158 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINruling for seven years (713-720), but no coins are known to exist
bearing his name. Thus, Roderic does not appear to have been rec-
ognised as king in the lower Ebro valley, the Catalan coastal region
and Septimania, all of which formed part of the kingdom of Achila.
As coin survival is very limited - for example, only about a dozen
coins of Roderic are recorded in toto -and the Chronicle of 754 implies
widespread conflict in the peninsula, it is possible that other rival
Visigothic monarchs existed at this time.3J Toledo may have been in
the hands of a rival in the person of Oppa, brother of the former
king Wittiza.
If that were the case, this real conflict may lie behind the later
stories in both Arabic and Latin sources in which the treacherous
behaviour of the 'sons ofWittiza' contribute directly to the success of
the invaders and the overthrow of Roderic and the Visigothic king-
dom. In the Arab stories Roderic is betrayed in the crucial battle on
the Guadalete by these 'sons ofWittiza'; whilst in the late ninth/early
tenth century Asturian chronicles they are made responsible for bring-
ing the invaders into the kingdom in the first place. This is at least
one element in the tangled mass of legend relating to the conquest
that is demonstrably impossible. The Visigothic king Wittiza was born
no earlier than 687. He was thus about twenty three years old at the
time of his death in 710.^32 Sons of Wittiza if they existed, would have
been far too young to have been betraying Roderic in battle or invit-
ing the Arabs to invade in 71l.
The military events of the conquest also take on greater credibility
in the Chrrmicle of 754's narrative. Rather than the simple conflict
between grotesquely disproportionate forces of the ideologically height-
ened Muslim accounts, a more complex picture emerges with at least
two Arab armies campaigning in the peninsula in 711/2.33 The ulti-
mately decisive role of a single battle and the defeat and probable
death of Roderic in the course of it are common features of both
traditions, as is the rapid fall of Toledo. These two elements are
crucial to an understanding of why the conquest was both so rapid
and so successful, features acknowledged in both the Christian and
the Muslim historiography.
The defeat and almost certain death of the king in battle, an event
unmatched since the overthrow of Alaric II at Vouille in 507, para-
lysed the operation of centralised authority in the Visigothic king-
dom. At the same time the military disaster meant the killing or
dispersal of the monarch's immediate following and of the palatine