In our previous video, we covered the Eastern frontier of the Umayyad
Caliphate during a period of unprecedented expansion under the recently-ascended Caliph
Al-Walid, as protracted conflicts in Transoxiana and Sindh pushed the borders of the Caliphate
ever further, greatly increasing the power of governor Al-Hajjaj, who as the overseer of
all the Caliph’s Eastern provinces had grown more influential than most kings. Moreover,
it was not only in Asia that the Umayyads, so recently on the brink of civil war, were seeing
renewed successes. At the same time, Muhammad ibn Kasim’s army was sweeping through Sindh, another
new frontier was being invaded thousands of miles to the West: the land of Iberia, under
the control of the Germanic Visigoths. Across such a vast area, the Caliphate as
being exposed to many different cultures, but you don’t have to invade Iberia to find
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vpn dot com slash kings and generals. The Visigothic Kingdom of Iberia could trace
its roots back to Alaric, the famous general who first fought for Emperor Theodosius against the
Franks, holding the Balkans as a Roman Foederati, or semi-autonomous ally, before his relationship
with the Empire soured, and he became the first person to sack the Eternal City in over 700 years.
The Visigoths had been one of several so-called barbarian peoples to arrive in the territory
of the crumbling Roman Empire, with various Gothic and other Germanic peoples found in great
numbers throughout the Empire and on its outskirts as slaves, soldiers, and allies. In the aftermath
of Western Rome’s fall, the Visigoths were among the first to carve out their own kingdom from
its ashes. Though Alaric’s power base had been in the Balkans, the Visigoths would migrate ever
westward following his death, at times allies of convenience to the collapsing Roman Empire and at
other times taking advantage of the West’s fall to expand their power. It would be in the Aquitaine
region of Western France that the Visigoths would first establish a true kingdom, from there pushing
into Suebi-controlled Hispania at Rome’s behest, their kingdom encompassing Aquitaine and nearly
the entire Iberian Peninsula by the death of the great warrior and lawmaker King Euric in 484.
The years that followed would be less kind, however, as easy expansion against the backdrop
of a crumbling Rome gave way to new rivalries against other powerful barbarian kingdoms,
most notably the Franks and Burgundians. It would not be long after Euric’s death, during
the reign of his successor Alaric II, that the Visigothic territories in France would fall to
these Northern rivals led by the Merovingian king Clovis, leading to the establishment of Toledo
as the new Visigothic capital. With the Pyrenees now forming a natural border, the Visigothic
kingdom would remain secure in Hispania for the next two centuries, with occasional further
conflicts with the Franks and a revanchist Eastern Roman Empire making little lasting change to
the status quo. As the 8th century dawned, though, the Visigoths would unexpectedly find
a far greater danger arising to their South. The Umayyad Caliphate’s border with the
Visigothic Kingdom had been an embattled one since their first arrival, with raids into
Southern Iberia having begun as early as 706, following the conquest of Tangier in today’s
Morocco. In fact, the campaign that would spell the end of the Visigothic Kingdom likely
began as another of these large-scale raids, with the force of some 1700 that crossed the
Strait of Gibraltar in 710 under the leadership of Tariq ibn Ziyad, governor of Tangier, being
quite sizeable for a skirmishing party but smaller than would be expected had they intended
a campaign of conquest from the beginning. But circumstances favored the Muslims:
following the recent death of King Wittiza, the Visigothic Kingdom had entered into a
succession crisis, with Roderic in control of Southern Iberia, pitted against the
poorly-documented Achila II in the North. However, this low-intensity civil war
was only indicative of larger weaknesses within the Visigothic kingdom. While the
Visigoths had ruled Iberia independently for more than two centuries at this point and
had exercised great autonomy under a weakened Rome for another century before their
independence, they had continued to rule on essentially tribal lines despite the scale
of their kingdom rendering them inefficient. The feudal systems that would allow later kingdoms
to efficiently raise armies through local vassals did not yet exist in Iberia, and while the
landed aristocratic class of the Roman period had essentially merged with the Visigothic
conquerors to form a unified ruling class, the ethnic Visigoths that still made up most
of the readily-available warriors the various Visigothic chiefs could draw on made up only
a very small minority in the larger kingdom. King Reccared’s abandonment of the Arian sect
of Christianity traditionally followed by the Visigoths in 589 in favour of their kingdom’s
majority Chalcedonian Christian faith, accompanied by the abandonment of the Gothic
tongue as a church language, had done much to unify the Visigoths with their subjects. However,
the Hispano-Roman aristocrats had not been a warrior nobility, and the kingdom lacked efficient
administrative systems by which to mobilize its peasantry to war - while every denizen of the
Visigothic kingdom was theoretically required to provide military service to the king on demand,
this duty was owed directly to the king rather than to a more accessible local intermediary,
making it a duty only too easy to ignore for the vast majority of the population outside Toledo and
