I. The Visigothic Kingdom and the Conquest of 711
In the early eighth century the Iberian Peninsula was ruled by the Visigothic kings from Toledo. The Visigoths had entered the peninsula in the fifth century as federates of Rome, and after the conversion of King Reccared from Arian to Catholic Christianity at the Third Council of Toledo in 589 the kingdom had developed a close partnership between crown and bishops. The councils of Toledo legislated on doctrine, discipline and royal succession together, and the kingdom produced a learned clergy whose most celebrated figure was Isidore of Seville, the author of the Etymologies. The same councils also issued increasingly severe measures against the Jewish communities of the peninsula, including forced baptisms under Sisebut and, by the late seventh century, decrees that reduced unconverted Jews to servitude. These measures are part of the background to later Jewish memory of the conquest.
The kingdom was politically fragile. Succession was elective in principle and contested in practice, and the death of King Wittiza around 710 was followed by the accession of Roderic in disputed circumstances. In 711 a force of Berbers and Arabs under Tariq ibn Ziyad, a client of Musa ibn Nusayr, the Umayyad governor of North Africa, crossed the straits and landed near the rock that still bears his name, Gibraltar, from Jabal Tariq. Roderic marched south and was defeated, probably near the Guadalete or the Barbate, in July 711. His body was never securely identified, and the Visigothic leadership collapsed with remarkable speed.
Tariq advanced on Toledo, which fell without a prolonged siege, and in 712 Musa crossed with a larger army and took Seville, Mérida and other cities. Within a decade almost the whole peninsula had passed under Muslim rule. In many places the conquest proceeded by treaty rather than by storm. The best known example is the pact made in 713 between Musa's son Abd al-Aziz and the Visigothic noble Theodemir, who kept his authority over seven towns in the region of Murcia in return for tribute and loyalty. Christians and Jews who submitted became protected subjects, dhimmis, who paid a poll tax and kept their own religious life and laws.
The new province was called al-Andalus. It was governed at first from Damascus through North Africa, and its early decades were marked by tension between Arab settlers and the Berbers who had formed the bulk of the conquering armies. Expeditions crossed the Pyrenees into Frankish Gaul until the defeat of Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi near Poitiers in 732 or 733. The Arab and Berber settlers concentrated in the river valleys of the south and centre. The northern mountains, from Galicia to the Pyrenees, were poor, wet and difficult to hold, and it was there that small Christian polities emerged.
The word Reconquista, meaning reconquest, is a later term. Medieval Christian writers from the ninth century onwards did describe their wars as a recovery of the lost Gothic kingdom, and the idea shaped the self-understanding of the northern kings. Modern historians use the word with caution, because the process lasted nearly eight centuries, included long periods of peace and alliance across religious lines, and was driven as much by dynastic ambition, land and tribute as by religion. The overview of the period on this site, The Reconquista and Bible Scholarship, traces the consequences for Hebrew and Latin learning. The present page follows the early military and political history from the mountains of Asturias to the line of the Duero.
II. Pelayo and the Battle of Covadonga
The founding narrative of the northern kingdom concerns Pelayo, a figure described in the later chronicles as a Visigothic noble, possibly a former member of the royal guard, who took refuge among the mountain peoples of Asturias. The main sources are the Chronicle of Alfonso III, written in two versions in the late ninth century, and the Chronicle of Albelda of around 881. Both were composed more than a century and a half after the events they describe, at the court of Oviedo, and both had an interest in presenting the Asturian kings as heirs of Toledo. Arabic sources mention Pelayo briefly and dismissively, describing him as the leader of a handful of men who survived on honey in the mountains.
According to the Asturian chronicles, Pelayo was chosen as leader by the Asturians around 718 and refused to pay tribute to the Muslim governor of Gijón, Munuza. A punitive expedition under a commander named Alqama was sent into the mountains, accompanied, in the chronicle's account, by Oppa, a bishop of Seville and son of Wittiza, who urged Pelayo to submit. Pelayo replied that the Church was like the moon, which is eclipsed and then returns to its fullness, and that he trusted in divine mercy to restore the people of Spain. The Muslim force advanced into the narrow valley below the cave of Covadonga, where Pelayo and his men had gathered. The chronicle describes the stones and arrows of the attackers turning back upon themselves, and the fleeing army being crushed by a landslide in the valley of the Deva.
