The first collision, indeed, of the Arabian conquerors with the warriors of the West was rather calculated to damp their hopes of European conquest. The Visigothic kings of Spain possessed the town of Ceuta on the African coast, of which Count Julian, at the time of which we speak, was military governor. The skill and courage of this great warrior and his garrison had hitherto frustrated all the attempts of Musa, the general of the caliph Walid, to make himself master of the place. The Saracens were already beginning to despair of success, when they suddenly received overtures from Count Julian himself, who now offered, not merely to open the gates of Ceuta, but to procure for the Saracens a ready admittance into Spain. The grounds of this sudden treachery on the part of one who had risked his life at the post of honour, cannot be stated with any degree of certainty. By some it was ascribed to the desire of avenging himself upon Roderic, his king, who is said to have abused his daughter; and by others to the fact that he had espoused the cause of Witiza’s sons, at that time pretenders to the Spanish throne. The Saracen general Musa, delighted to have found the Achilles-heel of Europe, immediately despatched a few hundred Moslems across the strait, under the command of Tarik; from whom the modern Gibraltar (Gebel al-Tarik) derives its name. These adventurers were well received in the town and castle of Count Julian at Algeciras, and soon returned to their expectant comrades, with rich booty and exciting tales of the fertility of the country, and the effeminacy of the degenerate Goths.
In the April of the following year, 711 A.D., a body of five thousand Saracens effected a landing on the coast of Spain, and entrenched themselves strongly near the Rock of Gibraltar. These were soon followed by other troops, until a considerable Moslem army was collected on the Spanish shores. The feeble resistance made to this descent was a fatal omen for the empire of the Visigoths. This once brave and hardy tribe of Germans had lost, during a long peace, the valour and endurance to which they owed the rich provinces of Spain; and, amidst the pleasures of that luxurious country, had grown so unaccustomed to the use of arms, that it was long before they could be roused to meet the foe. At length, however, the unwarlike Roderic, having collected an army four times as great as that of the enemy, but without confidence either in their leader or themselves, encamped at Xeres de la Frontera, in the neighbourhood of Cadiz. While awaiting at this place the approach of the enemy, the Gothic king is represented as sitting in an ivory chariot, arrayed in silken garments unworthy of a man even in time of peace, and wearing a golden crown upon his head. The battle which quickly followed was fought on the 26th of July, 711 A.D. It was of short duration and of no doubtful issue. The timid herd of Goths, scarcely awaiting the wild charge of the Saracens, turned and fled in irretrievable confusion. Roderic himself, fit leader of such an army, was among the first to leave the field on the back of a fleet racer, which had been placed, at his desire, in the neighbourhood of his tent, as if his trembling heart had foreseen the issue.
The Visigothic empire in Spain fell by a single blow. Tarik advanced with his victorious army as far as Cordova (Corduba), which immediately yielded at his summons; and he would, without doubt, have overrun the whole of Spain, had he not been recalled by the jealousy of Musa, who reserved for himself the glory of completing the splendid conquest.
Of all the Spanish towns which were captured on this occasion, Seville and Merida alone appear to have upheld the ancient glories of the Gothic name; but even these were finally reduced, and the last remnants of the Visigoths were driven from the rich plains they had so long possessed into the mountains of Asturias. It was in these rugged solitudes, and amidst the hardships and privations which they there endured, that they regained their ancient vigour, and preserved their Christian faith. It was thence that at a later period they descended upon their Moorish foes, and in many a hard-fought battle, the frequent theme of ballad and romaunt, recovered, step by step, the fair possessions which their ancestors had won and lost.
And thus by a single victory Spain was added to the vast dominions of the caliph, and the cross once more retired before the crescent. Nor did it seem that the Pyrenees, any more than the Rock of Gibraltar, were to prove a barrier to the devastating flood of Islamism. About 718 A.D., Zama, the Arabian viceroy of Spain, made himself master of that portion of Gaul, on the slopes of the eastern Pyrenees, of which the Goths had hitherto retained possession. In 731 A.D. he stormed Narbonne, the capital of the province, and having put all the male inhabitants capable of bearing arms to the sword, he sent away the women and children into captivity. He then pushed forward into Aquitaine, and laid siege to Toulouse, which proved the limit of his progress; for it was there that he was defeated by Eudo, the duke of the country, who was roused to a desperate effort by the danger of his capital. The check thus given to the onward march of the Moslems was of short duration. Anbasa, the successor of Zama, about four years afterwards once more made a movement in advance. Taking a more easterly direction, he stormed and plundered Carcassonne and Nîmes (Nemausus); and having devastated the country as far as the Rhone, returned laden with booty across the Pyrenees.
Duke Eudes of Aquitaine, deprived of the fruits of his single victory, resigned all hopes of successfully resisting the invaders, and endeavoured to preserve himself from utter ruin by an alliance with his formidable foes. He is even said to have so far belied his character of Christian prince as to give his own daughter in marriage, or concubinage, to Munuza, the governor of the newly made Gallic conquests.
It appears that the expeditions of the Saracens into Gaul had been hitherto made by individual generals on a comparatively small scale, and on their own responsibility. The unusually slow progress of their arms at this period, is to be ascribed less to any fear of opposition, than to inward dissensions in the Arabian empire, and a rapid succession of caliphs singularly unlike in their characters and views. Nine short years (715-724 A.D.) had seen the cruel Suleiman succeeded by the severe, yet just and upright Omar, the luxurious epicurean Yazid, and the little-minded, calculating Hisham.
[724-728 A.D.]
It is probable, therefore, that, amid more pressing anxieties and interests, the distant conquest of Spain was forgotten or neglected by the court at Damascus; and that the generals, who commanded in that country, were apt to indulge in ideas inconsistent with their real position as satraps and slaves of an imperial master. But a change was at hand, and the new actor Abderrahman (Abd al-Rahman), who suddenly appeared upon the scene with an army of four hundred thousand men, was charged with a twofold commission,—to chastise the presumption of Munuza, whose alliance with Eudo was regarded with suspicion,—and to bring the whole of Gaul under the sceptre of the caliph and the law of Mohammed. Regarding Munuza as a rebel and a semi-apostate, Abderrahman besieged him in the town of Cerdagne, to which he fled for refuge, and, having driven him to commit suicide, sent his head, together with his wife, the daughter of Eudes, as a welcome present to the caliph Hisham.
The victorious Saracens then marched on past Pampeluna,[125] and, making their way through the narrow defiles on the western side of the Pyrenean chain, poured down upon the plains with their innumerable hosts as far as the river Garonne. The city of Bordeaux was taken and sacked, and still they pressed on impetuously and without opposition, until they reached the river Dordogne, where Eudes, burning with rage at the treatment which his daughter had received, made a fruitless attempt to stop them. Irritated rather than checked by his feeble efforts, the overwhelming tide poured on. The standard of the prophet soon floated from the towers of Poitiers, and even Tours, the city of the holy St. Martin, was in danger of being polluted by the presence of insulting infidels, when, in the hour of Europe’s greatest dread and danger, the champion of Christendom appeared at last, to do battle with the hitherto triumphant enemies of the cross.