Moorish Gibraltar

Moorish Gibraltar
711–1462
The Moorish Castle's Tower of Homage, the largest surviving remnant of Moorish Gibraltar. The dents in its eastern wall were caused by Castilian siege engines in 1333.
Chronology Castilian Gibraltar

The history of Moorish Gibraltar began with the landing of the Muslims in Hispania and the fall of the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo in 711 and ended with the fall of Gibraltar to Christian hands 751 years later, in 1462, with an interregnum during the early 14th century.

The Muslim presence in Gibraltar began on 27 April 711 when the Berber general Tariq ibn-Ziyad led the initial incursion into Iberia in advance of the main Moorish force under the command of Musa ibn Nusayr, Umayyad governor of Ifriqiya.^[1] Gibraltar was named after Tariq, who was traditionally said to have landed on the shores of the Rock of Gibraltar, though it seems more likely that he landed somewhere nearby. Muslim sources claimed that Tariq established some kind of fortification on the Rock, but no evidence has been found and it is not considered credible. It was not until 1160 that a first fortified settlement was built there.

The Madinat al-Fath (English: City of Victory) was intended to be a major city furnished with palaces and mosques, but it seems to have fallen well short of the ambitions of its founder, the Almohad caliph Abd al-Mu'min, by the time it was captured by the Kingdom of Castile in 1309 after a short siege. Muslim control was restored in 1333 after another, much longer, siege. The city subsequently underwent a major expansion and refortification. A number of buildings and structures from this period still exist, including the Moorish Castle, parts of the Moorish walls, a bath-house and a subterranean reservoir.

Gibraltar was subjected to several more sieges before its final fall on 20 August 1462 (feast of St. Bernard) to Christian forces under the 1st Duke of Medina Sidonia. The population, Muslim and Jewish, was expelled en masse and replaced by Christian settlers.