Ill-named because it wasn't a reconquest of anything; Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that. It was a bunch of tribes originally, followed by the Greeks settling in, then the Romans, then the Visigoths, and then the Arabs. A mesh of many cultures until the main kingdoms united and wiped the land of "non-Christian blood". And thereafter the Spanish government has gone back and forth trying to wipe the remaining cultures in the peninsula to impose its own, as can be learned from the recent history of the past century. Nothing to be proud of, really. I actually hope Columbus turns out to be Jew so they stop talking about him.
That's a very strange way to present Spanish history.
Spain was unified province of Rome, and then its own country under the Visigoths for a total of 800 years. That's 800 years of unified governance. Spain had a common language (vulgate) and religion (various sects of christianity).
We have the pre-Islamic negotiations on issues of Faith. The Visigoths were Arians but slowly became Catholics. We have the history of countless councils.
Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take. And it's ridiculous to think it could have been - where did the people to fight the most powerful army of the day come from? Asturias is just not that big.
Hispania constituted several Roman provinces. I'm not sure what you mean by "unified". Unified legally under the Roman empire, sure, but not as a nation or even culturally. (By that token, we could say "Spain" was unified under the Arabs, too.) It is not until the marriage of the Catholic monarchs that historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation. So "reconquista" doesn't add up to reality; "unification" or "birth" would be a better term.
I think your other points are fine, thanks for adding.
> Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take.
It was fairly a walk in the park for them; took only a decade to get the peninsula under control and venture into France, until they lost their first battle there. That, and the Basque country; nobody can conquer the Basque country, which is why they speak a non-romance language to this day, among other things.
The provinces of the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the Balearic Islands and the coast south of the strait of Gibraltar, formed the Diocese of Hispania until the Germanic invasions.
Spain was always a confederacy of tribes! Even today!
The very concert of fueros formalizes this starting 1000 years ago. Those fueros still constitute the basis of the Spanish Constitution today (i.e. autonomous regions).
That the Spanish central state never felt the need to genocide Spain's constituent tribes like Paris did in France should be considered a good thing! Most Euskera speakers are on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees!
EDIT: the Asturians, from whom the seed of the reconquista came from, are ethnic celts and play a local variation of bag pipes.
Yup, in the North West of Spain live the "Spaniard Irish", but not everybody there is blond. Eva Longoria or Gloria Stephan descend from Asturian people and are a better example representative of Asturias women. Nobody in USA would call this women celts.
> Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take.
I think you're missing the point.
OP's point was that "Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that." The truth of the matter is that it didn't, and to make matters worse even today Spain itself is comprised of regions with distinct national identities which reject the idea of being a part of the castilian-based nation.
I've read different versions of that argument and it essentially boils down to saying that the Reconquista did not exist because there wasn't one single political entity implementing one single military plan over seven centuries.
This obscures the fact that there was ample religious, social, linguistic, and even legal (Liber Iudiciorum) continuity since Late Antiquity.
You pretend like it was a bunch of villages living in happy harmony until the Catholics arrived. You're lying. It was part of the post-Roman empire, then it got conquered by Muslims, then it got re-conquered by Catholics. Hence, reconquista.
Off-topic but why do people keep referring to Catholic Christians as Catholics as opposed to just Christians? I noticed that a lot in anglo-saxon spheres. It seems to function as an othering technique. I wonder if you are aware of you doing it. Other groups don't seem to get that kind of categorisation (just look at this thread)
Saying "catholics" instead of "Christians" is about the same as saying "Visigoths" instead of "Germanic tribes". I don't know why you would resist more precision. In the context of the times, it stands in opposition to e.g. "Eastern orthodox" (after the Great schism) or "Aryan".
I understand that it is a more precise term but my point is why does that additional precision matters in this particular context? All that is relevant is that a big external force came to unify a bunch of tribes. Christian seems good enough. On the other hand, why stop at "Visigoths"? You could list the actual sub-groups too. You can do the same with "Catholics" too.
But we don't because additional precision is not always necessary and in a context of several sub-groups, you would seem to emphasise a difference between them (by referring to the sub-group name) rather than their common name (Christians).
It's just something that I notice a lot in anglo-saxon (see non-Catholics) contexts and almost never outside the anglosphere.
> Off-topic but why do people keep referring to Catholic Christians as Catholics as opposed to just Christians
Mostly because it's a way to communicate such that the listener knows who you're talking about. Another example is calling Mormons 'Mormon' instead of Christian.
If you say 'Christian' people will think of what is likely in that geographic area the most common type of Christian, probably some form of protestant. If you say 'Catholic' the listener knows that you're talking about the group of people who follow the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. If you say 'Mormon', they'll also know who you mean.
