Spain: A Unique History (19 page)

Everything else about the reign was a disaster, ending finally in the deposition of the king himself. The crusading and imperial ambitions were completely frustrated, wasted great amounts of money, and sparked much internal discontent. The attempt to generate systematic new legal statutes for the realm trampled much of historical law and custom, and was strongly resisted. The effort to regulate by law a controlled commercial economy through what would later be called mercantilist regulations backfired badly. Finally the effort to deport a portion of the Mudéjar population of the south to make room for Castilian settlers boomeranged even more badly, leading to a formidable Mudéjar revolt that could only be put down thanks to extensive assistance from Aragon and Portugal. The attempt to impose a new
Fuero Real
, or code of royal law, taking precedence over the rights of the cities and the aristocracy, led to generalized revolt and breakdown of the kingdom, an opportunity seized by the emir of Granada and the sultan of Morocco to invade the south once more, a disaster from which Castile was again saved by assistance from the Aragonese and Portuguese. Royal policies of steeply increased taxation, fixation on politics in Italy and Germany to win the imperial crown, and a destructive economic program brought Castile ever closer to ruin and produced a general agreement to depose its conflictive ruler in 1282. In reply Alfonso formed an alliance with the Moroccans, producing yet another invasion of the south and eventually a political compromise in the melancholy final years of his reign.

Alfonso was the very opposite of "sabio" in terms of vision, objectivity, prudence, understanding of problems, or astuteness. It would, however, be fair to term him "el iluminado" or "el alumbrado" (visionary), as Villacañas Berlanga suggests. His political approach was sheer disaster. The famous
Siete Partida
s, more than a system of practical legal reform, was an exposition of Alfonso's politicojuridical ideology, in which the crown was all-powerful and potentially allcontrolling. There was no understanding of the role and character of a Western city as a potentially autonomous and self-governing
universitas
, and no sense of the kingdom as a corporative or organic entity, with objective laws and self-limiting justice that recognized rights, representation, and autonomy. Alfonso was indeed a unique figure in Spanish and in all of European history. He saw himself as endowed with a special towering charisma, a sort of messianic genius with the unique ability to establish a new order. In part, at least, by reaching too far he squandered the opportunities achieved by Castile through the Great Reconquest and left his kingdom unable to realize its full potential, wracked by internal disputes for the next two centuries.
¹³
He did, however, set a new norm for a juridically strengthened monarchy and the potential expansion of royal law, and to that extent charted the direction followed, however uncertainly, by the Castilian crown during the next two centuries, until it eventually developed impressive power.

In his imperial designs Alfonso el Sabio had not proposed to deprive the other principalities of their autonomy, for he had clearly recognized in the "Partidas" that the ruler of an empire held only a second category of rule over imperial domains and could not rule them directly like a king over his own kingdom or like the rulers of a republic. Empire was an hegemony, above all for purposes of external defense and a coordination of mutual problems. As it was, the only Hispanic empire developed during the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was that of the crown of Aragon in the western Mediterranean, the most complex European system of its time. Given the political failure of Castile, the leading role in peninsular affairs for the next century or so passed to the Aragonese rulers.

Pacts of cooperation and marriage alliances among the Hispanic states continued, and conflicts were somewhat reduced, but still persisted. Within Castile, ambitions were expressed from time to time of making its king "emperor of Spain." The last major Moroccan invasion was thoroughly smashed in 1340 by Alfonso XI, the only strong Castilian ruler of the fourteenth century, and by that time the habit, which had hung on for half a millennium, of intermittently calling on a Muslim ruler for assistance against another Hispanic principality, largely came to an end. The elites of the Hispanic kingdoms, including Portugal, continued to recognize each other as belonging to a kind of geographic and even politicocultural community, and they all continued to consider themselves Spanish, but any effective political union was lacking except within the politically sophisticated crown of Aragon.

At no time did expansionist ambitions come to an end, with the exception of landlocked Navarre. Granada lay within the Castilian sphere, and during those years in which the emirate paid tribute, a traditional relationship continued in which direct conquest was often not held to be necessary. Castile nonetheless continued to chip away at Granada's frontiers, and the dream of expansion into Africa was never forgotten. Alfonso X had conquered the Moroccan coastal city of Salé in 1260, slaughtering its inhabitants, and in 1402 Enrique III briefly entered Tetuán, while the conquest of the Canaries had already begun, if slowly and uncertainly. The ultimate goal in financing the expedition of Columbus was not to discover America — which no one dreamed of — but to outflank Islam and ultimately to hasten the Second Coming.

The fifteenth century was a time of recovery for Castile and of political, social, and economic decline for the crown of Aragon, particularly for Catalonia. The growth of the Castilian economy seems to have become notable during the second quarter of the century, beyond which it continued to climb, which helps to account for the sizable amount of impressive new construction in Castilian cities during the late fifteenth century. The factors involved in the decline of Catalonia have been well defined by Catalan historians, to which was added political and social conflict. Though the economy eventually stabilized, decisive new growth in Catalonia would not begin until the last third of the seventeenth century.

The Aragonese kingdoms had become politically static, dominated by the oligarchies enshrined in their elaborate constitutional systems, their monarchy increasingly debilitated and their oppressive social structures prone to internal convulsion and conflict. By the fifteenth century, in contrast, the Castilian monarchy had grown politically stronger, developing an increasingly formidable institutional structure that extended royal administration and royal law, making it for a time one of the most "modern" of European monarchies.