The date usually given is 722, although 718 has also been argued. The scale of the encounter was almost certainly small. What mattered was that a Christian chief in the Cantabrian mountains had defeated a Muslim expedition and established an autonomous lordship that the governors in Córdoba did not seriously attempt to subdue again. The chroniclers of Oviedo made Covadonga the origin of a providential history, and the cave became a shrine. The Basilica of Covadonga that now stands nearby is a nineteenth-century building, but devotion to the Virgin of the cave goes back to the Middle Ages.
Pelayo ruled from Cangas de Onís until his death around 737. His son Favila reigned briefly and, according to the chronicle, was killed by a bear. The succession then passed to Alfonso I, the son of Peter, duke of Cantabria, who had married Pelayo's daughter Ermesinda. This union of the Asturian and Cantabrian lineages gave the small kingdom a broader base along the northern coast.
Archaeology has added a little to the written tradition. Excavations in the Asturian heartland have revealed fortified hilltop sites and churches of the eighth and ninth centuries, and the small church of Santa Cruz de Cangas de Onís, built by Favila in 737 over a dolmen, is recorded in a dedicatory inscription preserved in copies. The inscription names Favila and his wife Froiliuba and is one of the very few near-contemporary documents of the first Asturian rulers. Beyond such fragments, the early history of the kingdom depends on the Oviedo chronicles, and historians read their account of Covadonga as a foundational narrative rather than as a record of a battle that can be reconstructed in detail.
The mountain peoples whom Pelayo led were not simply Visigothic refugees. The Astures and Cantabri had been only lightly Romanised, and the Visigothic kings had campaigned against them repeatedly. Their alliance with a Gothic leader against the new rulers of the south combined local resistance to outside taxation with the political claims of a displaced elite, and the kingdom that emerged reflected both.
III. Alfonso I and the Desert of the Duero
Alfonso I, who reigned from about 739 to 757, took advantage of the crisis that shook al-Andalus in the 740s. In 740 the Berbers of North Africa rose against Arab rule, and the revolt spread to the Berber garrisons of the peninsula, many of whom had been settled in the north-west, in Galicia and the Meseta. A famine in the early 750s added to the disorder, and many Berber settlers withdrew southwards. Alfonso led campaigns across the Cantabrian range into the plain of the Duero, and the Chronicle of Alfonso III lists a long series of towns, among them Lugo, Astorga, León, Zamora, Salamanca, Segovia and Ávila, which he is said to have taken, killing the Muslim inhabitants and bringing the Christians back with him to the mountains.
For much of the twentieth century this passage was read, under the influence of Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, as evidence that the Duero basin was deliberately depopulated, creating a desert between the two societies. Later archaeological and documentary work has modified that picture. The plain was not empty. It retained scattered communities without strong political organisation, and what disappeared was the structure of towns, bishoprics and public authority. The chronicle's language of devastation reflected the court's interest in presenting later royal colonisation as the reestablishment of order. Historians now generally speak of a zone of weak authority rather than of a true desert.
Alfonso's successors faced internal difficulties. Fruela I suppressed revolts in Galicia and among the Basques and founded a settlement at Oviedo. A series of short reigns followed, and the Asturian kingdom seems at times to have paid tribute to Córdoba. In 756 Abd al-Rahman I, a survivor of the Umayyad family overthrown by the Abbasids in the east, had taken power in Córdoba and established an independent emirate. The emirs conducted regular summer campaigns, aceifas, against the northern Christians, raiding the valleys of Álava, Castile and Asturias. The northern kingdom's survival depended on the mountains, the limited aims of these raids, and the recurrent internal strife of al-Andalus.
