The Christian powers however were disunited, while the Mussulmans had again gained, though at a heavy price, the advantage of union. ♦Conquest of Toledo. 1085.♦ Alfonso the Sixth, commanding the powers of Castile and Leon, pressed far to the south, and won the old Gothic capital of Toledo. ♦Battle of Zalacca. 1086.♦ But his further advance was checked by the African invaders at the battle of Zalacca. ♦Advance of the Almoravides.
Advance of Aragon.♦ The Almoravide power was too strong for any present hope of conquests on the part of Castile; but the one independent Mussulman state at Zaragoza lay open to the Christians of the north-east. ♦Conquest of Zaragoza. 1118.
Of Tarragona.♦ Zaragoza itself was taken by the king of Aragon, and Tarragona by the Count of Barcelona. ♦Of Tortosa. 1148.♦ Both these powers advanced, and the conquest of Tortosa made the Ebro the Christian boundary. ♦Advance of Portugal.♦ As the power of the Almoravides weakened, Castile and Portugal again advanced on their side. ♦Conquest of Lisbon. 1147.
Of Silvas. 1191.♦ The latter kingdom made the great acquisition of its future capital Lisbon, and a generation later, it reached the southern coast by the conquest of Silvas in Algarve. ♦Advance of Castile. 1147-1166.♦ Castile meanwhile pressed to the Guadiana and beyond, counting Calatrava and Badajoz among its cities. The line of struggle had advanced in about a century from the land between Douro and Tagus to the land between Guadiana and Guadalquivir.
This second great Christian advance in the twelfth, century was again checked in the same way in which the advance in the eleventh century had been. ♦Invasion of the Almohades. 1146.♦ A new settlement of African conquerors, the Almohades, won back a large territory from both Castile and Portugal. ♦Battle of Alarcos. 1196.♦ The battle of Alarcos broke for a while the power of Castile, and the Almohade dominion stretched beyond the lower Tagus. To the east, the lands south of Ebro remained an independent Mussulman state. ♦Decline of the Almohades.♦ But, as the Almohades were of doubtful Mahometan orthodoxy, their hold on Spain was weaker than that of any other Mahometan conquerors. ♦Battle of Navas de Tolosa. 1211.♦ Their power broke up, and the battle of Navas de Tolosa ruled that Spain should be a Christian land. All three kingdoms advanced, and within forty years the Mussulman power in the peninsula was cut down to a mere survival. ♦Conquest of the Balearic Isles. 1228-1236.
Of Valencia. 1237-1305.♦ Aragon won the Balearic Isles and formed her kingdom of Valencia. ♦Of Murcia. 1243-1253.♦ But as Castile, by the incorporation of Murcia, reached to the Mediterranean, any further advance in the peninsula was forbidden to Aragon. ♦Advance of Portugal. 1217-1256.♦ On the eastern side Portugal won back her lost lands, reached her southern coast, kept all the land west of the lower Guadiana and some points to the east of it. ♦Kingdom of Algarve.♦ To the kingdom of Portugal was added the kingdom of Algarve.
But the central power of Castile pressed on faster still. ♦Conquest of Castile under Saint Ferdinand.♦ Under Saint Ferdinand began the recovery of the great cities along the Guadalquivir. ♦Conquest of Cordova. 1236.
Of Jaen. 1246.
Of Seville. 1248.♦ Cordova, the city of the caliphs, was won; Jaen followed; then more famous Seville; and Cadiz, eldest of Western cities, passed again, as when she first entered the Roman world, from Semitic into Aryan hands. ♦Of Nibla. 1257.
Of Tarifa. 1285.♦ The conquest of Nibla and Tarifa at last made the completion of the work only a question of time.
No one in the middle of the twelfth century could have dreamed that a Mussulman power would live on in Spain till the last years of the fifteenth. ♦Kingdom of Granada. 1238.♦ This was the kingdom of Granada, which began, amid the conquests of Saint Ferdinand, as a vassal state of Castile. ♦Reconquered from Castile. 1298.♦ Yet, sixty years later, it was able to win back a considerable territory from its overlord. ♦Recovery by Castile. 1316.
1430.♦ Part of the land now gained was soon lost again; but part, with the city of Huascar, was kept by the Mussulmans far into the fifteenth century. ♦Gibraltar lost and won. 1309. 1333. 1344.♦ Meanwhile, on the strait between the ocean and the Mediterranean, Gibraltar was won by Castile, lost, and won again.
♦Geographical position of the four kingdoms.♦
Thus, in the latter part of the thirteenth century, the peninsula of Spain was very unequally divided between one Mussulman and four Christian states. Aragon on the one side, Portugal on the other, were kingdoms with a coast line out of all proportion to their extent inwards. Aragon had become a triangle, Portugal a long parallelogram, cut off on each side from the great trapezium formed by the whole peninsula. Between these two lay the central power of Castile, with Christian Navarre still separate at one corner and Mussulman Granada still separate at another. Of these five kingdoms, Navarre and Aragon alone marched to any considerable extent on any state beyond the peninsula. Castile barely touched the Aquitanian dominions of England, while Navarre and Aragon, both stretching north of the Pyrenees, had together a considerable frontier towards Aquitaine and France. Navarre and Aragon again marched on one another, while Portugal and Granada marched only on Castile, the common neighbour of all. The destiny of all was written on the map. Navarre at one end, Granada at the other, were to be swallowed up by the great central power. Aragon, after gaining a high European position, was to be united with Castile under a single sovereign. Portugal alone was to become distinctly a rival of Castile, but wholly in lands beyond the bounds of Europe.
♦Title of ‘King of Spain.’♦
Of the five Spanish powers Castile so far outtopped the rest that its sovereign was often spoken of in other lands as King of Spain. But Spain contained more kingdoms than it contained kings. ♦The lesser kingdoms.♦ Castile, Aragon, and Portugal were all formed by a succession of unions and conquests, each of which commonly gave their kings a new title. The central power was still the power of Castile and Leon, not of Castile only. Leon was made up of the kingdoms of Leon and Gallicia. Castile took in Castile proper or Old Castile, with the principality of the Asturias, and the free lands of Biscay, Guipuzcoa, and Alava. To the south it took in the kingdoms—each marking a stage of advance—of Toledo or New Castile, of Cordova, Jaen, Seville, and Murcia. The sovereign of Portugal held his two kingdoms of Portugal and Algarve. ♦1262.♦ The sovereign of Aragon, besides his enlarged kingdom of Aragon and his counties of Catalonia, Roussillon, and Cerdagne, held his kingdom of Valencia on the mainland, while the Balearic Isles formed the kingdom of Majorca. ♦1349.♦ This last, first granted as a vassal kingdom to a branch of the royal house, was afterwards incorporated with the Aragonese state.