Spain

By extending his rule over all the Christian states except Catalonia, Sancho III made an apparent advance toward the unification of Christian Spain. By choosing to treat his dominions as a private patrimony to be divided among his sons, however, he turned away from the Leonese tradition of a united, indivisible kingdom. He assigned the kingdom of Navarre to García III (1035–54); Castile to Ferdinand I (1035–65); and Aragon to Ramiro I (1035–63), who annexed Sobrarbe and Ribagorza in 1045 after the murder of a fourth brother, Gonzalo. As each of the brothers assumed the title king, Castile and Aragon thenceforward were regarded as kingdoms. Bermudo III recovered León after Sancho III’s death, but Ferdinand I defeated and killed him in 1037. Taking possession of the kingdom of León, he also assumed the imperial title. During the ensuing 30 years Ferdinand sought hegemony over all of Spain, triumphing over his brothers on the battlefield, capturing Coimbra, and reducing the Muslim rulers (reyes de taifas) of Toledo (Ṭulayṭulah), Sevilla (Ishbīliya), and Badajoz (Baṭalyaws) to tributary status.

Meanwhile, Count Ramon Berenguer I of Barcelona (1035–76) was actively fostering Catalan interests and relationships among the lords of Languedoc in southern France. He also published the earliest legal texts included in the compilation of Catalan law later known as the Usatges de Barcelona (“Usages of Barcelona”).

Adhering to his father’s practice, just before his death Ferdinand I divided his realms between his sons: Sancho II (1065–72) received Castile, and Alfonso VI (1065–1109) obtained León. However, the two brothers quarreled, and, following Sancho’s murder in 1072, Alfonso VI assumed the kingship of both Castile and León. Before acknowledging him as their monarch, the Castilian nobility forced Alfonso to swear that he had not caused his brother’s death. Among Alfonso’s new Castilian vassals was Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known to history as El Cid Campeador (from the Arabic sīdī, meaning “lord”). Driven into exile by jealousies at court, he entered the service of the Muslim king of Zaragoza and later provided protection for the king of Valencia.

At first Alfonso VI took advantage of the disunity among the kingdoms of Islamic Spain to demand tribute from them, but he eventually determined to subjugate them. The surrender of Toledo in 1085 not only extended his frontiers to the Tagus River but also had great symbolic value. Possession of Toledo, the ancient seat of the Visigothic monarchy, enhanced Alfonso’s claims to peninsular supremacy, which he expressed when he styled himself “Emperor of Toledo” as well as “Emperor of Spain.” According to Muslim sources, he described himself as “Emperor of the Two Religions,” thus underscoring his dominion over both Christians and Muslims. Thousands of Muslims and Jews, who in earlier times usually had retreated southward rather than submit to Christian rule, elected to remain within his kingdom. Also living in Toledo and the vicinity were many Mozarabs, or Arabic-speaking Christians. In succeeding generations the interaction among these differing religious and cultural traditions became especially tense.

Frightened by the fall of Toledo, the other Muslim kings of Spain appealed for help to the Almoravids of Morocco, an ascetic Islamic sect of Amazigh (Berber) zealots. After routing Alfonso’s army at Zalacca (Al-Zallāqah) in 1086, the Almoravids also overran Islamic Spain’s petty kingdoms. By restoring Islamic Spain’s unity, the Almoravids halted any further progress in the Reconquista and forced Alfonso to remain on the defensive thereafter. Although El Cid successfully repulsed the Almoravid attack on Valencia, his followers had to abandon the city after his death in 1099. Subsequently all of eastern Spain as far north as Zaragoza came under Almoravid domination.

As Christians and Muslims contended for control of the peninsula, steadily increasing northern European influences emphasized the links of Christian Spain with the wider world of Christendom. The leading proponent of the general reform of the church, Pope Gregory VII (1073–85), demanded liturgical uniformity by requiring the acceptance of the Roman liturgy in place of the native Mozarabic rite that dated to earliest times. He also claimed papal sovereignty over Spain, but, when the Spanish rulers ignored him, he did not pursue the issue. While French monks and clerics found opportunities for ecclesiastical advancement in Spain, numerous French knights came to take part in the wars of the Reconquista. The most fortunate among them, the cousins Raymond and Henry of Burgundy, married Alfonso VI’s daughters, Urraca and Teresa, and thereby became the ancestors of the dynasties that governed León and Portugal until the late 14th century.

After succeeding her father, Urraca (1109–26), then widowed, married Alfonso I (the Battler), who served as the king of Aragon and Navarre from 1104–34. The tension and conflict that plagued their marriage from the beginning finally caused Alfonso I to withdraw to Aragon. Alfonso VII (1126–57), Urraca’s son by Raymond of Burgundy, restored the prestige of the Leonese monarchy. His coronation as emperor—the first and last imperial coronation in Spain—in the cathedral of León in 1135 was intended to assert Leonese claims to ascendancy throughout Spain; however, the newly formed federation of Aragon and Catalonia and the newly independent kingdom of Portugal soon offered a daunting challenge to Leonese predominance.

After dissolving his marriage to Urraca, Alfonso I extended his frontiers to the Ebro River by seizing Zaragoza in 1118. Then, marching directly into the heart of Islamic Spain, he liberated the Mozarabs of Granada (Gharnāṭah) and settled them in Aragon. Thereafter, the Mozarabic population left in Islamic Spain appears to have been minimal. Before he died, Alfonso willed his realms to the military orders of the Hospitallers (Knights of Malta) and Templars and to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, but his people rejected this arrangement. The Navarrese, who had been ruled by the kings of Aragon since 1076, chose their own monarch, García IV Ramírez (1134–50), and the Aragonese asked Ramiro II (1134–37), the deceased king’s brother, to leave the monastic life and accept the kingship. After marrying and fathering a child, Petronila, who could inherit the kingdom, Ramiro returned to his monastery. Petronila was betrothed in 1137 to Count Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona (1131–62), who assumed responsibility for the governance of the kingdom. Alfonso II (1162–96), the child of this marriage, united under his rule the kingdom of Aragon and the county of Barcelona. Usually referred to as the Crown of Aragon, the federation of the kingdom and the county endured until the Middle Ages despite countless vicissitudes and disparate linguistic and cultural traditions. Catalonia soon emerged as a maritime power in the Mediterranean, while Aragon, an inland kingdom with an agricultural and pastoral economy, was controlled by a landed aristocracy. Both regions retained their characteristic customs and laws and vigorously opposed all efforts at assimilation.

The county of Portugal—originally part of the kingdom of León—which Alfonso VI had assigned to Teresa and Henry of Burgundy, also began to move from autonomy to independence. Teresa and Henry’s son, Afonso I Henriques (1128–85), repudiated Leonese suzerainty and took the royal title about 1139. By becoming a papal vassal and promising to pay a yearly tribute, he hoped to safeguard himself against Leonese reprisals. Only in 1179 did the pope formally address him as king.

Meanwhile, internal dissension and the rise of the Almohads, a new Islamic Amazigh confederation based in Morocco, led to the disintegration of the Almoravid empire. The Christian rulers, seizing the opportunity offered by civil war among the Muslims, raided at will throughout Islamic Spain and conquered some important places. Afonso I, aided by a fleet of Crusaders from northern Europe, captured Lisbon in 1147, while Alfonso VII and Ramón Berenguer IV, supported by a fleet from Pisa (Italy), seized the great seaport of Almería (Al-Marīyah) on the southeastern coast. The fall of Tortosa (Ṭurṭūshah) and Lérida (Lāridah) to the count of Barcelona in the next year advanced the county’s frontier to the mouth of the Ebro and concluded the expansion of Catalonia. Nevertheless, the Almohads, after crushing the Almoravids, invaded the peninsula and recovered Almería in 1157. By subjugating all of Islamic Spain, the Almohads were effectively able to halt any further Christian advance. The rise of Castile and Aragon

Alfonso VII subverted the idea of a Leonese empire, and its implied aspiration to dominion over a unified peninsula, by the division of his kingdom between his sons: Sancho III (1157–58) received Castile and Ferdinand II (1157–88) received León. Although the Christians remained on the defensive in the face of Almohad power, Alfonso VIII of Castile (1158–1214) and Alfonso II of Aragon concluded a treaty in 1179 apportioning their expected conquest of Islamic Spain between them. Castile retained the right of reconquest to Andalusia and Murcia (Mursīyah), while Aragon claimed Valencia. Nevertheless, Alfonso VIII’s efforts to dominate the other Christian rulers provoked contention and warfare and thwarted any concerted effort against the Almohads. Thus, in 1195 the king of Castile suffered a disastrous defeat by the Almohads at Alarcos (Al-Arak), south of Toledo. The other Christian monarchs, acknowledging that the Almohads threatened them all, came to terms with Castile. With the collaboration of Sancho VII of Navarre (1194–1234) and Peter II of Aragon (1196–1213) and Portuguese and Leonese troops, in 1212 Alfonso VIII triumphed over the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa (Al-ʿIqāb). The victory by the Christian forces was significant, marking the beginning of the end of the Almohad empire and opening Andalusia to the Christians.

While the kings of Aragon took an active role in the Reconquista, as counts of Barcelona they also had important relationships in southern France, where several lords were their vassals. When Pope Innocent III proclaimed a Crusade to check the spread of the Albigensian heresy throughout that area, Peter II, though no friend of the heretics, realized that his feudal rights and interests there were endangered by the arrival of northern French knights. In 1213 Peter was defeated and killed by the Crusading army at Muret after he went to the aid of his brother-in-law, the count of Toulouse. In the generation after his death, Catalan ambition and power were steadily curtailed in southern France.

As the Almohad empire fell apart in the second quarter of the 13th century, the Christian rulers reconquered nearly all of Spain. James I of Aragon (1213–76) utilized Catalan naval power in 1229 to conquer the kingdom of Majorca (Mayūrqah), the first significant step in Catalan expansion in the Mediterranean. The subjugation of the kingdom of Valencia was more difficult, especially as James was diverted temporarily by the expectation of acquiring Navarre. When Sancho VII died without children, the people of Navarre accepted his nephew, Count Theobald of Champagne (1234–53), as their king. Thereafter, French interest in Navarre steadily increased. Forced to give up his aspirations there, James I resumed the war against the Muslims and captured Valencia in 1238, bringing thousands of Muslims under his rule.

Meanwhile, Alfonso IX of León (1188–1230) drove southward to the Guadiana River (Wadi Ānā) and captured Mérida (Māridah) and Badajoz in 1230, clearing the way to Sevilla. When he died, his son Ferdinand III, already king of Castile (1217–52) by reason of inheritance from his mother, Berenguela, a daughter of Alfonso VIII, succeeded him as king of León. Henceforth Castile and León were permanently united. Using the combined resources of the two kingdoms, Ferdinand conquered Cordoba in 1236, Murcia in 1243, Jaén (Jayyān) in 1246, and Sevilla in 1248. The Muslims retained only the kingdom of Granada, whose rulers were obliged to pay an annual tribute to Castile. As a vassal kingdom, Granada by itself was not a threat, but, when supported by the Muslims of Morocco, this last outpost of Islamic power in Spain caused great difficulty for the Christians. Society, economy, and culture

The development of Christian society and culture in the first 300 years after the Islamic conquest was slow, but major changes occurred more quickly in the 12th and 13th centuries. The size of the population grew, communication with northern Europe intensified, commerce and urban life gained in importance, and the Reconquista was executed with greater success than ever.

By the middle of the 13th century, the kingdoms of Castile-León, Aragon-Catalonia, Navarre, and Portugal reached the frontiers that they would keep, with minimal alteration, until the end of the Middle Ages. As a confederation of the kingdoms of Aragon, Valencia, and Majorca and the principality of Catalonia, the Crown of Aragon had a distinctive character among the Christian states.

The idea of hereditary succession gained early acceptance, but the vestiges of election could still be detected in the acclamation of a new king. Following Visigothic custom, the king occasionally was anointed and crowned. Peter II of Aragon, who received his crown in Rome from the pope, became a papal vassal and held his kingdom as a papal fief. The principal officials of the royal household were the chancellor, usually an ecclesiastic, who was responsible for the issuance of royal letters and the preservation of records; the mayordomo, a magnate, who supervised the household and the royal domain; and the alférez (Catalan: senyaler), also a magnate, who organized and directed the army under the king’s command. The merinos or, later, adelantados, who functioned as provincial governors in Castile, were also drawn from the nobility. The Catalan counties initially were part of the Carolingian empire, but the various counts gradually achieved independence. The counts of Barcelona had gained an effective sovereignty over all of Catalonia by the 11th century. Under the count’s direction, vicars (vegueres) and bailiffs (batlles), responsible respectively for justice and taxes, administered the Catalan territorial subdivisions. The privilege of immunity granted to bishops, magnates, monasteries, and military orders prohibited royal officials from dispensing justice or levying taxes in immune lands, except in cases of negligence. The immunities of the archbishop of Compostela in Galicia and those of the military orders south of Toledo were among the most important.

Feudal ideas emphasizing private and personal relationships exerted great influence on the governmental and military organization of the Christian kingdoms—most fully in Catalonia, where French influence was strong. As vassals holding fiefs of the count of Barcelona, the Catalan nobles owed him military and court service, and they often had vassals of their own. In the western states, royal vassals usually held land in full ownership rather than in fief. As vassals of the king or count, the magnates, called ricos hombres (i.e., rich or powerful men) in the west and barones in Catalonia, functioned as his chief counselors and provided the bulk of the royal military forces. Nobles of the second rank, known variously as infanzones, caballeros, or cavallers, generally were vassals of the magnates.

Agriculture and pasturage were the principal sources of wealth in the Christian states, as the king, landlords, and nobles gained their income primarily through the exploitation of landed property. Peasants dwelling on noble estates cultivated the soil and owed various rents and services to their lords. The serfs (solariegos in Castile, payeses de remensa in Catalonia), who were effectively bound to the land, bore the heaviest burden. The rights (the so-called “evil usages”) of Catalan lords were such that they could abuse their serfs at will. Castilian peasants living on lands known as behetrías were free to choose their lord and to change their allegiance whenever they wished, but their right to do so was challenged in the 13th century. Life on the frontier attracted many peasants because, while it exposed them to risk and adventure, it also promised freedom. Like pioneers in all ages, they developed a strong sense of personal worth and independence.

The progress of the Reconquista made possible the colonization of the Duero valley, where fortified urban centres (concejos), each surrounded by a broad dependent rural area, were established. Royal charters (fueros) set down the rights and obligations of the settlers and allowed them to choose their own magistrates (alcaldes) and to govern themselves. The basis of the municipal economy was sheep and cattle raising and the booty won by the urban militia in the wars of the Reconquista. Industry and commerce were of secondary importance. The towns of Aragon and Catalonia had little autonomy, but some Catalan towns began to develop as important mercantile centres. The urban population increased significantly, and trade and industry began to develop substantially following the conquest of the Islamic cities of Toledo, Zaragoza, Lisbon, Cordova, Valencia, and Sevilla. Increasing numbers of craftsmen tried to protect their interests by organizing guilds. Merchants who made their living by large-scale commercial activity based on the use of money as a medium of exchange and credit instruments also became more numerous. A native overseas carrying trade began to develop as a result of the growth of shipbuilding at Santander, Barcelona, and other seaports.

Many thousands of Muslims and Jews came under Christian rule as a result of the Reconquista. The Mudéjares, as subject Muslims were called, were located mainly in country areas, but important Muslim quarters were also found in the towns. Jews, who were chiefly urban dwellers, engaged in trade and moneylending and often contracted to collect royal taxes. Both Muslims and Jews were required to pay a regular tribute, but otherwise they were allowed to worship freely and to administer their own affairs according to Islamic or Judaic law. On occasion, however, Christians assaulted their Jewish neighbours.

The increasing administrative, military, and economic importance of the towns eventually led the crown to summon municipal representatives to attend the royal council along with prelates and magnates. Alfonso IX convened the first such council (curia plena) at León in 1188, but similar assemblies appeared in the other states early in the 13th century. Later known as the Cortes, these assemblies performed a variety of functions, one of the most important of which was to give consent to the levy of extraordinary taxes necessitated by the king’s ever-increasing financial obligations as royal activities and responsibilities steadily expanded. The growth of parliamentary institutions was a common European phenomenon, though it is noteworthy that it occurred at such an early date in the peninsular kingdoms.

Another consequence of the Reconquista was the restoration of former bishoprics or the expansion of existing ones. The five metropolitan sees of Toledo (which claimed the primacy), Tarragona, Braga, Compostela, and Sevilla formed the principal ecclesiastical divisions in Spain. From the 12th century the papacy intervened more frequently in peninsular affairs. The reforms of the French monasteries of Cluny and Citeaux had a profound effect on monastic life in the 11th and 12th centuries. The mendicant orders of Franciscans and Dominicans (the latter founded by the Spaniard Domingo de Guzmán) established themselves in the peninsula in the early 13th century. The military orders of the Templars and the Hospitallers, both founded in the Holy Land, came to Spain in the 12th century, but in the second half of that century several native orders were organized—Calatrava, Alcántara, Santiago, and Avis. The knights followed a modified form of the monastic life, but they also played an increasingly important role in the military struggle against Islam.

Ancient cultural traditions were preserved by the clergy, who also authored the few books that have survived from the early centuries of the Reconquista. In the 8th century Bishops Elipandus of Toledo and Felix of Urgel advocated the teachings of Adoptionism, a Christian heresy that maintained that Christ in his humanity was the adopted son of God. The dispute over this teaching gave rise to several polemical works and brought condemnations from Charlemagne and his court and Popes Adrian I and Leo III. In the 9th century Eulogius and Alvarus of Córdoba produced many books defending their fellow Mozarabic Christians who had blasphemed Muhammad publicly in Córdoba and were then martyred by the Muslims of the city. Christians in Spain, however, not only involved themselves in writing polemics against Islam but participated in the important work of translating the Qurʾān and other Islamic religious texts in the 12th century for Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny. Early in the 13th century Alfonso VIII of Castile and Alfonso IX of León founded the Universities of Palencia and Salamanca, respectively, for the study of theology, philosophy, and Roman and canon law. Although Palencia ceased instruction by the middle of the century, Salamanca eventually attained international renown. The appearance in the mid-12th century of the first great epic in the Castilian tongue, Poema del Cid (The Poem of the Cid), signaled the beginning of the development of a significant vernacular literature. Although the literary production of Spanish authors was still limited, through his historical works Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo (died 1247), fixed the standard for Spanish historiography for centuries to come. Christian Spain, c. 1260–1479 Castile and León, 1252–1479

As the kings of Castile endeavoured to strengthen monarchical power in the late medieval centuries, they encountered a stiff challenge from the nobility, who tried to use the institutions of government for their own interests. The struggle for power commenced during the reign of Alfonso X (the Learned, 1252–84), who is perhaps best known for the literary and scientific achievements under his direction by scholars whom he summoned to his court. His aim to gain control of the Moroccan ports giving access to the Iberian Peninsula provoked a revolt in 1264–66 by the Mudéjares of Andalusia and Murcia, abetted by the king of Granada. Elected Holy Roman emperor in 1257, Alfonso spent the next 17 years engaged in a vain effort to counter a rival claimant and to secure papal acceptance. His expenditure of great sums of money on this enterprise and his innovations in taxation and legislation eventually brought about a grave challenge to his rule.

Alfonso concluded that a uniform royal law was necessary to overcome the multiplicity and diversity of local and regional laws, such as the municipal fueros and the Liber Judiciorum used in León (which Ferdinand III had translated into Castilian as the Fuero Juzgo). The Espéculo, a code of law intended for use in the royal court, and the Fuero Real, a code of municipal law meant for the towns of Castile and Extremadura, were drawn up and likely promulgated in 1254. Between 1256 and 1265 royal jurists, drawing heavily on Roman law, revised and amplified the Espéculo, which in its new form came to be known as the Siete Partidas (Seven Divisions). The nobles and the towns objected to these changes in the law and in 1272 compelled the king to confirm their traditional laws and customs. To underscore their opposition to royal policy, the magnates went into exile in Granada for two years. Following this setback, the pope in 1274 refused to recognize Alfonso’s imperial claims, and the king’s eldest son and heir, Fernando de la Cerda, died in 1275 while hastening to repel a Moroccan invasion. A dispute over the succession then ensued between the adherents of Fernando de la Cerda’s son, Alfonso, and the king’s second son, Sancho. Although the king recognized Sancho, their relationship deteriorated, in part because Alfonso X’s ill health rendered him less able to carry out his duties and caused him to act arbitrarily. In 1282 an assembly of nobles, prelates, and townsmen transferred the responsibilities of government from the king to Sancho. While the Muslims continued to threaten the kingdom externally, Castile was torn apart by civil war until the king’s death.

