Spain: Encyclopedia II - Spain - History

Spain - History

Main article: History of Spain

Spain - Prehistory

The aboriginal peoples of the Iberian peninsula, consisting of a number of separate tribes, are given the generic name of Iberians. This may have included the Basques, the only pre-Celtic people in Iberia surviving to the present day as a separate ethnic group. The most important culture of this period is that of the city of Tartessos. Beginning in the 9th century BC, Celtic tribes entered the Iberian peninsula through the Pyrenees and settled throughout the peninsula, becoming the Celtiberians.

The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians successively settled along the Mediterranean coast and founded trading colonies there over a period of several centuries.

Around 1,100 BC Phoenician merchants founded the trading colony of Gadir or Gades (modern day Cádiz) near Tartessos. In the 8th century BC the first Greek colonies, such as Emporion (modern Empúries), were founded along the Mediterranean coast on the East, leaving the south coast to the Phoenicians. The Greeks are responsible for the name Iberia, after the river Iber (Ebro in Spanish). In the 6th century BC the Carthaginians arrived in Iberia while struggling with the Greeks for control of the Western Mediterranean. Their most important colony was Carthago Nova (Latin name of modern day Cartagena).

Spain - Roman Empire

The Romans arrived in the Iberian peninsula during the Second Punic war in the 2nd century BC, and annexed it under Augustus after two centuries of war with the Celtic and Iberian tribes and the Phoenician, Greek and Carthaginian colonies becoming the province of Hispania. It was divided in Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior during the late Roman Republic; and, during the Roman Empire, Hispania Taraconensis in the northeast, Hispania Baetica in the south and Lusitania in the southwest.

Hispania supplied the Roman Empire with food, olive oil, wine and metal. The emperors Trajan, Hadrian and Theodosius I, the philosopher Seneca and the poets Martial and Lucan were born in Spain. The Spanish Bishops held the Council at Elvira in 306. Many of Spain's present languages, religion, and laws originate from this period. It was the centuries of uninterrupted Roman rule and settlement that left the deepest and most lasting imprint upon Spain.

Spain - Muslim Spain

Main article: Al-Andalus

In the 8th century, nearly all the Iberian peninsula, which had been under Visigothic rule, was quickly conquered (from 711), by Muslims (the Moors), who had crossed over from North Africa. Visigothic Spain was the last of a series of Christian nations conquered in a great westward charge through then Christian Palestine and across north Africa by the religiously zealous armies of the Umayyad empire. Indeed this onslaught continued northwards until it was decisively defeated in central France at the Battle of Tours in 732. Only three small counties in the north of Spain kept their independence: Asturias, Navarra and Aragon, which eventually became kingdoms.

Very soon the Muslim emirate split into small kingdoms. Muslim Spain was rarely peaceful throughout its history. Christian and Muslim kingdoms fought and allied among themselves, with the Christians driving the Moorish forces out of the northernmost parts of the peninsula within a few decades. The Muslim taifa kings competed in patronage of the arts, and the Jewish population of Iberia set the basis of Sephardic culture. Much of Spain's distinctive art originates from this seven-hundred-year period, and many Arabic words made their way into Castilian (Spanish) and Catalan, and from them to other European languages.

The Moorish capital was Córdoba, in the southern portion of Spain known as Andalucía. During the time of Arab occupation, large populations of Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in close quarters, and at its peak some non-Muslims were appointed to high offices. At its best it produced exquisite architecture and art, and Muslim and Jewish scholars played a great part in reviving the study of ancient Greek and Roman culture and philosophy, making their own important contributions to it, and becoming one of the most important ways by which these studies were revived in Europe. However there were also restrictions and prohibitions on non-Muslims, which tended to grow after the death of Al-Hakam II in 976, and were accentuated after the fall of Al-Andalus in 1031. Later invasions of stricter Muslim groups from north Africa even led to persecutions of non-Muslims, forcing some (including Muslim scholars) to seek safety in the then still relatively tolerant city of Toledo after its Christian reconquest in 1085.

