Viking raid on Seville

After raiding the coasts of what are now Spain and Portugal, a Viking fleet arrived in Išbīliya (now Seville) through the Guadalquivir on 25 September and took the city on 1 or 3 October.

Emir Abd ar-Rahman II of Córdoba mobilized and sent a large force against the Vikings under the command of the hajib (chief-minister) Isa ibn Shuhayd.

[8] During this period, al-Andalus was in a state of uneasy peace with the Iberian and Frankish Christians to its north, dotted by constant skirmishes and occasional military campaigns across a sort of a demilitarized zone between them.

[11][12] The governor of Lisbon, Wahballah ibn Hazm, wrote about the attack to Emir Abd ar-Rahman II of Córdoba, who was the overall leader of Muslims in Spain.

[12][13][6][11] They looted and pillaged the city, and, according to Muslim historians, gave its inhabitants the "terrors of imprisonment or death" and spared "not even the beasts of burden".

[14] When he heard about the fall of Seville, Abd ar-Rahman II mobilized his forces under the leadership of his hajib, Isa ibn Shuhayd.

[3] Ships and weaponry were made, sailors and troops were raised, and messenger networks were established to spread information about future attacks.

[3] Most of the Vikings sailed back to Francia (modern-day France), and their defeat by the Andalusian army might have discouraged them from attacking the Iberian Peninsula again.

However, the key evidence, a thirteenth-century account by Ibn Diḥya, in which an Arab diplomat Al-Ghazāl ("the gazelle") is dispatched to a pagan court during the reign of Abd-ar-Raḥman II, has been shown neither clearly to refer to Vikings nor probably even to have happened.

[6][17] According to the Arabist Lévi-Provençal, over time, the few Norse survivors of the raid converted to Islam and settled as farmers in the area of Qawra, Qarmūnâ, and Moron, where they engaged in animal husbandry and made dairy products (reputedly the origin of Sevillian cheese).

[18][19] Knutson and Caitlin write that Lévi-Provençal offered no sources for the proposition of conversion to Islam by northern Europeans in al-Andalus and thus it "remains unsubstantiated".