A hill in the northwest of Murcia is forcing historians to rethink some of the most established ideas about the early centuries of Al-Andalus. Excavations at Cerro de la Virgen de Calasparra have brought to light an early Christian church that not only survived the Muslim conquest of 713, but remained in use for almost two more centuries.
The study (source in Spanish), published in the scientific journal “Salduie” by researchers David Martínez and Rubén Fernández, documents the existence of a church founded around the first half of the 5th century that would have preserved its religious function at least until the 9th century. If this chronology is fully confirmed, it would amount to one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the continuity of Christian worship in the Iberian Peninsula during the first years of Moorish occupation.
The church was identified thanks to various prospecting and excavation campaigns carried out in the area since 2021. Archaeologists describe it as a single-nave building with a tripartite chancel, a layout they see as characteristic of certain “late antique” churches.
“This represents an architectural model with notable parallels in Visigothic churches such as Santa Cristina de Lena”, the authors of the study note, referring to this church in Asturias. They also point out that the sacristies and apses show similarities with some “parochial and episcopal” churches in Syria, a connection that reflects the use of similar architectural models across the Mediterranean in late antiquity.
Much more than a question of timing
Radiocarbon dating places the construction of the building between the years 410 and 440 AD. This is backed up by ceramic and stratigraphic analyses that support the hypothesis of prolonged occupation of the site. The site had already attracted researchers’ attention in previous campaigns, when a striking early Christian bronze lamp was unearthed, shaped like a eucharistic dove and considered at the time an exceptional piece in the European context.
However, the most significant aspect of the new study is not the age of the church, but its survival as such after the Muslim conquest of the Peninsula. Traditionally, many historical accounts have presented the arrival of Moorish troops in the early 8th century as a relatively sharp break with Visigothic traditions. The Calasparra finds, however, sketch a more complex reality.
The researchers argue that there is no evidence that the church was converted into a mosque, nor that it immediately lost its religious function. In fact, they state that “the record, with the presence of containers and cooking pottery, should not be understood as evidence of the desacralisation of the church or its conversion into Islamic dwellings”, the study reads.
“On the contrary, such materials should be analysed as indicators of continued use of the space for community practices that encompassed both worship and resource management”, they argue. This reading is reinforced by the central conclusion of the work: “The typological and stratigraphic study of the ceramics points to the liturgical character of the church enduring well into the 9th century”.
The research also places this phenomenon in the context of the kūra of Tudmīr, the administrative entity that emerged after the pact signed in 713 between the Muslim authorities and the Visigothic nobleman Theodemir. That agreement allowed numerous Christian communities to retain for a time part of their political, religious and economic structures in exchange for paying taxes.
Taxation is in fact another key to understanding the site. Among the materials recovered are scales, weights and other objects linked to economic control and tax collection. One of these weights even bears an Arabic inscription that translates as “justice belongs to God”.
Christian faith, Muslim taxes
The presence of these objects shows that Cerro de la Virgen played a role that went far beyond the strictly religious. Its strategic position, dominating important communication routes and local agricultural resources, turned it into a centre of territorial and economic organisation. In other words, the Christian community that used the church also took part in the fiscal mechanisms of the new Andalusi power.
The authors sum up this situation with a blunt statement: “The hill was a Christian community subjected to the taxes of the Islamic state and obliged to integrate into regional fiscal and commercial circuits”.
For the researchers, the case of Calasparra helps to shed light on how the islamisation of peninsular society took place. Far from an immediate replacement of populations or institutions, the process seems to have been marked by decades of adaptation, coexistence and gradual transformation.
As they explain, the Christian population “gradually found itself caught between two converging dynamics: on the one hand, the growing capacity of the Andalusi state to reorder the territory and ensure fiscal extraction; on the other, islamisation also operated as a pathway to social and legal accommodation”.
The study concludes that the disappearance of these Christian communities did not necessarily stem from episodes of destruction or expulsion at the hands of the Moors, but from a slow process of integration into the new Andalusi society.
“The ecclesiastical hierarchy proved unable to sustain the favourable agreements reached at the time of the conquest, while the increasing centralisation and efficiency of fiscal structures and the urban pull of Córdoba eroded the productive base of churches, monasteries and Christian elites”, Martínez and Fernández write in their study.
More than 13 centuries later, the ruins of Cerro de la Virgen thus offer a new window onto one of the most decisive periods in the history of the Iberian Peninsula. And they suggest that the transition between the Visigothic world and Al-Andalus was, at least in some regions, far more gradual, negotiated and complex than had been taken for granted for decades.