The Age of Chivalry (35 page)

1139
Portugal attains independence from León-Castile.

1170
The Almohad dynasty has replaced the Amoravids as rulers of Islamic Spain.

1212
Aragon, León-Castile, Navarre and Portugal unite in battle to defeat the Almohads. Cordoba is retaken (1236).

1238
The emirate of Granada becomes Castile's vassal.

1248
Ferdinand III of Castile retakes Seville.

1492
Aragon-Castile conquer Granada.

As Carolingian power declined in the ninth century the
walis
became increasingly independent and hereditary rulers of their own fiefdoms, and they started to call themselves counts. It was this region of the march that would later become part of the principalities of Navarre, Catalonia and Aragon, and right from its Carolingian origins onward it was something of a socio-economic experiment. Settlers were attracted into this sparsely populated and strategically vital area by Charlemagne's land grants. These allowed extensive rights and immunities in return for a promise of military service when required. A military aristocracy, based in the myriad small castles that dotted the landscape, was thereby created. Its martial obligations, owed first to Charlemagne and subsequently transferred to the regional counts, anticipated later European developments in lordship and feudal duties.

Although these Christian border states regarded Islam as their foe, they were also keen to establish their independence from their northern neighbor, the kingdom of the Western Franks. To this end, each of them was quite content to play off their Muslim and Christian neighbors against each other. Navarre, centered on its capital Pamplona, was a hereditary kingdom by the 820s, and Barcelona's counts—the region's predominant magnates—were passing on their holdings to their sons from the 880s onward. Borrel II asserted the county of Barcelona's formal independence of France's Capetian rulers in 948, and all of these frontier states of the ninth and tenth centuries had remarkably stable boundaries. Nevertheless, they were mostly small entities, and the same mountains that protected them from invasion also limited their ability to break out and take on al-Andalus (the Arabic name for the part of the Iberian Peninsula held by the Muslims). The kingdom of the Asturias in Spain's northwest was, however, better placed for expansion, and during the long reign of Alfonso II (r. 791–842) his forces conquered Basque dissidents to the east as well as the province of Galicia to the west.

The discovery of St. James's supposed bones in the Galician town of Santiago de Compostela turned the Asturias into a major pilgrimage center from the early ninth century onward, and the shrine was an important element in the kingdom's leadership of the
reconquista
. Alfonso II's reliance on plunder in order to maintain his kingdom, based on the city of Oviedo, makes him a characteristic medieval ruler. The tribute that he exacted gave him the means to raid Muslim-held towns
such as Lisbon and Zamora. A more consistent pattern of continuous expansion to the south developed after his time, with the Asturian possessions in the regions of Castile and León being fortified and systematically repopulated.

Alfonso III (r. 866–910) made the city of León his new capital, and from this base he campaigned to establish control over the lands to the north of the Douro river. A major reorganization of his kingdom saw Galicia and Portugal becoming duchies, and Castile was founded as a county. The southward movement of peoples from Galicia and Asturias changed the region's center of gravity. From 924 onward it was known as the kingdom of León, and although the Cordoban caliphate was at the height of its power in the tenth century Leónese forces were still able to mount damaging attacks on both Toledo and Seville.

The Battle of Simancas (July 19, 939) was a great moment in the history of León, and the victory gained by the forces of Ramiro II (r. 931–51) over the caliph's army extended his kingdom's boundaries toward the Douro. Ramiro's army was, however, in a coalition with forces loyal to Fernan Gonzalez, the ruler of Castile who was now
using his position of power in order to assert his county's independence of León. Such maneuverings show that for most of the tenth century the Christian states of Spain had little conception of the
reconquista
as a strategic campaign which might coordinate their individual interests and efforts. By the end of the century, however, Navarre had made itself the Iberian region's greatest Christian power, and its ruler Sancho the Great (r. 1004–35) had shown little fastidiousness in pursuing that goal. A marriage alliance meant he could annex Castile, a powerful army helped him to conquer the two adjacent Christian marcher states of Sobrarbe and Ribagorza, victory in war against King Bermudo III turned León into Sancho's protectorate and Barcelona's count came to pay homage to Navarre.

The reign of Sancho III the Great covers the period of the Cordoban caliphate's disintegration into a number of small principalities termed
taifas
in the generation following the death of al-Mansur (
c
.938–1002), chief adviser to the caliph and effective ruler of al-Andalus. Al-Mansur was the greatest military strategist ever to confront the
reconquista
, and at the Battle of Cervera fought near Burgos on July 29, 1000 he inflicted a great defeat on Castile's army. But the succession disputes that arose after al-Mansur's death plunged the caliphate into civil war, and by the 1030s it had disappeared to be replaced by myriads of emirs running their own
taifas
.

Sancho divided his legacy among his sons, but he had shown how a tough hegemon could build up a Christian coalition, and his son Ferdinand, who had been allocated the county of Castile, shared a similar resolve. After waging a successful war on León, whose monarch was his own brother-in-law, Ferdinand succeeded him on the throne in 1037 and in the same year he turned Castile into a monarchy. The dynasty of Navarre had become the greatest power in Christian Spain, but it was the united realm of León and Castile—along with its contiguous areas in Galicia and the Asturias—which was the real political center of Spanish Christianity. As king of León and of Castile, Ferdinand kept up the pressure on the Muslim-run
taifas
until his death in 1065, and the system of tributes known as
parias
was designed to weaken his Islamic subjects both financially and politically.

