marcos, high in green mountains above a river, and a few hundred men standing in front of it, watching an army come up the valley.
A few hundred against an army? I know how that ends.
So did the army. They were wrong. A kingdom began in that valley, and it is still remembered: the heirs to the throne of Spain carry its name to this day.
And who told the story? The men in front of the cave, or the army coming up the valley?
For two centuries, Hispania had been ruled by the Visigoths, a Germanic people who had become Christian and governed from Toledo. In 711, an army from North Africa, part of the vast Umayyad caliphate ruled from Damascus, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar. The Visigothic king, Roderic, was defeated and killed near the river Guadalete, and within a few years almost the whole peninsula was under Umayyad rule, as al-Andalus.
Only the high, rainy mountains of the north were hard to hold. There, in what is now Asturias, local people and Visigothic refugees had to choose: submit and pay tribute, or resist.
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