Spanish society became increasingly complex under Muslim rule. This is partly because Islamic conquest did not involve the systematic conversion of the conquered population to Islam. Islam restricted the ability of Muslim rulers to tax other Muslims, making it financially advantageous for a ruler to have non-Muslim subjects. At the same time, Christians and Jews were recognized under Islam as “peoples of the book.” Christianity and Judaism shared with Islam the tradition of the Old Testament, and Islam considered Jesus Christ a major prophet. Thus, Christians and Jews were free to practice their religion, but they had to pay a prescribed poll tax. They also were not permitted to repair churches or synagogues and certainly not build new ones. Clothing conventions were used to mark them out. Conversion to Islam proceeded slowly.

The Roman Catholic Church in Muslim Spain continued to function, although it lost contact with religious reforms in Rome. Muslim Spain came to include a growing number of Mozarabic Christians, people who adopted Arabic language and culture and followed forms of religious service different from those of Rome. In addition, Jews held prominent positions in government, commerce, and the professions under Muslim rule.

The Muslim community in Spain was itself diverse and beset by social tensions. From the beginning the Berber tribespeople of North Africa clashed with the Arabs of Egypt and the Middle East. The Berbers, who were comparatively recent converts to Islam, accounted for the largest share of Moors in Spain and they resented the sophistication and aristocratic pretensions of the Arab elite. They soon gave up attempting to settle the harsh lands of the northern reaches of the Meseta Central handed to them by the Arab elite, and, complaining of Arab duplicity, many returned to Africa. Meanwhile many Christians in Spain, mainly among the elite, including Visigothic nobles, converted to Islam. Conversion was commonplace among merchants, large landowners, and other local elites. Drawn into the politics of Islamic power, many Christians found that conversion made it easier to maintain their influence.

Spain was wealthy and sophisticated under Islamic rule. Mediterranean trade and cultural exchange flourished. Muslims imported a rich intellectual tradition from the Middle East and North Africa, including knowledge about mathematics, science, and philosophy, and they continued to build upon it in Spain. Crops and farming techniques introduced by the Arabs, including new irrigation practices, led to a remarkable expansion of agriculture that had been in decline since late Roman times. In towns and cities the Muslims constructed magnificent mosques, palaces, and other architectural monuments, many of which still stand today. Outside the cities the mixture of large estates and small farms that existed in Roman times remained largely intact, because Muslim leaders rarely dispossessed landowners. The Muslim conquerors were relatively few in number and so they generally tried to maintain good relations with their subjects.

Roman, Jewish, and Muslim culture interacted in complex ways. A large part of the population gradually adopted Arabic. Even Jews and Christians often spoke Arabic, while Hebrew and Latin were frequently written in Arabic script. These diverse traditions interchanged in ways that gave Spanish culture—religion, literature, music, art and architecture, and writing systems—a rich and distinctive heritage.

Life in Muslim Spain was much different than contemporary Spanish life is. Arabic was the official language of government and commerce in Arab controlled areas of Spain, and the majority of the population in the south spoke it. Islam was Spain's official religion in Muslim areas, and by the 11th century, the majority of southern Spain's population was Muslim. In the closing years of this century, however, northern Spain was back under Christian control.

Spain - The Fall of Muslim Rule

Main article: Reconquista

The long, convoluted period of expansion of the Christian kingdoms, beginning in 722, only eleven years after the Moorish invasion, is called the Reconquista. As early as 739, the north-western region of Galicia, which became one of the most important centres of western medieval Christian pilgrimage (Santiago de Compostela), had been liberated from Moorish occupation by forces from neighbouring Asturias. The 1085 conquest of the central city of Toledo had largely brought to an end the reconquest of the northern half of Spain. The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 heralded the collapse, within a few decades, of the great Moorish strongholds, such as Seville and Córdoba, in the south-west. By the middle of the thirteenth century most of the Iberian peninsula had been reconquered, leaving only Granada as a small tributary state in the south. It ended in 1492, when Isabella and Ferdinand captured the southern city of Granada, the last Moorish city in Spain. The Treaty of Granada [1] guaranteed religious tolerance toward Muslims while Jews were expelled that year. At Ferdinand's insistence the Spanish Inquisition had been established in 1482. Behind much real religious intolerance was always the fear that the Muslims might assist another Muslim invasion. Also Aragonese labourers were angered by landlords use of Moorish workers to undercut them. A 1499 Muslim uprising, triggered by forced conversions, was crushed and was followed by the first of the expulsions of Muslims, in 1502. The year 1492 was also marked by the discovery of the New World. Isabella I funded the voyages of Columbus. In their contests with the French army, Spanish forces, under Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, relied more on well trained, highly mobile, regular soldiers and eventually achieved success with the organised tactical use of hand guns against armoured French knights, revolutionizing warfare, in the Italian Wars from 1494. The combined Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragon emerged as a European great power.

