THE ARAB CONQUEST 161origins of the church go back to the sixth century, the settlement that
surrounds its southern side seems to reflect the events of the Arab
conquest. A scatter of gold coins of king Achila dates the final phase
of occupation to the period 710-713, and the excavators have indi-
cated that the settlement was abandoned in a hurry, with a wide
range of items of everyday use just dropped almost randomly. The
deductions that have been drawn imply that the village was aban-
doned by its inhabitants in the course of the first Arab campaign in
the lower Ebro valley, probably to be dated to 714.
In 720 the vestigial Visigothic kingdom of Ardo in the north-east
seems to have come to an end. The Chronicle of 754 indicates that
Arab armies crossed the Pyrenees and took and garrisoned Narbonne
that year. By 721 they were pressing on seeking new prey, this time
the duchy of Aquitaine. As in 711 they may have hoped to take ad-
vantage of internal divisions in the ranks of their intended victims. A
civil war had broken out in the Frankish kingdom in 715, in which
duke Eudo of Aquitaine had become a participant. He withdrew
suddenly from the conflict north of the Loire in 719/20, possibly as
a result of the advancing Arab threat in Spain, and proved rather
better prepared than others had been when the blow fell. An Arab
attack on the city of Toulouse was beaten off by the duke's forces in
721, and its leader, the governor Al-Saml) (718-721) was killed. Al-
though further expeditions were launched in the 720s and early 730s,
this defeat at Toulouse marked the beginning of the end of Arab
expansion in the west. Some of these raids were severe and far reach-
ing: one got as deep into Francia as Autun in 725, and in 737 the
Arabs threatened to cut the Rhone valley off from the Mediterranean
coast by taking Avignon, but none of them led to large-scale territo-
rial aggrandisement of the kind seen throughout the period 635 to
711.
In the west at least part of the reason for this slowing down of
conquest was the need to organise and administer the recently con-
quered territories. The Mrican campaigns of the first decade of the
eighth century had been part of a rolling process of military expan-
sion, and conquered Berber tribes had been used to maintain this by
being drawn on for the military manpower needed for the next phase
of expansion. In Spain, however, the Christian population was not
able to be assimilated as quickly as the Berbers; nor was it as well
organised for war. The military nucleus of the Visigothic army, the
royal comitatus appears to have been destroyed in the fighting of 711/