During the reign of Sancho IV (1284–95), domestic and foreign supporters of his nephew maintained a steady opposition. At the same time, Sancho had to defend the realm against another Muslim invasion from Morocco. Thus began a long struggle to control the Strait of Gibraltar and to close that invasion route. During the minority of Ferdinand IV (1295–1312), new efforts were made in favour of Alfonso de la Cerda, but in 1304 he renounced all claims to any portion of the Crown of Castile. Although the king seized Gibraltar in 1309, the Muslims regained possession a quarter century later. The minority of Alfonso XI (1312–50) witnessed new disorders, but when Alfonso reached adulthood he brutally crushed his enemies among the nobility. Aided by his Christian neighbours, he gained a great triumph over the allied Islamic forces from Granada and Morocco at the Salado River in 1340 and thus ended for good all Moroccan attempts to establish a base in Spain. He captured Algeciras (Al-Jazīrah al-Khaḍrāʾ) four years later, but he was unable to take the nearby fortress of Gibraltar because he fell victim to the Black Death.

During the reign of Peter the Cruel (1350–69), the monarchy and the nobility again came into violent conflict. Challenging the king’s right to rule, his half brother, Henry of Trastámara, an illegitimate son of Alfonso XI, appealed to France for support. Backed by a mercenary army commanded by the Frenchman Bertrand du Guesclin, Henry was able to eject Peter from the kingdom in 1366. In order to recover his throne, the king enlisted the help of Edward, prince of Wales, and a combined Anglo-Castilian army defeated Henry of Trastámara at Nájera in 1367. After Edward’s withdrawal, however, Henry and du Guesclin defeated and killed Peter at Montiel in 1369.

As the first of the Trastámara dynasty, Henry II (1369–79) had to maintain his rights to the throne against his peninsular neighbours and domestic enemies. He eventually overcame his opponents and was even able to assist his French allies by providing a fleet to attack English shipping. As an ally of France, Henry’s son John I (1379–90) acknowledged the Avignonese pope during the Great Schism. The Trastámara family’s aspirations to acquire the other peninsular kingdoms were first manifested when John claimed Portugal by right of marriage. His invasion in 1385 roused the Portuguese national spirit, and he suffered a grievous defeat at Aljubarrota. Then John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, claiming the Castilian throne as the husband of Peter I’s daughter, landed in Galicia in 1386. Although John was aided by the Portuguese, he was unsuccessful and came to terms in 1388. The marriage of his daughter Catherine to Henry III, John I’s oldest son, ended the hostility between the two branches of the Castilian royal family.

The nobility took advantage of the minority of Henry III (1390–1406) to pursue their own gain at royal expense, but, once the king reached adult age, he strongly asserted his power. However, royal prestige and authority suffered terribly during the long reign of his son, John II (1406–54). The king’s uncle, Fernando de Antequera, who acted as regent, maintained stability until he was elected king of Aragon in 1412. John II, a weak and disinterested monarch, allowed Luna" class="md-crosslink">Álvaro de Luna, the royal favourite, to dominate him and to direct royal policy. Fernando’s sons, Henry and John of Navarre, tried to gain control of the king and the organs of government, but Luna successfully thwarted their schemes. Luna retained effective authority during most of the reign, but in 1453 he incurred the king’s wrath and was summarily executed.

The nobles continued to engage in an intense struggle for influence and power in the reign of Henry IV (1454–74). Although Juan Pacheco, marqués de Villena, initially gained ascendancy over the king, others vied for royal favour. The nobles, alleging Henry’s impotence, refused to accept the legitimacy of the infanta Joan, who they declared was the child of the queen and of the king’s most recent favourite, Beltrán de la Cueva. Because of that account, the young girl was derided as “La Beltraneja.” Henry IV repudiated her and recognized his sister Isabella as heir to the throne in the Pact of Los Toros de Guisando in 1468. Although Villena and his supporters hoped to control Isabella, they soon learned that they could not. Without first seeking her brother’s consent as she had promised, in 1469 Isabella married Ferdinand, son and heir of John II of Aragon. An angry Henry IV denounced her and tried to exclude her from the succession, but when he died she was proclaimed Queen Isabella I (1474–1504). Afonso V of Portugal, who was betrothed to Joan, invaded Castile on her behalf, but in 1479 Joan abandoned her rights to the throne. Ferdinand’s accession to the Aragonese throne in the same year brought about a personal union of Aragon and Castile. Castilian institutions, society, and culture

In the 13th century the recovery of the idea of the state, as reflected in Roman law and Aristotle’s Politics, profoundly influenced the development of the Castilian monarchy. As the one primarily responsible for maintaining the well-being of the state, the king (God’s vicar on earth, according to the Siete Partidas and numerous other medieval texts) tended to concentrate power in his own hands. The royal bureaucracy, now largely directed by jurists, attempted to strengthen royal authority in every way. Although contemporaries were wary of Roman law, its influence continually expanded. The place of Roman law and legal procedure in the courts was secured when Alfonso XI promulgated the Ordenamiento de Alcalá in 1348. Henry II reorganized the royal tribunal (audiencia), but its development was not completed until the end of the Middle Ages. In the pursuit of greater centralization of power, the crown took advantage of the persistent factionalism in the towns to intervene frequently in municipal administration. The lower classes were denied any civic role, as the urban knights, a non-noble aristocracy, controlled town affairs. The knights also struggled to win noble status for themselves, with its accompanying exemption from taxation. The crown dispatched corregidores (governors) to the towns to restrain violence and to supplant local governmental officials. Although this was initially a temporary expedient, by the 15th century it had become a permanent institution.

Both the nobility and the representative assembly of the municipalities, the Cortes, challenged the royal inclination toward absolutism. In 1386 John I, responding to the demands of the Cortes, included representatives of the three estates (consisting of the nobility, the church, and the towns) in the royal council (consejo real) where they could regularly monitor royal policy. That plan did not succeed, because in the 15th century the nobility came to dominate the council and used it to further their own interests. Throughout the realm the power and influence of the magnates continued to grow, as they were entrusted with various territorial administrative responsibilities, including the posts of adelantado mayor (governor) in Castile, Murcia, and Andalusia. In order to retain their favour, the Trastámara kings granted them vast territorial lordships as well as lordships over some of the principal municipalities. This was a serious loss for the monarchy, as the cities and towns had long been the chief supporters of royal authority. As a mentality favourable to the aristocracy came to the fore in the 15th century, the magnates became ever more brazen in arrogating royal rights to themselves.

The role of the Cortes in the political life of the kingdom was especially important from about 1250 to 1350 and again during the reigns of Henry I and John I, who hoped to use it to strengthen their hold on the throne. The Cortes was convened frequently to consent to taxation (servicio) for fixed terms and for specific purposes. Both Ferdinand IV and Alfonso XI explicitly stated that they would not levy an extraordinary tax without the consent of the Cortes, and John I agreed to let the Cortes audit his accounts. The monarch often enacted ordinances in the Cortes, and if he accepted petitions presented by that body, they became the law of the land. John II and Henry IV curtailed the role of the Cortes and abused the rights that it had gained in the 14th century. At times the crown appointed municipal procurators and summoned fewer and fewer towns, so that eventually only 18 were called to represent the entire realm. Indeed, many towns held in lordship by the magnates, who claimed to speak for them, lost their right to attend the Cortes.

The predominance of agriculture and pasturage in the Castilian economy continued. As the Reconquista opened vast pasturelands in Extremadura and Andalusia, sheep and cattle grazing acquired new importance. The Mesta, a kingdomwide organization of sheep owners chartered originally by Alfonso X, had great economic and political power. Although the manufacture of woolen cloth became important in the towns, the urban middle class was not especially strong, and an effective guild organization never really matured. Forged during the Reconquista, the urban aristocracy’s military mentality impeded its participation in trade and crafts. While the ports of the Bay of Biscay maintained a substantial trade with England, Flanders, France, and Portugal, the Genoese, who were solidly established at Sevilla, the chief southern port, had a great share in the overseas trade originating there.

Following the outbreak of the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century, the population declined sharply, and there was serious social and economic unrest. In 1351 Peter I (the Cruel) tried to guarantee stability by enacting the Ordenamiento de Menestrales, which required workers to accept the same wages as before the plague. Owing to popular agitation, a great pogrom against the Jews erupted in 1391 and rapidly spread throughout the peninsula. Forced to choose Christianity or death, many Jews converted. A number of these conversos, freed of earlier legal restraints, now attained prominence in public life, but they were always suspected of continuing privately to observe Jewish practices. The demand that they demonstrate limpieza de sangre—i.e., that their ancestry was unsullied by Jewish or Muslim blood—was intended to exclude them from any important place in government or the church.

The cultural integration of Castile into western Europe was now complete. The development of Castilian as a literary language owed much to Alfonso X, whose stimulus to learning has been described as having prompted an intellectual renaissance. Under his patronage both the General estoria (“General History”) and the Estoria de Espanna (“History of Spain”) were written; astronomical tables were arranged, and translations of Arabic scientific works were undertaken; and the Siete Partidas was compiled. The Cantigas de Santa María (“Songs to the Virgin”) is a collection of more than 400 poems written in Galician, a language considered appropriate for lyric poetry; the poems are generally assumed to be the work of Alfonso himself, and many of them constitute a royal autobiography. Alfonso’s nephew, Don Juan Manuel (died 1348), authored many works, including El Conde Lucanor; o, el libro de Patronio (1328-35; “Count Lucanor; or, The Book of Patronius”, a collection of fables and folk tales with a didactic intent) and the Libro de los estados (a treatise on social classes). Juan Ruiz, the archpriest of Hita (died c. 1350) and one of the great medieval poets, took a satirical look at love; his Libro de buen amor (1330; expanded 1343; Book of Good Love) intersperses ribald and comic poems of love with beautiful hymns in praise of the Virgin Mary. The history of this period was recorded in a succession of royal chronicles. Pedro López de Ayala (died 1407), a brilliant writer who searched for motives and realized the importance of social and institutional developments, wrote excellent chronicles of Peter I, Henry II, John I, and Henry III. During the reign of John II, who was a patron of poets and scholars, the Italian Renaissance influenced Castilian writers and thinkers, including the marqués de Santillana (died 1458), whose lyric poems have great beauty; Jorge Manrique (died 1479), who reflected on the vanities of the world in the Coplas por la muerte de su padre (Verses on the Death of His Father); and Fernán Pérez de Guzmán (died c. 1460), who sketched the characters and personalities in the court of Henry III in the Generaciones y semblanzas (Generations and Sketches). Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, 1276–1479

In the late Middle Ages the Crown of Aragon experienced a confrontation between the monarchy and the nobility similar to that which occurred in neighbouring Castile. As Roman law and its practitioners gained in influence, there were protests in both Aragon and Catalonia, and James I confirmed the customary law of Aragon in an assembly at Ejea in 1265. He also agreed that the justicia, a judge appointed by the king from the ranks of the knights rather than from among the professional jurists, should adjudicate litigation involving the nobles. A critical stage in relations between the crown and the nobles was reached during the reign of Peter III (the Great; 1276–85), the heir to Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia (the kingdom of Majorca fell to the share of his younger brother James).

Peter III’s conquest of Sicily, where he reigned as Peter I, was the second major step in the Mediterranean expansion of Catalonia, marking the beginning of a long international struggle with serious domestic complications. Although the papacy had awarded Naples and Sicily to Charles of Anjou, Peter’s wife represented Hohenstaufen claims to them. Taking advantage of the Sicilian Vespers, a rebellion by Sicilians against Charles’s rule, Peter occupied Sicily in 1282. Pope Martin IV not only excommunicated and deposed Peter but also offered Aragon to a French prince. Seizing the opportunity created by these difficulties, the Aragonese nobles organized a union to uphold their liberties and in 1283 compelled the king to grant their demands, which were set down in the document known as the General Privilege. Peter agreed to convene the Cortes each year and confirmed the right of the justicia to hear the lawsuits of the nobility. He made similar promises in Valencia and Catalonia, where the allegiance of his subjects was more secure. After the pope proclaimed a Crusade, King Philip III of France led the Crusading army against Peter but failed to achieve success. Thereafter the disposition of Sicily remained the chief concern of Peter’s three sons.

Alfonso III (1285–91), who inherited the mainland dominions, and his younger brother James, who received Sicily, valiantly tried to overcome the formidable opposition of the pope, the king of France, and the house of Plantagenet (Anjou). Alfonso seized Majorca because his uncle James had aided the French during their Crusade against Aragon. Once again the Aragonese nobles challenged the king, forcing him in 1287 to confirm his father’s General Privilege and to permit the nobles to control the appointment of certain royal councillors. After succeeding his brother as king of Aragon, James II (1291–1327) tried to secure an unchallenged title to that kingdom by yielding his rights to Sicily in 1295 and returning Majorca to his uncle James. Pope Boniface VIII awarded Sardinia to James II as compensation. In 1302 the pope reluctantly agreed to accept the third brother, Frederick, who had been proclaimed as king of Sicily. The Catalan Company, a mercenary troop idled by the end of the Sicilian wars, transferred its activities to the Byzantine Empire and in 1311 gained dominion over the duchy of Athens. Although neither Sicily nor Athens came under the direct rule of the king of Aragon, they remained bastions of Catalan influence and power in the Mediterranean.

After securing a favourable alteration of his frontier with Murcia, James II occupied Sardinia in 1325. As Genoa disputed Aragonese rights there, his successors, Alfonso IV (1327–36) and Peter IV (the Ceremonious; 1336–87), were forced to wage a series of wars. Accusing his cousin, the king of Majorca, of disloyalty, Peter IV annexed Majorca permanently to the Crown of Aragon in 1343. In 1347 Peter provoked a constitutional crisis by naming his daughter as heir to the throne rather than his brother, the count of Urgel, who argued that women were excluded from the succession. The Aragonese union, which had been relatively inactive in the previous reign, again confronted the king and compelled him to confirm the privileges granted by his predecessors. The Valencian nobility also organized a union and exacted similar concessions. The devastation caused by the Black Death and the royalist victory over the Aragonese union at Epila in 1348 enabled Peter to dissolve the union and to annul its privileges. The union never again threatened the crown.

After mid-century, Peter I of Castile invaded the Crown of Aragon, prompting Peter IV to back Henry of Trastámara’s claims to the Castilian throne, but Henry subsequently refused to reward him with any territorial concessions. That disappointment was offset to some extent by the reincorporation of Sicily into the dominions of the Crown of Aragon in 1377. Peter IV remained neutral during the Great Schism, but his son John I (1387–95) acknowledged the pope of Avignon. Both John and his younger brother and successor, Martin (1395–1410), had to attend constantly to agitation and unrest in Sardinia and Sicily. When Martin died without immediate heirs, the Crown of Aragon faced an acute crisis. Claimants were not lacking, but none enjoyed wide popularity. The estates of Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia appointed nine commissioners to meet at Caspe to resolve the issue. The Compromise of Caspe, announced in 1412, determined that Fernando de Antequera, brother of King Henry III of Castile, had the best claim to the throne by right of inheritance. The accession of Ferdinand I (1412–16), the first of the Trastámara dynasty to rule in Aragon, prepared the way for the eventual union of Aragon and Castile. By withdrawing obedience from the Avignonese pope Benedict XIII, Ferdinand helped to terminate the schism.

Alfonso V (the Magnanimous; 1416–58) opted to pursue ambitions in Italy and generally neglected his peninsular domains. After occupying the Kingdom of Naples in 1442, he hoped to lord it over the rest of Italy and to extend his influence and power into the eastern Mediterranean. A spirit of discontent fostered by his long absence from Aragon provoked a crisis during the reign of his brother, John II (1458–79). John inherited the mainland kingdoms as well as Sicily, while Ferrante, Alfonso V’s illegitimate son, obtained Naples. John had already added another kingdom to the Trastámara holdings when he married the queen of Navarre in 1420. By quarreling with his son, Prince Charles of Viana, he antagonized many and provoked the open hostility of the Catalans. Charles’s sudden death in 1461 led many to believe that he had been poisoned by John. Already restive because of economic and social uncertainties, the Catalans revolted and offered the principality to other potential rulers. Louis XI of France seized the opportunity to occupy Roussillon and Cerdagne, thereby laying the foundation for future enmity between France and Spain. By 1472 John II had suppressed the Catalan revolt; subsequently he aided his daughter-in-law Isabella in acquiring the Castilian crown. His son Ferdinand succeeded him as king of Aragon and Sardinia, and his daughter Eleanor inherited Navarre. Aragonese institutions and society

Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia constituted the nucleus of the Crown of Aragon during the late Middle Ages. James II declared in 1319 that these three states formed an indissoluble union. At various times Majorca, Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples were added to, separated from, and finally reunited with the Crown of Aragon. Peter IV and the people of Valencia opposed a plan to dismember the kingdom of Valencia for the benefit of the king’s younger brother. When the Catalans revolted against John II and unsuccessfully tried to secede, the Aragonese federation faced the threat of dissolution, but it was able to hold together. Ever since Peter II had offered his dominions in fief to the papacy in 1204 several popes had intervened directly in Aragonese affairs and had even tried to dispose of the throne.

Dominated by jurists favouring royal absolutism, the bureaucracy of the Crown of Aragon became highly complex. Peter IV carefully structured the administration around four principal officials—the chancellor, the chamberlain, the mayordomo, and the mestre racional (chief financial officer). The employment of nonnatives in administrative positions was vigorously opposed in each of the federated states. Although Peter IV abolished the Aragonese union, the justicia, who were appointed and removed by the king at will, continued to adjudicate lawsuits concerning the nobility.

As his father’s lieutenant, the king’s oldest son usually was appointed procurator general for all the realms. A procurator or governor-general permanently represented the crown in Valencia and Majorca, which the king visited only occasionally. A vicar or justicia also acted in the name of the crown in the towns, which enjoyed a greater degree of self-government than before. Executive authority in Barcelona was entrusted to a council of five who were responsible to a larger consell de cent, or council of 100.

The fundamental law for Catalonia and Majorca continued to be the Usages of Barcelona, and in 1251 James I pledged that Roman law would not supplant them. He provided the newly conquered kingdom of Valencia with the Fori Regni Valentiae (1240), a code of law largely Roman in substance. In 1247 he promulgated the Code of Huesca, a compilation of the customary law of Aragon; the code, which originally defined Aragon’s territory, came to embody the criminal and civil legal code in Aragon. As new laws were added, the Aragonese legal code was reorganized as the Fueros de Aragón, which included the Code of Huesca and the General Privilege, in the 15th century.

A vigorous parliamentary structure emerged in the Crown of Aragon. Each of the peninsular states (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia) had a parliament, and the king occasionally assembled a general parliament of all three. The development of Catalan constitutionalism received a strong impetus from two significant pledges made by Peter III in the Corts (parliament) of Barcelona in 1283. He declared that he would convene an annual Corts “to treat of the good estate and reformation of the land” and that he would not make any general statute for Catalonia without its consent. The Corts did not meet annually thereafter, but the constitutions and capitols de Corts enacted during these meetings testify to its legislative role. The parliaments in Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia also voted on taxes. Not trusting the monarchy, the Catalans established a commission to control the collection and disbursement of taxes authorized by the Corts. In the late 14th century this commission, known as the Diputació del General de Catalunya or simply the Generalitat, became permanent. When the Corts was not in session, the Generalitat represented the Catalan community and defended Catalan liberties against royal encroachments. Early in the 15th century similar agencies were established in Aragon and Valencia.

