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Spains

IN OCTOBER 1469, two young princelings—Isabel, eighteen, and her cousin Ferdinand, seventeen—married in a small Castilian town in virtual secrecy. As members of the same Trastámara dynasty, their marriage was an attempt to establish order and stability in the peninsula following decades of conflict, regicides, rebellions, and civil wars.
Isabel became queen of the crown of Castile in 1474 when she succeeded her brother Enrique IV. Five years later, in 1479, Ferdinand became king of the crown of Aragon. This was strictly a union of heads, not bodies: the marriage accords did not call for, or envisage, a true political and juridical union of the two crowns and their kingdoms. Nevertheless, the practical result of the marriage was that for the first time in centuries, the two most powerful states in the Iberian Peninsula were dynastically amalgamated.
Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians claimed that this fateful union of the crowns of Aragon and Castile stitched together a territorial unit rent asunder by the eighth-century Arab invasion of the peninsula and also unquestionably marked the birth of Spain as a nation and state. In the past few decades, however—at least since the establishment of democracy in Spain in the 1970s—historians have challenged this interpretation. In their view, the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabel did not forge a nation, and the old kingdoms survived as autonomous entities with deeply entrenched “national” identities that have endured until the present day. Alternatively, a growing number of early modern historians have observed that one of the key if unintended consequences of the marriage between Isabel and Ferdinand was not the creation of a nation-state so much as the emergence of a well-defined Spanish national identity. They find evidence of this process in cultural and juridical concepts and practices that reveal an increasingly widespread sense among early modern Spaniards of belonging to a “Spanish” nation and in a growing popular tendency to self-identify unambiguously as “Spaniards.”1
Rather than engage in an extended, polemical discussion of this voluminous historiography, this chapter intends to explain political and territorial involutions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and to inquire along the way into the meaning for contemporary Spaniards of terms such as Spain, nation, and patria. This study departs from both the old and new interpretations. Its goal is to analyze how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberians viewed and understood Spain and whether they believed that the marriage of Isabel and Ferdinand fundamentally changed the structure of the Spanish state. To answer these questions one must turn to political initiatives; to the cultural and social strategies launched from the writing desks of government ministers, advisers, and intellectuals; and to the debates and sometimes violent conflicts over what kind of Spain should prevail.
As a case study, Spain can usefully be compared to other European polities. J. G. A. Pocock exemplifies the comparative approach. He characterizes the British Islands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as “multinational: a history of nations forming and deforming one another and themselves.
 No nation’s history can be understood without that of its interaction with other histories; that national histories have been shaped in the process of shaping others.”2 Likewise, a history of the various kingdoms that coexisted as parts of a larger entity called the Spanish monarchy must also consider the increasing attempts to create a united kingdom of Spain.
The history of the Iberian Peninsula in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries must be viewed as a multinational history, the history of Spains in the plural rather than the singular. The axis of this chapter is the continuously shifting balance between the regions and the center or, to be more precise, between the various regions and the one that ended up becoming dominant among them: Castile. Perhaps there was one Spanish monarchy, but there was not one Spanish nation. However, this should not be read as a history of a failure but as one of experimentation: it is a history of copious debates, recurrent uncertainty, and struggles to define what Spain was.
Over the course of these two centuries, erudite Spanish writers—or, to use the term of the day, letrados (“the lettered elite”)—developed an obsessive interest both in Spain and in each one of its constituent kingdoms, their history, their formation, the origins of their peoples and communities.3 Many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spaniards from various professions—historians, poets and theologians, legal experts, medical doctors, diplomats and military commanders, rulers and vassals—contributed to the construction of varied theories and concepts that help explain how Spaniards saw themselves. It is nevertheless important to keep in mind that this obsession with Spain did not result in a consensus about Spain, its history, or its composition. In retrospect, some common threads can be found in these disparate theories and political initiatives—a coherence and certitude that they often lacked: the scholarly and literary production of this period was, before all else, fluid and polyvalent.
Like the book overall, this chapter is a history strictly of those territories that contemporaries thought of as “Spanish”—the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula and the American territories under the sovereignty of the Spanish king. The Spanish Habsburgs also held possessions in Italy and in the Low Countries; however, discussions, reflections, and conflicts over Spain and its future composition transpired almost exclusively in the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America. A few Italian authors contributed to these debates, but they were solitary islets in a Hispanic sea. One of the central arguments of this book is that it is important to distinguish between the history of a dynasty—the Habsburgs—and the history of a territorial community identified from time immemorial as “Spain” (Hispania). The Habsburg kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula were part of a global monarchy. But these peninsular kingdoms, along with the Indies, configured themselves not only as the principal part of this global monarchy but also as a part that was clearly differentiated from the rest of the Habsburg possessions.
In the struggles for diplomatic precedence during the sixteenth century, English and Spanish writers debated about which of the two monarchies was the more ancient, stable, united, and centralized. For the English the answer was obvious: the English monarchy was more ancient, the only one of the two that could claim to be administratively and territorially united and that had remained free of foreign domination for more than 500 years. The Spanish monarchy, in contrast, was internally divided into autonomous kingdoms. The history of Spain had been one of glaring dynastic discontinuities. Even more significantly, for almost 800 years parts of Spain had been subject to a foreign power, the Arab followers of Muhammad who invaded the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century.
