Tariq ibn Ziyad was the Berber commander who led the Umayyad invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 711. He served as governor of Tangier under the Umayyad walī of Ifriqiya Musa ibn Nusayr, having been a freedman or client of the Arab dynasty rather than a member of its kin group. The medieval sources, primarily Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam and al-Maqqari writing several centuries later, identify his tribal affiliation variously within the Nafza or Walhasa branches of the Zenata.
In April 711 Tariq crossed the Strait of Gibraltar with a force conventionally numbered at seven thousand and disembarked at the rock that now carries his name: Jabal Tariq, "the mountain of Tariq." Within three months he had defeated the Visigothic king Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete and pushed inland to Toledo. His army, predominantly Berber rather than Arab, took the bulk of the peninsula within seven years, opening the Andalusi era.
The relationship between Tariq and his nominal superior Musa ibn Nusayr structured the politics of the early conquest. Musa crossed the Strait the following year with a larger force and a complaint about Tariq's having advanced beyond his orders; both commanders were subsequently summoned to Damascus by the Caliph al-Walid I, where Tariq was dismissed and disappears from the historical record around 720.
The structural tension between Berber commanders and the Arab Umayyad centre that Tariq's career exemplifies would persist through the eighth-century revolts of the Maghreb, the Kharijite movements, and the rise of the autonomous Berber dynasties of the central medieval period.