who invaded the iberian peninsula and lived there for eight centuries
Iberian Peninsula From the 8th–15th centuries, only the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula was part of the Islamic world. It became a center of culture and learning, especially during the Caliphate of Córdoba, which reached its height of its power under the rule of Abd-ar-Rahman III and his successor al-Hakam II.[31] The Muslims, who were initially Arabs and Berbers, included some local converts, the so-called Muladi.[32] The Muslims were referred to by the generic name, Moors[33] The Reconquista gained momentum on c. 718, when the Christian Asturians opposed the Moors. The southern march to push out the Muslims continued for three hundred years[citation needed]. For another four hundred years, only the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula was transformed into a Romance-speaking and Arabic-speaking Muslim land, along with pockets of a large minority of Arabic-speaking Sephardi Jews[citation needed].
Reconquista Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista with a war against the Emirate of Granada that started in 1482 and ended with Granada's surrender on January 2, 1492. The Moors in Castile previously numbered "half a million within the realm." By 1492 some 100,000 had died or been enslaved, 200,000 had emigrated, and 200,000 remained in Castile. Many of the Muslim elite, including Granada's former Emir Muhammad XII, who had been given the area of the Alpujarras mountains as a principality, found life under Christian rule intolerable and emigrated to Tlemcen in North Africa.[34]