Occurring in about 720, the Battle of Covadonga was a clash between Muslim warriors and a much smaller Christians from Asturias in northernSpain, who were led by their king, Pelayo. It guaranteed the survival of a Christian foothold in Iberia and is sometimes described as the start of the Reconquista—the reconquest of Spain from its Umayyad rulers, who had invaded the peninsula only nine years earlier.
When Don Pelayo was elected king of Asturias around 718, he drew upon the climate of ill feeling among his subjects toward the Moorish rulers of the Muslim kingdom known as Al-Andalus, which occupied much of the Iberian Peninsula, and instigated a rebellion, refusing to pay tribute. Rather than a single engagement, Covadonga can be seen as the final act in a series of rebellions starting in 718 and lasting for two to three years. During this time Pelayo had successfully repulsed attempts by the Moors to reassert control in Asturias.
In 720, a large force estimated at some 20,000 Moorish fighters was sent to Asturias to deal with the problem. After a series of minor defeats, Pelayo was forced to retreat into the mountains. Here he formed a defensive position in a gorge flanked by steep sides, taking shelter in a large cave with part of his force and deploying other detachments on either side of the gorge. Pelayo’s force was probably fewer than 500 men, but the terrain meant that a large frontal attack was impossible. On arrival, Al-Qama, the Moorish leader, sent surrender terms to Pelayo, who refused to accept them.
Al-Qama ordered his attack and sent his elite troops into the gorge. The Asturians fired arrows from both sides of the gorge, inflicting terrible casualties on the Moors, who were then pushed back by a sudden counterattack led by Pelayo. The Moors’ return fire was ineffective, and the arrows they shot upward toward their foe instead fell back and landed on their own men. As the panicked Moors retreated, they were attacked by the Asturians, whose numbers were suddenly swelled by villagers who saw that victory might be possible. Some of the surviving Moors died in an avalanche while trying to flee across the surrounding mountains, while others drowned in the fast-flowing Deva River. Al-Qama himself was killed in the fighting. Afer the battle, Pelayo established his capital at nearby Cangas de Onís, ruling there until his death in 737.
Victory at Covadonga and the subsequent rout of the retreating Moors secured the independence of Asturias. This ensured that one small part of Iberia remained under Christian control.
Losses: Unknown.
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The Reconquista was a centuries-long series of battles by Christian states to expel the Muslims (Moors), who from the 8th century ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula. Visigoths had ruled Spain for two centuries before they were overrun by the Umayyad empire.
Who was involved in the Reconquista?
Because it lasted so long, many combatants were involved in the Reconquista. An Umayyad emirate was established in Spain in the 8th century. The rulers of Asturias were the first to try to wrest Spain from the Moors. Charlemagne captured Barcelona. The Christian kingdoms of Castile and León also fought, as did the kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre. Almoravids and Almohads successively followed the Umayyads and continued the war.
The Reconquista began not as a religious crusade but rather as a matter of political expansion. By the 11th century the pope supported some of the campaigns against the Moors. The Hospitaller and Templar knights fought in Spain, and Spanish military orders were also formed. The Second Crusade had a branch focused on Iberia. However, the Reconquista was not explicitly religious until after the power of the Muslims in Spain had been broken.
Carolingian empireThe Carolingian empire and (inset) divisions after the Treaty of Verdun, 843.
Though the beginning of the Reconquista is traditionally dated to about 718, when the Christian Asturians opposed the Moors at the Battle of Covadonga, the impulse toward reconquest was expressed only sporadically through the first three centuries of Muslim hegemony. After a failed invasion of Muslim Spain in 778, in 801 Charlemagne captured Barcelona and eventually established Frankish control over the Spanish March, the region between the Pyrenees and the Ebro River. Asturian kings, presenting themselves as the heirs to the Visigothic monarchy that had ruled Spain prior to the Muslim conquest, capitalized on dissension within the Moorish ranks and expanded their holdings in the late 9th century. The Reconquest might have taken root at that earlier date had it not been for a resurgence in the power of the Córdobancaliphate and a break between the Christian kingdoms of Castile and León in the 10th century.
