The Reconquista was a 780-year period of the history of the Iberian Peninsula from 718 AD to 1492 AD during which the Christian kingdoms of present-day Spain and Portugal reconquered Iberia from the Muslim Arab and Berber Moors of al-Andalus. The Moors had arrived in Spain in 711 as soldiers in the army of the Umayyad general Tariq ibn Ziyad, whose victory at the Battle of Guadalete had enabled him to conquer the vast majority of Iberia from the Germanic Visigoths in the span of a decade. However, the Visigothic nobleman Pelayo blunted the Umayyad invasion at the Battle of Covadonga in 718 and went on to found the Kingdom of Asturias in northern Spain, uniting the Visigoths, Astures, Gallaeci, Cantabri, and Vascones into one Roman Catholic kingdom. From 781 to 806, the Frankish ruler Charlemagne intervened in Iberia to secure his southern border at the Pyrenees, conquering the Taifa of Barcelona in 801 and creating the Christian County of Barcelona; this county would eventually evolve into the Kingdom of Aragon in 1162. In 910, on the death of King Alfonso III of Asturias, his realm was divided between his sons, creating the new kingdoms of Castile and Leon (Asturias was absorbed into Leon in 924). While the Christian kingdoms of Spain occasionally fought against each other, they were often capable of forming a united front against the Moors, whose central authority collapsed following the overthrow of the Umayyad Caliphate by the Abbasid Caliphate in 750. The Umayyad remnants in Iberia formed the Emirate of Cordoba and then the Caliphate of Cordoba, but the Umayyad vizier Almanzor - despite sacking the great Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in 997 - was unable to reconquer northern Spain during his thirty years of campaigning in the north. The collapse of the Caliphate of Cordoba in the early 11th century led to the disintegration of central authority in the Moorish-held parts of Spain (called al-Andalus, or "land of the Vandals"), with the former kingdom fragmenting into self-reliant taifas (city-states). The northern Christian kingdoms took advantage of this to reconquer much of central and northeastern Spain during the 11th century, including Toledo in 1085 and Valencia in 1092. The Christian kings either conquered the small taifas, fostered civil war among them, or made them pay large tributes (parias) for "protection". The Almoravids of North Africa invaded Iberia in the late 11th century and conquered several of the smaller taifas, asserting their authority in southern Iberia. This new menace suffered a major defeat in the 1147 Siege of Lisbon, during which the Western European knights of the Second Crusade conquered the coastal city of Lisbon and handed it over to the Iberian county of Portugal, which, under King Afonso Henriques, would assert its independence from Leon and the other Spanish kingdoms. The Almoravids were eventually overcome and replaced by the Almohads, fanatical newcomers who sought Islamic renewal in Iberia. In 1212, the Christian kingdoms decisively defeated the Almohads at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, which enabled the Christians to conquer Cordoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. These victories left the Emirate of Granada as the sole surviving Muslim enclave in Spain, ruling the south as a Christian tributary state. For two centuries, there was a lull in the Reconquista as Granada enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity, with the Nasrids becoming the longest-lived Muslim dynasty in Iberia and building the Alhambra palace. There were occasional clashes between the Spanish and the Nasrids, such as the 1330 Battle of Teba, and in 1340, when the Marinids of Morocco launched a failed invasion of Iberia in the Battle of Rio Salado, the last time that a Muslim army invaded the Iberian Peninsula. Algeciras, which had been in Marinid hands, fell in 1344, and, after King Alfonso XI of Castile died of the Black Death in 1350, the Spanish and Nasrids agreed to peace. By the early 15th century, minor clashes continued between the Spanish and Moors, causing the Castilians to seize Gibraltar in 1462. A new truce was agreed upon in 1478, but a Moorish surprise attack on Zahara in December 1481 in retaliation for a Christian raid led to the married "Catholic Monarchs" of Castile and Leon and Aragon, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, embarking on a final campaign to conquer Granada. The Spanish engaged in seasonal campaigns against the Moors, conquering the Nasrid fortress of Setenil in 1484, Malaga in 1487, Baza in 1489, and Granada following an eight-month siege from April 1491 to 2 January 1492. The Fall of Granada marked the end of the Reconquista; of the 500,000 Moors who had lived in the realm before Granada's fall, 100,000 had died or had been enslaved, 200,000 had emigrated back to North Africa, and 200,000 remained in Castile, where they, along with the Sephardic Jews of Iberia, were forced either to convert to