Some historians question the official version according to which Islam was violently implanted in the peninsula after an Arab invasion in the year 711. They argue that Islam was neither imposed nor was it alien to the Hispanics, who embraced it freely and in the majority. In their opinion, the Muslim imposition was not such. It was an “invention” promoted by the Church in order to cover up its defeat by the Unitarian Christians, followers of the Arianism preached by Priscillian.

Is it possible that, in the 8th century AD, a Muslim army crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, defeated the Visigothic troops and advanced victoriously to the point of subduing almost the entire peninsular territory? Could a handful of Berbers have subdued 20 million Hispanics for several centuries? Against this hypothesis we have the fact that the documents of the time do not contain references to that terrible invasion that, if true, would have meant for the peninsulars all the unimaginable evils. The first news does not appear until the Latin and Muslim chronicles of the ninth century, six generations (150 years) of the events that are reported, when Islam was already firmly rooted in the peninsula.

Some researchers, after verifying that the Muslims attributed impossible victories to their co-religionists and that the Christians omitted to record any aspect of what was happening on their soil, conclude that the myth has survived, against all logic, because it has been in their interest to maintain it. Among the Muslims, because it gave them a patina of glory; among the orthodox Christians, because it covered up for their own people what was in reality a social and religious failure.

The civil war that broke out in the Iberian Peninsula at the beginning of the 8th century, explained as a political conflict and later disguised as an invasion by a foreign power, had its true origin in events that date back four centuries earlier, in the confrontation between two Christian currents: the Unitarians or Arians, who denied that the Son was equal to the Father – on the premise that Jesus was not God – and the Trinitarians, adhering to the dogma preached by St. Paul, who maintained that there are three distinct persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – in one true God.

Therefore, to get closer to the truth of what really happened in the year 711, when a contingent of warriors from North Africa, among whom the Berbers predominated, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, defeated the Visigothic troops led by Don Rodrigo and settled in the Iberian Peninsula, we will have to go back to the fourth century.

In 325, Emperor Constantine had just convened a council in Nicaea to settle the theological disputes that were harming the empire. It was a crucial date, because the dogma of the Trinity was imposed and included in the official religion, while the excommunication of the Alexandrian bishop Arius, a berber, who died in 336, the day before the one set by the emperor to force him to reconcile with the Church, was reaffirmed. A century later, his message had an unforeseeable echo.

The martyrdom of Priscillian

The ideas that Arius had preached in the East were propagated by Priscillian in the Iberian Peninsula and southern Gaul. This controversial character was born in the bosom of a senatorial family in 340 -it is believed that in Galicia- and began his preaching around 370. He was a cultured, ascetic, vegetarian man who made no distinction between men and women in matters of appointments related to worship, principles that would be taken up centuries later by the Cathars.

Arius’ books were burned and hardly any of Priscillian’s works remain. Of the external signs and sacraments of Arianism we only know, by references of his enemies, the use of some form of tonsure and that baptism was performed by three immersions, perhaps in correspondence with the trilogy “body, soul and spirit” or “physical, astral and mental body”. Priscillian had to endure throughout his public life the theological and personal harassment of the Trinitarian bishops, fearful of his growing influence among the clergy and the population. The last act of this story took place in the year 385 in the city of Trier, where the Emperor Maximus summoned him to defend himself against the accusation of sorcery launched by his adversaries. There was a trial, vitiated by clerical and imperial interests, and a condemnation: Priscillian’s head was cut off. He was the first heretic to suffer the death penalty. Curiously, Emperor Maximus himself was executed three years later by order of Theodosius.

Unamuno suggests that who is buried in Compostela is not the Apostle Santiago, but Priscillian, which would give an idea of the extension and importance of his doctrines. What is certain is that his execution would strengthen Arianism in the country. On the other hand, around the year 460 the Gothic monarch Euricus took power in the peninsula, who converted to the Arian faith and thus truncated the ambitions of those who had not hesitated to kill Priscillian in order to put an end to his ideas.

The mythe of the muslim invasion, part 2:Recaredo’s abjuration

The mythe of the muslim invasion, part 3: Solomon’s Table

The mythe of the muslim invasion, part4: The emir with blue eyes

Part 1 Source here