Spain: A Unique History (18 page)

A further step was taken with the thirteenth-century Reconquest, which made of Castile a major European territorial state. Fernando III termed himself
rex in omni Spania
and Alfonso el Sabio
Imperator totius Hispaniae
.

Elements of a common Hispano-Christian identity were clearly present throughout the Middle Ages, but they were essentially nonpolitical in nature. They involved a common continuity with Hispano-Visigothic culture (stronger in some areas than others), including the common use of Visigothic law (the Fuero Juzgo), the Visigothic script, and common forms of art and architecture. Religion was the most important unifying factor, with common use of the Visigothic or Mozarabic rite for three centuries.
⁸

The emergence of the separate kingdoms was, however, not due exclusively to geographic differences and the Reconquest wars, but also to specifically political factors as well. The strengthening of independent Christian societies in the north only increased political particularism. Much the same might be said of papal influence, which encouraged concentration on the Reconquest but otherwise stimulated division and rivalry between the Spanish states to strengthen the papacy's influence in each one individually. Thus the mounting influence of European Catholicism had something of a centrifugal effect, partly because of papal policy and partly because it severed the connection with the traditional common Hispanic expression of Catholicism. In the process, the most specific common point of reference — the Mozarabic community of Al-Andalus with its traditional Hispano-Christian culture — had disappeared with the advance of the Reconquest and the Moroccan invasions.

The legal/institutional revolution of the High Middle Ages (eleventh through thirteenth centuries) had differing effects in various parts of Europe and also in the peninsula. Ironically, one of the philosophical inspirations for the new concepts of sovereignty that developed in the French and Norman states (including England) from about 1100 on was the doctrines of San Isidoro, but the new changes did not take root to the same extent in the peninsula. The medieval legal/political revolution raised the status of a kingdom to that of total independence, subordinate to no external empire, for, as the Norman kings of England would subsequently say, "We are an empire."
⁹
The new policy emphasized the power of the king as complete head of his realm and of the kingdom as a complete unit.

It brought a new, more sophisticated concept of law, administration, and responsibilities, with the doctrine of the king's two bodies or natures, both human and divine, an idea perhaps derived from the distinction between the bishop and his episcopal function in the Church, and certainly from the theological doctrine of the two natures of Christ. This program would introduce the first new European and Christian concept of government and the state, basing the legitimacy of royal law not simply on inheritance, will, or power — factors long present in pre-Christian history — but on law and legal jurisdiction, and on the crown's responsibility to establish both justice and peace under the rule of codified law. This would be administered by a "modern" rational royal bureaucracy, somewhat modeled on that of the Church. It declared the king ruler of all the people, denying completely independent privileges to the aristocracy, now enjoined from swearing any political oath in opposition to the crown.

During this era none of the Hispanic states formed completely closed and internally unified entities, equivalent to the English and Norman states (or, to some extent, the kingdom of France). They remained subject both to royal patrimonialism (which might divide the principality) and to centrifugal seigneurialism. Despite the revival of the Visigothic divine unction in royal consecrations, no sacralization of Hispanic princes equivalent to that of their northern counterparts took place, and thus they lacked the symbolic reinforcement enjoyed by the latter.

By the eleventh century Catalonia became in some respects the most organized and had the most fully developed legal structure (crowned by the Usatges), as well as the strongest institutional basis for the development of new law, with its territory fully defined by the beginning of the thirteenth century. Similarly, only in Catalan cities would one encounter civic development somewhat approximating cities in other parts of Europe.

At the same time, the Catalan elite shared in the common sense of the cultural, religious, and geographical community of the Spanish states. The Catalans had earlier categorically affirmed their own neo-Gothicism, and in the immediate aftermath of the Muslim conquest their ancestors may have had a stronger sense of identity and continuity with Visigothic institutions than did the Asturians. There are many references in the Catalan chronicles to the Catalans being "de Espanya" or "d'Espanya" and occasionally even declarations of Espanya as the "patria" of the Catalans. By comparison, neo-Gothicism was much later in entering Navarre and Aragon. This concept was not merely peninsular in scope, but for the Catalans for some time included the right of sovereignty over Visigothic Septimania northeast of the Pyrenees.

Castile became by far the largest Christian principality and hence also the most powerful militarily, but did not develop a political, legal, or institutional structure of equivalent solidity, at least prior to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As a separate kingdom in the earlier period, León was equally or even more prone to elite dissidence. The attempt to maintain a completely independent León ended in failure, due to the absence of internal unity and coherence, though initially León had enjoyed more juridical and institutional development than Castile, and had convened pre-parliaments (
concilios
) and parliaments (
curias
/
Cortes
) before any other in Europe. The disappearance of León as a discrete entity on one level might be considered the first major Spanish political failure, even though the final union with Castile ultimately constituted a step forward. Though it early achieved some of the first forms of medieval development, such as local autonomies in some districts and an initial convocation of Cortes, Castile was slow to develop effective institutions equivalent to those of France and England. Its society was strongly dominated by aristocratic seigneurialism, like that of most of Europe, but it never experienced fully organized feudalism, with the tightly binding reciprocal relationships between lord and vassals found in France, England, or Aragon-Catalonia. Thus in the first centuries the potentially strong monarchy of Castile was effective only when there was a strong monarch ruling; in other periods it might be quite weak. This was the general tendency in all medieval kingdoms, but it was particularly noticeable in Castile. For several centuries the Castilian aristocracy remained quite independent, at first rather more so than that of the Aragonese principalities. Rather than resting on a developed and institutionalized juridical basis, as in the best organized medieval kingdoms, elite relations in Castile rested on loose pacts or agreements between crown and aristocracy, eventually called "costumbre de España," that did not recognize the fully overriding authority of the crown. The kingdom was based on a loosely defined territory, with only rudimentary institutional structure, and little political or constitutional sense of the king as "king of the Castilians." Royal power tended to be conceived primarily as willpower and superior military strength. Compared with a kingdom such as England, royal law was much more limited. Thus the semi-autonomous cities and concejos were somewhat stunted in their development and, despite the relative freedom of early Castilian society, in the long run never developed the same political status as did cities elsewhere. Autonomous local institutions were structured especially to expedite local military strength, not political or economic development.

