Reconquista

The Reconquista (""reconquest"") is a historical period of approximately 770 years in the history of the Iberian Peninsula, beginning after the Islamic conquest 711-718, to the fall of Granada, the last Islamic state on the peninsula, in 1492. It marks the gradual return of Christian rule in the Iberian Peninsula. It ended right before the discovery of the New World, and the period of the Portuguese and Spanish colonial empires which followed.Traditionally, historians mark the beginning of the Reconquista with the Battle of Covadonga (718 or 722), in which a small army, led by the nobleman Pelagius, defeated an Umayyad army in the mountains of northern Iberia and established a small Christian principality in Asturias.