Muslim Invasion of Medieval Iberia in 711 AD - DEBUNKED

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. As always, I'm your host, Nick Barksdale. And for our series, Debunked or Explained, where we take controversial or complicated subjects and debunk them or explain them. We are joined today by Dr. Kyle Lincoln to talk about briefly the conflict that has supposedly been, you know, contextualized as this Muslim invasion of medieval Iberia, almost like this D-Day of sorts. And so without further ado, Dr. Lincoln, on the subject of the Islamic conquest of medieval Iberia, what would you like to hit on? So two things, Nick. First, there absolutely was an invasion from North Africa into the Iberian Peninsula at the beginning of the eighth century. However, there are a number of huge, complicating factors that make it entirely inaccurate to simply label it as the Islamic invasion of Iberia. First, the Visigothic kingdoms were in the middle of a civil war at the time. And it should be pointed out that when I say Visigothic kingdoms, I mean that literally there were warring factions that were actually attempting to carve up Visigothic territory into a number of their own conflicts. And there were separate kingdoms in the Northwest that were client kingdoms, sometimes allies, sometimes enemies of both the Visigoths and the latent Roman state, such as it existed in Byzantium and southern Italy. All of those things should suggest that there isn't one Visigothic kingdom and some unified thing that can be instantly defeated, that can have its own operation overlord. But instead, what actually happens is that one faction sees on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar that there might be some soldiers who have had some really solid success against the Vandals, against the remnants of the Byzantines, against other North African polities. Hey, why don't you guys come in and help us win this war? We'll pay you some money. We'll give you some land. It'll be great. It's a really traditional practice. The Romans had done it for generations. And even the Sassanids in the East had done it in the same vein earlier, right? It's one of the ways that Islam was starting to expand in the same period. And so these warriors, nominally under the control of a Numayad governor, land in Iberia, fight the civil war on the behalf of the Visigoths. They got Visigoths that win the war, then saying, like, well, we don't really want to pay you. At which point, instead of being left completely with nothing, the warriors that had been invited in, and that's a key point, they had been invited in as allies, said, well, if you're not going to live up to your end of the bargain, we're just going to take what we can. We've got a number of really important documents from this early period, both Arabic language and Latin language accounts that suggest that the fighting was particularly bitter, but relatively swift. They pushed all the way north to the Duero and the Minho rivers in both what is now modern Spain and what is now modern Portugal, and that the Christians that were left over, some of them, the defeated nobility fled to the north. The majority, however, continue to live in in what Arabic sources call Al-Andalus, right? That southern section of Iberia and converted in large numbers over generations so that by perhaps the turn of the 11th century, most of the people living in the Iberian Peninsula are Muslim and they're native Muslim because they were born there. That makes them native. That's how that word works. That curve of conversion was originally theorized by Richard Bouyer, a scholar who's retired from one of those evil aid institutions in the northeast of the United States. But all of it suggests that there's a huge amount of piecemeal work being done. For example, there's a treaty that is signed. It's often called the Treaty of the Tudmir. Probably Tudmir is the Arabic attempts to pronounce the Arabic language attempt to pronounce they ought to mirror a relatively common ish Visigothic name, a kind of corruption of a Theodore sort of. You can hear that the similarities is not exactly the same, but it's the equivalent in a lot of ways that actually says you Tudmir and your descendants, as long as you pay us taxes on time, you pay us the right tribute. You don't slander the prophet. You don't build churches that are bigger than our mosques. We're cool, right? One of the pieces that's often pointed to is, well, here's proof that there was an Islamic Iberian invasion. And here's proof that Islam took over is the construction of the Grand Mosque of Cordoba. Right now, nobody who is there who has ever seen that building could feel anything other than inspired. Right. When Charles V completes the little cathedral that's weirdly inset inside the mosque, he actually says, I have destroyed something unique to the world, right? He grieves over the fact that for five centuries at this point, well, three centuries that had been in Christian hands, five centuries that have been standing, it was a unique monument that it was this glowing monolith, right? That it's mathematical proportions are brilliant. That it's architecture is impressive. It's mosaic work is astounding. Here's a monument to the power of Islam. Often people who want there to be this bloodthirsty Islamic invasion, this Islamic Operation Overlord that had taken place in the eighth century that proves that the tide of Islam was this unstoppable wave, if not for sure, and Boisier defeated an army. It wasn't an army. It was a