ABSTRACT
Al-Andalus A strait only sixteen kilometres wide separates North Africa from the Iberian Peninsula and connects the Atlantic Ocean with the Mediterranean. In 711, the Berber commander Jabal Tariq crossed the strait and landed on the promontory that was later named after him, Tariq’s mountain, Gibraltar. The Arabic conquest of the dry plateaus to the south went quickly, and in less than ten years, Tariq’s armies had reached the more mountainous and difficult terrain in the North. Here, they suffered their first defeat to the Christian king Pelágio in the battle of Covadunga in 722.1 The Arab expansion continued nevertheless all the way to Poitiers, only about 300 kilometres from Paris, where the Muslims were halted by the Frankish ruler Charles Martel in 732 in a battle that made him famous in later historical writing as the saviour of Europe. Perhaps the Muslims only retreated because there was nothing of interest to them so far to the north in Europe. Nevertheless, the result was that the strong Arab empire became confined to the south of the Pyrenees. Almost all of the Iberian Peninsula came under the rule of successive Umayyad regents, who, in 929, finally formalized the prevailing political state of things when Abd al-Rahman III proclaimed himself a caliph, independent from the original caliph in Baghdad. Al-Andalus, the Arab term for the Muslim empire on the Iberian Peninsula, was in both military and cultural terms a strong power, and independent in relation to the rest of the Muslim world.
