During the caliphate of the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid I, commander Tariq ibn-Ziyad led a small force that landed at Gibraltar on 30 April 711, ostensibly to intervene in a Visigothic civil war. After a decisive victory over King Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete on 19 July 711, Tariq ibn-Ziyad, joined by the Arab governor Musa ibn Nusayr of Ifriqiya, brought most of the Visigothic kingdom under Muslim occupation in a seven-year campaign. The Visigothic resistance to this invasion was ineffective, though sieges were required to sack a couple of cities. This is in part because the ruling Visigoth population is estimated at a mere 1 to 2% of the total population. On one hand this isolation is said to have been 'a reasonably strong and effective instrument of government'; on the other, it was highly 'centralised to the extent that the defeat of the royal army left the entire land open to the invaders. The resulting power vacuum, which may have indeed caught Tariq completely by surprise, would have aided the Muslim conquest immensely. Indeed, it may have been equally welcome to the Hispano-Roman peasants whoas D.W. Lomax claimswere disillusioned by the prominent legal, linguistic and social divide between them and the 'barbaric' and 'decadent' Visigoth royalty.
During the caliphate of the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid I, commander Tariq ibn-Ziyad led a small force that landed at Gibraltar on 30 April 711, ostensibly to intervene in a Visigothic civil war. After a decisive victory over King Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete on 19 July 711, Tariq ibn-Ziyad, joined by the Arab governor Musa ibn Nusayr of Ifriqiya, bro,ught most of the Visigothic kingdom under Muslim occupation in a seven-year campaign. The Visigothic resistance to this invasion was ineffective, though sieges were required to sack a couple of cities. This is in part because the ruling Visigoth population is estimated at a mere 1 to 2% of the total population. On one hand this isolation is said to have been 'a reasonably strong and effective instrument of government'; on the other, it was highly 'centralised to the extent that the defeat of the royal army left the entire land open to the invaders. The resulting power vacuum which may have indeed caught Tariq completely by surprise would have aided the Muslim conquest immensely. Indeed, it may have been equally welcome to the Hispano-Roman peasants whoas D.W. Lomax claimswere disillusioned by ,the prominent legal, linguistic and social divide between them and the 'barbaric' and 'decadent' Visigoth royalty.