It's also possible to subdivide the group referred to above as 'Christian' - you can use 'Baptist', 'Pentecostal', etc. Those are also names that aren't "Christian" for groups of Christians.
But why does it matter in a general context? It's like me referring to a group of people by the colour of their shoes or the material of the coats that they wear. It seems oddly segregational.
"Probably some kind protestant" surely, it would be Catholic as that's the largest denomination.
But my point is why you need to specify what kind of Christians are you talking about? Or why would you assume that you are talking about a subset of Christians only? Imagine talking about the weather in the western world in terms of city neighbourhoods. Sure, it helps knowing what specific area you are talking about but it seems oddly meticulous. I don't know if this is an anglo-saxon thing as I have seen Brits and North Americans talking in this way. But I haven't seen anyone from Germany, Italy or Spain talking in this way.
I suspect it might be a thing that people raised in non-Catholic countries say because in my experience, Catholics will see all Christians as Christians and not with some othering kind of word (see us-vs-them group dynamics in psychology). That othering emphasises the differences (often used by people that seek to distance themselves from them all despite the commonalities) while using the same word highlights the commonalities (often used by people that embraces them all despite the differences) I notice this non-Catholic pattern of us-vs-them othering in the context of Catalonia and Taiwan too so I suspect it might be an us-vs-them group dynamics thing.
Surely you can just say something like apostolic Christians or something but I find it odd that for individuals whose core belief is a figure called Christ that they wouldn't use the original term "Christian" to refer to themselves and instead keep breaking away from each and using new words for their group every time they don't agree with each other
I don't pretend or lie. Historians put the start of Spain as a unified nation with the Catholic monarchs. Spain did not exist as a nation prior to then. Hence, nothing to conquer "back", just a succession of empires and smaller kingdoms and a melting of cultures consolidating into the birth of the nation that it is today.
You're making this weird semantic distinction that is irrelevant. Nobody is arguing that Spain was a single, completely unified polity before the Islamic conquests. But it was controlled by the Christian Visigothic Kingdom of Spain, and then it was conquered by the Islamic Umayyads, so the reconquista was to bring it back under Christian rule.
The semantic distinction is relevant because Reconquista, with the capital R and everything, is an ideological, propagandistic narrative by the Spanish (central government) originating in the 20th century.
You're arguing that nothing was reconquered and the term is pure propaganda because the state didn't exist pre-Muslim conquest. Now you're using your conclusion (the term is pure propaganda) to explain why the lack of a pre-Islam state is relevant. You're arguing in circles.
You have yet to provide any evidence that the term originated as early modern propaganda, you've just asserted that it must have on the grounds that the state didn't exist before (which as OP says is unconvincing reasoning).
If you were saying that it was 15th century propaganda I'd have a much easier time swallowing it, but you're trying to insist it's a modern construct and that's a tough sell. We're talking about a time period overlapping with literal crusades. It's not a stretch to think that the Christian kingdoms (yes, plural) saw themselves as reclaiming the peninsula for Christendom.
> The concept was born from the chroniclers of the Christian kingdoms “when they recovered what is called the neo-Gothic ideal ” by which “the kings of Asturias, then of León and then of Castile proclaimed themselves descendants and legitimate heirs of the Gothic kings,”
> ...
> the idea of Reconquista “was a myth that only began to take shape from the 11th century as part of the program of royal legitimacy promoted by the clergy of Burgundy in support of the claim of the dynasty of Castile and León to have sovereignty over the entire Peninsula.”
So it's medieval propaganda, not early modern propaganda. That I can buy.
I'm not particularly interested in whether the word Reconquista is used by these people if even these historians agree that they saw themselves through that lens. Whether they had a correct understanding of the history behind the Muslim presence is a separate question from whether they believed they were reconquering.
You kind of cherry-picked two paragraphs and butchered the article. The article's point is that Reconquista, with capital R, is not a good designation for the historical events that took place. It does use the term throughout the article, though, which maybe is a bit confusing. But if you read a couple paragraphs past the one you quoted, you'll see it restated that the term Reconquista is a 20th century invention. "The idea of Reconquista" is talking about the idea, specifically, not the term; the term, and mysticism surrounding it (like the originating battle that actually never took place as such), part of which is debunked also in the article, is modern propaganda.
You're ignoring what I actually said about the quotes—I read all of that and I don't care when the term originated, that's pointless pedantry. The medieval kings thought of themselves as reconquering, so reconquista is a decent word to describe what they thought they were doing, regardless of its origins.
