The historical period conventionally known as the Reconquista is one of the most complex and fascinating in the history of the Iberian Peninsula. Its traditional chronological span runs from the Battle of Covadonga — where Pelagius (Pelayo) led the first Christian victory against the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate, around 718–722 — to the conquest of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492. These roughly 770 years are far too dense to cover in full depth here; we will limit ourselves to the main milestones.
Covadonga and the kingdoms of the north
The Battle of Covadonga — or rather, the skirmish known by that name — is wrapped in mysticism and legend. It is traditionally regarded as the birth of the Kingdom of Asturias, the first nucleus of Christian resistance in the northern peninsula. From there, the kingdom gradually expanded southward: it moved its capital to the newly conquered city of León and took the name Kingdom of León.
Successive dynastic divisions, unions and wars gave rise to several political entities. To the west, the Kingdom of Galicia (910–1109) took shape around the discovery of the supposed remains of the Apostle James, whose cult wove the Camino de Santiago as a route connecting the region to Christian Europe. Portugal proclaimed its independence from the Kingdom of León by force of arms in 1139 and grew into the state we know today. To the east, the frontier county of Castile was elevated to a kingdom in 1065 and eventually absorbed León and Galicia under the Crown of Castile, becoming the dominant political entity and the principal founding piece of the future Kingdom of Spain. These divisions encouraged the evolution of Vulgar Latin into distinct languages that survive today: Castilian, Asturleonese, Fala, Galician, Valencian, Catalan and Portuguese.
The other focus of Christian resistance was in the Pyrenees. After the Muslim conquest, the Carolingians intervened in the north-east of the peninsula in the late 8th century, creating the Hispanic March, a series of counties intended to defend the southern frontier of the Carolingian Empire. These lordships gradually gained independence from the Franks, giving rise to three distinct entities: the Kingdom of Pamplona — later Navarre —, the counties of the central Pyrenees, which coalesced into the Kingdom of Aragon, and the Catalan counties led by Barcelona. Aragon later expanded to include the Catalan counties through dynastic union and, afterwards, through conquest would go on to create the Kingdoms of Valencia and Mallorca.
Al-Andalus: from emirate to caliphate
Meanwhile, in the south, the Umayyad administration organised the conquered territory under the name of al-Andalus. The state went through internal tensions between Arab elites, Berber troops and the native population, both those converted to Islam and Christians. In this context, the exiled Abd al-Rahman I, one of the few survivors of the Umayyad dynasty after the Abbasid revolution, took control and in 756 proclaimed the Emirate of Córdoba, independent of the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad. The golden age of al-Andalus arrived with Abd al-Rahman III and the proclamation of the Caliphate of Córdoba: a period of power, prosperity and relative religious tolerance in which Córdoba rivalled Baghdad and Constantinople as a centre of learning and the arts.
The Christian advance: from Toledo to Las Navas
During the first phase, the Caliphate of Córdoba retained hegemony over the peninsula: it demanded tribute from the Christian states, launched military raids and arbitrated their internal disputes. The death of the military leader Almanzor in 1002 triggered a rapid process of fragmentation that broke the caliphate up into small independent kingdoms known as the taifa kingdoms.
This fragmentation accelerated the Christian push. The northern kingdoms began collecting tribute payments — the parias — from the disunited southern emirates, and city after city fell under their control. In 1085, Alfonso VI of León took Toledo, the former Visigothic capital: a military and symbolic victory of the first order.
Museo L’Iber holds an impressive diorama recreating precisely the siege of Toledo. The scene, built with figures from Alymer’s Miniplom line, shows the city walls — with their characteristic horseshoe-arch gate — as two armies clash at the foot of the fortress. The photograph is the work of Maurizio Corona.
Alymer was a Spanish brand founded in Valencia by Ángel Comes, specialising from its origins in the production of collectible metal figures in 20mm scale and later 54mm. Its Miniplom line, aimed at high-quality miniatures, became a benchmark for collectors across Spain and Europe. Alymer’s medieval series — with infantry and cavalry from the peninsular kingdoms — rank among the most highly prized in its catalogue.
Two centuries after the fall of Toledo, Alfonso X the Wise would institutionalise there the famous Toledo School of Translators, a meeting point between the Christian, Muslim and Jewish traditions.
The fall of Toledo alarmed the taifas, who requested help from the Almoravid Empire, across the strait. Of Berber origin and strict Quranic observance, the Almoravids conquered the taifa kingdoms within a few decades and temporarily halted the Christian advance, seizing Valencia from the widow of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid) in 1102, three years after the Castilian hero’s death in 1099. However, Almoravid rule over al-Andalus lasted barely a generation: the failure at Toledo, the fall of Zaragoza to Alfonso I the Battler, revolts by Andalusis and Mozarabs, and the Almohad push all precipitated a second period of taifas.
The Almohads, of an even stricter doctrine, crossed the strait to subdue both Almoravids and taifas alike. The new threat was of such magnitude that Alfonso VIII of Castile formed a coalition with Sancho VII of Navarre and Peter II of Aragon, joined by the masters of the military orders of Santiago and Calatrava and numerous European crusaders, since Pope Innocent III had declared a Crusade in Iberia. On 16 July 1212, at Las Navas de Tolosa, the allied forces inflicted an overwhelming defeat on the Almohad caliph Muhammad al-Nasir. The debacle, and the caliph’s subsequent death, marked the beginning of the end for the Almohad Empire and opened a third period of taifas.