IV. Alfonso II and the Gothic Restoration at Oviedo
The long reign of Alfonso II, the Chaste, from 791 to 842, gave the Asturian kingdom its lasting institutions. Alfonso established his court permanently at Oviedo, where he built a palace and churches, among them the church of San Salvador, which became the cathedral, and the Cámara Santa, a chapel that housed the relics of the kingdom. The Chronicle of Albelda states that he restored at Oviedo the whole order of the Goths as it had been at Toledo, both in the church and in the palace. Whether this means the formal reception of the Visigothic law code, the Liber Iudiciorum, and the ceremonial of the Toledan court is debated, but the claim of continuity was deliberate.
Alfonso faced Umayyad campaigns that reached Oviedo itself in 794 and 795. He defeated a Muslim army at Lutos in 794 and survived the sack of his capital. He also opened diplomatic contact with the Carolingian court of Charlemagne, which had established a frontier march in Catalonia after the capture of Barcelona in 801. The Frankish annals record Asturian embassies bringing gifts from the spoils of a raid on Lisbon in 798.
These decades also saw a doctrinal controversy that shaped the relations of the Spanish churches. Elipandus, the archbishop of Toledo under Muslim rule, defended a Christology in which Christ in his humanity was described as the adopted Son of God. The view was opposed by Beatus of Liébana, a monk in the Asturian kingdom and the author of a commentary on the Book of Revelation, and it was condemned at Carolingian councils in Regensburg, Frankfurt and Aachen between 792 and 799. The dispute separated the churches of the north from the primatial see of Toledo and helped orient Asturias towards the Frankish and Roman churches. Beatus's commentary on the Apocalypse, with its long quotations from the Latin text of Revelation, became one of the most frequently illuminated books of the Spanish Middle Ages, and the surviving Beatus manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries are among the masterpieces of Mozarabic and Romanesque painting.
V. The Tomb of Santiago
During the reign of Alfonso II, probably between 820 and 830, the bishop Theodemir of Iria Flavia in Galicia reported the discovery of a tomb that was identified as that of the apostle James, the son of Zebedee. The Greek Scriptures record that James was put to death by Herod Agrippa I in Jerusalem, as described in Acts 12:1-2. The tradition that James had preached in Spain and that his body had been carried there after his death developed in the seventh and eighth centuries. It appears in Latin catalogues of the apostles and in a hymn of the reign of King Mauregatus, O Dei Verbum, which names James as the patron of Spain.
Alfonso II visited the site and built a church over the tomb. A larger basilica was built by Alfonso III and consecrated in 899, and the settlement that grew up around it became Santiago de Compostela. From the late tenth century and above all in the eleventh, Compostela drew pilgrims from across Latin Christendom, and the pilgrim road across northern Spain, later known as the Camino de Santiago, became an artery of trade, settlement and cultural exchange.
The cult also acquired a military aspect. A charter attributed to Ramiro I and dated 834 described the apostle's miraculous appearance at a battle of Clavijo against the Muslims and granted a perpetual tribute to the church of Santiago. The charter is a forgery of the twelfth century, composed at Compostela to support the church's claims, and the battle of Clavijo is not attested in the earlier sources. Nevertheless, the image of Santiago Matamoros, the apostle on a white horse riding against the enemy, became a central symbol of the later Reconquista and of Spanish expansion overseas. The contrast between this martial image and the apostle of the Gospels, who with his brother John was rebuked for wishing to call down fire on a Samaritan village in Luke 9:54-55, was noticed by later commentators.
VI. Alfonso III and the Advance to the Duero
The second half of the ninth century saw the decisive expansion of the Asturian kingdom onto the plain of the Duero. Ordoño I, who reigned from 850 to 866, repopulated León, Astorga and Tui, and his son Alfonso III, the Great, who reigned from 866 to 910, carried the frontier to the river itself. In 884 the count Diego Rodríguez Porcelos founded Burgos in the east, and Castile, the land of castles, began to take shape as a frontier county. In the west, Christian forces took Porto in 868 and Coimbra in 878, establishing the county of Portugal between the Minho and the Douro. In 893 Alfonso repopulated Zamora, and in 899 Simancas and Toro followed. By the early tenth century a line of fortified settlements stretched along the Duero from Zamora to San Esteban de Gormaz.