The most positive feature of medieval Castilian institutions was the limitation of serfdom. Castile had fewer serfs than most parts of medieval Europe, a consequence often judged to have been a result of its more open status as a frontier region. Despite the growing dominance of the aristocracy, Castilian peasants were thus juridically, at least, freer than elsewhere, even though probably poorer in economic terms, and may have imbibed the aristocratic ethos to a greater degree than peasants anywhere else in medieval Europe. One consequence of this increasingly aristocratic ethos was the pronounced tendency toward pride, arrogance, and touchiness — something remarked upon by Catalan writers even in the Middle Ages. Later, foreign commentators would come to consider these some of the defining characteristics of the Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, constitutive factors, in fact, of the Black Legend.

The downside of weak political development in medieval Castile was that the powerful monarchy frequently broke down under weak rulers. Civil strife was distressingly common, and occurred even more often than in some other medieval principalities, sometimes even leading to temporary collaboration by factions, or by the crown, with Muslim potentates against their Castilian rivals.

The "model" European medieval kingdom was France, where by the thirteenth century the crown had been sacralized according to the new doctrines and fulfilled a sacramental role for the mystical body of the kingdom (a concept derived from the Church as mystical body of Christ). The king's function was partly theocratic, but at the same time limited by law, for he was in charge of justice and supervised development of the legal structure. He had a special role as leader of the Church and possessed great authority in dealing with the papacy. As supreme military leader and king, he always fulfilled caesarist functions, but to some degree he governed with parliament and with the courts and legal system. Thus the crown enjoyed a special charisma as leader of France and of the French. By comparison the English system would become yet more united and representative, even achieving proto-republicanism by the seventeenth century, while the crown of Aragon enjoyed the difficult distinction of ruling over the most complex royal system in Europe, but one that in the final medieval centuries tilted heavily in the direction of a rigid re-feudalization, increasingly weakening royal government.

The reign of Fernando III "el Santo" was one of the most extraordinary in the history of medieval Europe, as the territory comprising the kingdom of Castile-León doubled in size within twenty years. By the middle of the thirteenth century, there was a sense that the reconquest of the peninsula had been essentially completed, since the main remaining taifa emirate, Granada, was comparatively small and reduced to being a vassal of the crown of Castile. The "Great Reconquest," as it is sometimes called, came at a price, for Castile could not immediately absorb so vast a territory, and the movement of population had the effect of weakening the economy, while the Muslim level of production could not be sustained in the southern territories. The experience was extenuating and, curiously, did not strengthen the crown politically, although it added greatly to the territory under royal domain. The crown's authority during this reign derived from crusading, nominally a religious function and little accompanied by political development. The crusader king left, at the time of his death, a relatively discontented and autonomous nobility, willing to use the "costumbre de España" to rebel against the crown; he had, however, failed to identify the Church leadership fully with the crown, as in France.

His son Alfonso X, who would be known as "el Sabio" (the Wise, or the Learned), was the most ambitious and also by comparison one of the least successful of all Spanish kings. He sought to equal and even exceed the achievements of his father by extending the crusade to Africa, reestablishing and expanding the tenuous political hegemony in the peninsula briefly enjoyed by Alfonso VII, and helping to guarantee the latter by winning election as ruler of the Holy Roman Empire (a candidacy to which he had only the most dubious title). He created a systematic new legal code for Castile, all the while stimulating a remarkable cultural program that would translate and distill in Castilian the learning and literature of the Muslims and Jews.
¹⁰
These were breathtaking ambitions which could not possibly have all been realized at once, and which in fact conflicted with and contradicted each other.

Don Alfonso has become best known as a dynamic cultural figure, thanks to the work of literature professors. The cultural enterprise of Alfonso X was uniquely cosmopolitan, but also prized vernacular language more than did any other contemporary monarchy. It represented a combination of the oriental and occidental, reflecting the unique cultural situation of thirteenth-century Castile.
¹¹
It failed altogether to deal with the impressive new achievements of the European universities in philosophy, theology, and jurisprudence, which at that moment were largely beyond the Castilian ken. In some ways it resembled the work of San Isidoro in attempting to record a comprehensive approach to knowledge, and in its typically Western "eccentric" attempt to incorporate the learning of a different civilization reflected a special Castilian focus of what was already coming to be a characteristic of advanced Western culture.
¹²
The attempted new philosophical-cosmological synthesis could not be achieved, for it lacked objectivity, rigor, and true political and intellectual sophistication. The main accomplishment was to complete a stunning variety of translations of Muslim and Jewish materials and also to produce new writings in the vernacular, especially much important work in history. It produced no completely new knowledge or intellectual analysis to speak of, and failed to spark any cultural renascence in Castile, but it certainly constituted a unique enterprise. The
Estoria de España
was not merely the first vernacular history of Spain but also the first attempt at a broader history of the peninsula, even though its primary purpose was narrow, presenting Alfonso's version of the history of the Asturian-Leonese-Castilian monarchy as its legitimate ruler.