The remarkable marriage of the rulers (later known as the Catholic Monarchs) finally effected the combination that could bring together all but one of the peninsular states under a single dynasty (after the conquest/inheritance of peninsular Navarre in 1512). The observation that an alternative marriage with Afonso V of Portugal would have created a different dynastic alliance based on a more coherent institutional structure/logic that combined Castile and Portugal, instead, is perhaps sensible in the abstract but overlooks the fact that Afonso V of Portugal was an aging king who might not have been able to generate a new dynasty. That the new united monarchy ruled over a diversity of states was in no way unusual, for that was in fact the norm among European monarchies at that time, and the Aragonese monarchy merely had the most complex of these structures. Thus, it was the Aragonese model that was adopted by the new Spanish monarchy, with the major difference that it now included a "great power" state, Castile.

The international marriage alliance arranged by the united monarchy enabled it to inherit a European dynastic empire on the very eve of the age in which the conquistadores would carve out a vast American territorial empire. The combination of the two produced the most unique imperial structure in world history, consisting of both a discontiguous European continental empire and the first true world empire, with possessions in America, North Africa (cities on the coast of Morocco and Algeria), and later, in the western Pacific. The temporary dynastic union with Portugal added to its vast extent and heterogeneity. There has never been a European empire like that of the Spanish Habsburgs, for all the other major intra-European empires (Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Poland-Lithuania, tsarist Russia, and the Ottomans) consisted of contiguous territorial domains. Conversely, the first European oceanic empire, that of Portugal, was a coastal thalassocracy that did not include significant territorial colonies until the development of Brazil. The complexity and geographical discontinuity of the Habsburg European crownlands would always be a major problem, leading to the severing of the eastern and western Habsburg domains after little more than a generation, a decisive act that merely reduced but did not resolve the inherent difficulties involved.

In more recent times, the main concern about the political identities of this era has to do not with the empire but with the united monarchy in the peninsula. To European opinion, the Iberian principalities of the united monarchy simply constituted "Spain," although no such single uniform political entity existed. There was a united monarchy that functioned as a single state for foreign and military policy, but internally governed on the basis of the individual autonomy of the several Hispanic principalities.

Modern Spanish patriots and nationalists for understandable reasons like to refer to the "origins of the Spanish nation," and so on. Claudio Sánchez Albornoz and other "essentialists" have posited an enduring essence of sociocultural characteristics among the native population of the peninsula since pre-Roman times, though the eminent medievalist refers to the kingdom of Asturias as the "origin of the Spanish nation," as do some others. What one clearly had in Asturias was the beginning of the state that directly evolved in a long historical process, without total interruption, into the modern Spanish state, but that is a different proposition. More commonly, Spanish patriots have seen the origin of the modern nation in the united monarchy in the late fifteenth century.

The modern concept of a nation as a single institutionally unified society with a common language and history, and common rights and restrictions for all citizens, either possessing or aspiring to possess an independent state (or at the very least complete autonomy), is a product of the era of the French Revolution. It is further accepted that the major European nations all have deep historical roots, and in no case were merely "invented" in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, despite the faddish and misleading language of commentators.
¹⁴
The only major nation to have developed nationhood as early or earlier than France was England, which as the United Kingdom of England, Wales, and Scotland began to develop a distinctive highly assertive nationalism in the second half of the eighteenth century that transcended the earlier English proto-nationalism.
¹⁵

The case of Holland is interesting, for only Holland was developing a society and system that was as modern as England during the first half of the seventeenth century. Several commentators have suggested that Holland was becoming the first modern nation, which in some respects may have been the case, yet Dutch political development, though dynamic and precocious, became arrested during the course of the seventeenth century so that Holland failed to blossom fully at that time into a completely unified nation.

Prior to the era of the French Revolution, the word "nation" had several different meanings, none of them equivalent to the modern sense. The term obviously refers to the birth origins of an individual or a group, and in earlier times was used to refer variously to individual regions, ethnic groups, or principalities, or to general language groups or even to broadly identifiable areas. Any one of the Hispanic states or regions might be referred to as a nation in the traditional sense, just as groups of traders from any or all of the peninsular ports might be identified abroad as Spanish or of the Spanish nation, and as all students from the peninsula in other European universities might be lumped together as the Spanish nation, though their own native languages might vary. Conversely, in Bruges a "Vizcayan nation" was formed by the late fifteenth century, which included not merely Vizcayans but traders from other ports of northern Spain. In the traditional usage, "nation" referred essentially to a place or a territory, or even groups thereof, or to those who spoke a particular language, but not to a unified political entity. In this traditional or historical sense, Spain may have been the oldest "historical nation" but not at all the first modern political nation.

Prophetic and even apocalyptic images were not uncommon in the peninsula, as elsewhere in Europe, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these included prophecies of the future unity of all the Hispanic states and their special role in history. After formation of the united monarchy, the term "nación de España" was used by several Castilian writers and at least one Aragonese writer,
¹⁶
but the Catholic Monarchs scarcely ever called themselves "monarchs of Spain," Fernando, for example, referring to the "crown of Spain" on only one public occasion in 1514. In such an event, the crown of Portugal was always quick to complain, because the sense of Spain as an all-peninsular term remained very strong, and would remain so into the eighteenth century.
¹⁷

The most common term for the next two centuries would therefore be the less direct form "la Monarquía hispánica," the term introduced by Felipe II to distinguish the state later known to historians as "imperial Spain" from the central European Habsburg domains, which had been split off under the rule of his Austrian cousins. The plurality and distinct institutions of the crown's principalities were always acknowledged, and historians would later devise the term "monarquía compuesta" (compound monarchy) for the totality involved. Nonetheless, specific Spanish terminology would be applied to the crown more and more, as "crown of Spain" or "de las Españas," even though never an official title, while Felipe II sometimes termed himself
Princeps Hispaniorum
or
Hispaniorum et Indorum Rex
, which referred to the principal domains and base of, but not all the patrimony of, the monarchy.