719 and 751, the Muslim leaders tried to maintain control over the southern regions of France but were eventually driven out by Charles Martel and his son, Pepin III. After these defeats, the Muslims contented themselves with controlling the Iberian Peninsula.
Although Spain fell to the Muslims because of Gothic disunity, the Muslim conquerors were not models of unity either. The Arabs, who comprised the Muslim leadership and upper classes, were divided into factions which dated back centuries. Even more seriously, the soldiers who did most of the fighting, and dying, were not Arabs but Berbers. The Arabs took the best land in Spain and relegated the Berbers to the bare plateau in central Spain. In the middle part of the Eighth Century, the Arab governor of the Maghrib taxed the Muslim Berbers in the fashion as they taxed the Christians and enslaved their children. A radical Muslim sect inspired a Berber revolt in North Africa and Spain at this time, but the Berbers were defeated in Spain by Syrian horsemen imported by the Arab leaders. The bloody conflict and a famine caused the Berbers to leave Spain, abandoning the northern plateau to the Christians.
In 750, resentment against the Arabs and the Ummayad caliphate led to the overthrow of the Ummayads and the transfer of the caliphate to the Abbasids in Baghdad. Although most of the Ummayads were killed, one them, Abd al-Rahman, escaped to Spain. Winning support from various factions, he overthrew the governor of Spain and proclaimed himself emir in 756, asserting authority over the entire Peninsula. He established the single Muslim kingdom of Spain, calling it al-Andulus, and declared it to be independent of Baghdad. The capital of the empire became C=rdoba, from which the emir, and later the caliph, ruled. With the establishment of the emirate, Moorish Spain, or al-Andulus, became united under a single ruler and its prosperity gradually grew greater than that of...