Medieval Iberians never called their wars Reconquista
From Asturias’s stand at Covadonga around 718 or 722 to Granada’s fall in 1492, northern Christian kingdoms clawed Iberia back from Muslim al-Andalus. Yet no medieval writer ever called that struggle the Reconquista: the word, and the tidy story of a lost homeland regained, were built by historians centuries later.
In 711 a mostly Berber army under Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed at Gibraltar and met King Roderic at Guadalete between 19 and 26 July; desertions broke the Visigothic host and Roderic drowned. Musa ibn Nusayr, governor of Ifriqiya, followed up, taking Mérida, Córdoba, and Zaragoza in 712, while some lords such as Theodemir kept autonomy by treaty.
Traditional timelines open with Covadonga’s Asturian victory, then leap to thirteenth-century breakthroughs after Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, when León, Castile, Aragón, Navarre, and Portugal rolled up major Muslim cities. The campaigns ended when the Catholic Monarchs seized Granada in 1492. Peaceful coexistence and local skirmishes actually filled more of the 781 years of Muslim presence than constant holy war.
The Chronica Prophetica of 883–884 already linked Asturias to the kingdom Tariq had overrun, and Sisnando Davídiz told Granada’s last Zirid emir that Christians meant to recover their old lands by exploiting Muslim weakness. Yet charters of the tenth and eleventh centuries say nothing of a grand reconquest. The emirs of Córdoba, for their part, never ruled the whole peninsula and showed little interest in winning back the north. Crusading ideas from the late eleventh century, plus epics like the Chanson de Roland, hardened the religious framing.
The modern concept took shape in nineteenth-century Spanish historiography, bound up with a Castilian, Catholic, centralist nationalism. During the Civil War, Franco’s Nationalists cast their revolt as a crusade to save the fatherland, while Republicans painted his Army of Africa, which included Moroccan Regulares, as foreign invaders. Recent scholars prefer to describe many separate, regionally distinct episodes rather than one continuous war.
Source: Reconquista
