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In 711 Muslim armies went north into Spain, ultimately occupying it and crossing the Pyrenees into France. In 732 Charles Martel, in a defining battle, defeated the Muslim armies, forcing them back behind the mountains and confining them to the Iberian Peninsula. Had Martel lost that battle, Europe would have been a very different place.
Europe developed the concept of merit. If reason was the only standard by which to judge men, then those men who had reason should rule.
opened the door to the superiority of the most persuasive, not the most rational.
The Enlightenment increasingly dispensed with religion in the name of progress, and in the end, it was, as Peter Gay put it, a form of paganism.
Romantic nationalism magnifies a sense of greatness and a sense of victimization because it is about beauty more than about reason.
The European peninsula was occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union, its sovereignty compromised. Over the next decades its empire would disintegrate and its global power disappear.
