To die for country, land or faith in Castilian medieval thought

This is an analysis of the concept of patria in the Castilian sources of the period between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. These texts show that, contrary to the opinion of Nieto Soria, patria did not have the same connotations as in other regions of the late medieval west. Until the fifteenth century at least, ‘country' and ‘land' were seen as largely synonymous in Hispanic thought. ‘To die for the land and for the faith' seems to have been the essential ideological justification for those fighting the Muslim enemy.