This advance was made possible by the weakness of the emirate in the late ninth century, when Córdoba faced rebellions by Muladí lords, converts and their descendants, such as Umar ibn Hafsun in the mountains of Bobastro, and by the frontier families of the Ebro valley such as the Banu Qasi. The process of settlement, which Spanish historians call repoblación, involved both royal and comital initiatives and the spontaneous occupation of land by peasants, a practice known as presura, in which a cultivator acquired title by clearing and working unclaimed ground. Many of the new settlers were Mozarabs, Arabic-speaking Christians who migrated north from al-Andalus, bringing with them their liturgy, their script and their building styles. The monastery of San Miguel de Escalada, consecrated in 913 and founded by monks from Córdoba, preserves the horseshoe arches characteristic of their architecture.
Alfonso III's court was also the setting for the chronicles that gave the kingdom its historical identity. The Chronicle of Albelda, the Chronicle of Alfonso III and the so-called Prophetic Chronicle of 883 presented the Asturian kings as successors of the Goths and the loss of Spain in 711 as a punishment for the sins of the Visigothic rulers. The Prophetic Chronicle even interpreted the prophecy against Gog in Ezekiel 38:2 as a reference to the Goths and calculated that Muslim rule in Spain would end in 884. These writings are the earliest clear expression of the idea of reconquest.
VIII. The Campaigns of al-Mansur
In the last quarter of the tenth century the caliphate came under the control of Muhammad ibn Abi Amir, the chamberlain of the young caliph Hisham II, who took the title al-Mansur, the Victorious, in 981. Al-Mansur reorganised the army around Berber and Slavic professional troops and led more than fifty campaigns against the Christian north. These were not wars of conquest but punitive and plundering expeditions intended to demonstrate the caliphate's power, gather slaves and booty, and secure his own position at home.
His raids reached every Christian realm. In 985 he sacked Barcelona. In 988 he took León and destroyed its walls, and he sacked the monasteries of Sahagún and Eslonza. In 997 he marched on Santiago de Compostela, which the inhabitants had evacuated. He destroyed the town and the basilica of Alfonso III but spared the tomb itself, and according to the Arabic historians he had the bells of the church carried to Córdoba on the shoulders of Christian captives, to be used as lamps in the great mosque. The bells were returned to Compostela in 1236, after the conquest of Córdoba, carried this time by Muslim captives, an episode treated in Ferdinand III and the Fall of Córdoba and Seville.
Al-Mansur died in 1002 at Medinaceli, returning from a campaign in the Rioja. A later Christian tradition placed his death after a defeat at Calatañazor, but the battle is not attested in contemporary sources and is now regarded as a legend. His son Abd al-Malik continued the campaigns until his own death in 1008. After that the caliphate collapsed into a civil war, the fitna, between Berber and Andalusi factions, during which Madinat al-Zahra was sacked. In 1031 the caliphate was formally abolished, and al-Andalus split into more than twenty successor states, the taifa kingdoms, centred on cities such as Seville, Badajoz, Toledo, Zaragoza, Valencia and Granada.
IX. Sancho the Great and the Kingdom of Castile
The collapse of the caliphate transformed the balance of power. The leading Christian ruler of the early eleventh century was Sancho Garcés III of Pamplona, called the Great, who reigned from about 1004 to 1035. Through marriage, inheritance and intervention he extended his influence over Aragon, Sobrarbe, Ribagorza and the county of Castile, and in 1034 he occupied the city of León. He opened his kingdoms to influences from beyond the Pyrenees, encouraging the reform of monasteries along the lines of Cluny and diverting the pilgrim road to Santiago through his lands.
