The then recent and rapid spread of Mohammedanism among all the people of Northern Africa is, on its surface, one of the most remarkable facts in history. As a religion it served to unite, under the banner of the Crescent, all who accepted it, and guaranteed to all who fell in its defense immediate admission to paradise. All who did not accept it were enemies and only fit to perish by the sword of the Saracen. The founder of this religion died A.D. 632, and seventy-nine years afterward his followers, in Northern Africa alone, won their great victory over the Gothic dynasty of Spain. When once on Spanish soil they appeared to take root there and held possession of a large part of Spain for nearly nine hundred years.
Now that I have traversed the field of Spain and Northern Africa, from the first dawnings of history down to the beginning of the seventeenth century, in order to gather in all that history reveals touching the introduction and propagation of the horse in those regions, we are ready to summarize the facts that we have gleaned. At the periods of six hundred (when Carthage became independent of the mother country), four hundred, and two hundred years before the Christian era, there is undoubted evidence, over and over again, that Spain and Northern Africa were abundantly supplied with horses. Then, how is it possible that the hordes of Barbarians from Asia could have supplied these countries with horses, when they did not arrive there until several centuries after the supply is established to have existed? Take, if you please, the shortest of the periods suggested above, when Hannibal’s cavalry almost annihilated a great Roman army, two hundred and sixteen years before the Christian era. This was five hundred and seventy-two years before Arabia had any horses; and how can “the blind leaders of the blind” supply Hannibal’s cavalry with Arabian blood? When the people of Northern Africa, west of Egypt, fought their way into Spain it is not known that there was a single Arabian soldier nor a single Arabian horse in the whole army. They were all called Arabians, however, and that pretense has existed ever since.