The reconquest of Spain from the Muslims is probably one of the most significant events in Spanish history since the fall of the Roman Empire. Arabic quickly lost its place in southern Spain's everyday life, and was replaced by Castilian. In the south, the majority Muslim population was gradually converted back to Roman Catholicism. The mosques and synagogues (some now popular with tourists) were converted into churches.

Spain - From the Renaissance to the 19th Century

Until the late of the 15th century, Castile and Léon, Aragon and Navarre were independent states, with independent languages, monarchs, armies and, in the case of Aragon and Castile, two empires: the former with one in the Mediterranean and the latter with a new, rapidly growing, one in the Americas. The process of political unification continued into the early sixteenth century. It was the unification of these separate Iberian empires that became the base of what is in now referred to as the Spanish Empire.

By 1512, most of the kingdoms of present-day Spain were politically unified, although not as a modern, centralized state (in contemporary minds, Spain was a geographic term meaning Iberian Peninsula, which includes Portugal, not the present-day state called Spain). The grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor but called in Spain Carlos I, extended his crown to other places in Europe and the rest of the world. The unification of Iberia was complete when Charles V's son, Philip II, became King of Portugal in 1580, as well as of the other Iberian states (collectively known as "Spain" at that time).

During the 16th century, under the reigns of Charles V and Philip II, Spain became the most powerful nation in Europe. The Spanish Empire covered most territories of South and Central America, Mexico, some of Eastern Asia (including The Philippines), the Iberian peninsula (including the Portuguese empire from 1580), southern Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. It was the first empire about which it was said that the sun did not set. It was a time of daring explorations by sea and by land, the opening up of new trade routes across oceans, conquests and the beginning of European colonization. Not only did this lead to the arrival of ever increasing quantities of precious metals, spices and luxuries, and new agricultural plants, that had a great influence on the development of Europe, but the explorers, soldiers, traders and missionaries also brought back with them a flood of knowledge that radically transformed the European understanding of the world, ending conceptions inherited from medieval times. This intellectual transformation is best seen in the School of Salamanca.

The treasure fleet across the Atlantic and the Manila galleons across the Pacific made it the wealthiest and most powerful nation in Europe, but the rapidly rising influx of silver and gold from the colonies in the Americas throughout the 16th century ultimately resulted in economically damaging rampant inflation and led to economic depression by the 17th century. Religious and dynastic wars supported by the Spanish crown, especially in the Netherlands, also greatly burdened the empire's economy.

In 1640, under Philip IV, the centralist policy of the Count-Duke of Olivares provoked wars in Portugal and Catalonia. Portugal became an independent kingdom again, taking with it its empire, and Catalonia enjoyed some years of French-supported independence but was quickly returned to the Spanish Crown, except Roussillon.

A series of long and costly wars and revolts followed in the early 17th century, and began a steady decline of Spanish power in Europe from the 1640s. Controversy over succession to the throne consumed the country and much of Europe during the first years of the 18th century (see War of the Spanish Succession). It was only after this war ended and a new dynasty—the French Bourbons—was installed that a true Spanish state was established when the absolutist first Bourbon king Philip V of Spain in 1707 dissolved the parliamentarist Aragon court and unified the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon into a single, unified Kingdom of Spain, abolishing many of the regional privileges and autonomies (fueros) that had hampered Habsburg rule. The British abandoned the conflict after Utrecht (1713), which led to Barcelona's easy defeat by the absolutists in 1714. The National Day of Catalonia still commemorates this defeat.

Of note during the 17th century was the cultural efflorescence now known as the Spanish Golden Age.

