Spanish Games of Thrones: the Convivencia between Reconquista and Jihad in the High Middle Ages

Tuesday 22 August 2023 / 19:00 / Marian Church.

Admission voluntary

Tadeáš Vala

Religionist, Islamologist and Africanist working at the Universities of Pardubice and Hradec Králové.

Program

The history of medieval interreligious relations in the Iberian Peninsula is still a subject of debate among scholars and the general public. There is still no consensus on the nature of these relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews in Muslim al-Andalus and the Christian kingdoms of the peninsula.

On the one side stands the theory of reconquista, which presents the medieval history of the Iberian Peninsula as a nearly eight-century-long continuous Christian struggle to reclaim and liberate Spain from illegitimate Muslim rule.

The opposing theory of convivencia describes the medieval Iberian Peninsula as a region of exceptional interreligious tolerance and cooperation between three monotheistic traditions.

So how did Muslims, Christians and Jews actually interact during the so-called reconquista? Was the medieval Iberian Peninsula an area of superlative religious tolerance that did not occur in other Christian and Muslim territories in the Mediterranean?

Can we speak of the phenomenon of the reconquista as a process of the Christian reconquest of Spain?