Jebel Musa (Africa) from Jebel Tarik (Europe)
The atmosphere was tense as tired and hungry soldiers anticipated long-awaited orders. Finally Alaric, the King of the powerful Visigoths, gave the signal. On the 24th August, 410, they marched into Rome and sacked it. It was the end of an era. Rome would never be the same again. Flavius Honorius, Western Roman Emperor, could only contemplate civilization’s impotence from his distant refuge in Ravenna. As always, the mighty had fallen...
Later that year the forty-year old Alaric – his name meant “the king of all” – succumbed, it seems to malaria, and died. The accelerated life of the man born on the shores of the Danube thus ended in Cosenza, southern Italy. Thirteen years, almost to the day, after the sack of Rome the thirty-nine year old Honorius, emperor of a decayed empire, died of dropsy. Others, soon forgetting the nature of their own mortality, also allowed ambition and greed to rule over them. They filled the empty niches and perpetuated history.
One consequence of Visigothic success was their entry and settlement, five years after the sack of Rome, of the Roman territory of Hispania. Six hundred and thirty three years after the hard-earned Roman conquest of Hispania from the Carthaginians the Visigoths, with Roman encouragement, eased into the Iberian Peninsula and made it their home. Time had eroded the bravery and nobility of the great Roman general Scipio Africanus, victor over Hannibal in Zama, into forgotten futility. For history does not matter when confronted by expediency.
Almost three hundred years after the Visigoths had entered Hispania, a new king comes to the throne. This is not an unusual occurrence. Roderick happened to be the thirty-third monarch since Hispania came under Visigoth control, a testament to the turbulence and violence of the time. But even by Visigoth standards – I calculate the average life span of a reign to have been under nine years – Roderick’s seventeen-month sovereignty was, to say the least, brief. It is not unusual, either, that he came to power after a bloody civil war. It was the Visigoth way. On the 1st March, 710, Roderick was proclaimed king of Hispania. He was to be the last king of the Visigoths.
From the outset this king had to contend with intrigue and vengeance plots from those he had defeated and deposed: the brother of Witiza (Roderick’s rival) - Oppas, the bishop of Seville - among them. He sought refuge and assistance on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, in Ceuta. Ceuta was under the control of an obscure character, a Count Julian who is often regarded to have been a Gothic relative of Witiza. Others regard him to have been the former Byzantine governor of Carthage, which had fallen to a new force – the young Muslim Empire – in 698. Julian, it seems, had good reason for wanting to remove Roderick from power. He had, in accordance with tradition, sent his beautiful young daughter Florinda to the Visigothic court in Toledo where she would receive education close to the king. Roderick raped the girl.
While all this was happening the relentless westward expansion of the Arabs across North Africa had brought them to the Maghreb where they had to contend with a tough resistance from the local Berbers. They were renowned warriors and had home advantage in the abrupt terrain of the Rif and Atlas mountains. Conquest took the route of absorption into the faith. Equipped with the fervour of their new-found religion, the Berbers were unstoppable. Tension and rivalry between them and their Arab masters simmered but a common faith kept the pot from boiling over. In history, the call of the gods has often been a powerful rallying force. Territorial expansion has been its close ally. Count Julian knew this and was about to exploit it to his advantage...
Two men sit, minds wonderfully concentrated, as Samuel Johnson would put it in another place and time, with the prospect of death looming. One is an Arab and the other a Berber. Here in Damascus in February of the year 715 it all seems so distant in space and time. Sulayman b. ‘Abdilmalik, has just achieved absolute power – he is the Caliph, successor to the messenger of God. The Caliph summons the Arab who approaches uneasily. It is hard to believe that this Arab – Musa b. Nusayr – had been the governor of the whole of North Africa and had been instrumental in the conquest of the territory that the Arabs had chosen to call al-Andalus – the old Hispania of the Romans and Visigoths. Why was he here and in such a precarious position? He had overstepped his authority. Worried that his massive achievement, beyond the orders given, might overshadow the Caliph, Musa had been summoned to Damascus. But Sulayman was also, more mundanely, concerned with the spoils of war. Musa had arrived as the former Caliph, al-Walid, was dying. Sulayman, al-Walid’s brother, ordered Musa not to enter Damascus – he wanted to receive Musa, once proclaimed Caliph, and receive the treasures for himself. But Musa ignored the order.
Musa faced many charges, most to do with division of spoils of conquest and misappropriation of treasury shares. Tariq, the Berber, confirmed the charges against his master. This should not surprise us. When Tarik crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in April 711 he had marched on and faced none other than Roderick in one of those singular battles of history that decided the fate of a kingdom. Tarik had managed to “sneak” twelve thousand men across the Strait and landed on the Rock which since then has borne his name. He did it with the help of the astute Julian – he provided Tarik with Visigothic merchant vessels that disguised conquest in a veil of commerce. He also advised Tarik on the manner of the conquest by providing him with intelligence. Julian had avenged his daughter.
Tarik, with significantly smaller numbers than Roderick’s army, won the protracted battle in July 711 and eventually caught up and killed Roderick. Betrayal played a central role in the defeat. Witiza’s sons had plotted to abandon Roderick in full battle, leaving his flanks exposed to the attacks of the Berber cavalry. They had expected Tarik’s to have been a raid followed by withdrawal, leaving Hispania to them. They had not anticipated Tarik’s rapid drive to the capital Toledo. It seems that Musa had not either. Envious of Tarik’s success, and not wanting to miss out on the booty, he quickly followed him to Toledo. When Tarik came to greet his master, the reward for his achievement was to be struck by Musa’s whip for having exceeded the limits of his authority. The division between Arab and Berber could not have been more accentuated – envy had, on this occasion, overruled religion.
Musa seems to have pacified Sulayman with his treasures to the point that both later travelled together to Mecca in 716. It seems, rather obscurely, that he died on the way. Musa’s family and friends were treated badly by the new regime in North Africa. Tarik’s fate seemed a better one for a while as Sulayman contemplated making him governor of al-Andalus but envious advisers told the caliph that “if Tarik were to tell the Muslims of al-Andalus to pray facing any direction other than the qibla, they would obey him, without thinking that this was heresy.” Tarik, a Berber after all, never got the job and died in total obscurity. Were it not for the Jbel Tarik in which we live, most of us would probably be oblivious of this Berber general’s achievement.
In the end, the loss of energy that defeated the Romans ironically affected the formerly energetic conquering Visigoths who were themselves conquered by a new wave of energy. Once in al-Andalus these new settlers would also be accused by other North African dynasties of having become soft. The Strait of Gibraltar would see repeated waves of conquerors from the south over the next six hundred years...
Clive Finlayson
This article was first published in the Gibraltar Chronicle
