Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

4 .4
4.4
CENTRAL ASIA
AND SPAIN
Despite the great distance between Spain and Central Asia, the
historical fortunes of the two regions have seen episodes of brief ties and some longer
lasting connections.
Strange as it may seem to the reader, the first evidence of contact between Spain and
the peoples living on the territory of Central Asia is connected with the Alans, ancestors
of the Ossetians, after whom the modern Republic of North Ossetia – Alania is named.
However, it is an established fact that, in antiquity, the Alans inhabited the area
adjacent to the Aral Sea, where they even had their own state, which the Chinese called
Yancai. Even in the 10th century, some Alans were still living in their ancient habitat
and, as al-Biruni testified, at that time ‘their language combined the languages of the
Khorezmians and Pechenegs’. Under pressure from the Huns and other nomadic
peoples, some Alans migrated to the Black Sea region and the North Caucasus in the
first centuries AD.
In the 4th century AD, the new wave of Hun invasions once again displaced the
Alans from their homes on the Don river and the Black Sea coast, and together with the
Germanic tribes of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Vandals they moved to Europe and the
Iberian Peninsula, i.e., Spain. The Alans and Vandals then crossed over to North Africa,
from where their combined armies, led by Gaiseric, attacked Rome and plundered it
mercilessly. This ‘sack of Rome’ provides the origin of the word ‘vandal’ and its derivative
‘vandalism’, denoting extreme acts of destruction of material and cultural wealth.
At the beginning of the 8th century AD, Spain and Central Asia were united under the
aegis of one state – the Arab Umayyad Caliphate, which pursued an extremely aggressive
policy of conquering new territories. In AD 711, while Qutaiba ibn Muslim was brutally
suppressing the resistance of the peoples of Sogdia, Khorezm, and Ferghana, another
Arab commander, Tariq ibn Ziyad, crossed the straits separating Africa and Europe and
began his conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. The straits have since been called ‘Gibraltar’,
from the Arabic Jabal al-Tariq – ‘Tariq’s mountain’. Some evidence of this unification can
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