Reconquista

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Reconquista is the name given to the long struggle in which northern Christian kingdoms pushed back against Muslim-ruled al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula. No medieval writer ever used that word. It was coined centuries after the events it describes, and it has carried a different meaning for almost every generation that used it. Some scholars have wielded it as a weapon in ideological disputes. Others put their objection bluntly: "no military campaign lasts eight centuries." Yet the term is still in wide use today. It is the inspiration for the Moros y cristianos festival, popular in the southern Valencian Community and celebrated in parts of Spanish America. So what really happened on the Iberian frontier? Who fought whom, and were the sides as clear as the name suggests? What drove the kings to war: faith, tribute, or plunder? And what became of the Muslims and Jews who were still living there when the fighting ended?

  492141537

• 2. Kingdoms of the North

  ›

  Around 722, a Muslim expedition marched north in late summer to crush a rebellion led by a man called Pelagius, known in Spanish as Pelayo. His victory at Covadonga, dated to around 718 or 722, is the moment traditional histories treat as the beginning. His Asturian realm lay in the wet Cantabrian Mountains. The rulers in Córdoba saw it as a cul-de-sac on the fringe of the Islamic world, and they gave it little attention.

  Pelagius died in 737, and his son Favila was elected king. Favila was killed by a bear during a trial of courage. The dynasty survived anyway. Because Asturian control was loose in those early decades, the kings bound the north together with marriages. Ermesinda, Pelagius's daughter, wed Alfonso, son of Dux Peter of Cantabria. Their son Fruela married Munia, a Basque from Álava, after crushing a Basque uprising.

  Alfonso II ruled from 791 to 842, and under him the kingdom took firm shape. A royal expedition pillaged Lisbon in 798. Muslim raids pushed the capital to Oviedo. Charlemagne and the Pope recognized Alfonso as king. In 813, or perhaps two or three decades later, the bones of St. James the Great were declared found at Iria Flavia, today's Padrón. The cult later moved to Compostela, a name from the Latin campus stellae, meaning "the star field." Pilgrims began to arrive from other Christian realms.

  In 824, Íñigo Arista led a revolt against Frankish authority and was elected or declared king in Pamplona. His kingdom stayed closely tied to its Muslim kinsmen, the Banu Qasi of Tudela. Navarre grew mighty under Sancho the Great, who reigned from 1004 to 1035. He absorbed Castile, León and what was to become Aragon. Then he divided his realm among his sons. Aragon passed to Ramiro I, an illegitimate son. In 1137, the heiress of Aragon married the count of Barcelona. Their son Alfonso II ruled their combined lands from 1162, a union modern historians call the Crown of Aragon. James I, known as James the Conqueror, later signed the Treaty of Corbeil in 1258, in which the French king gave up any feudal claim over Catalonia.

  Portugal began with a battlefield acclamation. After a great victory over the Almoravids at Ourique in 1139, Afonso Henriques was proclaimed king by his troops. Legend adds that Christ himself announced Afonso's deeds from heaven. Alfonso VII of León and Castile recognized Portuguese independence in the Treaty of Zamora in 1143. Santarém fell in 1147, and Lisbon followed seven months later. Pope Alexander III confirmed the kingship in 1179 with the bull Manifestis Probatum. Afonso III finished the Portuguese campaign by taking the Algarve in 1249, with Faro falling in March of that year. Along the way, contact with Muslim navigation techniques helped inspire the caravel, the ship that would carry Portugal's later voyages of exploration.

  6570858688

• 3. Allies and Rivals

  ›

  The young nobleman Rodrigo Díaz, later called El Cid Campeador, won his first battle experience in 1063 at Graus. He fought there on the side of al-Muqtadir, the Muslim sultan of Zaragoza, against the army of Ramiro I of Aragon. The Cid spent years in paid service to Muslim kings. It was a pattern, not an exception. Christian mercenaries sold their swords to Arab and Berber rulers, and kings of both faiths married women born into the other.

  The quarrels among Christians could be vicious. In 939, Ramiro II of León and Fernán González of Castile cooperated to defeat the Caliph at Simancas. Soon afterwards Fernán attacked Ramiro, and their war lasted until 944. In 1196, after Alfonso VIII of Castile was beaten at Alarcos, Alfonso IX of León and Sancho VII of Navarre allied with the Almohads and invaded Castile. In early 1197, Pope Celestine III declared a crusade against Alfonso IX, at the request of Sancho I of Portugal. The kings of Portugal, Castile and Aragon invaded León, and Alfonso IX sued for peace in October 1197.

  The Muslim side was just as divided. Between 1009 and 1031, a civil war known as the Fitna of al-Andalus tore the Caliphate of Córdoba into as many as 34 small taifa kingdoms. Their rulers had no larger vision and attacked each other whenever it paid. Alfonso VI took Toledo in 1085, the old Visigothic capital. The conquest was gradual and mostly peaceful, unfolding over several decades. The frightened taifa rulers then called on Yusuf ibn Tashfin, leader of the strict Almoravid movement. He defeated Alfonso at Sagrajas in 1086. Then he turned on his hosts and had conquered their lands by 1091.

