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Actually, Spain didn't do OK. Foreign knights from Brittany and Cornwall made all the difference. It was a business for many centuries for noble families in both countries to finance a knight, with horses and armor and send him to Spain to join a noble lord to fight in the Reconquista. If he did well he'd get land and his pick of women. If he did badly, he'd be dead and the families would simply send more knights.

For the most part most of the nobles in Spain today have Breton sentences for surnames!

For a variety of reasons most historians give the credit to '"French knights" ~ which simply wasn't the case.

Note, for a very long time the various kingdoms and principalities fronting the Bay of Biscay were what amounted to a regional super power. The differences from their life and that of the people further inland were stark. The modern nation states we know so well were for the most part pastoral or agricultural, peopled mostly by slaves or near slaves ruled over by a dissolute gang of drunken, brawling nobles of unsavory sexual hygiene and behavior.

> Actually, Spain didn't do OK. Foreign knights from Brittany and Cornwall made all the difference.
> For a variety of reasons most historians give the credit to '"French knights" ~ which simply wasn't the case.

Both of those views are news to me. I've always had the impression that the Reconquest was an off-and-on series of battles, fought over centuries, mostly by Spaniards. I see no evidence to the contrary in the Wikipedia account. Do you recall the names of historians who claim that the Spaniards were not responsible?