Alfonso VIIIAlfonso VIII, sculpture in the Sabatini Gardens, Madrid.
In the meantime, the Christian and Islamic peoples of Spain had become tightly associated with each other culturally and economically, to the extent that consequences of the crusading spirit that manifested in the 11th century were often scarcely less harmful to the Christian conquerors than to the conquered Moors. At that time, Moorish unity broke down, and the Christian lands of northern Spain were briefly united under Sancho III Garcés (Sancho the Great), who greatly expanded the holdings of Navarre. Sancho created the kingdom of Aragon in 1035, and his successors there pursued the Christian reclamation of the peninsula in earnest. Alfonso I of Aragon captured the former Moorish capital of Zaragoza in 1118. In 1179 Alfonso II of Aragon and Alfonso VIII of Castile concluded the Pact of Cazorla, an agreement whereby the task of reconquering the Moorish kingdom of Valencia was reserved to the Aragonese crown. In exchange Aragon relinquished all claims to other Moorish-held territory in the peninsula.
After suffering a crushing defeat at the Battle of Alarcos (July 18, 1195) at the hands of the Almohad caliph Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb al-Manṣūr, Alfonso VIII appealed to other Christian leaders, and in 1212 he won the support of Pope Innocent III, who declared a Crusade against the Almohads. Supported by the armies of Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal, Castilian forces routed the Almohad emir of Morocco, Muḥammad al-Nāṣir, at Las Navas de Tolosa (July 16, 1212) and so removed the last serious Islamic threat to Christian hegemony in Spain. The way was now open to the conquest of Andalusia.
Ferdinand IIIFerdinand III, sculpture in the Sabatini Gardens, Madrid.
The last king of León, Alfonso IX, was succeeded upon his death in 1230 by his son, Ferdinand III, who was already king of Castile. Castile and León were thus reunited, and the new sovereign at once embarked on a great series of campaigns to subdue Andalusia. Those began with the capture of Córdoba (1236) and culminated in the surrender of Sevilla (1248). Influenced by the crusading zeal instilled into the Spanish church by the Cluniac and Cistercian orders, Ferdinand at first expelled the Moorish inhabitants of the Andalusian cities en masse but was later forced to modify his policy by the collapse of the Andalusian economy that inevitably ensued. He also assented, chiefly for financial reasons, to the establishment of the new Moorish kingdom of Granada under Castilian suzerainty. The Granadine Moors were forced to pay to Castile a sizable annual tribute, but Moorish culture experienced something of a rebirth in Christian Spain. In Toledo, a Castilian city already famous throughout Europe as a crossroads of Christian, Arab, and Jewish thought, Alfonso X established the Escuela de Traductores (School of Translators), an institution that made Arabic works available to the Christian West.
During the same period, James I of Aragon completed Aragon’s part in the Reconquest. After occupying the Balearics (1235), he captured Valencia (1238). Unlike Ferdinand, James carefully worked to preserve the agricultural economy of the Moors and so established the final peninsular frontiers of Aragon. In Portugal, Afonso III captured Faro (1249), the last Moorish stronghold in the Algarve. By the end of the 13th century, the Reconquest was, for all practical purposes, brought to an end. The last significant Muslim incursion into Christian Iberia culminated with the Battle of Río Salado (October 30, 1340), where Portuguese and Castilian forces administered a crushing defeat to the armies of MarīnidsultanAbū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī.
Spanish InquisitionSpanish Jews pleading before King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, while grand inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada argues for their expulsion from Spain, in a painting by Solomon A. Hart.
The kingdoms of Aragon, Castile, and Portugal spent the next century consolidating their holdings, until the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile in 1469 united the Spanish crown. The Catholic Monarchs, as Ferdinand and Isabella came to be known, completed the conquest of Granada in 1492. Many historians believe that the crusading spirit of the Reconquista was preserved in the subsequent Spanish emphasis on religious uniformity, evidenced by the strong influence of the Inquisition and the expulsion of people of Moorish and Jewish descent.
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