How did Asturias pull it off?

How did Asturias pull it off?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Roncevaux_Pass
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They stuck to their stretch of beach behind a mountain range and kept ambushing the Umayaad troops sent to fight them

they cowered behind a mountain range

Arabs can't fight

>proud gothic warriors vs desert raiders
gee i wonder

Why did it take so long for the Christians to take back the peninsula?
And why did the Muslim not make any long lasting gains after that? It's like the Muslims would sometimes make gains on the Christians that always either were minor or never lasted for long. This while el cid could without support from any states go and conquer and hold a Major city for quite some time.

that stretch of land was always very hard to conquer, even if the population wasnt very high. it took the romans centuries.

The only people of the Iberian peninsula who keep their pre roman names are those of the north, the Galicians, Asturians, Cantabrians and Basques.

Spain is divided by many rivers that cover most of its territory east to west, Duero, Tajo, Guadiana, Guadalquivir.

Usually the situation was, muslims and christians each had a river as a limit, and the land between those 2 rivers was a no mans land.

The muslims were too strong and united the first 3 centuries, in which the frontier didnt change much. But after that, the Cordoba Caliphate fragmented in many smaller states, and it was pretty much game over for the muslims. They had to invite armies from the Almohade and Almoravid North African empires to defend themselves.
By the mid XIII century the reconquista was over, Portugal and Aragon had their modern frontiers, and Granada still existed but as a vassal tribute paying state of Castile.

By the way, those northern territories were also very hard to control for the Visigoths. Gascony in France was create by the Carolingians to defend themselves from the Basques, and in the Chanson de Roland Charlemagne is attacked by basques.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Roncevaux_Pass

Asturias was so shit though that the arabs didnt bother with it. Eventually they just hid behind their mountain until the caliphate collapsed and even then they had to get other christians to do their work for them.

Wasn't it just a minor skirmish against a scouting party?

...

Good post

Wasn't there a battle where the Spaniards claimed that Jesus himself came to fight muslims? I remember reading something about this but I can't find it anywhere.

I want to see a wuxia style film about Jesus murdering thousands of Umayaad shits

Umayyad bro??

It was st. Jacob, santiago. Thus, the order of santiago.

These are always the best

What battle was this?

Aryan superpowers

Because they weren't really a thread to the Ummayads, and their land was so shitty that it wasn't worth the effort to conquer.

Nobody in Spain is white.

Really, when a small group of people manages to resist a large empire, usually this is the case. If you are a huge empire already, a small backwater country is not a threat to you, so you don't really have to destroy it. Conquering it might make you stronger, but sometimes it just has such few resources and strategic value that it doesn't worth the money and manpower needed to annex it. So the empire might make the minimal investment to take that land, and if they are defeated, they often cut their losses and leave that backwater alone.

Augustus didn't get that memo tough. When he tried to conquer the Cantabrians and Asturians (basically what the Kingdom of Asturias was later one, before the massive Gothic/other Christian immigration towards it changed the essence) in the Bellum Cantabricum et Asturicum he used the following: Legio I Augusta, II Augusta, IIII Macedonica, V Alaudae, VI Victrix, IX Hispana, X Gemina, XX Valeria Victrix to which he added various auxiliary troops: Ala II Gallorum, Cohors II Gallorum,Ala II Thracum Victrix Civium Romanorum, Cohors IV Thracum Aequitata, Ala Parthorum, Ala Augusta than we know off, plus the Roman navy to blockade them, and needed 10 years to totally conquer them (but the Romans had to stationed a pair of Legions becuase rebellions flared every x years for some more after it). He even got really sick Making war there. But he really wanted to have all the peninsula I guess, touhg only Iron mines and mercs of worth there.

Spanish laziness.
>Muslims took 13 years to subjugate the peninsula.
>Spics take almost a millenia.

>But he really wanted to have all the peninsula I guess

Usually it's because leaving a belligerent, mountainous region alone would threaten the more profitable lowlands.

Did the Muslims ever have any victories near the scale of Las Navas De Tolosa after the year 1000?

The battle before the battle of Tolosa actually. Alfonso VIII was defeted quite hard vs the Almhoads and prepared during years to defeat them.

What said.

Also
>300 Asturias
vs
>150k Muslims
Seems like legit numbers.

>mfw people believe Asturias defeated a 200k Umayyad army with cavemen conscripts but things like the Rashidun victories are all exaggerated and unrealistic

why is Veeky Forums so biased?

That was the Battle of Ourique and it was by the Portuguese.

Sardinia pulling that out was much more impressive, after 400 years of constant attacks they were never conquered or converted.

Sardinia is so weird.

The arab army was very small (about 20.000) compared to the population of Spain (about 5M). The kingdom was in the middle of a 'civil war' as per usual in the last 50 yrs and after their victory in the battle of Guadalete they quickly took the Guadalquivir valley but were hesitant to move forward and capture Toledo, the capital, even though there was literally nothing stopping them and the population didn't give a shit, they were tired of all the internal wars and saw it as elites removing other elites and establishing peace and order instead. The muslim advance was walk in the park, but slow because clay is big and the number of troops very limited, so the further they went north, the more tenuous the ocuppation is and the more weak and dispersed the garrisons are. Also, the south and mediterranean coast was the urbanized area; the north and the west, the mudhuts area, so they would focus on securing the areas that mattered the most with the limited resources they had.

So apart from some meme garrisons here and there, the entire atlantic north, from the Basque Country to Galicia never really was under effective control of the Arabs, relying instead in deals and delegating authority to the local chiefs.

It's basically like the Norman invasion of England, except that in Spain's case these niggas in the north decided to fightback and remove Arab garrison. In a few decades Asturias covered the entire northern litoral and the Basque tribes were de facto indepent. And more into fuck franks than fight muslims btw. In fact they had chill friendly deals with the Banu-Qasi muslim rulers in Zaragoza, which relates to the origins of the Kingdom of Pamplona-Navarra, but that's another story.

Even if we cut them down by 90%, the asturians were still outnumbered 65:1.

And the rashidun victories have shit like the Sassanids and Byzantines working together (lmao) and Byzantines fielding more soldiers in a single battle than their entire army force all across the empire at that time

The Muslims got greedy and pushed into France, before getting smacked down by the Franks who weren't pushover like the rest of the Barbarians. Then the Arabs, Berbers, and Spanish Muslims started fighting each other and the Asturians took advantage and slowly started creeping south.

Sweet desert and arid mountain empire brah

Really makes you think