““In any case, the royal remains of the last Goth to rule Hispania were never found-only his magnificent white stallion, still saddled and dead in a ditch. A batch of heads, severed from the necks of ranking Visigoths, was collected and wrapped in camphor-soaked cloth to send along with bejeweled hilts and gold rings to Damascus as tributary proof of the scale of the Believer's victory. Once again in history, a civilization's fate was determined by an encounter in which the objective factors of location, numbers, and equipment were decidedly not favorable to the winners.””
