Her Visions Defeated an Army

The sorceress's mane swirls around her as she screams: "I, dear, will be killed, and my head carried on horseback to the Orient, exhibited before the King of Arabs." Her three sons stare in horror. Another of her visions. It is around 697 in the Maghreb, North Africa. Most of Dea's army of horsemen are dead, and the survivors have retreated deep into the mountains. In the valley below, thousands of spears and swords of General Hassan's advancing Arab army glint in the sun. "Mother, why won't you flee?" "I am a queen, and queens do not flee death."

The Free People Before the Storm

In the seventh century, the coast of what is now Tunisia and eastern Algeria was ruled from Carthage by the Byzantines—the surviving eastern half of the Roman Empire. But the vast interior, all the way to the Atlantic, belonged to different groups the Byzantines called Moors and the Arabs would call Berbers, probably from the Greek "barbarian." Today, some of their descendants see this as derogatory and prefer Amazigh—"free people." These groups had lived in North Africa for thousands of years, often linked only by related languages. Some of their kingdoms had been absorbed into the Roman Empire, blending into a diverse Roman African society. But after the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century, and the Byzantines reclaimed only a fraction of the land