RECONQUISTA, by David Warren

By David Warren, The Catholic Thing, October 3, 2025

David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist in Canadian newspapers. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.

Let us begin by remembering Covadonga, the great Christian victory in Spain, A.D. 722, and the beginning of the Reconquista.

This was a decade before the Battle of Tours, when Charles Martel, “the Hammer,” repelled the “unstoppable” Umayyad cavalry, preparing the ground for the Carolingian Empire that saved, or one might say, invented, Europe.

For all of Christendom had been laid waste, including the civilized centers in Egypt and Syria, except for the shrinking “Rome” (Byzantium), and the largely pagan wastelands in the far, far, far, far West. Miracles alone saved France, for instance, from falling prey to the aggression. …