Its identity and unique idiosyncrasies have been forged by a variety of phenomena, such as the discovery of the Americas and its neutral position during the two world wars. At the same time, however, there are strong parallels between Spanish history and the history of other European countries; although it never renounced its diversity, Spain emerged as a unified state at a very early stage and played a crucial role in some of the most brilliant episodes in modern European history.
Based on the findings at Atapuerca Burgos province , estimated to be around , years old, the presence of hominids on the Iberian Peninsula dates back to the Lower Palaeolithic period. Experts are still debating the origin of these early settlers, who may have entered the peninsula directly from Africa via the Straits of Gibraltar, but more likely arrived by crossing over the Pyrenees.
In any case, the remains of utensils and works of art found on the peninsula are certainly from this period, corresponding to the same hunter-gatherer cultures that existed in other parts of Europe. Known as the Neolithic Revolution, this process consisted of the transition from a collector economy to a producer economy based on agriculture and stockbreeding.
Another period in the history of the peninsula began around or B. From approximately B. At the end of this period, both civilisations were displaced by the Romans and Carthaginians respectively. Hence, between the 12th and 4th centuries B. The latter territory was inhabited by various tribes, some of them Celts. With a relatively primitive social organisation, these peoples engaged in migratory herding, which consisted of alternating the grazing pastures in the northern uplands that they used in the summer with those of the southern part of the central plateau, or Meseta, used in the winter.
Shepherds and sheep, the conquerors of grazing lands, played a key role in the geo-history of the Iberian Peninsula. By contrast, in the 4th century B. The earliest written records about the peninsula date from this period. Hispania, the name the Romans gave to the peninsula, is allegedly a Semitic word derived from Hispalis Seville. The Persistent Traces of the Roman Presence. The Roman presence on the peninsula basically followed the same pattern as the Greek commercial bases, but unlike the Greeks, Rome's introduction to Iberia was the result of a power struggle with Carthage to gain control of the Western Mediterranean during the 2nd century B.
In any case, it was at this point that the Iberian Peninsula as a geographic unit entered the arena of international politics and, by virtue of its privileged location between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and its rich agricultural and mineral resources in the south, became a much coveted strategic objective.
The Roman invasion and eventual conquest of the peninsula took place over the long period between and 19 B. The Romans were alarmed by the Carthaginian expansion to the northeast; like Napoleon centuries later, they believed that the Ebro River delineated a natural boundary with Gaul, which was then a Roman province.
This conflict of interests led to the Second Punic War. While Hannibal was making his legendary journey across the Alps, the Roman legions were attacking his Spanish base at Carthago Nova present-day Cartagena , with its seaport and mines. Hannibal's defeat by Publius Cornelius Scipio B. However, these plans met with considerable resistance, particularly in the interior. Of the numerous confrontations that took place throughout the Roman conquest of the inland region of Hispania, the most famous was the so- called Celtiberian-Lusitanian War, which lasted for twenty years B.
The war tactics of the Lusitanian chief Viriathus and the legendary, although unsubstantiated, collective suicide of the people of Numantia under siege by the Romans were much celebrated by Latin historians. The Roman presence in Hispania lasted seven hundred years, during which time the basic boundaries of the peninsula in relation to other European countries were established. The interior divisions drawn up by the Romans seem curiously prophetic: Lusitania, Tarraconensis and Baetica.
But the Romans bequeathed more than just a territorial structure; they also left institutions such as the family unit, language, religion, law and the concept of the municipality, and their assimilation situated the peninsula firmly in the Greco-Latin and later the Judaeo-Christian world. Meanwhile, the vast array of public works such as roads, bridges, aqueducts, temples arches, theatres, amphitheatres and circuses clearly reflects the geographical distribution of Roman settlements on the peninsula.
However, at the beginning of the 5th century A. At the same time, certain phenomena had been gaining momentum since the 3rd century A. On the other hand, local oligarchies were becoming more powerful as they offered safety in return for loyalty. A major event of this period was the beginning of the Christian conquest of Hispania, although its exact origins are still unknown. Paul was probably present in Hispania between 62 and 63 A.
By the 5th century the Visigoths were already a Romanised people who saw themselves as the perpetuators of the extinct imperial power. Around the mid s, the pressure exerted by the Suebi in the west Galicia , the Cantabrian- Pyrenean shepherds in the north, and the Byzantines in the south Baetica on three different fronts led them to establish their capital in Toledo at the centre of the peninsula.
