Musa ibn Nusayr
Musa ibn Nusayr was the Umayyad governor of North Africa who completed the conquest of the Berbers to the Atlantic, sent his Berber freedman Tariq across the strait in 711 with seven thousand men, and when Tariq had beaten the Visigothic king and taken Toledo came himself the next year with eighteen thousand Arabs, took Seville and Merida, met Tariq at Talavera and struck him for going beyond his orders, and pushed north to Saragossa and the Ebro before the caliph called both men to Damascus. He went home with the loot of a kingdom and died in disgrace. He was born about 640, the son of a Christian prisoner from Iraq who had become a client of the Umayyads, and rose in the service of the governor of Egypt, who sent him west to Ifriqiya in 698 after the Byzantines had been driven out of Carthage. In ten years he took the Berber country from Tripoli to Tangier, by war and by enlisting the tribes he beat, so that the army that went to Spain was mostly Berber, and he sent fleets to Majorca and Sardinia. Tariq's crossing in the spring of 711, at the invitation of the enemies of King Roderic, was a raid that became a conquest when Roderic was killed at the Guadalete in July, and Musa crossed in June 712 to take his share and the credit. Seville held out a month, Merida from the winter to June 713, and at Toledo the two commanders divided the Visigothic treasure, of which the chroniclers remember a table of gold and jewels said to have been Solomon's, over which they quarrelled. They went on together to Saragossa and Musa to Lugo in Galicia, and in 714 the caliph al-Walid, who did not want a governor who owned a kingdom, summoned them both. Musa left his son Abd al-Aziz to govern Spain from Seville, marched to Syria with thirty thousand captives and the table, and arrived as al-Walid lay dying. The new caliph Sulayman stripped him of everything, fined him, and had Abd al-Aziz killed in Seville in 716 on suspicion of making himself king. The head was shown to the father. Musa died the same year, on the pilgrimage or in poverty at Damascus, the tradition is not sure which.
- Lived: 640 CE – 716 CE
- Nationality: Arab
- Roles: general, governor
