Islam invades Spain (711 CE)
After conquering North Africa, the Arabs invaded Spain and France but were stopped at Poitiers
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Next Thursday: Caliphate
WHERE THE DESERT meets the ocean on the western edge of North Africa, a lone Muslim warrior spurred his horse into the surf, raised his eyes to Heaven and cried: ‘Great God! if my course were not stopped by this sea, I would still go on, to the unknown kingdoms of the West, preaching the unity of thy holy name, and putting to the sword the rebellious nations who worship other gods than thee.’
The warrior was Uqba Ibn Nafi (622–683 CE), spearhead of the westward advance of Islam. As the historian Edward Gibbon remarked, ‘The career, though not the zeal, of Akbah [sic] was checked by the prospect of a boundless ocean.’
Uqba had led his men as far as the Roman province of Mauretania Tingitana (roughly modern-day Morocco), the source of ivory and citron wood and the purple shellfish prized in the Muslim capital of Damascus, some 4000 kilometres to the east, where he had begun his journey of conquest.
Uqba felt that he had amply fulfilled the passage in the Koran exhorting all Muslims to go forth and bring Islam to the world: ‘And Allah has made the earth for you as a carpet spread out, that you may go about therein on broad roads.’
The pattern of Muslim conquest was: attack, destroy any resistance, seize the spoils, and convert the infidels to Islam or tax them if they refused.
As Islam swept across North Africa, that model was imposed with ruthless efficiency upon a succession of Berber tribes, as well as on Jewish and Christian communities, from the Nile River to the Atlas Mountains.
North African Christians and Jews offered a rich source of wealth, and the Muslims’ most expedient way of seizing it was to let the ‘People of the Book’ keep their faith, while imposing the annual jizya tax on the inhabitants of the occupied lands.
Greed overrode zeal in regions of North Africa. Many conquering Arab emirs preferred to line their pockets than harvest souls for Allah. Some warlords actively discouraged conversion to Islam, and were even known to expel converts in preference for the tax.
As a result, while the Muslim conquests of North Africa took just a few decades, the rate of local conversion to Islam was grindingly slow. The Arabs’ reliance on the lucrative levy and the reluctance of the subject people to abandon their faith dragged out the process.
Not until the tenth and early eleventh centuries would most of North Africa convert to Islam.
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Today, the ‘Maghreb’ – a term referring to Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Mauritania and others – comprises the largest Islamic region on Earth.
The landgrab began with the seizure of Cyrenaica, in modern-day Libya. The fall of what remained of Carthage followed, in 705 CE, hastening the escape of the few Greeks and Goths who still inhabited the relic of this once-great metropolis, the creation of Dido and the former seat of Hannibal.
Further west, the Berbers of the Zanta tribe in the Aurès Mountains, in today’s Algeria, put up brave, if disorderly, resistance under the astonishing leadership of a Berban Boudica, their warrior queen al-Kahina (died 703 CE).
This fiery prophetess, of Christian or Jewish faith, saw rapine, not religion, in the arrival of Islam.
Her response, according to Gibbon, was scorched-earth. She left nothing but a wasteland to the invaders, as she wrote:
‘Our cities and the gold and silver which they contain, perpetually attract the arms of the Arabs. These vile metals are not the objects of OUR ambition; we content ourselves with the simple productions of the earth. Let us destroy these cities; let us bury in their ruins those pernicious treasures; and when the avarice of our foes shall be destitute of temptation, perhaps they will cease to disturb the tranquility of a warlike people.’
From Tangier to Tripoli, the fortifications were destroyed, the fruit trees lopped, the fields desecrated, until this once ‘fertile and populous garden was changed into a desert’, as Gibbon put it.
Al-Kahina’s strategy briefly delayed the 12,000-strong Muslim army of Hassan ibn al-Nu’man, who soon cornered her in her mountain fastness at the Battle of Tabarka (c. 703 CE).
Her last utterance foretold her own destruction: the Arabs slew her (or she poisoned herself) and routed her tribe. The survivors melted away into the desert or escaped to Spain.