the king’s own demesne. Thus, while the Caliphate had been able to vastly expand its power through
its conquests, through recruiting large numbers of converts in conquered territories for further
campaigns and by embracing the sophisticated administrative systems left behind by the Romans
and Persians - coupled with the laws laid down in the Qur’an - the military power of the Visigothic
kingdom was not fundamentally changed from the tribal armies that had fought Rome under Alaric,
its army still made up in large part by the personal warriors of Visigothic chiefs despite the
vastly larger Latin population they ruled over. In addition to the relative unpreparedness of
their foes, the Arabs had an valuable ally on their side - Count Julian of Ceuta, who was most
likely a Byzantine governor who had switched his allegiance upon his Empire’s abandonment of
North Africa rather than attempting to fight a doomed resistance against the Arabs. While it
seems he aided by providing his suzerain ships for the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar, his
larger role in the story is somewhat in question. Despite his importance in later accounts -
which claim he had made the first attack on Iberia with his own forces in 709, seizing loot
with which to entice the Arabs to destroy Roderic for him and avenge his daughter’s rape at the
Visigothic king’s hands, no mention of this grudge exists in the Mozarabic Chronicle of 754,
the earliest surviving account of the invasion, and neither Julian’s subservience to the more
powerful Arabs nor Musa’s predictable decision to expand into the rich lands of the Visigoths
require any tales of vengeance to explain. The accounts that paint Julian as the architect of
Visigothic kingdom’s conquest also clash with both the Mozarabic Chronicle’s assertion
that Arab raiding had begun years before the conquest and with the common narratives of
later Christian accounts, which claim that it was enemies of Roderic within Iberia that requested
and facilitated the Muslim invasion. While any of these stories might be at least partly true,
they are likely irrelevant - with North Africa subjugated and inhospitable, difficult to traverse
desert to the South, the Caliphate’s invasion of Hispania was an inevitability whether Roderic
was guilty of raping Julian’s daughter or not, and Julian would have been compelled to support
Musa as a Caliphal vassal with or without any personal grudge. Anecdotally, as a side note,
the modern name of the Strait of Gibraltar is named for Tariq, in a corruption of the
Arabic Jabal Tariq, or Tariq’s mountain. The renewal of raiding in the South went
at first unanswered by the Visigoths, allowing Tariq to establish a secure base
of operations on the site that would later become the town of Algeciras, from there pushing
deeper into Iberia. They would face their first opponent shortly after - Theodemir, a Visigothic
count holding extensive territories near Murcia, who with his force of some 1700 men attempted to
delay the invaders in a series of skirmishes while sending reports and pleas for aid back to Roderic.
The establishment of this base and the arrival of further Muslim reinforcements quickly demonstrated
to Roderic that this was no common raid, and he began assembling what forces he could muster
at Cordoba, sending a force of cavalry ahead to aid Theodemir in his resistance and instructing
the count to withdraw northwards to join him,. Meanwhile, he began his own much slower
march south, hindered by poor logistics, the slow arrival of reinforcements from disloyal
vassal chieftains, and a lack discipline among the conscripted serfs. He finally regrouped with
the battered remnants of Theodemir’s force at Guadalete, their numbers weakened after a
series of skirmishes over at least a month that greatly favoured the mobile Berber cavalry
making up the bulk of Tariq’s forces, which had also been mercilessly raiding the countryside so
as to force Roderic into a battle on the field. Guadalete would soon be the site of a historically
pivotal but poorly-documented battle that has been the basis for countless conflicting tales
and legends. The numbers involved are very much in question, with later Christian
chronicles claiming as high as 187,000. Though the number given for the Muslim
forces in the Mozarabic Chronicle - 7,000 in Tariq’s initial landing force, with
5,000 reinforcements bringing the total to 12,000 - is likely at least slightly inflated
as well, it is at least plausible considering the readiness of converted Berbers to join
Musa’s forces across subjugated North Africa. No figures are given for the Visigothic forces
under Roderic, save a similarly unlikely 100,000 claimed by later Arab chronicles. The defenders
did most likely outnumber the invaders - with over 30,000 in the highest modern estimates,
though given the previously mentioned challenges in mobilizing their Hispano-Roman
subjects, even a number half this is likely generous - but faced problems of disloyalty
that undermined their small numbers advantage. Some recurring themes found in both Muslim
and Christian sources may shed some light on the events of the bloody July day. The
previously-mentioned Mozarabic Chronicle of 754, though a useful source for information on the
Visigothic kingdom’s history and politics, mentions the Battle of Guadalete only in passing
and elaborates little on the tactics involved. It does, however, make it clear that many of the
more powerful Visigothic tribal leaders had only feigned their support when accompanying their
king to battle, intending to lead Roderic to his downfall and claim the throne themselves.
