Ill named?
Spain was unified province of Rome, and then its own country under the Visigoths for a total of 800 years. That's 800 years of unified governance. Spain had a common language (vulgate) and religion (various sects of christianity).
We have the pre-Islamic negotiations on issues of Faith. The Visigoths were Arians but slowly became Catholics. We have the history of countless councils.
Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take. And it's ridiculous to think it could have been - where did the people to fight the most powerful army of the day come from? Asturias is just not that big.
I think your other points are fine, thanks for adding.
> Spain wasn't, but for some savages, empty land for the muslim armies to take.
It was fairly a walk in the park for them; took only a decade to get the peninsula under control and venture into France, until they lost their first battle there. That, and the Basque country; nobody can conquer the Basque country, which is why they speak a non-romance language to this day, among other things.
That was an administrative region that existed only for slightly over a century. The caliphate of Cordoba existed for longer than that.
The very concert of fueros formalizes this starting 1000 years ago. Those fueros still constitute the basis of the Spanish Constitution today (i.e. autonomous regions).
That the Spanish central state never felt the need to genocide Spain's constituent tribes like Paris did in France should be considered a good thing! Most Euskera speakers are on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees!
EDIT: the Asturians, from whom the seed of the reconquista came from, are ethnic celts and play a local variation of bag pipes.
I think you're missing the point.
OP's point was that "Spain did not exist as a nation anytime prior to that." The truth of the matter is that it didn't, and to make matters worse even today Spain itself is comprised of regions with distinct national identities which reject the idea of being a part of the castilian-based nation.
This obscures the fact that there was ample religious, social, linguistic, and even legal (Liber Iudiciorum) continuity since Late Antiquity.
But we don't because additional precision is not always necessary and in a context of several sub-groups, you would seem to emphasise a difference between them (by referring to the sub-group name) rather than their common name (Christians).
It's just something that I notice a lot in anglo-saxon (see non-Catholics) contexts and almost never outside the anglosphere.
Mostly because it's a way to communicate such that the listener knows who you're talking about. Another example is calling Mormons 'Mormon' instead of Christian.
If you say 'Christian' people will think of what is likely in that geographic area the most common type of Christian, probably some form of protestant. If you say 'Catholic' the listener knows that you're talking about the group of people who follow the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. If you say 'Mormon', they'll also know who you mean.
It's also possible to subdivide the group referred to above as 'Christian' - you can use 'Baptist', 'Pentecostal', etc. Those are also names that aren't "Christian" for groups of Christians.
"Probably some kind protestant" surely, it would be Catholic as that's the largest denomination.
But my point is why you need to specify what kind of Christians are you talking about? Or why would you assume that you are talking about a subset of Christians only? Imagine talking about the weather in the western world in terms of city neighbourhoods. Sure, it helps knowing what specific area you are talking about but it seems oddly meticulous. I don't know if this is an anglo-saxon thing as I have seen Brits and North Americans talking in this way. But I haven't seen anyone from Germany, Italy or Spain talking in this way.
I suspect it might be a thing that people raised in non-Catholic countries say because in my experience, Catholics will see all Christians as Christians and not with some othering kind of word (see us-vs-them group dynamics in psychology). That othering emphasises the differences (often used by people that seek to distance themselves from them all despite the commonalities) while using the same word highlights the commonalities (often used by people that embraces them all despite the differences) I notice this non-Catholic pattern of us-vs-them othering in the context of Catalonia and Taiwan too so I suspect it might be an us-vs-them group dynamics thing.
I don’t know how common this belief is in the US but I personally have encountered a number of people that believe this.
The sale of indulgences was a charitable donation done to mitigate the penalties of Purgatory.
Abuses were committed, but the telling of the protestants is quite fantastic. It was not, for example, a get-of-Hell sale
You're arguing that nothing was reconquered and the term is pure propaganda because the state didn't exist pre-Muslim conquest. Now you're using your conclusion (the term is pure propaganda) to explain why the lack of a pre-Islam state is relevant. You're arguing in circles.
