‘Who can relate such perils? Who can enumerate such grievous disasters?’

This is a book about the development of social relations and politics in Christian northern Spain in the three centuries after Iberia was radically transfigured by the Muslim invasion of the early eighth century. These events mark a historical and historiographical caesura of unusual clarity, for in the summer of 711, Arab-Berber armies under the command of Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, destroyed the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo, and set in place the foundations of Islamic Iberia, better known to posterity as al-Andalus. Famously, for the anonymous writer of the Latin Chronicle of 754, one of the few more or less contemporary sources, the scale of ‘such grievous disasters’ was hard to accept: Spain, ‘once so delightful and now rendered so miserable’, had fallen into ruin and disgrace of the most ignominious kind. Yet this colourful description of the fall of the regnum Visigothorum is little more than a literary set-piece, and if we look beyond the predictable alarm expressed by the Christian writer of this crucial early text and draw upon insights provided by a wide range of later sources, it becomes clear that the Arab-Berber advance moved through the peninsula with surprising ease, after an initial, seemingly decisive, victory had been achieved near Medina Sidonia. Surviving accounts suggest that a combination of military superiority and negotiated settlement with prominent local powerbrokers – such as the Visigothic count, Theodomir – ensured that most of the peninsula was under nominal Muslim control as early as 720. The imposition of taxation soon followed, and Toledo lost its political centrality over the course of the next few years. Conquest and consolidation, certainly in the southern half of the peninsula, proved to be a relatively straightforward affair.

In contrast, it is not clear that the Arabs held long-term designs on either the northern reaches of the dry central plateau known as the Meseta, or the area to the north of the Cantabrian chain, a range of limestone mountains that carves its way across northern Spain; indeed, after a major Berber revolt in the 740s, the Arabs seem to have all but abandoned the vast region from the Basque Country to Galicia, having previously established garrisons at sites such as Lugo and Gijón. Quite why the northern littoral was abandoned remains a contentious issue.