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Hueste (in Spanish), hoste (in Portuguese/Galician), host (in Catalan) or ost (in French) was the designation, used in the Iberian Peninsula and France, during the Middle Ages, to refer to a group of armed men under the command of a prelado or rico-hombre, with the objective of executing expeditions or warfare. Huestes were initially drawn from the broader population, but later became more selective as combat skills became more specialized.
The terms, in the several Iberian languages, come from the Latin hoste or hostis, meaning "the enemy".
At the start of the Middle Ages, there was no term in the Iberian Peninsula to signify a group of men with military objectives. The Castilian term hueste appeared in the Siete Partidas of the 13th century, with a meaning similar to the modern Castilian word tropas ("troops"). The word is also exist in Italian (oste) and Romanian (oaste~oasti) languages, however, in the latter, it is considered an archaic word.
The original meaning of the word in the classical Latin era was "enemy," but it changed during the late Latin period. The reason for this change is that from the 5th century onwards, mainly barbarians - aka. the former enemies - served in the Roman Empire's army. This semantic shift occurred in all the modern-day Romance languages.
The Iberian Peninsula, also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in south-western Europe. Separated from the rest of the European landmass by the Pyrenees, it includes the territories of Peninsular Spain and Continental Portugal, comprising most of the region, as well as the tiny adjuncts of Andorra, the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, and, pursuant to the traditional definition of the Pyrenees as the peninsula's northeastern boundary, a small part of France. With an area of approximately 583,254 square kilometres (225,196 sq mi), and a population of roughly 53 million, it is the second-largest European peninsula by area, after the Scandinavian Peninsula.
The Reconquista or the reconquest of al-Andalus was a series of military and cultural campaigns that European Christian kingdoms waged against the Muslim kingdoms following the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Umayyad Caliphate, culminating in the reign of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain. The beginning of the Reconquista is traditionally dated to the Battle of Covadonga, in which an Asturian army achieved the first Christian victory over the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate since the beginning of the military invasion. The Reconquista ended in 1492 with the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada to the Catholic Monarchs.
The term Moor is an exonym first used by Christian Europeans to designate the Muslim populations of the Maghreb, al-Andalus, Sicily and Malta during the Middle Ages. Moors are not a single, distinct or self-defined people. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica observed that the term had "no real ethnological value." Europeans of the Middle Ages and the early modern period variously applied the name to Arabs, Berbers, and Muslim Europeans.
The Spanish language has two names: español and castellano. Spanish speakers from different countries or backgrounds can show a preference for one term or the other, or use them indiscriminately, but political issues or common usage might lead speakers to prefer one term over the other. This article identifies the differences between those terms, the countries or backgrounds that show a preference for one or the other, and the implications the choice of words might have for a native Spanish speaker.
Moriscos were former Muslims and their descendants whom the Catholic Church and Habsburg Spain commanded to forcibly convert to Christianity or face compulsory exile after Spain outlawed Islam. Spain had a sizeable Muslim population, the mudéjars, in the early 16th century.
The Iberian Romance, Ibero-Romance or sometimes Iberian languages are a group of Romance languages that developed on the Iberian Peninsula, an area consisting primarily of Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Andorra and southern France. They are today more commonly separated into West Iberian and Occitano-Romance language groups.
An alcázar, from Arabic al-Qasr, is a type of Islamic castle or palace in Spain built during Muslim rule between the 8th and 15th centuries. They functioned as homes and regional capitals for governmental figures throughout the Umayyad caliphate and later for Christian rulers following the Iberian Reconquista. The term alcázar is also used for many medieval castles built by Christians on earlier Roman, Visigothic or Islamic fortifications and is frequently used as a synonym for castillo or castle. In Latin America there are also several colonial palaces called alcázars.
The Iberians were an ancient people settled in the eastern and southern coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, at least from the 6th century BCE. They are described in Greek and Roman sources. Roman sources also use the term Hispani to refer to the Iberians.