raiding party and a counter raiding party. But who cares? Whatever. I'll let a Carolingian historian deal with that. Instead, they'll say, well, there's this mosque and underneath was a church. There was half of a church. The other half was already owned. It was falling into disrepair. The archaeological stratigraphy says that it wasn't much of a church to begin with and that most of the Christians weren't living in that part of town anyway. Now, is there a mosque there? No, it's a cathedral now. In fact, Muslims are routinely arrested. It happens once or twice every couple of years. A group of young Muslim men being provocateurs, being drinksters. If you like, I don't want you to get demonetized by saying the word that I would usually use about it. We'll go and we'll attempt to perform this a lot in the mosque as a provocative statement against the archdiocese of Cordoba. And apart from being, you know, young men getting into young man problems, there really isn't much of an effort to do with re-Islamizing the space. A lot of modern Spanish far-right politicians, especially the Vox party, will say things like, well, here's proof that Spain is no longer Christian. Spain has never been exclusively one thing ever. In fact, really, there isn't a Spain except in a kind of political fiction. Somebody from Galicia speaks a different language than somebody from Andalusia. From Andalusia, a different vernacular dialect than people in Catalonia. We won't even get started with what's going on in the Pais de Vasco. All of that suggests that this is a way more complicated story than just there was an invasion for three years, and then it was Muslim for five centuries until Christians took over. Because, A, Christians didn't take over. The balance of power was constantly seesawing back and forth. B, there's no such thing as a monolithic Islam in this period. Most of the soldiers that were invited in 7-11, if they were Muslim, were only functionally converted. Right. That is to say, they maybe knew some of the rituals. They knew how to say the Shahada. They knew how to maybe perform the Salat. But they were by no means the kinds of scholars that were already proliferating in the Hejaz under the leadership of early communities that were producing the kind of early scholarly efforts to codify the Hadith that had started to define the boundaries between allied sympathizers. We would later call them Shia and Sunni. None of this, of course, deals with any of the Ibadi or Karajai differences, all of which became important in Northwestern Africa. So the short version is if there was an Islamic invasion of Iberia, that also at some point there was an invasion from Mars when pieces of space debris in a very loose, very unhistorical sense. Sure, the invasion was Islamic, was Muslim, but it's way more complicated than that. And as is usually the case, whenever anybody gives you a too simple answer on the Internet, it's either because they're lying or they're too stupid to know that the answer is more complicated than that. Unless, of course, they provide you with a clarification where they say, well, it's a lot more complicated than that. Leaving all of this to one side, somebody might want to know, well, OK, if I can't trust you, scholarly expert on 12th century crusading in medieval Iberia, go ahead, Google me. What book should I read by someone who's an actual historical expert? Should I read this book that I found on the Internet? No, probably not. The book you should read is by one of the most important Arabic language scholars of medieval Iberia in the world today. It's a great book. It's a really easy read. His scholarship's impeccable. His Arabic is immaculate. It's Kingdoms of Faith by Brian Katlos. Anybody who can have a tenured position at two universities simultaneously because they're so smart, world class university systems will agree to share them. Probably credible. Anybody who tells you that it's OK to read the Arabic sources in translation and publishes a book with a vanity press that commits a number of academic integrity frauds, probably not so useful, no matter how catchy a title they might have and how much they they're planning to dispel some myths for you. Instead, this is one of those times when the expert opinion is, no, it didn't really happen that way. It's a little bit more complicated. So stay tuned for the rest of the video, except we've already done the video. Nick, there wasn't wasn't really an Islamic invasion of Iberia. There was an invasion by mercenary forces. Some of whom were Muslim, but all of whom were fighting on behalf of the Visigoths. And it's only because the Visigoths really screw things up that we can really talk about even a massive conversion practice over the course of, oh, you know, four centuries. And of course, none of this even gets into the propaganda about the Christian attempts to recapture the peninsula. We can leave that for a whole other video or a whole other series. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us here today at the study of antiquity in the Middle Ages, where we took a certain controversial topic and really just laid it out on the table briefly. So you can enjoy it. You can actually get an expert to really break it down and explain certain parts that are very important that you may have not been familiar with. And I think lastly, what we learned that's the most important lesson is always pay your mercenaries. And so, Dr. Lincoln, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me, Nick. I hope that helped.