Understanding the Spanish Reconquest: Key Insights

This is just a simplified guide. The questions are not central to the discussion in this class, but rather basic starting points. Prof. Jorge Majfud

1. What was the Reconquest about?
2. What was the most developed empire during those centuries?
3. Who persecuted the Jews and forced them to convert to another religion?
4. What was the period of convivencia, and how did it shape cultural and intellectual life in the Iberian Peninsula?
5. What happened to Jews and Muslims in Spain after 1492?
6. How did the Reconquest influence Spanish national identity and the justification of later colonial expansion?
7. What were the long-term consequences of religious intolerance for Spain and Europe?

The Reconquest of Spain

In this course, we will propose that the history (and present) of Latin America has been built, destroyed, and rebuilt around five major gravitational forces: (1) Indigenous peoples, (2) Iberian colonization, (3) African slavery, (4) modern imperial forces (most notably the United States), and (5) revolutionary resistance and progressive alternatives —from indegenous to Marxist traditions.

We will begin with the European factor, introducing it through the history of the Iberian Peninsula, since Spain’s political, religious, cultural, and social transformations directly shaped its later conquest of the Americas. However, it is impossible to understand the Hispanic factor without also considering Jewish and, even more critically, Arab and Islamic influences.

The following analysis is the professor’s own synthesis, and certain aspects of it remain contested by traditional or popular nationalist narratives.

A summary

Before 1492, the Iberian Peninsula contained different Christian kingdoms and was also shaped for centuries by Muslim rule. Al-Andalus included Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities. Under Muslim rule, Córdoba and other centers became important sites of scholarship, scientific development, translation, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, and literature. Arabic intellectual and scientific traditions influenced later European developments.

The Reconquest was a centuries-long process culminating in the Christian conquest of Granada in 1492. The term itself was applied retrospectively and reflects the perspective of the eventual victors.

Following the Christian victory, Ferdinand and Isabella established religious and social policies emphasizing Catholicism, Christian ancestry, and Castilian Spanish. Jews and Muslims were expelled or pressured to convert, and converted communities continued to face discrimination.

The period illustrates the relationship between religion, political power, identity, language, and the construction of historical narratives.

The course material emphasizes coexistence as well as conflict among Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities and examines how later national narratives represented that history.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims

Spain did not exist in 711. Modern Spain only began to coalesce structurally with the dynastic union of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 and the completion of the Reconquista in 1492. The Iberian Peninsula was largely Christian under Visigothic rule, although political unity behind the Christian faith was a relatively recent development. What we call “Christianity” today was not exactly the same as the Christianity of that time. Even the Gospels were not simply the only four texts that survived the first centuries of Christianity. Formal lists of the New Testament canon (the current four) were debated and solidified in later regional synods (such as the Council of Hippo in 393 AD and the Councils of Carthage in 397 and 419 AD) and listed by figures like Athanasius in 367 AD. All of those locations and figures were in North Africa: Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt.

Before 711, the relationship between Jews and Christians in the Iberian Peninsula degraded from centuries of relatively peaceful neighborly life under Roman rule into one of the most severe state-sponsored persecutions in early medieval Europe.

King Reccared’s conversion from Arianism to Catholicism in 589 tied the Visigothic monarchy directly to the Church, cementing Catholicism as the state religion by the seventh century. This new political alliance left Jewish communities increasingly vulnerable; successive royal decrees systematically targeted their property, religious freedom, and social autonomy. The hostility reached a dramatic peak at the 17th Council of Toledo in 694, where King Egica —citing foreign conspiracies— ordered Jews stripped of their possessions, reduced to slavery, and forced to surrender their children to Christian households. Far from being a harmonious mix of equal faiths, the Visigothic realm on the eve of the 711 invasion was a rigid, deeply fractured state defined by intense systemic repression.

From 711 on, under Islamic jurisprudence, Christians and Jews were classified as dhimmis or «protected people.» The Muslim rulers didn’t just wipe out Christianity and replace it with Islam. Muslims, Christians, and Jews continued living side by side, with many Christian families keeping their faith for generations. Under Islamic legal frameworks, Christians and Jews were designated as dhimmis—protected monotheistic minorities. They retained the right to worship and run their own local institutions, but they lacked full legal and political parity with Muslims and had to pay a distinct tax known as the jizya. Although within a top-down hierarchy rather than an equal native American society, Islamic rule provided genuine protection and religious autonomy for Jews nd Christians.

There were exceptions: in the mid-12th century, the arrival of the Almohad dynasty from North Africa brought strict religious enforcement, ultimately resulting in forced conversions and the exile of non-Muslims. However, for most of the eight centuries of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, there existed a convivencia (coexistence) —not as an ideal of modern equality, but as a complex framework combining cooperation, social hierarchy, and periodic friction.

