718 Reconquista "reconquest" of the Iberian Peninsula

 


The Reconquista^[a] (Spanish for the "reconquest") is the period of history of the Iberian Peninsula spanning approximately 770 years between the Islamic conquest of Hispania in 710 and the fall of the last Islamic state in Iberia at Granada to the expanding Christian kingdoms in 1492. The Reconquista ended immediately before the European re-discovery of the Americas—the "New World"—which ushered in the era of the Portuguese and Spanish colonial empires.
Historians traditionally mark the beginning of the Reconquista with the Battle of Covadonga (718 or 722), the first victory by Christian military forces since the 710 Islamic conquest of Iberia by the Umayyad Caliphate. During the Battle of Covadonga, a small Christian army led by the nobleman Pelagius defeated the caliphate's army in the mountains of northern Iberia and established the independent Christian

Concept and duration

Catholic, Portuguese and Spanish historiography, from the beginnings of historical scholarship in Christian Spain until the 20th century, stressed the existence of a continuous phenomenon by which the Christian Iberian kingdoms opposed and conquered the Muslim kingdoms, understood as a common enemy who had militarily seized Christian territory.^[1] The concept of a Christian reconquest of the peninsula first emerged, in tenuous form, at the end of the 9th century.^[2] A landmark was set by the Christian Chronica Prophetica (883–884), a document stressing the Christian and Muslim cultural and religious divide in Iberia and the necessity to drive the Muslims out.

The Islamic Almohad dynasty and surrounding states, including the Christian Kingdoms of Portugal, León, Castile, Navarre, and the Crown of Aragon, c. 1200.

Nevertheless, the difference between Christian and Muslim kingdoms in early medieval Spain was not seen at the time as anything like the clear-cut opposition that later emerged. Both Christian and Muslim rulers fought amongst themselves. Alliances between Muslims and Christians were not uncommon.^[2] Blurring distinctions even further were the mercenaries from both sides who simply fought for whoever paid the most. The period is looked back upon today as one of relative religious tolerance.^[3]
The Crusades, which started late in the 11th century, bred the religious ideology of a Christian reconquest, confronted at that time with a similarly staunch Muslim Jihad ideology in Al-Andalus by the Almoravids, and to an even greater degree by the Almohads. In fact previous documents from the 10th and 11th centuries are mute on any idea of "reconquest".^[4] Propaganda accounts of Muslim-Christian hostility came into being to support that idea, most notably the Chanson de Roland, a fictitious 12th-century French version of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (778) dealing with the Iberian Saracens (Moors), and taught as historical fact in the French educational system since 1880.^[5][6]
Many recent historians dispute the whole concept of Reconquista as a concept created a posteriori in the service of later political goals. A minority of historians has called it a "myth".^{[7][8][9][10][11][12]} One of the first Spanish intellectuals to question the idea of a "reconquest" that lasted for eight centuries was José Ortega y Gasset, writing in the first half of the 20th century.^[13] However, the term is still widely in use.


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