What’s in a name?
Spain’s Christian conquerors immortalised their victories as the righteous restoration of Christian rule, but was this narrative religious propaganda used to alienate Spain from its Muslim heritage?
The name ‘reconquista’ was coined by the Christian conquerors themselves, but is it in fact propaganda?
The Emirate of Granada’s surrender in 1492 marked the formal end of Muslim rule on the Iberian Peninsula. Soon after, the conquerors began forced conversions of Muslims, culminating in the expulsion of all Muslims and Jews from Spain. The Christian victors celebrated their success as a moral victory, dubbed the Reconquista, or ‘Reconquest’, of Spain, which British historian David Nicolle calls “a classic case of history being written by the winning side”. For centuries, he adds, the Muslim period was written off as an “alien interlude”, a narrative that academics have increasingly begun to question.
To understand the issue, it’s important to first look at the nature of the original Muslim conquest. The Visigothic king of Hispania and Septimania first adopted the Catholic faith in 589. When King Witiza died in 710, his successor Roderic was seen to have usurped the throne for himself. Early Arab chronicles suggest that Roderic’s enemies invited the Umayyads to invade Spain. Though this claim is debatable, Roderic was a deeply unpopular figure, which played a huge role in the Umayyad’s ability to sweep through and conquer Spain in matter of seven years. Jews, who had undergone intense persecution under Christian rule, may very well have welcomed the Muslims as liberators. In the aftermath, the Visigoths fled to the north, where they founded new Christian kingdoms.
In the ensuing eight centuries, the Iberian Peninsula became a fluid entity, with waves of power lapping between Muslim and Christian rule. In Muslim areas, in keeping with tradition set by the earliest Rashidun Caliphate, nonmuslims such as Christians and Jews could practise their faith freely so long as they paid the jizyah non-muslim tax. Over time, the population of Andalusia grew into a diverse melting pot of indigenous converts, Arabs, Berbers, Black and European slaves, Jews and Christians. Although they were in some respects viewed as second-class citizens,
Christians and Jews enjoyed autonomy over their own communities and could expect to rise to high-ranking positions. By the 10th century 80% of the indigenous Spanish population had converted to Islam.
As evidenced in the life of El Cid, after the collapse of the Emirate of Cordoba into a series of taifas, or principalities, Christians and Muslim powers were more than happy to ally with one another against rivals of their own faith. The idea of a Holy War for the peninsula only really intensified with the rise of the zealous Almohad dynasty and Pope Innocent III’S declaration of a Crusade before the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. When Alfonso IX of León sided with the Almohads against Castile, the pope called for Christians to fight him with as much gusto as the Muslims, until Alfonso agreed to a truce.
The crusaders who arrived in 13th century Toledo found it a thoroughly Arab city, populated mostly by Arabic-speaking Christians. The local cathedral still was housed in a former mosque and residents had voluntarily embraced Muslim fashion. Despite arriving under the auspices of piety, the foreign crusaders massacred scores of Jews without provocation, forcing the urban militia to come out to stop them. Like the later expulsion, incidents like this undermine the legitimacy of the narrative of Catholicism as an inherently natural or righteous liberating force.
Two of the leading voices in this debate are Emilio González Ferrín and Alejandro Garcíasanjuán. Ferrín argues against the very notion of the Muslim ‘conquest’, asserting that the word represents the rapid rise of Islam as a “sudden disaster”, cutting short the organic progress of history by deposing Christianity’s peninsular legitimacy. García-sanjuán, meanwhile, explores the Reconquista myth itself – identifying it as a construct of the pan-european nationalist movement, used by conservatives to exaggerate the role of Catholicism in the Spanish cultural identity. Under Franco, National Catholic propagandists embraced the narrative of the ‘catastrophe’ of the Islamic ‘invasion’ and the Christian Spanish nation’s subsequent quest for redemption through reunification. Some contemporary conservatives have even gone so far as to inappropriately correlate the conquest of 711 with modern acts of terrorism.
As García-sanjuán points out, the Andalusian period, spanning more than eight centuries, “encompasses some of Spain’s most important historical landmarks”, such as Alhambra and the mosque of Córdoba. However, Spanish academics, politicians and journalists continue to clash over its role in the country’s heritage and culture to this day.