Abstract

The conquest started one day in the summer of 710, but few people in Spain realized it: only a few Arabic sources tell us about the first boats from North Africa that in July arrived on the southern coast of the Iberian Peninsula. It is more evident in the sources what happened one year later, in the late spring of 711, when the governor of Ifriqiya, Musa ibn Nusayr, decided that a military effort on a wider scale would be possible: the troops led by Tariq, governor of Tangeri, reached the point that would take his name: mountain of Tariq, in Arabic jabal Tariq, Gibraltar; soon came the moment of the clash with Roderico, the last king of the Visigoths, and in October of the same year the fall of Cordova that opened the way to the north. This is the very well-known starting point of a long history: the history of the farthest Occidental region of the Islamic world, that will take the Arabic name of al-Andalus; the history of the most Occidental frontier with Christian territories.