20 August with little or no defence being mounted, and for a short time the fleet harried
the area immediately west of the Straits of Gibraltar. The towns of Cádiz, Medina
Sidonia and Algeciras were burned on the Spanish side, and possibly Asilah on the
Moroccan coast, a settlement under the distant control of the Abbasid Caliphate. The
Vikings then turned briefly northwards again, and entered the Guadalquivir River to
take Seville on 3 October, where they halted and plundered the surrounding countryside
for over a month. During this period Castillo de Azaguac, Coria and Beja were sacked,
while the invaders harried at will in the lower Guadalquivir valley, basing themselves on
a defendable island, Isla Menor (Collins 1995 : 193 ; Morales Romero 2004 a: 58 – 62 ).
It was at this point that the emir Abd al-Rahman II mobilised his forces, perhaps
due to Seville’s proximity to the capital at Córdoba which may even have come under
attack (Pons-Sanz 2004 : 5 ). A large Andalusian army was then sent out against the
Vikings, who held their ground at Tablada but suffered heavy losses: according to
Muslim sources, more than 1 , 000 Scandinavians were slain and thirty ships lost. Many
of the vessels were set ablaze by a highly volatile and lethal substance known as Greek
Fire, which was thrown from catapults and resembled a primitive form of napalm. The
same chronicles record that more than 400 raiders were captured, almost all of whom
were later hanged from palm-trees at Seville.
It was not a complete victory for the emirate, but the surviving Vikings had little
choice but to negotiate their way out of the area in return for surrendering the prisoners
that they had taken to sell as slaves, together with all the plunder they had seized. A
thirteenth-century Arab poet, Ibn Dihya, describes these presumably somewhat tense
discussions in his collation of earlier sources, noting also that the Scandinavian com-
mander had been killed in the fighting (Allen 1960 : 19 ). The remnants of the Viking
fleet managed to evade the ships sent after them by the emir, and limped home to the
Loire after brief raiding in the Algarve (Lévi-Provençal 1944 : 152 f.). Back in Frankia
they presumably recounted the disaster that had befallen them in Iberia, and it would
seem to have been as a direct result of this that no further Scandinavian raids were
mounted in the peninsula for thirteen years.
The Andalusians sometimes referred to the Vikings as majus, ‘fire-worshippers’, pre-
sumably referring to their religious customs, though the term could also be applied to
other non-Muslim foreigners (Pritsak 1990 ; al-Azmeh 1992 ). Although relations
between the Umayyads and the Scandinavians were often violent, the possibility of
Muslim trading contacts with the Vikings cannot be ruled out (El-Hajji 1967 ). Indeed,
one of the leading scholars of early medieval Spain has suggested that the Vikings were
among the main sources for the constant supply of slaves that the emirate required
(Collins 1995 : 192 ).
The negotiation of some aspects of this trade may have been on the agenda of a
diplomatic delegation that Abd al-Rahman II sent to the Scandinavians, a mission led
by the poet Yahya b. Hakam al-Jayyani, whose looks earned him the name al-Ghazal
(‘the Gazelle’) by which he is more commonly known to scholarship. The exact date of
the embassy is uncertain but has been assumed to shortly post-date the 844 raid, nor
is its objective or even destination clear (Hiberno-Norse Ireland, the Scandinavian terri-
tories in Frankia and Denmark have all been proposed). Its very existence has also been
called into question, and it may be a conflation with an earlier mission to Byzantium
led by the same man (Lévi-Provençal 1937 ; González Campo 2002 b, 2004 ; Pons-Sanz
2004 ). If it even occurred, deeper study of the mission is made difficult by the fanciful
–– Neil Price––