The Aragonese economy was dominated by agriculture and pasturage. A numerous class of Mudéjares, Muslims living under Christian rule and retaining many of their own institutions, farmed the land in lower Aragon and Valencia. The main industry in the Catalan towns, where a strong guild organization developed, was the manufacture of woollen cloth. Barcelona and Valencia—trading with Tunis, Alexandria, Sicily, Sardinia, the Holy Land, and the Black Sea area—ranked among the major Mediterranean seaports. To represent their interests, Catalan merchants and consuls resided in many of the principal African ports. Catalan maritime law, compiled about 1370 in the Llibre del consolat de mar (Book of the Consulate of the Sea), enjoyed wide European recognition and usage.

Following the havoc caused by the Black Death, recurrent social and economic crises disturbed the peace and provoked the massacre of the Jews in Valencia and other cities in 1391, as well as other violent acts. Financial uncertainty, the failure of many private banks, and the decline of trade in the later 14th century compounded problems. In Barcelona the agitation of the popular party (the Busca) against the ascendancy of the wealthy urban aristocracy (the Biga) helped to foment the Catalan revolt against John II. Hoping to win their liberty, the serfs, or payeses de remensa, joined the rebellion. Aragonese culture

Culture flourished in the Crown of Aragon in the late Middle Ages. After James II founded the University of Lledia (Lérida) in 1300—the first in Aragon—other universities were established at Huesca, Barcelona, and Zaragoza. Two Dominicans—St. Raymond of Penyafort (died 1275), a great canonist, and St. Vincent Ferrer (died 1419), a preacher of exceptional eloquence—were outstanding representatives of the university tradition. Several works of history, generally regarded as gems of Catalan literature, helped to shape the vernacular as a literary language: The Chronicle of James I, purportedly written by the king himself; Bernat Desclot’s Chronicle of the Reign of King Peter III; Ramon Muntaner’s Chronicle, reporting the adventures of the Catalan Company; and the Chronicle of Peter IV, of which the king claimed to be the author. Ramon Llull (died 1315), who was equally facile in Latin, Catalan, and Arabic, was the most prolific writer of the times. Primarily an active propagandist concerned with the recovery of the Holy Land and the conversion of the Muslims, Llull also was a philosopher, theologian, and mystic. Among his principal writings were the romantic Book of the Lover and the Beloved, Blanquerna, and Book of the Order of Chivalry. Lo Crestià, an encyclopaedic work dealing with moral and political theory, was the best-known work of Francesc Eiximenis (died 1409). The poet Ausiàs March (died 1459) explored the psychological dimensions of love. Joseph F. O'Callaghan Muslim Spain The conquest

In the second half of the 7th century ce (1st century ah), Byzantine strongholds in North Africa gave way before the Arab advance. Carthage fell in 698. In 705 al-Walīd I, the sixth caliph of the Umayyad dynasty, the first great Muslim dynasty centred in Damascus, appointed Mūsā ibn Nuṣayr governor in the west; Mūsā annexed all of North Africa as far as Tangier (Ṭanjah) and made progress in the difficult task of propagating Islam among the Imazighen. The Christian ruler of Ceuta (Sabtah), Count Julian (variously identified by the Arab chroniclers as a Byzantine, a native Amazigh, or a Visigoth), eventually reached an agreement with Mūsā to launch a joint invasion of the Iberian Peninsula (see also North Africa; Islamic world).

The invasion of Spain was the result both of a Muslim readiness to invade and of a call for assistance by one of the Visigothic factions, the “Witizans.” Having become dispossessed after the death of King Witiza in 710, they appealed to Mūsā for support against the usurper Roderick. In April or May of 711 Mūsā sent an Amazigh army headed by Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād across the passage whose modern name, the Strait of Gibraltar, derives from Jabal al-Ṭāriq; in July they were able to defeat Roderick in a decisive battle.

Instead of returning to Africa, Ṭāriq marched north and conquered Toledo (Ṭulayṭulah), the Visigothic capital, where he spent the winter of 711. In the following year Mūsā himself led an Arab army to the peninsula and conquered Mérida (Māridah) after a long siege. He reached Ṭāriq in Toledo in the summer of 713. From there he advanced northeast, taking Zaragoza (Saraqusṭah) and invading the country up to the northern mountains; he then moved from west to east, forcing the population to submit or flee. Both Mūsā and Ṭāriq were recalled to Syria by the caliph, and they departed in 714 at the end of the summer; by then most of the Iberian Peninsula was under Muslim control.

The rapid success of the Islamic forces can be explained by the fact that Hispano-Visigoth society had not yet succeeded in achieving a compact and homogeneous integration. The Jews, harassed by the legal ordinances of Toledo, were particularly hostile toward the Christian government. Moreover, the Muslim conquest brought advantages to many elements of society: the burden of taxes was generally less onerous than it had been in the last years of the Visigoth epoch; serfs who converted to Islam (mawālī; singular: mawlā) advanced into the category of freedmen and enrolled among the dependents of some conquering noble; and Jews, who were no longer persecuted, were placed on an equal footing with the Hispano-Romans and Goths who still remained within the Christian fold. Thus, in the first half of the 8th century, a new society developed in Muslim Spain. The Arabs were the ruling element; a distinction was made between baladiyyūn (i.e., Arabs who had entered Spain in 712 under Mūsā) and Syrians (who arrived in 740 under Balj ibn Bishr). Below them in status were the Imazighen, who made up the majority of the invading troops, whose numbers and influence continued to grow over the course of centuries because of their steady influx from Africa. Then came the native population who had converted to Islam, the musālimah, and their descendants, the muwallads; many of them were also mawālī (i.e., connected by patronage with an Arab) or even themselves of Amazigh lineage. This group formed the majority of the population because during the first three centuries social and economic motives induced a considerable number of natives to convert to Islam. Christians and Jews who kept their religion came next in the social hierarchy, but their numbers decreased in the course of time. Finally, there was a small group of slaves (Ṣaqālibah)—captives from the northern peninsula and other European countries—and black captives or mercenaries.

The period between 711 and 756 is called the dependent emirate because Muslim Spain, or Al-Andalus, was dependent on the Umayyad caliph in Damascus. These years were marked by continuous hostilities between the different Arab factions and between the various social groups. Nonetheless, Muslim expansion beyond the Pyrenees continued until 732, when the Franks, under Charles Martel, defeated the Muslims, led by the emir ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ghāfiqī, near Tours. This battle marked the beginning of the gradual Muslim retreat. A major Amazigh uprising against the Arabs in North Africa had powerful repercussions in Muslim Spain; it caused the depopulation of the northwestern peninsula, occupied at that time mainly by Imazighen, and brought the Syrian army of Balj to Al-Andalus, which introduced a new motive for discord. This situation changed with the establishment of an independent emirate in 756 by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I al-Dākhil, an Umayyad prince who, having succeeded in escaping from the slaughter of his family by the ʿAbbāsids and in gaining power in Al-Andalus, became independent of them politically (not religiously; he did not adopt the title of caliph). The independent emirate

The dynasty of the Andalusian Umayyads (756–1031) marked the growth and perfection of the Arabic civilization in Spain. Its history may be divided into two major periods—that of the independent emirate (756–929) and that of the caliphate (929–1031)—and may be interpreted as revolving around three persons of like name—ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I (756–788), ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II (822–852), ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III (912–961)—and the all-powerful ḥājib (chief minister) Abū ʿĀmir al-Manṣūr (976–1002).

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I organized the new Arab state. Vigorously checking all dissident elements, he endeavoured to base his power on the Eastern aristocracy affiliated with his house and heaped upon it property and riches, though he nonetheless treated it ruthlessly when it showed signs of rebellion. He protected the religious authorities who represented orthodoxy, and, through a series of punitive campaigns, he held in check the Christians of Asturias. In the eastern part of the country he was troubled by intrigues of the ʿAbbāsids, and in the north he had to cope with the ambitions of Charlemagne, who menaced the valley of the Ebro (Ibruh). As discussed above, Charlemagne failed; he was forced to raise the siege of Zaragoza, and in the course of his retreat the Basques attacked and destroyed his rear guard at Roncesvalles (778), an event which is celebrated in the great medieval epic The Song of Roland. The Franks had to be content with occupying the upper valleys of the Pyrenees. The Frankish advance ended with the Muslim seizure of Girona (Jerunda) in 785, Barcelona (Barjelūnah) in 801, and Old Catalonia, which were later taken back by the Franks and formed part of the Spanish March.

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I’s successors, Hishām I (788–796) and al-Ḥakam I (796–822), encountered severe internal dissidence among the Arab nobility. A rebellion in Toledo was put down savagely, and the internal warfare caused the emir to increase the numbers of Slav and Amazigh mercenaries and to impose new taxes to pay for them.

ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II inaugurated an era of political, administrative, and cultural regeneration for Muslim Spain, beginning a sharp “Orientalization” or, more precisely, an “Iraqization.” ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s most severe problems sprang from his restless vassals in the Ebro valley, especially the convert Banū Qāsī family and the Mozarabs. Incited by the extremist chiefs Alvarus and Eulogius (the latter being canonized after his death), the Mozarabs sought to strengthen their Christian faith through the aura of martyrdom and began to publicly revile the Prophet Muhammad, an action punishable by death from 850 onward, according to Mozarabic sources. The emir sought to persuade the blasphemous to retract, but, failing in his attempts, he imposed the death penalty. The “vogue” of seeking martyrdom was a reaction of the conservative Mozarabic party against the growing “Arabization” of their coreligionists. The conflict ended in 859–860, and, despite official tact, this provocation by the Christians led to the execution of 53 people and was finally disavowed by the ecclesiastical authorities.

In foreign policy, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II conducted intensive diplomatic activity, exchanging ambassadors with the Byzantine Empire and with the Frankish king Charles II (the Bald) and maintaining friendly relations with the sovereigns of Tāhart, who lent military support to Muslim Spain. He confronted the constantly growing incursions of the Vikings (Norsemen), whom he defeated in the vicinity of Sevilla. Furthermore, he established permanent defenses against the Viking invaders by creating two naval bases, one facing the Atlantic at Sevilla and another on the Mediterranean shore at Pechina near Almería.

His successors Muḥammad I (852–886), al-Mundhir (886–888), and ʿAbd Allāh (888–912) were confronted with a new problem, which threatened to do away with the power of the Umayyads—the muwallads. Having become more and more conscious of their power, they rose in revolt in the north of the peninsula, led by the powerful Banū Qāsī clan, and in the south (879), led by ʿUmar ibn Ḥafṣūn. The struggle against them was long and tragic; Ibn Ḥafṣūn, well protected in Bobastro and in the Málaga mountains, was the leader of muwallad and even Mozarabic discontent in the south of Al-Andalus, but his defeat in 891 at Poley, near Córdoba, forced him to retreat and hide in the mountains. ʿAbd Allāh, however, was unable to subdue the numerous rebels and thus left a weak state for his grandson, the great ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III, who from 912 was able to restore order. He subdued all of Al-Andalus, from Jaén (Jayyān) to Zaragoza (Saraqusṭah), from Mérida (Māridah) to Sevilla (Ishbīliyah), and the Levant. He even challenged Ibn Ḥafṣūn successfully—especially after the latter’s political error of reverting to the Christianity of his Spanish ancestors, a move that caused the desertion of numerous muwallads who regarded themselves as good Muslims. When Ibn Ḥafṣūn died in 917, his sons were forced to capitulate, and in 928 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III captured the theretofore impregnable fortress of Bobastro. The caliphate of Córdoba

One of the first international political problems that ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III faced was that of his juridical status vis-à-vis the ʿAbbāsid caliphate at Baghdad. As long as religious unity existed in the Islamic dominions, the Umayyads in Spain were resigned to acknowledge the religious leadership of Baghdad. However, when the heterodox caliphate of the Fāṭimids developed in Tunis after 910, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān III proclaimed himself caliph and adopted the caliphal title of al-Nāṣir in 929. This new caliphate, the caliphate of Córdoba (Qurṭubah), was to rule Al-Andalus for more than a century.

Al-Nāṣir’s internal situation was already almost assured; the last bulwarks of resistance were not long in capitulating (Toledo, 933), and thereafter he was able to devote all his efforts to foreign affairs. As to Christian Spain, his successes were meagre, and, what was more serious, he suffered a severe defeat in 939 at Simancas (Shānt Mānkas). Afterwards, however, the internal debilitation of the kingdom of León enabled him to restore his predominance on the peninsula by political means. He consolidated his position through a series of embassies to Otto I, the emperor in Germany and the most powerful figure in Christian Europe, to the Christian sovereigns of the peninsula, to the pope, and to Constantinople. His sovereignty was also acclaimed by the corsair enclave in Fraxinetum (Frakhshinīṭ; modern-day La-Garde-Freinet), in southern France.

In Tunis the Fāṭimids fought the establishment of an empire that would reach as far as the Atlantic and encompass Al-Andalus. In order to forestall Fāṭimid hegemony in the Maghrib, the Islamic area of northwestern Africa, al-Nāṣir occupied the North African ports of Melilla (Malīlah) and Ceuta (931). Intense naval warfare between the two western caliphates coincided with clashes on land in the Maghrib and attempts at subversive wars in the enemy states in northwest Africa. In the latter area, al-Nāṣir nearly overthrew the Fāṭimid caliphate by supporting the rebel Abū Yazīd al-Nukkārī; the conflict between the Umayyads and the Fāṭimids dragged on and ended in 969, when the latter conquered Egypt and lost interest in the Maghrib, thus leaving a power vacuum that was rapidly filled by the Umayyads.

Al-Nāṣir was succeeded by his son al-Ḥakam II (961–976), who adopted the caliphal title of al-Mustanṣir. His peaceful reign succeeded in resolving the problem of the Maghrib, thanks to the strategic ability of General Ghālib and the policy of the intendant, Abū ʿĀmir al-Maʿāfirī, who soon became the all-powerful al-Manṣūr (Spanish: Almanzor), the Victorious One.

On al-Mustanṣir’s death, his throne was occupied by his son Hishām II al-Muʾayyad, a minor. Hishām grew up under the tutelage of his mother, Aurora, and of the prime minister, Jaʿfar al-Muṣḥafī, who before long was liquidated by al-Manṣūr. The latter succeeded in eliminating all temporal power of the caliph, whom he dominated, and acquired complete power for himself.

Al-Manṣūr won control over a great part of the Maghrib, which he transformed into the viceroyalty of Córdoba, and he halted the expansion of the Christian kings from the north through a series of raids—usually every six months—in which he sacked nearly every Christian capital on the peninsula. With the support of a professional army consisting predominantly of Imazighen, many of them recent arrivals from Africa who obeyed him blindly, he managed to dispense with the Arab aristocracy, which for the most part was pro-Umayyad, and to hold in check the influence of the slaves, whose numbers had been increasing since al-Nāṣir had placed them in posts of high responsibility. But this balancing of forces—Arab aristocracy, Imazighen, and slaves—could be sustained only by the strong hand of a ruler such as himself.

Al-Manṣūr played the role of a grand lord. A protector of poets and scholars, he concealed his rationalism under a cloak of piety and was the darling of the faqīhs (scholars versed in the traditions of Islam); he contrived to attract to himself the outstanding poets of the era. By the time of his death, he had won more than 50 raids and succeeded in leaving a robust and well-organized state for his son ʿAbd al-Malik al-Muẓaffar.

Al-Muẓaffar (1002–08) continued his father’s policies, hemming in Hishām II and fighting against the Christians. After Al-Muẓaffar’s premature death, his brother ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Sanchuelo took the reins of power, but he lacked the fortitude to maintain the structure built by his father. An uprising that sought to vindicate the political rights of Hishām II resulted in Sanchuelo’s death and brought about the beginning of the end of the Umayyad dynasty in Spain. The ṭāʾifas

The death of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Sanchuelo in 1009 ushered in 21 years of unrest, during which the social and political unity—among “Andalusians” (Arabs, Imazighen who had settled in Al-Andalus a long time earlier, and the population that had converted to Islam), Imazighen who had arrived fairly recently, and the slaves—fell apart. The consequence of those years of anarchy was the formation of numerous independent kingdoms, or ṭāʾifas, which may be classified into the following: (1) “Andalusian” factions in the three capitals of the frontier area (Zaragoza, Toledo, and Badajoz), in the valleys of the Guadalquivir (Wadi Al-Kabīr), and in the transition zone from the Ebro to the Tagus (Tajo) valley, (2) “new” Imazighen in Granada, Málaga, and four small southern ṭāʾifas, and (3) groups of slaves in the east.

The political history of the period comprises an uninterrupted series of internecine wars. Preeminent is the confrontation between the Arab factions, under the leadership of Sevilla (Ishbīliyah) and governed by the dynasty of the Banū ʿAbbād, and the Imazighen, presided over by Granada. Little by little, Sevilla united southern Al-Andalus under its aegis, exclusive of Granada and Málaga. This state was ruled by Muʿtaḍid" class="md-crosslink">al-Muʿtaḍid, a sovereign devoid of scruples, who pretended at first to have found the vanished Hishām II al-Muʾayyad (at most, the pretender was a mat maker from Calatrava who bore some resemblance to the old caliph), and then by al-Muʿtaḍid’s son, the poet-prince al-Muʿtamid. In the east, except for a brief period when the petty state of Denia (Dāniyah) built a powerful fleet that enabled it to stage incursions throughout the western Mediterranean as far as Sardinia, the various ṭāʾifas preserved a certain static and dynastic equilibrium; farther to the north, the various ṭāʾifas also spent their time embroiled in interminable internal quarrels.

This fragmentation facilitated the expansion of the Christian states of the north, which, lacking the demographic potential to repopulate the lands they had succeeded in occupying, wisely annexed only those that they were capable of repopulating and garrisoning. The Christian states also imposed a heavy economic burden of tribute on the ṭāʾifas. Christian armies forced the Andalusian petty kings to buy peace by paying annual tribute, the famous parias. The tribute revitalized the economy of the Christian states, but it created sharp friction between the Muslim authorities and their subjects. The ṭāʾifas constantly had to increase the yield from their imposts, and they constantly laid new and heavier tax burdens on their subjects; when cash was lacking, they devalued the currency, minting low-standard coins that were not accepted by the Christians. This in turn gave rise to new tax increases and to popular discontent, which was considerably aggravated by the legalistic party of the faqīhs. Furthermore, the extravagant luxury and lavish public outlays of the local petty courts rendered Al-Andalus ripe for the foreign intervention that came when the Castilians occupied Toledo (1085), the key to the Meseta Central and to the entire peninsula. The factional chiefs, alarmed by the Christian advance, called in the help of the Almoravids, the powerful Amazigh confederation then exercising hegemony over northwestern Africa. The Almoravids

The Almoravid ruler Yūsuf ibn Tāshufīn entered the Iberian Peninsula from North Africa and slowly advanced to the fields of Al-Zallāqah, north of Badajoz (Baṭalyaws), where in 1086 he defeated a Castilian army under Alfonso VI. However, unable to further exploit his victory, he returned to the Maghrib. For two years Almoravid policy in Spain remained indecisive, but it appears that the siege of Aledo (1088) convinced Yūsuf ibn Tāshufīn of the urgent necessity of putting an end to the ṭāʾifas if he was going to rescue Spanish Islam. From 1090 he deposed their rulers, beginning with those of Granada and Málaga; the next year he dethroned the rulers of Almería and Sevilla, followed by the leader of Badajoz in 1093. Only Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (the Cid), exiled from his native Castile by King Alfonso VI, was able to resist the Africans, and he established an independent kingdom in Valencia—a new ṭāʾifa. The figure of the Cid—the Lord (Spanish Arabic: al-sīd), a title that the Arabs conferred upon him—is quite curious. He first served as a mercenary in the ṭāʾifa of Zaragoza, after which he became an independent prince in the east, ruling over states that were mainly inhabited by Muslims. He had the good fortune, however, of finding efficient administrators from among the Mozarabs residing in his states; further, his superb grasp of Almoravid tactics enabled him to overcome his numerical inferiority. Upon his death, Valencia remained under the control of his forces until 1102, when they were forced to evacuate it and seek refuge in Castile. Following the fall of Valencia, the Almoravids were unopposed, and in 1110, under the leadership of ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf (1106–43), they were able to occupy Zaragoza.

Alfonso VI, portrait miniature from a manuscript, 12th century; in Santiago cathedral, Spain.Archivo Mas, Barcelona

However, the conquest of Zaragoza marked the beginning of the Almoravid decline. The Aragonese king, Alfonso I (the Battler), and his stepson, Alfonso VII of Castile, launched renewed Christian assaults against the entire frontier of Islam in Spain. In 1118 Zaragoza fell into the hands of Alfonso I, who reconquered a large part of the valleys of the Jalón and of the Jiloca. After 1121 the Almoravids experienced serious difficulties in Africa as a result of the preachings of an Amazigh reformer, Muḥammad ibn Tūmart, and could not successfully withstand the Christian onslaught; indeed, they had to hire Christian mercenaries to help them. A resounding Almoravid victory over the Aragonese at Fraga (Ifragah) in 1134 bore no fruit, because the Almoravids lacked the resources to exploit it. The Almohads

In Africa the Almohad dynasty finally triumphed, and ʿAbd al-Muʾmin (1130–63), successor to Ibn Tūmart, turned his attention to Spain and to the integration of all the Muslim states—the second ṭāʾifas—formed under the shield of the latest internecine wars caused by the Almoravid decline. Of these states, those under Ibn Mardanīsh (1147–72)—who was successful with Christian help in becoming the master of Valencia, Murcia, and Jaén and in securing Granada and Córdoba—especially stood out.

The Almohads assumed the title of caliph, introduced a series of severe religious measures, and sought to strengthen their states through religious unification—i.e., by compelling the Jews and Christians to either convert to Islam or emigrate. Two great sovereigns, Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf (1163–84) and Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb al-Manṣūr (1184–99), raised western Islam to the zenith of its power. Benefiting from the quarrels that divided the Christians, al-Manṣūr defeated the king of Castile, Alfonso VIII, in 1195 at the Battle of Alarcos (Al-Arak); despite this victory, however, he proved unable to exploit his triumph—repeating the fate that had befallen the Almoravids after al-Zallāqah. Years later, during the reign of his successor Muḥammad al-Naṣīr (1199–1214), the Christians avenged this defeat in the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (Al-ʿIqāb). This battle created a power vacuum into which stepped some of the ṭāʾifas, prominent among which were those of Banū Hūd of Murcia (Mursīyah) and of the Naṣrids of Arjona (Arjūnah). The policies of the two emirs were quite divergent: Muḥammad ibn Hūd (1228–38) emphasized resistance on the part of the Muslims against the Christians who, led by Ferdinand III, were occupying the Guadalquivir valley; by contrast, Muḥammad I ibn al-Aḥmar (ruled in Granada 1238–73) acknowledged himself to be a vassal of the king of Castile and even helped him against his own Muslim coreligionists. This realistic policy enabled him to preserve in his possession the territory of what are the modern provinces of Málaga, Granada, and Almería, together with portions of neighbouring provinces. Thus, after the middle of the 13th century and the reconquest of Jaén (Jayyān), Córdoba, Sevilla, and Murcia by the Castilians and of Valencia and the Balearic Islands by the Catalan-Aragonese crown under James I (the Conqueror), no independent dominions of Islam remained in Spain—with the exception of Granada, Minorca (until 1287), and the tiny area of Crevillente (Qirbilyān), which soon disappeared. Granada

The Naṣrid dynasty, founded by Muḥammad ibn al-Aḥmar in Granada, endured for two and a half centuries. The Muslims of Granada lacked sufficient forces to constitute a genuine danger to the Christians, who limited themselves to collecting tribute and launching an attack against the Muslims from time to time, snatching from them some city or other. The people of Granada, for their part, always bore in mind what had happened in the cases of the Almoravids and the Almohads, who, having arrived from Africa as auxiliary troops, became masters in Al-Andalus. Vis-à-vis the new North African empires, particularly the empire of the Banū Marīns, they maintained a policy of balance of power. Although they permitted the influx of volunteers from Africa to enroll in their army to fight against the Christians, they never permitted the crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar by massive organized contingents. The years between 1302 and 1340 were extraordinarily complex both diplomatically and militarily. The Banū Marīns in both the western Maghrib and Castile vied for the possession of the Granadan ports of Tarifa (Jazīrat Ṭarīf) and Algeciras (Al-Jazīrah al-Khaḍraʾ), ports that controlled the strait. Granada, therefore, allied alternately with the Africans and the Christians, hoping thus to maintain the balance of power. A fourth state, Catalonia, called a Crusade; hoping to obtain a larger slice of the Reconquista, it intervened with its fleet and laid siege to Almería (Al-Marīyah) in 1309.

When Ismāʿīl I (1314–25) ascended the throne, another branch of the Naṣrid family gained power. Ismāʿīl checked the reconquest ambitions of Alfonso XI—who in 1340, with the aid of the Portuguese, won a decisive victory over the Maghribian army of Abū al-Ḥasan at the Battle of the Salado. The defeat of the Maghribians and the lack of interest in reconquest on the part of Alfonso’s successors created a favourable climate for Granada, which found itself free from political pressures of both Maghribians and Castilians. During the reign of Muḥammad V (1354–59; 1362–91) Granada attained its greatest splendour; its ministers included some of the most learned men of the epoch, such as the polymath Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Khaṭīb, the physician Abū Jaʿfar ibn Khātima, and the poet Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn Zamraq. Important figures from the Maghrib were in close touch with Granada.

During this long era there also developed the institution of the “judge of the frontier” (juez de la frontera y de los fieles del rastro); the judge was a Muslim official who heard Christian complaints against the Granadans. This procedure did much to reduce frontier incidents between Muslims and Christians.

Little is known about the decline of the Naṣrid dynasty, since with Ibn al-Khaṭīb died the last great Muslim historian of Al-Andalus. The extant records and reports from the 15th century are as a rule from Christian sources or from the tales of travelers. The narrative poems that are of the utmost interest as historic sources for other periods in Muslim history are completely lacking in this era. The conventional verses of the king-poet Yūsuf III (1408–17), of his court poet Ibn Farkūn, or of the anonymous Arab poet of the romance Abenamar, Abenamar, moro de la morería, do little to illuminate the history of this period. More illustrative, however, are the verses of ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Qaysī (c. 1485), an esteemed member of Granada’s middle class, who eschewed classic themes and wrote of such mundane phenomena as the increase in the cost of living or the decline of Granada and its continuous territorial losses.

Foreign relations entered a long period of tranquillity as a result of the ghastly losses of life from the Black Death, which reached Spain in 1348, and afterward from the internal wars that weakened Christian Castile. Only an occasional confrontation served to remind the Muslims and Christians that their territorial struggle, considered by the latter as a reconquest, had not yet come to an end. In the 15th century, however, the Reconquista proceeded apace. The Castilian regent, Prince Ferdinand, seized Antequera (Antaqīrah) in 1410; Jimena and Huéscar fell in 1435, Huelma in 1438, and Gibraltar in 1462. One result of these events was that the people of Granada became increasingly less tolerant of Christians, and the Granadan faqīhs professed the most extreme xenophobia. The policy of intolerance and xenophobia points to the existence of a Granadan school of law, which before long exerted an influence on the other side of the strait; the Maghribians—subjected to the constant pressure of the Portuguese, who had gained possession of their coastal areas (Ceuta first, in 1415)—realized, like the Granadans, that the only way to escape Christian hegemony was through the profession of the most rigorous Islamic ideals and the practice of the most extreme xenophobia. This policy, common to both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, did not achieve equal results. It saved the Maghrib from its external enemies, but in Spain it became the casus belli for the “Granada War” (Guerra de Granada), which was to inaugurate the conclusion of the Reconquista.

The sultan Muley Hacén (Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī) refused to pay the annual tribute he owed to the Catholic Monarchs and seized the fortified town of Zahara (1481), thus launching hostilities that were destined to liquidate the last bastion of Andalusian Islam. The campaign proved difficult for the Christian army, despite the discord that split the royal family of Granada and was exploited in Machiavellian fashion by Ferdinand II (the Catholic): Muḥammad XII (Spanish: Boabdil), son of Muley Hacén, rebelled in Guadix against his father and was recognized in Granada with the aid of the Abencerrajes, a powerful Granada family. Muley Hacén, however, who had taken refuge in Málaga, succeeded in recapturing the capital with the assistance of the Zegries family. Muley Hacén was successfully deposed by his brother, the Zagal (Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad al-Zaghall—the Valiant One), who was supported by the Venegas family.

Muḥammad XII was captured by the Catholic Monarchs during his attack at Lucena. In order to regain his freedom, he signed the Pact of Córdoba, in which he pledged himself to deliver the portion of the kingdom that was in the hands of the Zagal in exchange for help from the Castilians in recovering Granada, part of which (the Alhambra) was still in the hands of Muley Hacén. The latter and the Zagal allied themselves against Muḥammad XII, who fled and sought asylum in the court of the Catholic Monarchs. The death of Muley Hacén in 1485 enabled Muḥammad XII, with the help of the inhabitants of Albaicín, to occupy the Alhambra. The Zagal, who had been routed by the Christians before Vélez Málaga, retreated to Guadix in 1487 and, being incapable of further resistance, delivered his territories to the Catholic Monarchs and emigrated to Tlemcén (1491). Taking advantage of this civil war, the Christians seized Ronda, Marbella, Loja, and Málaga and were in a position to lay siege to Granada. When the siege began, the population divided into factions: one consisted of pacifists and the other of belligerents who, despite their quarrels, fiercely defended the city.

Court of the Lions, the Alhambra, Granada, Spain.© Jose Ignacio Soto/Fotolia

By the end of 1491 the situation became desperate, and Muḥammad XII capitulated. But before making the news public, he brought a detachment of Castilian troops into the Alhambra on the night of January 1–2 for the purpose of avoiding a disturbance on the part of his vassals that might render it impossible for him to comply with the terms of the pact. The official surrender, and with it the end of Muslim political power on the Iberian Peninsula, took place the following day, January 2, 1492. Islamic minorities, such as submissive Mudejars (later called Moriscos), remained in Spain until the 17th century. Society

In discussing the influx of the Muslims into Spain, the various social groups into which the population was divided have already been pointed out: Arabs (baladiyyūn and Syrians), Imazighen, muwallads, Mozarabs, Jews, and slaves. The Muslim population continued to increase during the early centuries of the occupation because of the wave of conversions that markedly reduced the number of Christians. Precise figures cannot be given, but it is estimated that at the time of the conquest some 4,000,000 Spaniards inhabited the peninsula and that in the course of the 8th century the number of immigrant Arabs rose to about 50,000 and of Imazighen to about 250,000. The population was primarily rural, and large cities were few in number. At the end of the 10th century one can estimate the following urban populations: Córdoba, 250,000; Toledo, 37,000; Almería, 27,000; Granada, 26,000; Zaragoza, 17,000; Valencia, 15,000; and Málaga, 15,000.

At the peak of the administrative pyramid was the emir, caliph, sultan, or king, depending on the era. All the functionaries exercised their power by delegation from the sovereign, who embodied within himself all executive, legislative, and judicial authority, even though at times he delegated power to a ḥājib (chamberlain) or, after the 11th century, to a prime minister (dhu al-wizāratayn). In the discharge of his functions he was assisted by various viziers. At times there was, at the head of the various departments, a kātib, or official secretary. The provinces were governed by wālīs who enjoyed wide autonomy. Uniform municipal organization did not exist, and the duties fulfilled by some officials cannot be considered as representative; such officials included, for example, the chief of police (ṣāḥib al-shurṭa) and the market inspector (known until the 10th century as ṣāḥib al-sūq [zabazoque] and later as muḥtasib). The Muslim cities of Spain, with their baths, gardens, markets, mosques, and high cultural level, were quite different from and, some believe, superior to those of Christian Europe.

The army was based on the voluntary recruitment of soldiers or on contracts with soldiers from abroad. The units (jund), grouped according to the places of origin of their men, were deployed strategically along the borders and possessed extraordinary mobility at the time of the caliphate. Holding castles close to the enemy lands as their bases of operation, they were glad to welcome into their midst the Muslims, who were eager to die in combat in order thus to open for themselves the gates of paradise. These volunteers, who became more and more numerous with the passage of time and about whom many details are known, were frequently second-class soldiers, since they enrolled during years when they constituted a hindrance rather than a source of help. The navy and merchant marine, organized by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān II, remained an effective force until the middle of the 14th century.

The entire state structure rested, theoretically, on a foundation of the most rigid Islamic orthodoxy as interpreted by the Malikite (Mālikīyah) school, which in Al-Andalus manifested special characteristics of a hyperconservative nature. It is not known whether the school acquired these traits upon settling in the peninsula because intolerance was indigenous to the inhabitants there or whether it indoctrinated the Andalusian Muslims in this manner and they in turn transmitted it to the Christian states, their reconquerors. The economy

The Muslim conquerors divided the lands seized from the Christians by force of arms and operated them, as a general rule, by means of “tenant-farmer” leases. Possibly about the 10th century the woodlands achieved their widest expansion, and the cultivation of irrigated lands was encouraged by means of drastic regulations, which, however, were favourably received. Plants used in the manufacture of textiles (flax, cotton, esparto grass, and mulberry for silk) as well as those with medicinal properties were protected by the state.

In addition to agriculture, the raising of livestock (sheep and Arabian horses) occupied a central position in the peninsular economy. As in the Roman period, lead, iron, gold, and mercury were mined. Domestic industry, which never went beyond the handicraft stage, culminated in the production of luxury cloths such as silk (a state monopoly), in the tanning of hides (Córdoban leather), and in the export of ivory objects. Commerce was selective and carried on in products “of low weight and high value” that frequently reached the most remote regions of the known world. There are reports of Andalusian travelers as far as the Sudan, central Europe, and even China.

The evolution of economic life was conditioned by political events; as the productive centres passed into Christian hands, the commercial vigour of the Muslims kept diminishing proportionally. No phenomenon is more illustrative of this than the confidence placed in the currency. In the 11th century Barcelona was counterfeiting Muslim coins; in the 14th century Granada was doing the same with Barcelona’s coins. Culture of Muslim Spain

Arab civilization in the peninsula reached its zenith when the political power of the Arabs began to decline. Immediately following the Muslim conquest in the 8th century, there were no traces of a cultural level higher than that attained by the Mozarabs who lived among the Arab conquerors. All available evidence points to the fact that in this period popular works of medicine, agriculture, astrology, and geography were translated from Latin into Arabic. Many of these texts must have been derived from the Etymologies of Isidore of Sevilla and from other Christian writers. In the 9th century the situation changed abruptly: the Andalusians, who traveled east in order to comply with the injunction to conduct a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetimes, took advantage of their stay in those regions to enhance their knowledge, which they then introduced into their native country. Literature

In the 9th century there flourished such court poets as ʿAbbās ibn Nāṣih, ʿAbbās ibn Firnās, Yaḥyā al-Ghazāl, and the knight Saʿīd ibn Jūdī. Towering above all these, however, was Muḥammad ibn Hāniʾ, nicknamed the “Mutanabbī of the West” (Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī was a 10th-century poet of Iraq), who by virtue of his religious ideas was obliged to forsake his native land and enter into the service of the Fāṭimid caliph al-Muʿizz. In the 10th century al-Manṣūr assembled in Córdoba a notable group of court poets. Bards performed the functions of modern journalists, accompanying their protector on military expeditions and celebrating his exploits in verse, the singsong rhyme of which became engraved in the memory of the people of Al-Andalus. As al-Manṣūr chose the foremost talents of his time to serve as “poet-journalists”—men such as Ibn Darrāj al-Qaṣtallī, al-Ramādī, Ṣāʿid of Baghdad, al-Ṭalīq, and numerous others—this occasional poetry sometimes attained literary heights. In the 10th century Ibn Faraj of Jaén deemed himself to possess sufficient background to compose the Kitāb al-Ḥadāʾiq (“Book of Orchards”)—the first anthology of Andalusian poets. This anthology was soon followed by one by the physician Ibn al-Kattānī.

The highest peak in Islamic literature in Spain was attained during the era of the ṭāʾifas, when the poet-king al-Muʿtamid established an embryo of an academy of belles lettres, which included the foremost Spanish intellects as well as Sicilians who emigrated from their native land before its conquest by the Normans. Other petty kings in the peninsula endeavoured to compete with al-Muʿtamid, but they were unable to assemble a constellation of writers of comparable stature.

Among the outstanding poets of the 12th century in eastern Andalusia (the Andalusian Levant) were Ibn Khafajā of Alcira and his nephew Ibn al-Zaqqāq. To the era of greatest decadence, in the 13th century, belonged Abū al-Baqāʾ of Ronda and Ibn Saʿīd. In the 14th century three court poets, Ibn al-Jayyāb, Ibn al-Khaṭīb, and Ibn Zamraq, preserved their verses by having them inscribed in the Alhambra.

In Arab literature, poetry possesses greater vitality than prose. Even so, there are several prose writers of importance. Ibn Shuhayd (c. 1035) was the author of a work that lent inspiration to Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī for his Risālat al-ghufrān (“Epistle of Pardon”). The prolific Ibn Ḥazm of Córdoba (died 1064) wrote the delightful Ṭawq al-ḥamāmah (“The Ring of the Dove”), which dealt with love and lovers and which is still popular today. The enormous output of Ibn Ḥazm includes Kitāb al-Fiṣal, a history of religions that was not surpassed by Western scholars until well into the 19th century. He also was a leading exponent of the Ẓāhirī school of jurisprudence, which stressed thorough knowledge of the Qurʾān and the Hadith. He applied the principles of Ẓāhirism to theology and denounced all non-literalist approaches to theology. Another polymath was the vizier-historian Ibn al-Khaṭīb (died 1375). Two 12th-century anthologies of historical and literary works by Ibn Bassām and Ibn Khāqān are excellent sources of information concerning the apogee of Andalusian letters. Often the best grammars and dictionaries of a language are written by authors living in peripheral zones who endeavour to prevent gross errors being committed by their countrymen in the region. This perhaps explains why Al-Andalus, located at the western fringe of the Muslim world, produced works that to this day are used as texts in some traditional Islamic universities. From among these grammarians al-Zubaydī, tutor of Hishām II and Ibn Maḍāhʾ of Córdoba, who proposed a drastic reform of grammatical methods, stands out. Ibn Mālik of Jaén’s didactic poem Alfiyya (“The Thousand Verses”) constitutes an excellent handbook of grammar; and Abū Ḥayyān of Granada (died 1344), who emigrated to the east, wrote an outstanding commentary on the Quʾrān as well as the first Turkish grammar. In the field of lexicology, the blind Ibn Sīda of Denia (died 1066) is preeminent, author of a sort of “dictionary of ideas.”

Noteworthy in the field of Quʾrānic science are Abū ʿAmr of Denia and Ibn Fierro of Játiva, whose handbooks made possible the correct psalmodizing of the Quʾrān. In addition, various collections of hadiths (traditions referring to the Prophet) appeared, but none of these was of particular importance. In this area the Andalusians were imitators of the East, and figures such as Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr, Ibn Rushd (Averroës), and Ibn ʿĀṣim are of interest.

