Spain: A Unique History (14 page)

Existing documentation makes it clear that when the Asturian monarchy first had the opportunity for significant reconquest, it expressed such a design as its long-range goal in the reign of Alfonso III. For some years internal fragmentation within the Andalusi despotism made it seem as though the latter might collapse, but Asturian aspirations were blocked by the massive revival of Cordoban power in the tenth century. At varying times each of the Christian principalities accepted terms of submission to the caliphate — technically under Koranic and Sharia norms the only ones on which peace was possible with the non-Muslim "House of War." There were also moments in which individual Spanish princes temporarily made common cause with the Muslims against each other, but these were brief interludes. As soon as Andalusi power weakened, the Spanish expansion resumed and, after another generation, reassumed the goal of major reconquest.

This was not a static concept but was modified from generation to generation. At times it disappeared almost altogether, but always returned. The original goal had apparently been to reclaim land and win booty; later, as aims expanded, it was to regain all the territory seized by the invader and to "restore the churches of Christ." During the eleventh century, the policy was more to establish a complete hegemony, rather than to seize the entire peninsula militarily. More than a century was dedicated to fighting off the invasions of the two successive new Moroccan empires, after which the main reconquest was completed in the thirteenth century. This did not require the expulsion of all Muslims, except for most of the urban population, but accepted terms of subordination equivalent to those for Christians and Jews in Al-Andalus. Even then, Muslim assaults did not end, for there was another major Moroccan invasion in the fourteenth century. Altogether, the Spanish world was under repeated Muslim assault for more than six hundred years, from 711 to 1340. After a partial respite, Muslim attacks resumed in the sixteenth century and did not completely end until Western powers finally imposed themselves early in the nineteenth century.

With the Great Reconquest of the thirteenth century, the Spanish advance projected itself farther afield, making its first brief incursion into Morocco. The best educated Spaniards of that era were well aware that Mauritania had once constituted the sixth province of the late Roman diocese of Hispania, and that the Visigoths had also held a small territory there. By that point, in the mid-thirteenth century, the Reconquest had become such a fundamental and widely accepted ideal of the Iberian principalities that even land-locked Navarre, which played the most limited role in the enterprise, wrote the Reconquest into the first codification of its Fuero Antiguo (law code) in 1238.

The Reconquest was not for four centuries a "crusade," something only institutionalized in Latin Christendom at the close of the eleventh century, but it was always in part a religious war or, at the very least, as the distinguished medievalist Hispanist Joseph O'Callaghan puts it, a "war ... of religious confrontation."
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The earliest statements of the chroniclers declared that the restoration and expansion of the Christian religion were basic goals, though hardly the only goals. This remained such a constant factor in Spanish history that Villacañas Berlanga can accurately say that Spain "was always on the road to Jerusalem."
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The objective was not primarily to convert the Muslims but to regain the territory they had usurped, to recover a kingdom that had been lost. The ideal of religious conversion through missionary work did not develop originally in Spain but in Rome, and also among religious orders in Italy and France at the end of the eleventh century, and was relatively slow to be adopted in Spain. It never received prominence, but as the frontier advanced, small numbers of Muslims were converted and incorporated into Spanish society.
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There is a sense in which nearly all wars are declared to be "holy wars" — that is, military actions for which higher goals and sacred purposes are invoked, based on a sacralization of patriotic and national causes, if not on religion itself. To some extent, this phenomenon is observable in varying degrees in all societies. The official religious and military Crusade, however, was first codified by the papacy as a formal institution toward the end of the eleventh century, whence it was received in Spain. The idea of a military crusade as a new kind of religious institution had developed over a lengthy period from the initial idea of just war to that of "religious war" or "holy war" against non-Christians as a defensive tactic to that of "missionary wars" to extend the frontiers of Christendom, finally crystallizing in the formal ideal of the Crusade for the recovery of the Holy Land, violently seized by the Muslims more than three centuries earlier.
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Justification and goals of the Crusade were religious, its practice earning spiritual merit. The official Crusade had special features, such as a formal vow on the part of crusaders, juridical and spiritual recognition by the Church (which also provided financial support, at least in part), military struggle to roll back Muslim conquests (primarily recovery of the Holy Land), and the promise of remission of sins. In recent years it has been falsely presented as gratuitous aggression against peaceful Muslims, but in fact the Crusade was designed for purposes of reconquest of key Christian territory that had been seized by warlike Muslims. It did not feature any plan for a general war of conquest of Muslim territory as such or against Islamic civilization as a whole, though some such danger might be implicit.
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Broader plans would be developed by the crowns of Castile and Portugal only during the fifteenth century.

The popes actively promoted the Reconquest in Spain, tying it together with the official Crusade, employing in their documents and exhortations to the Spanish such Latin terms as
recuperare
,
liberare
,
reparare
,
restaurare
, and a variety of others to urge completion of reconquest. Spanish crusaders were prohibited from joining the expeditions to the Holy Land but instead exhorted to concentrate on the Reconquest (although a small number of Spanish combatants did join the Holy Land crusades). The papacy was incensed at the interruptions of the Reconquest that occurred from time to time, persistently encouraging its resumption.

