Critical Approaches,
Images & Intersections
Beginning in the year 711 CE, Muslim armies based in North Africa took control of the vast majority of the Iberian peninsula, supplanting the Christian, Germanic Visigoths, who had themselves assumed power in the region in the wake of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Muslims named the land al-Andalus, and for the next five centuries, Islamic religious and legal discourse and Arabic cultural and intellectual trends were preeminent on the peninsula. By the middle of the thirteenth century, however, Christian armies had regained control of most of what is now modern Spain and Portugal...
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