A man sat his horse on the side of a mountain. He wore a circlet of bronze on his head; his beard was brown and matted from days of rough riding. A Toledo sword hung at his side. The peaks still had snow, but the chestnut, oak, beech and bracken mantled both sides of the narrow valley southward in June green. The year was 722 A.D. The place was Covadonga, a valley deep in the mountain range now known as the Picos de Europa in the north of Spain. The man’s name was Pelayo…
The Man Who Started a Seven-Hundred Year War