La Convivencia

Convivencia (Spanish for "living together") is a term used by scholar Américo Castro to describe a period in Spanish history from the Muslim Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the 700s to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain. It claims that in the different Moorish Iberian kingdoms, the Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in relative peace. This idea suggests that medieval Spain was a place of religious tolerance and cultural exchange-very different from later periods when only Catholicism was allowed.

However, some scholars have challenged the historicity of the above view of intercultural harmony, depicting it as a myth, and claiming that it is ahistorical. According to The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, "Critics charge that [the term 'convivencia'] too often describes an idealized view of multi-faith harmony and symbiosis, while supporters retort that such a characterization is a distortion of the complex interactions they seek to understand."