I’m interested in the history of Spain after the Roman empire fell up to Ferdinand and Isabella. Who came there in the last days of the Roman Empire, and what were the major population movements there? Also, I am under the impression that Ferdinand and Isabella “reconquered” Spain from the Muslims, which implies that there was the Spanish culture there before the Muslims. Is this an accurate assumption?
Sorry if this quesion is unclear, this is my first post.
This isn’t another homework post, I hope?
Spain, like most of the Western Roman Empire, was overrun by Germanic tribes, most prominently the Vandals ( in passing, on way to North Africa within twenty years ) and with them the Suevi ( mostly in the far west, eventually incorporated into the Visigothic state ) and Alans ( Iranian, rather than Germanic ). Then the Visigoths who established a kingdom initially centered in Toulouse straddling southern/western France and eastern Spain ( 419-507 ), then, after defeat at the hands of the Franks, shifted to all of Iberia and the southern coastal strip of France ( 507-711 ). Then came the Muslim conquest.
Was there a pre-Muslim “Spanish” culture? Sure, of a sort. In fact Visigothic Spain was rather more of a unitary entity than neighboring Germanic states of the time, like Anglo-Saxon England or Merovingian France. However it was a somewhat uncertain edifice as the rapid conquest of the penninsula shows. It would also be a mistake to overestimate 8th century notions of national identity. Even the Kingdom of Asturias that rose out of revolt in the north didn’t seem to play all that heavily on “Spanish identity” or even entirely on sectarian anti-Muslim resistance ( actually records are scarce on the early history of that state ) - there seems to be no indications that they were out to recreate a Spanish kingdom and some local Christians, including at least one Bishop, are listed as being in opposition to it.
Spain was occupied by the Visigoths until the Muslim invasion in 711. For the next 8 centuries the Christian slowly reconquered the Peninsula from the Muslims until they completed the reconquest in 1492 with the conquest of Granada.
There is no way to recount several centuries of the history of a country in a short post. Better get yourself a book at the library.
Like an encyclopedia, for starters.
There was a Christian society even in the muslim kingdoms of Spain. Christians and Jews were taxed, since they did not follow Shari’a and they lived relatively without much bother from their overlords. This is the situation where Mozarabic was born, which has a lot of borrowed arabic words and phrases, and also is similar to an archaic form of Spanish. The best examples we have of the language are Kharjahs, poems about love and loss:
1 Vayse meu corachón de mib
2 ¿Ya Rab, sise me tornarad?
3 ¡Tan mal meu doler li-l-habib
4 enfermo yed ¿cuánd sanarad?
1 My heart’s love is gone from me.
2 Dear Lord, will he perhaps return?
3 My yearning for the beloved is so great!
4 He (o: it, sc. my heart) is ill, when will he (it) recover?
Written by Yehuda Halevi
The remaining vestige of Mozarabic Christianity left is the Mozarabic rite, which is done at the Cathedral in Toledo in Spain.
My bad, the Christians under Arab rule paid a tax that exempted them from serving in the Muslim army, not for not practicing shari’a. Also, they followed visigothic canon law.
"Cut off from the Islamic world by the Straight of Girbraltar and, from 740 onward, by independent city-states in Morocco and Algeria, Umayyad Spain developed a distinictive Islamic culture blending Roman, Germanic, and Jewish traditions with those of the Arabs and Berbers. Historians disagree on how rapidly and completely the Spanish population converted to Islam. If we assume that the process was similar to that in the eastern regions, it seems likely that the most rapid surge in Islamization occurred in the mid-tenth century.
"Just as in the east, governing cities were that the core of the Islamic presence in al-Andalus, as the mUslims called the regions they ruled in Spain. Cordoboa, Seville, Toledo, and other cities grew substantially, becoming much larger and richer than comparable cities in neighboring France. Converts to Islam and their descendants, unconverted Arabic-speaking Christians, and Jews joined with the comparatively few descendants of the Arab invaders to create new architectural and literary styles. In the countryside, where the Berbers preferred to settle, a fusion of preexisting agricultural technologies with new crops, notably citrus fruits, and irrigration techniques from the east gave Spain the most diverse and sophisticated agricultural economy in Europe.
"The rulers of al-Andalus did not take the title caliph until 929, when Abd al-Rahman III (r.912-961) did so in Cordoba, in response to a similar declaration by the newly established Fatimid ruler in Tunisia. Toward the end of the tenth century, this caliphate encountered challenges from breakaway movements that eventually splintered al-Andalus into a number of small states. But political decay did not stand in the way of cultural growth. Some of the greatest writers and thinkers in Jewish history worked in Muslim Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, sometimes writing in Arabic, sometimes in Hebrew. At the same time, Islamic thought in Spain was attaining its loftiest peaks in Ibn Ham’s treatises on love and other subjects, the philosophical writings of Ibn Rshud (known in Latin as Averroës) and Ibn Tufayl, and the mustic speculations of Ibn al-Arabi.
“The Samanids, Fatimids, and Spanish Umayyads are representative of the political diversity and awakening of local awareness that characterized the period of Abbasid decline. Yet drawing and redrawing political boundaries did not result in the rigid division of the Islamic world into kingdoms, as was then occurring in Europe. Religious and cultural developments, particularly the rise in cities throughout the Islamic world of a social group of religious scholars known as the ulama -Arabic for ‘people with (religious) knowledge’–worked against any permanent division of the Islamic umma.”
Richward W. Bulliet, Pamela Kyle Crossley, Daniel R. Headrick, Steven W. Hirsch, Lyman L. Johnson, David Northrup. The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global history. Jean L. Woy. Second. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.
New Advent.org’s article on El Cid Campeador.
Check out that thread in IMHO about the most important war in the history of the world. The Battle of Tours is mentioned, where Christiandom somehow managed to stop the super-rapid spread of Islam into Europe.
The “Reconquista” was when Christian Spain reconquered Spain from the Muslims. The Moors were finally driven out in 1492- the same year Columbus discovered America. But does anyone think of that? Nooooo.
As I just noted in that thread Tours/Poitiers status as the battle that halted the Muslim advance is an illusion. It had already ground to a halt.
Well, they certainly should, insomuch as the two are closely interlinked. It was the fall of Granada that persuaded the Spanish crown to finally free up the funds to finance the trip.
However it is worth noting that the expulsion of the Moors as a demographic group, rather than a political presense, came a little later ( most massively and definitively in the early 17th century )