38 CHAPTER 2 THE HISPANIC BACKGROUND
had created unimaginable confl icts that exhausted
scarce resources and slowed its imperial advance
after the tenth century. Second, the Muslim world
was torn by fi erce political and religious feuds over
control of the empire. Some Muslims scorned the
Umayyads as blasphemers for their reluctance to
follow the “messengers of God” and their desire to
concentrate power in the hands of kings. On the
Iberian Peninsula, these internal differences were
complicated by confl icts between the Umayyads
and Almoravids, North African Berbers who were
recent converts to Islam and more fanatically de-
vout than their teachers. By the mid-eleventh
century, the caliphate of Córdoba had broken into
a large number of taifas (states) that constantly
warred with one another. These discords enabled
the petty Christian kingdoms that had arisen in
the north to survive, grow strong, and eventually
launch a general advance against the Muslims. In
the west, the kingdom of Portugal, having achieved
independence from Castile by the mid-twelfth cen-
tury, attained its historic boundaries two centuries
later. In the center, the joint realm of León and Cas-
tile pressed its advance, and to the east, the king-
dom of Aragón steadily expanded at the expense of
the disunited Muslim states.
The Reconquest began as a struggle of Chris-
tian kings and nobles to regain their lost lands and
serfs; only later did it assume the character of a
religious crusade. Early in the ninth century, the
tomb of St. James, supposedly found in the penin-
sula’s northwestern lands, became the center of
the famous pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela
and gave the Christian kingdoms a warrior patron
saint who fi gured prominently in the Reconquest
and the conquest of the New World. But the career
of the famous Cid (Ruy Díaz de Vivar), to whom his
Muslim soldiers gave the title “Lord,” illustrates
the absence of religious fanaticism in the fi rst stage
of the struggle. True to the ideals of his time, the
Cid placed feudal above religious loyalties and,
as a vassal of the Muslim kings of Saragossa and
Valencia, fought Muslim and Christian foes alike.
When he captured Valencia for himself in 1094,
he allowed the Muslims to worship freely and re-
tain their property, requiring only the payment of
tributes authorized by the Koran.
The Umayyads vainly sought to check the
Christian advance by calling on the newly con-
verted, fanatically religious Almoravids of North
Africa to come to their aid. The Christian victory
at Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) in Andalusia over
a large Almoravid army marked a turning point in
the Reconquest. Ferdinand III of Castile captured
Córdoba, the jewel of Muslim Iberia, in 1236, and
the surrender of Seville in 1248 gave him control of
the mouth of the Guadalquivir River and commu-
nication with the sea. By the time of Ferdinand’s
death in 1252, the Muslim territory had been
reduced to the small kingdom of Granada. The
strength of its position, protected by steep moun-
tains and impassable gorges, and the divisions that
arose within the Christian camp gave Granada two
and a half more centuries of independent life.CASTILE
Although the twentieth-century Spanish fascists
under Francisco Franco sought to legitimize their
contemporaneous quest for power by identifying
with the historic achievements of their fi fteenth-
century ancestors, no unifi ed nation-state called
Spain existed on the Iberian Peninsula until rela-
tively recently. Instead, it consisted of a variety of
more or less independent Christian kingdoms that
engaged in a brutal contest among themselves and
with their Muslim occupiers, fi rst to dominate the
Mediterranean world and then to control the world
beyond the seas. Castile, the largest and most pow-
erful of these kingdoms, played a leading role in the
Reconquest. The great movement left an endur-
ing stamp on the Castilian character. Centuries of
struggle against the Muslim occupation made war
almost a Castilian way of life and created a large
class of warrior-nobles, who regarded manual la-
bor with contempt. In the Castilian scale of values,
the military virtues of courage, endurance, and
honor were paramount, and both nobles and com-
moners accepted these values. The lure of plunder,
land, and other rewards drew many peasants and
artisans into the armies of the Reconquest and
diffused militarist and aristocratic ideals through-
out Castilian society. To these ideals the crusad-
ing spirit of the Reconquest, especially in its later