Life for non-Muslims shifted dramatically depending on the era, location, local ruler, and shifting politics. Throughout much of the Umayyad era —especially during the tenth century— Córdoba blossomed into a dazzling, cosmopolitan hub where people of all three faiths mingled in royal courts, bustling markets, academic circles, medical practices, and the arts. Jewish communities in particular entered a remarkable cultural and intellectual renaissance during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Jewish poets, philosophers, doctors, statesmen, and merchants often rose to prominent positions, prompting scholars to call this era a Jewish Golden Age. Still, tolerance comes with an asterisk: non-Muslims could thrive, but their legal status remained subordinate. Córdoba during the Umayyad Caliphate (especially under Abd al-Rahman III and Al-Hakam II in the 10th century) became an intellectual and cultural hub where Jewish figures flourished as scholars, physicians, and statesmen.

Nor was al-Andalus an uninterrupted oasis of open-mindedness. As the region fractured politically and stricter North African dynasties like the Almohads took power in the twelfth century, pressure on minority populations spiked, occasionally boiling over into open persecution. By the same token, Christian territories weren’t universally hostile either; Christian kings frequently hired Muslim and Jewish scholars, advisors, and craftsmen. Medieval Iberia was ultimately a messy patchwork of peaceful coexistence (convivencia), social hierarchy, daily cooperation, intense rivalry, religious conversion, systemic discrimination, and sporadic violence —not very different from our contemporary world.

The crucial line to draw is between religious coexistence and religious equality. Medieval Islamic society respected Jews and Christians as fellow «People of the Book,» granting them a recognized place in the social order, albeit a step below Muslims for political privileges. Even so, this arrangement often afforded non-Muslims far greater stability and intellectual room to breathe than they endured under earlier Visigothic rule or later Christian monarchs. That contrast explains how Jewish culture managed to produce such extraordinary achievements in Muslim Iberia, while serving as a reminder not to romanticize al-Andalus as some kind of egalitarian paradise.

Some contributions of that period:

The medieval Islamic world—anchored by the intellectual nerve centers of Baghdad, Córdoba, Cairo, and Damascus—did not merely store knowledge; it expanded, interrogated, and re-invented it. To speak strictly of an «Arabic empire» is to fall into a linguistic trap that obscures a far richer reality. The so-called Islamic Golden Age (roughly from the 8th to the 13th centuries) was an organic, multilingual polyphony: a collective labor carried out in Arabic by Arab, Persian, Central Asian, Jewish, Christian, and Berber scholars.

What we call the foundations of modernity are, in truth, the echoes of this intellectual cross-pollination:

• Algebra (al-Jabr): In his Kitab al-Jabr, the Persian scholar al-Khwarizmi did not merely solve equations; he formulated a systematic methodology for mathematical abstraction. The very term algebra remains a linguistic monument to his work.
• Algorithms: The word itself is a Latinized corruption of al-Khwarizmi’s name. His operational logic laid the invisible foundations of modern computation.
• Numerical Mathematics: By adopting, refining, and propagating the Hindu-Arabic numeral system—most crucially the conceptual revolution of zero—scholars in the Islamic sphere transformed arithmetic into a fluid, universal language.
• Astronomy: Far beyond passive observation, astronomers mapped planetary movements, calculated the Earth’s dimensions with striking precision, built pioneering observatories, and refined instruments like the astrolabe.
• Medicine: Figures like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and al-Razi (Rhazes) moved medicine from dogma to empirical observation, synthesizing vast encyclopedias that governed European medical thought for centuries.
• Hospitals (Bimaristans): The institutionalization of care took shape in organized hospitals featuring specialized wards, pharmacies, clinical training, and systemic treatment—the direct ancestors of modern medical institutions.
• Surgery: Al-Zahrawi (Albucasis) transformed surgical practice through his illustrated encyclopedia, detailing procedures and inventing instruments that redefined operative medicine.
• Pharmacology: The systematic classification of botanical, mineral, and chemical compounds elevated drug preparation from folklore into an exact science.
• Optics: Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) revolutionized how we understand vision and light. His empirical method dismantled ancient Greek theories of sight, forging the experimental principles of modern physics.
• Philosophy: Far from passive copyists, thinkers like al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) engaged in a fierce, critical dialogue with Aristotle and Plato. Their commentaries, critiques, and original metaphysics became the intellectual engine that eventually shook Western medieval scholasticism.
• The Translation Movement: A colossal civilizational effort that translated Greek, Persian, and Indian treatises into Arabic—rescuing priceless works from oblivion while subjecting them to immediate critique and expansion.
• Education & Institutions: Houses of knowledge like Baghdad’s Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) institutionalized research, creating vast libraries and research centers where scholarship was treated as a vital civilizational project.
• Geography & Cartography: Geographers like al-Idrisi synthesized data across Europe, Asia, and Africa, drawing remarkably sophisticated maps that redrew humanity’s visual understanding of the globe.
• Navigation: The convergence of mathematical geography, stellar astronomy, and improved astrolabes enabled open-sea navigation across the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean long before European expansion.
• Engineering & Technology: From advanced hydraulic pumps and water-raising machines to intricate clocks and automata, engineers like al-Jazari demonstrated a mastery of mechanical physics that anticipated modern automation.
• Agricultural Revolution: By expanding advanced irrigation techniques and acclimatizing crops like citrus, sugarcane, rice, and cotton across new regions, Islamic trade routes reorganized agrarian economies.
• Finance & Commerce: Long before modern capital markets, Islamic merchants developed sophisticated partnerships, lines of credit, bills of exchange, and early banking practices. The modern word check traces its origin directly to the Arabic sakk.
• Global Trade Networks: A vast commercial web connected Europe, Africa, Central Asia, India, and China, moving not only physical commodities but ideas, technologies, and philosophies.
• Architecture: Distinctive urban forms—domes, geometric infinity, vaults, courtyard gardens, and complex hydraulic features—emerged from a synthesis of Roman, Byzantine, and Persian traditions.
• Urbanism: Metropolises like Baghdad, Córdoba, Cairo, and Damascus operated as vibrant hubs of manufacturing, governance, sanitation, and intellectual density, standing in stark contrast to the fragmented landscapes of contemporary feudal Europe.
• Chemistry/Alchemy: Through rigorous techniques of distillation, crystallization, evaporation, and sublimation, scholars guided the transition from symbolic alchemy toward empirical chemistry.
• Language: Arabic functioned as the lingua franca of world science, philosophy, and international commerce, leaving an indelible mark on European vocabularies through hundreds of technical and everyday terms.
• Literature: Narrative and poetic traditions—from complex philosophical allegories to collections like One Thousand and One Nights—deeply influenced global narrative form and literary imagination.
• Paper Culture & Knowledge Circulation: The adoption and perfection of paper-making from China revolutionized manuscript production. Libraries and scriptoria proliferated, creating an unprecedented democratizing force for the written word.

