According to Sunglassestracker, the same uncertainty reigns over the causes that determined the Arab invasion and the events of the conquest campaign.
A few centuries later, mixing historical elements and fantastic elements drawn from everywhere, the Spanish Christians, already well ahead in the war of revenge and eager to explain and justify their initial defeat, in a series of legends around Rodrigo attributed to a Count Julián, governor of Ceuta, the sad guilt of having launched the Muslims against the kingdom of the Visigoths to avenge the outrage done to his daughter; and, reliving the passions and hatreds of the first years of the century. VIII, Witiza or Rodrigo was held responsible for the greatest offense inflicted on a woman’s honor. Now, since the time of King Wamba, the Muslims of North Africa had thought of a raid on the Iberian coast, and during his rule there had been the first clash between the Visigothic and Arab fleet.
Later, to try the enterprise again they had to be pushed by the very serious riots that greeted Rodrigo’s accession to the throne and that, in the country dominated by a turbulent aristocracy, found nourishment in the discord that broke out between the supporters of the rights of the descendants of Witiza. and the partisans of the new monarch, which became so profound that it was still alive centuries later, when the formation of the aforementioned legends began. And most likely, in this state of affairs, their intervention invoked, certainly hoped to use, that of the two contenders who did not have the throne and wished to conquer it.
It seems that the invitation came from Olian, the Count Julián of legends, but in reality Christian Berber, chief of the tribe of Gomera in Northern Mauretania, according to some subjects of the Visigothic king, according to others of the Byzantine emperor: who, after having resisted for a long time against the onslaught of the Umayyads, the rise to power of Rodrigo, ended up giving Ceuta to Mūsà ibn Nuṣair, governor of Muslim Africa, and advised him and with the mirage of a large booty persuaded him to move against the Iberian Peninsula (October 710). A lucky raid followed by Ţārif who, having landed where Tarifa then arose, went as far as Algeciras (July 710). And then, in April 711, with a few thousand soldiers, mostly recruited from among the Berber followers of Olian, Ţāriq ibn Ziyād went to settle in the place that after his name was called Gibraltar. Then Rodrigo moved against the invader. But the decisive battle, known as the Guadalete and fought on the banks of the Río Salado between Medina Sidonia and Vejer de la Frontera (July 711), was not lucky for him, because at the right moment those of his troops who were under the orders from the sons of Witiza. It is not known whether the sovereign himself was killed: perhaps he managed to escape by fleeing to try again, two years later, the fate of the weapons, which once again was adverse to him, in Segoyela (Salamanca) for at the right moment those of his troops who were under the orders of the sons of Witiza passed over to the side of the enemy. It is not known whether the sovereign himself was killed: perhaps he managed to escape by fleeing to try again, two years later, the fate of the weapons, which once again was adverse to him, in Segoyela (Salamanca) for at the right moment those of his troops who were under the orders of the sons of Witiza passed over to the side of the enemy. It is not known whether the sovereign himself was killed: perhaps he managed to escape by fleeing to try again, two years later, the fate of the weapons, which once again was adverse to him, in Segoyela (Salamanca) : but of the existence of this battle (September 713) we are not entirely sure. Certainly Ţāriq was able to continue his fruitful raid to the center of the peninsula, and in the same year 711 he entered Toledo, the capital of the Visigothic kingdom.
The country made no resistance, perhaps because Witiza had deprived it, with the means of offense, even of the means of defense; perhaps because it was believed that that of the Arab leader was a passing incursion; and, moreover, one of the warring parties had joined the latter, and the other was defeated. But, even if it had some resipiscence – the resistance opposed, it seems, from Mérida and some other cities would prove it – the country did not know, or could not, or did not want to organize a valid resistance even when in 712, upon the arrival of Mūsà with reinforcements, the raid was transformed into an expedition of stable conquest; and when at the end of the following year in Toledo the caliph of Damascus was proclaimed sovereign of the occupied region. The privileges and honors given to Witiza’s children and their supporters, local political disagreements, religious tolerance, the favors granted to the Jews, especially the happy welcome made by the rural population and by at least a part of the town, who hoped for an improvement in their sad situation by a political change and an alleviation of the Visigothic taxation immediately promised by invader, they made occupation easy for the latter (renewing in Spain what had already happened in Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt) and the attitude of the popular classes gave the event the character of a profound social revolution. It is certain that the Arabs only beyond the Pyrenees were stopped by the Frankish Carlo Martello in Poitiers, where their emir ‛Abd ar-Rāḥmān al Ghāfiqī (732) fell: so that, in an attempt to retrace the road already trodden by the Visigoths, to ensure the possession of the territories that they had kept in Gaul until the day of the end of their domination, to give the Berbers greedy for booty new countries to plunder, they had to decide to give up hope in further conquests. And in the Iberian Peninsula, more than by a Catholic reaction, between 732 and 756 their dominion was endangered by the civil strife that broke out among the invaders. In fact, among the Arab tribes, which had kept their own team and which belonged especially to southern Arabia, those dissensions that had already made turbulent the life of the homeland of origin rekindled, and the conflicts assumed greater proportions with the arrival of new hosts. of Muslims, such as those from Syria: the leaders of both, forming the new aristocracy, they began to dispose of power, in a confused jumble of coups d’etat, conspiracies, bloody clashes. And furthermore, the struggle between Arabs and Berbers was very serious, which, which had already broken out in Africa and had calmed down for a short time in Spain, where the Berbers had been led to vent their ardor there, resurrected here with renewed strength. The Berbers, dissatisfied with having had the poorest regions (Galicia, Asturias, León) in the division of territories, although the conquest of the peninsula had been largely their work, rose up to obtain a rectification of this division; and, defeated and then decimated by the hunger of 753, they emigrated en masse towards the South, leaving behind the desert. Then, the frontier of Muslim Spain, which had reached its maximum expansion at the time of ‛Oqba (734-40), became press’ .
