I think it isn’t so much invalidating the event itself but the name of the event. It was an expansion or a conquest.
I believe what historians mean is that the term was heavily promoted by the fascist regime as an ideological tool to show how unified the peninsula had been for centuries under the Christian faith… Which wasn’t true.
As far as I know and understand (not an historian!) before the conquest of the peninsula by the Muslim and the establishment of Al-Andalus, there was no unified… Anything. The mythos of “Christians getting back what was ours” was a powerful propaganda tool for fascism, so it is fascist rethoric at play more than anything – and (as much as I understood it from recent readings on the matter) politically and socially speaking, this term was not a thing before the 19th century.
First of all, thanks for the clarification at the end. I’ve been targeted and insulted so many times in the old site, I very rarely engage in conversation here unless it is overly… “sanitised.” So I appreciate your words, from a sleep-deprived person to another.
Now, I think we’re pretty much on the same page. I’m not denying that Christian kingdoms expanded south or that power shifted over time. It is more about the suitability of a term that suggests there was this originally unified Christian peninsula that everyone was just “taking back,” but that doesn’t really match how messy and complicated things actually were back in the medieval days.
That whole framing was created much later, and fascists jumping on it doesn’t give it extra points on my and many historians books – but I don’t think it is about policing language, and more about being fair to history.