<P> The Reconquista (Spanish and Portuguese for "reconquest") is a name used in English to describe the period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula of about 780 years between the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in 711 and the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada to the expanding Christian kingdoms in 1491 . The completed conquest of Granada was the context of the Spanish voyages of discovery and conquest (Columbus got royal support in Granada in 1492, months after its conquest), and the Americas--the "New World"--ushered in the era of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires . </P> <P> Traditional historiography has marked the beginning of the Reconquista with the Battle of Covadonga (718 or 722), the first known victory in Iberia by Christian military forces since the 711 military intervention in Iberia of combined Arab - Berber forces . In that small battle, a group led by the nobleman Pelagius defeated a Muslim patrol in the mountains of northern Iberia and established the independent Christian Kingdom of Asturias . It ended with the conquest of the Emirate of Granada, the last Muslim state in the peninsula, in 1491 . </P> <P> After 1491, the entire peninsula was controlled by Christian rulers . The conquest was followed by the Alhambra Decree (1492) which expelled Jews who would not convert to Christianity from Castile and Aragon, and a series of edicts (1499--1526) which forced the conversions of the Muslims in Spain . Since the mid-19th century, the idea of a' reconquest' took hold in Spain associated with its rising nationalism and colonialism . </P> <P> Traditional historiography has stressed since the 19th century the existence of the Reconquista, a continuous phenomenon by which the Christian Iberian kingdoms opposed and conquered the Muslim kingdoms, understood as a common enemy who had militarily seized territory from native Iberian Christians . The concept of a Christian reconquest of the peninsula first emerged, in tenuous form, at the end of the 9th century . A landmark was set by the Christian Chronica Prophetica (883--884), a document stressing the Christian and Muslim cultural and religious divide in Iberia and the necessity to drive the Muslims out . </P>

Who was driven out of spain during the reconquista