The Shadow Reconquista, or just Reconquista, was the effort by Christian Lasombra and their mortal allies to put an end to Muslim power in the Iberian Peninsula during the Dark Ages.
The Crimson Curia leads the Christian Lasombra against the Ashirra Lasombra, better known as the Qabilat al-Khayal.
Overview[]
The rapid expansion of the Islamic world led them to conquer almost all of the Iberian peninsula by the early eighth century -- in fact the Muslim forces reached as far as Poitou, where they were repulsed by Charles Martel in 732. The native forces began the reconquest of Iberia almost immediately but made little ground against the unified enemy. Only when the Islamic hegemony collapsed into a collection of petty states in the 11th century did they begin to make progress. The Crusader mentality that swept Europe likewise surfaced in Iberia, but rather than being directed toward the Holy Land, it was channeled into the liberation of "their" lands from Islamic domination. The most notable of the lords of the early Reconquista was Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, better known as El Cid (from the Islamic sayyid or “lord”), who despite his refusal of the Embrace remained a major icon for the region's Lasombra Cainites.
Unusually, though he sought to expand Christian holdings, El Cid worked with the Muslim ruler of Saragossa and occasionally fought against other Christians, demonstrating the complex interactions of politics and religion. This complexity also applies to the supernatural conflicts that mark the Iberian Peninsula. Batini and Hermetic mages can often be found in discussion, though relations between Messianics and the Islamic magi are much more volatile. Several military orders emerged as a result of -- or to support -- a succession of Iberian crusades, most notably the Knights of Santiago, who protected the pilgrimage routes across northern Iberia to Santiago de Compostela. Cainites, seeking to eject the Ashirra from Iberia, founded their own military orders, some intertwined with mortal institutions, others standing alone. Their clashes with the Islamic vampires are perhaps more clear-cut than the mortal wars of reconquest; while the mortals entertain the ideas of incorporating the lands and peoples of their enemy, the Cainites seek their annihilation or ejection. A number of Iberia's vampires, particularly in Portugal, are embroiled in the Cainite Heresy that often works at cross-purposes with Clan Lasombra's Amici Noctis, promoting tensions within the Christian Cainites of Iberia.
By the 1230s, much of Iberia has been returned to native control and, with the exception of expansion by Aragon into the Balearic Islands, the "liberation" of Iberia comes to a virtual standstill for several decades, the Moorish Kingdom of Granada recognizing the overlordship of Castile and working in harmony with its northern neighbors.
The Shadow Reconquista divided clan Lasombra because the ripples created by the conflict extended far outside Iberia, involving even distant partisans. Officially, the Amici Noctis has declared neutrality on any issue relating to the Shadow Reconquista. In practice, this is because they had no power to impose order on the chaos in Iberia.