ABSTRACT
What with priests and mullahs on either side of it and men and even womencrossing and recrossing more or less unhindered, it always was its own sort of frontier. It had been so almost since whenever it was within a few years of the ‘Arab’ (actually mostly Berber) invasion of 711 that the myth of the origins of the Spanish Reconquest had begun to take shape, with at its core the symbolic breaching by don Oppas of both the physical and the confessional lines which separated the peninsula’s new alien masters from the Christian remnants of the old order holed up in their cave at Covadonga. Oppas, the collaborationist bishop whose failed attempt to persuade don Pelayo and his band to surrender on terms to the invaders, as he himself and so many of the Visigothic old guard had done already, set the scene for the annihilation of 180,000 or so ‘Arabs’, was medieval Spain’s very first, and also perhaps its only wholly uncomplicated frontiersman (Gil Fernández et al. 1985: 126).