On Sancho's death his territories were divided among his sons. Ferdinand, who had received Castile, defeated and killed his brother-in-law Bermudo III of León at the battle of Tamarón in 1037 and became king of León as well, the first ruler to unite Castile and León. Ferdinand I, who reigned until 1065, began the policy that would dominate the following century. Rather than conquering the taifa kingdoms outright, he forced them to pay tribute, the parias, in gold in return for protection. Toledo, Zaragoza, Badajoz and Seville all paid. The flow of Andalusi gold financed churches, monasteries and the great donations of the Leonese kings to Cluny.
Ferdinand also extended the frontier in the west. In 1064 he took Coimbra, which had been lost to al-Mansur in 987, securing the line of the Mondego. In 1063 he obtained from the ruler of Seville the relics of Isidore, which were carried to León and placed in the royal church that became the basilica of San Isidoro. The translation linked the new dynasty to the Visigothic learning of Seville and gave León a patron saint to stand beside Santiago.
Ferdinand's will divided his realms among his sons, with Castile for Sancho, León for Alfonso and Galicia for García, and the fratricidal wars that followed occupied the next decade. Their outcome, the reunion of the kingdoms under Alfonso VI, opened the way to the capture of Toledo in 1085.
X. Frontier Society and Religious Coexistence
The early centuries of the Reconquista did not produce a fixed line between two religious blocs. Christian kings and counts allied with Muslim rulers against their own kin, and Muslim lords sought Christian help against Córdoba. Marriages crossed the frontier. Abd al-Rahman III was the grandson of a Navarrese princess, and his mother was a Christian captive. Mozarab Christians lived in al-Andalus, and later Mudéjar Muslims would live under Christian rule. Jews served both courts as physicians, administrators and translators.
The frontier was also a place of violence. The summer raids from Córdoba and the counter-raids of the northern kings took captives and burned crops, and the frontier towns of the Duero were organised for constant war. Their charters, the fueros, granted settlers freedom from certain dues and gave the municipal militias a central role. The class of villein knights, caballeros villanos, men who owned a horse and arms and owed military service in return for privileges, became a distinctive feature of Castilian society.
Religious ideas played a part from the start. The chroniclers of Oviedo framed the struggle as a punishment and restoration ordained by God, and they drew on the language of the Hebrew Scriptures, in which the people of Israel lose their land through unfaithfulness and recover it through repentance, as in Deuteronomy 30:1-5. But the systematic ideology of crusade, with papal indulgences and the comparison of war in Spain to war in the Holy Land, belongs to the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. It arrived with the French knights, the Cluniac monks and the reformed papacy, and it shaped the next phase, described in Toledo, the Almoravids and the Cid.
XI. The Mozarabs and the Martyrs of Cordoba
The Christians who remained under Muslim rule in al-Andalus are known as Mozarabs, from an Arabic term meaning those who had become Arabised. They kept their bishops, their Visigothic liturgy and their Latin Bible, but over the ninth and tenth centuries many adopted Arabic as their everyday language, and a steady stream converted to Islam. The process worried some members of the clergy. In the 850s a group of Christians in Córdoba, encouraged by the priest Eulogius and his friend the layman Paul Alvarus, deliberately sought death by publicly denouncing the Prophet of Islam before the qadi. Between 850 and 859 about forty-eight people were executed, among them priests, monks, nuns and lay men and women from mixed families, some of whom were legally Muslims because of a Muslim parent and were therefore treated as apostates.
The episode divided the Christian community itself. A council of bishops called at Córdoba in 852, under pressure from the emir Muhammad I, discouraged voluntary martyrdom, and many Christians regarded the martyrs as provocateurs who endangered the whole community. Eulogius wrote the Memoriale Sanctorum to defend them, citing the call of the Gospels to confess Christ before men in Matthew 10:32-33. Alvarus, in his Indiculus Luminosus, complained that young Christians preferred Arabic poetry to Latin learning and could no longer write a proper letter in Latin, while composing verses in Arabic with skill. Eulogius was himself executed in 859. His relics were later taken north to Oviedo in 884, in the reign of Alfonso III, as part of a diplomatic exchange, a sign of the links between the Asturian court and the Christians of the south.
