From the Muslim conquest of 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492: how al-Andalus rose and fragmented, and how the Christian kingdoms of the north pushed south, frontier by frontier.
Stop 01 · 711–718
The Conquest of 711
In April 711 a mainly Berber army under Tariq ibn Ziyad, governor of Tangier, crossed from North Africa and landed near the rock that still bears his name, Gibraltar (Jabal Tariq, 'Tariq's mountain'). Estimates of his force run from about 1,700 to 7,000 men. The Visigothic kingdom was split by a disputed succession, and in July, at the Guadalete, a river whose exact site is unknown, Tariq defeated and killed King Roderic. His superior, Musa ibn Nusayr, followed with an Arab army in 712. Toledo, the Visigothic capital, fell, and within about seven years almost all of the Iberian Peninsula was under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus. Muslims called it al-Andalus.
Carte historique des Royaumes d'Espagne et PortugalHenri Chatelain · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
On the map
Tariq crosses from Africa, 711 · Conquest
The conquest reaches the north, 711–718 · Conquest
In April 711 a mainly Berber army under Tariq ibn Ziyad, governor of Tangier, crossed from North Africa and landed near the rock that still bears his name, Gibraltar (Jabal Tariq, 'Tariq's mountain'). Estimates of his force run from about 1,700 to 7,000 men. The Visigothic kingdom was split by a disputed succession, and in July, at the Guadalete, a river whose exact site is unknown, Tariq defeated and killed King Roderic. His superior, Musa ibn Nusayr, followed with an Arab army in 712. Toledo, the Visigothic capital, fell, and within about seven years almost all of the Iberian Peninsula was under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus. Muslims called it al-Andalus.
One corner held out. In the mountains of Asturias, a Visigothic noble named Pelagius (Pelayo), chosen as leader around 718, refused to pay the tax on non-Muslims and drove out the local governor. In 722 an Umayyad force under Alqama came after him. At Covadonga, a narrow valley in the Picos de Europa, his men showered arrows and stones from the slopes, then charged out of a cave. Christian chroniclers told of a slaughter, Muslim writers of a skirmish; later Christian kings made it the start of the Reconquista, the 'reconquest'. Meanwhile, Muslim armies crossed the Pyrenees into France, until Charles Martel's Franks stopped them between Tours and Poitiers on 10 October 732, killing their commander.
In 750 the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyad caliphs and hunted down their family. One prince, Abd al-Rahman, escaped by swimming the Euphrates, crossed North Africa in hiding, and in 756 made himself emir in Córdoba. In 929 his descendant Abd al-Rahman III declared himself caliph, a rival to the Abbasids in Baghdad and the Fatimids in North Africa, and from 936 built a palace-city, Madinat al-Zahra, outside the capital. Córdoba, with its great mosque, begun in 785, became one of the largest and richest cities in Europe and a centre of learning. In the north, Charlemagne's son Louis took Barcelona in April 801 after a long siege, creating a frontier zone, the Spanish March.
Late in the 900s, real power in Córdoba passed to Muhammad ibn Abi Amir, the chamberlain (hajib) of the boy caliph Hisham II. He took the name al-Mansur, 'the Victorious', which Spanish renders as Almanzor. By most counts he led about 56 campaigns, many of them deep into the northern kingdoms. In July 985 he sacked Barcelona; in 994 he took León; and in the summer of 997 he devastated Santiago de Compostela, the shrine of St James, after its bishop had evacuated the town. Muslim chroniclers boast of tens of thousands of captives sold in Córdoba's market. Almanzor died at Medinaceli in 1002, and within seven years the caliphate he had dominated fell into civil war.
After two decades of civil war, the Caliphate of Córdoba broke apart in 1031 into about thirty small kingdoms, the taifas, from the Arabic for 'faction'. The strongest were Seville, Toledo, Zaragoza and Badajoz. They fought each other, and paid tribute (parias) to the Christian kings for protection, reversing the old flow of money. In 1085 Alfonso VI of León and Castile took Toledo, the old Visigothic capital, in the heart of the peninsula, after a siege of about two months; the surrender terms guaranteed Muslims their lives, property and freedom of worship, and he entered the city on 25 May. It was the biggest Christian gain yet, and the frontier moved to the Tagus.
Alarmed, the taifa kings called on the Almoravids, a Berber reform movement from the western Sahara that now ruled Morocco from Marrakesh. Their leader, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, crossed in 1086 and beat Alfonso VI at Sagrajas on 23 October, then took over the taifas themselves. In the east, the Castilian knight Rodrigo Díaz, El Cid, held Valencia from 1094 until his death in 1099. In 1147 another Moroccan movement, the Almohads, took Marrakesh and began replacing the Almoravids. The Christian kingdoms kept advancing anyway: Alfonso I of Aragon took Zaragoza in 1118, and Afonso I of Portugal, with English, Flemish and German crusaders on their way east, took Lisbon on 25 October 1147.
In 1211 the Almohad caliph Muhammad al-Nasir crossed from Morocco with a large army. Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade, and Alfonso VIII of Castile was joined in person by Peter II of Aragon and Sancho VII of Navarre, with the military orders and volunteers from across Europe. Led through a mountain pass by a local shepherd, they surprised the Almohad camp and crushed it at Las Navas de Tolosa on 16 July 1212. Almohad power in Iberia collapsed. Within forty years the Christian kingdoms took most of the south: Córdoba in 1236, Valencia in 1238, Seville in November 1248 after a 16-month siege, and Portugal reached the Algarve coast, taking Faro in 1249.
Only the Nasrid Emirate of Granada survived, a small, mountainous kingdom in the south whose founder, Muhammad I ibn al-Ahmar, began the palace-fortress of the Alhambra, 'the red one', in 1238. It usually paid tribute to Castile, and lasted two and a half centuries. Muslim refugees from the conquered lands crowded in, making it densely populated and more uniformly Muslim and Arabic-speaking than before; its culture peaked under Muhammad V in the later 1300s. The frontier was a place of raids, truces and trade. In Castile and Aragon, Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side by side, in what historians call convivencia, under growing pressure: in 1391 mobs attacked Jewish quarters, forcing many to choose baptism or death.
The marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 united the two largest Christian kingdoms. From 1482 they fought a ten-year war against a Granada torn by civil war, using artillery to take town after town; Málaga fell in August 1487. Granada's last emir, Boabdil, surrendered the city on 2 January 1492, under terms promising Muslims their mosques and their law. That March the Catholic Monarchs ordered Spain's unconverted Jews to leave by 31 July; between 40,000 and 100,000 were expelled. In August, Columbus, sponsored by Isabella, sailed west. Muslims were forced to convert in the following years, and their descendants, the Moriscos, were expelled in 1609–1614.