Integration between Visigoths and Hispano-Romans was both rapid and successful. It was also greatly facilitated by King Reccared's conversion to the Catholic faith at the 3rd Council of Toledo , which enabled the Church to acquire a predominant and fiscal role in politics through the celebration of a series of Councils of Toledo and the adoption of relatively similar social structures, contained in the Liber Judiciorum promulgated by Recceswinth that basically unifi ed Visigothic and Hispano-Roman law.
Both cultures boasted a landed aristocracy and an ecclesiastical aristocracy, and both institutions favoured the autonomy of the nobility at the expense of royal power. Muslim Spain: Cradle of a Flourishing Culture. It was precisely one of the ostracised noble clans, the Witiza family, which brought about the collapse of the Visigothic state at the beginning of the 8th century by appealing for help to the Arabic and Berber troops on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar.
In fact, the degree of disintegration within the Visigothic state apparatus enabled the Muslims to secure isolated pacts with the semi-independent aristocracy hostile to the Crown. During the first third of the 10th century, a member of the Umayyad dynasty in Hispania, Abd al-Rahman III, restored and expanded the state of Al-Andalus and became the first Spanish caliph.
The proclamation of the caliphate had a dual purpose. In the interior, the Umayyads were keen to reinforce the peninsular state. In the outlying territories, their quest was to consolidate the commercial routes in the Mediterranean that would guarantee economic relations with the eastern basin Byzantium as well as the supply of gold. Melilla was occupied in and by the middle of the same century the Umayyad Caliphate controlled the triangle between Algeria, Sijilmasa and the Atlantic.
The small Christian enclaves in the north of the peninsula became modest fiefdoms of the caliph, whose superiority and arbitration they recognised. The foundations of Muslim Spain's hegemony rested on considerable economic power derived from substantial trade, a highly developed crafts industry and farming methods that were much more efficient than those employed in the rest of Europe. The Caliphate of Cordoba was the first urban and commercial economy to flourish in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire.
Moreover, its capital and main city, Cordoba, had a population of approximately ,, which made it the largest urban centre in Europe at the time. Muslim Spain produced a flourishing culture, especially following the accession of the caliph Al-Hakam II , who is attributed with creating a library of several hundred thousand volumes - an inconceivable feat in Europe at the time. The most characteristic trait of this culture was its swift re-adoption of classical philosophy, most notably by Ibn Masarra, Abentofain, Averroes and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides.
But above all, Hispano-Muslim scholars were noted for their contributions to the fields of medicine, mathematics and astronomy. The fragmentation of the Caliphate of Cordoba occurred at the end of the first decade of the 11th century and was brought about by the intense military aggressions perpetrated by its last leaders, combined with asphyxiating fiscal pressure.
The successors of the unitary caliphate were known as taifas or petty kingdoms, and the word has passed into the Spanish language as a synonym of the ruin that generated the fragmentation and disunity of the peninsula. As a result of this gradual weakening of the state, by the midth century Muslim Spain had been reduced to the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. The first Christian uprising occurred in the first third of the 8th century in Covadonga, located in the mountains of Asturias.
However, this early Christian resistance was more a question of survival than a deliberate offensive campaign or "reconquest. On the Meseta, this expansion led to the creation of the county and then the kingdom of Castile, which later united with the kingdom of Leon under the reign of Ferdinand III in Meanwhile, in the Atlantic flank of the peninsula became the kingdom of Portugal.
The result of these dynamics was the creation of the area we now call Western Europe around A. By the final third of the 13th century the Muslim presence had been reduced to the Muslim presence had been reduced to the Nasrid kingdom of Granada until 2 January The end of the Reconquest - or, in Roman- Visigothic terminology, the recovery of Hispania - had a profound impact on Christian Europe, being regarded as compensation for the fall of Constantinople to the Turks.
Given that the Reconquest lasted so long, there were several periods of co-existence and even, at certain times in the 12th century, a type of frontier society. In any case, the Christian monarchs conquered through colonisation, offering land to anyone who promised to occupy, cultivate and defend it.
