Talk:Reconquista

Maybe add an Infobox?

Perhaps it would be good to add a Template:Infobox military conflict? To get a overview over the belligerents, results and similar. GusGusBrus (talk) 16:18, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

The current consensus leans against it. The topic is a contested concept in historiography, althought lately the lead section has been doing a poor job at accounting for that feature. Go figure why an infobox may be a bad idea.--Asqueladd (talk) 17:56, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

The Reconquista was not a war, it was a period. It would be very confusing and difficult to do since there were many times where Christians were allied with Muslims and there were many wars between Christians or Muslims, see Reconquista#Infighting for more info. RobertJohnson35 (talk) 18:44, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Regarding the ongoing edit war over use of the word "successful" applied to Christian armies fighting in the so-called "Reconquista"

I've said this before, more than once, but the word Reconquista has only been used since the beginning of the 19th century, and since the beginning of the 21st century historians have generally avoided its use, except with "scare quotes".

Teresa Tinsley expresses this very well in her essay, "Reframing 'Reconquista'. Hernando de Baeza's Take on the Conquest of Granada":

The idea of a medieval history of Iberia as the progressive 'reconquering' of land unjustly occupied by Islamic invaders has been a surprisingly tenacious paradigm, although it is only since the beginning of the nineteenth century that the word 'Reconquista' began to be used and only since the twenty-first century that historians, acknowledging its inherent bias, have tended to avoid the term except in inverted commas. It is generally accepted that the ideas we have come to call 'Reconquista' had their roots in early Asturian and Leonese chronicles which were taken up and developed by successive Castilian monarchs and their supporters. Recent discussion of the concept has taken one of two main directions. On the one hand, medievalists have discussed the extent to which the idea of 'Reconquista' was 'real' at the time, in the sense of a shared and constant ideology driving forward military action against al-Andalus. On a different but related tack, scholars have critiqued the development and (mis)use of the term in nationalist historiography and discussed the distortions it has engendered.

And as the abstract of her chapter in A Plural Peninsula: Studies in Honour of Professor Simon Barton says:

The Catholic Monarchs proclaimed the 1492 conquest of Granada as the culmination of an 800-year struggle against the Muslims. Yet, the conquest of Muslim territory was not always predominant in Christian strategic thinking, as relations between the faith groups were not consistently hostile and political alliances were commonplace. The narrative of the 'fall and redemption' of Spain, with its roots in ideologically-driven 'Gothic' histories designed to justify Castilian supremacy in a divine mission to combat Islam, became embedded in historiography from the mid-16th century onwards, and was later re-utilised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by national-Catholic historians. It can therefore appear that the idea of an exclusive Christianity triumphing against Islam and repressing Jewish elements in its heritage was uncontested and inevitable.

The idea that the so-called Reconquista was a continuous campaign of Christian armies opposed to Muslim armies over the course of eight centuries, culminating in a Christian "victory" betrays an ignorance of the actual history, in which there were many and various alliances between Christians and Muslims fighting against Christian or Muslim forces. Do editors really not know that El Cid, for example, fought with both Christian and Muslim armies? Carlstak (talk) 19:24, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

I don't see how that is relevant to this dispute. The Reconquista, when refering to the series of military campaigns of the Christian kingdoms against the Muslims Powers, as done in the lead sentence, was successful. The Christian Kingdoms were victorious, the Muslims Powers got beaten and conquered, the Iberian Peninsula became Christian again. That is simply a fact. So why shouldn't this be mentioned in the lead sentence?

How is the fact that historians use the term Reconquista more carefully nowadays, that it wasn't a single continuous campaign or that there were at times Christian and Muslim fighters on both sides relevant to this? Nobody is denying that. Bellerophon451 (talk) 20:23, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Calling the many campaigns "successful", some of which were not, implies that there was an organized, sustained, and general campaign by Christians to "reconquer" the peninsula when such a concept didn't even exist. This narrative is a myth—a crude and simplistic ideology seized on by National Catholic propagandists during Franco's reign of terror and now by Islamophobes who stand against a multicultural society and call for a "new Reconquista" to drive the Muslim "occupiers" from Iberia. Carlstak (talk) 22:15, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Part of the spat is the use of "...was/were a series of military campaigns..." IMO the usual word to use in such situations is the singular 'was' (a/one series), but in this case there were many series so the plural 'were' should be used. The singular and plural of 'series' is spelt the same, which adds potential confusion. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 22:25, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

I get your point, but my point is that there was no actual Reconquista, the existence of which has been a subject of dispute here for years. It doesn't mean that we can't have an article about the antiquated concept. Maybe eventually historical laggards will catch up to modern historiography. Carlstak (talk) 22:33, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

Carlstak is correct. إيان (talk) 22:37, 9 September 2024 (UTC)

I am not familiar with all the detail, or the history of this article, which might be an advantage. Was there anything unique to this lengthy period of time that allows us to treat it as one subject? If there is, how else could it be described? At first sight it does look as though there was a steady decline in the Moorish population, whther that was planned or not. Also, there are other poorly named events in history that are used, even if the name gives a wrong impression of what actually happened. Why can't we just carry on using the term reconquista for this period even though it might give a wrong impression? Roger 8 Roger (talk) 05:29, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

We have this article about the antiquated concept called "Reconquista", and we should have it, but it should reflect current scholarly consensus. In previous discussions (now archived) on this talk page, there were howls of protest when إيان rewrote the lede of the article, describing "Reconquista" as an historiographical construction, notwithstanding the fact that the terminology accurately reflects that consensus. Some editors seem to think that this is some sort of heretical neologism, ignoring or unaware that we have works like Martín Ríos Saloma's La Reconquista. Una construcción historiográfica (siglos XVI–XIV) (2011).

Tinsley refers to:

...what we might call the hinge moment in the development of the ‘Reconquista’ imaginary—the conquest of Granada in 1492—the moment when, as an ideology, it stopped framing immediate lived reality and functioning as a call to arms, and was reduced to providing a particular identity-defining understanding of the past.

...the key elements of 'Reconquista' ideology—the 'othering' of Muslims as enemies of the faith, concepts of recovery and redemption, and the special role of the monarchs in completing a divinely-ordained mission...

As John Tolan of Université de Nantes says: "'Reconquista' like 'feudalism', will no doubt continue to spark debate, indeed more so, since 'feudalism' is of interest primarily to academic medievalists and economic historians, while the reconquista is still seen by many Spaniards as a vital formative element of their culture."

It's not just Spanish traditionalists who hold that view, as the revision history of this page will show. I don't want to reiterate every single point that I've already made in prior discussion. If you want to have a better understanding of the debate here, look in Archive 2. Frankly, I think many of the former participants are bored with it, or have said their piece and moved on. Carlstak (talk) 15:59, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

What needs to happen is a split into an article about the medieval military history of Iberia (where the bulk of the current content of this article will go) and an article about the historiographical narrative of Reconquista. I might work on this in the future. إيان (talk) 16:15, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

An excellent idea. Carlstak (talk) 16:21, 10 September 2024 (UTC)