MERIDA, VISIGOTHIC AND ARAB

Capital  of Extremadura

Versão Portuguesa

It was one of the cities very important of the kingdom visigotic of Roman Spain. From his your foundation, she occupied a strategic point placed in the confluence of rivers and ways. Your political and religious level only was overcome by Toledo. The city suffered an intense transformation in this period, there being constructed important buildings, which unfortunately did not come to the present day. The Moslem invasion and the fights that happened with posteriority, devastated the heredity visigotic of the city, being able to observe his magnificence by means of the spectacular remains that the archeologists rescued of your soil. These vestiges, they can astonish in the Museum Visigotic, unjustly

MÉRIDA ARAB

With the Arab invasion the future of the city becomes uncertain. After the first invading wave after Guadalete's battle, the cities visigotics were giving up themselves without scarcely resistência, well because the supporters of Witiza were his allies or because those of Don Rodrigo moved retired for the lands of the North. Incorporated into the campaign Muza, this one initiates the conquest of these centers of examination meeting an unusual and unforeseen resistance in Merida, which met involved in a long siege that lasted very of one year, up to his capitulation in the summer of 713.

They did not run good times for the city, since successive internal revolts, they will go to that Abderramán II in the year 842, powerful army was attacking the seat with um, causing an enormous devastation, which was the beginning of your decadence and the loss of your political, religious and strategic power.

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Antonio García Candelas        Suggestions and impressions