Colonial Mythmaking: Narrating Conquest and Dispossession in Medieval Iberia and North Africa

Image of a late medieval copy of an Arabic chronicle written in 9th-century Iberia — Folio from a late medieval copy of an Arabic chronicle written in 9th-century Iberia. ‘Abd al-Malik ibn Ḥabīb, Ta’rīkh, MS. Marsh 288 (Bodleian Library, Oxford University).

Emma Snowden

Kingdon Fellow (2024-2025)

Assistant Professor, History, University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Colonial Mythmaking: Narrating Conquest and Dispossession in Medieval Iberia and North Africa

Reconquista, the idea that Christians “reconquered” territory lost to Muslim invaders in the 8th century, has long been a powerful framework for understanding medieval Iberian history. But at the same time that Christian Iberian states like Castile, Aragón, and Portugal were expanding at the expense of peninsular Muslims, they were also at odds with two successive North African states, the Almoravid emirate and the Almohad caliphate, who conquered and ruled southern Iberia in the 11th-13th centuries. I show that this period when Christian Iberian and Muslim North African powers competed for colonial control in southern Iberia was also characterized by increased borrowing and exchange of historical narratives between Muslim and Christian chroniclers. Specifically, I trace the development of mythologized visions of the historical relationship between Iberia and North Africa, arguing that chroniclers adopted and adapted from writers working in different religious, linguistic, and geopolitical contexts in an effort to legitimate contemporary claims to contested territory.

Emma Snowden is a historian of the medieval Mediterranean, focusing in particular on Iberia and North Africa. Her research explores how people from different religious, linguistic, and ethnocultural backgrounds interacted with one another and how this influenced the ways they wrote about their shared past. After completing her PhD at the University of Minnesota in 2021, she spent two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor teaching premodern global history at Hollins University. In fall 2023, she started a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, teaching courses in medieval Islamic and premodern world history. Her articles have appeared in La corónica and Gender & History, and she is currently at work on her first monograph, Colonial Mythmaking: Narrating Conquest and Dispossession in Medieval Iberia and North Africa.

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