Catholicism or face torture, death, or exile during the Spanish Inquisition. Many Moriscos (Moorish converts to Christianity) and Conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) continued to practice their old faiths in secret, despite their persecution; the "New Christians" also faced persecution due to fears that they, too, had secretly reverted to their old faiths. The Catholic Spanish would go on to invade Muslim Africa in the following years, conquering Melilla and Djerba in 1497, Oran in 1509, and Bougie and Tripoli in 1510. A series of peasant rebellions by the Moriscos in the 16th century led to the decreed expulsion of the 300,000 Moriscos (4% of the Spanish population) by King Philip III of Spain from 1609 to 1614, but 40% of them avoided expulsion altogether and tens of thousands more were ultimately able to return to Spain. Persecution of crypto-Muslims continued into the 18th century, with the last mass persecution occurring in Granada in 1727. By 1800, indigenous Islam and Morisco identity had been extinguished in Spain, although Islamic cultural influences on Iberian culture have survived and flourished through Moorish architecture (notably the palace of Alhambra), the Moors' introduction of limes, lemons, rice, and artichokes to Iberian cuisine, the presence of hundreds of Arabic-derived words in the Spanish language (otherwise a Romance language), Arabic placenames in the former region of al-Andalus, and the presence of distinctive Sephardic Jewish and Moorish DNA in 20% and 11%, respectively, of Spaniards and Portuguese.
Background[]
A Muslim Advance[]
Map of the early Muslim conquests
Since the prophet Muhammad first proclaimed his message in the 7th century, a series of Arab conquests had spread the word of Islam through much of the known world. Crossing the Straits of Gibraltar, the Moors (the Muslim inhabitants of North Africa) had taken most of Spain. Their advance in Western Europe had been held by the Franks at the Battle of Poitiers, but this left almost all of the Iberian Peninsula in Moorish hands. Only in a tiny pocket, in the mountains of Asturias in the far north, did Christian rulers still hold sway.
A Glittering Kingdom[]
Most of what we think of today as Portugal and Spain were under the control of the Caliphate of Cordoba, proclaimed in 929 by Abd ar-Rahman III. The Moors referred to their Spanish kingdom as al-Andalus: centered on the south, in the region known today as Andalusia, it was a place of wealth and culture. Toledo, the Visigothic capital of the country, became a major center under the Moors as well. After quarrels among the rulers of the al-Andalus, this region went its separate way, becoming an independent kingdom under the control of the caliphate.
Christian Kingdoms[]
The Spanish Reconquista started as a fight for survival and became a power struggle, only gradually did it take on the character of a crusade. By the middle of the 8th century, the Moors had occupied almost the entire Iberian Peninsula. In 722, however, amid the mountains of Asturias to the north, the Muslims had been held by the local Visigothic ruler, Pelayo, at the Battle of Covadonga. Here, at least, the idea of a Christian Spain endured.
In the centuries that followed, the region of Asturias not only flourished but managed to extend its boundaries. In 910, indeed, it was divided into two. A new kingdom, Galicia, was established to the west, with a new state centered on Leon. Next to this, the Kingdom of Castile was created: the two later united as the kingdom of Castile and Leon in the 11th century. To the east, following Frankish incursions across the Pyrenees, the kingdoms of Navarra, Aragon, and Catalonia emerged. Although this was a patchwork of little states that warred as much with one another as with the Moors, all of northern Spain had now fallen into Christian hands.
Reconquista[]
War without end[]
Within these little kingdoms too, conflict was very much the norm, with local lords locked in endless small-scale turf wars. Combat was mostly between mounted knights: any local peasants who might have made up the infantry were usually needed on the land. At the same time, there were truces in fighting with the Muslims - some of them of long duration. The Moors had their own divisions, with inequalities between the Arab elite and the North African Berber rank-and-file leading at times leading to tension, and in some cases, open conflict.
The Reconquista was more messy and confusing than the later mythology would have us believe. The story of the renowned "El Cid" is case in point. Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar (c. 1045-1099) was a truly formidable figure; but he was also a profoundly ambivalent one, as his very nickname shows. "Cid" is no Spanish word, but comes from the Arabic sayyidi ("chief" or "boss"). He was a warlord, loyal mainly to himself. Amid the complicated realities of a rapidly changing situation, he found himself fighting on the Muslim side on more than one occasion.
