Word: conquests
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...gain significance after the Roman Empire collapsed and the invading Visigoths took over, and it became a capital in the 9th century A.D., when Charlemagne's heirs conquered the city port, threw out the Arabs who had taken charge of it as the northern extension of the Arab conquest of Spain, and then in effect turned it over to a Catalan strongman, Wilfred the Hairy, the semilegendary founder of the Catalan state...
...laws and Christian rites had been superimposed. But as a political entity, Iberia was on the verge of collapse. Thus when the Arabs looked across the Mediterranean, they saw a vast territory spotted with squabbling factions -- Christians, Jews, Visigoths -- separated from Africa by a small strait and ripe for conquest. In 711 a mixed force of Arabs and Berbers under the command of Musa ibn Nusayr crossed the sea and smashed through the patchy Visigothic resistance; within 50 years most of Spain, except for the pockets of Castile and Catalonia in the north, had become al-Andalus, the farthest western...
...sons of the Prophet brought no Arab women with them; they intermarried with Iberian ones. The conquering power became an indigenous one in short order, although the successive caliphs tended to retain a nostalgia for Baghdad. Out of the Moorish conquest grew the first unified culture Spain had seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire. It lasted until 1492, when Catholic armies, under Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, drove the last vestiges of Arab power back to North Africa. If you want to grasp why Spain, traditionally, is unique in Europe, you must begin with the fact...
...scholars seem unable to decide where it comes from -- or even whether it is from al-Andalus at all. It may equally well be Egyptian, North African or Iranian, though the Pisans themselves (who installed it on the facade of their cathedral) believed it was war booty from their conquest of Majorca, once an Arab fiefdom. Severely holed by bullets in the 19th century, it remains an overwhelmingly authoritative image -- rigid, swollen, and yet almost liquid in its linear rhythms, as in the rhyme between the profile curve of its breast and the serpentine edges of its wings: a guardian...
...durable art of al-Andalus -- the Arabs' word for Spain between their initial conquest and their final expulsion -- was, of course, architecture. Of the 4,000 or so "castles in Spain" that still stand (military buildings of all kinds, from fortified palaces to watchtowers), fully a quarter were built by the Arabs. Several of their buildings, from the Alhambra, or "red castle," in Granada to the Great Mosque of Cordoba to the towering Giralda in Seville, are among the key works of world architecture...