The Christian Reconquest of Spain

One day, after a battle seven days’ long, saw the ruin of Spain—that fatal day in July, AD 711, when Roderick, the last of the Goths, lost his army, his kingdom, and his life, on the banks of the Guadalete. Nearly eight hundred years were spent by the Christians in undoing that day’s work and in winning back their country from the Moslem. The story of the conquest has been told, from the Moorish side, in a former volume of this series. It remains for me to tell of the fortunes of the conquered—of the long and slow process by which Spain was recovered to Christendom, and of the rise of the nation into its full stature under Ferdinand and Isabella. 

The fall of Granada, in AD 1492, which brought the long controversy between Christian and Moor to an end, seems a fitting conclusion to this story of the Recovery of Spain. By that date the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon had been happily accomplished. The tide of African invasion had been stemmed; and the Peninsula was once more Christian, from Gibraltar to Biscay, from Lisbon to Valencia. The whole country called Spain, with some trifling exceptions on the northern border, had become an independent nation, co-extensive with the territory so named, under one government and one dominion. For the first time in history, the people, though various in origin, and divided by old jealousies and rivalries, differing in laws and institutions, and not yet welded into harmony, were united in a common polity, and were able to take their place as one Power in the system of Christendom. The redeeming of the soil from the Moslem; the reconquest of the land, step by step, by the Christians from the Moorish invaders; the long and slow process, often suspended, but never wholly lost sight of, by which the Spaniards recovered their hold of the country, and formed themselves into one nation—this is the story which I propose to tell.