And while later accounts are of questionable reliability, this general narrative of betrayal
surrounding the kingdom’s fall remains a constant. Some accuse Roderic of having had Wittiza
assassinated in a coup attempt, while many other accounts are quite hostile towards Wittiza and his
line as a result of the late king’s anti-clerical policies, with villainization of Wittiza
growing harsher and more common as time passed. Wittiza’s opposition to a series of discriminatory
decrees by the Spanish church councils targeting Iberia’s large Jewish population might have
contributed to this, given the growing hostility towards Europe’s Jews in the era of the Crusades
and Reconquista, a period that had seen renewed interest in the fallen Visigothic kingdom and
to which many of these later chronicles trace. Many of these chronicles even suggested that
two sons of Wittiza, seeking to claim their father’s throne, had invited the Arabs into
Iberia, or that Iberia’s Jews had used their close ties to the Jews of North Africa to
do the same, seeing an opportunity to end their long suffering under the harsh anti-semitic
policies of the Visigothic kingdom and its church, which since 694 had even allowed for
any Jew refusing baptism to be enslaved. Neither story seems likely, especially
considering Wittiza was unlikely to have been older than twenty-five himself when
he died, making any children he might have had rather young for such scheming, but
whatever the case, if anyone had hoped to take advantage of the Muslim incursion to claim the
Visigothic throne, they would very disappointed. Roderic had his loyal Visigothic warriors,
armored and bearing axes and swords, split into two contingents - the larger
making up the center of the vanguard and a smaller detachment held in reserve. Behind these
staunch defenders, the ill-equipped levies he had raised from his demesne around Toledo and
during the mustering at Cordoba were arrayed, in a particularly sorry state even for peasant
conscripts, Roderic’s hurry to engage the invaders leaving little time to see these slaves and
serfs equipped or drilled. On the wings were the forces of allied chieftains, many of questionable
loyalty, and the kingdom’s comparatively meager cavalry remaining after the losses inflicted
during Theodemir’s fighting retreat. Tariq, though outnumbered, had far more cavalry than
his foe and fewer concerns of morale and loyalty. Though the majority of the Arab warriors
that had come forth from Syria to conquer North Africa had either returned home or remained
behind with Musa, he had a strong contingent of heavily-equipped Arab cavalry making up his army’s
center, with Berber and Arab infantry behind them, while Berber light cavalry on the wings and
in the rearguard made up the bulk of his army. Accounts vary greatly, but it would seem that
the first two days of fighting remained more or less in the balance, with both armies suffering
mounting casualties and with greater Visigothic numbers seemingly giving them the edge at
first. Both leaders encouraged their forces with speeches - Tariq chastising his forces for
falling back during the second day’s fighting, claiming that only by holding fast and seizing
victory could they hope to survive to return home, and promising to lead them to riches
and glory on the following day. When the third day’s fighting began, Tariq would
prove true to his word, personally leading his heavier cavalry in a charge that broke through the
Visigothic warriors making up Roderic’s center. With the enemy vanguard depleted by two days’
fighting, Tariq’s cavalry soon found themselves with nothing but scattering serf levies between
them and the enemy leaders and rearguard, with the Muslim infantry taking advantage of the breach
and following closely behind. The circumstances of the following rout are unclear - a Visigothic
leader slain early in the charge seems to have been mistaken by the Muslims for Roderic, starting
a false rumor of the king’s death that hastened panic and desertion in an army already held
together by very little. Some accounts claim that much of the Visigothic cavalry under the Bishop
Oppa - a possibly illegitimate son of Wittiza’s father and predecessor Egica - defected to Tariq
as part of a prearranged betrayal, and while this claim is rather doubtful, it is clear that many
did desert the king as the tables began to turn. A general rout soon followed as the levies broke
and the Berber cavalry charged the enemy flanks, running down fleeing soldiers. Though Roderic’s
personal forces put up a staunch defense despite their broken lines, inflicting sizable casualties,
the premature rumor of the king’s death would soon prove to have come only a few hours too early, and
by the fierce battle’s end the king and a sizable portion of the Visigothic nobility had been slain.
