The People of Gibraltar

2020 – Once upon a time in Islamic Gibraltar

Anonymous - Crónica Bizantina-Arábiga del 741

It’s heavy going trying to write an essay on this manuscript. 
For a start nobody seems to know what its original title was - if it ever had one at all. There are also several versions of it, some very similar to each other while a few have passages which appear to have been added later. Perhaps that might be one reason why it has ended up with quite a few different titles – from the one I am using (741) to another without a date – “Continuatio Byzantia-Arabica”, to yet another with a different date “Chronica Hispana-Orientalia ad annum 724”

This last title is probably the most accurate one, as in most versions the text begins in 601 AD with the death of Reccared, King of the Visigoths and ends in 724 AD with the death of the Umayyad Caliph Yazid II (720-724).

I have chosen the title with the 741 date because the historical text mentions the Emperor Leon III who died in 741. It also appears to be the most popular title with modern historians.

Imaginary portrait of Reccared I, King of the Visigoths (1857 - Dióscoro Puebla - Museo del Prado)

What the manuscript does not mention, however, are any proper details concerning the conquest of Iberia by the Muslims – an event that must have taken place possibly less than thirty years since the Crónica was written by its Mozarabic author.

 In fact, as confirmed by Javier Albarrán Iruela in his 2011 essay, Dos crónicas mozárabe . . . .,

. . . para el estudio de la conquista musulmana de la Península Ibérica solo es de utilidad un párrafo de toda la crónica . . . 

The following quote of the passage in question is also from Javier Albarrán who took it from Martín, José Carlos’ Los (sic) Chronica Byzantia-Arabica”. p. 56

“Hulit obtuvo a continuación el cetro del reino de los sarracenos, según lo que había establecido su padre, sucediendo a éste en el reino. Reina durante nueve años. . . Sometió con sus conquistas los territorios de la India. Y en las regiones de Occidente, por medio del general de su ejército de nombre Musa invadió y sometió el reino de los godos en Hispania, reino firme y poderoso desde antiguo; y tras echar abajo este reino, hizo a los godos súbditos suyos. Llevando así a cabo prósperamente todas estas guerras, durante el noveno año de su reinado, tras haber sido mostradas ante él riquezas procedentes de todos los pueblos tal y como él lo había imaginado, llegó al final de su vida” p49/50

Notes: 

“Leon III” was Byzantine Emperor from 717 to 741.

“Hulit” refers to the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik (668-715), Al-Walid I for short. He was Caliph from 705 y 715.

“Musa” is Musa ibn Nusayr who was indeed commander of the Umayyad armies in the west and was eventually appointed Governor of the North Africa territories by his Caliph Walid I. However, despite the success of his leadership in the invasion of Visigothic Iberia in 711, Musa ended up with very few honours.

As María Elvira Gil Egea noted in her Africa del Norte, Al-Walid never gave actually gave him the title of Governor of Al-Andalus or indeed any other title. In fact, the first official Islamic Governor of Iberia was his son Abd al-Aziz

In an analysis of the Crónica published in 2008, Cyrille Aillet makes the following observation:

The lack of interest in Iberian matters is undisguised: the fall of the Visigothic state and the conquest of Hispania are described so allusively that they seem to have little importance for the author. For many scholars, this is proof that the author was not ‘Spanish’.

The idea being that if the author had been an Iberian-born Catholic Mozarabic Goth, the Muslim invasion of his homeland - which one would assume had taken place during his lifetime - would have been a traumatic event – and it would seem that it wasn’t.

As regards gothic “Gibraltar”, I would imagine that during the late 7th century it was probably a more or less uninhabited rock of mythological interest but of little historical importance. I am not sure whether the Goths had a specific name for it or whether they continued to know it as Calpe. As regards the Straits, they may well have continued to refer to as the Fretum Herculaneum, thus perpetuating the myth of its creation and keeping Gibraltar – albeit indirectly - in the news. 

Date unknown, possibly late 17th early 18th century

Finally, although the name of Gibraltar does not appear in this chronical, I decided to include it as my opening essay because it is probably the oldest indirect reference available of a moment in which – once upon a time - Gibraltar became part of Islamic al-Andalus. 

To return to the list of essays on the Introduction please click on the link below