[2][3][4][5] After defeating king Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete in July the same year, Tariq was reinforced by an Arab force led by his superior wali Musa ibn Nusayr and continued northward.

From 740 to 742, the invasion was then disrupted by the Berber Revolt, and in 755 when an Abbasid force led by Yusuf ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Fihri landed to claim the territory from the Umayyads.

By 781, Abd al-Rahman I had quashed all rebellions and rivals and consolidated Umayyad rule over an almost wholly reunified Iberia, a presence that would remain until the Reconquista, which was aimed at reclaiming the entire Iberian Peninsula for Christianity.

[7] Walter Kaegi says Tabari's tradition is dubious and argued that conquest of the far western reaches of the Mediterranean Sea was motivated by military, political and religious opportunities.

[12] Numismatic evidence suggests a division of royal authority, with several coinages being struck, and that Achila II remained king of the Tarraconsense (the Ebro basin) and Septimania until circa 713.

In 712, Tariq's forces were then reinforced by those of his superior, the wali Musa ibn Nusayr, who planned a second invasion, and within a few years both took control of more than two-thirds of the Iberian Peninsula.

It is probable that this army represented a continuation of a historic pattern of large-scale raids into Iberia dating to the pre-Islamic period,[11] and hence it has been suggested that actual conquest was not originally planned.

[26] While this isolation is said to have been "a reasonably strong and effective instrument of government"; it was highly "centralised to the extent that the defeat of the royal army left the entire land open to the invaders".

It may have been equally welcome to the Hispano-Roman peasants who were probably – as D.W. Lomax claims – disillusioned by the prominent legal, linguistic and social divide between them and the "barbaric" and "decadent" Visigoth royal family.

[28]In 714, Musa ibn Nusayr headed north-west up the Ebro river to overrun the western Basque regions and the Cantabrian mountains all the way to Gallaecia, with no relevant or attested opposition.

In 714, his father, Musa ibn Nusayr, advanced and overran Soria, the western Basque regions, Palencia, and as far west as Gijón or León, where a Berber governor was appointed with no recorded opposition.

Considering that era's communication capabilities, three years was a reasonable time spent almost reaching the Pyrenees, after making the necessary arrangements for the towns' submissions and their future governance.

[33] In 713, Abd al-Aziz ibn Musa subdued the forces of the Visigothic count Theodemir (or Tudmir), who had taken over southeastern Iberia from his base in Murcia after the power vacuum after King Roderic's defeat.

[5] The treaty entailed that the local ruler, Theodemir, would remain in power as long as he recognized Muslim suzerainty, constituted in Abd al-Aziz, and paid monetary tribute.

Upon them rests the curse of Allah, of the Angels and of man collectivelyHis government and the Christian beliefs of his subjects were respected; in exchange, he pledged to pay a tax (jizya) and to hand over any rebels plotting against Umayyad rule or the Islamic religion.

[36] The treaty signed with Theudimer set a precedent for the whole of Iberia, and towns surrendering to Umayyad troops experienced a similar fate, including probably the muwallad Banu Qasi based in the Ebro Valley and other counts and landowners.

In the area thought to be part of King Roderic's territory, Mérida also staged a prolonged resistance to the Umayyad advance but was ultimately conquered in mid-summer 712.

[37] As of 713 (or 714), the last Visigothic king, Ardo, took over from Achila II, with effective control over only Septimania and probably the eastern Pyrenean threshold and coastal areas of the Tarraconense.

An early governor (wali) of al-Andalus, al-Hurr ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Thaqafi, spread the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate up to the Ebro Valley and the northeastern borders of Iberia, pacifying most of the territory and initiating in 717 the first forays across the Pyrenees into Septimania.

[38] Moreover, al-Hurr restored lands to their previous Christian landowners, which may have added greatly to the revenue of the Umayyad governors and the caliph of Damascus, by increasingly imposing the vectigalia on the former, a tax that was applied on a specific region or estate, not per capitation (jizya).

The Berbers, recently subdued and superficially Islamized, were usually in charge of the most difficult tasks and the most rugged terrains, similar to the ones found in their North African homeland, while the Arabs occupied the gentler plains of southern Iberia.

An early uprising took place in 730 when Uthman ibn Naissa (Munuza), master of the eastern Pyrenees (Cerretanya), allied with the duke Odo of Aquitaine and detached from Cordova.

Around 739, on learning the news of Charles Martel's second intervention in Provence, Uqba ibn al-Hajjaj had to call off an expedition to the Lower Rhone to deal with the Berber revolt in the south instead.

By 756, south and central al-Andalus (Cordova, Sevilla) were in the hands of Abd-ar-Rahman, but it took another 25 years for him to hold sway over the Upper Marches (Pamplona, Zaragoza and all of the northeast).

In 756, Abd al-Rahman I, a survivor of the recently overthrown Umayyad dynasty, landed in al-Andalus and seized power in Cordova and Seville, and proclaimed himself emir or malik, removing any mentions of the Abbasid Caliphs from the Friday prayers.

Rome relied on an alliance with Charlemagne (in war with the Cordovan emirs) to defend its political authority and possessions and went on to recognize the northern Asturian principality (Gallaecia) as a kingdom apart from Cordova and Alfonso II as king.