The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Conflict, by Patricia E. Grieve

Abstract

Scholarly attention to the practice and uses of historical writing in the past, its interaction with literary works and its role in shaping local or national consciousness has emerged as a major trend, and recent books by Anthony Grafton, Chantal Grell and Richard L. Kagan, among others, confirm its vitality. Patricia E. Grieve, a literary historian, has devoted a richly documented book to one such case: the ‘fall of Spain’—that is, the defeat of the Visigothic kingdom by Muslim invaders in 711 and the subsequent dominion by the latter over most of the Iberian Peninsula. While the Visigoths had previously suffered from political instability, the chronicle tradition focused instead on a highly personalised drama, involving four main characters: Don Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king; Don Julián, one of his closest aristocratic followers; Florinda La Cava, the latter's daughter, whose rape by the king prompted her father to seek revenge by aiding the Moorish invasion; and Don Pelayo, a noble of Visigothic ancestry who, shortly thereafter, began to resist the Muslims from his northern redoubt in Asturias. The latter's exploits were eventually seen as the first step of the Reconquista, the centuries-long struggle of the Iberian Christian kingdoms to expel the Muslims, and which the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, finally brought to a triumphal end in 1492. Thus, the sin and defeat of 711 eventually gave way to virtue and rebirth, and, in so doing, became a powerful founding myth for Christian Iberia and particularly Spain.