Fortun was the son of Garcia Iniguez, King of Pamplona and Urraca de Giménez, see the previous chapter. His brother Sancho & sister Jimena are also Delaforce ancestors. Fortun Garces was king only in name, as he had had to spend 20 years as a hostage in Cordova when the Moors had been able to put a squeeze on Navarre. Consequently, he had no administrative experience & Garcia Jimenez actually ran the kingdom until 890. After ten years, Fortun, also nicknamed 'the One-eyed', abdicated to become a monk in 901. That he married a Moor, Aurea, suggests the usual political marriage but they clearly rubbed along well enough to produce at least four children. His trees are below:-

In our search for Delaforce ancestors, it seemed sensible at this stage to examine anyone with a name such as Forte, Fortun etc (Fortun hunting) & this is how we met the Banu Qasi.

Two names leap off the page at us: Musa ibn Fortun & Mohammed the Prophet. What has been going on? Perhaps we should start with Queen Aurea of Navarre & the story of how some of the Goths running Spain at the time of the invasion by the Moors coped:-

Aurea, Queen of Navarre’s grandfather was Musa ibn Fortun. He was the quarter-Arab Governor of Saragossa, the chief of the Banu Qasi who were Muslim converts of Basque & Visigoth origin. This group were founded by his great-grandfather, Cassius of Meark, a Visigoth. When Musa ben Nusier al-Bekir occupied the Ebro Valley during the Moorish invasion, Cassius, who was a smart politician, pragmatically converted to Islam in 714, with the intention of retaining power locally. He clearly managed to protect the Asturian rump of the Visigoth kingdom, see the Goths chapter below.

The Banu Qasi were centred on Zaragosa & controlled the Ebro Valley. It seems that they paid precious little attention to the central Moorish authority of al Andalus, where fratricidal scraps weakened its authority. Al Andalus is what the Moors called Spain, in tribute to the Vandals who only occupied Suthern Spain for 20 years. The alliegeance of the Banu Qasi wassubject of a later chapter.

Musa ibn Fortun effectively founded half of what was to become the Kingdom of Navarre, to who's kings the Banu Qasi were related & which kept its independence by a mixture of diplomacy & military alliances, both with the Basques, who with reason still regard Navarre as theirs & with the Mosarabs (non-converted Christian subjects of the Moors, not actually Arabs). In fact, the Cordova regime had to call upon Musa, after fighting with him for decades, to clear the Normans out of the Spanish river systems they had invaded. By 850, Musa was being called the 'Third King of Spain' & his son Lope ibn Musa was installed as a Consul in Toledo. However, Banu Qasi power collapsed soon after, as King Ordoño I attacked and beat Musa in 859 at Clavijo.

Musa ibn Fortun seems always to have thought of himself as a Goth but his mother was descended from the prophet Mohammed according to most Sunni scholars, although the Shia will not have it that Zainab, Ruqayya and Umm Kulthoom were other than nieces of Khadija, Mohammed's wife. A few Sunni scholars believe that the girls were Khadija's daughters by her first marriage. We stick to the majority opinion.

Ruqayya's husband Uthman was the 3rd Caliph. He was murdered and his body thrown on a dung-heap. After the death of Mohammed, the Moslems were almost immediately at each other throats & this is why there is a split between the Sunnis & the Shias.

Lope ibn Musa was the father of Queen Aurea, who married Fortun Garces, King of Navarre (857 - 908?). Lope ibn Musa's son Mutarrif (the younger) managed a short resurgeance of Banu Qasi power. We take this story further below, when discussing Sacho Garces, the 'Optimo Imperator'

Goths are beginning to appear in the family tree & we shall examine them in the next three chapters.