Ferdinand's son succeeded his father as Castile's King Sancho II, and then defeated his brother Alfonso in battle to become king of León in the months preceding his assassination in 1072. Alfonso had fled for safety to the
taifa
of Toledo (one of his Muslim client states), and Sancho's murder meant that he could now reunite León and Castile. The great event of Alfonso VI's reign (r. 1072–1109) was the conquest of Toledo in 1085, and the city's designation as an archbishopric made it the spiritual center of Spanish Christianity. Alfonso had
already proclaimed himself “emperor of all Hispania” in 1077, and the close links he established with the papacy and European monarchs opened his kingdom to external influences. The Roman liturgical rite was now adopted by the Spanish Church, and the
reconquista
started to attract non-Spanish crusaders including, especially, the French.

Although Arab-led, the Muslim conquest of Iberia had always relied on large numbers of Berbers from North Africa, both as fighters and as settlers. Confronted by the Christian advance, the rulers of al-Andalus decided to summon an additional force of Berber auxiliaries in 1086, and the warriors who crossed the Straits of Algeciras under the command of Yusuf ibn Tashfin ensured that Alfonso VI suffered a rare defeat in the Battle of Sagrajas (October 23, 1086). As well as being a Berber, Yusuf also belonged to the Almoravid dynasty, whose rule already extended over Morocco, Algeria and through the southern Sahara into Senegal. Fortified by a vividly fundamentalist Islamic faith, the Almoravids regarded al-Andalus as a Muslim society that had weakened and whose defeats were a form of divine retribution. When Yusuf returned in 1090, therefore, he came at the head of an army of conquest whose enemies were now the emirs of al-Andalus.

The qualified toleration extended to its Christian and Jewish subjects by the Córdoba caliphate started to be threatened in the early 11th century. However, the Almoravid regime was set on a course of outright persecution, and that policy gave a new solidarity to the government of Islamic Spain. By 1094 Yusuf had removed most of Spain's local Muslim princes from power and the
taifas
, with the exception of Zaragoza, were absorbed within a single Almoravid caliphate. The dynasty's rule contained the
reconquista
for some two decades, but it was coming under increasing pressure in its North African base from the Almohads, another dynasty of Islamic Berbers and whose fanaticism rivaled that of the Almoravids.

Zaragoza maintained its resistance to the Almoravids until 1110. Its emir played a major role in the Almoravids' loss of authority, because following the defeat he and his army became allied to Aragon. In 1118 the Aragonese force seized Zaragoza, and the city became the capital of a Christian kingdom that was in the vanguard of the
reconquista
. Toward the west the Almoravids' defeat at the Battle of Ourique (July 25, 1139) was another immensely significant event, since it enabled Prince Afonso Henriques to proclaim himself as Afonso I, Portugal's first king, and to declare his realm's independence of the kingdom of León and Castile.

A
BOVE
A 12th-century painting of Alfonso VI, king of León, Castile and Galicia, from the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela
.

The Almohads had replaced the Almoravids as emirs of Marrakesh in 1149, and in the years that followed they would also displace them in al-Andalus. In 1170 the Almohad capital was transferred to Seville, and although the regime lasted in al-Andalus for half a century its indifference to the arts and sciences made for a melancholy contrast with the sophistication of the Islamic Iberian past. The Almohad dynasty was nonetheless an effective warrior class and the victory gained by its Berber forces at the Battle of Alarcos (July 18, 1195) undermined the Castilian kingdom's self-confidence. That defeat, however, instilled in the Christian states a new conviction that unity was the key to success. At the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (July 16, 1212), fought near Jaen in modern Andalusia, the forces of Castile were joined by those of Navarre, Aragon, León and Portugal as well as by a French contingent. Together they inflicted the defeat on the Almohads that signified the end of the
reconquista
of the central Middle Ages.

It fell to Ferdinand III of Castile to consolidate the conquest by taking Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248, with Jerez and Cadiz falling soon after. The Almohads were forced to retreat to North Africa, though here, too, they suffered a gradual attrition of authority, and when the last of the dynastic line was murdered in 1269 he held only Marrakesh. In the 1230s, therefore, Spain's Islamic far south was a power vacuum, and it was the Nasrid dynasty that seized the moment of regional opportunity. In 1237 Mohammed ibn Nasr established his authority in Granada, which then became the capital of his kingdom, and in the following year he accepted his status as Castile's vassal emir.

The Alhambra Palace was built by the Nasrid dynasty, but its architectural glories were a nostalgic tribute to the past rather than a guide to contemporary reality: Granada was obliged to raise troops for Castile and suffered major territorial losses as a result of Castilian invasions. The self-confident and united realms of Aragon and Castile conquered the kingdom of Granada in 1492, and it was taken over by the Castilian administration. By the terms of the Alhambra Decree (March 31, 1492) issued by Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, all Spanish Jews had to either become Christians or leave the country. The Inquisition that the monarchs established in Spain in 1478 was already investigating the cases of various “new Christians.”
Conversos
were former Jews and
Moriscos
were ex-Muslims. Both groups were suspected of a merely opportunistic conversion to Christianity and of a maintaining a secretive observance of their ancestral faith.
Conversos
and
Moriscos
could also be defined as individuals whose ancestors had converted during the
reconquista
, and their cases could therefore involve investigation of events that had occurred at least two or three centuries previously. An obsession with the “purity” of Spain meant that the
reconquista
lived on as a set of attitudes long after the completion of Iberia's territorial re-conquest in the name of Christian faith.