160 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINmetal and produce and promised not to give aid to anyone resisting
the Arabs, in return for retaining their own ruler, Theodemir, and
the free exercise of their religion.^34
The treaty was made with the new governor or wall of Al-Andalus,
MUsa's son 'Abd al-Azlz (712-715). Following the chronology of the
Chronicle of 754, Musil himself had been recalled to Damascus in the
Winter of 712/3. Of Tariq no further mention is made in this source
after his victory in 711, and there is no need to believe in the later
Arab stories of conflict and rivalry between him and his master. 'Abd
al-Azlz ibn Musa continued as governor until 715, when he was
murdered in Seville, which he had made the centre of his adminis-
tration.^35 The new caliph Sulayman may have been planning to re-
move him, but he was killed before he could be replaced by members
of his own following, who, according to the Arab accounts, resented
his adoption of Visigothic royal practices, such as the wearing of a
crown and requiring them to perform acts of obeisance before him.
He had certainly married Roderic's widow Egilona, a detail confirmed
by the Chronicle of 754, and it could be that he was tempted by the
possibility of reviving a peninsular monarchy.36 Visigothic Spain was
the first autonomous political entity in the Mediterranean to fall vic-
tim to the Arabs, and thus had its own traditions of independent
monarchy; whet"eas Syria, Egypt and Africa had previously formed
parts of the East Roman and Byzantine empire and generally looked
to Constantinople for authority. The Chronicle of 754 is clear that 'Abd
al-Azlz 'tried to throw off the Arab yoke from his neck and retain the
conquered kingdom of Iberia for himself. ,37
His failure and death marked the last such attempt. The succeed-
ing governors remained generally faithful, and for most of the next
twenty years devoted themselves to further military expansion. The
details of this process are not easy to come by. The Arab sources
telescope the conquest of the peninsula primarily into the period of
Moo ibn Nu~ayr and Tariq's campaigns.^38 As the Tudmir treaty, dated
to 713 and the period of 'Abd al-Azlz's governorship shows, the pro-
cess of imposing the new Arab rule was rather slower, and involved
the making of such local and regional treaties as much or even more
than it did military subjugation. Certainly, there must have been an
element of the latter: one of the most tantalising of early medieval
archaeological sites in Spain seems to relate to just this period. This
is the church and settlement site of EI Bovalar, on the south bank of
the river Segre, a few miles west of Lerida in Catalonia. While the