Though nearly 3,000, close to a quarter of the Muslim force, had been among the casualties,
losses had been far greater for the defeated Visigoths, and their kingdom would not long
outlive their fallen king. With the Visigothic kingdom so reliant on the military dominance of
its ruling minority and commanding little loyalty from its subjects, this single crushing defeat
effectively spelled its end.. Tariq was quick to march to Toledo in the aftermath, where Oppa -
who does not in fact seem to have been present at Guadalete despite later claims of his battlefield
betrayal - had taken the Visigothic throne. Oppa would prove a ready collaborator with
the conquerors, aiding them in capturing and executing many of the remaining Visigothic chiefs
and nobility as they made to flee the capital. 712 would see Musa cross the strait with
another army to join his victorious underling in pacifying the remainder of Iberia,
with Tariq’s army splitting into four in order to more swiftly overcome what
little scattered resistance remained. Some cities would put up spirited defences,
with Seville requiring a three month siege and Merida five for Musa’s army to capture, and
with Seville even rising shortly in late 713 in a rebellion crushed by Musa’s son Abd al-Aziz.
However, the Visigoths’ unpopularity in the urban centers such as Cordoba left many ready
to accept their new conquerors, and even the Mozarabic Chronicle - though quite hostile towards
the Arabs - makes note of Cordoba’s flourishing after its later establishment as the capital of
the new Caliphal province of Al-Andalus in 716. Though Oppa, Theodemir and some few other figures
from the old ruling class retained a degree of their former status through collaboration,
there would be no more Visigothic kings, and their lines quickly fade into obscurity - if
Oppa, Achila or any others had indeed conspired with the Muslims to take the throne, their ploy
had failed, with the Visigoths being assimilated into the larger Iberian Christian population
and their power broken. In their place, Musa placed Arabs in most positions of power within the
newly-conquered state, though the Muslims did also rely heavily on Iberia’s Jews to help hold and
administer their new territory. With the harsh restrictions put in place by the Visigoths
lifted, Jewish communities were among the most eager in accepting the change of rulership,
and many Jews rose to positions of prominence as advisors and officials under the comparatively
even-handed governance of early Al-Andalus. However, this story would end in
tragedy even for many of the victors, and Musa and Tariq would not enjoy the
fruits of their success for long. By 715, they had completed the initial conquest of the
peninsula, overrunning the lands of the Basques and the northern territories held by Achila,
who disappeared from the record - making his supposed collaboration with the Arabs
unlikely. But just as Musa had himself taken power in North Africa after the political
disgrace of its conqueror Hassan ibn al-Nu’man, Tariq and Musa - by this point feuding with each
other over the spoils and glory of the conquest, a precursor for more Arab-Berber hostility to
come - would be summoned to Damascus by a sickly and aging Al-Walid, only to find the Caliph
already on his deathbed upon their arrival, with his brother Sulayman the acting monarch.
Mired in a rocky succession, with Al-Walid having backed his son Abd al-Aziz ibn Al-Walid
for the throne, Sulayman ordered Musa to delay his triumphant entrance into Damascus until after
Al-Walid expired and he properly became Caliph. In doing this, Sulayman hoped to claim some of the
glory of the conquest to inaugurate his new reign. Musa refused, however, entering and dedicating
his victory and the spoils to Al-Walid. This did little to ingratiate him with Sulayman, with
predictable results after Al-Walid’s death less than a week later. Tariq and Musa were both
first stripped of their wealth, then disgraced and publicly paraded as traitors, ostensibly
in response to Musa’s complaints towards the confiscation but in all likelihood an inevitable
part of the broader crackdown on Al-Walid’s governors and loyalists that took place upon
Sulayman’s inauguration. The two conquerors of Al-Andalus would live the rest of their lives in
obscurity, while Musa’s sons Abd al-Aziz and Abd Allah - left behind as governors of Al-Andalus and
Ifriqiya respectively - would both be killed on the Caliph’s orders. Sulayman’s mishandled efforts
to assert his control over the far-flung provinces of the empire would backfire in Al-Andalus,
however, with the death of Abd al-Aziz sparking a period of self-destructive infighting, spurred
largely by resentment among the Berbers towards their lesser treatment compared to their Arab
coreligionists despite playing such a vital role in Iberia’s conquest. With the conquerors turned
against each other, their hold on Iberia would begin to show cracks almost as swiftly as they had
won it, with the mountainous Northern territories breaking away under the Visigothic noble
Pelagius to form the Kingdom of Asturias in 722. It was not the far-flung western frontier of
Iberia that Sulayman would spend his short reign focused on, however. Eager to forge
his own legacy to match his brother’s in the short time remaining to him, he would soon
turn the armies of the Caliphate towards a prize long denied them: Constantinople. In
our next episode on early Islamic history, we will cover the Caliphate’s strike into
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