This gave rise to transfers and migrations from the north of the Iberian Peninsula and Europe, a rare phenomenon in other latitudes at the time. Those colonisers gradually formed a peasant society that was comparatively freer than its contemporaries in other parts of Europe, where subjugation to the feudal lords was much greater.
Between the 9th and 11th centuries, these semi-free peasants were grouped into towns governed by elected councils to which the monarchs granted special charters fueros based on certain exemptions and privileges.
Subsequently, in the 12th century, these burghers sat down with the other two branches of society - the nobility and the clergy - in assemblies known as Cortes, where they discussed and voted on matters pertaining to taxes. The quest for unity did not end with the last military victory of and the conquest of Granada, but continued - in its ambition for religious, ethnic and cultural uniformity - with the expulsion that same year of the Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism and then of the Moriscos, or Moorish converts.
The difficult situation in which the Jews found themselves was not confined exclusively to Spain. Since the Council of Letran in , they had unfortunately suffered a similar if not harsher fate in the rest of Europe. Until , Christian territory in Spain had been a melting pot of Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultures, most famously giving rise to the so-called disputas or debates between scholars of the three cultures united in a movement sponsored by King Alfonso X and known as the Toledo Translation School.
The work produced by this school enriched European culture with the science of the Greeks and the achievements of the Arabs. Expansion of the calibre described above undoubtedly created a frontier economy with the acquisition of vast spaces. Since the 13th century the Hispanic kingdoms were based on rapidly growing societies, the dynamics of which were clearly reflected in the economic and political boom experienced by the kingdom of Aragon with the conquest of Sardinia, Sicily and Naples in the Mediterranean.
In this race, the Castilians found an extremely active competitor in another Iberian state-Portugal. Signed in , this agreement enabled Castile to maintain the Canary Islands in return for renouncing all eastern voyages around the African coast, which was assigned to Portugal.
Such an unfair division can only be explained by the fact that the treaty also addressed an age-old issue of the Iberian states, namely, the unity of the peninsula. Although the incorporation of Navarre in improved peninsular unity, the cycle of unification was really completed with the capture of Granada in That same year, Nebrija published the first grammar of a popular language - Castilian - and a Spanish fleet reached the coasts of America.
The legendary aura surrounding Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs, has hindered the task of providing an adequate assessment of their context and a sober evaluation of their work.
Internally, they invested all their efforts in reinforcing the state apparatus and the authority of the Crown, seeking support in the existing legal and administrative institutions and creating new ones, often inspired by those of other European countries. Such was the case, for example, of the Tribunal of the Inquisition. Introduced at a later date in Spain than elsewhere, this court not only served religious purposes but was also an instrument used by monarchs to reinforce the authority of the state.
In the Spanish monarchy represented one of the earliest modern states in Renaissance Europe. Its outward expansion across the Atlantic the Americas and Flanders and the Mediterranean Italy was based precisely on this. Indeed, Spain's foreign policy at the time was orchestrated by the creation of a permanent state staffed by civil servants and diplomats, with a unitary but flexible and confederate concept of the monarchy.
Although Castile had lost its African routes to Portugal, its possession of the Canary Islands provided it with an excellent springboard for alternative routes. This is precisely what Christopher Columbus offered the state, which was clearly in need of such an offer, although it had prepared for and become accustomed to enterprises of this nature.
By the united Spain boasted powerful war machinery, a solid economy, an international presence, experience at sea and in exploring new commercial routes, and considerable scientific and technical expertise: mathematicians, geographers, astronomers and shipbuilders, forged in the melting pot of the three cultures. By the midth century, the main viceroyalties had been established and settled: Mexico on the Atlantic flank and Peru in the South American Pacific. Thereafter, Havana- Veracruz the Tierra Firme fleet in the Atlantic and Acapulco-El Callao-Philippines the China ship in the Pacific, together with control of the Western Mediterranean - under eternal threat from the Turks - became the vital arteries of the Spanish Empire's overseas territories.
The convoys of Spanish galleons maintained these routes open despite attacks from marauding English and Dutch ships until the decisive Battle of Trafalgar in In both cases, confrontations were a last resort, used only after intense attempts to avoid them. The Spanish sought allies in the tribes they subjugated and in discontented leaders; they agreed to capitulations in exchange for privileges; they distributed the new lands among Spanish colonists; and they reorganised the indigenous settlements.