The first extant chronicles of Muslim Spain, such as the Taʾrīkh iftitāḥ al-Andalus (“History of the Conquest of Spain”) by Ibn al-Qūṭiyyah, date back to the 10th century. In the ṭāʾifa era the preeminent Spanish historian is Ibn Ḥayyān of Córdoba (died 1076), whose mostly preserved Muqtabis is an anthology of historical texts collected from the works of his predecessors; however, he also wrote an original chronicle, the Matīn. Of human interest are the Memoirs of the king Zīrī ʿAbd Allāh, who was deposed by the Almoravids and who sought to justify in those memoirs his deeds as a statesman. In the Naṣrid era is found the aforementioned Ibn al-Khaṭīb. The works of the North African historians Ibn Khaldūn (died 1406) and al-Maqqarī (died 1631) supply much information concerning Al-Andalus. Philosophy

Andalusia enjoyed a great tradition in philosophy, in part as a means to compete with the dynamic culture in Baghdad and also as a result of limitations placed on philosophic inquiry in the eastern Islamic world. As early as the 10th century, the caliph of Córdoba, al-Ḥakam II al-Mustanṣir, imported books from the east to build a great centre of learning in his city. His efforts bore fruit as Córdoba was graced by three great scholars in the 10th and 11th centuries—Ibn Masarrah (died 931), Maslama al-Majrīṭī (died 1008), and Kirmānī (died 1068)—all of whom were knowledgeable in philosophy, geometry, and other disciplines. The most important, however, was Ibn Masarrah, whose teachings drew from the 5th-century-bce Greek philosopher Empedocles and laid the basis of later Andalusian mysticism.

The foundations of the study of philosophy, set in the 10th and 11th centuries, bore fruit in the 12th century when Neoplatonic thought flourished in Islamic Spain. This development is associated with two important figures: Avempace, known in Arabic as Ibn Bājjah, and Ibn Ṭufayl. Although Avempace, a physician who probably died by poisoning, wrote a number of commentaries on important works by Aristotle and al-Farabi, he is best known for his Tadbir al-mutawah hid (“The Regime of the Solitary”), which was influenced by Neoplatonism and commented on the corrupt nature of society. Avempace’s later contemporary, Ibn Ṭufayl, court physician and adviser of the Almohad ruler Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf, offered a more-developed Neoplatonism in his philosophical novel, Ḥayy ibn Yaqzān (“Alive son of Awake”). It is the story of a man who lives the first 50 years of his life on a deserted island, develops his own philosophy, and learns the truth about God.

The greatest Andalusian philosopher, however, and arguably the most important Muslim philosopher, is Ibn Rushd—or, as he is commonly known in the West, Averroës. He represents the high point of the philosophic tradition in Islamic Spain. His commentaries on the works of Aristotle, which had been translated into Arabic in Spain, had great influence on Jewish and Christian thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant, and Boethius of Dacia. From a prominent Córdoban family, Averroës enjoyed a career as a court physician and religious judge in Spain. In 1169 he was commissioned to write commentaries on Aristotle’s works by Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf, who was introduced to Averroës by Ibn Ṭufayl. One of the greatest expositors of Aristotle, Averroës also wrote a commentary on Plato’s Republic, in which he critiqued contemporary rulers and governments. Best known for his works on Aristotle, Averroës also wrote The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Tahāfut al-Tahāfut), a spirited defense of philosophy against the theologian al-Ghazālī, and the Decisive Treatise on the Agreement Between Religious Law and Philsophy (Faṣl al-Maḳāl), which argues for the fundamental agreement between religion and philosophy (he did not, however, advocate the doctrine of the double truth, which his Latin interpreters did). Science

In the mid-11th century Ṣāʿid, a qāḍī of Toledo, composed a noteworthy handbook of the history of science that contained much information on technical subjects. Mathematical sciences received little attention, though Maslama al-Majrīṭī (died 1008), who probably took part in the translation of Ptolemy’s Planispherium and made some contributions to pure mathematics, is particularly noteworthy. During the heyday of Granada, ʿAlī al-Qalaṣādī, commentator on Ibn al-Bannāʾ, did important work on fractions. Despite their lack of interest in the physical sciences, the Andalusians excelled in both theoretical and practical astronomy. A number of these scholars sought to simplify the astrolabe, and finally al-Zarqālī (Azarquiel; died 1100) achieved success by inventing the apparatus called the azafea (Arabic: al-ṣafīḥah), which was widely used by navigators until the 16th century. Al-Zarqālī also anticipated Johannes Kepler by suggesting that the orbits of the planets are not circular but ovoid. The Arab mathematician Jābir ibn Aflaḥ (12th century) was also notable for his criticism of the Ptolemaic system.

Astrology was popular in Muslim Spain, and after 788 the Umayyad rulers retained an official astrologer in their courts. The most widely used astrological treatises were those of the Tunisian ʿAlī ibn Abi al-Rijāl and another, anonymous scientist, who made a translation from Vulgar Latin into Arabic in the 8th century. This book was translated from Arabic into Spanish during the era of Alfonso the Learned under the title of Libro de las Cruces (“Book of the Crosses”).

The treatises on esoteric or occult subjects attribute to Maslama al-Majrītī two works on natural science that are not properly his but may be ascribed to one of his pupils. They are Ghāyat al-ḥakīm (“The Goals of the Scholar”; also known as Picatrix) and Rutbat al-ḥakīm (“The Step of the Scholar”). Greater interest is merited by the Materia medica, a revision of the Eastern Arabic text of the 1st-century Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides ordered by al-Naṣir, on which Jews, Arabs, and Christians collaborated. Gradually the Andalusian Arabs kept adding new medicinal “simples”—which described the properties of various medicinal plants—to those described by Dioscorides, and the last eminent essayist on the subject, Ibn al-Bayṭār (died 1248), describes more than 1,400 of these. The Andalusians were familiar with the texts of the great Latin classics relating to natural science, and Ibn Wāfid, Ibn Baṣṣāl, and Ibn al-ʿAwwām (11th and 12th centuries) quote Varro, Virgil, and others. The most notable geographers in Muslim Spain were Abū ʿUbayd al-Bakrī (died 1094), who wrote the Kitāb al-masālik wa’l-mamālik (“Book of Highways and of Kingdoms”), and al-Idrīsī (died 1166), who was in the service of Roger II of Sicily and is the author of the leading universal geography composed by the Arabs. Somewhat later (1323) there appeared the first Arabic nautical map, possibly of Granadan origin. In technology, Muslim Spain was noted for its windmills and for its manufacture of paper. The Jews who lived in Muslim Spain had become culturally Arabized. They also pursued their own religious studies; the works of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) are a good example of the cultural brilliance of the Andalusian Jews. Juan Vernet Ginés María J. Viguera United Spain under the Catholic Monarchs The union of Aragon and Castile

When Ferdinand II (1479–1516; also known as Ferdinand V of Castile from 1474) succeeded to the Crown of Aragon in 1479, the union of Aragon (roughly eastern Spain) and Castile (roughly western Spain) was finally achieved, and the Trastámara became the second most powerful monarchs in Europe, after the Valois of France. The different royal houses of the Iberian Peninsula had long sought a union of their crowns and had practiced intermarriage for generations. Nevertheless, the union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon was far from inevitable in the last quarter of the 15th century. A union between Castile and Portugal was equally feasible, and it has been argued that it would have made more sense, for it would have allowed the two western Hispanic kingdoms to concentrate on overseas exploration and expansion, and it would not have involved Castile in Aragon’s traditional rivalry with France. The reasons that led John II of Aragon to arrange the marriage of his son and heir, Ferdinand, with Isabella of Castile in 1469 were essentially tactical: he needed Castilian support against French aggression in the Pyrenees. In Castile an influential party of magnates, led by Alfonso Carillo, archbishop of Toledo (who later reversed himself), and opposed to King Henry IV, supported the succession claims of the princess Isabella, the king’s half sister, against those of his daughter, Joan. They were anxious for the help and leadership of the Aragonese prince and content with the alliance of a country in which the magnates had such far-reaching privileges as the Aragonese nobility. It needed a forged papal dispensation for the marriage, the blackmailing of Henry IV into (wrongly) denying the paternity of his daughter (Joan), and, finally, several years of bitter civil war before Ferdinand and Isabella defeated Joan’s Castilian supporters and her husband, Afonso V of Portugal.

Ferdinand II (left) and his wife, Isabella I, relief with gilt and polychromy by Alonso de Mena, 1632; in the Capilla Real, Granada, Spain.Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis Aragon and Catalonia

Ferdinand and Isabella ruled jointly in both kingdoms and were known as the Catholic Monarchs (Reyes Católicos). It was, however, a union of crowns and not of kingdoms. In size, institutions, traditions, and, partly, even language, the two kingdoms differed greatly. Within the kingdom of Aragon, Aragon and Valencia each had about 270,000 inhabitants, of whom some 20 percent and more than 30 percent, respectively, were Muslims and Moriscos (Muslims officially converted to Christianity). Catalonia had about 300,000 inhabitants. In each of these kingdoms the powers of the crown were severely limited. The barons ruled their estates like kings, dispensing arbitrary justice over their peasants. In Catalonia they had the right to wage private war. In Aragon anyone arrested by order of the king could put himself under the jurisdiction of a justicia who held his office for life and was therefore independent of the king’s pleasure. It was this highest judge who crowned the kneeling king and made him swear to observe the fueros, the laws and privileges, of the kingdom. Although it is now known that the formula

We who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you accept all our liberties and laws; but if not, not

is a forgery, most probably of the mid-16th century, the quotation does summarize succinctly the relations between the kings of Aragon and the Aragonese nobility.

Ferdinand made no attempt to change this position; nor did he do so in Catalonia, where the crown had just emerged successfully from a long and confused civil war. The nobility and the urban aristocracy of Barcelona had been faced with violent social movements of the peasants and the lower classes of the cities and were themselves riven by family and factional strife. The crown intervened, mainly on the side of the lower classes but, inevitably, in alliance with some of the noble factions and against the French who had taken the opportunity to occupy Cerdagne and Roussillon. In 1486 Ferdinand settled the Catalan problem by a compromise, the Sentencia de Guadalupe, which effectively abolished serfdom and the more-oppressive feudal obligations of the peasants in return for monetary payments to the lords. Otherwise, the political and legal privileges of the rural nobility and the urban aristocracy were left intact. Effectively, therefore, Ferdinand made no attempt to strengthen the powers of the crown and to give the principality a more efficient system of government. But Ferdinand had given Catalonia peace and the opportunity to make good the ravages of the civil wars and the losses of commercial markets to Italian competitors. This opportunity was only partially taken by the Catalans. They failed completely to prevent the Genoese from establishing a dominant position in the economy of Castile and, more especially, in the vital and rapidly expanding Atlantic trade of Sevilla. The union of the Crowns of Aragon and Castile therefore led to neither a political and institutional union nor to an economic integration of the Iberian Peninsula. Castile

Castile, too, was a poor country. Much of its soil was arid, and its agriculture was undeveloped. The armed shepherds of the powerful sheep-owners’ guild, the Mesta, drove their flocks over hundreds of miles, from summer to winter pastures and back again, spoiling much cultivated land. Despite the violent hostility of the landowners, the government upheld the Mesta privileges, since the guild paid generously for them and was supported by the merchants who exported the raw wool to the cloth industry of Flanders. The activities of the Mesta were undoubtedly harmful to the peasant economy of large parts of Castile and, by impoverishing the peasants, limited the markets for urban industries and thus the growth of some Castilian towns. A change, however, occurred in the 16th century. Just as in the rest of Europe, the population of Spain grew, rising in Castile from about 4.25 million in 1528 to about 6.5 million after 1580. To meet the increasing demands for agricultural products, the peasants expanded the cultivation of grain and other foodstuffs, and the Mesta and its migratory flocks gradually lost their dominant position in the Castilian economy. Their contributions to government finances declined as a proportion of total government revenue. The growing market also stimulated urban industries. Segovia, Toledo, Córdoba, and other towns expanded their manufactures of textile and metal. The apex of this expansion was reached in the third quarter of the 16th century, but it never matched that of Flemish and northern Italian cities. Overall, Spain remained a country that exported raw materials and imported manufactures.

In the northern provinces of Castile there lived a large class of minor nobles, the hidalgos. The inhabitants of Guipúzcoa (by the westernmost French border) even claimed that they were all of noble birth. But the south, New Castile (southeast of Madrid), Extremadura (southwest of Madrid), and especially Andalusia—that is, those provinces most recently reconquered from the Muslims—were the domain of the great nobility. There the Enríquez, the Mendoza, and the Guzmán families and others owned vast estates, sometimes covering almost half a province. They had grown rich as a result of the boom in wool exports to Flanders during the 15th-century, when there were more than 2.5 million sheep in Castile, and it was they, with their hordes of vassals and retainers, who had attempted to dominate a constitutionally almost absolute, but politically weak, monarchy.

It was in this kingdom that the Catholic Monarchs determined to restore the power of the crown. Once this was achieved, or so it seemed, the liberties of the smaller kingdoms would become relatively minor problems. Like their contemporary Henry VII of England, they had the advantage of their subjects’ yearning for strong and effective government after many years of civil war. Thus, they could count on the support of the cities in restoring law and order. During the civil wars the cities of northern Castile had formed leagues for self-defense against the aggressive magnates. A nationwide league, the hermandad (“brotherhood”), performed a wide range of police, financial, and other administrative functions. Isabella supported the hermandad but kept some control over it by the appointment of royal officials, the corregidores, to the town councils. At the same time, both municipal efficiency and civic pride were enhanced by the obligation imposed on all towns to build a town hall (ayuntamiento).

With the great nobles it was necessary to move more cautiously. The Catholic Monarchs revoked usurpations of land and revenues by the nobility if these had occurred since 1464, but most of the great noble estates had been built up before that date and were effectively left intact. From a contemporary chronicler, Hernán Pérez del Pulgar, historians know how they proceeded piecemeal but systematically against the magnates, sometimes using a nobleman’s defiance of the law, sometimes a breach of the peace or of a pledge, to take over or destroy his castles and thus his independent military power. Even more effective in dealing with the nobility was the enormous increase in royal patronage. Isabella was stage manager to Ferdinand’s election as grand master of one after another of the three great orders of knighthood: Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara. This position allowed the king to distribute several hundred commanderships with their attached income from the huge estates of the orders. Equally important was royal control over all important ecclesiastical appointments, which the Catholic Monarchs insisted upon with ruthless disregard of all papal claims to the contrary. In the Spanish dependencies in Italy, Ferdinand claimed the right of exequatur, according to which all papal bulls and breves (authorizing letters) could be published only with his permission. A letter from Ferdinand to his viceroy in Naples, written in 1510, upbraids the viceroy for permitting the pope to publish a brief in Naples, threatens that he will renounce his own and his kingdoms’ allegiance to the Holy See, and orders the viceroy to arrest the papal messenger, force him to declare he never published the brief, and then hang him. In Spain the Catholic Monarchs had no formal right of exequatur, but they and their Habsburg successors behaved very much as if they did. From that time onward the Spanish clergy had to look to the crown and not to Rome for advancement, and so did the great nobles who traditionally claimed the richest ecclesiastical benefices for their younger sons.

Perhaps most effective of all in reducing the political power of the high nobility was their virtual exclusion from the royal administration. The old royal council, a council of great nobles advising the king, was transformed into a bureaucratic body for the execution of royal policy, staffed by a prelate, three nobles, and eight or nine lawyers. These lawyers, mostly drawn from the poor hidalgo class, were entirely dependent on the royal will and became willing instruments of a more efficient and powerful central government. The Catholic Monarchs established the Council of Finance (1480, but not fully developed until much later), the Council of the Hermandad (1476–98), the Council of the Inquisition (1483), and the Council of the Orders of Knighthood (for the administration of the property and patronage of the orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara), and they reorganized the Council of Aragon. Charles I (Holy Roman emperor as Charles V) and Philip II were later to continue this work and to add further councils, notably those of the Indies (1524) and of Italy (1558).

After Isabella’s death in 1504, the nobles appeared to be tamed and politically innocuous. In fact, their social position and its economic basis, their estates, had not been touched. The Laws of Toro (1505), which extended the right to entail family estates on the eldest child, further safeguarded the stability of noble property. In 1520 Charles I agreed to the nobles’ demand for a fixed hierarchy of rank, from the 25 grandees of Spain through the rest of the titled nobility, down to some 60,000 hidalgos, or caballeros, and a similar number of urban nobility, all of them distinguished from the rest of the population, the pecheros, by far-reaching legal privileges and exemption from direct taxation. Thus, the Catholic Monarchs’ antinoble policy was far from consistent. Having won the civil war, they needed the nobility for their campaigns against the kingdom of Granada and, later, the kingdoms in North Africa and Italy. They now favoured the nobles against the towns, allowing them to encroach on the territory around the cities and discouraging the corregidores and the royal courts from protecting the cities’ interests. Thus, the seeds were sown for the development of the comunero movement of 1520. The Spanish Inquisition

With its large Muslim and Jewish populations, medieval Spain was the only multiracial and multireligious country in western Europe, and much of the development of Spanish civilization in religion, literature, art, and architecture during the later Middle Ages stemmed from this fact. The Jews had served Spain and its monarchs well, providing an active commercial class and an educated elite for many administrative posts.

By the late 14th century, however, the status of the Jews in Christian Spain began to change. Their former protectors, the monarchs in Spain, began to restrict the rights and privileges of the Jews, and the devastation caused by the Black Death led to increased popular hostility, as many believed that the plague was a plot devised by Jews to destroy Christianity. Animosity toward the Jews was stimulated further by Jewish converts to Christianity who issued polemics against their former coreligionists. Calls for the expulsion or persecution of the Jews were answered by anti-Jewish riots in 1348 and 1391. The pogroms of 1391 were especially significant because of the subsequent mass conversion of Jews to Christianity in response to the violence perpetrated against them.

The conversos and Marranos—the “new Christians”—became a highly controversial group throughout Spain. Many of these converted Jews and their descendants assumed important positions in government and society and associated themselves with powerful noble families. They also achieved economic power and prosperity, which inspired increasing hatred of them by the “old Christians,” who already questioned the sincerity of their conversions. Indeed, although there were many devout Christians among the conversos, there were also those who were at most agnostic converts, and the Marranos secretly continued to practice Judaism.

The wealth of the conversos created jealousy and their uncertain conversions hatred in a population that traditionally saw itself as the defender of Christianity against the infidel. The Catholic Monarchs, ever good tacticians, profited from this feeling. In 1478 they first obtained a papal bull from Sixtus IV setting up the Inquisition to deal with the conversos whose conversions were thought to be insincere. Since the Spanish Inquisition was constituted as a royal court, all appointments were made by the crown. Sixtus IV realized too late the enormous ecclesiastical powers that he had given away and the moral dangers inherent in an institution the proceedings of which were secret and that did not allow appeals to Rome.

With its army of lay familiars, who were exempt from normal jurisdiction and who acted both as bodyguards and as informers for the inquisitors, and with its combination of civil and ecclesiastical powers, the Spanish Inquisition became a formidable weapon in the armory of royal absolutism. The Supreme Council of the Inquisition (or Suprema) was the only formal institution established by the Catholic Monarchs for all their kingdoms together. Nevertheless, they thought of it primarily in religious and not in political terms. The Inquisition’s secret procedures, its eagerness to accept denunciations, its use of torture, the absence of counsel for the accused, the lack of any right to confront hostile witnesses, and the practice of confiscating the property of those who were condemned and sharing it between the Inquisition, the crown, and the accusers—all this inspired great terror, as indeed it was meant to do. The number of those condemned for heresy was never very large and has often been exaggerated by Protestant writers. But during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs several thousand conversos were condemned and burned for Judaizing practices. The whole family of the philosopher and humanist Juan Luis Vives was wiped out in this way. Many more thousands of conversos escaped similar fates only by fleeing the country. Many Roman Catholics in Spain opposed the introduction of the Inquisition, and the Neapolitans and Milanese (who prided themselves on their Catholicism and who were supported by the popes) later successfully resisted the attempts by their Spanish rulers to impose the Spanish Inquisition on them. Even in Spain itself, it was the sumptuous autos-da-fé, the ceremonial sentencings and executions of heretics, rather than the institution and its members, that seem to have been popular. But most Spaniards seem never to have understood the horror and revulsion that this institution aroused in the rest of Europe.

The first inquisitor general, Tomás de Torquemada, himself from a converso family, at once started a propaganda campaign against the Jews. In 1492 he persuaded the Catholic Monarchs to expel all Jews who refused to be baptized. Isabella and most of her contemporaries looked upon this expulsion of more than 160,000 of her subjects as a pious duty. At the moment when the country needed all its economic resources to sustain its new European position and its overseas empire, however, it was deprived of many of its most economically active citizens and was laid open to exploitation by German and Italian financiers.

Torquemada, Tomás deTomás de Torquemada.Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid The conversos

The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 did not signify the end of Jewish influence on Spanish history, as was long thought. It is not, however, easy to establish a clear-cut direction or pattern of this influence. At the end of the 15th century there may have been up to 300,000 conversos in Spain, and the majority of these remained. They had constituted the educated urban bourgeoisie of Spain, and the richer families had frequently intermarried with the Spanish aristocracy and even with the royal family itself. After 1492 their position remained precarious. Some reacted by stressing their Christian orthodoxy and denouncing other conversos to the Inquisition for Judaizing practices. Others embraced some form of less conventional, more spiritualized Christianity. Thus, the followers of Sister Isabel de la Cruz, a Franciscan, organized the centres of the Illuminists (Alumbrados), mystics who believed that through inner purification their souls should submit to God’s will and thus enter into direct communication with him. While they counted some of the high aristocracy among their number, most of the Illuminists seem to have been conversos. Again, it was among the conversos that Erasmianism (named after the famous humanist Desiderius Erasmus), a more intellectual form of spiritualized Christianity, had its greatest successes in Spain. The Erasmians had powerful supporters at court in the early years of Charles I as emperor, when his policy was directed toward the healing of the religious schism by a general reform of the church. But in the 1530s and ’40s the enemies of the Erasmians, especially the Dominican order, launched a systematic campaign against them. The Inquisition annihilated them or forced them to flee the country, just as it had done in the case of the Illuminists as early as the 1520s. Nevertheless, the influence of Erasmus did not completely disappear from Spanish intellectual life, and it has been traced into the latter part of the 16th century.

But the majority of the conversos and their descendants probably became and remained orthodox Roman Catholics, playing a prominent part in every aspect of Spanish religious and intellectual life. They range from such saints as Teresa of Ávila and St. John of God, one a mystical writer and founder of convents, the other an organizer of care for the sick, to Diego Laínez, a friend of St. Ignatius of Loyola and second general of the Jesuit order. They include Fernando de Rojas, author of La Celestina, the first great literary work of the Spanish Renaissance, and, two generations later, Mateo Alemán, who wrote a picaresque novel, Guzmán de Alfarache; Luis de León, a humanist and poet; a Dominican, Francisco de Vitoria, perhaps the greatest jurist of any country in the 16th century; and another famous Dominican, the defender of the American Indians and historian of the Indies, Bartolomé de Las Casas.

Along with Luis Vives (mentioned earlier), these are only the most famous among the many distinguished conversos who played such a central and varied role in creating the cultural splendours of Spain’s “Golden Age.” This extraordinary phenomenon had no parallel anywhere else in Europe before the 19th or even 20th century. Although any attempt at explanation is bound to be speculative, the following may be suggested. The Spanish Jews and conversos formed a comparatively large section of the relatively small educated elite of Spain who were primarily responsible for the cultural achievements of the period. Moreover, having deliberately broken with the Jewish tradition of Talmudic scholarship (from the Talmud, the body of Jewish civil and canonical law), the conversos found the glittering Renaissance world of Christian Spain ambivalently attractive and repellent but always stimulating. Their response to this stimulus was probably sharpened by the hostility that they continued to meet from the “old Christians,” who were bitterly resentful and aware of the ubiquity of the conversos, however much the conversos assimilated into Spanish culture. The statutes of limpieza

Religious, racial, and even anti-aristocratic class prejudices combined to create the obsession with “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) which became characteristic of the Spaniards in the 16th and 17th centuries. It first crystallized with a statute of limpieza, imposed in 1547 on the cathedral chapter of Toledo, by which purity of ancestry both from the “taint” of converso blood and from any accusations of heresy by the Inquisition was made a condition of all future ecclesiastical appointments. The author of this statute was Juan Martínez Siliceo, archbishop of Toledo, a man of humble and, hence, by definition, untainted origins who had found himself despised by the aristocratic canons, many of whom were of converso ancestry. In 1556 Philip II gave his royal approval to the statute on the grounds that “all the heresies in Germany, France, and Spain have been sown by descendants of Jews.” This remark was sheer fantasy with regard to Germany and France, and it is especially ironic that Pope Paul IV, then at war with Spain, quite correctly described Philip II himself as a Marrano, or a descendant of Jews who had converted to Christianity.

Statutes of limpieza spread rapidly throughout Spain. The statutes helped to perpetuate a set of values that equated pure ancestry, orthodoxy, and personal honour. Although this certainly helped to prevent the spread of heresies in Spain, in the long run it had a blighting effect on Spanish society, especially because the statutes were linked so closely with the basically corrupt institution of the Inquisition and its encouragement of the inevitably corrupting and divisive practice of spying on and denouncing one’s neighbours.

By the middle of the 16th century the Inquisition had largely run out of suspected heretics and Judaizers. Apart from its continued concern with the Moriscos, the Inquisition began to concentrate its efforts on the censorship of books and on enforcing correct religious beliefs and moral (i.e., mainly sexual) behaviour among the “old” Christians. As religious conflicts in Europe became sharper in the second half of the 16th century, such supervision came to be practiced in Protestant as well as in Catholic countries. It was in this respect that the Spanish Inquisition, spreading its network of courts and familiars from the towns to the countryside, could surpass even the strictest Calvinist-Puritan communities, even though the use of torture was no longer deemed necessary and death sentences had become rare. Taken together with a royal prohibition against students studying at foreign universities, even Catholic ones, the Inquisition tended to isolate Spanish intellectual life from that of the rest of Europe.

On the positive side there was the Inquisition’s general unwillingness to join in the widespread mania of witch hunting that led to thousands of executions in other European countries, especially Protestant ones. Most Spanish theologians did not believe in the existence of witchcraft and held that spells and sorceries were only female vapourings that could be safely ignored or dealt with by shutting the witch-women up in convents. The conquest of Granada

The impact of the Muslims on Spanish life and traditions had been rather different from that of the Jews. It was most evident, perhaps, in the position of women in southern Spain, who long remained semiveiled and in much greater seclusion than elsewhere in Christian Europe. It was evident also where Jewish influence was practically nonexistent, in the visual arts and especially in architecture. Not only did houses in southern Spain for a long time continue to be built facing inward onto a patio, but a whole style of architecture, the Plateresque, derived from an imaginative fusion of the Moorish (Muslim) and the Christian: classic Renaissance structures were decorated with Gothic or Renaissance motifs but executed in the Moorish manner, as if a carpet had been hung over the outside wall of the building. This charming style, which was invented during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, spread far and wide over Spain and eventually even to the New World.

To Ferdinand and Isabella, the Moorish problem presented itself in the first place in a political and military form, for the Muslims still ruled their independent kingdom of Granada. The Catholic Monarchs had to concentrate all their military resources and call on the enthusiastic support of their Castilian subjects to conquer the kingdom in a long and arduous campaign, which ended with the capture of Granada, the capital, in 1492. In this campaign Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the “Great Captain,” developed the tactics, training, and organization that made Spanish infantry almost unbeatable for 150 years.

The Muslims were granted generous terms and religious freedom. However, against the advice of the saintly Hernando de Talavera, the converso archbishop of Granada who was trying to convert the Muslims by precept and education, the queen’s confessor, Jiménez de Cisneros" class="md-crosslink">Francisco (later Cardinal) Jiménez de Cisneros, introduced forced mass conversions. The Muslims rebelled (1499–1500) and, after another defeat, were given the choice of conversion or expulsion. Jiménez and Isabella did not regard this new policy as a punishment of the Muslims for rebellion, for Christian baptism could never be that. It was rather that they considered themselves to have been released by the rebellion from their previous guarantees to the Muslims, which they had entered into only with misgivings. Although many Muslims chose conversion, the problem now became virtually insoluble. There were never enough Arabic-speaking priests or money for education to make outward conversion a religious reality. The Moriscos remained an alien community, suspicious of and suspect to the “old” Christians. There was very little intermarriage between Moriscos and Christians, and the Moriscos were less likely to accept Spanish Christianity than were the conversos, who, despite the statutes of limpieza, became an integral part of Spanish society.

Cardinal Jiménez and other Castilians wanted to follow up the conquest of Granada by invading North Africa. There were religious, strategic, and historical reasons for keeping the two shores of the western end of the Mediterranean under single political control, as indeed they had been since Roman times. But Ferdinand, thinking in dynastic and imperial rather than national terms, chose to concentrate his efforts and Spanish resources on the traditional Aragonese claims against France along the Pyrenees and in Italy.

Aragon still held Sicily and Sardinia from the much more extensive medieval Aragonese empire. French intervention in Italy from 1494 gave Ferdinand his chance. To secure his southern flank while he led his army into Italy, Charles VIII of France agreed to return to Ferdinand the counties of Cerdagne and Roussillon (Treaty of Barcelona, 1493), which Louis XI had seized during the Catalan civil wars in 1463. But it was through Ferdinand’s own diplomacy and through the generalship of Gonzalo de Córdoba that he acquired the Kingdom of Naples (1503). For the first time the union of Aragon and Castile had shown its strength, and Spain now rivaled France as the most powerful state in Europe. Ferdinand had carefully arranged the marriage of his children to strengthen his diplomatic position against France by alliances with Portugal, England, and Burgundy (which ruled the Netherlands). The unexpected deaths of the two eldest and of their children, however, left the succession of Castile after Isabella’s death (1504) to the third, Joan the Mad, and her husband, Philip I (the Handsome) of Castile, ruler of the Burgundian Netherlands. The Netherlands nobility were delighted to see this enormous accretion of power to their ruler and looked forward to the advantages that they might reap from it. They accompanied him to Castile, where a large section of the high nobility, in their turn, were anxious to acclaim him rather than the redoubtable Ferdinand. Ferdinand was therefore forced to recognize Philip’s claims but, when Philip died in 1506, was left as uncontested ruler. Ferdinand’s last great success was the annexation of the Spanish part of the kingdom of Navarre in 1512. Spain and the New World

While the exploration of the Atlantic coast of Africa had been mainly a Portuguese concern in the 15th century, the Castilians had not been entirely disinterested in such activities and had occupied the Canary Islands (off northwest Africa). In the Treaty of Alcáçovas (1479), Afonso V of Portugal renounced his claims to the Crown of Castile, and he also recognized Castilian possession of the Canaries in return for Spanish recognition of Portuguese possession of the Azores (in the Atlantic Ocean west of Portugal), the Cape Verde Islands (off West Africa), and Madeira (north of the Canaries). The conquest of Granada allowed Castile, for the first time, to concentrate major resources and effort on overseas exploration. The support that Christopher Columbus received from Isabella was indicative of this new policy. In 1492 Columbus made his landfall in the West Indies, and over the next half century the Spaniards conquered huge empires in the Americas and made their first settlements in East Asia. From the beginning there were disputes with the Portuguese, who were establishing their own colonial empire. The Catholic Monarchs obtained a series of papal bulls (1493) from the Spanish pope Alexander VI, which eventually resulted in the Treaty of Tordesillas with Portugal (1494) to settle their respective claims. Everything west of an imaginary line 370 leagues (here, the league was just over three nautical miles) to the west of the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic was assigned to Spain; everything east went to Portugal. The rest of Europe saw no reason to accept the pope’s decision, and the result was constant and brutal warfare in the overseas colonies, even when the European governments were officially at peace (see also Latin America, history of).

Colonial policy

Unlike the other European colonists of that age, the Spaniards were vitally concerned with the moral problems of the conquest, conversion, and government of so-called heathen peoples. If the great majority of conquistadores ruthlessly pursued gold, power, and status, they also took with them Dominican and Franciscan friars who set themselves to convert and educate the American Indians and, sometimes, to protect them from their Spanish masters. The Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas fought long battles to modify at least the greatest evils of colonial exploitation. His debates with a theologian, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, and the writings of Francisco de Vitoria provide the first systematic discussions of the moral and legal problems of conquest and colonial rule. Their importance lay in their effects on Spanish colonial legislation. The Leyes Nuevas (“New Laws of the Indies”) of 1542 were based largely on the arguments of Las Casas. While in the Spanish colonies these laws were breached more than observed, they provided at least some protection for the Indians, and there was nothing like them in any of the other European overseas colonies of the period. However, even Las Casas supported the transatlantic slave trade of black Africans until late in his career, when he began to recognize its evils. The Atlantic trade

The crown insisted that all trade with the colonies should be carried on through Sevilla and should be reserved for Castilians, on the argument that it was Castilian money and blood that had built the Spanish overseas empire. This trade was closely regulated by the Casa de Contratación (1503), or House of Commerce, in Sevilla. The city itself rapidly became one of the greatest trading centres in Europe, and its population rose from 25,000 in 1517 to 90,000 in 1594. Yet Castile was unable to supply all the manufactures that the colonists demanded and for which they paid in solid gold and silver. Far from seeing this trade as an opportunity for Castilian industry, the Cortes (parliament) actually petitioned the crown in 1548 to prohibit exports to the Indies, which, they claimed, were raising prices in Castile. The government did not accept this petition, but Castile had to import much of what its colonists needed from Italy and the Netherlands. The Castilian monopoly of trade with Spanish America had in practice only the effect of giving the rest of Europe the chance to compete on equal terms for the American trade with the monarchy’s non-Castilian subjects. The organization and financing of the Spanish Atlantic trade was largely in the hands of Genoese and South German merchants.

From the 1540s, when a new method of extracting silver from ore with the use of mercury was discovered, silver mining became a major industry in both Mexico and Peru, and silver shipments in rapidly increasing quantities soon surpassed the earlier gold shipments in value. Precious metal was exported from the Indies to Spain, partly as the crown’s right of one-fifth (quinto real) but, more important, as payment for imports. The average annual quantities, as registered by the Casa de Contratación (not counting the unknown quantities that were smuggled), rose rapidly from about 1 million pesos in the five-year period from 1526 to 1530 to 5 million from 1541 to 1554 and then to the peak of more than 35 million during the period from 1591 to 1595. The growth of overall trade between Sevilla and the New World followed a very similar pattern, rising until 1550, then stagnating until the early 1560s, and rising again to a peak in the last decade of the 16th century. Prices, especially of agricultural produce, had started to rise in Spain, as in the rest of Europe, long before American silver was imported in considerable quantities. Whatever the ultimate causes of the price revolution of the 16th century, there can be little doubt that American silver greatly aggravated the inflation in Spain in the second half of the 16th century. The theologians of the University of Salamanca (some 100 miles west-northwest of Madrid) in the 1550s were the first to see this connection and to formulate the earliest version of a quantity theory of money (in which money is worth more when scarce than when abundant). Very little of this American treasure seems to have been invested in economic production. Most of it was used for display by the court and ruling circles, to pay for Spanish imports, for the Spanish armies abroad, and to satisfy the government’s German, Italian, and Netherlandish creditors. Thus, Spain, with all the treasure of the New World at its command, remained a poor country.

Spain under the Habsburgs Charles I

Ferdinand died on January 23, 1516, and the crowns of the Spanish kingdoms devolved to his grandson, Charles I (1516–56), the ruler of the Netherlands and heir to the Habsburg dominions in Austria and southern Germany. This new union had not been planned in Spain, and at first it was deeply resented. Francisco Cardinal Jiménez, the regent until Charles’s arrival in Spain, had to battle the old antagonisms between nobles and towns that were flaring up again when the magnates took the opportunity of the regency to try to regain their old power. When Jiménez tried to raise a militia, the nobles and the towns both sabotaged the plan. The old hostilities between the different Spanish kingdoms were as bitter as ever, with the men of Navarre, for instance, claiming that they would rather accept a Turk than an Aragonese as governor of the fortress of Pamplona. Although the court at Brussels had been careful to hold its hand in the distribution of patronage, the Spaniards nevertheless accused the Netherlanders of greed and place hunting. It took Charles’s Netherlandish ministers a year and a half to settle the Netherlandish government and to make agreements with France and England that would allow the boy king to take possession of his new kingdom without outside interference. It was a considerable achievement, but for Spain the time was still too long. When Charles finally arrived in Spain in September 1517, his supporters were already disillusioned, and the country was apprehensive of the rule of a foreigner. Ugly, inexperienced, speaking no Spanish, and surrounded by Burgundian councillors and courtiers, Charles did not initially make a good impression. The different Cortes of Castile, Aragon, and Catalonia granted his financial demands but attached to them much pointed advice and criticism. The comunero movement

On June 28, 1519, Charles was elected Holy Roman emperor as Charles V and prepared to go to Germany. His chancellor, Mercurino Gattinara, summoned the Castilian Cortes to Santiago in northwestern Spain (April 1520) to demand more money, even though the former grant had not yet expired. The towns immediately made their displeasure apparent. The Toledans refused to appear; the others demanded the discussion of grievances before they would supply the funds. By a mixture of bribery and concessions, the government finally induced a majority of the delegates (who had transferred from Santiago to A Coruña [Spanish: La Coruña] on the northwest coast of Spain) to vote the new grant. Many of the delegates were immediately disowned in their hometowns, and one from Segovia was murdered by an enraged mob. As Charles set sail (May 20, 1520), the Castilian revolution had already begun.

The towns, led by Toledo, formed a league and set up a revolutionary government. They claimed—more boldly even than the Third Estate during the French Revolution in 1789—that they were the kingdom and that the Cortes had the right to assemble without a royal summons and to discuss all matters relating to the welfare of the realm. There was talk of dethroning Charles in favour of his mother, Joan the Mad. The comunero leader, Juan de Padilla, actually captured the castle of Tordesillas (100 miles northwest of Madrid), where Joan was kept as prisoner, but the queen, whether out of madness or calculation of the interests of the monarchy, would not commit herself to Padilla’s proposals. The comunero movement spread rapidly through Castile, and the nobles did nothing to check it. They had not forgiven Charles for his quest to attain the imperial title (which they thought inferior to that of king of Castile) nor for his foreign councillors and courtiers. They resented above all his bestowal of the archbishopric of Toledo on a young Burgundian, Guillaume de Croy, and the appointment of his former tutor, Adrian of Utrecht (later Pope Adrian VI), as regent of Castile. Even the appointment of the admiral Fadrique Enríquez and the constable of Castile, Iñigo de Velasco, as Adrian’s coregents did little to mollify the offended grandees. Only when the more radical and popular elements in the cities were gaining control of the comunero movement and beginning to spread it to the nobles’ estates did the nobles combine to raise an army and defeat the comunero forces at Villalar (April 23, 1521).

The power of monarchy was thus restored in Castile, never to be seriously shaken again under the Habsburg kings. But in practice it was far from absolute. The towns kept much of their autonomy, and the corregidores were often unable to exert effective royal control over determined town councils. The 18 “royal towns” that were summoned to the Cortes never again challenged the ultimate authority of the crown. However, they continued to quarrel with the king about their claim that they were entitled to delay granting taxes until after their grievances had been dealt with, and they frequently managed to sabotage the government’s demand that their deputies be given full powers to vote on government proposals. Moreover, when the crown found it convenient to convert the alcabala (a medieval sales tax) into the encabezamiento (global sums agreed by the Cortes and raised by the individual towns as they wished), the towns achieved a great measure of control over the administration of parliamentary taxation. Nor did the estate of the nobles in the Cortes prove easier to handle. In 1538, when Charles proposed a tax from which the nobles should not be exempt, there were immediate rumblings of revolt. The king had to give way, but he never summoned the nobility again to the meetings of the Cortes. The monarchy had thus won its political victory in Castile only at the cost of letting the nobility contract out of the financial obligations to the state and the empire. The rising burden of taxes fell therefore on those least able to bear them and on the only classes whose activities and investments could have developed the Castilian economy. The nobility

The traditions of the grandees and hidalgos, formed in the centuries of struggle against the Muslims, made them even more averse to economic activities than the rest of the European nobility. Many engaged in wholesale trade in wool and grain, and some profited from the American trade in Sevilla. But the majority invested their money in land—without, however, improving agriculture—and preferred careers in the army, the church, and the civil service to the ignoble occupations of commerce. In the long run, the economic weakness of Spain, aggravated by its social traditions and its system of taxation, proved a serious handicap in Spain’s struggle with its western European rivals.