You have yet to provide any evidence that the term originated as early modern propaganda, you've just asserted that it must have on the grounds that the state didn't exist before (which as OP says is unconvincing reasoning).
If you were saying that it was 15th century propaganda I'd have a much easier time swallowing it, but you're trying to insist it's a modern construct and that's a tough sell. We're talking about a time period overlapping with literal crusades. It's not a stretch to think that the Christian kingdoms (yes, plural) saw themselves as reclaiming the peninsula for Christendom.
https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/47205574...
> The concept was born from the chroniclers of the Christian kingdoms “when they recovered what is called the neo-Gothic ideal ” by which “the kings of Asturias, then of León and then of Castile proclaimed themselves descendants and legitimate heirs of the Gothic kings,”
> ...
> the idea of Reconquista “was a myth that only began to take shape from the 11th century as part of the program of royal legitimacy promoted by the clergy of Burgundy in support of the claim of the dynasty of Castile and León to have sovereignty over the entire Peninsula.”
So it's medieval propaganda, not early modern propaganda. That I can buy.
I'm not particularly interested in whether the word Reconquista is used by these people if even these historians agree that they saw themselves through that lens. Whether they had a correct understanding of the history behind the Muslim presence is a separate question from whether they believed they were reconquering.
> the first time that the term "reconquista" was used to refer to the fight against the Muslims was in the work of José Ortíz y Sanz entitled Compendio cronológico de la historia de España, published after 1795. The use of the term, however, did not spread until the 1840s thanks to two new editions of Ortiz's work and the publication of the Historia general by Modesto Lafuente.
So the term did not originate in the 20th century, but it was added to the dictionary in 1936.
16th-19th century historians would have used the term "restoration". The northern kingdoms prosecuting this supposed restoration were keen to claim their legitimacy as a continuation of the entire Visigoth Kingdom, and made it their business to recapture it... even if they never held that territory.
It seems like a bit of iconoclasm to deny the Reconquista because it helps (does it?) with the Catalan claim to independence. In LatAm people don't really care about any of Spain's internal politics, and the Reconquista is simply an accepted fact of history.
The capitalization of the word might be a propagandistic act, but it might also just be an application of modern style, or just recognition that the concept requires a bit more dignity, or something.
This entire sub-thread stinks of... anti-Spanish propaganda, heh.
Since they considered that territories were part of the Roman-Christian Empire in the past from their perspective they were certainly taking it back.
Spain being or not being a nation at the time seems entirely irrelevant..
Medieval Europeans saw Christendom as the legitimate successor of the Roman Empire. (Or at least the elites did.) Many wars were fought to expand the borders of Christendom. Some of them against pagans, and some to take back land that used to be Christian. The wars that are often called the Reconquista were part of the latter.
So, in a sense, it was not about taking Spanish land back for Spain, but about taking Roman land back for Rome.
The term "Reconquista" is perfectly suited to describe what hapoened: European Christians re-conquered that land. Especially in term of Christendom this was a re-conquest.
There are many things wrong with the term. A "reconquest" also makes it sound like the area was under siege by the Arabs or something. But the fact of the matter is that the peninsula, except for perhaps the Basque country, has been a melting pot of cultures under the succession of rules by larger empires. It's not like those christians, or the "Spanish", held control at some point, lost it, and then got it back; they never had it in the first place or even existed as a nation. So it's just a ridiculous term altogether.
https://www.lavanguardia.com/historiayvida/20191208/47205574...
https://blogs.elpais.com/historias/2015/04/la-batalla-de-cov...
We should be careful not mindlessly apply our modern ideas of Islam and Christianity to a completely different time period.
In their view they did, the existence of the “Spanish nation” is tangential. From their perspective they were culturally/politically Christians and whatever exact language they happened to speak was secondary to that. So in that it was obviously a “reconquest” from the perspective of the Christians living in Iberia.
> So it's just a ridiculous term altogether.
Hardly more ridiculous than claiming that the fact that some common Spanish national identity didn’t exist back in the 1100s is somehow relevant.