Historically, the period of the mid 17th century to the mid 20th century was a relative failure for Spain compared to north western Europe. The extended, lingering decline of the Spanish empire was due in large part, ironically, to its spectacular successes in the 15th and 16th centuries that led to the centuries of the treasure fleets bringing back silver and gold into the country from the American mines. These shipments engendered inflation (a fact noticed by the School of Salamanca that ate away at Spanish trades and commerce by causing local goods to be uncompetitive, and eventually making the country almost totally dependant upon imports by the mid seventeenth century, which proved disastrous as the silver mines became exhausted. Greatly worsening matters were the constant wars defending the global empire against envious European rivals, internal successions and the European wars (Eighty Years War and Thirty Years War), where Spain's resources were constantly drained defending the Habsburg's dynastic and religious interests, including the Counter Reformation. From the early 17th century the government sought to meet its needs by tampering with the silver content of the currency, leading to severe bouts of inflation and deflation. The terrible burden of taxes on the productive classes of the country, and the financial instability led to the collapse of the Castilian economy to the point where people resorted to bartering in 1627. A severe decline in food production ensued. The result was a steep real economic and demographic decline during the 17th century, especially in empire's overburdened lynchpin, Castile, aggravated by failed harvests and plagues. Habsburg policies that entrenched the privileges and exemptions of the nobility (with its roots back in the Castilian War of the Communities of 1518-1520) and the Church (as part of support of the Counter Reformation), with a great extension of Church lands, also played a decisive part in the undermining the Spanish economy and in curtailing the spread of modern thought. This was in stark contrast to the diminishing status of both institutions in rivals France, England and the Netherlands. The resentment of ordinary peasants and labourers would find expression in implicating the nobility of Moorish ancestory and the churchmen of hypocrisy. These accusations found their way into the theatre and literature of the time. The beggary that grew rapidly from the late 16th century forced many to live by their wits and inspired the popular picaresque genre of literature. Spain's economic and political decline in the late 17th and early 18th centuries mirrored in general the fate of other regions of southern Europe such as Portugal, the Italian states, the Balkans, and much of central and eastern Europe, as much of the rapidly growing global oceanic trade, pioneered by the Iberian countries, was diverted to north-western Europe.

Following the wars of Spanish succession at its commencement, the 18th century saw a long, slow recovery, with an expansion of the iron and steel industries in the Basque Country, some increase in trade and a recovery in food production and population. The new Bourbon monarchy drew on the French system in trying to modernise the administration and economy, in which it was more successful in the former than the latter. In the last two decades of the century there was an extraordinary growth (from a relatively low base) in general trade after the opening up of free trade within the empire (ending Andalucia's royally granted monopoly), and even the beginnings of an industrialisation of the textile industry in Catalonia. Spain's effective military assistance to the rebellious British colonies in the American War of Independence won it renewed international status. But this promising late eighteenth century resurgence was short-lived, being totally disrupted by the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 19th century, that preceded the loss of the vast mainland American territories and plunged the country into endemic political instability, which lasted until 1939. The Napoleonic incursion led to a fierce guerilla war (Peninsular War) which saw the first wide spread manifestation of Spanish nationalism. In the 19th century, the Romantic travellers saw in a backward Spain an exotic country, based on Romantic 19th century mythmaking, from which the present day stereotypes mainly originate. In the latter half of the 19th century, Spanish Catalonia became the main center of Spain's industrialization. Pockets of relative modernity would appear, especially in Catalonia, Valencia and the Basque country, but generally Spain's extreme political instability in the 19th century made progress slow and very uneven.

At the end of the 19th century, Spain lost all of its remaining old colonies in the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific regions, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines, and a large number of Pacific islands to the United States after the Spanish-American War of 1898 (See also Battle of Guam (1898).) Outstanding military efforts by soldiers and officers were badly let down by inept higher military and government leaders.

However "the Disaster" of 1898, as Spanish-American War was called, led to Spain's cultural revival (Generation of '98) in which there was much critical self examination, and relieved it from the burden of its last major colonies. However political stability in such a dispersed and variegated land, caught between pockets of modernity and large areas of extreme rural backwardness and strongly differentiated regional identities would elude the country for some decades yet, and was ultimately imposed only by a brutal dictatorship in 1939.