The Historical Fallacy of the Straight Line

The core contribution of this era was not a single discovery, but the creation of an interconnected, polycentric network of human thought. Scholars writing in Arabic inherited the intellectual currents of Greece, Rome, Persia, India, and China, interrogated them through experiment and debate, and transmitted this amplified matrix into medieval Europe via points of contact like al-Andalus (today’s Spain) and Sicily (Italy).

This intellectual circulation provided the foundational bedrock for the European Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. However, history is rarely a one-way street or a clean handoff.

It is tempting to simplify this historical movement into a neat, pedagogical linear sequence:

Greece > Islamic World > Medieval Europe > Renaissance > Scientific Revolution > Modernity

Yet, this linear construct is an ideological illusion. Knowledge does not travel like a relay baton along a track; it flows like a dynamic, multi-directional network. Many of the breakthroughs framed as purely «Islamic» or later «European» were themselves the product of centuries of continuous, decentralized dialogue among Arab, Persian, Greek, Indian, Chinese, Jewish, Christian, and Berber minds. Modernity was not born in a single region; it was forged in the matrix of global exchange.

Sources

Boum, Aomar. «The Performance of Convivencia: Communities of Tolerance and the Reification of Toleration.» History Compass, vol. 10, no. 7, 2012, pp. 519–531. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2012.00342.x.

Fancy, Hussein, and Ana Echevarría Arsuaga, editors. Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia. Cornell UP, 2013.

Gerli, E. Michael, and Ryan D. Giles, editors. The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Medieval Iberia: Unity in Diversity. Routledge, 2021.

Linehan, Peter, et al., editors. Beyond the Reconquista: New Directions in the History of Medieval Iberia (711–1085). Brill, 2020.

Melammed, Renée Levine. «Jews and Conversas: The First Century of Crypto-Judaism.» Oxford Academic, 2002. https://academic.oup.com/book/10956/chapter-abstract/159241399.

Menocal, María Rosa. The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. Little, Brown, 2002.

Nirenberg, David. Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today. U of Chicago P, 2014.

O’Callaghan, Joseph F. Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. U of Pennsylvania P, 2003.

Pérez, Joseph. History of a Tragedy: The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. U of Illinois P, 2007.

Pick, Lucy K. Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain. U of Michigan P, 2004.

Ray, Jonathan. Jewish Life in Medieval Spain: A New History. U of Pennsylvania P, 2023.

Reglero de la Fuente, Carlos M. «Reappraising the Origins of Exclusion in Late Medieval Castile.» Histories, vol. 6, no. 2, 2026. https://doi.org/10.3390/histories6020033.

Ruiz, Teofilo F. Spain’s Centuries of Crisis: 1300–1474. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Wolf, Kenneth Baxter. «Convivencia in Medieval Spain: A Brief History of an Idea.» History Compass, vol. 7, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00119.x.


«Inquisitorial Careers.» The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Inquisition, Cambridge UP, 2025. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/C59F7BBC700AB34820661DA18C33EDB3/9781009456791c2_45-71.pdf/inquisitorial-careers.pdf.

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