Tariq ibn Ziyad

d. c. 720 CE

A Berber Muslim commander who crossed the strait from Africa to Iberia in 711 CE with seven thousand men. Faced a Visigothic army of a hundred thousand. Won. Andalusia was Muslim for the next seven and a half centuries.

Life

Tariq ibn Ziyad was a Berber freedman of Musa ibn Nusayr, the Umayyad governor of Ifriqiya (North Africa). In 711 CE, at the invitation of a faction of Visigothic Iberia and against a divided Christian kingdom, he was sent across the strait with a force of about seven thousand men, mostly Berber converts to Islam.

They landed at the great rock at the southern tip of Iberia. That rock has been called Jabal Tariq ("Tariq's Mountain") ever since. Say it in Spanish for a thousand years and it becomes Gibraltar.

Once on land, Tariq is said to have ordered his ships burned so that his men would have no thought of retreat: the way home was ahead of them. He faced the Visigothic king Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete with about seven thousand men against a Christian force reported at somewhere between forty thousand and a hundred thousand. He won. The Visigothic kingdom collapsed within a season. In the following decades, Muslim armies would push through most of the Iberian Peninsula and into what is now southern France.

The Muslim presence in Iberia lasted seven and a half centuries. Cordoba, Granada, Seville, Toledo, the Alhambra, the great mosque of Cordoba, the libraries and observatories of Al-Andalus, all of the flowering of a civilization that would carry Greek philosophy and Arabic science into Christian Europe, trace their origin to that landing at Tariq's mountain.

Stories

Each story below is drawn from the classical Islamic sources and is told in longer form on its own page.