Place · Iberian Peninsula
Toledo
Ancient names: Toletum
City taken by the Christians in 1085, a landmark of the advancing Reconquista.
39.8567°N 4.0245°W · representative coordinate · Pleiades 266066 ↗
Statements linked to this place
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The Spanish caliphate lasted until the early eleventh century, when local rulers again shook off Córdoba's central power. Spain slid into civil war and the caliphate gave way to small principalities, the taifas. Their disunity emboldened the Catholic kings of the north to push back, and by the end of the eleventh century the Reconquista had won back about the northern half of the peninsula, Toledo falling to the Christians in 1085. The book's Map 6.2 shows the Christian reconquest of Muslim Spain (Portuguese, Castilian and Aragonese) and marks Granada as the last Muslim that kingdom on Iberian soil, conquered in 1492.
Community: Jews of Toledo
Toledo, taken in 1085, was the first big triumph of the Christian Reconquista. Even after the Christians made it capital of Castile, its Jews maintained a strongly Arabized culture, and their linguistic skills let their elites take part in cultural and diplomatic exchange between the peninsula's Christian and Muslim states. The cultural give-and-take that lasted for centuries, despite Reconquista warfare and sectarian violence, shows in the synagogue built in Toledo in 1357 at the behest of Samuel ha-Levi Abulafia, a wealthy court Jew who served as treasurer to King Pedro I of Castile.