Umayyad Conquest of Hispania - Invasion

Invasion

According to traditional Islamic accounts, in the early 8th century an army estimated at some 10,000–15,000 combatants led by one Tariq Ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa. Ibn Abd-el-Hakem reports, one and a half centuries later, that "the people of Andalus did not observe them, thinking that the vessels crossing and recrossing were similar to the trading vessels which for their benefit plied backwards and forwards." They defeated the Visigothic army, led by King Roderic, in a decisive battle at Guadalete in 712. Tariq's forces were thence reinforced by those of his superior, the Emir Musa ibn Nusair, and went on to take control of most of Iberia.

During the period of the second (or first, depending on the sources) Arab governor Abd al-Aziz ibn Musa (714-716) the principal urban centres of Catalonia surrendered, at which time Muslim troops reached Pamplona. This submitted too, after a compromise was brokered with Arab commanders to respect the town and its inhabitants, a practice that seems to have been common in many towns of the Iberian Peninsula. The Muslim troops found little resistance and, given the situation of the communications, 3 years seems to have been a reasonable lapse of time to cover the distance to almost the Pyrenees after making the necessary arrangements for the towns' submission and their future governance.

The Chronicle of 754 states that 'the entire army of the Goths, which had come with him fraudulently and in rivalry out of hopes of the Kingship, fled'. This is the only contemporary account of the battle, and the paucity of detail led many later historians to invent their own. The location of the battle is not totally clear, but was probably the Guadalete River.

Roderic is believed to have been killed, and a crushing defeat would have left the Visigoths largely leaderless and disorganized. In this regard, the ruling Visigoth population is estimated at a mere 1 to 2% of the total population, which on one hand led to 'a reasonably strong and effective instrument of government’, however it was highly 'centralised to the extent that the defeat of the royal army left the entire land open to the invaders’. The resulting power vacuum, which may have indeed caught Tariq completely by surprise, would have aided the Muslim conquest immensely. Indeed it may have been equally welcome to the Hispano-roman peasants who, as D.W. Lomax claims were disillusioned by the prominent social divide between them and the 'barbaric' and 'decadent' Visigoth royal family

The conquering army was made up mainly of Berbers, who had themselves only recently come under Muslim influence. It is probable that this army represented a continuation of a historic pattern of large-scale raids into Iberia dating to the pre–Islamic period, and hence it has been suggested that actual conquest was not originally planned. Both the Chronicle and later Muslim sources speak of raiding activity in previous years, and Tariq's army may have been present for some time before the decisive battle. It has been argued that this possibility is supported by the fact that the army was led by a Berber and that Musa, who was the Ummayad Governor of North Africa, only arrived the following year — the governor had not stooped to lead a mere raid, but hurried across once the unexpected triumph became clear. The Chronicle of 754 states that many townspeople fled to the hills rather than defend their cities, which might support the view that this was expected to be a temporary raid rather than a permanent change of government.