Spain - 20th century

The 20th century initially brought little peace; Spain made a late and minor entry into the scramble for Africa, with the colonization of Western Sahara, Spanish Morocco and Equatorial Guinea. A military disaster in Morocco in 1921 contributed to discrediting the monarch and worsened political instability. A period of dictatorial rule (1923 - 1931) ended with the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic. The Republic offered political autonomy to the Basque Country and Catalonia and gave voting rights to women. However, in July 1936, against a backdrop of increasing political polarization, anti-clericalism and pressure from all sides, coupled with growing and unchecked political violence, the Republic was faced with an attempted military coup d'etat led by right-wing army generals. Although the coup initially failed, the ensuing Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 with the victory of the nationalist forces led by General Francisco Franco and supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Republican side received tepid support from European democracies, which left the Soviet Union and idealist voluntary International Brigades as the only supporters of the legitimate democratic Republican rule. The Spanish Civil War has been called the first battle of the Second World War. After the civil war, General Francisco Franco ruled a nation exhausted politically and economically. During the Second World War Franco, under extreme pressure (Hitler had brought his army to the border of Spain after invading France), opted to remain neutral arguing that Spain could not afford a new war, but, as a concession to his civil war backer, authorised volunteers to go to the Russian front to fight the Soviet Union in an anti-Communist crusade in what came to be known as the Blue Division. The resentment of Franco's brutality towards the more modern pro-Republican regions of Catalonia and the Basque country, whose distinctive languages and identity he suppressed during his long reign, continues to fuel strong separatist movements to this day.

The only official party in Spain at the time of Franco´s regime was the Falange party founded by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. Primo de Rivera denied his party was fascist, calling fascism fundamentally false. His political philosophy was based on Catholicism, saying that man "carries eternal values" and carries "a soul that is capable of damning or saving itself". He called for "the greatest respect for... human dignity, for the integrity of man and for his liberty." Primo de Rivera called for what he called "organic democracy". Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera was executed in Alicante in 1936.

After World War II, being one of few surviving fascist regimes in Europe, Spain was politically and economically isolated and was kept out of the United Nations until 1955, when it became strategically important for U.S. president Eisenhower to establish a military presence in the Iberian peninsula. This opening to Spain was aided by Franco's opposition to communism. In the 1960s, more than a decade later than other western European countries, Spain began to enjoy economic growth and gradually transformed into a modern industrial economy with a thriving tourism sector. Growth continued well into the 1970s, with Franco's government going to great lengths to shield the Spanish people from the effects of the oil crisis.

Upon the death of the dictator General Franco in November 1975, his personally-designated heir Prince Juan Carlos assumed the position of king and head of state. With the approval of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 and the arrival of democracy, some regions — Basque Country, Navarra— were given complete financial autonomy, and many — Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia and Andalusia— were given some political autonomy, which was then soon extended to all Spanish regions, resulting in a quite decentralized territorial organization in Western Europe. Remaining dysfunctionalities, such as unlimited financial strain on contributor regions such as Catalonia make their people aim for a more equilibrated system, such as those enjoyed in Germany, where financial contribution to the whole can never exceed 4% of a Land's GDP. In the Basque Country pro-peace Basque and Spanish nationalisms coexist with radical nationalism supportive of the terrorist group ETA, which remains one of the biggest problems faced by Spanish citizens.

Adolfo Suárez González, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo Bustelo, after an attempted coup d'état in 1981, Felipe González Márquez (when Spain joined NATO and European Union), José María Aznar López and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero have been prime ministers of Spain.

Spain - 21st century

On March 11, 2004, a series of bombs exploded in commuter trains in Madrid, Spain. These resulted in 192 people dead and 1,460 wounded. It also had a significant effect on the upcoming elections in Spain, due in part to the ruling government's insistence that the ETA was the prime suspect in the bombings, even as the evidence of Muslim extremist terrorism rapidly emerged from the police investigation and the international press. see the 11 March 2004 Madrid train bombings article for more information

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki