720
year

Year 720 (DCCXX) was a leap year starting on Monday of the Julian calendar. The denomination 720 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.
Events
By place
Byzantine Empire
Summer – Emperor Leo III secures the Byzantine frontier, by inviting Slavic settlers into the depopulated districts of the Thracesian Theme (western Asia Minor). He undertakes a set of civil reforms, and reorganizes the theme structure in the Aegean region. Leo's 2-year-old son Constantine V is associated on the throne, and married to Tzitzak, daughter of the Khazar ruler (khagan) Bihar.
Europe
Umayyad conquest of Gaul: Governor Al-Samh continues his campaign; he makes Narbonne the capital city of Muslim Septimania (Southern France), and uses it as a base for razzias. King Ardo is killed, and becomes the last ruler of the Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania. Some Visigoths refuse to adopt the Muslim faith, and flee north to Aquitaine. This marks the end of the Visigothic Kingdom.
Muslim forces under Al-Samh begin the prolonged siege of Carcassonne, a fortified Visigothic town located in the Languedoc-Roussillon.
“720” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23539. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “720” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.