The Reconquest

It’s hard to appreciate, but Spain and Portugal have experienced perhaps more blood thirsty wars than almost any other part of mainland Europe, and certainly more than Britain, over the last thousand years.
After the sudden explosion of the Muslim faith across the Middle East, the Jihad rolled across the Arab world, along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, and from there Arabs, Berbers and Syrians crossed the Straits of Gibraltar in 711. Within five years they had overwhelmed the entire peninsular.
The Christians were appalled. Soon they began banding together to eject the invaders. Thus began the Reconquista – in effect, the Crusades in reverse – with the Christians trying to throw the Muslims from lands wrested from them.
By the eleventh century, tiny enclaves of Christians existed: Galicia, Léon, Castile, Navarre and Aragon, each kingdom existing under appalling pressure. This was permanent war. Muslims raided, driving off cattle, stealing horses, raiding and burning, and catching any Christians they could in order to sell them at the slave-markets. Yet the Kings of the north never lost their determination to win back their peninsular.
This was why the great military Orders were created. Military Orders like Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara grew famous, better known in the peninsular than the Templars, because they were fighting nearer to home. They didn’t need to leave home to go on Crusade, their fight was all about them; they were protecting their wives and daughters by staying and winning back the lands stolen from them.
It is into the end of this blood-soaked era and territory that I have set Baldwin and Simon in this, their fifteenth story. I have tried to imagine what Santiago de Compostela in Galicia would have felt to foreign pilgrims like Baldwin and Simon, and how the massive, beautiful fortress and convent of Tomar in Portugal would have felt to a Templar still bereft after the loss of his Order, on finding that the place was all but unchanged even after the persecution of the Knights Templar, who used to own it.
It was immensely satisfying to write this tale, and I only hope you also enjoy it. If you are interested in the Knights Templar, I also urge you to visit the fabulous fortress of the Knights of Christ at Tomar in Portugal.

Mike Jecks
Northern Dartmoor
May 2003