Battle of Covadonga

In 722, in a narrow valley of the Picos de Europa mountains in Asturias, northern Spain, a small Christian force under the nobleman Pelagius turned back an expedition sent by the Umayyad rulers of the peninsula. Little is known for certain about the fight, and the two sides remembered it very differently. Yet later Christian tradition made Covadonga the birth of the Kingdom of Asturias and the starting point of the Reconquista, the centuries-long Christian recovery of Iberia.

From 711 the armies of the Umayyad Caliphate conquered most of Hispania, bringing the Visigothic Kingdom to an end. Refugees, including members of the Visigothic nobility, moved north into the remote mountains of Asturias, a region whose people, among them the Astures and Cantabri, had never been fully absorbed into Visigothic society.

According to Christian texts written in the late ninth century, these refugees chose Pelagius as their leader in 718. He was said to be the son of Favila, an official at the court of the Visigothic king Egica, and he made his base at Cangas de Onís. Pelagius stopped paying the jizya, the tax levied on non-Muslims, attacked small Umayyad garrisons and drove out the local governor, Munuza.

At first the authorities in Córdoba paid little attention to a revolt in distant mountains, and their forces were busy raiding beyond the Pyrenees into Gaul. That changed after a Muslim army was defeated at Toulouse on 9 July 721. The governor of al-Andalus, Anbasa ibn Suhaym al-Kalbi, reportedly saw a quick victory over the Asturian rebels as a way to restore his troops' morale.

In 722 a force under the commander Alqama, together with Munuza, entered Asturias. Legend adds Oppas, bishop of Seville, who is said to have tried in vain to persuade the Christians to give up. Pelagius retreated deep into the mountains to a narrow, steep-sided valley at Covadonga, where a large army could not attack on a broad front.

Alqama sent an envoy demanding surrender, and when Pelagius refused, he ordered his best troops forward into the valley. The defenders rained arrows and stones down on them from the slopes, and then Pelagius led a sortie from a cave in which part of his band had been hiding. Alqama was killed and his army withdrew. Christian chroniclers described a terrible slaughter of the attackers; Muslim writers treated the affair as a minor skirmish.

As the defeated troops retreated, people from the Asturian villages took up arms and, according to the Christian accounts, killed hundreds of them. Munuza gathered the survivors into a new force but was beaten by Pelagius near the present-day town of Proaza and died in the fighting. Pelagius held the territory against further attempts to restore Muslim control and ruled the new kingdom until his death in 737.

Because the earliest accounts date from more than a century and a half later, historians treat the details with caution. The battle's significance lies largely in what it came to represent: the survival of an independent Christian realm in the far north. It is commemorated at the shrine of Our Lady of Covadonga. The Christian advance it symbolised reached a milestone four centuries later with the siege of Lisbon and was completed in 1492.

Our 700 map shows the Iberian Peninsula on the eve of the conquest, and the 800 map shows the peninsula after the Umayyad conquest, in the lands of today's Spain.