After Villalar, however, the Spanish nobility had come to accept Charles I. His championing of Roman Catholic Christianity against the Muslim Turks and German heretics appealed to their own traditions of Christian warfare against the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. While Charles kept the grandees out of the central government of Spain itself, he had many prizes to offer in military commands, provincial governorships, and even viceroyalties in Italy and Spanish America. The hidalgos, trained as lawyers at Salamanca or as theologians at Alcalá de Henares (just east of Madrid), could look forward to dazzling careers in the king’s councils and in the Spanish church. Even though Charles spent only 16 of the 40 years of his reign in Spain, the Spanish upper classes were beginning to accept and enjoy their monarch’s position as the greatest ruler in Europe. Charles I’s foreign policy

Because of Charles’s role as Holy Roman emperor, Spain became involved in interminable wars. The necessity of defending southern Italy against the Turks brought Charles’s empire into collision with the Ottoman Empire, with the central Mediterranean as the chief battleground. Ferdinand’s failure to complete the conquest of North Africa now brought a bitter revenge. The corsair leader Khayr al-Dīn, known as Barbarossa, had made himself master of Algiers (1529) and acknowledged the suzerainty of the sultan of Constantinople. Thus, the purely local problem of the Muslim raids on the Spanish south coast became merged into the much more formidable struggle with the Ottoman Empire. In 1535 Charles captured Tunis. In perhaps his most satisfying triumph, Charles appeared in his chosen role of, as he said himself, “God’s standard-bearer.” He now seriously considered carrying the war into the eastern Mediterranean, even conquering Constantinople itself. But in 1538 Barbarossa, with a Turkish fleet, defeated Charles’s Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria, at Préveza (western Greece), and in 1541 the emperor himself failed against Algiers. At the end of the reign, the balance of the two great naval powers in the Mediterranean, the Spanish and the Turkish, was still even.

Rival claims to Naples by the Aragonese and the Angevins (cousins of the ruling French house) also brought conflict with the French kings, against whom Charles fought four wars. His armies conquered Milan (northern Italy) and reduced most of the still-independent Italian states to Spanish satellites. An increasing part of the burden of these wars fell on Spain and especially on Castile. The Spanish tercios (infantry regiments) were not only the emperor’s best troops, but it was in Castile that he could raise the largest part of his imperial revenues—moreover, without having to account for the way he spent them, as he had to do with the taxes voted by the States General of the Netherlands. It is therefore not surprising that the empire in Europe with Charles V as head became gradually transformed into a Spanish—or, rather, Castilian—empire of Charles I. In the latter part of his reign, Spaniards and Hispanicized Italians monopolized all high positions in the empire south of the Alps and began to appear in Germany and the Netherlands. More and more they came to interpret the international and Roman Catholic ideals of the emperor in terms of the political predominance of Spain in Europe and overseas. Philip II

When Charles abdicated his various lands (1555–56), Philip II (1556–98) succeeded to all his father’s dominions except Germany. His empire in Europe, now without the imperial title, was still only a loose union of independent states recognizing the same head. Philip, a great traditionalist, was not the man to inspire his different subjects with a new unifying idea, though he improved the central administration of his empire by the creation of the Council of Italy (1558). But his own Castilian upbringing and preferences increased the tendency toward transforming the Holy Roman Empire into a Castilian empire. Six of the nine viceroys Philip appointed to govern Sicily were Spaniards, as were all those of Naples with the single exception of one, Antoine Cardinal Perrenot de Granvelle, and 10 out of 13 governors of Milan. In the Spanish viceroyalties of Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, and Navarre and in those of Mexico and Peru, none but Spaniards, preferably Castilians, were ever thought of at all, with the exception of one or two Italians. These were the key figures in Philip II’s empire, and they were backed by the commanders of the Spanish regiments. Fortresses were nearly always governed by Castilians. It was necessary to appoint natives to military commands only in the Low Countries (Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands).

When the viceroys and governors were appointed, they were given “secret” instructions—in short, ones not meant for purely propagandistic purposes. These instructions reflected the current commonplaces of Christian government that could be found in scores of “Mirrors of Princes” (handbooks of government popular at the time) published in the 16th century and that Philip had made his own. The governors were to represent the king—not the state or the Spanish empire—as if he were present in person; it was stressed that they were not appointed for their own benefit but for that of the community they were sent to govern; they were to watch so that the king’s subjects might sleep in peace and quiet and to dispense equal justice to rich and poor.

Many of the Castilian grandees who were appointed to these high offices undoubtedly strove to live up to these precepts. In practice, however, their success depended largely on the strength of the local opposition they met: there was, for example, a great deal of local opposition in Sicily, which had gained the reputation of being “fatal to its viceroys,” but very much less in Naples, about which at least one viceroy remarked that no one should wish to be viceroy there, because of the pain he would have to suffer when he had to leave that post at the end of his term. A great part of the viceroys’ difficulties, however, stemmed from the unreliability of the king himself. Philip was always anxious to maintain the dignity of their office, but he encouraged the local ministers and officials to report on their viceroys behind their backs, and he had no compunction about recalling a viceroy, governor, or minister when it suited him in this way to appease local opposition.

The king kept control over his viceroys and governors by weekly, sometimes daily, correspondence, carried by the excellent postal service that the house of Austria had organized in Europe. All important political decisions were thus taken in Madrid, and there the king relied almost entirely on Spaniards for advice. Only one non-Spaniard, Cardinal Granvelle of Franche-Comté, was ever summoned to Madrid to play a leading role in the king’s inner councils (1579–86). It was Granvelle who had earlier, as the king’s chief minister in the Netherlands, reminded his master of the international character of his empire. He advised a more international dispensation of royal patronage, as, for instance, the appointment of the Prince of Orange (William I the Silent) to the viceroyalty of Sicily so that Netherlanders and Italians would no longer think that the king regarded only the Spaniards as his “legitimate subjects.” But Philip had refused to listen, and the bitter Castilian hostility to Granvelle at court ended by making the cardinal’s ministry in Madrid less and less effective in the last two or three years before his death in 1586. Finance and imperial policy

Philip II inherited from his predecessor an unfinished war with France and a debt of some 20 million ducats. While his ally England (to whose queen, Mary Tudor, Philip was married) lost Calais, Philip’s own armies won considerable victories, and he was able to conclude the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis with France (1559), which confirmed Spanish possessions and hegemony in Italy and which left the frontiers of the Netherlands intact. But the financial position had deteriorated irretrievably, and Philip’s governments, both in Madrid and in Brussels, had to declare a moratorium on their debts, or rather a forcible lowering of the very high rates of interest on government loans and a rescheduling of the repayments of short-term loans. It was the first of three such moratoriums in Philip II’s reign—the other two were declared in 1575 and 1596—and it set the tone for the remainder of Habsburg rule in Spain, marked by growing disparity between the monarchy’s imperial policies and the financial resources at its disposal to carry out these policies. For the rest of the 16th century this disparity was still largely masked by the fluctuating, but generally increasing, shipments of silver from the New World. These shipments inspired both the king and his German and Genoese creditors with the perennial hope of new treasure to pay off ever growing debts. But the armies and navies continued to swallow up more than the stream of American silver. Much of the money was already spent in the ports and coastal areas where the troops assembled and waited for embarkation to Italy or the Netherlands. Moreover, successive naval building programs provided further economic stimulus to the peripheral areas of the peninsula rather than the centre, Castile—which, however, had the highest rates of taxation. Thus, the financial burden of empire fell more and more on Castile, and it was these conditions that did much to determine the course of Spanish history for the next 100 years.

When Philip II returned to Spain in 1559, he still faced a naval war with the Turks, and in the following year his galleys suffered a humiliating and costly defeat at the island of Jarbah (off Tunisia’s east coast). In 1566 the steadily deepening crisis of the Netherlands came to a head when groups of radical Protestants ransacked Roman Catholic churches, desecrating hosts, smashing stained-glass windows, and breaking sacred images. In that year Sultan Süleyman I (the Magnificent) died, and for a time the Turkish danger faded into the background. Philip could therefore risk sending his commander duque de Alba" class="md-crosslink">Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, 3^er duque de Alba, with his best Spanish and Italian troops to the Netherlands (1567) to settle the problems of that dominion once and for all. Alba was to root out heresy, punish those responsible for the rebellion, and impose taxes sufficient to relieve Castile of the need to send any more financial help to the government in Brussels. It was the king’s most terrible miscalculation, for rebellion now became revolt and involved Spain in the Eighty Years’ War, 500 miles from its own borders (1568–1648). It was in the pursuit of this war that the Spanish empire in Europe eventually foundered.

The key to the strategic thinking of Philip II and his successors, however, was always France. This was reasonable, for France was potentially the strongest military power in Europe and its hostility to Spanish greatness was absolute, despite occasional short periods of rapprochement. But, until 1595, France was paralyzed by a long succession of civil wars. Much as Philip II hated and feared a possible Huguenot (French Protestant) victory in France, he was content to see the civil wars continue, anxious most often to intervene on the side of the Catholics yet sometimes covertly offering help to the Huguenots. Until the late 1570s the threat from the Turks rivaled in importance the problems of the Netherlands. Philip switched his limited resources from the Low Countries to the Mediterranean and back again, unable to achieve a decisive victory in either theatre. It was natural, therefore, that Spanish foreign policy remained on the defensive for 20 years after the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. There were, moreover, still formidable internal Iberian problems to be solved. The Moriscos

The most immediate problem was that of the Moriscos of Granada. The attempt to Christianize and assimilate them had proceeded only very slowly. In the 1560s the ineptitude and the wrangling among the different public authorities in Andalusia brought government to a virtual standstill. The captain general of Granada, in charge of defense and internal security, was quarreling with the municipal council of Granada and with the audiencia, the supreme court for Andalusia, over precedence, rights of jurisdiction, and the ownership of some pastures. The audiencia, in its turn, quarreled with the Inquisition over disputed rights of jurisdiction, as did the captain general. He was supported by the archbishop of Granada, who was, however, involved in a lawsuit with his cathedral chapter. Such disputes were typical of the Spanish system of government, and it was also characteristic that they became immediately involved in faction fights at Philip II’s court. These were therefore rarely settled according to their merits but according to the prevailing political alignment at court. In this case the governor-general, who had usually acted as the protector of the Moriscos against exploitation by the Christians, lost. The government in Madrid first sent a commission to inquire into titles of land, and this commission confiscated mainly Morisco land. In 1567 a decree was published forbidding the Moriscos the use of their Muslim names and dress and even their Arabic language. Internal security was transferred from the governor-general to the audiencia. This decision meant that now there was no one to protect the peaceful Morisco farmers from the large number of outlaws in the Alpujarras mountains. On Christmas Day, 1568, they rose against the hated Christians. It took two years of ferocious campaigning, with dreadful atrocities committed by both sides, before the rebellion was put down. The Moriscos of Granada were then deported in small groups to different parts of Castile and settled in a last attempt to achieve assimilation. In the absence of systematic education and in the face of the hostility of the Christian population, this attempt was also doomed to failure. Portugal and Aragon

The question of the complete unification of the Iberian Peninsula remained. In the case of Portugal, Philip’s opportunity came when his nephew, King Sebastian of Portugal, lost his life and a great Portuguese army in an ill-prepared Crusade at the Battle of the Three Kings in northern Morocco (1578). During the short reign of Sebastian’s old uncle, King Henry (1578–80), Philip carefully prepared his ground in Portugal by intrigue and bribery. Nevertheless, when Henry died, the opposition to Castile was still so strong in Portugal and the attitude of France and England so threatening that it was necessary for Philip to send Alba with an army to conquer Portugal in 1580. Although Philip respected the laws and privileges of his new subjects and left them to administer their own colonial empire, the union increased rather than diminished the old hostility between the Castilians and the Portuguese.

Philip II’s last action in the peninsula was against Aragon. It was precipitated by a court intrigue that led to the flight (1590) of the king’s secretary, Antonio Pérez, to Aragon. Since Pérez was unlikely to be convicted in the justicia’s court there, the king demanded his transfer to the court of the Inquisition. The populace of Zaragoza (some 160 miles west of Barcelona) rioted, freed Pérez, and killed the king’s special representative (1591). To the Aragonese this meant the defense of their liberties; to Philip it meant open rebellion. A Castilian army marched into Aragon (1591), and Philip made a number of constitutional changes. The justicia was from then on removable at royal pleasure; the viceroy could be a Castilian, and the principle of majority voting was substituted for that of unanimity in the Aragonese Cortes. These changes gave the crown the ultimate power of decision in Aragon but preserved the kingdom’s autonomy. Lepanto

In the Mediterranean the Spanish fleet was inferior to that of the Turks, and Philip had to remain on the defensive, even when the Turks were besieging Malta (1565). However, the Turks’ failure to capture the island from the Hospitallers, who had leased it from Charles V in his capacity as emperor, marked the end of their great offensive. Six years later the combined Spanish, Venetian, and papal fleets—in alliance the numerical equals of the Turks—virtually annihilated the Turkish fleet in the Lepanto" class="md-crosslink">Battle of Lepanto (1571). The strategic effects of this great victory were negligible, but its moral effects were immense. It confirmed the Spaniards in their chosen role as champions of Christendom and explains much of their continued willingness to support their king’s religious and imperial policies, even in the face of ruinous costs and mounting disasters. After Lepanto, however, it became clear that the stalemate in the Mediterranean could not be broken. In 1580 Spain signed a truce with the Sublime Porte (Ottoman government).

From about 1580 the Spanish government became convinced that the rebellion (1568–1609) and heresy in the Netherlands could not be crushed as long as the rebels received help from England and France. These countries, moreover, gave active support to the Portuguese pretender, António, prior of Crato (mid Portugal), and their privateers committed continual acts of piracy against Spanish trade in the Americas. Philip began to give financial aid to the Holy League, the ultra-Catholic party in France. From 1586 he prepared an invasion of England. The Armada, which set sail from Lisbon in May 1588 numbering about 130 ships and nearly 30,000 men, was commanded by Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, duque de Medina-Sidonia, in place of Alvaro de Bazán, marqués de Santa Cruz, who had died in February. Although a brave and resolute commander, Medina-Sidonia was given the impossible task of convoying the army under Alessandro Farnese, duke of Parma, from the Netherlands to England in the face of a better-armed English fleet and without control of a single deepwater channel port. The defeat of the Armada was probably inevitable but not dishonourable.

Spanish intervention in France from 1590 was equally doomed to failure. The duke of Parma, with his Spanish veterans, won great tactical victories, but Spain failed to prevent the succession of Henry of Navarre as Henry IV of France and the collapse of its ally, the Holy League, when Henry converted to Roman Catholicism in 1593.

Philip viewed his role and that of Spain essentially as that of defender of the Roman Catholic Church against the aggression of the heretics, an aggression that now seemed to have become mainly military and that consequently had to be met by military force. It was therefore essential that the king should safeguard and extend the power of Spain and the just claims of his house, such as those he made for his daughter for the throne of France. Every other consideration was subordinated to this obligation, even to the point at which the Spanish ambassador in Rome, Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimental, conde-duque de Olivares, intervened in three successive conclaves in order to assure, by a mixture of promises and threats, the election of popes congenial to his master (conclaves in 1590–91 of Urban VII, Gregory XIV, and Innocent IX). He just failed in the fourth, but crucial, election—of Clement VIII, who was to receive Henry IV back into the Catholic church (1595).

Gaspar de Guzmán y Pimental, conde-duque de Olivares, detail of Equestrian Portrait of Olivares by Diego Velázquez, c. 1634–35; in the Prado Museum, Madrid.Archivo Mas, Barcelona

Although Philip II could thus justify his aggressive policies to himself, both Spain’s enemies and its allies were convinced that they were witnessing the quest for Spanish dominance over Europe. Many Spaniards themselves believed this, and, as the war dragged on and the costs mounted, even the faithful Castilian Cortes began to question the king’s policy. In 1574 Philip proposed tripling the value of the encabezamiento, which had remained fixed during the previous 20 years; however, the Cortes opposed this proposal and managed to achieve a considerable reduction. After 1580, silver shipments from the New World to Sevilla reached new record levels, and this undoubtedly helped to persuade Philip II to embark on his grandiose schemes against England and France. Yet this silver represented only a quarter of his annual revenues. The rest was derived from taxation and from loans for which future revenues were pledged. The Armada campaign was said to have cost 10 million ducats; the combined cost of the continuing naval war against England, the campaigns in the Netherlands, and the military intervention in France was even greater. In 1590 the Cortes accepted the royal demand for a new excise tax that was to raise eight million ducats in six years and that was appropriately nicknamed the millones. But by 1595 a deputy from Sevilla said bitterly that

the reason why taxes have been raised without noise is because they have not fallen on the rich who are those who have a voice…and the sweetness which they find, that is the blood of the poor.

The following year Philip II’s government declared its third bankruptcy (moratorium) and failed to get the Cortes to agree to an increase or even the renewal of the millones before 1601.

Spain had gambled its own prosperity and its American treasure, and with it its own hegemony over the European continent, on a decisive victory over the heretics in western Europe, and it had failed. Shortly before his death, Philip II concluded the Treaty of Vervins (1598) with France, which substantially reestablished the position of 1559. Yet, although Spain had failed in its highest ambitions, it remained the greatest power in Europe at the end of the 16th century. It had brought Christianity to millions overseas—which to most contemporaries, if they thought about it at all, seemed worth the appalling price paid in terms of the lives and freedom of non-European peoples—and Protestantism, though not destroyed, had been contained. Spanish monks and mystics had given Roman Catholicism a new content, and Spanish theologians and jurists had created the basis of international law. Spanish literature and art were only now entering their greatest period. Morally and economically, there were dark sides to the picture, but to the Spaniards the 16th and early 17th centuries have always been their “Golden Age.” Spain in 1600

It is not surprising that the enormous exertions of the last quarter of the 16th century, with its mixture of triumphs, disappointments, and miseries, should have been followed by a general mood of introspection and even disenchantment. This was particularly evident in economic and social thinking. The arbitristas (literally, “projectors”) were writers who combined an economic analysis of the social ills of Spain with projects for economic recovery and social and moral regeneration. They saw clearly the central weakness of Spain: the attitude of mind that despised productive work and those who engaged in it. Far too many strove to live the life of a hidalgo. The treasures of Mexico and Peru, so far from stimulating investment and industrial production, had only encouraged men to look for shortcuts to riches and to live the life of rentiers, investing their money in the censos, the government annuities. These censos were the greatest plague and perdition of Spain, wrote González de Cellorigo, perhaps the most acute of the arbitristas of 1600. “It seems,” he concluded, “as if we had wanted to turn these kingdoms into a republic of enchanted men, living outside the natural order.”

The positive plans (among many fantasies) advocated by the arbitristas included the drastic cutting of government expenditure, the reform of the tax system, the encouragement of immigration into Castile, systematic and extensive irrigation, protection of industry, improvement of transport, and, finally, the sharing of the cost of empire among the constituent kingdoms of the monarchy. These were reasonable proposals, not unlike those put forward by mercantilist writers in the rest of Europe who treated economic activity as a means of increasing the power of the state. But time would show that the Castilian ruling classes would be neither capable nor willing to act on them. Their attitudes were varied and often ambivalent, and this ambivalence is reflected in the imaginative literature of the period. Spain’s Golden Age in literature

At one extreme there was the picaresque novel, with its implicit satire of a society in which one could make one’s way by cleverness and roguery rather than by honest work—that is, if one did not happen to be born a nobleman. Thus, the hidalgo in the Lazarillo de Tormes (published 1554; doubtfully attributed to Diego Hurtado de Mendoza), the first of the picaresque novels, is down and out but would rather starve than work, and he expects his servant, the boy Lazarillo, to scrounge for them both. In Don Quixote (published 1605 and 1615), Miguel de Cervantes raised the novel to a completely new level of social and psychological insight. It is, among other things, a parable of Cellorigo’s “republic of enchanted men” living in a world of illusions and tilting at windmills.