You keep saying "20th century" when the term was first popularised in the 1840s, and one scholar has traced the term back to 1795. See De la Restauración a la Reconquista: la construcción de un mito nacional (Una revisión historiográfica. Siglos XVI-XIX)https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/ELEM/article/viewFile/ELEM... (PDF)
> the first time that the term "reconquista" was used to refer to the fight against the Muslims was in the work of José Ortíz y Sanz entitled Compendio cronológico de la historia de España, published after 1795. The use of the term, however, did not spread until the 1840s thanks to two new editions of Ortiz's work and the publication of the Historia general by Modesto Lafuente.
So the term did not originate in the 20th century, but it was added to the dictionary in 1936.
16th-19th century historians would have used the term "restoration". The northern kingdoms prosecuting this supposed restoration were keen to claim their legitimacy as a continuation of the entire Visigoth Kingdom, and made it their business to recapture it... even if they never held that territory.
If we're going to be pedantic, the capital-R Reconquista name for the process of the -uh- re-conquest of Spain was introduced in the 19th century. And it was used throughout Latin America in elementary schoolbooks at least in the 1980s. Franco might have wanted to do some propagandizing with the term, but it was mainly seen as a non-partisan propaganda because Catholicism was a unifying force in Hispanic cultures rather than a partisan and divisive one.
It seems like a bit of iconoclasm to deny the Reconquista because it helps (does it?) with the Catalan claim to independence. In LatAm people don't really care about any of Spain's internal politics, and the Reconquista is simply an accepted fact of history.
The capitalization of the word might be a propagandistic act, but it might also just be an application of modern style, or just recognition that the concept requires a bit more dignity, or something.
This entire sub-thread stinks of... anti-Spanish propaganda, heh.
What was 'conquered back' was the Iberian Peninsula. Whether or not a particular state was there at the time doesn't matter, the land and people were conquered and reconquered.
Well.. the people doing the “reconquering” viewed themselves as [Roman] Christians first and foremost, that was the core of their cultural and political identity.
Since they considered that territories were part of the Roman-Christian Empire in the past from their perspective they were certainly taking it back.
Spain being or not being a nation at the time seems entirely irrelevant..
Reconquista is an anachronistic concept here, but so are nations in the modern sense. Instead of looking at the wars in Iberia in isolation, it's better to consider them in the context of the wider Europe.
Medieval Europeans saw Christendom as the legitimate successor of the Roman Empire. (Or at least the elites did.) Many wars were fought to expand the borders of Christendom. Some of them against pagans, and some to take back land that used to be Christian. The wars that are often called the Reconquista were part of the latter.
So, in a sense, it was not about taking Spanish land back for Spain, but about taking Roman land back for Rome.
The Iberic peninsula had been conquered by Arab Muslims, who moved into France before being pushed back.
The term "Reconquista" is perfectly suited to describe what hapoened: European Christians re-conquered that land. Especially in term of Christendom this was a re-conquest.
Named by whom? The term did not even show up until the 20th century, so it wasn't the christians who named it like that. Pure Spanish myth. Oh, and the battle that started it all? Never even existed. Pure historical revisionism for nationalistic purposes with no more reality that horned vikings.
There are many things wrong with the term. A "reconquest" also makes it sound like the area was under siege by the Arabs or something. But the fact of the matter is that the peninsula, except for perhaps the Basque country, has been a melting pot of cultures under the succession of rules by larger empires. It's not like those christians, or the "Spanish", held control at some point, lost it, and then got it back; they never had it in the first place or even existed as a nation. So it's just a ridiculous term altogether.
The point about the naming isn't very interesting. The concept existed since medieval times. In the 18th century it got termed reconquista. Later, in the 19th century it got capitalized. None of that is 20th century Francoist propaganda even if Franco did also push the concept.
It wasn't all sunshine and roses back then. When the Reconquista was completed, one of the first thing Spain did was expel all the Jews. Jews could in theory convert to Christianity instead, but then they became the prime targets of the Spanish Inquisition.
We should be careful not mindlessly apply our modern ideas of Islam and Christianity to a completely different time period.
In their view they did, the existence of the “Spanish nation” is tangential. From their perspective they were culturally/politically Christians and whatever exact language they happened to speak was secondary to that. So in that it was obviously a “reconquest” from the perspective of the Christians living in Iberia.
> So it's just a ridiculous term altogether.
Hardly more ridiculous than claiming that the fact that some common Spanish national identity didn’t exist back in the 1100s is somehow relevant.
The Arabians were a conquering people in the peninsula. In that sense, kicking them out is absolutely a reconquista, and this sort of absolute denial of that is just flat out historical revisionism.
