Why Osama Bin Laden wants Muslims to re-occupy Al Andalus (Spain
Why Osama Bin Laden wants Muslims to re-occupy Al Andalus (Spain)
This is same mentality why that bearded satan, Osama Bin Laden wants Muslims to re-occupy Al Andalus (Spain). Spain is one example where the Muslims were able to sink their claws in for eight hundred years before they were thrown out by the heroic fighters of the Spanish re-conquista. The last sigh of the Moriscos (Moors) still makes the Muslim aggressors breathless, and they pine for the re-occupation of Spain.
The Spanish Reconquista, in the Middle Ages, was the most successful example of an European answer to Muslim expansionism. Christian European forces battled incessantly for eight hundred years and eventually liberated the entire Iberian Peninsula, permanently from Muslim tyranny. The origins of the movement, however, were exceedingly modest.
After the Battle of Guadalete river in 711, the Moors had conquered most of Southern and Central Iberia within five years. The reconquest began almost immediately in 718 with the defeat of the Muslim army at the battle of Alcama by the Visigoth chieftain Pelayo who was one of the few survivors of the battle of the Guadalete river.
Pelayo refused to accept Islamic overlordship of his homeland. He escaped capture at the battle of Guadalete, where he was a member of the Visigothic King Rodrigo’s bodyguard, and returned to his native Asturias in the northern part of Spain. He soon became the leader of a rebellion against Munuza, the Moorish governor of the area. He was captured in 717 and imprisoned by the Moors, but soon escaped and returned to Asturias, where he defeated Munuza and established the Kingdom of Asturias in 718, with its capital at Cangas de Onis.
In accordance with Visigothic custom, he was elected as his nation’s first king by a vote of his countrymen. For a few years after that, Pelayo’s kingdom was always under the threat of extinction, as he was facing attacks from Muslim forces much stronger than his own.
It wasn’t until 722 that his kingdom was secured, when a powerful Muslim force sent to conquer Asturias once and for all was defeated by Pelayo at the Battle of Covadonga. Today, this is regarded as the first Christian victory of the Reconquista. The Muslims, ungracious in their defeat, as usual, described Pelayo and his men as “thirty wild donkeys” in their chronicles. But this itself tells a story. Pelayo, with a small band of brave warriors had tamed the Muslims. Pelayo’s was a story of bravery matching that of King Arthur and Robin Hood.
Pelayo had won independence for his country. Pelayo died in 737. His son Favila succeeded him as king but could not enjoy the throne for a long time: legends claim that he was killed by a bear. After Pelayo, the subsequent kings of Asturias, León, Castile and Spain itself could trace their lineage back to him in some manner for hundreds of years. Some sources link Pelayo to the royal house of the Visigoths (he is supposed to be the grandson of the Visigothic King Chindaswinth (563-653).
After Pelayo the resistance continued, but could become substantial in the course of the next four centuries. When the Muslim hordes overran Spain from 711 to 730, Pelayo’s tiny Kingdom of Asturias, centered on Oviedo, had survived as a sole Christian sentinel in Spain, exposed to continuous Muslim raiding. This kingdom was helped by Charlemagne’s March in Catalonia on the Pyrenees that threw the Muslim barbarians out of France. In the early 900s, the Asturias king took advantage of Muslim infighting to move his capital south to Leon and the County of Castile.
Though not a Crusader-type state and content to work with Muslim amirs in order to survive, its leaders began to attract freemen as colonists with generous offers of agricultural land and tax rebates. Warring with Muslims when it suited them, Castilian leaders were not at this point fighting a war of liberation.
Continued resistance was put up, to rebuff the renewed attacks launched to overrun this tiny Christian enclave by the Ummayad Khilfah al Qurdubah (Caliphate in Cordoba). By 1034, Sancho the Great had incorporated Aragon, Sobrarbe, Barcelona, as well as Asturian Leon and Castile.
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