Reconquista and Crusade in Fifteenth-Century Spain

Abstract

When Western European ‘crusaders’, mostly from France or Germany, set off towards Jerusalem in 1096, the Spanish Christian war against Islam had been in progress, often intermittently, for nearly four centuries. From the eighth century until the present day, controversy has raged over whether there was indeed, from the start, a coherent movement of Reconquista —; reconquest — since it involved regaining for Christendom territory that had been captured and occupied by Muslim rulers.¹ What cannot be denied, though, is that over a period of nearly 800 years, between the occupation by Muslim forces in the years 710–20 of nearly the whole of the Iberian peninsula, and the fall of the emirate of Granada at the beginning of 1492, intermittent warfare took place between Christian and Muslim forces. It is equally undeniable that this warfare, in its latter stages, explicitly took on the character of a holy war waged by Christians against Muslims — a ‘crusade’. This lengthy episode had begun in 711, when mixed Arab and Berber forces crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and rapidly gained control of the great bulk of the territory of the Christian Visigothic monarchy. Muslim supremacy in the peninsula lasted until 1031, when the caliphate of Córdoba began to disintegrate into a set of small kingdoms, known from the Arabic as taifas (pieces).