The Reconquista was a large scale genocidal war with millions dead?

Try to find a single reliable source supporting this claim. You might be surprised to find that it doesn't exist, and that it's also an example of citogenesis. [1] This is another perfect example of what I'm talking about. After Muslim armies invaded the Iberian Peninsula they created a system of government with a tiny minority of Arabs at the top with everybody else treated as distant second class citizens. They started trying to force people to convert and imposed taxes and other penalties on those who did not.

The predictable rebellions against this were the start of the Reconquista. It spanned many hundreds of years but was almost all extremely small scale. And they weren't driving anybody out in large numbers. The Arab and Berber tribes never engaged in mass migration or anything like that. Iberia remained overwhelmingly native Iberian with a tiny Arab elite. The same Spaniards and Portuguese you know of today are the ones that were there under Islamic rule as well.

[1] - https://xkcd.com/978/

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jacobolus 2 days ago | parent [-]

How many do you think were killed then, over those centuries of conflict? Several hundred thousand? What if we include deaths due to famine? How many were forced to migrate? Also several hundred thousand?

As I said, I'm not an expert; and you are right, it's not easy to find good sources for numbers about this. As far as I can tell were quite a few individual events with tens of thousands of people killed at a time. There were hundreds of recorded major battles.

	▲	somenameforme a day ago \| parent [-]
		The Reconquista lasted more than 700 years and the number of people killed in any given conflict is unknown, with estimates varying by orders of magnitude. Both sides tended to exaggerate casualties, including their own. It was a defacto holy war, and so large casualties on your side could be seen as a sign of great martyrdom and piety, while inflicting heavily casualties on the enemy was also framed as having God's favor - heads I win, tails you lose. The only thing that's entirely clear is that it was very small scale for the overwhelming majority of the conflict, punctuated by a very small handful of "large" battles that would generally be considered moderate to small scale in modern times. There were certainly not hundreds of major battles. So I don't think anybody knows exactly how many were killed other than 'not that many.' Put another way - over some 700 years it's certain that far fewer people died than e.g. one large modern battle like the Battle of Stalingrad. The greatest legacy of the era was defining, or at least solidifying, the character of Spain/Portugal and the more militant nature of Catholicism at the time. So for some context, Columbus would set sail for the New World just months after Grenada finally fell!