The Umayyad Dynasty: Tariq ibn Ziyad - The Conquest of Al-Andalus (Part 2)

In 711 CE, Tariq ferried seven thousand men across the Strait of Gibraltar on borrowed ships, hiding an invasion in plain sight. He landed at the base of a rock the Greeks had called a Pillar of Hercules, renamed it after himself, and within months had shattered the Visigothic kingdom of Hispania - a state that had stood for three centuries. His men fought fasting, in the heat of a Ramadan summer, outnumbered at least two to one. The battle lasted eight days.

This episode traces Tariq's story from the reconnaissance raid of 710 to the fall of Toledo, the fury of his superior Musa ibn Nusayr, and the devastating moment in Damascus when a single table leg proved who really conquered Al-Andalus. We examine why the famous "burn the ships" speech is almost certainly fiction, why the Jewish population opened their gates to the Muslim army, and how a conquest born from one father's rage - or one politician's calculation - became an eight-hundred-year civilization that produced the largest city in Europe.

Drawing from Ibn Abd al-Hakam's ninth-century account, al-Tabari, al-Baladhuri, Ibn al-Qutiyya (a descendant of Visigothic royalty), and modern historians including Firas Alkhateeb, this episode separates the legend from the man - and finds the real story far more compelling than the myth.

Content Warning: This episode includes descriptions of state-organized persecution, including enslavement and forced family separation.

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