Reconquista

The Reconquista, meaning reconquest in Spanish and Portuguese, was a centuries-long sequence of military campaigns by the Christian kingdoms of northern Iberia to retake the peninsula from Muslim rule, conventionally dated from 711, when an invading army under Tariq ibn Ziyad defeated the Visigothic king Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete and brought most of Iberia under Muslim control as al-Andalus, to 1492. Christian resistance is traditionally traced to a small victory around 722 at the Battle of Covadonga under the Asturian leader Pelagius, though the campaigns that followed unfolded unevenly across many separate kingdoms and centuries rather than as a single continuous war, gaining major momentum after the powerful Caliphate of Cordoba fragmented into smaller rival states in 1031. A decisive Christian victory at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 broke the power of the North African Almohad dynasty, and the following decades saw the fall of major Muslim-held cities including Cordoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248, leaving only the southern kingdom of Granada under Muslim rule until its surrender in January 1492. The conquest of Granada was quickly followed by the expulsion of Iberia's Jewish population later that same year and, over the following century, the gradual expulsion of its Muslim population as well, closing nearly eight centuries of Muslim presence on the peninsula. Historians caution that the Reconquista is better understood as a long process with substantial regional variation than as a single continuous crusade, a modern term not used by medieval writers themselves.