Though real, religious oppositions sometimes paled into insignificance beside other enmities. It was not unusual for Muslim and Christian leaders to form alliances against rivals in their own camps. Even so, by slow degress Christian kings were extending their sphere of influence: in 1074 Ferdinand I of Leon took Coimbra, now in Portugal, from the Moors.
Holy war[]
In 1077, Alfonso VI of Castile announced that he was "Emperor of all Spain". No longer content to tussle with his fellow kings, he saw himself - in aspiration, at least - as ruler of the peninsula as a whole. He captured Toledo, until then the center of a rich and prestigious Muslim state.
Thrown into panic, the rulers of al-Andalus called on assistance from the Almoravids, who had recently taken on power in North Africa. The Almoravids went on to beat Alfonso at the battle of Sagrajas in 1086. But their fight was only just beginning, as the elite of al-Andalus found out to their consternation. A Berber movement, dedicated to both moral and spiritual renewal within Islam, the Almoravids disapproved of the easygoing attitudes they found in Moorish Spain, and now set about transforming it into their own kind of aggressively Islamic state. The Almoravids started reversing the conquests of the Christians, but met their match in 1094 at Valencia. El Cid took the southeastern city after a siege of 20 months: he set up as ruler over there, ostensibly in Alfonso's name. In many ways, El Cid was the last in a line whose attitude to the struggle with the Muslims remained opportunistic. But such pragmatism was becoming unacceptable. Even as the Almoravids were changing the tone of the conflict on the Muslim side, there was a clear shift on the side of the Christians too. The calling of the First Crusade in 1099 placed the conflict with the Moors in a new perspective, as a sacred struggle to reclaim Iberia for the creed of Christ.
On the Offensive[]
It was a struggle the Christians seemed to be winning: in 1118 King Alfonso I of Aragon and Navarra took the city of Zaragoza. El Batallador ("The Battler") soon made deep inroads into the south, where Christian Mozarabs - happy under Moorish rule for many generations - were finding life a lot less comfortable under the Almoravids. After one audacious raid, King Alfonso brought 10,000 of them back with him for resettlement along the Ebro in the far northwest.
In 1139 another Alfonso won a victory, defeating the Almoravids at the Battle of Ourique, in what is now the south of Portugal. Here, Afonso Henriques, son of Henry of Burgundy, who also claimed the title of Count of Portugal, led his considerably outnumbered Christian army to a victory. In the cold light of military history, this result, although unexpected, seems to have been the consequence of failing communication and disagreements on the Moorish side. Not unnaturally, the Christians were overjoyed at this most unexpected triumph and were quick to attribute it to divine agency.
It was in fact this triumph that brought the modern country into being. Alfonso declared - defying Castile and Leon - that he intended to reign over his conquered territory as Afonso I of Portugal. That country's capital, Lisbon, was liberated following a six-week siege by crusaders en route for the Holy Land: the local bishop promised them the right of rape and plunder in the city in return.
The Almoravids found themselves faced with another enemy in the 12th century. This time, they were Muslim. These were the Almohads, also Berbers, and also seeking Islamic renewal. Having already taken over the territories of the Almoravids in North Africa, establishing their capital at Marrakesh, they invaded al-Andalus in 1147. In doing so, they reversed what had been the gradual weakening in Moorish resistance to the Reconquista. Even so, the northern kingdoms scented victory and pressed hard to repel them;. Begged by his officials in al-Andalus, Abu Yusuf Yaqub, the Almohad Caliph, came from Morocco and took personal command of the kingdom's armies. He inflicted a shattering defeat on Alfonso VIII of Castile in the battle of Alarcos, earning himself the title, by which he is still remembered, al-Mansur ("the victor").
Final Victory[]
The "Disaster of Alarcos" was followed by other reversals for Alfonso. But at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, he won his revenge. Leading an army stealthily over the mountains of Andalucia, he sprang a suprise attack upon the Almohads. The vast Muslim army - by all acounts up to 300,000 strong - was all but exterminated in the brutal fighting. The Reconquista had acquired unstoppable momentum. Even so, the struggle was to continue for the best part of three centuries: it would not be until 1492 that the Moors were finally expelled from Granada.