Guadalete and the Sudden Collapse of Visigothic Spain

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Muslim Conquest of Iberia was the Umayyad campaign that brought most of the Iberian Peninsula, then ruled by the Visigothic Kingdom, under caliphal rule within a remarkably short span of just a few years. An initial force under the Berber commander Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa in 711 and won a decisive victory over King Roderic's own army at the Battle of Guadalete, after which the Visigothic kingdom's central authority collapsed with startling speed across the whole peninsula behind it.

The Umayyad governor of North Africa, Musa ibn Nusayr, followed with a much larger army the very next year, and by 718 Umayyad forces controlled most of the peninsula except for a narrow strip along the northern mountains that had escaped conquest. Umayyad rule over most of Iberia lasted for centuries afterward, surviving even the Umayyad dynasty's own overthrow far away in Damascus in 750, when a surviving Umayyad prince fled west and established an independent emirate at Cordoba on the very peninsula the dynasty had already conquered. The whole conquest, from Tariq's initial crossing in 711 to Umayyad control of the peninsula's bulk by 718, spanned barely seven years, a pace historians frequently contrast with the decades the Muslim Conquest of North Africa had taken against sustained Berber resistance immediately before it.