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Explanation: In the 15th century AD, Christian Spain and Portugal finished the Reconquista which sought to expel Muslim polities from the Iberian peninsula and began to expand into the Americas.
In the same century, the Muslim Ottoman Empire finished off the Christian Byzantines, conquering the peninsula Constantinople/Istanbul was situated on, and made themselves into an empire on three continents (Asia, Africa, Europe).
Just a quick trade!
Thanks for posting!
It is becoming more and more common to challenge and revisit the term “reconquista”, as it is closely linked with nationalism, Islamophobia, and the Franco regime.
Wikipedia has a nice explanation of this in this article, under Legacy.
Never have heard of that connection until right now. It seems pretty straightforward: there was a Moorish Conquest of the Iberian peninsula starting in the 8th century, and the Reconquest starting right after and ending in the 15th century.
It’s very weird to me linking any of that with the fascism of mid 20th century.
Huh.
This reads to me like a soft invitation to avoid using the term. But I’m not seeing why you’d need to revisit or challenge the word “Reconquista”. Will it be updated to the “Bad Reconquista”? It was a conquest, which is not a generally nice word. If anything you’d want to challenge the feelings of the Reconquista as a positive event.
Unfortunately, dragging the US into the conversation, it’s as if USists were proud of the Indian Removal Act because it helped solidify the country’s hold of lands east of the Mississippi River. Sure, it lead to the formation of the country as we know it but it wasn’t a good event. Sure, the Reconquista was a historical event necessary to the formation of the nation we know as Spain but you shouldn’t be really proud of what occurred.
I think it isn’t so much invalidating the event itself but the name of the event. It was an expansion or a conquest.
I believe what historians mean is that the term was heavily promoted by the fascist regime as an ideological tool to show how unified the peninsula had been for centuries under the Christian faith… Which wasn’t true.
As far as I know and understand (not an historian!) before the conquest of the peninsula by the Muslim and the establishment of Al-Andalus, there was no unified… Anything. The mythos of “Christians getting back what was ours” was a powerful propaganda tool for fascism, so it is fascist rethoric at play more than anything – and (as much as I understood it from recent readings on the matter) politically and socially speaking, this term was not a thing before the 19th century.
From what I’m seeing, Christians ruler did control the peninsula but in the “loosely-aligned polity” sense that was the style of the time. Perhaps joined together by local Iberian culture under the Visigothic Kingdom, rather than Spanish “nationality”. But I don’t think that’s subverting or undercutting any truth to a rulership that cranked the “default” back to “Christianity” by re-conquering the Iberian peninsula from Berber Muslim ownership, like an angry dad with the thermostat. I do see how fascist would love to use the term to further other-ize people but I don’t like ceding anything to fascist especially not language.
I’m also not a historian despite what my access to Wikipedia might fool me into believing. I guess if the shift is just dropping “Re” from the term, then that’s reasonable. I just am sleep-deprived and leery of (not saying this is you) self-identified “scholars” who want to claim discourse space by misinterpreting the past under the guise of “recontextualization”. To be clear, I’m specifically not saying that is what you are or was your intent, but that sort of miscourse is insidious. I’m being more literal because I’m tired and won’t really double-check what I wrote to ensure my writing was well-crafted to properly impart “intention”.
First of all, thanks for the clarification at the end. I’ve been targeted and insulted so many times in the old site, I very rarely engage in conversation here unless it is overly… “sanitised.” So I appreciate your words, from a sleep-deprived person to another.
Now, I think we’re pretty much on the same page. I’m not denying that Christian kingdoms expanded south or that power shifted over time. It is more about the suitability of a term that suggests there was this originally unified Christian peninsula that everyone was just “taking back,” but that doesn’t really match how messy and complicated things actually were back in the medieval days.
That whole framing was created much later, and fascists jumping on it doesn’t give it extra points on my and many historians books – but I don’t think it is about policing language, and more about being fair to history.
*conditions apply
Muslims: just pay the jizya tax and it will all be ok
Christians: TAXES!?!?1?!1
The ottomans did some Bayezid things for sure.
Yes, no slavery, no forced conversions, no children abductions, no massacres.
People of the Balkans were crazy for hating the Ottoman empire.
Didn’t say it was a just religious empire, only that Jews and Christians were allowed, with a little asterisk for good measure.
People of the Balkans were crazy for hating the Ottoman empire.
Almost like people want sovereignty, be self-governing and all that jazz.
