Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
". . . al-Andalus represents, in one form or another, the presence of Islam in Europe for the subsequent seven-hundred-odd years, some three times the present duration of the American Republic. . . . Abd al-Rahman, went west and became the first of the Umayyads in a place we too often relegate to being a “corner” of Europe but which became Europe’s veritable center for centuries thereafter. . . . Rome had governed there for nearly six hundred years, beginning about 200 B.C.E., when it followed in a long line of Mediterranean settlers and cultures—Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Greeks. . . . This tribe [Visigoths], infamous for the sack of Rome in 410, eventually ended as the overlords of the former province of Hispania, although not without centuries of destructive battling over the territory with the Vandals and then among themselves. . . . By the time Abd al-Rahman arrived, less than fifty years after the first Muslim armies had ventured across the Strait of Gibraltar, nearly all the formerly Visigothic territories as far north as Narbonne, in Aquitaine, had been taken over by Muslims." [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 9, 24-7]