  The same script played out again from 1147 to 1157, when the Almoravid dynasty fell and the Almohads swept in. Even Charlemagne was drawn in. In 777 at Paderborn, rulers hostile to Abd ar-Rahman I invited him to cross the Pyrenees. Zaragoza closed its gates against him in 778. His retreating rearguard was destroyed at Roncevaux Pass, the battle later romanticised in the Song of Roland.

  In the final years, the roles reversed. Castile had the strength to conquer what remained of Granada, but its kings preferred to wait and collect tribute. That tribute, along with trade in Granadan goods, was one of the main channels by which African gold reached medieval Europe.

  4245174023

• 4. Banner of the Cross

  ›

  In 1064, Pope Alexander II sanctioned the conquest of Barbastro, an event often described as a rehearsal for the crusades. Yet the Iberian kings of that era rarely thought of themselves as defenders of Christendom. Their motives were more ordinary: tribute, loot, and rivalry with other Christians. Alfonso VI, called "the lord of the three religions," generally preferred to collect parias, the tribute paid by weaker rulers for protection, over conquering their lands.

  The church worked to change that. Pope Urban II tried to keep Iberians from marching east. He offered those who died fighting Saracens in Iberia the same indulgences granted to those dying in the Holy Land. Pope Callixtus II went further at the First Council of the Lateran, declaring Iberian warfare against Muslims part of the Crusades. Iberian military orders were created in the image of the Templars and Hospitallers.

  In 1147, crusaders from Germany, Flanders and England, on the road to the Holy Land during the Second Crusade, joined in the conquest of Lisbon. Afonso Henriques's rival cousin Alfonso Raimúndez drew Genoese and Pisan ships to the siege of Almería under the papal bull Divina dispensatione. In 1148, the County of Barcelona and Genoa took Tortosa with English and Flemish crusaders and with Templars and Hospitallers.

  The call could be turned against other Christians too. At Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada tried to internationalize the campaign, and Pope Innocent III granted indulgences. Yet almost all the foreign forces from beyond the Pyrenees deserted before the battle. The Church still counted it a true crusade.

  After Ferdinand III of Castile conquered Córdoba, Pope Gregory IX named him Athleta Christi and provided funding of 40,000 gold pieces per year. When James I of Aragon took Valencia, Gregory announced to "all the world" that a king "has ripped the Kingdom of Valencia from the hands of the pagans." The pope also offered crusader status to those who would defend it. The French king Louis IX sent James a gift: a thorn from the Crown of Thorns, kept in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris.

  1957605958

• 5. Settlers and Charters

  ›

  In the 940s, Count Fernán González granted the people of Castrojeriz the first known fuero, a charter of privileges. Charters like it were the legal engine behind repopulation, the process of moving Christian settlers into lands that Muslims had left empty. A frontier is hard to hold without people, and the kings needed a population able to defend the border.

  The main resettled regions were the Douro Basin on the northern plateau, the high Ebro valley around La Rioja, and central Catalonia. North of the Douro, in the 9th and 10th centuries, the system was called presura. Peasants crossed the mountains and settled abandoned land. Asturian law granted a peasant all the land he could work and defend. Nobles and clergymen in Asturias and Galicia also sent their own peasants to settle. The result was heavily feudal territory, as in León and Portugal.

  Castile took a different course. It was an arid land of vast plains and harsh climate, and it attracted only peasants with no hope in Biscay. It was governed by a single count and stayed largely non-feudal, with many free peasants. Presuras also appear in Catalonia, where the count of Barcelona ordered the Bishop of Urgell and the count of Gerona to repopulate the plains of Vic.

  South of the Douro, in the 10th and 11th centuries, presura gave way to fueros. A fuero was granted only by the monarch, so it offered an escape from the feudal system. The town council answered to the crown alone and owed it auxilium, meaning aid or troops. Those town troops became the caballeros villanos. Navarre used fueros as its main repopulating system. Aragon adopted them in the 12th century, and the fuero of Teruel in the early 13th century was among the last.

  From the middle of the 13th century, no more charters were granted, because the demographic pressure had eased. The old fueros lingered as city charters until the 18th century in Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia, and until the 19th in Castile and Navarre. People were prepared to fight to defend them. The abolition of the fueros in Navarre in the 19th century would be one of the causes of the Carlist Wars.

  7976747778

• 6. Javelins and Mail

  ›

  At the siege of Zamora, the young Rodrigo Díaz fought beside Sancho II of Castile, who was killed there in 1072 by the traitor Bellido Dolfos. Armies of that era mixed two kinds of fighters. The cavalry was mostly nobles, with commoner knights added from the 10th century. The infantry, called peones, were peasants who fought only when needed, which was not often.

  The cavalry style was unusual. Knights rode toward the enemy, threw javelins, and withdrew before turning back for another pass. Once the formation was weakened, they charged with thrusting spears. Lances did not arrive in Hispania until the 11th century. There were three kinds of knights: royal knights, noble knights called caballeros hidalgos, and commoner knights called caballeros villanos, meaning "mounted soldier from a villa." The commoners were not noble, but they were rich enough to afford a horse. Uniquely in Europe, these horsemen formed a militia cavalry with no feudal links, answerable only to the king or the count of Castile through their fueros.