Spanish writers had a radically different view. First, they argued that there was ample evidence that Spain had been a united monarchy from the Visigothic invasion in the fifth century until the present. Although the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth century had led to the establishment of several independent kingdoms, it should not obscure the fact that since the eighth century “there have been 68 (Spanish) kings succeeding each other in legitimate order.” The 1492 conquest of Granada, the last remaining Muslim stronghold, had made it possible to reunite the kingdom of Spain, reverting back to the time of the Goths, who had ruled over the “whole” kingdom of Spain as had Ferdinand and Isabel and their successors during the sixteenth century.4
Neither interpretation advanced by English and Spanish writers was entirely correct. However, both highlighted the great complexities in the juridical and political evolution of Spain and anxieties felt by many Spaniards and Europeans at the time. Indeed, for many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spaniards, it was no secret that the Spanish monarchy was composed of a number of kingdoms with contrasting juridical-political realities and that, rather than designating a single polity, Spain was the name given to a geographical region occupied by several communities.
To be sure, the Iberian situation and history was not unique in Europe. The fifteenth century in most other European polities was characterized by instability and conflicts between neighboring kingdoms, some intent on expansion, others equally committed to a vigorous defense of their independence. This was certainly true in the British Isles, where the independent kingdoms of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland had been competing for territory. In France, which is often thought of as a relatively unified monarchy since the Middle Ages, the political-territorial reality in the fifteenth century was actually one of divisions, conflicts, and kings able to lay claim only to portions of the territory identified by the old chronicles as the lands of the Franks. Alongside a throng of duchies and counties were independent or quasi-independent territories—Navarre, Brittany, Flanders, BĂ©arn, and Burgundy. In all cases, unification, or territorial agglomeration, occurred militarily or through matrimonial alliances between ruling houses.
Around 1450, some two decades before the marriage of Isabel and Ferdinand, the Iberian Peninsula was divided into a number of competing independent kingdoms. Various territories in the north, northeast, center, south, and east of the Iberian Peninsula—the old kingdoms of Galicia, Leon, Asturias, Cantabria, Old and New Castile, Extremadura, Murcia, the so-called Basque provinces, and all of Andalusia with the exception of Granada—had coalesced earlier to form the crown of Castile. This was the most powerful peninsular crown in terms of size, population, and economic resources. Between 1400 and 1700, the population in the crown of Castile amounted to nearly 80 percent of the total population of the peninsula. Castilian monarchs had belonged to the Trastámara family since the mid-fourteenth century, and Isabel had held the crown since 1474.
The other important crown was Aragon, composed of kingdoms and territories in the eastern part of the Iberian Peninsula. They included Aragon, a kingdom since the early twelfth century; Valencia, constituted as a kingdom in the mid-thirteenth century; the principality of Catalonia, formally founded in the twelfth century (in the seventeenth century it would become one of the most powerful and wealthiest territories of the peninsula); and the Balearic Islands, established as a kingdom in the fourteenth century. The territories of the crown of Aragon had a long history of expansion in the Mediterranean, which accounts for the Catalan presence in Sicily and Naples from the fourteenth century onward.
These two powerful crowns shared the peninsula with smaller independent kingdoms. To the south was the Emirate of Granada, the only remaining Muslim kingdom in the Peninsula after 1250, which would remain independent until 1492. Portugal occupied most of the western Atlantic seaboard. It was a kingdom already constituted by the thirteenth century within its present borders, independent until 1580 and again after 1640. Finally, straddling the northeastern fringes of the peninsula and present-day southwestern France was the kingdom of Navarre, the first Christian realm established following the Arab conquest, in the tenth century, and governed since the fourteenth by a French royal family.
The marriage of Isabel and Ferdinand made it possible to establish peace between the crowns of Castile and Aragon and between them and the kingdom of Portugal. This territorial unification continued in the coming decades. In 1492, the armies of Isabel and Ferdinand conquered Granada, the last remaining Islamic kingdom. In 1512, eight years after Isabel’s death, Spanish armies conquered the territories of the kingdom of Navarre in the Iberian Peninsula. Almost seventy years later, in 1581, Philip II became the king of Portugal. Charles I was Ferdinand and Isabel’s grandson and the first Habsburg ruler of Spain. His enthronement in 1517 as king of both crowns transformed the monarchy created by Ferdinand and Isabel into a pan-European monarchy. Charles inherited jurisdiction over extensive territories scattered throughout the continent. In addition to the Iberian kingdoms, he ruled over a number of Italian territories—Sardinia, Naples, Sicily, Genoa, and Milan—the Low Countries, and French Lorraine. The situation did not change much after Charles resigned in 1556 and left the Spanish and a majority of his European possessions to his son Philip II.
The immediate political and military consequences of the union of Ferdinand and Isabel irreversibly changed the course of Iberian history. Their contemporaries were apparently convinced that, virtually overnight, a new political entity had been created, the start of a definitive reunification of the peninsular kingdoms. In 1492 the humanist Antonio de Nebrija, author of the first grammar of the Castilian language, declared that, with the dynastic union of Ferdinand and Isabel and their great triumphs, “the limbs and the pieces of Spain, which had been scattered over many parts, were brought together and joined as one body and kingdom.”5 Royal officials recognized the merits of reuniting the various peninsular kingdoms under the authority of one monarch. At the start of their joint reign official circles talked approvingly of Ferdinand and Isabel proclaiming themselves “kings of Spain, now that they were [rulers] of the major part of the peninsula.” The monarchs rejected the temptation and held on to their separate titles.6 As equal partners, both Isabel and Ferdinand were in agreement that they were not going to promote the dissolution of all extant kingdoms in order to create one, and only one, Spanish kingdom.
MAP 1. Spain in 1600: A composite monarchy
The crowns of Castile and Aragon were united in 1474. The kingdom of Granada was conquered in 1492 and annexed to the crown of Castile. The kingdom of Navarre was conquered in 1512 and annexed to the crown of Castile. The crown of Portugal joined ...