The final conquest: James I and the entry into Valencia (1238)
Christian supremacy on the peninsula became unassailable. The Crown of Castile conquered the Andalusi taifas while Portugal completed its expansion with the capture of the Algarve.
On the eastern coast, the Crown of Aragon under James I the Conqueror took the Balearic Islands (1229–1235) and the Kingdom of Valencia (1233–1245). The conquest culminated on 28 September 1238, the date James I entered the city of Valencia after the surrender of governor Zayyan ibn Mardanish. This event has a direct connection to the very ground on which Museo L’Iber now stands, as we will tell in a future article.
The Museum holds an exceptional diorama recreating this triumphal entry. The scene is inspired by the frescoes of Alcañiz Castle (Teruel), a 13th-century pictorial cycle considered one of the earliest iconographic records of the conquest. On the left, the Moorish population watches the advance of the Aragonese troops led by figures in armour bearing the banners of the Bars of Aragon; in the background, an oil-painted backdrop evokes the city’s skyline and its castle.
The figures are the work of Carmelo Loreto, one of the great names in Spanish toy-figure craftsmanship, with a long career creating historical miniatures closely tied to Museo L’Iber.
The third diorama shows Aragonese cavalry with the characteristic red and yellow bars on cloaks and caparisons, advancing in combat formation beneath the royal standard. A piece that illustrates with great uniformological precision the heavy cavalry of the Crown of Aragon in the 13th century.
The surrender of Granada (1492): the end of al-Andalus
The only exception to Christian rule after Las Navas was the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, which survived for two more centuries as a nominal vassal of Castile, a period during which the construction of the Alhambra was completed.
On 2 January 1492, Sultan Muhammad XII — known as Boabdil — handed over the keys of the city, formally bringing to an end the last Islamic state on the Iberian Peninsula. With Boabdil’s surrender came the end of one of the most defining processes in the history of Spain and Portugal, one that would shape the identity of both countries and drive their later Atlantic and Mediterranean expansion.
Museo L’Iber holds a striking diorama that recreates this surrender, taking as its direct reference the famous painting The Surrender of Granada (1882) by Francisco Pradilla Ortiz. The figures belong to Alymer’s Miniplom line: Boabdil on horseback handing over the keys to the Catholic Monarchs, with the Nasrid army in retreat and the Alhambra in the background.
It is worth noting a historiographical curiosity that the diorama shares with Pradilla’s painting: Queen Isabella I is shown present in the scene, when historical sources indicate it was Ferdinand II who received the keys while Isabella waited at the camp of Santa Fe. Pradilla included her for compositional and symbolic reasons, and the miniature follows that same pictorial convention. It is a fine example of how art — and miniature art as much as any other — carries the collective memory of an event as much as, or more than, the strict facts.
The historiographical debate: did the Reconquista really happen?
The very term “Reconquista” is the subject of an intense academic debate that is worth addressing here.
The classic interpretation was systematised by 19th-century Romantic historiography and consolidated by historians such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal and, above all, Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, for whom the Reconquista formed the backbone of Spanish identity: a continuous, conscious struggle with a clear goal, the recovery of the lost Visigothic Hispania. This view found support in medieval documents that did indeed use terms such as restauratio or recuperatio to legitimise Christian territorial expansion.
Since the mid-20th century, however, this interpretation has been challenged with solid arguments. Américo Castro proposed the concept of “convivencia” (coexistence) to describe the complex mutual influence and cohabitation among the three cultures — Christian, Muslim and Jewish — that lived side by side on the peninsula. For Castro, reducing eight centuries of history to a religious confrontation erased the richness of the cultural intermingling that defined the Iberian world.
The most systematic criticism has come from medievalists such as Brian Catlos and Simon Barton, and, in Spanish historiography, Alejandro García Sanjuán, whose book La conquista islámica de la Península Ibérica y la tergiversación del pasado (2013) is now essential reading. His central arguments are:
• The word “Reconquista” does not appear in medieval sources; it is a 19th-century historiographical construct with a nationalist ideological charge.
• Peninsular conflicts did not follow a purely religious logic: alliances between Christians and Muslims were frequent, as were wars between monarchs of the same faith.
• The notion of “recovering” a lost Visigothic territory was more a rhetorical legitimisation used by emerging powers than a coherent political project sustained over centuries.
• The concept anachronistically projects onto the Middle Ages national and religious categories that belong to the 19th and 20th centuries.
In response to these criticisms, other historians defend the usefulness of the term as an analytical category, provided it is used with precision: the expansion of the Christian kingdoms did have a real and well-documented religious component — crusading rhetoric, the involvement of military orders, papal bulls — and medieval actors themselves frequently framed their campaigns in terms of restoration.
The debate remains open. The dominant academic trend today tends to use the term with caution, or to prefer more neutral expressions such as “Christian expansion” or “medieval peninsular conquests”, without giving up on describing the complexity of a process that, whatever label one prefers, irreversibly transformed the political, cultural and linguistic map of the Iberian Peninsula.
At Museo L’Iber you can see these historical moments brought to life through three dioramas that depict them in the Middle Ages room: the siege of Toledo in 1085, the triumphal entry of James I into Valencia in 1238, and the surrender of Granada in 1492. Three scenes, three centuries of history, a multitude of figures that turn the past into something you can see, understand and remember.
About the author — Alejandro Noguera Borel, Director of Museo L’Iber and Fundación Libertas 7. In the world of toy soldiers since the 1970s.
CV · LinkedIn · Academia.edu · Google Scholar
