Unmasking El Cid: Myth and the Shadows of Spain’s Muslim Past

Unmasking El Cid: Myth and the Shadows of Spain’s Muslim Past

Years ago, in Damascus, a Spanish colleague told me she’d been named after the Battle of Covadonga in northern Spain, where the Moors had tasted defeat around 720. The Arabs had never penetrated Asturias and Galicia, and the battle is often seen as the symbolic beginning of the Christian Reconquista — a centuries-long campaign by Christian kingdoms to wrest the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule, which lasted from 711 to 1492.  What struck me ab…