AHC/WI: Moors conquer all of Iberia

DStecks

One of the more interesting yet neglected areas of history would have to be Al-Andalus, the half-millenium of Muslim control of large parts of Spain.

Al_Andalus.png


At its greatest extent, over three quarters of the Iberian peninsula were under Muslim control. So, the question: what would it have taken for the Moors to push the Christians all the way to the Pyrenees? And what might the consequences have been?
 

katchen

Banned
If there is a stable Caliphate at the Pyrenees from the 7th to the 12th Century, we will see an Albainan or Bosnian effect in Langedoc in 1205 when King Louis IX invades in the Albigensian Crusade. The Cathars will do as the Bogomils did or are doing or will do and convert en masse to Islam and call to the Caliphate for help if the alternative is being burned alive en masse.:eek: And they will get it. Suddenly Occitania will be this Muslim nation bordering on the Mediteranean between the Pyrenees and the Rhone, with Marseilles, Provence and Italy in jeopardy. :eek:And France in real danger of being cut off fom the Mediteranean Sea.
 
Alex Richards

Alex Richards

Donor
That's a tad over the top don't you think? There might not even be any Cathars ITTL, and unless the Caliphate can conquer Languedoc, that area's unlikely to stay Muslim even if they do convert.

In any case, the Moors did reach the Pyrenees OTL, that map shows the situation after Asturias had managed to expand and then split.

As is, the Caliphate's decline had a lot to do with internal problems. Reducing the Christian threat from the North may simply heighten these to give an Iberia split into multiple Islamic states fighting between themselves much earlier than OTL.
 

Tocomocho

They did. All of Iberia and Septimania (later Occitania) up to the mouth of the Rhone (Nimes) in the 720s. Then they mended the river in the campaign that ended in Tours (732).

What fucks up the Muslims and prevents them from holding the northern mountains for long is not military defeats like Tours, or Toulouse (721), or Covadonga (722); those were comparatively minor setbacks from which they could have recovered and come back with a bigger army if they wanted to. It's actually the Berber revolts in Africa and Spain from 739 onwards, which in Spain translate into all out ethnic war between Berber and Syrian garrisons. These surprise the Caliphate with its pants down in a moment when the Franks are striking back from Tours and invade Septimania; even so, the region was populated and well fortified, and had a long history of fighting off the Franks. The fact that it took the Muslims 5 years to submit the Septimania and 20 to the Franks (reaching the Roussillon in 760 only) speaks volumes about who they were more willing to live under, the Franks having to promise later to uphold Gothic laws in Septimania in order to get the Gothic nobles to defect.

Meanwhile in Spain, we have Asturias strenghtening itself and marrying into the Dukes of Cantabria, then taking Galicia (bigger than Asturias and Cantabria together) without a fight in 740 because the Berber garrison there just plain rebels and leaves. Then in 756 Abd-al-Rahman I arrives and wages his own war to take control of what's left of Al-Andalus for decades. He's not yet finished when the Abbasids attempt a landing in Murcia in 777, and Charlemagne marches on Zaragoza in 778, so Abd-al-Rahman, having bigger fishes to fry, is happy to secure peace with the by then well established kingdom of Asturias and leave it alone while he campaigns in the Ebro basin until 781. All through this time and up to his death Abd-al-Rahman had to fight off revolts and twart several assassination attempts too.

But what if the Berber revolt had been prevented? Then you give the Muslims a chance to fight back in the 740s-50s and prevent the establishment of the Ummayads in Cordoba, avoiding the additional decades of warfare that entailed...
 

DStecks

Tocomocho said:
They did. All of Iberia and Septimania (later Occitania) up to the mouth of the Rhone (Nimes) in the 720s. Then they mended the river in the campaign that ended in Tours (732)...
Click to expand...

Fascinating stuff, thanks for the post! :)

Tocomocho said:
But what if the Berber revolt had been prevented? Then you give the Muslims a chance to fight back in the 740s-50s and prevent the establishment of the Ummayads in Cordoba, avoiding the additional decades of warfare that entailed...
Click to expand...

Would it have been conceivable for the Muslims to decide to cut their losses in Africa and focus on holding Iberia?
 

XanXar

If a feudal-like system came in giving Al-Andalus a stable source of manpower, it would help a lot. Also getting rid of the pseudo-caste System of Arabs, Berbers and Muladis would help a lot. But most importantly avoid Almanzor's reign, which is what destabilised the already fragile Caliphate of Cordoba.
Hoped that helped :).
 

MNP

Appreciate the vote of confidence Tocomocho :)
DStecks said:
Would it have been conceivable for the Muslims to decide to cut their losses in Africa and focus on holding Iberia?
Click to expand...
What do you mean by "cut their losses"? The revolt itself was focused on Tunisia. If the Caliphs lost Tunisia they would find it even harder to support or project power in Al-Andalus. Everything west from eastern Algeria was already abandoned to the Berbers until the Idrisids so in a way they did cut their losses. In fact the Umayyads debated abandoning Al-Andalus entirely (that might make an interestingly weird TL, sort of an early era of party-kings).

I think fixing the issues with Al-Andalus is largely going to have to be an internal matter.
 
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