I am in Manzanares, a bit north of Madrid, and I thought to take this opportunity to give a brief introduction to the Reconquista, because it's one of the most inspiring events in history, in my humble opinion.
So, basically, in order to understand the Reconquista, we have to go back a few hundred years before it began to see the situation in the Iberian Peninsula.
And even before that, we have to discuss the Visigoths, a Germanic tribe who, along with other tribes during the migration era, carved out kingdoms from the crumbling Western Roman Empire.
That being said, it's important to point out that the Visigoths and the Romans fought on the same side in one of the most pivotal battles in world history, the Battle of the Catalonian Plains.
Attila the Hun has begun storming through Gaul, sacking numerous towns.
Fearing an attack on northern Italy, Magister Militum Flavius Aesius has mustered an army in an effort to resist the Hunnic advance.
The Romans have found an unlikely ally in the form of Theodoric I, King of the Visigoths.
Intercepting Attila on the Catalonian plains, the two sides meet in battle.
The battle was won by the Roman and Visigothic forces, and soon afterwards, the Visigoths began to take over formerly Western Roman territories in France and Spain, and eventually they had conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula.
Unfortunately, the Visigothic kingdom couldn't last because the ever-expanding Muslims came into the European Sine during the 700s.
They got stopped at Tours by Charles Martel in 732, but they managed to conquer most of Spain, most of Iberia.
However, there was one last area in Spain that remained unoccupied, in Asturias.
In 722, the Visigothic nobleman Pelagius won a decisive battle, the Battle of Covadonga, against the Muslim invaders.
That was seen as the beginning of the Reconquista, and he is seen as the founder of the Kingdom of Asturias.
So, even though it took about 800 years for the Reconquista to be complete, the majority of land gains were won during the central part of the Middle Ages.
As seen on this map, the absolute majority of the Iberian Peninsula was reconquered by the year 1270.
And then Granada in the south, which is the deep purple in this map, held out the longest.
The Reconquista began almost immediately after the Muslims got stopped in northern Spain.
And even though it was a conflict between European Christians versus Muslim Arabs and Berbers, the conflict was not black and white.
There was plenty of infighting between both the Christian sides and the Muslim side.
So during the Middle Ages the general trend was that the Christian kingdoms took more and more lands back from the Muslims but there was some setbacks as well and again there was fighting between the various Christian kingdoms because they obviously wanted a larger slice of the cake, the geographical cake so to speak.
And the same thing with the Muslims, they also fought for power in the south.
Then of course after the Spanish, the Iberian Peninsula was united, or at least Spain was united completely, a golden era for Spain awaited with new territories to conquer in the new world.
And that will have to be a video for another time.
