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Reconquista

Medieval Christian military campaigns (722–1492)

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Ejército moro (derecha) de Almanzor durante la Batalla de Reconquista de San Esteban de Gormaz.
Creator:Abdula · Public domain

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Through Umayyad Caliphate

The beginning of the Reconquista is traditionally dated to the Battle of Covadonga (c. 718 or 722), approximately a decade after the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula began, in which the army of the Kingdom of Asturias achieved the first Christian victory over the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate since the beginning of the military invasion. By the early 11th century, the Umayyad state of Córdoba fell apart under the sustained military pressure into a series of petty successor states known as taifas. The northern kingdoms advanced further against these fiefdoms and often made them pay parias – tribute to ensure protection.

Following an Almohad resurgence in the 12th century, the Christian kingdoms of León, Castile, Aragón, Navarre, and Portugal made further territorial gains over the ensuing decades. After the decisive Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, major Muslim-held centres fell to Christian forces over the course of the 13th century, including Siege of Córdoba in 1236 and the Siege of Seville in 1248, leaving Granada as the only remaining Muslim-ruled state in the south, where it survived as a tributary polity. The king's actions took precedence over those of the local lords with the help of military orders and also supported by Repoblación, the repopulation of territory by Christian kingdoms. After the surrender of Granada in January 1492, the entire Iberian peninsula was controlled by Christian rulers. On 30 July 1492, as a result of the Alhambra Decree, the Jewish communities of Castile and Aragon—some 200,000 people—were forcibly expelled. The conquest was followed by a series of edicts (1499–1526) that forced the conversions of Muslims in Castile, Navarre, and Aragon; these same groups were expelled from Habsburg Spain by a series of decrees starting in 1609. Approximately three million Muslims emigrated or were driven out of Spain between 1492 and 1610.

Beginning in the 19th century, traditional historiography has used the term Reconquista as the restoration of the Visigothic Kingdom over conquered territories. The concept of Reconquista, consolidated in Spanish historiography in the second half of the 19th century, was associated with Spanish nationalism during the period of Romantic nationalism. Recent scholarship describes the Reconquista as a process that unfolded in multiple episodes, with regional variation. It is the inspiration for the Moros y cristianos festival, popular in the southern Valencian Community, and which is also celebrated in parts of Spanish America. Pursuant to an Islamophobic worldview, the concept is a symbol of significance for the 21st-century European far-right.

Concept and duration

The term 'Reconquista' was not used by medieval writers to describe the struggle between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. Since its development as a term in historiography occurred centuries after the events it references, it has acquired various meanings. Its meaning as an actual "reconquest" has been subject to the particular concerns or prejudices of scholars, who have sometimes wielded it as a weapon in ideological disputes.

A discernible irredentist ideology that became part of the concept of Christian conquest appeared in writings by the end of the 9th century. For example, the anonymous Christian chronicle Chronica Prophetica (883–884) claimed a historical connection between Tariq ibn Ziyad's conquest of the Visigothic Kingdom in 711 and the Kingdom of Asturias in which the document was produced, and stressed a Christian and Muslim cultural and religious divide in Hispania, and a necessity to drive out the Muslims and restore conquered territories. Literature from both sides described a divide based on ethnicity and culture between the inhabitants of the small Christian kingdoms of the north and the dominant elite in the Muslim-ruled south.

The linear approach to the origins of the Reconquista adopted in early twentieth-century historiography is complicated by several issues. For example, periods of peaceful coexistence, or at least of limited and localised skirmishes on the frontiers, were more prevalent over the 781 years of Muslim rule than periods of significant military conflict. Additionally, both Christian and Muslim rulers fought other Christians and Muslims, and cooperation and alliances between Muslims and Christians were not uncommon, such as between Íñigo Arista, the founder of the Kingdom of Pamplona (later 'Navarre'), and the Banu Qasi as early as the 9th century. Blurring distinctions even further were the mercenaries from both sides who fought for whoever paid the most. The period is seen today to have had long episodes of relative religious coexistence and tolerance such as the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain.

