April 29 711 AD – Moorish General Tariq ibn-Ziyad Lands at Gibraltar
Long before Sultan Mehmed II terrified Europe after seizing Constantinople, the western edge of the continent fell under Muslim control when the Moors landed on the Iberian Peninsula. Tariq ibn-Ziyad, at the head of a 10,000-strong army from North Africa, began the conquest on April 29, 711AD at Gibraltar — a strip of land jutting into the Mediterranean Sea he named after himself. For nearly 500 years the Umayyad Dynasty reigned in Spain, leading to a flowering of culture while the rest of Europe languished in the Dark Ages. In the centuries following the disintegration of the Roman Empire, the Visigoths marched southwest out of France into the Iberian Peninsula. By the middle of the 500s, the new capital of Toledo was the center of a kingdom headed by Liuvigild that covered all but a sliver of northern and western Spain. Unlike the heart of Europe, where the Ostrogoths, Franks, Burgundians, and others were disassembling the cultural institutions which gave Rome its distinct influence, the Visigoths maintained a similar social structure. For the next 150 years, the monarchy fostered a feudal system, linking the classic Roman estates together with promises of mutual protection under the king’s armies in exchange for providing a few dozen soldiers. Most people worked under the thumb of a Visigoth overlord, creating a peasant class of Iberians with little connection to their rulers.