Arab chroniclers do not fail to point out the irony of enlisting and arming enslaved people who were captured in raids or bought. In fact, this is a much more complex phenomenon, common to many cultural areas that based their defence system on an army of captives. It is an almost universal reality to which history testifies, beyond medieval Muslim spaces. As B. Ares, C. Bernard and A. Stella (2006) show in their collective work, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cādiz, like other Iberian cities, had many legions of black (morenos) and mulatto (parados) soldiers. It is also interesting to note the importance of this model in the Kingdoms of Spain and the rest of the Muslim world. The bravery of the formidable Nubian archers, whose unfailing reputation dates back to the times of the Pharaohs and Ptolemies is well known. The same is true of the Berber horsemen who, more than once, enabled their queen Al-Kāhina (Balādhurī, op. cit., p. 231; Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam, op. cit., pp. 134-6) and prince Kusayla (Mālikī, 1983, vol. I, pp. 33-47; Ibn 'Idhārī, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 28-32; Ibn Khaldūn, op. cit., vol. IV, pp. 222-3, vol. VI, pp. 127-8, 172-4, vol. VII, p. 11; Ibn Abī Dīnār, op. cit., pp. 44-5) to defeat the first Muslim raids.  
Regarding the twists and turns of the first engagements in Europe, it was primarily the Spanish geographer Ishāq ibn al-Husayn ${ }^{2}$ who explicitly mentioned  
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