Umayyad conquest of Hispania Puns

All my family is from Asturias, Spain and everyone is always very prideful about Pelagius of Asturias who used the mountainous terrain to keep the Moorish at bay and consequently pushing them back and out of Spain. I am just looking to find some validity or understanding of the events that lead to Spain's rising as a super power in the following centuries.

Comment down below what you think could change that would create this alternate timeline and the comment with the most upvotes will be selected

Edit: Found a similar question with high quality answers here: https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/e9k57s/how_come_the_romans_were_able_to_impose_their/

IDK if this is normal/intentional or a bug (not the part where the dukes split off, but where the new states gain shitloads of gold), but it is very frustrating trying to declare war on each new duke since they can just raise mercenaries for days and never have any kind of dent in their wealth.

Overall, this is making my playthrough VERY frustrating

So the dev diary says :

>"A Reconquista will be considered a success when all the lands of Iberia has been taken, or a Christian Emperor of Hispania is crowned. Similarly, if a Muslim gets the Empire of Hispania, they will stop the Reconquista as well."

In my game the Umayyads hold the empire of Hispania. According to the dev diary that should stop the Reconquista. But is there any way to restart it again? What if the Umayyads lose the empire title? I have never played in Spain before so im not sure if that would work.

Im playing a norse bloodline collector game and it would be a shame to miss out on the Reconquista bloodlines.

With the Visigothic conquest of the Iberian peninsula, a lot of native peoples there started carrying gothic-style surnames (e.g. Ramirez -> son of Ramiro), which are still largely in use today.

For that reason I wanted to ask: do people who carry that type of surname have a gothic ancestor, or did it somehow become fashionable for locals to fabricate a connection to the gothic ruling class?

What are good books on the Roman conquest of Hispania and pre-Roman Iberian societies?

https://www.britannica.com/place/North-Africa/From-the-Arab-conquest-to-1830

Also , there was "practices as levying human tribute on the Berber tribes, through which the Arab ruling class was provided with slaves, especially female slaves. "

Given that the native North African Berbers barely fell to the invading Muslim Arab armies from the east like less than two decades prior in the 690s (with many still resisting for a long time after, including the big revolts a bit later), how was it possible that the Berbers became fanatical and devout enough Muslims to take upon a campaign like taking down the Visigothic kingdom of Spain so soon, by 711? Did they even have enough time to be properly Islamicized?? I know there is contention and debate about the ethnic origin of Tariq ibn Ziyad, but most now seem to see him and much of his army as Berbers... something's just not really adding up for me here. Could anyone explain how this would have gone down?

It's even more interesting since prior to that time, (correct me if I'm wrong) the Berbers barely ever even attacked Europe and mostly kept to their own affairs (except maybe as part of Hannibal's armies). But suddenly these Arabs come and whip them into a frenzy to start massive conquests going all the way to Gaul till the defeat by Charles Martel? Or were they mostly forced? How did they ensure compliance like that?

Even today I know of ethnic Berbers who are not Muslim and are proud of being separate from Arabs and still speak their Amazigh/Kabyle languages.

From what I've read it seems as if the entirety of the reconquista was left up to the Kingdom of Asturias. The Moors would certainly have been seen as a threat especially to the Franks, but did they just not care after Charles Martel pushed them back over the Pyrenees? I feel like other European kingdoms would have been more concerned with the caliphate conquering Spain, but as far as I'm aware it was the Spanish Kings who took it back themselves. Any clarification would be great thanks!

So I was playing around in google maps and I noticed that most countries using Arabic script for their cities lie in the Sahara. I then realized how most (maybe all?) muslim-majority African countries lie in precisely in that desert.

This got me curious and I started reading a bit about the early caliphates. I couldn't find a good detailed answer of why these early conquests stopped short of the resource-rich subsaharan Africa (SSA) -- if I try to put myself in their shoes and was looking to expand an empire from the Arabian peninsula, I'd look south-west before looking west.

I found some vague answers saying that there were strong empires in SSA, like the Mali empire, but I want a bit more detail. Why specifically were these conquests not directed at SSA? What were the political parts in play here?

Thanks!!