The Mozarab migration northwards over the following decades enriched the Leonese kingdom. Monks from al-Andalus founded or restored monasteries in the Duero valley and the Bierzo, and they brought with them manuscripts, Arabic names and building techniques. The Mozarabic liturgy, with its own calendar and chants, remained the rite of the Spanish churches until its replacement by the Roman rite in the late eleventh century. The Latin Bible text used in Spain, which includes readings distinctive to the Iberian tradition, owes much to this Mozarab inheritance.
XII. War, Booty and the Economy of the Frontier
The wars of the early Reconquista were sustained by an economy in which raiding was a regular source of wealth. On both sides the summer campaign brought in captives, livestock and precious objects, and captives were either ransomed, sold or put to work. The trade in captives was so extensive that specialised redeemers, later organised in religious orders such as the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians in the thirteenth century, emerged to negotiate ransoms. Muslim and Christian law both regulated the treatment of prisoners and the division of spoils, and the royal share of booty, the fifth, was a principle common to Islamic and Castilian practice.
Fortification shaped the landscape. In the Christian north, towers and castles sprang up along the Duero and in the Ebro valley, and in al-Andalus the frontier was organised in three marches, the Upper, Middle and Lower, centred on Zaragoza, Toledo and Mérida. Watchtowers on hilltops passed signals by fire and smoke. Many place names in central Spain, such as those beginning with Alcalá from the Arabic for castle, preserve the memory of this military geography.
The settlers who moved into the frontier lands were drawn by the promise of land and liberty. Royal and comital charters offered them exemption from many dues, the right to elect their own magistrates and judicial privileges that included the pardon of past crimes. The charter of Castrojeriz, granted in 974, is one of the earliest examples. Such frontier communities developed a culture of self-reliance and armed readiness that later accompanied Castilian expansion into the south and, in the sixteenth century, into the Americas.
XIII. Legacies of the Asturian Beginnings
By 1037 the Christian kingdoms held roughly the northern third of the peninsula. The line ran from Coimbra in the west across the Duero valley and along the southern edge of the Castilian county, then north-east through the Ebro valley, where Zaragoza remained Muslim, to the Catalan counties around Barcelona. The kingdom of Asturias had become the kingdom of León, Castile had grown from a frontier county into a kingdom, and Navarre and Aragon had emerged as separate realms in the Pyrenees.
The memory of Covadonga, the Gothic restoration and the apostle of Compostela became the foundation of a historical identity that later Spanish writers used to explain the whole medieval past. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the story of Pelayo was given a national and sometimes a political meaning, and the shrine at Covadonga became a focus of patriotic devotion. Historians have since tried to separate the history of the period from its later uses, stressing the small scale of the early kingdom, the importance of local communities and Mozarab migrants, and the many forms of coexistence across the frontier.
For the history of the biblical text, the period is significant for two reasons. The northern monasteries preserved and copied the Latin Bible in the Visigothic script, and the great Leonese and Castilian Bibles of the tenth century, such as the Bible of 920 and the Bible of 960 now at León, transmitted the Spanish tradition of the Vulgate described in The Latin Vulgate. In al-Andalus, meanwhile, Jewish scholars under the caliphate began the work in Hebrew grammar and lexicography that would make Spain one of the centres of biblical philology. Both traditions passed through the wars that followed.
XIV. Bibliography
The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.
Collins, Roger. The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710–797. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Collins, Roger. Caliphs and Kings: Spain, 796–1031. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Fletcher, Richard. Saint James's Catapult: The Life and Times of Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
Fletcher, Richard. Moorish Spain. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992.
García Fitz, Francisco. La Reconquista. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2010.
Kennedy, Hugh. Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus. London: Longman, 1996.
O'Callaghan, Joseph F. A History of Medieval Spain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Ríos Saloma, Martín F. La Reconquista: Una construcción historiográfica (siglos XVI–XIX). Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2011.
Wolf, Kenneth Baxter, trans. Conquerors and Chroniclers of Early Medieval Spain. 2nd ed. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999.
Grokipedia. Reconquista.
Grokipedia. Battle of Covadonga.
Grokipedia. Kingdom of Asturias.