Before the Reconquista: Frontier Relations in Medieval Iberia, 718–1031

The word “Reconquista” implies a claim by the inhabitants of the northern Iberian Peninsula to a past in which their ancestors had held dominion over the lands to the south, whose recapture would return the Peninsula to Christian control. The past to which this claim referred was the Visigothic kingdom that collapsed after defeat at Muslim hands in 711. As this view would have it, between then and the era in which conquests were made against the Muslim powers, following the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba from 1006 onwards, a spring of righteous resentment and military readiness was being wound in the north by unvarying enmity and conflict. A chronicle written in Oviedo in the early 880s has been held to illustrate this when it describes the Peninsula of its author’s day as held by Muslims whom the Christians fight day and night without being able to take it back. On the other side of the frontier, meanwhile, a historiographic tradition based largely on sources from Córdoba has preserved a picture of a Muslim state founded on enlightened principles of convivencia. For the Christian chronicler, the Muslim enemy was close by and easy to attack; for the Cordoban courtiers, however, the Christians were distant, known mainly by their embassies before the emir or caliph. Neither of these pictures can have been wholly true, and between them, conceptually and geographically, lies a space of many possibilities, some of which this chapter aims to explore.