711: The Battle That Ended a Kingdom. The Muslim Conquest of Visigothic Spain and the Mystery of Guadalete
HISTORY 360
M. Muñoz · AI-narrated by Madison (from Google)
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4 hr 16 min
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In the summer of 711, an invading army crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from North Africa and, within months, brought down a kingdom that had ruled Hispania for nearly three hundred years. This book tells the real story behind the battle of Guadalete, stripping away the legends of a single doomed king and a single afternoon of fighting that Spanish schoolbooks have repeated for centuries. It reconstructs the deep crisis inside the Visigothic kingdom before the invasion ever began: a disputed succession between King Roderic and the sons of the previous king, Wittiza, that split the Visigothic nobility long before any Arab or Berber soldier set foot on Iberian soil. It follows the Umayyad commanders who led the invasion, Tariq ibn Ziyad and Musa ibn Nusayr, and asks hard questions about why the surviving accounts of the battle itself, written mostly by Arab chroniclers generations later, disagree so sharply on basic facts, including what actually happened to Roderic. It traces the startling speed of the conquest that followed, as city after city fell or negotiated surrender within a few short years, and examines the uncomfortable possibility that parts of the Visigothic elite made their own arrangements with the invaders. Written for readers with no specialist background, this is a clear-eyed, honest account of one of the most consequential and least understood battles in European history, one whose true details remain genuinely uncertain thirteen centuries after historians began arguing over them.
In the summer of 711, an invading army crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from North Africa and, within months, brought down a kingdom that had ruled Hispania for nearly three hundred years. This book tells the real story behind the battle of Guadalete, stripping away the legends of a single doomed ...
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