Under the authority of the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid I of Damascus, and led by the Berber general Tariq ibn Ziyad, the army of North-African Muslims (Moors) landed at Gibraltar on April 30 and then moved on northward in a 8-year long military campaign at the end of which most of the Iberian Peninsula was brought under Muslim occupation save for small areas in the northwest (Galicia and Asturias) and the largely Basque regions in the Pyrenees. The conquered territory, under the Arabic name al-Andalus, became part of the expanding Umayyad empire.
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Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Muslim (Moorish) conquest of the Iberian peninsula". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 May 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=6796, accessed 23 November 2024.]