Introduction: Conquest and Defeat: Legacy and Literature

Abstract

Iberia’s rich history of conquest is aptly summarized by the thirteenth-century King Alfonso X who described his wish to record for posterity Spain’s passage through many different dominions, and its harsh treatment in the process, “el fecho dEspanna, que passo por muchos sen-norios et fue muy mal trecha, recibiendo muertes por muy crueles lides et batallas daquellos que la conquirien” (1955, 4). He is referring here to the historical invasions of the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans, Suevi, Vandals, Alani, Visigoths, and Moors, all of which left an important, if at times brutal, legacy. Historical conquests are deemed by the king to be an important part of a shared collective memory, a viewpoint widely propagated in medieval Spanish literature where conquest plays a constitutive role in a range of narrative and lyrical contexts. It was the Islamic invasion of 711, however, which dominated the medieval Spanish imagination and, in practice, shaped lived experience, socially, culturally, and politically, for the people of Iberia for over 700 years. It was recounted in poem and prose, expressed in written and oral contexts, and altogether formed a source of both wonder and horror for the Christian population of Iberia throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.