ABSTRACT
These words, written in the twelfth century at the monastery of SantoDomingo de Silos, south of Burgos, convey the dramatic effect of the islamic conquest of Hispania on the way her history would be written. The monk was exaggerating the impact of the conquest for anti-muslim polemical purposes. The deeds of the christians did not altogether perish in silence. Yet the events of 711 set christians on one side or the other of a geographical and ideological frontier between Christianity and Islam which has dominated the historiography of the peninsula. In the unconquered northwest, propagandists for the emerging kingdom of the Asturias practised a rhetoric of resistance to the invaders . 'The Saracens took over the kingdom of the Goths, which even nowadays they still possess in part. And the christians have battles with them day and night, and are in daily conflict, but they cannot take the whole of Spain from them' .2 Thus wrote a chronicler at the monastery of Albelda in the ninth century. The author of the Chronicle ifAlfonso III, written at about the same time, made the defeat of Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king, the pre lude to a slow but inexorable Reconquest of the peninsula, initiated by the Asturian kings who claimed to be the heirs of the Visigoths. This Reconquest began with the famous (and perhaps legendary) victory of Pelayo over the Arabs and their Berber allies at Covadonga. Later christian historians echoed Asturian triumphalism when writing about the contest between christian and muslim Spain. Although the word 'Reconquest' was first used in the twelfth century, and it was only at this period that it began to take on
the ideology of Crusade, the battle of Covadonga was placed at the head of a chain of victories which culminated in the fall of the kingdom of Granada in 1492 and the final liberation of the christians under muslim rule.
