Onésimo Redondo: Roman roads, the 'highways' of conquest
Between 661 and 750 the Umayyad Caliphate expanded from Hispania to Central Asia from Damascus. A forum user attributes the rapid conquest to the Roman roads.
English · Original discussion in Spanish · Published
Hispania fell fast: a forum user blames the Roman roads
The conquest of Hispania was not an unrepeatable military antiestéticat: it was the collapse of a kingdom broken from within. Between 661 and 750, the Umayyad Caliphate went from ruling in Damascus to controlling a territory stretching from Spain to Central Asia. Less than a century to build a massive empire. And some argue the decisive factor was not the superiority of its armies, but the disintegration of the Visigothic kingdom and an inherited infrastructure: the Roman roads.
Why was the Muslim conquest of Hispania so fast?
The Visigothic kingdom had been consumed for decades by fratricidal struggles for the throne. According to this reading, Hispania had been the birthplace of councils and one of the territories where Christian culture flourished most, but that very sophistication was its downfall: the Roman roads, intact, worked as highways for an extremely fast conquest; without them, they argue, the advance would have cost what it cost the Romans, or would have been outright impossible. The kingdom did not fall for lack of walls, but for lack of unity.
Did the Umayyads have a real administration?
Here the analysis splits. One school holds that talking about administration in the year 700 is an anachronism: no premodern empire centralized anything, they just paraded armies around and collected taxes to maintain them. The reply is direct: Rome had provinces, censuses, written law and centralized tax collection, and the Umayyads inherited much of that apparatus, kept the Byzantine and Persian fiscal systems, employed Christians and Jews as officials and created the diwan, the military and fiscal registry. The myth of the empire without a state does not hold up.
Poitiers: where the expansion was halted
The limit came in the north. At the Battle of Poitiers it was the Franks who defeated an Umayyad army, and two hundred years later history repeated itself at Lechfeld against the Hungarians. Had the invaders won both clashes, the map of Europe would be a different one. What remained was a border that split the continent in two.
Was Hispania a single nation before the Muslim conquest, or a kingdom that no one knew how to stitch together in time?
The conquest of Hispania was not an unrepeatable military antiestéticat: it was the collapse of a kingdom broken from within. Between 661 and 750, the Umayyad Caliphate went from ruling in Damascus to controlling a territory stretching from Spain to Central Asia. Less than a century to build a massive empire. And some argue the decisive factor was not the superiority of its armies, but the disintegration of the Visigothic kingdom and an inherited infrastructure: the Roman roads.
Why was the Muslim conquest of Hispania so fast?
The Visigothic kingdom had been consumed for decades by fratricidal struggles for the throne. According to this reading, Hispania had been the birthplace of councils and one of the territories where Christian culture flourished most, but that very sophistication was its downfall: the Roman roads, intact, worked as highways for an extremely fast conquest; without them, they argue, the advance would have cost what it cost the Romans, or would have been outright impossible. The kingdom did not fall for lack of walls, but for lack of unity.
Did the Umayyads have a real administration?
Here the analysis splits. One school holds that talking about administration in the year 700 is an anachronism: no premodern empire centralized anything, they just paraded armies around and collected taxes to maintain them. The reply is direct: Rome had provinces, censuses, written law and centralized tax collection, and the Umayyads inherited much of that apparatus, kept the Byzantine and Persian fiscal systems, employed Christians and Jews as officials and created the diwan, the military and fiscal registry. The myth of the empire without a state does not hold up.
Poitiers: where the expansion was halted
The limit came in the north. At the Battle of Poitiers it was the Franks who defeated an Umayyad army, and two hundred years later history repeated itself at Lechfeld against the Hungarians. Had the invaders won both clashes, the map of Europe would be a different one. What remained was a border that split the continent in two.
Was Hispania a single nation before the Muslim conquest, or a kingdom that no one knew how to stitch together in time?
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Summary of a discussion on Burbuja.info - Foro de economía, actualidad y política., translated from Spanish and reviewed before publication. Read the full discussion (15 replies).
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