Battle of Guadalete - Legend

Legend

Among the legends which have accrued to the history of the battle, the most prominent is that of Count Julian, who, in revenge for the rape of (or affair with) his daughter Florinda (the later Cava Rumía or Doña Cava) by Roderic while the youth was being raised at the palace school, supposedly lent Ṭāriq the necessary ships for launching an invasion. That the Arabs already possessed sufficient naval forces in the western Mediterranean is attested by their activities against the Balearic Islands. While the rape (and the name of his daughter) are universally disregarded, the Count Julian of the Arabic histories has been identified with a North African Catholic named Urban who appears in the Chronicle of 754. This Urban accompanied Mūsā across the straits. Urban may be the Julian of legend, but more likely Julian is the legend of Urban. According to one interpretation of the Urban-Julian legend, he was a Byzantine governor of Ceuta who joined with the Arabs to raid the southern coasts of Iberia in 710 with Ṭārif. Glick has suggested that Ṭārif is an invention designed to explain the etymology of Tarifa, the ancient Julia Traducta, of which "Julian" was probably the (unnamed) Gothic count (comes julianus).

The "sons of Wittiza" that figure so prominently in later Christian sources, are likewise unhistorical. Wittiza, who is praised by the Chronicle of 754, is almost universally vilified in subsequent works, beginning with the Chronicle of Moissac around 818. The outrageousness of the accusations is proportional to the chronological distance of the narrative. Thus, Lucas de Tuy, writing in the late thirteenth century, portrays a monster, while Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, rectifying the disparate accounts, shows Wittiza commencing his reign with promise and evolving into an tyrant. The Monk of Silos around 1115 recorded that the sons of Wittiza fled from Roderic to Julian and enlisted his aid.

Among the other legends surrounding the battle is that of Roderic's arrival at the field in a chariot drawn by eight white mules. Concerning the conquest are the legends of the sealed chamber in Toledo ("la maison fermée de Tolède") and the table (or carpet, depending on the translation) of Solomon that ʻAbd al-Ḥakam alleges was also discovered in Toledo. Roderic's golden sandal was allegedly recovered from the Guadalete river. The nineteenth-century American military history writer Henry Coppée penned a history of the conquest which incorporates and retells many of the legends.