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the structure. Some were tribal, for the Arabs were always prone to quarreling among themselves. The Berbers were restive and often rebelled against Arab pretensions. And as soon as central authority diminished, the political units fragmented. Thus, over those five centuries there were only three periods of enforced unity and each was of relatively limited duration. The first was under the Emirate, which became the Caliphate of Cordoba in the tenth century. The second and third periods were under the domination of the Moroccan dynasties of the Almorávides and the Almohades during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.19 But these episodes were surrounded by long years of disunity and civil war. In this the Muslim state resembled the Christian kingdoms to the north, which were as prone to fighting against one another as against their putative common enemy.

Although the Muslim states called the entire peninsula “Al-Andalus,” the northern rivers Ebro and Duero soon formed the effective dividing line between Christian and Islamic rule. Faced with the impetuous advance of the Muslims, Pelayo’s small independent Christian statelet survived in the high mountains of northwest Spain. Myth traced an unbroken tradition of Christian rule from these Asturian mountains, where, as Edward Gibbon put it, “A vital spark was still alive; some invincible fugitives preferred a life of poverty and freedom in the Asturian valleys; the hardy mountaineers repulsed the slaves of the caliph.”20 In reality, the Arab columns had been more concerned to push forward across the Pyrenees into France than fight in the mountains. By 717, the Arabs were well established around the city of Narbonne, which they captured in 719. From their southern base, they sent out large-scale raids ever deeper into France until, at the battle of Tours in 732, a Muslim raiding army from Spain was thrown back by the Franks led by Charles Martel.21 In the history of France this event loomed large: “The men of the north stood as motionless as a wall; they were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved, as they slew the Arabs with the sword.”22 The victory over Islam at Tours became in Western eyes an archetypal triumph, charged like the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 or Lepanto in 1571 with a deep symbolic meaning. But in reality, although these northern raids continued for some years after the conquest, the Muslims were content to consolidate their rule farther south. Much of the terrain north of the river line was barren and unproductive. It quickly became a no-man’s-land, dotted with towns and castles—some owing notional allegiance to a Christian king, others to the emir or caliph in Cordoba.

In these northern Spanish lands, the small nucleus in the Asturian mountains expanded eastward to become the Kingdom of Leon, with its capital at Oviedo. The border between Leon and the Muslim south was nicknamed “the land of the castles”—Castile—because it was an area where towers and fortresses populated the landscape. Eventually Castile became larger and more powerful than its parent, Leon. To the east of Castile was the Kingdom of Aragon, which began in the foothills of the Pyrenees and slowly expanded south and east toward the Mediterranean. There it confronted the Frankish County of Barcelona and the border Muslim Kingdom of Valencia. Over time these were incorporated into the patrimony of Aragon. By the mid–fourteenth century, Christian Spain consisted of five kingdoms: Portugal, in the west; Leon-Castile, straddling the center; the tiny Kingdom of Navarre, in part north of the Pyrenees and in part south; Aragon, including Catalonia; and formerly Muslim Valencia (conquered by King James I of Aragon in 1238), which occupied most of the Mediterranean littoral.

The cities and the most productive terrain were in the south and held by the Muslims: Cordoba and later Seville in the flat, fertile land around the river Guadalquivir, Granada with its Vega, growing almost every type of fruit, and the rich orchards and gardens (huerta) around Valencia, described by