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By Root 1200 0

was inconsequential. Ships constantly crisscrossed between the harbors of North Africa and the ports of southern Spain. The richness and abundance of Spain proved an irresistible lure.4 Thus in the same decade, 710–20, that the Muslim armies encamped before Constantinople for the second time and were defeated, in the West their coreligionists were victorious beyond their wildest imagining. We know the outcome—the seizure of almost all the land from the southern Spanish shore to the Pyrenees (and beyond)—but the process of conquest remains shrouded in mystery. As in the East, the first contact of Muslims and Christians did not attract a chronicler until decades after the event.5

Some facts are undisputed. In 710, an advance party of Berber soldiers was ferried in four small ships across the ten miles of water to an island called Las Palomas, just off the Spanish coast, close to modern Tarifa.6 The commander, Tarif bin Malik, had only 400 infantrymen and 100 horsemen. They were lightly armed, carried only a minimum of food and water, and no heavy equipment. Nonetheless, meeting with virtually no resistance, they soon filled their ships with a huge amount of plunder. Tarif’s sortie indicated that a raid in strength on the Spanish mainland would yield rich pickings. In the following year, his superior commander in Tangier, Tariq bin Zayid, mounted a larger expedition. He sailed from the African shore early in April, and landed his 7,000 men under cover of darkness beneath the mountain that now bears his name, Gibraltar (Jebel Tariq, the mountain of Tariq). In the morning, they marched over the sandy strip separating the rocky peak from the mainland and occupied a wide circle of land beyond the small town now called Algeciras.

This was little different from any of the other speculative expeditions that had characterized the Arab conquest. In the early eighth century, Spain was ruled by a Visigothic dynasty, and although the sources are scanty, we know that the king of Spain, Roderick, quickly came south with a large army to repel the invaders. He was killed in battle not far from the point where the Muslims had landed, close to the old Roman town of Asida Caesarina. The Visigothic army melted away. After the battle there was almost no organized resistance, and Tariq, who commanded little more than 7,000 men, sent a small detachment under a trusted tribesman called Mugith al-Rumi to take Cordoba. When the band arrived on the bank of the river Guadalquivir opposite the city, they learned from a shepherd that the Visigoths had abandoned Cordoba, except for a few hundred men. Al-Rumi also discovered that there was a gap in the defenses. By night he smuggled in a handful of men, who opened the gate to the old Roman bridge. In the early morning his few soldiers took the city.

Meanwhile Tariq pressed north with all speed toward the Visigothic capital at Toledo. He was joined by his senior commander Musa ibn Nasir with much-needed reinforcements. When they reached the walls, they found the gates open and the city virtually empty. The occupation of Spain north of Toledo that followed in subsequent years met with very little more opposition than this first advance. One or two towns resisted and were sacked, but as in the Levant, the Muslim conquest seemed completely irresistible. However, at the time the loss of Spain seemed even less explicable than the loss of the East. The earliest Christian account of the fall of Spain, written about 754, put the loss into a biblical framework, much as the patriarch had done in Jerusalem a century before.7 The Christian chronicler also declared Tariq’s overlord, Musa, to be “altogether pitiless,” for he “burned fair cities, sentenced noble and leading men of the time to be tortured, and had children and nursing mothers beaten to death.” But once he had “filled everyone with such terror, some cities which remained soon sued for peace, and he, with blandishments and mockery and guile, granted these wishes.” For the most part, such agreements were fulfilled. Christian overlordship was quickly and easily