Tariq crosses the strait

Part oneA rock at the edge of Europe

Stand on the high ground above the Strait of Gibraltar on a clear day and you can see two continents. At its narrowest the water between Morocco and Spain is about fourteen kilometres wide. A strong swimmer could not cross it, but a fleet of small ships could do so in a morning.

By the year 711 the Muslims of North Africa had been in the west for more than a generation. Musa ibn Nusayr governed the province of Ifriqiya for the Umayyad caliph al-Walid in Damascus, and his writ ran all the way to the Atlantic. Most of the Berbers, the native people of the region, had by then accepted Islam, and many served in his armies. Arab armies had first entered North Africa in the 640s, and around 670 they founded the garrison city of Kairouan, in what is now Tunisia. Resistance among the Berber peoples lasted for decades. Once they joined the new faith, though, they quickly became its soldiers and its commanders. Across the water lay the Visigothic kingdom, which had ruled most of the peninsula from its capital at Toledo for two centuries.

The man Musa chose to lead the crossing was Tariq ibn Ziyad. He was a Berber, not an Arab, and he commanded the garrison at Tangier. Tradition says he sailed with about seven thousand men, most of them Berbers like himself. They landed in the spring or early summer of 711, below a great limestone rock. The Arabs called it Jabal Tariq, the Mountain of Tariq. Over the centuries the words wore down into the name Gibraltar.

The kingdom they faced was weaker than it looked. The Visigothic nobles had a long habit of fighting over the crown, and King Roderic had taken the throne only recently, against rivals who did not accept him. The Jews of the peninsula had suffered under harsh royal laws for generations. The peasants had little reason to die for the nobility that taxed them.

The main figures

• Tariq ibn Ziyad: the Berber commander who led the first crossing.
• Musa ibn Nusayr: governor of Ifriqiya, who sent him and later followed.
• Roderic: the last Visigothic king of Toledo.
• Al-Walid: the Umayyad caliph in Damascus.

Part twoFrom a landing to a province

Roderic gathered his army and marched south. The two forces met in July 711, in a battle usually placed near the river Guadalete in the south. Accounts differ on the exact site and on many details. What is clear is the result. Roderic's army broke, and the king himself disappears from the record.

Tariq did not turn back. He split his force and sent parties to Cordoba and to other towns, and he marched on Toledo itself. Many towns made terms rather than fight, and in several of them the Jewish community is said to have welcomed the newcomers. In 712 Musa crossed with a larger army of his own, and the two commanders worked their way through the peninsula in the next two years. Around 714 the caliph al-Walid summoned both of them to Damascus. The expedition that had begun as a raid had become the conquest of a country.

What did ordinary people in Iberia notice first? Probably very little. Their farms, their taxes and their churches stayed much as they were, and the new rulers were few in number. Christians who lived under Muslim rule and adopted Arabic speech and many Arab customs, while keeping their faith, came to be called Mozarabs. They were a large community for centuries.

Arabic has a word for this kind of arrival: fath, an opening. It fits Iberia better than the word "conquest" alone, because so much was settled by agreement. A treaty made in 713 with a Visigothic lord named Theodemir, whom the Arabs called Tudmir, survives in the records. He kept his towns in the south-east, his people kept their churches and their own law, and they paid a fixed tax in return for protection. Treaties like it were made across the peninsula.

By about 718 almost the whole of Iberia was under Muslim governors, apart from the mountains of the far north, where a small Christian kingdom began to form in Asturias. Later Spanish tradition places its first success against a Muslim force at Covadonga, around 722, though historians debate the date and the scale. The Muslims called the new province al-Andalus. Its governors pushed over the Pyrenees into southern France, and in 732 an army was turned back between Tours and Poitiers. After that the great expansion stopped, and the peninsula became the western edge of the Umayyad world.

The early years were not easy. The settlers were mostly Berber soldiers with an Arab ruling class above them, and the two groups quarrelled over land and rank. Conversion was gradual and went on for centuries. The Muslim population grew mainly because the people of Iberia chose, one family at a time, to join the faith.

The expedition that had begun as a raid had become the conquest of a country.

WatchThe lecture for this chapter

Lecture Islamic GuidanceHow Islam Came To Spain And Portugal (opens on YouTube)

The mapWhere it happened

• Tangier
• Ceuta
• Jabal Tariq (Gibraltar)
• the river Guadalete
• Cordoba
• Toledo

This map is a simple sketch to help you picture where events took place. Positions, distances and borders are approximate, so please use it for reference only, not as an accurate map.

SourcesSources for this chapter