Reconquista

Reconquista (“reconquest”) refers to the historic process by which Catholic kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula sought to recover regions under Muslim control. This process lasted from the eighth-century Battle of Covadonga to the fall of the Nazari kingdom of Granada in 1492. The Reconquista is a unique phenomenon in European history. It entailed a prolonged war that lasted close to eight centuries between al-Andalus and the Catholic kingdoms, with continuously moving borders, depending upon which side had the strategic upper hand. Spain was the first European nation to recover lands conquered by the Moors. There would be no similar phenomenon until the reconquest of Hungary in the seventeenth century.

The Reconquista began with an uprising of Christian tributaries against Muslim rulers and ended in a victory for a newly united Spanish Empire. This victory dovetailed with the enrichment of Spain through colonization and the expulsion of Jews from Spain.

Brief History

The Reconquista is the centuries-long struggle, identified by some scholars as a crusade, to recover the Iberian Peninsula areas under Muslim control. The region under Islamic hegemony was known as al-Andalus and, at its peak, occupied most of the Iberian Peninsula and parts of France. Islamic civilization, which was significantly more advanced than feudal Spanish society, had a great impact upon Spanish culture and, by extension, the regions around the world that Spain would eventually conquer.

In 711, the governor of North Africa, Musa Ibn Nusair, sent a general, Tariq Ibn Ziyad, and an army across what is now known as the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain (Hispania), which was under the Visigoth ruler Roderick. By 720, Muslims controlled most of Spain. The loss of Spain to the Moors became a psychic wound in Catholic Spain for centuries after. While Christian Spain did not officially participate in crusades, it expended around eight centuries in the effort to reconquer its territory.

Reconquista resistance took place on several fronts. Although many Christians left in open rebellion to form Christian refugee and guerrilla-style groups in the southern mountains, the Mozarabs, Iberian Christians living under Islamic rule, also organized urban resistance groups. The latter groups, who repopulated the region with Christian communities, were essential to the reconquest effort.

The reconquest began with the rebellion of Pelayo (ca. 718–25). Pelayo was a Visigoth who founded the kingdom of Asturias. He established a Christian state independent from Moorish dominion and started the Battle of Covadonga. The reasons for his rebellion have never been established, and it is not clear that it was religiously motivated.

During the European High Middle Ages, the Iberian Peninsula’s Christian region was fragmented into small states that lagged behind in culture and civilization compared to their European neighbors to the north and to the Muslim civilization occupying the peninsula. However, in time, they managed to consolidate groups of small states by taking advantage of internal conflicts occurring in al-Andalus.

From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, the Christian regions experienced a revitalization of religion and population, which gave them the military upper hand, while al-Andalus weakened due to continuous internal strife. Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon reconquered Toledo in 1085. By 1119, the Catholic forces had recovered several crucial regions. The Reconquista mostly ended in the thirteenth century with the reconquest of large territories by Ferdinand III, king of Castile and Leon, and James I, king of Aragon. Portugal recovered a major region by 1263. By the thirteenth century, all that remained to the Nazari (or Nasrid) dynasty was Granada, as a tributary under Spanish rule. During the late Middle Ages reconquest activities ceased. Granada remained under Islamic rule until 1492, when it was retaken by Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile.

Impact

The Reconquista was a very complex phenomenon, with periods of tentative peace and alliances between some Islamic caliphates of al-Andalus and Christian rulers, and as such it had several important consequences. Some historians argue that it stopped Islamic rule from taking over the rest of Europe. The birth of Spain as nation, which began with its consolidation and Christianization by the Roman Empire, finally coalesced during the effervescence of religious sentiment and nationalism that brought about the Reconquista.

In its inception, medieval Spain was a plurality of kingdoms that joined forces during the Reconquista. The long period of shared religious cause and a common enemy fueled a sense of national unity, even though they were many different cultures and several different dialects. It shaped the unifying concept of Spain as a strongly conservative Catholic nation, which in time would give way to the imposition of the Inquisition, coerced conversion to Catholicism, and the expulsion of Jews from Spain.

One of the most important conflicts of the Reconquista was the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212). It was then that the Reconquista consolidated the conglomerate of kingdoms of Spain and that an idea of Spain as a nation arose. The concept of Spain as a unified nation of Hispanic states and a shared culture was born in a context of militant and religious imperatives against what they considered a common enemy: Islamic hegemony. This militant and Christian sense of embattlement was essential to the maintenance of Reconquista efforts.

Spain came out of the Reconquista imbued with a strong and militant religious ideology. It became a military force of importance in fifteenth-century Europe. Free from the Islamic rule preoccupation, Spain turned its efforts to becoming a political and military power and built a vast transcontinental empire that included conquered lands in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

The embattled religious spirit of the Reconquista spread through Spain’s growing hegemony and reappeared in the Counter-Reformation movement, which arose as a response to the Protestant Reformation, and in the religious ideology that fueled the conquest of Spain’s American colonies. Its aggressively militant Christianity was in direct contraposition to the secularism and liberalism that the scientific era and Enlightenment would further. These competing ideologies would continue to drive social conflicts and civil strife during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Bibliography

Collins, Roger. The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Print.

Collins, Roger. Caliphs and Kings: Spain, 796–1031. Chichester: Wiley, 2014. Print.

Constable, Olivia Remy, ed. Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Jewish and Muslim Sources. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012. Print.

Lane-Poole, Stanley, and Arthur Gilman. The Story of the Moors in Spain. 1837. New York: Cosmo, 2010. Print.

Linehan, Peter. Spain, 1157–1300: A Partible Inheritance. Chichester: Wiley, 2008. Digital file.

Lowney, Chris. A Vanished World: Medieval Spain’s Golden Age of Enlightenment. New York: Free, 2005. Print.

O’Callaghan, Joseph F. Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. Print.

Vidmar, John. The Catholic Church through the Ages: A History. 2nd ed. New York: Paulist, 2014. Print.