Reconquista (nonfiction)

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The Reconquista ("reconquest") is a period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula, spanning approximately 770 years, between the initial Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the 710s and the fall of the Emirate of Granada, the last Islamic state on the peninsula, to expanding Christian kingdoms in 1492.

The Reconquista ended immediately before the European re-discovery of the Americas — the "New World" — which ushered in the era of the Portuguese and Spanish colonial empires.

Historians traditionally mark the beginning of the Reconquista with the Battle of Covadonga (718 or 722), in which a small Christian army, led by the nobleman Pelagius, defeated an army of the Umayyad Caliphate in the mountains of northern Iberia and established a Christian Kingdom in Asturias.

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