Talk:Spain in the Middle Ages

message: Take a look, for example, at this fragment:
    > All the elements of the Spanish people already existed in the Kingdom of the Catholic Goths; the Latinized Celtiberian race, or Hispano-Romans, the Gothic element, and the Catholic faith. These elements, however, were as yet uncombined, and still lacked that which thorough fusion was to make of them one people, with a character and historical destiny of its own. The Muslim invasion encouraged the Goths and Hispano-Romans, in the mountains of the north, became one people with one religion and one national aspiration, to reconquer their Spanish fatherland and make the Cross triumph over the Crescent.[1]
    > Though already morally a unit, the Spanish people were still eight centuries away from political unity, and the Reconquest was begun from four distinct centres. Chief among these four centres was Asturias. The fugitive Goths found a retreat in those mountains where the Romans had never been able to effectively establish their authority; only a few years after the Battle of Guadalete, they gained a victory over Alqama in the portentous Battle of Covadonga. Don Pelayo, or Pelagius, the Gothic chieftain who was victor at Covadonga, was acclaimed king, and took up his residence at Cangas de Onís. His son Favila was killed while hunting, torn to pieces by a bear, and was succeeded by Alfonso I, son-in-law of Don Pelayo, who set about pushing the Reconquest as far as Galicia and Tierra de Campos (the "Gothic Fields" or Campos Góticos).[1]
Not only the wording is clearly biased ("make the Cross triumph over the Crescent"???) and not appropriate of an encyclopedia, but some things said here are downright false. For example: "[the Goths and Hispano-Romans] became one people with one religion and one national aspiration, to reconquer their Spanish fatherland". It is debatable if even today Spaniards are "one people with one national aspiration", but the concepts of "Spain" or "nationality" did not even exist at the time, and wouldn't, for at least a thousand years!
The Christian kingdoms at the time were politically divided (kingdom of Asturias, many counts in the Pyrenees under Frankish authority...), and did not share a common language. And the Iberian peninsula at the time was far from "one people with one religion" since different groups (Christians, Jews, and Muslims) lived in those kingdoms at different levels of integration.
In conclusion, this fragment seems taken out of 1960s nationalist propaganda. The source is clearly biased as well, and there has been extensive historiography written about the Reconquista such that we don't need to resort to the "Catholic Encyclopedia".
After taking another look at it, practically the whole section titled "Medieval Christian Spain" must be reworked. It's not history: it narrates medieval Iberian history as a linear process directed at only one natural and positive outcome ("national unity", as it's called in the article), something that the Reconquista was not. And appealing to the "Providence" to explain a historical outcome is not history, it's, as I said before, propaganda, and goes against the basic principles of the discipline of History.
I recommend deleting the entire section and redirecting whoever wants to know more about it to Reconquista, since it is supposed to narrate the same events, but Reconquista is, at least, not blatant propaganda. Since I do not know what is the standard procedure here, I'll remove the worst parts and do something with the rest later.
Now the article is incomplete, but it's better incompleteness than directly disfiguring history.
    
Jllc (talk) 21:28, 31 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. The content is Francoist propaganda. Carlstak (talk) 15:21, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article is not neutral. Some parts of it are downright Francoist propaganda