The early Christian insurgency in Islamic Spain

The Christian resistance to the Arab invasion of Spain in 711 tends to be glossed over as a sideshow in what is usually presented as the inexorable progress of the conquest. This reflects the bias of our meagre sources, which mostly take the Arab perspective. Nevertheless, with close consideration and careful handling of these sources, we can draw from them an impression of a persistent insurgency that presented a real problem to the Islamic authorities and induced them to take both political and military countermeasures. This paper suggests how the resistance formed, its organization and tactics, and why the Arabs were unable to suppress it.