The Reconquista
Learn about the Reconquista — the centuries-long Christian campaign to recapture the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule, completed with the fall of Granada in 1492.
The Reconquista was the centuries-long process by which Christian kingdoms gradually recaptured the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim control. Beginning almost immediately after the Muslim conquest of 711 CE and culminating with the fall of Granada in 1492, it was not a single coordinated campaign but a complex, often intermittent struggle that shaped the identity of Spain and Portugal.
The Christian kingdoms of the north — León, Castile, Navarre, Aragon — expanded southward in fits and starts over nearly 800 years. Progress accelerated dramatically after the collapse of the Córdoba caliphate in 1031, which fragmented Al-Andalus into competing taifa kingdoms that could be conquered or intimidated individually. Key turning points included the capture of Toledo (1085), the decisive battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), and the fall of Seville (1248), which reduced Muslim rule to the small kingdom of Granada.
The Reconquista profoundly shaped Iberian culture and, through colonization, the entire Americas. It produced a warrior aristocracy accustomed to conquest and religious crusade. The ideology of limpieza de sangre ("blood purity") that emerged in its later stages led to the persecution and expulsion of Jews and Muslims, ending the convivencia that had characterized the best of Al-Andalus. When Columbus sailed in 1492 — the same year Granada fell — he carried the Reconquista's mentality of conquest and conversion across the Atlantic.