The swift conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Umayyad Caliphate, taking advantage of the Visigothic kingdom’s succession civil war, cannot be explained so much by the strength of those troops, ...

These ruins of a church were once part of the huge palatine complex in Reccopolis, a rare urban settlement founded by the Visigoths in Spain. One consequence of this turmoil was that, across most of ...

In the year 507, the pressure from the Franks led the Visigoths, who had until then occupied and controlled the southern Gaul and much of the northern Iberian Peninsula, to mass migrate to Hispania.

In 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed into Spain with a force that should never have succeeded. He commanded roughly 7,000 Berber troops — not an invasion army, but a raiding force. Yet Spain was already ...

Successively a Roman municipium, the capital of the Visigothic Kingdom, a fortress of the Emirate of Cordoba, an outpost of the Christian kingdoms fighting the Moors and, in the 16th century, the ...

Was the Reconquista really a “reconquest,” or just a fresh conquest with better branding? The argument is that the original Visigothic kingdom was gone, and the northern Christian states were new ...