Forum User: 'The Spanish Reconquista is a 19th Century Invention'

Why the Spanish Reconquista is a 19th Century Invention

Eight centuries of battles, a term that barely appears in historical sources, and a country that didn't yet exist. This is the mix underpinning a historiographical thesis defended by a participant in the debate: that the so-called Spanish Reconquista was never such a thing. The word itself only became widespread in the 19th century, when first the Bourbon conservatives and later Franco's dictatorship needed an epic national narrative. Before that, it is argued, no one spoke of a Reconquista.

The first problem is semantic. To reconquer implies recovering something that was once yours, and the Christian kingdoms advancing south were not aiming to rebuild the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo, but to expand their own domains. Castile, León, Aragon, and Portugal grew at the expense of their neighbors. And the horizon extended beyond the peninsula: for centuries, the ideal of conquering North Africa persisted, and Charles V even considered recapturing Constantinople for Christendom. The drive was religious and expansive, not restorative.

Reconquista, Conquest, or Recovery?

Here, disagreement is total. For some, the issue is purely nominal: the peninsula was Christian before the arrival of Sarracin and became so again afterward, meaning there was a religious restoration even if the kingdoms were new. There was Christianity, then Sarracin, and then Christianity again, summarizes this view. In this line of thought, Spain's identity was forged precisely in the struggle against Sarracin.

The objection is that these are two different things. Christianity becoming dominant again does not make the process a reconquest of kingdoms: the people who repopulated the conquered territory were not the same ones who had left eight centuries earlier. In many cases, they hadn't left at all. They had converted. Mozarabs and Muladis shared origins with those arriving from the north, but no longer shared language or culture.

The Problem of Calling it 'Spanish'

If 'reconquista' is debatable, calling it 'Spanish' borders on anachronism. During the eight centuries of the Christian advance, neither a Spanish nation nor a Spanish state existed—not at the beginning, middle, or end. Spain, as a modern political entity, emerged much later: for some analyses, after the War of Succession and with the Constitution of 1812.

This is where another dispute, running through the entire issue, begins. The historical concept of Spain, which encompassed the entire peninsula including Portugal, was always geographical, ethnic, and religious, but never a cultural unit. Hence, each kingdom tried to impose its laws, language, and norms on its neighbors. Castile won that contest, which is why some argue the country should be called Castile, not Spain.

The genetic map has been used as evidence of this lack of unity: the peninsula is structured along vertical north-south axes—Galaico-Portuguese, Astur-Leonese-Extremaduran, Cantabrian-Castilian, Aragonese-Valencian, Catalan-Balearic, and Basque-Navarrese—rather than forming a homogeneous block. Based on this, even Portuguese and Spaniards are described as distinct ethnicities in some sources.

But not everyone accepts this framework. Some recall that the term 'Hispania' was never abandoned in the Middle Ages, and that as early as the 7th century, Saint Isidore of Seville praised Hispania in his Etymologies. Christian monarchs even titled themselves imperator totius Hispaniae, emperor of all Spain. The Spanish nation, therefore, existed as an ethnic, cultural, and religious reality long before it became a modern political nation.

Visigoths, Astures, and the Battle for Heritage

The classic narrative presents the Christian kingdoms as heirs to the Gothic kingdom. The fine print complicates the picture. Don Pelayo was not Gothic, but Asturian, and some argued that the core of the resistance was not a Visigothic restoration but an Asturian conquest. By the 13th century, the process was already complete: Cadiz was taken in 1262, and Granada was reduced to a tributary state of Castile.

The relationship between Goths and Hispano-Romans was also not one of a people intent on maintaining purity. They arrived as federates in the service of Rome, not as invaders seeking segregation, and although the Breviary of Alaric II, from 506, still prohibited mixed marriages, the rule gradually relaxed until the code of Leovigild. Both groups eventually mixed: the Goths lost their language and Arian religion while dissolving into a much larger population.

Therein lies the knot. The Visigothic kingdom represented, according to one participant, barely a minority within an ocean of Hispano-Roman population; some estimate this minority at just 2%. Claiming its heritage centuries later was more an operation of dynastic legitimation than historical memory. It's no coincidence that the first counts of Barcelona, already under Frankish influence, were linked to the aristocracy of Gothic origin.

What Remains of the Narrative

The debate remains unresolved. Proponents of the strong thesis argue that the entire edifice is a 19th-century construct reused by Francoism, and that increasingly more historians opt to speak of Christian conquest. Critics retort that chronicles of the time did conceive of the advance as a recovery, and that the concept of Spain appears in texts much earlier than the Bourbons.

A third, more prosaic, view reduces it all to interests, pragmatism, and accidents: displaced Gothic counts, local elites seeking legitimacy, a religion turned into a banner, and dynasties needing to present themselves as heirs to the kingdom of Toledo. That the term is debatable does not turn the process into a fairy tale, but it does make it a battlefield for the narrative.

The discussion about the name is, fundamentally, a discussion about the present. About which Spain is taught, who frames the narrative, and to whom it is convenient. And there, in the realm of words, the analysis gets stuck: some trace the idea back to the 7th century, others push it back to the 19th, and neither side yields. Without agreement on when the term originated, there is no agreement on what it names.