The memoirs of the last Zirid ruler of Granada, Abdallah ibn Buluggin, recalls a conversation with the Christian nobleman, Sisnando Davídiz, who had arrived to collect parias:

He said to me face to face: "Al-Andalus originally belonged to the Christians. Then they were defeated by the Arabs and driven to the most inhospitable region, Jillīqiya. Now that they are strong and capable, the Christians desire to recover what they have lost by force. This can only be achieved by weakness and encroachment. In the long run, when it has neither men nor money, we'll be able to recover it without any difficulty".

Documents dating from the 10th and 11th centuries are mute on any idea of reconquest. The Crusades, which started late in the 11th century, birthed the religious ideology of a reconquest. In al-Andalus, Christian states of that era were confronted by the century-long rule of the Sanhaja-ruled Almoravid dynasty and subsequently the religious extremism of the Almohad Caliphate of the Masmuda, which supported a similarly staunch ideology of jihad.

Propaganda accounts of Muslim-Christian hostility came into being to support that idea, most notably the Chanson de Roland, an 11th-century French chanson de geste that offers a fictionalised retelling of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass dealing with the Saracens or Moors, and centuries later introduced in the French school system to instill moral and national values in the population following the 1870 defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian War, regardless of the actual events.

The consolidation of the modern idea of a Reconquista is inextricably linked to the foundational myths of 19th-century Spanish nationalism, associated with the development of a Centralist, Castilian, and staunchly Catholic nationalism, evoking nationalistic, romantic and sometimes colonialist themes. The concept gained further track in the 20th century during the Francoist dictatorship. It thus became one of the key tenets of the historiographical discourse of National Catholicism, the mythological and ideological identity of the regime. The discourse was underpinned in its most traditional version by an avowed 'historical illegitimacy' of al-Andalus and the subsequent glorification of the Christian conquest.

The idea of a "liberation war" against Muslims, who were viewed as foreigners, suited the anti-Republican rebels of the Spanish Civil War. This Nationalist faction agitated for the banner of the patria, the fatherland which, according to them, was being threatened by regionalism and communism. Their rebellious pursuit was thus a crusade for the restoration of the unity of the Church and State, where Franco stood for both Pelagius of Asturias and El Cid.

The Reconquista has become a rallying call for right-wing populist and far-right parties of Spain such as Vox to expel from office incumbent progressive or peripheral nationalist options as well as their values in different political contexts.

Similar propaganda was circulated during the Spanish Civil War by the Republicans, who wanted to portray their enemies as foreign invaders, especially given the prominence of the Army of Africa among Franco's troops. This army consisted of Berber soldiers of the Tiradores de Ifni and Regulares from the Spanish protectorate in Morocco.

Traditionalist scholarship viewed the Reconquista as proof that the process of Christian state-building in Iberia was often defined by the reclamation of lands that had been lost to foreigners in past generations. State-building was characterised—at least in ideological, if not practical, terms—as a process by which Iberian states were being "rebuilt". Current historians dispute the entire concept of the Reconquista as created a posteriori in the service of later political goals. A few historians point out that Spain and Portugal did not previously exist as nations and the heirs of the Christian Visigothic Kingdom were not reconquering them, as the name suggests. 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. However, the term Reconquista is still widely in use.

Mirror medieval narratives

The emirs of Córdoba do not seem to have brought forward a narrative of territorial recovery for losses in northern Iberia in the 8th and 9th centuries. They never controlled the whole Iberian peninsula nor did they actually put much effort into such control even at the peak of their power. A narrative of recovery was formulated in the wake of the 1064 Christian taking of Barbastro (as the place was conquered in 1065 by al-Muqtadir ibn Hud), during the first taifa period. Whatever the case, the Muslim retaking of Barbastro was soon overshadowed by the 1085 Christian conquest of Toledo (a much more important city), which proved to be permanent. The rhetoric of recovery was more prominently used as a trope by Almoravids and Almohads, to the degree that their legitimacy as foreign dynasties relied on their ability to counter Christian expansion. It is so far recorded for successful military operations in locations such as Valencia and Talavera (Almoravids) and Almería and Silves (Almohads).

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