ABSTRACT
At the moment when the Arab invasion came to throw Spain into turmoil, society was in process of organization under the Gothic kings. From the fifth century to the thirteenth, from Orosius and Isidore of Seville to Roderick of Toledo and Lucas of Tuy, all literature was Latin. The Mussulman conquest was an essential factor in medieval Spain. In comparison with this civilization, so brilliant at times, especially under the Omayyads, that of the little Christian kingdoms appears, at the outset, crude and rudimentary. At the end of the 12th century, when Spanish literature really begins, the five great Christian States were Castile, Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia and Portugal. Romanesque art flourished during the 11th and 12th centuries, and all the varieties of it are represented in northern Spain. Under the Asturian monarchy, artistic efforts were merely clumsy, incoherent imitations of Roman, Visigothic or Byzantine models.
