AD 718

Battle of Covadonga

Pelagius's Asturian revolt and election as leader

The famous battle report was written generations later, and its dialogue is built from biblical patriarchs and martyr stories.

What 718 can carry

A modern peer-reviewed reconstruction considers 718 the likeliest year in which Pelagius rebelled in the Asturian mountains against al-Ḥurr, the governor of al-Andalus. It does not securely date the later battle narrative to that same year.

Other proposed dates are 722 and 735–737. The 2019 study favours 718 for the revolt, while noting that 722 was a scholarly reconstruction whose arguments are not conclusive.

No contemporary eighth-century source supplies a day-by-day account of Pelagius's election or a securely dated Battle of Covadonga.

What the late chronicle narrates

The late-ninth-century Chronicle of Alfonso III says people in Asturias gathered and elected Pelagius as their princeps. It then narrates a separate punitive expedition commanded by Alqama, a confrontation at a cave on Mount Auseva, Alqama's death and Bishop Oppa's capture.

That chronicle was composed roughly 160 to 200 years after the alleged events and is heavily shaped by biblical and hagiographic models. Its total of 187,000 enemy troops splits into 124,000 dead and 63,000 fugitives — figures scholars trace to biblical numerology rather than military accounting.

In the same account, stones hurled at the cave reverse direction and strike the attackers.

The dispute among historians

A 2022 scholarly reassessment goes further, disputing whether the conventional Covadonga battle can be established independently at all. One recent reading assigns the Chronicle of 754's documented Pyrenean fighting to ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Qaṭan's 733–734 campaign instead.

Calling the episode the beginning of the Reconquista is a retrospective interpretive framework rather than a contemporary description.

Even Cangas de Onís, later treated as Pelagius's first capital, is absent from the primitive version of the Covadonga story.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 4 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~0718.

What the sources leave uncertain

The event listing merges at least three things: Pelagius’s election or revolt, the Battle of Covadonga, and the later emergence of the Kingdom of Asturias.
The proposed dates include 718, 722 and 735–737. The 2019 study favors 718 for the revolt but notes that 722 was a scholarly reconstruction whose arguments are not conclusive.
The main detailed narrative, the Chronicle of Alfonso III, was composed roughly 160–200 years after the alleged events and is heavily shaped by biblical and hagiographic models.
A 2022 scholarly reassessment goes further and disputes whether the conventional Covadonga battle can be established independently at all. The sheet therefore preserves the historiographical dispute rather than presenting the late chronicle literally.