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No further major battles disrupted the Arabs’ westward march, thanks largely to the diplomacy of a new commander, the formidable Musa ibn Nusayr, the son of a freed slave, who was to play a crucial role in the conquest of southern Spain.
Rather than attack the Berber tribes, Musa sought to appease them. He tolerated their religion and culture in exchange for tribute. As elsewhere, this proved remarkably effective: many Berbers preferred their Muslim overlords to their erstwhile rulers, the Byzantine Christians, and chose to convert to Islam.
Musa was no romantic like Uqba, who had raced ahead and sallied forth into the ocean. He was a hard-headed pragmatist. He pegged his gradual advance with garrisons, promoted Berbers to senior positions in the Muslim army, and ordered instructors to teach the tribes the Koran.
In 708 CE Musa pulled up at Tangier and established a military base directly opposite the granite outcrop of what the Muslims would call Jabal Tariq, ‘Mount of Tariq’ (known today as Gibraltar).
The rock was named after the Moorish commander and ex-slave Tariq ibn Ziyad, who now led Musa’s Berber army, and crossed the straits of Gibraltar in 711 CE to confront the Visigothic kingdom of King Roderic.
Thus began the Muslim conquest of southern Spain and Portugal, or al-Andalus.
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The Visigoths were a Germanic tribe of converted Christians who had ruled Spain peacefully from Toledo for 300 years.
Their faith had softened them, and they succumbed without serious resistance to the Muslim invasion. Toledo and Seville fell in 712 CE.
The archbishop of Toledo lost his nerve, writes the historian Hugh Kennedy, and ‘like a hireling rather than a shepherd [he] deserted Christ’s flock and headed for his Roman homeland’.
By 716 CE, all al-Andalus was in Muslim hands.
The usual negotiations with local nobles followed. In one typical settlement, in 713 CE, Musa assured Theodemir, the ruler of Murcia, that he would not be deposed, and the Murcian people were free to practise their faith on the condition that they recognised Muslim rule, refused to shelter enemies and paid one dinar each per year, together with measures of wheat, barley, fruit juice, vinegar, honey and olive oil.
‘There is no God but God,’ appeared on newly minted coins, while dress, art, language and social relations were gradually transformed to the Moorish style. Acts of resistance were brutally suppressed.
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A few Spanish Christians chose martyrdom. One serious rebellion occurred, in the Asturias, around 717 CE, when a nobleman called Pelagius dared to oppose the Muslims from his mountain fastness in the Picos de Europa, in northern Spain.
When a large Arab army confronted Pelagius’ rebels in the village of Covadonga, a collaborating bishop asked him how he hoped to defeat the conquerors of the Visigoths.
Pelagius replied: ‘Christ is our hope and through this little mountain which you see, the well-being of Spain and the army of the Gothic people will be restored.’
The Muslims attacked. The rebels held on and, using the rugged terrain to their advantage, inflicted huge casualties on the invader.
The surviving Arabs fled, leaving Pelagius free to build a small, independent Christian kingdom, of which several sprung up in the Pyrenees and the Basque country in the ensuing years, effectively locking the Arabs out of northern Spain.
Ever since, Spanish Christians have romantically commemorated the Battle of Covadonga as the first blow for Christ against the Muslim horde.
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It was a minor Christian victory.
By 720 CE southern Spain had become an autonomous caliphate under the descendants of the Umayyad caliphs (and would remain Islamic until 1492, when Spanish Christian forces completed the ‘reconquest’ and drove the Arabs and Berber ‘Moors’ out of the country).
After seizing the towns of Cordoba, Grenada and Seville, the Arabs pressed on into western Europe, racing along the Mediterranean coast.
In swift succession Barcelona, Girona, Narbonne, Carcassonne and Nîmes fell to the Koran.
The Islamic surge turned north, engulfed Avignon and penetrated the Frankish lands as far as Burgundy, before the Arabs met their first major defeat at Poitiers (or Tours, in some English histories) in 732 CE, at the hands of a Carolingian prince known as Charles Martel (‘Charles the Hammer’), ruler of the Franks and the grandfather of Charlemagne.
Opposing Martel was the devout Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, who, although one of the ablest Muslim administrators in Spain, lost control of his men at Poitiers and failed to penetrate Martel’s infantry phalanxes.
