Muslim Iberia lasted from 711 until Granada fell in 1492
Al-Andalus names the shifting Muslim polities that ruled Iberia—and sometimes bits of southern France—between 711 and 1492. From a Umayyad province to Córdoba’s caliphate, then taifa shards and Maghrebi empires, it ended as the Nasrid Emirate of Granada, a Christian tributary until the final conquest.
Under Caliph al-Walid I, Tariq ibn Ziyad brought roughly seven thousand mostly Berber troops ashore at Gibraltar on 30 April 711, officially to meddle in a Visigothic civil war. Beating King Roderic at Guadalete on 19 July opened the peninsula; Musa ibn Nusayr’s larger Arab column, with client mawālī, completed the sweep. Córdoba became capital of a province reporting to Kairouan rather than Damascus, later organised into five districts that roughly match Andalusia, Castile-León, the northeastern kingdoms, Portugal-Galicia, and Languedoc-Roussillon.
Political forms kept changing: Umayyad province, Emirate then Caliphate of Córdoba, taifa splinters, Almoravid and Almohad overlords, last Nasrid Granada. Once the Córdoba caliphate dissolved by 1031, expansive taifas such as Toledo, Zaragoza, Seville, and Badajoz filled the vacuum until Christians took Toledo in 1085 and Maghrebi dynasties intervened. Thirteenth-century Portuguese, Castilian, and Aragonese offensives swallowed the southwest, Guadalquivir basin, and eastern districts, isolating Granada as a tribute-paying remnant.
Pushes beyond the Pyrenees soon hit limits. Duke Odo of Aquitaine routed an Andalusi army at Toulouse in 721, and in 732 Charles Martel beat another raiding force near Poitiers, killing its commander Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi. A Berber uprising that spread from North Africa in 740 then convulsed the province; some 10,000 Syrian troops under Balj bin Bishr crossed the straits in 741, and in 743 they were planted on regimental fiefs from Elvira to Seville. The turmoil let Asturias seize Galicia and León, and let the Franks take Narbonne in 759.
In 755 the Umayyad prince Abd al-Rahman I, escaping the Abbasid slaughter of his family, came ashore at Almuñécar after four years of exile in North Africa. The Emirate and then the Caliphate of Córdoba followed, and under the caliphate the city ranked among the leading cultural and economic hubs of the Mediterranean. Even the name is disputed: its earliest trace is on dinars of 716 inscribed in Latin and Arabic, and the old Vandal derivation has been challenged by proposals tying it to Atlantis, a Gothic word and a pre-Roman substrate.
Source: Al-Andalus