In Italy the Spanish monarchy adopted the tradition of engaging in confrontations with France and alliances with England. The Battle of Pavia in , which resulted in the capture of King Francis I of France by the Spanish infantry regiments, consolidated Spain's superiority until the midth century.
Eventually, in their quest to further Spain's diplomatic and commercial relations with the Netherlands, Ferdinand and Isabella joined the Spanish Crown to the Duchy of Burgundy. The fabulous legacy embodied in the Flemish Prince Charles, grandson of the Emperor Maximilian and the Catholic Monarchs, was to condition Spanish and European politics until the 18th century.
The solution adopted by the Spanish Hapsburgs to manage this enormous legacy was to establish an all-encompassing, flexible monarchy, consisting of a constellation of kingdoms and domains united in a vast confederation around a single Crown. There would have been no unity without the figure of the king, since each kingdom maintained its own institutions, language, laws, and even its own borders.
The Carolingian Empire was therefore a conglomerate of territories randomly united under a common sovereign. The first consequence to arise from this was the complete absence of any attempt to create an institutional organisation common to the whole empire. Similarly, the second consequence was that no attempt was made to secure any type of political or economic cooperation between the various territories, which would have helped consolidate the idea of an empire - that is, the participation of all parties in a shared enterprise.
The most notable achievement of Spain under the Hapsburgs was its ability to retain control over its vast territories spread around the world. No other state in the 16th and 17th centuries was faced with such an enormous administration problem. Spain had to explore, colonise and govern a new world. The Spanish Empire and its "Black Legend". This acceptance of differences by the Spanish Hapsburgs encompassed all domains except for one: religion.
They strove to create a universal empire founded on the Madrid-Brussels-Vienna triangle, which did not sit well with the emerging nationalist states and was even less palatable to the individualist mindset of the Reformation. These two ingredients - nationalism and Protestantism - met head on in the Dutch uprising against Philip II, who had succeeded the Emperor Charles in the Duchy of Burgundy and on the throne of the Spanish kingdoms in The conquest of America was an attempt to annex the territory and subjugate the population.
Just as the Roman Empire had done, language, religion, laws, administration and crossbreeding provided the vehicles for the Hispanicisation of America, all of which guided the continent firmly into the western fold. Against such a background it is hardly surprising that it was the Spanish, through Francisco de Vitoria, who first advocated the concept of international law. The state that had gradually been forged, first by the Catholic Monarchs and later by Philip II, was the prototype of the modern absolutist state.
The Spanish Empire invented an administrative apparatus that was highly complex for the time, based on a system that put security before all else and attained enormous prestige. But rather than reducing the size of the state and eradicating duties, the imperialists chose to asphyxiate society. The breakdown of the system became evident in with the rebellion of Catalonia and the separation of Portugal. The decline of the Spanish Empire, brought about by fiscal exhaustion, coincided with a gradual disintegration of the confederated system, which was subjected to centralist practices.
The rise of Protestant states in northern Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean begin the country's gradual decline. Bourbon dynasty, originally from France, centralises the Spanish state, shutting down many regional autonomous assemblies and modernising government and the military. Fierce nationalist resistance and British intervention in the Peninsular War gradually force French troops out.
Radical policies of land reform, labour rights, educational expansion and anti-Church legislation deepen the political divide. A coup by right-wing military leaders captures only part of the country, leading to three years of civil war. More than , Spaniards died in the fighting, and Franco purges all remaining Republicans. Spain remains neutral throughout the Second World War, although the government's sympathies clearly lie with the Axis powers.
Spain is admitted to the UN in and the World Bank in , and other European countries open up to the Franco government. Its violent campaign begins with an attempt to derail a train carrying politicians in Subsequent attempts to liberalise the Franco government founder on internal divisions. Spain makes transition from dictatorship to democracy, and withdraws from the Spanish Sahara, ending its colonial empire.
Spain severed diplomatic relations with the United States on April 21, , and U. Minister Stewart Woodford closed the legation in Madrid on that day.
Joseph E. Williard , though originally appointed as Envoy, was made Ambassador on September 10, , and presented his credentials on October 31, Jean de Luz, France , where U. Ambassador to Spain Claude Bowers spent the last part of his assignment. The Embassy was re-established in Spain on April 13, , when H.
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