Reconquista

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Reconquista is conventionally dated from 711, when Umayyad forces crossed from North Africa and overran the Visigothic kingdom of Hispania within a few years, to 1492, when the Emirate of Granada, the last independent Muslim state on the peninsula, surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. Between those two dates lie nearly eight centuries of intermittent warfare, truces, tribute payments and shifting alliances among a changing cast of Christian and Muslim kingdoms, rather than a single continuous campaign.

Christian resistance is traditionally traced to a small victory at Covadonga around 722, from which the kingdom of Asturias, and later Leon, Castile, Aragon, Navarre and Portugal, gradually expanded southward over succeeding centuries, punctuated by long periods of stalemate and by Muslim political consolidation under the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba and, later, the North African Almoravid and Almohad empires that periodically reversed Christian gains. The decisive turn came in the thirteenth century, when Christian victories including the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 broke Almohad power and left only the Emirate of Granada as a surviving Muslim state, paying tribute to Castile for over two centuries more.

Granada's fall on January 2, 1492, ended Muslim political rule in Iberia but did not end the story: the same year brought the expulsion of Spain's Jewish population, and forced conversion and eventual expulsion edicts against Iberia's remaining Muslims followed over the following century, closing out a religiously mixed peninsula in favor of one whose new rulers demanded confessional uniformity.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The word Reconquista, meaning reconquest, packages nearly eight centuries of Iberian history into a single continuous religious struggle, and that packaging is itself the subject of a genuine historiographical argument. The historian Joseph O'Callaghan's study of the period found that papal crusading language and the specific indulgences that came to define a formal crusade were only attached to Iberian campaigns from the twelfth century onward, more than four hundred years after the fighting is conventionally said to have begun. For the centuries before that, O'Callaghan argues, territorial ambition, dynastic rivalry and simple opportunism drove much of the warfare as readily as religious conviction did.

The record bears this out in ways the word Reconquista tends to obscure. Christian kingdoms fought one another as often as they fought Muslim states, formed alliances across the religious divide when it suited them, and in some periods paid tribute to Muslim rulers rather than warring against them at all. The tidy narrative of a unified Christian reconquest was substantially a later construction, useful to the Catholic Monarchs and to later Spanish nationalism alike, imposed retrospectively on a messier and more pragmatic reality.

None of this erases the periods, particularly from the twelfth century forward, when religious framing genuinely did drive policy, nor the real and brutal consequences the wars had for Iberia's religious minorities as Christian rule expanded. The honest position, and the one this atlas takes, is that the Reconquista was real but was never one single religious war: it was a name imposed afterward on centuries of conflict fought for a shifting mix of reasons that changed as the centuries themselves did.