  The peones were poorly equipped, with bows, spears and short swords. Their job was to hold the enemy until the cavalry arrived and to block enemy infantry from charging the knights. Early armour was leather with iron scales. Helmets were round with a nose protector, influenced by designs used by the Vikings who raided in the 8th and 9th centuries. The iron double-axe, about 30 cm long, worked equally well thrown or in close combat.

  Kings often lacked enough soldiers, so mercenaries mattered. Norsemen, Flemish spearmen, Frankish knights, Moorish mounted archers and Berber light cavalry were all available for hire. Historian Jim Bradbury noted in 2004 that not every Christian fighter shared the same motives. The military orders were more committed to religious war than some of their secular counterparts. In his words, they "carried out raids and even atrocities, such as decapitating Muslim prisoners."

  In the 12th and 13th centuries, a soldier typically carried a sword, a lance, a javelin, and either bow or crossbow. Knights rode in two styles. The Muslim style, a la jineta, used short stirrups and bent knees for speed and control. The French style, a la brida, used long stirrups for a more secure seat. In the 14th and 15th centuries heavy cavalry became dominant, and knights began to appear in full plate armor.

  6619626356

• 7. A Word Invented Later

  ›

  The anonymous Chronica Prophetica, written in 883 and 884 in the Kingdom of Asturias, linked the Muslim conquest of 711 to the Asturian kings. It stressed a religious and cultural divide and argued for driving the Muslims out. It is the earliest sign of what became the reconquest idea. Documents from the 10th and 11th centuries, by contrast, say nothing about any such project. The crusades, which began late in the 11th century, gave the idea its religious form.

  The Chanson de Roland, an 11th-century French poem, gave it a story. It offers a fictionalised retelling of the battle at Roncevaux Pass against so-called Saracens. Centuries later, after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the poem was introduced into French schools to instill moral and national values, regardless of the real events.

  In Spain the modern concept was consolidated in the second half of the 19th century. It was bound to Romantic nationalism, and to a centralist, Castilian and staunchly Catholic national story. It gained further force under the Francoist dictatorship, becoming a pillar of National Catholicism. The Nationalist rebels of the Spanish Civil War cast their rising as a liberation war, with Franco standing for both Pelagius of Asturias and El Cid. The Republicans answered in kind. They portrayed their enemies as foreign invaders, pointing to the Army of Africa, which included Berber soldiers of the Tiradores de Ifni and Regulares from the Spanish protectorate in Morocco.

  In the first half of the 20th century, the intellectual José Ortega y Gasset was among the first Spaniards to question a reconquest lasting eight centuries. Today historians observe that Spain and Portugal did not yet exist as nations, so the heirs of the Visigothic Kingdom were not reconquering them. Periods of peaceful coexistence were longer than periods of major warfare, including the golden age of Jewish culture in Spain. Modern scholars describe the Reconquista instead as a process of multiple episodes with regional variation. Meanwhile, the word remains a rallying call for far-right parties such as Vox in Spain.

  1529252634

• 8. After Granada

  ›

  The Granada War began in 1482 under Ferdinand and Isabella and ended with the city's surrender on the 2nd of January 1492. The war overlapped with a succession struggle inside Granada, where the emir Abu'l-Hasan Ali was deposed by his son Muhammad XI. Before the conquest, some half a million Moors had lived in Castile. By 1492, about 100,000 had died or been enslaved, 200,000 had emigrated, and 200,000 remained. Muhammad XI was given the Alpujarras mountains as a principality but found life under Christian rule intolerable and moved to Fez in North Africa.

  On the 30th of July 1492, the Alhambra Decree forcibly expelled the Jewish communities, some 200,000 people. Many who stayed converted to Catholicism. In 1502, Queen Isabella I made conversion compulsory in Castile. In 1526, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V imposed the same requirement on the Moors of Aragon, during the Revolt of the Germanies. Portugal expelled its Jews in 1497.

  Spanish power also crossed the sea. Melilla was taken in 1497, Oran in 1509, and Bougie and Tripoli in 1510. The capture of Tripoli cost the Spanish about 300 men. Between 3,000 and 5,000 of the inhabitants were killed, and another 5,000 to 6,000 were carried off as slaves. The rising Ottoman Empire soon pushed the Spanish back.

  At home, the Spanish Inquisition watched those who had converted. People known as conversos, Marranos and Moriscos shared ancestors with many Christians, especially in the aristocracy, who tried to hide their non-Christian roots. Those found to be secretly practicing Islam or Judaism were executed, imprisoned or exiled. Other groups carried their own names. Mozarabs were Christians living under Muslim rule. Mudéjares were Muslims living under Christian rule. Muwallads were native Iberians who converted to Islam after the Arab and Berber arrival.

  Between 1492 and 1610, approximately three million Muslims emigrated or were driven out of Spain. The series of decrees expelling the Moriscos from Habsburg Spain began in 1609, and with them the last large Muslim community left the peninsula.

  1210111398