Reconquista
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The Reconquista was the almost eight centuries of warfare by which the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula took the peninsula back from Muslim rule, from the small principality of Asturias in 722 to the fall of Granada in 1492. It was not a continuous campaign but a succession of advances, truces, marriages and collapses: Alfonso III and Ramiro II won early victories, the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 broke the Almohad power, and James I of Aragon took Valencia and Majorca. Each advance was peopled with repartimientos, grants of land and Muslim tenants to the settlers who came south. The Christian kingdoms fought each other as often as they fought the Muslims, and the great orders of Santiago, Calatrava and Alcantara provided cavalry. Muslim states were not simply expelled: Granada survived as a tributary emirate for two and a half centuries, and after 1492 the Catholic monarchs turned on the Jews and then the converted Muslims of the new Spain. The war defined Spanish identity and left a landscape of castles, churches built over mosques and a mixed legal heritage. The name reconquista was coined later, but the war gave each generation its kings, saints and enemies.