At the other extreme, there was the drama from exponents such as Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. As with the picaresque novel, the comedy of the Golden Age was concerned with the contemporary social scene. The psychological problems faced by its characters arose nearly always directly out of social conflicts. But the social purpose of these plays was essentially conservative, representing a defense of Spain’s highly structured society. This was achieved by insisting on the special dignity and honour of all social ranks, from the king down to the peasants. Thus, Lope introduced the common people as fully rounded characters on the stage, allowing, for instance, to the daughter of a blacksmith the emotions of love formerly reserved on the stage to aristocratic ladies. Heredity and blood are the principles of a social order that, in the comedies, may be threatened but is always reaffirmed in the end. There is perhaps a link here between the visual arts of the age and the Baroque style. The “Golden Age” in architecture and painting

In the more severe artistic climate of the Catholic Reformation of the second half of the 16th century, the playful Plateresque style of buildings fell into disfavour. Philip II preferred the unornamented and monumental architecture of Juan de Herrera, the greatest Spanish architect of the century. It could be very effective, as in Philip’s monastic palace of El Escorial (20 miles northwest of Madrid), which embodied the gloomy and ascetic spirit of the king and also blended with the stark and forbidding landscape of the Guadarrama mountain range northwest of Madrid. But too often the style produced only an ugly and pompous monumentality, such as not infrequently afflicts the architecture of countries at the height of their imperial periods. Yet, at the turn of the century, this style gave way to the Italian Baroque, which Spanish architects found no difficulty in acclimatizing to their country. The Baroque style could achieve monumentality without being pompous. It could display the grandeur of the church or the monarchy or anyone rich enough to build himself a palace. Perhaps most important of all, it was a style that, by its love of ornamentation and its essentially theatrical character, became immensely popular with the mass of the population.

The single most splendid monument in the Baroque style, the Buen Retiro Palace just outside Madrid, has not survived (for a discussion of the fine porcelain manufactured there later, see Buen Retiro ware). Built in the 1630s, in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, at a time when Spain’s military fortunes were beginning to decline, it was designed to reaffirm the greatness of the Spanish monarchy. Like El Escorial, it had a forbidding exterior; its interior decoration, however, like that of the splendid library of Philip II’s monastery-palace, showed, literally or allegorically, Spain’s victorious battles with the enemies of Catholic Christendom. Great numbers of paintings were bought in Spain and abroad, and Spanish courtiers were coerced to lend or even to make presents of their own paintings and other art objects. As in other courts of the period, splendid theatrical and musical entertainments were organized, mainly for the benefit of the court and the diplomatic corps, but occasionally the Madrid public was also invited or allowed to buy tickets. Perhaps it was symbolic of the Spanish monarchy in this period that such a grandiose vision and its overhasty construction should have produced rising and increasingly unacceptable maintenance costs.

The painting of the period does not lend itself as easily to a social interpretation, but certain patterns may still be observed. The greatest painter of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos, from Crete), made his home in Toledo, where the local aristocratic and ecclesiastical society (but not Philip II) seems to have fully appreciated his genius. El Greco’s superb portraits, but, above all, his religious paintings, with their elongated figures rising like so many flames to heaven, seem like the embodiment of the most spiritual aspects of Spanish Catholicism.

El Greco left no school of painting. The painters of the following generation, especially Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, had a different religious sensibility, more naturalistic than that of El Greco, more personal, and more romantic; and again, as did Baroque architecture, they appealed successfully to a popular religiosity. But the greatest of them, Diego Velázquez, was hardly a religious painter at all. His subjects were the king with his family and court and, characteristic for the age and parallel with the drama of the period, the common people. All these he represented with a realism and psychological insight unmatched in the 17th century, except perhaps by Rembrandt. The reign of Philip III

It was the tragedy of Spain that its ruling classes failed to respond to the social and political problems of the age as creatively as its writers and artists. For this failure there are at least some good reasons. In the first place, the system of royal government, as it was understood at the time, depended ultimately on the king’s ability to lead and to make decisions. Philip II’s very consciousness of his divinely imposed obligations, compounded by his almost pathological suspiciousness of the intentions and ambitions of other men, had led him to deprecate independent initiative by his ministers. He thus failed to educate an effective ruling class with a tradition of statesmanlike thinking and decision making.

Philip III, painting by Diego Velázquez, 1631–36; in the Prado Museum, Madrid.Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis

Devout but indolent and passive, Philip III (1598–1621) was incapable of carrying on his father’s methods of personal government. He therefore had to have a minister (privado) who would do all his work for him. His choice, duque de Lerma" class="md-crosslink">Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, duque de Lerma, however, turned out to be a singularly unfortunate one. Amiable, incompetent, and, inevitably, under heavy attack from those who envied his position, Lerma strove to maintain himself by the lavish dispensation of royal patronage to the high nobility. He was unable to turn the schemes of the arbitristas into effective reforms. During the reign of Philip III the government of Spain either became the victim of events that it did not attempt to control or allowed its hand to be forced by outsiders.

Not all events could have been controlled. In 1599–1600 an epidemic plague claimed some 500,000 victims in Castile. This sudden decimation of the labour force caused a sharp rise in wages, which in turn acted as another disincentive to capital investment by Spaniards. Yet the advantages that the labourers had reaped from the rise in wages were quickly offset by renewed inflation, the result of the government’s decision to solve its perennial financial problems by the massive minting of vellón, a debased copper coinage. Although this action did not prevent the need for another moratorium on government debts, in 1608 the king promised the Cortes of Castile that the government would not issue any more vellón money for 20 years. But in 1617 and 1621 he was forced to ask the Cortes to allow additional issues. The expulsion of the Moriscos

The plight of the Moriscos was the most serious social crisis of the reign. The great majority of the Moriscos lived in the kingdom of Valencia. Like those of Andalusia, they had been forcibly but ineffectively converted to Christianity. Most of them were relatively poor farmers, agricultural labourers, or small tradesmen and hucksters. Although they were hated and despised by the poor Christian peasants, the Moriscos were protected by the landowners for whom they provided industrious tenants and labourers.

For many years a controversy raged between those who wanted to “solve” the Morisco problem by expulsion and those who pleaded for time and money to achieve the genuine assimilation and Christianization of the Moriscos. While the practical economic aspects of these two views were not neglected, it was characteristic of the Spain of the period that the main emphasis of the debate was on the religious and moral problems. In 1609 Lerma’s government ordered the expulsion of the Moriscos. Lerma saw it as part of a policy of disengagement from “Castilian” power politics in central Europe—he himself was a Valencian—and a renewed shifting of Spanish energies toward North Africa and Islam. As a Valencian landowner, he also hoped for personal gain from the confiscation of Morisco land. By 1614 some 275,000 Moriscos had been forced to leave Spain. The majority of Spaniards undoubtedly approved of the expulsion.

The economic effects of the expulsion have generated considerable debate, both at the time and today. In Castile the effects were probably slight. In Aragon and Valencia, where the Moriscos had constituted between 20 and 30 percent of the population, they were certainly much greater. Some but by no means all Morisco land was resettled by “old” Christians. There was a shift from labour-intensive sugar and rice production to mulberry cultivation for silk and viticulture. The greatest difficulties were caused by the indebtedness of the Morisco peasants and the consequent losses suffered by their urban creditors. An ironic footnote to the expulsion was the plight of the Aragonese and Valencian Inquisitions. Although they once favoured expulsion, they were now left without their major source of income, the composition fines for Moorish practices that they imposed on the Morisco villages. Spain and Europe

Neither Philip III nor Lerma was emotionally or intellectually capable of the fundamental reappraisal of foreign policy that Philip II’s failures required. Very few even of the arbitristas had seen this need sufficiently clearly. The court, the nobility, and, above all, the clergy and the king’s confessors remained caught in the now-hardening tradition of Spanish imperialism, simplistically interpreted as the cause of God. This attitude caused a serious misjudgment of the political forces in England, leading to the absurd hope of placing the infanta Isabella on the English throne upon the death of Elizabeth I. In 1601 a small Spanish force was disembarked at Kinsale, in Ireland, to cooperate with the Irish rebels. The English army had no difficulty in forcing it to surrender.

Fortunately for Spain, the new government of James I was anxious for peace. On the Spanish side, the Treaty of London (1604), which ended 16 years of Anglo-Spanish war, was negotiated on the initiative of Philip II’s son-in-law, the archduke Albert, to whom Philip II in his last year had handed over the nominal sovereignty of the Spanish Netherlands. Albert and his Genoese general, Ambrogio Spinola, also urged the Spanish government to negotiate with the Dutch rebels. Between 1604 and 1607, Spain sent unprecedentedly large sums to Flanders. Spinola captured Ostend (on the coast of present-day Belgium) and won victories in Friesland (northern Holland). But, he wrote to Madrid, it would take 300,000 ducats a month to continue the war successfully. After the moratorium of 1607, Philip III was in no position to raise such sums. He and Lerma, but not the Castilian grandees in the Council of State, were prepared to recognize Dutch independence, but they insisted that the Dutch withdraw from their recent conquests in America and the East Indies. The Dutch refused to accept this as well as an alternative Spanish condition, the toleration of Roman Catholics in their state. As a compromise, the two sides concluded a 12-year truce, beginning in 1609.

In 1610 a new war with France threatened, but the French king Henry IV was assassinated, and for almost 20 years France, Spain’s most formidable opponent in Europe, became preoccupied with its internal problems. The years from 1610 to 1630 were the last period in which Spain clearly dominated Europe. For the first of these two decades Europe enjoyed a kind of Pax Hispanica. Spanish armies controlled Italy, Flanders, and parts of the Rhineland. Spanish and Spanish-inclined Jesuits were confessors at the courts of the Austrian Habsburgs, Poland, Bavaria, and some of the minor German and Italian princes. Spanish subsidies, pensions, and bribes made clients even of Protestant politicians in England, Holland, and the Swiss cantons (although much less effectively so than Madrid hoped); and Spanish-paid spies fed the governments of Madrid and Brussels with valuable, if not always accurate, information about potential enemies in the United Provinces (Holland), England, and France. Yet, to a much greater degree than most contemporaries realized, this Spanish domination of Europe rested on default: the disunity and temporary weakness of Spain’s political and religious opponents. The psychological effects of this position on Spain were wholly disastrous, for it confirmed the Castilian ruling classes in their imperialist attitudes.

For Philip III and Lerma this attitude led, for reasons of both finance and temperament, to a largely defensive stance, though its effect was quite the opposite for the Spanish representatives abroad. In the absence of an effective lead from Madrid, the Spanish grandees who were the king’s viceroys and ambassadors in Europe took it upon themselves to advance Spanish interests as they saw them—that is, in terms of Spanish power. They fortified the route from Milan to the Tirol (western Austria) through the Valtellina, the vital link with the Austrian Habsburgs; they annexed several small Italian lordships; they enticed Dalmatian pirates (operating from the eastern shore of the Adriatic), the Uskoks, to prey on the trade of Venice, and they even seem to have plotted the complete overthrow of that republic.

More fateful still were their activities in Prague and Brussels. At the courts of the emperors Rudolf II and Matthias, the ambassador Baltazar de Zúñiga organized an effective “Spanish” party. His successor, the conde de Oñate, negotiated the secret Treaty of Graz (1617) by which the Jesuit-educated archduke Ferdinand of Styria (later Emperor Ferdinand II) was designated as heir to Matthias. In return for giving up Philip III’s claims to the Austrian succession, which Madrid had never seriously pursued in any case, Oñate obtained the promise of full Spanish sovereignty of the Tirol and Alsace (now in eastern France), the two German pillars of the “Spanish Road” between Italy and the Netherlands. At the same time, the “Spanish” party in Prague managed the preelection of Ferdinand as king of Bohemia in case of Matthias’s death. Zúñiga and Oñate had undoubtedly strengthened Spain’s strategic position in central Europe, but they had also, for the first time since the abdication of Charles V, involved Spain again in the local politics of the Holy Roman Empire. For Philip IV this involvement turned out to be even more disastrous than it had for Charles V. Spanish leadership, as practiced by the self-willed Castilian grandees abroad, had proved to be energetic and clever, but it was ultimately as devoid of true statesmanship as the slackness of the king and his privado.

In 1618 Lerma’s enemies at court finally managed to overthrow him. Zúñiga returned to Madrid and became the leading advocate of aggressive policies. Alonso de la Cueva, marqués de Bedmar, former Spanish ambassador to Venice and the organizer of the anti-Venetian conspiracy, went as ambassador to Brussels and immediately began to press for the reopening of the war against the United Provinces. In 1621 Philip III died, and with him disappeared the last restraints on the neoimperialists. Only 16 years of age, Philip IV left the effective powers of kingship in the hands of his former gentleman of the chamber, the conde-duque de Olivares. Olivares shared the political views of his uncle, Zúñiga, and he soon dominated the Council of State. Philip IV’s reign Spain and the Thirty Years’ War

In 1620, following the defeat of Frederick V (the elector palatine, or prince, from the Rhineland who had accepted the crown of Bohemia when it was offered to him in 1618) and the Bohemians, Spanish troops from the Netherlands entered the “Winter King’s” hereditary dominions of the Rhenish Palatinate. Militarily, Spain was now in a favourable position to restart the war with the United Provinces at the expiration of the truce in 1621. The decision to do so was, however, taken on more general grounds. The Dutch had used the truce only to capture the carrying trade with Spain of western Europe and the Baltic, Zúñiga argued. On the oceans they had never observed the truce but continued their piracies against Spanish and Portuguese shipping. If they were allowed to continue, first the Indies would be lost, then the rest of Flanders, Italy, and, finally, Spain itself, for it would have lost the dominions that had made it great. These were very different grounds for resuming the war from those habitually advanced by Philip II. Little was said about religion or even the king’s authority, while the protection of the overseas empire had become the central consideration in Spanish relations with the Dutch rebels. Olivares dismissed the counterarguments of the Council of Finance. The young king, content to be told that he was not responsible for the debts of his predecessors, piously declared his intention not to burden his subjects any further. Yet neither he nor his ministers could foresee that a recent slump in silver shipments from America was not a temporary setback but heralded a rapid, long-term decline. The Dutch were equally anxious for war—partly, at least, because of the vain hope that the Belgians would rebel against Spain and join the United Provinces.

Having decided on war, Olivares pursued a perfectly consistent strategy: communications between Spain and the Spanish Netherlands were to be kept open at all costs, and the Dutch were to be hit wherever they were most vulnerable. The first objective led Spain to build up a naval force in the Spanish Netherlands (Belgium) that preyed on Dutch shipping in the North Sea and, on the diplomatic front, to cultivate the friendship of James I of England and even to contemplate the restoration of Frederick V to the Palatinate and the marriage of Philip IV’s devoutly Roman Catholic sister to the heretic prince of Wales (later Charles I). It led to very close cooperation with the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs and the need to fight for the control of the Valtellina. The second objective, which followed the advance of the imperial armies under Albrecht Wallenstein (an adventurer who made himself indispensable to the Habsburgs as a military organizer) to the Baltic, led to grandiose schemes of building an imperial Spanish fleet in the Baltic with Hanseatic (the Hanse towns on the Baltic were independent mercantile organizations) and Danish help in order to destroy the Dutch Baltic trade and with it the economic prosperity of the republic.

However rational and limited these aims and plans seemed in Spain, in the rest of Europe they appeared to show only too clearly the limitless ambitions of the house of Austria. The now habitual talk in Spanish court and military circles of restoring Spain’s greatness did not help to persuade Europe otherwise. Spinola’s and Wallenstein’s victories in the mid-1620s convinced the Spanish Council of State that victory against the Dutch was possible and blinded them to the danger of raising up new and more powerful enemies. Thus, they let the last chances of a favourable peace slip away. Yet, despite enormous sums sent annually from Castile to Flanders, the Spanish armies could not break Dutch resistance. They could not even supply their own provisions and ammunition without the covert help of Dutch merchants, who, in their turn, argued that this trade with the mortal enemy brought in the money needed to pay for the troops fighting this enemy. From 1630, when Sweden and France actively intervened in the war, Spain rapidly lost the initiative. The war was fought on a global scale, in central Europe and from the Philippines to Brazil. Spanish armies could still win tactical victories in Italy and Germany, but the number and seriousness of Spanish reverses, especially at sea, were now steadily mounting. The government of Olivares

Olivares was undoubtedly the most able politician directing the Spanish government since Cardinal Granvelle. The Catholic Monarchs, the emperor, and Philip II had kept the high nobility, to a greater or lesser degree, out of the central government. Lerma had reversed this policy, and Olivares could not go back on this position, although he bitterly lamented the incompetence of his fellow aristocrats and sharply reduced the overgenerous flow of royal patronage to them. He could—and did—develop a system of committees (juntas) of experts within the councils, which took over a great deal of government business and made its administration more efficient.

In 1623 and 1624 Olivares presented to the king and Council of State a number of memorandums that were nothing less than plans for a far-reaching reform of government and society on the lines advocated by the arbitristas. Like them, Olivares saw the need to change mental attitudes; in particular, he recognized the need for restraints on the aristocratic love of splendour and display, the need to appreciate the dignity of work and productive economic activity, and the need to end the economically harmful and morally indefensible mania for limpieza de sangre (Olivares himself, through his grandmother, was of converso ancestry). On the more immediately practical level, Olivares’s memorandums were concerned principally with finance, for, with an annual expenditure of eight million ducats, there was a deficit of four million. The count-duke proposed the abolition of some of the most harmful taxes, the millones and the alcabala, and their substitution by simpler and more-equitable taxes. Finally, he argued that Castile should not be expected to continue to bear nearly the entire cost of the war. Like Granvelle, Olivares recognized that the king’s non-Castilian dominions could be expected to share in the burdens of empire only if they could also enjoy its advantages—the honours, commands, and control over policy that had been all but completely reserved to the Castilians.

None of these plans was put into practice. The Spaniards were unwilling to change their mode of life and their ingrained beliefs at the behest of a royal favourite. Olivares did manage to arrange loans with a consortium of Portuguese Marrano (Christianized Jews) businessmen, but he was bitterly attacked for this action. The court itself gaily abandoned a short-lived austerity in the celebrations that followed the arrival of the prince of Wales in his romantic but abortive quest for a Spanish bride (1623). The financial reforms foundered on the opposition of vested interests to taxation by the Cortes and on the opposition of the whole Castilian ruling class to the plan for the decentralization of the empire. Just as had happened to Granvelle’s proposals, there was not even any serious discussion of Olivares’s plan. In the 1560s the result of this failure had left Philip II with no alternative but Alba’s policy of repression, which caused the revolt of the Netherlands; in the 1620s it left Olivares with no alternative but his Union of Arms, which caused the revolts of Catalonia and Portugal. The Union of Arms was a scheme for the creation of a reserve army of 140,000 men that was to be paid for by the dominions of the Spanish empire in proportion to their estimated resources. But the non-Castilian dominions disliked this proposal because it infringed on their liberties. They also distrusted Castilian intentions—and with good reason, for in 1625 Olivares had advised the king in a secret memorandum to “secretly plan and work to reduce these kingdoms of which Spain is composed to the style and laws of Castile.” The revolt of Catalonia

Apart from Portugal, Catalonia was the state with the greatest degree of autonomy. Its medieval form of government had not been changed since Ferdinand the Catholic had settled it in 1486. Its countryside, especially on the French border, was infested with smugglers and bandits and riven by local feuds. Its taxes were administered by the Diputació, a self-perpetuating and corrupt committee of the Catalan Corts that functioned during the long intervals between the meetings of that body. The viceroys, hemmed in on all sides by local privileges and without control over the finances of the province, were virtually powerless. In 1626 Philip IV summoned the Cortes of the realms of the Crown of Aragon. Aragon and Valencia reluctantly voted some money but refused conscription of troops. Catalonia refused everything. Nevertheless, Olivares published the royal decree for the Union of Arms. Subsequently relations between Madrid and Catalonia deteriorated rapidly.