Pre-Encounter Spain Notes
1450 – 1492 (1494)

I. Spain 711 - 1492: the Context

In 711, Muslims from North Africa (principally, Morocco) conquered 90% of the Iberian peninsula and advanced for a generation as far as the middle of France. For the next 781 years, nearly eight centuries, the European late-Latin-speaking Christians from the extreme northern areas of north central Iberia fought to reconquer the Iberian peninsula from Arabic-speaking Muslims from north Africa who called their home in Iberia Al-Andalus. From the European perspective, this long period of intermittent struggle and war is known as the Reconquest (la reconquista). The reconquest was cultural, linguistic, and religious. In a sense, it was like the Crusades, but on a strictly local level. At the same time, it must be understood, that after the Jewish Diaspora from Jerusalem and Palestine in 70 CE, Iberia became one of the principal homes for the next fourteen centuries of the Jewish people. Hebrew-speaking Jews came to calle their home Sepharad (Spain, in Hebrew). However, precisely because the Reconquista was local, because it was so gradual, and because there were three main ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups involved (Muslims, Jews, and Christians), a lot of mixing and fusion took place among all of these peoples. It has been said anecdotally that the ethnic and racial mixture that makes up Spaniards today is one-third Palestinian Jewish, one-third African Muslim, and one-third European Christian. Of course, Spain today is 95% Catholic, but Spanish culture retains a strong sense of being the product of centuries of mixture.

By the thirteenth century, in the center of the peninsula a kind of fragile yet, for its time or, perhaps, any time, a unique harmony had developed between the three contending groups. This harmony is known as the Convivencia ("living together"; no single English word faithfully translates convivencia). Nevertheless, by the end of the next century the convivencia began to break apart. In 1391, for example, horrifiic pogroms broke out all over the peninsula, during which thousands of Jews were killed by fanatical Christians. Meantime, the once flourishing Muslim civilization of Al-Andalus had been reduced to a small, tribute-paying kingdom in the southeastern segment of the peninsular centered on the city of Granada.

II. 1450 - 1492

While the rest of Europe had been gradually evolving out of the medieval constructs of the Middle Ages, poor and chaotic Spain was still living out the last struggles of the Reconquest. Unlike the slow pace of events during Spain's Middle Ages, over these 42 years events happened rather fast, and dramatic changes occurred. In a phrase, Spain evolved from a medieval conglomeration of small states to the world's first nation-state. The woman who would become queen Isabel la Católica (Isabel I of Castilla, later, of Spain) in 1474 was born in 1451. The man whom she would marry, Fernando de Aragón, and who would become known as Fernando el Católico (together they are los Reyes Católicos, so designated by the pope), was born in 1452. Also in 1452, in Germany, Johannes Gutenberg published the first book ever printed on movable type, the famous Gutenberg Bible. This invention would revolutionize and democratize the world of knowledge and learning, thereby giving a technological infrastructure to the development of the new European model of culture, the Renaissance. Two other major European events that signalled the end of the Middle Ages, and therefore the beginning of a new era, are the facts that, first, the so-called One Hundred Years War, which actually began in 1337, ended in 1453. Second, the Muslim Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople at the eastern edge of Europe, thus ending the almost 1,500 years of the Roman Empire both of the East and the West. All of these major events would impact Spain in significant ways during the lives of the Reyes Católicos.

Isabel and Fernando, two very active, intelligent, well educated, and ambitions young heirs to their respective thrones (Castilla and Aragón, the two most prominent Christian kingdoms on the Iberian peninsula, emarried in 1469. In 1474, Isabel ascended to the throne. Five years later, in 1479, Fernando became king Fernando II of Aragón. Thereafter, their kingdoms were united in ways that, although complex, were sufficiently effective to create a powerful new national entity that historians have long called the world's first nation-state. This union was the first big step toward achieving national unity. Under the pretext to create religious unity in Castilla, in 1478 (the Inquisition began earlier in Aragón), Isabel set up the Spanish Inquisition, whose main purpose was to eliminate Spaniards were were thought to have converted (conversos) from Judaism to Christianity. This was the second significant step intended to create national unity. From 1478 unitl 1834, the Inquisition effectively silenced religious freedom of conscience and freedom of expression in Spain. The third major unifying step took place in 1482, when Fernando and Isabel united their financial and military assets in a campaign to finish the Reconquista, which had begun in 718 in Covadonga, Asturias, in northern Spain. This last war of reconquest against Al Andalus was directed toward the last remnant of Muslim Spain in the kingdom of Granada. This war, which sometimes is referred to as the last of the medieval Crusades, lasted from 1482 to 1492. By conquering Granada, all Iberians lands were ruled by Christian monarchs--Navarra in the extreme north, Portugal to the west, and the Reyes Católicos in the most powerful of these kingdoms, which was beginning to be known as Spain.

III. 1492

The most dramatic of the events that occurred in Spain in the year 1492 (January) was the Christian reconquest of Granada. Yet another very significant unifying event in Spain during the reign of the Reyes Católicos also occurred in 1492. It was the bitter and tragic decision by the Catholic Monarchs (Reyes Católicos) to force all Jews living in Spain either to convert immediately to Christianity (perhaps as many as a third chose to do so) or go into permanent exile (deadline: July 31st). As many as 300,000 Jews left Spain (Sepharad) by the deadline (July 31st), thereby spreading Spanish-speaking Sephardic Judaism first around the Mediterranean and later around the world. Jews who converted then formed an active and influention social class whose members were known as conversos. This expulsion of Jews who remained faithful to their religion is the fourth major step undertaken by the Reyes Católicos under the guise of unifying their nation-state. Later on, the disappearance of the talent, energy, creativity, and skills of Spain's Jews, along with the continuing persecution of the conversos, would contribute to Spain's long and slow decline. But, for the next century, Spain expanded exponentially. In 1502, Spain's Muslims were given the same "choice" as the Jews were given a decade earlier. Most Muslim Spaniards converted, but these moriscos would be expelled finally in 1609.

All of the events mentioned above impact the character and nature of Spain, the first European nation to extend its power into the Western Hemisphere; but the last major event Spain in 1492 is, of course, the sailing of Cristóbal Colón (English version of his name from Latin: Christopher Columbus), commanding three ships, the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María, from Spain to an Island in the Bahamas and then around much of the Caribbean. Although queen Isabel's support for Columbus' adventure was not intended as one of the grand unifying acts that she and her husband Fernando made on behalf of the unification of the nation-state of Spain, the result of Columbus's discovery (or encounter), over the next three centuries, would become the source for creation of the Spanish empire, the largest, most extensive, richest, and most powerful empire the world has ever known. When combining the long-gestating historical forces that came together to create modern Spain with Columbus's discovery pre-Columbian America begins to become Latin America, even though the term "Latin" America would not be used until the nineteenth century.

III. Tordesillas

In 1493, the monarchs of Spain and Portugal went to Pope Alexander VI, who came from a powerful Spanish aristocratic family, to negotiate a line of demarcation between the regions of the "New World" encountered by Columbus and claimed by both countries. Both countries were still behaving in a medieval fashion according to which the European pope's sacred or religious authority was valued above all other earthly authorities. In a papal bull called "Inter Caetera", the pope divided regions of possession and the right of conquest, settlement, and colonization 100 leagues west of the Azores islands in the Atlantic Ocean. Portugal protested that they were given almost no part of the so-called new world, so, in 1494, in the small Castilian city of Tordesillas, these two nascent colonial nations negotiated the Treaty of Tordesillas, according to which they moved the line of demarcation 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands (off the west coast of Africa). For a drawing of these two lines of demarcation, click on the following image: