Julian, Count of Ceuta

Julian, Count of Ceuta (, (The honorific Don may be an anachronism but that is the way he is referred to in the mediaeval Spanish romances 'Abd al-Hakam gives him the title صاحب سبتة (, "Lord of Ceuta").) According to Arab chroniclers, Julian had an important role in the Umayyad conquest of Hispania, a key event in the history of Islam, and in the subsequent history of what were to become Spain and Portugal.

Historicity As a historical figure, little is known about Count Julian. The earliest extant source describing Julian is Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam's 9th-century Kitāb futuḥ misr wa akhbārihā (The History of the Conquests of Egypt, North Africa, and Spain), which claims that Julian first resisted the Muslim conquest of the Maghreb, and then joined the Umayyad conquest of Hispania. Other details, such as the existence of a daughter known as La Cava, appear in the 11th century. The debate concerning Julian's historicity ranges at least to the 19th century; by the 21st century, the academic consensus seemed to lean toward Julian being ahistorical, with most scholars since the 1980s agreeing with Roger Collins that the portions of the story concerning Florinda la Cava are fantastical and that arguments for even Julian's existence are weak, while not entirely excluding the possibility that he was a real personage.

Byzantine and native resistance and the importance of Ceuta Byzantine strategy at the time, as articulated by John Troglita, a Byzantine general under Justinian I, advocated dispersal and retreat back to artificially or naturally fortified places and ambush tactics against a superior foe. The Exarchate of Africa was divided into ducates led by a duke (, ), also called strategos (στρατηγός). cited in cited in

Disintegration and Mauretanisation of the Byzantine exarchate The Arab conquest of North Africa was quite rapid. The Umayyads faced an internally weakened Byzantine state, one of whose emperors, Constans II, was assassinated in his bath in the midst of an army revolt and another, Justinian II, was deposed, mutilated and exiled in 695, only a few years before the Arabs broke through into the province of Africa in 697. For a while, a Byzantine expeditionary force under John the Patrician was able to re-supply coastal garrisons and in some cases aid in the reconquest of lost territory, especially the important city of Carthage, but the next year the Arabs sent in their own reinforcements after an appeal to the caliph by Hasan ibn al-Nu'man, and forced the Byzantines to yield most of the province. After losing the subsequent Battle of Carthage outside the walls, the expeditionary force retreated to its island naval bases to re-group, whereupon the Droungarios of the Cibyrrhaeot Theme, Apsimar, seized control of the fleet's remnants after a mutiny by naval officers. The emperor Leontius was himself deposed and mutilated, to be replaced by Apsimar, now calling himself Tiberius III.

Identification of "Julian" The earliest extant source for Julian is a chapter in Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam's work Futuḥ misr headed Dhikr Fatḥ Al-Andalus (Chapter on the Conquest of Spain). Its 19th-century translator into English, John Harris Jones, noted that Julian is usually called يليان (Ilyan) by later Arabic authors, while in the manuscripts available to Jones he is called بليان (Bilian). A better manuscript with vowels was available to Torrey, who in his critical edition of the Arabic text, gave the least corrupt form as بؙلْيان (Bulyan), which he supposed should be corrected to يُلْيان (Yulyan).

Jones disputes Juan Francisco Masdeu and "most [contemporary] Spanish critics", who held that Julian was a fictional character, as well as Pascual de Gayangos y Arce's assertion that no sources prior to the 11th century mention any quarrel with Roderic on Julian's part; Jones replies that these only seem true if one consults Christian sources, and names both Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam and Ibn al-Qūṭiyya as 9th-century historians who mention both Julian and his rift with Roderic. in

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Indeed, historically Ceuta (then called "Septem") and the surrounding territories were the last area of Byzantine Africa to be occupied by the Arabs: around 708 AD, as Muslim armies approached the city, its Byzantine governor, Julian (described as "King of the Ghomara"), changed his allegiance and exhorted the Muslims to invade the Iberian Peninsula. After Julian's death, the Arabs took direct control of the city, which the indigenous Berber tribes resented. They destroyed Septem during the Kharijite rebellion led by Maysara al-Matghari in 740 AD, but Christian Berbers remained there (even if harshly persecuted in the next centuries).

In Part I, Chapter 41, of Don Quixote (1605), Miguel de Cervantes writes:

Meanwhile, the wind having changed we were compelled to head for the land, and ply our oars to avoid being driven on shore; but it was our good fortune to reach a creek that lies on one side of a small promontory or cape, called by the Moors that of the "Cava rumia," which in our language means "the wicked Christian woman;" for it is a tradition among them that La Cava, through whom Spain was lost, lies buried at that spot; "cava" in their language meaning "wicked woman," and "rumia" "Christian;" moreover, they count it unlucky to anchor there when necessity compels them, and they never do so otherwise. (Spanish text.)

The Jacobean playwright William Rowley recounts Julian's story in his play All's Lost by Lust (c. 1619).

The British writers Sir Walter Scott, Walter Savage Landor, and Robert Southey handle the legends associated with these events poetically: Scott in "The Vision of Don Roderick" (1811), Landor in his tragedy Count Julian (1812), and Southey in Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814).

The American writer Washington Irving retells the legends in his 1835 Legends of the Conquest of Spain, mostly written while living in that country. These consist of "Legend of Don Roderick," "Legend of the Subjugation of Spain," and "Legend of Count Julian and His Family."

Expatriate Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo takes up the legends in Count Julian (1970), a book in which he, in his own words, imagines "the destruction of Spanish mythology, its Catholicism and nationalism, in a literary attack on traditional Spain." He identifies himself "with the great traitor who opened the door to Arab invasion." The narrator in this novel, an exile in Morocco, rages against his beloved Spain, forming an obsessive identification with the fabled Count Julian, dreaming that, in a future invasion, the ethos and myths central to Hispanic identity will be totally destroyed.

In 2000, Julian's story became a West End musical, La Cava.