Reconquista - Concept and Duration

Concept and Duration

When used as a historical period in traditional Spanish and Portuguese historiography, the term Reconquista has often been used to refer to a period extending from 718 (or 722 according to other sources) to 1492, when the last remaining Islamic state in Iberia, the Emirate of Granada, was defeated. During that period Christian kingdoms gradually took control over the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim kingdoms and with the fall of the Granadian emirate, the entire Iberian Peninsula was brought under Christian rule, while native Mozarabic Christian practices held for centuries in Muslim-ruled territory were first suppressed as early as 1080, by Alfonso VI of Castile, as Roman-rite Christian kingdoms advanced south.

Twentieth-century Spanish historiography stressed the existence of a continuous phenomenon by which Iberian kingdoms opposed and reconquered the Muslim kingdoms understood as a common enemy. However, despite the above claim of its beginning in the Battle of Covadonga (718, or 722), the ideology of Reconquest started to take shape at the end of the 9th century.

A landmark was set by the Christian Prophetic Chronicle (883-884), a document stressing the Christian and Muslim cultural and religious divide in Iberia and the necessity to drive the Muslims out. However, Christian and Muslim rulers commonly became divided and fought amongst themselves. Co-existence and alliances were as prevalent as frontier skirmishes and raids, especially in the eighth and ninth centuries. Blurring distinctions even further were the mercenaries from both sides who simply fought for whoever paid the most.

The Crusades which started late in the eleventh century only exacerbated the religious ideology of reconquest, confronted at that time with a similarly staunch ideology found on the Muslim actors strong in Al-Andalus: the Almoravids and, more, the Almohads. In fact previous documents (10-11th century) are mute on any idea of 'reconquest'. Propaganda accounts of Muslim-Christian hostility came into being to support that idea: most notably, the Chanson de Roland, a highly mythical contemporary French re-creation of the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (778) dealing with the Iberian Saracens, and taught as true in the French educational system until not long ago.