The Age of Chivalry by Hywel Williams

Author:Hywel Williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781623652760
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-12-15T05:00:00+00:00

RIGHT The Great Mosque of Córdoba, now a Christian cathedral, was built over a period of 200 years and completed by 987.

Attachment to Arianism gave a group identity to Spain’s Visigothic rulers and set them apart from their Catholic subjects. But the conversion of King Reccared to Catholicism in 587, followed swiftly by that of Spain’s Visigothic nobility, gave rise to an intense brand of religious nationalism in the peninsula. Reccared’s father, Leovigild, had already united most of the peninsula under his rule between 567 and 586, and his approval of mixed marriages was leading to the Romanization of the Visigoths. By c.600, therefore, Spain’s national identity had acquired some distinctive roots and was strongly allied to the cause of the Church. One of the casualties of this Hispano-Gothic fusion was the country’s large Jewish population, and the intolerance to which they were subjected led many Jews to welcome the arrival of an army of Muslim invaders in 711. Some 7000 soldiers had left Tangier under the command of the city’s Arab governor, Taiq ibn Ziyad, consisting mostly of non-Arab Berber tribesmen along with a number of Syrians and Yemenis. The Visigothic nobility had only recently elected Roderick—in all probability Baetica’s military governor—to the throne, and dissidents who supported the claims of the previous king’s two sons joined the ranks of defectors. Toledo and Córdoba fell to Islam, and the arrival in the following year of another invasion force, again mostly Berber, meant that by 714 Islam was in effective control over most of Spain, a country that became collectively known as al-Andalus.

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