From the late eleventh century on, the bulls of crusade were regularly preached in the peninsula and soon became a regular part of the Reconquest and beyond that of the war-making and finance of the peninsular principalities. Introduction of the Crusade was but one aspect of the broadening and deepening of new ideas, institutions, and techniques from France and Italy in eleventh-century Spain, ranging from new religious institutions to economic practices and to breeding stronger horses to mount new French-style heavy cavalry. The Reconquest had long been considered a "holy war" of a certain kind, but it was a military, political, and economic enterprise that did not earn specific spiritual merit authorized by the Church until the appearance of the Crusade.
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Reception of this new doctrine was only encouraged by the long struggle that began at approximately the same time against the new Moroccan invasions, which practiced jihad with a greater intensity than had been the norm in Al-Andalus. By the twelfth century the concepts of crusade and reconquest became intertwined. Subsequently Castilian texts would regularly refer to "guerra divinal" and "guerra santa" more or less interchangeably with the Crusade. Though the Spanish had made no ideological contribution to the idea of the crusade (beside presenting the main practical example in the West of persistent warfare against Muslims), by the later Middle Ages the peninsular kingdoms (including Portugal) were the only parts of Latin Christendom that had completely institutionalized among themselves the idea and practice of crusade, and had become its principal champions.
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The Spanish principalities founded more individual crusading orders of monk-combatants than any other land, especially the Castilian orders of Alcántara, Calatrava, and Santiago, but there were others less known. The incorporation of the institution and ethos of the Crusade did not mean that all rulers and interests were always firmly united behind this goal and that conflicts, contradictions, and distractions did not frequently develop, nor that Christian mercenaries might not still be found occasionally in Muslim ranks. The "cruzada" tax, provided by the Church, became a major source of income for Spanish rulers, and though much of the time the proceeds were not devoted to crusading activities, after the twelfth century the principal victories of crusading against the Muslims were won in the Iberian Peninsula. At the Council of Basel in 1434, Castilian representatives argued that the crown of Castile merited precedence over that of England because it regularly practiced "la guerra divinal," while the latter did not. Though the idea of the crusade declined during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, after completion of nearly all the peninsular Reconquest, it was revived once more by the Catholic Monarchs.

It is not unusual for human societies of all types and at all stages of development to conceive of a special role or category for themselves. Primitive tribes, for example, often have terms for their own group translated approximately as "the human beings," all outsiders automatically relegated to a lower level. Even the ancient Hebrews were probably far from the first to understand themselves as constituting a "chosen people," for various kinds of "chosen people" concepts have been common in history.
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Sometimes such concepts are widely shared within the society, though in other cases they do not extend very far beyond the elite. The sense of the superiority and mission of the Roman empire was widely shared by its citizens. Early on, the Frankish monarchy conceived of itself as the elect of God with a divine mission, while the Mongols of Genghis Khan considered themselves the "scourge of God," destined to conquer the world. In other cases a special national destiny is thought to be revealed through suffering, as in the case of nineteenth-century Polish nationalism, which termed Poland the "Christ of the nations" for the dismemberment and suffering it experienced. Something of the same spirit informed Serbian identity under Turkish domination, conceived as that of a "heavenly people" whose aspirations were spiritual and transcendental, though independence and dominion would eventually be restored to them.
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The most striking case in the modern world has been the persistent example of Russian messianism, beginning with the concept originating more than half a millennium ago of Muscovy as the "Third Rome," and moving on to PanSlavism and then Communism.
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Nikolai Berdiaiev subsumed it under the rubric of the "Russian idea," while, with regard to Germany, Karl Marx would write of a "German ideology," in this case referring to cultural ideas.

It seems clear that historically there has been a "Spanish idea," both similar to and different from the "Russian idea," the French concept, and others, that underwent an extensive historical evolution and transformation from the sixth and seventh centuries. It was one of the longest "national ideas" in history, stretching in various forms for nearly a millennium and a half. Its last great avatar, for better or worse, was Francisco Franco, and with his death it quickly went into terminal decline.

In modern nations, national or messianic ideas simply represent a kind of common attitude, shared either more or less widely, but usually not a fully developed ideology such as those found in the major modern political movements nor a specific continuous policy shared by all elites. Nor is a national or messianic idea the same as a specific identity or a fully developed major nationalist movement, though it may help eventually to generate the latter. It reflects a persistent attitude or mentality on the part of certain elites, but may be quite discontinuous and at times altogether ignored in favor of other interests, though reappearing once more under favorable circumstances. It does not produce a unique kind of political form, but may be found in varying modes of expression in different kinds of polities from monarchies to republics to dictatorships. For purposes of historical analysis, it may be considered a sort of ideal type, an aspiration expressed in a variety of modes or degrees through history, sometimes dominant but frequently recessive.

Origins of the first Spanish idea in the age of San Isidoro have been discussed in chapter 1. It is likely that in the seventh century such concepts were shared only by very few elites. A more direct line may be traced from the late ninth century in Asturias, during the reign of Alfonso III, with the mission of reconquest and restoration of the Gothic patrimony and Christian dominion. Although this seems to have been more directly assumed as state policy than had been the earlier idea among the Visigoths, there is again no evidence that it extended beyond a narrow elite. In later centuries it would be vigorously resumed, but sometimes not as the highest priority of policy, particularly after the completion of the Great Reconquest of the thirteenth century, though at that point North Africa was first fit within the parameters of such policy.

The sense of mission advanced a step farther in the late fifteenth century. The general religious revival of that era coincided in Spain with completion of the peninsular reconquest, stimulating a new mood of messianism (which, in other forms, extended well beyond Spain). This strongly motivated Columbus, for example, as well as having a vigorous presence at the court of Manoel "O Afortunado" in Lisbon, during whose reign the full Portuguese maritime supremacy or thalassocracy began to be established. The Testament of Isabel la Católica was explicit concerning the future responsibilities of the kingdom of Castile. Historians debate and are often skeptical regarding grander motivations among the conquistadores, but mission and extension of the faith were always mentioned and certainly played a role.