ABSTRACT
The overwhelming rapidity of its propagation was no less surprising than the immensity of its conquests. It took only seventy years from the death of Mohammed (632) to spread from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. Nothing could stand before it. At the first blow it overthrew the Persian Empire (637-644); then it deprived the Byzantine Empire, one by one, of each of the provinces which it attacked: Syria (634-636), Egypt (640-642), Africa (698), and Spain (711). The Visigoths had retaken Spain from the Byzantines, and their last king, Roderick, fell in the battle of Cadiz (711).