The Arab army chose to salvage booty rather than fight on. With his flanks exposed, al-Rahman was cut down and the battle lost.
Christendom has since hailed Poitiers as the battle that preserved the cross from godless barbarians.
In one of his grander flights of fancy, Gibbon wrote that had it not been for Charles Martel’s victory at Poitiers, ‘perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford’.
‘With Christ’s help,’ concluded one Frankish source, Martel ‘overturned the enemy’s tents and hastened to grind them small in slaughter’.
Word of the victory even reached the Venerable Bede (c. 672–735 CE) in Northumbria, in northern England, who noted: ‘The Saracens who had devastated Gaul were punished for their perfidy.’
Religion and rapine marched together at Poitiers. In an unseemly lunge for the spoils, the Arabs cast their eyes on the wealthy monastery of Saint Martin du Tours, while the Carolingian Franks were determined to grab Aquitaine, regardless of whether their enemies were Arab or Christian.
That is not to suggest the belligerents were insincere in their faith. Allah and the Koran were uppermost in the minds of the Arab soldiers, many of whom were consciously fighting for the salvation of their souls.
And religious zeal had no small part in Charles Martel’s success. Although he was a defiler of church lands and a brutal warlord who deserved his nickname, Martel’s victory over the Muslims at Poitiers earned him accolades as the defender of Christendom against waves of ‘heresy’.
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Back in North Africa, tensions between the Arab rulers and their Berber subjects were at breaking point. The coming of Islam was a harrowing experience for the original inhabitants of North Africa.
The name ‘Berber’ (from the Greek barbaros, or ‘foreigner’) was a catch-all label for a tapestry of distinct tribes and occupations: the Berbers were nomads, farmers, mountain-dwellers and seafarers, many of them scratching out a living amid the Ozymandian ruins of the post-Roman world.
If the Berbers were unable to pay in cash the tribute imposed on them by their Islamic conquerors, they were forced to pay in human lives: hundreds of thousands of Berbers, many of them children, were taken into slavery.
After the capture of Cyrenaica, for example, Amr ibn al-As (c. 573–664 CE) forced the Berbers to hand over their sons and daughters, to cover the 130,000-dinar peace terms he had imposed on them.
Of some 300,000 Berber captives after the Battle of Tabarka, 60,000 were given as slaves to pay the caliph’s share of the spoils.
The barbarity of condemning Berber boys to forced labour and girls to the harem seems not to have troubled the consciences of the Muslim leaders: ‘Holy war’ in North Africa, as Kennedy writes, had become little more than ‘a giant slave raid’.
In the first fifty years of Muslim rule, hundreds of thousands of Berbers of all ages were enslaved. Beautiful Berber girls were said to fetch 1000 gold dinars; one captured at about this time became the mother of the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur (c. 714–775 CE).
In direct contravention of Islamic law, the Arabs continued to enslave the Berbers even after the tribes had converted to Islam. In time, the combination of slavery and heavy taxes broke Berber tolerance. Inspired by preachers of the breakaway Kharijite Islamic sect, in 740–743 CE the Berber Muslims rose in fury against their Arab  oppressors.
They nearly succeeded in forcing them from their lands until a vast Arab army arrived from Syria to kill the uprising. The great Berber revolt nonetheless seeded numerous Berber statelets that grew beyond the reach of the Umayyad caliphs in Damascus.
Next Thursday, 26th June 2025: Caliphate
Selected sources and further reading:
Bede with Collins, E. and McClure, J. (eds.) (1999) The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Christys, A.R. (2011) Christians in Al-Andalus 711–1000, Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Gibbon, E. (2013) The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Harrington, DE: Delmarva Publications.
Hirschberg, H.Z. (1963) ‘The Problem of the Judaized Berbers’, The Journal of African History, 4(3), pp. 313–39.
Hodgson, M.G.S. (1977) The Venture of Islam (Vols. 1–3), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kennedy, H. (2008) The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, Boston: De Capo Press.
Laroui, A. and Manheim, R. (transl.) (1977). The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mackintosh-Smith, T. (2019) Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.