date_of_birth al-hakam i
Septimania ( ) was the western region of the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis that passed under the control of the Visigoths in ___MASK79___ , when Septimania was ceded to their king , Theodoric II . Under the Visigoths it was known as simply Gallia or Narbonensis . It corresponded roughly with the modern French region of Languedoc - Roussillon . It passed briefly to the Emirate of Córdoba in the eighth century before its conquest by the Franks , who by the end of the ninth century termed it Gothia or the Gothic March (" Marca Gothica "). Al - Hakam Ibn Hisham Ibn Abd - ar - Rahman I ( Arabic :     ) was Umayyad Emir of Cordoba from 796 until 822 in the Al - Andalus ( Moorish Iberia ) . Al - Hakam was the second son of his father , his older brother having died at an early age . When he came to power , he was challenged by his uncles Sulayman and Abdallah , sons of his grandfather Abd ar - Rahman I . Abdallah took his two sons Ubayd Allah and Abd al - Malik to the court of Charlemagne in Aix - la - Chapelle to negotiate for aid . In the mean time Sulayman attacked Cordoba , but was defeated and driven back to Mérida where he was captured and executed . Abdallah was pardoned , but was forced to stay in Valencia . Al - Hakam spent much of his reign suppressing rebellions in Toledo , Saragossa and Mérida . The uprisings twice reached Cordoba . An attempt was made to dethrone Al - Hakam and replace him with his cousin Mohammed ibn al - Kasim . When the plot was discovered , on 16 November 806 72 nobles ( accounts talk of ___MASK52___ , 000 ) were massacred at a banquet , crucified and displayed along the banks of the river Guadalquivir . Such display of cruelty was not unusual during this period , with the heads of rebel leaders or Christians killed in expeditions to the north being put on show at the gates of Cordoba . Following the rebellion in Cordoba , Al - Hakam established a personal bodyguard , the Al - Haras , led by the Visigothic leader of the secular Christians in Cordoba , the Comes ( Count ) Rabi , son of Theodulf , who also served as the Emir ' s tax collector . Rabi was later removed and executed by crucifixion for alleged misappropriations . In 818 he crushed a rebellion led by clerics in the suburb of al - Ribad on the south bank of the Guadalquivir river . Some 300 notables were captured and crucified , while the rest of the inhabitants were exiled . Some moved to Alexandria in Egypt , some to Fez and Crete . Others joined the Levantine pirates . Al - Hakam I died in 822 after having ruled for 26 years . Al - Andalus ( trans . Berber : " Andalus "), also known as Muslim Spain or Islamic Iberia , was a medieval Muslim territory and cultural domain occupying at its peak most of what are today Spain and Portugal . At its greatest geographical extent in the eighth century , southern France  Septimania  was briefly under its control . The name more generally describes parts of the Iberian Peninsula governed by Muslims ( given the generic name of Moors ) at various times between ___MASK72___ and ___MASK21___ , though the boundaries changed constantly as the Christian Reconquista progressed . The ( Spanish and Portuguese for the " reconquest ") is the period of history of the Iberian Peninsula spanning approximately ___MASK62___ years between the Islamic conquest of Hispania in 710 and the fall of the last Islamic state in Iberia at Granada to the expanding Christian kingdoms in 1492 . The " ended just before the European discovery of the Americas  the " New World " which ushered in the era of the Portuguese and Spanish colonial empires . Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain , is a sovereign state largely located on the Iberian Peninsula in southwestern Europe , with two large archipelagos , the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea and the Canary Islands off the North African Atlantic coast , two cities Ceuta and Melilla in the North African mainland and several small islands in the Alboran Sea near the Moroccan coast . Its mainland is bordered to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea except for a small land boundary with Gibraltar ; to the north and northeast by France , Andorra , and the Bay of Biscay ; and to the west and northwest by Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean . It is the only European country to have a border with an African country ( Morocco ) and its African territory accounts for nearly ___MASK52___ % of its population , mostly in the Canary Islands but also in Ceuta and Melilla .