Andalusi Romance, also called Mozarabic or Ajami, refers to the varieties of Ibero-Romance that developed in Al-Andalus, the parts of the medieval Iberian Peninsula under Islamic control. Romance, or vernacular Late Latin, was the common tongue for the great majority of the Iberian population at the time of the Umayyad conquest in the early eighth century, but over the following centuries, it was gradually superseded by Andalusi Arabic as the main spoken language in the Muslim-controlled south. At the same time, as the northern Christian kingdoms pushed south into Al-Andalus, their respective Romance varieties gained ground at the expense of Andalusi Romance as well as Arabic. The final extinction of the former may be estimated to 1300 CE.
Spaniards, or Spanish people, are a people native to Spain. Within Spain, there are a number of national and regional ethnic identities that reflect the country's complex history, including a number of different languages, both indigenous and local linguistic descendants of the Roman-imposed Latin language, of which Spanish is the largest and the only one that is official throughout the whole country.
West Iberian is a branch of the Ibero-Romance languages that includes the Castilian languages, Astur-Leonese, and the descendants of Galician-Portuguese. Pyrenean–Mozarabic may also be included.
Iberism, also known as pan-Iberism or Iberian federalism, is the pan-nationalist ideology supporting a unification of all the territories of the Iberian Peninsula. It mostly encompasses Andorra, Portugal and Spain, but may also include: Gibraltar and territories of France such as Northern Catalonia or the French Basque Country.
In etymology, two or more words in the same language are called doublets or etymological twins or twinlings when they have different phonological forms but the same etymological root. Often, but not always, the words entered the language through different routes. Given that the kinship between words that have the same root and the same meaning is fairly obvious, the term is mostly used to characterize pairs of words that have diverged at least somewhat in meaning. For example, English pyre and fire are doublets with merely associated meanings despite both descending ultimately from the same Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word *péh₂ur.
The language known today as Spanish is derived from spoken Latin, which was brought to the Iberian Peninsula by the Romans after their occupation of the peninsula that started in the late 3rd century BC. Today it is the world's 4th most widely spoken language, after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. Influenced by the peninsular hegemony of Al-Andalus in the early middle ages, Hispano-Romance varieties borrowed substantial lexicon from Arabic. Upon the southward territorial expansion of the Kingdom of Castile, Hispano-Romance norms associated to this polity displaced both Arabic and the Mozarabic romance varieties in the conquered territories, even though the resulting speech also assimilated features from the latter in the process. The first standard written norm of Spanish was brought forward in the 13th century by Alfonso X the Wise, probably drawing from the speech of the upper classes of Toledo. Features associated with the Castilian patterns of Hispano-Romance also spread west and east to the kingdoms of León and Aragón for the rest of the middle ages, owing to the political prestige achieved by the Kingdom of Castile in the peninsular context and to the lesser literary development of their vernacular norms. From the 1560s onward the standard written form followed Madrid's.
In English, Castilian Spanish can mean the variety of Peninsular Spanish spoken in northern and central Spain, the standard form of Spanish, or Spanish from Spain in general. In Spanish, the term castellano (Castilian) can either refer to the Spanish language as a whole, or to the medieval Old Spanish, a predecessor to Early Modern Spanish.
Arabic has had a great influence on other languages, especially in vocabulary. The influence of Arabic has been most profound in those countries visited by Islam or Islamic power.
Castilians are the inhabitants of the historical region of Castile. However, the region's exact limits are disputed.
Canarian Spanish or Canary Island Spanish is a variant of standard Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands by the Canary Islanders.
Hispania was the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula. Under the Roman Republic, Hispania was divided into two provinces: Hispania Citerior and Hispania Ulterior. During the Principate, Hispania Ulterior was divided into two new provinces, Baetica and Lusitania, while Hispania Citerior was renamed Hispania Tarraconensis. Subsequently, the western part of Tarraconensis was split off, initially as Hispania Nova, which was later renamed "Callaecia". From Diocletian's Tetrarchy onwards, the south of the remainder of Tarraconensis was again split off as Carthaginensis, and all of the mainland Hispanic provinces, along with the Balearic Islands and the North African province of Mauretania Tingitana, were later grouped into a civil diocese headed by a vicarius. The name Hispania was also used in the period of Visigothic rule. The modern place names of Spain and Hispaniola are both derived from Hispania.