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How the Reconquista Suppressed Islam in Spain

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How the Reconquista Suppressed Islam in Spain

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Islam is suppressed in Spain through the Reconquista, the centuries long Christian reconquest of al Andalus usually dated from the fall of Toledo in 1085. The process advanced kingdom by kingdom over the following four centuries and reached its conclusion in January 1492, when Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian peninsula, fell to the combined forces of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs.

The conquest itself was carried by a succession of Christian kingdoms, Castile, Aragon and their allies, advancing across Iberia over four centuries rather than any single campaign or ruler. What followed Granada's fall changed the character of the whole process: the Catholic Monarchs had promised the surrendering Muslim population religious tolerance under the terms of capitulation, and that promise gave way within a few years to policies of forced conversion, ending the legal practice of Islam in Spain even where the population itself remained.

What this changed for Islam's spread was not a battlefield loss alone but the end of an organized Muslim political and religious presence in Western Europe that had lasted since the eighth century. Al Andalus, the polity that had once carried Islam onto the Iberian peninsula and sustained centers of Islamic learning there for generations, ceased to exist as a Muslim state, and what practice of Islam continued in Spain after 1492 would have to continue in secret.

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Sources
Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain, 1492-1614
Matthew Carr, The New Press, 2009
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