Spain's history: a state assembled from crowns that kept their own laws

Who ruled Iberia before Castile and Aragon

Iberians, Celts and other pre-Roman peoples held the Iberian Peninsula before Rome took it, and Roman rule left the province of Hispania deeply Romanised and later Christianised. After the Western Roman Empire fell, tribes from central Europe crossed into the peninsula, and the Visigoths established a kingdom centred on Toledo.

That kingdom ended in a single summer. In 711 a Berber force led by Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to intervene in a Visigothic civil war, and the Visigothic king Roderic was defeated and killed at the Battle of Guadalete on 19 July. By 718 Muslim forces controlled nearly the whole peninsula.

What followed was not one Muslim state for long. Abd al-Rahman I, a fugitive from the Abbasid overthrow of the Umayyads, defeated the incumbent governor outside Córdoba in May 756 and made the city the capital of an emirate that became a caliphate in 929. Christians and Jews lived under the dhimmah system as subordinate groups, and over the ninth and tenth centuries most of the population of al-Andalus converted to Islam. When the caliphate broke apart in civil war in the early eleventh century it splintered into the taifa kingdoms.

The Christian kingdoms in the north pushed south across four centuries and at very different speeds. Toledo fell in 1085, which brought the Almoravids in from North Africa; an alliance of Christian kingdoms broke the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. Ferdinand III took Córdoba in 1236 and Sevilla in 1248, expelling the Andalusian population of those cities until the collapse of the local economy forced him to modify the policy, and he let a Moorish kingdom of Granada survive under Castilian suzerainty in return for a sizable annual tribute. James I of Aragon took the Balearics in 1235 and Valencia in 1238, and worked instead to keep the Moorish agricultural economy intact.

By the end of the thirteenth century the reconquest was, for practical purposes, over, and Granada survived for two more centuries as a tributary. The kingdoms that had done the conquering did not merge. Castile, Aragon and Portugal each kept their own institutions, and the written languages settled with them: Castilian became the language of public documents under Alfonso X, Galician was the standard written language of its region from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, and Catalan from the twelfth to the eighteenth.

How a marriage joined two separate crowns

Isabella took the Castilian throne after the War of the Castilian Succession, fought from 1475 to 1479 against Joanna la Beltraneja. She had married Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 and the two ruled jointly. What the marriage produced is described in the standard account as a union in title only, because each region retained its own political and judicial structure.

The Catholic Monarchs used that union hard. Granada fell in 1492. In the same year they ordered the remaining Jews in Spain to convert or leave, and estimates of the number expelled run from tens of thousands to about 200,000. Muslims faced the same choice about sixty years later, and the converts among them were expelled in the early seventeenth century. Also in 1492 the monarchs authorised the first expedition of Christopher Columbus, and Antonio de Nebrija published the first grammar of the Castilian language.

The Canary Islands had been under conquest since 1402 and were not finished until 1496, and by 1520 the Guanche population was extinct, from European military technology, from epidemics, and from enslavement and deportation.

What American silver bought and what it cost

Charles I became king in 1516 and shortly afterwards Holy Roman Emperor, which put Castile at the centre of European dynastic war for a century. Large-scale silver extraction began at Guanajuato in the 1520s and was greatly augmented from 1546 by Zacatecas and by Potosí in what is now Bolivia. Silver paid for armies and for debt. Spanish kings declared sovereign defaults nine times between 1557 and 1666, and Seville, which had operated 16,000 looms at the start of the sixteenth century, was down to 400 by 1621.

From 1580 the monarch of Castile was also monarch of Portugal, and the two were ruled as separate entities on the peninsula and in the Americas alike, until the House of Braganza revolted in 1640 and Portuguese independence was reasserted for good.

Catalonia revolted in the same year and for a related reason. The Count-Duke of Olivares, who directed policy from 1621 to 1643, tried to centralise power and raise wartime taxation across the whole monarchy. The revolts in Catalonia and Portugal that followed brought him down. French forces were expelled from most of Catalonia and the Catalan bid was suppressed, while Portugal was lost. The plague of 1596 to 1602 had already killed 600,000 to 700,000 people, about a tenth of the population.

The Siglo de Oro ran alongside all of this. Cervantes, Velázquez, El Greco and Lope de Vega worked while the treasury failed and the armies lost.

Why Philip abolished the laws of Aragon

Charles II died in 1700 without a direct heir and the crown passed to Philip of Anjou, a French Bourbon prince. The other European powers fought the War of the Spanish Succession from 1700 to 1714 to stop France and Spain sharing a monarch, and the Treaty of Utrecht recognised Philip as king on condition that he renounce any claim to the French throne. Inside the peninsula the war had also been a civil war, and the Crown of Aragon had largely backed the Habsburg candidate.

Philip's answer was the Decreto de Nueva Planta, signed in 1715. It revoked most of the historical rights and privileges of the kingdoms that made up the Spanish crown, the Crown of Aragon above all, and unified them under the laws of Castile, whose Cortes had been more receptive to royal wishes. Central authority was strengthened against the provinces, merit counted for more in appointments than it had, and Spain became a political follower of absolutist France.

This is the decree that reference accounts of Spanish history reach for when they date the Spanish nation state. In that account the new state was formed as other European nation states were, by imposing the political and cultural characteristics of the dominant group, here the Castilian, on the others, who became minorities to be assimilated, and the same account holds that the policy has been the seed of repeated territorial conflict inside the state ever since.

The rest of the eighteenth century was calmer than the one before it. Under Ferdinand VI and Charles III the economy improved, with greater productivity and fewer famines and epidemics, though the historian Jonathan Israel argues that Charles III and his ministers paid little attention to Enlightenment ideas and aimed always to reinforce monarchy, empire and ecclesiastical control over education.

How Spain lost an empire in a century

Napoleon invaded in 1808 and deposed Ferdinand VII, who had been on the throne for forty-eight days, and Joseph Bonaparte entered Madrid on 20 July 1808 as king. The Spanish army lost almost every battle it fought after its one victory at Bailén in June 1808, which was the first major defeat suffered by a Napoleonic army. What wore the French down was an insurgency Napoleon dismissed as bandits led by monks, together with British and Portuguese forces under Wellington.

While the fighting went on, a Cortes meeting at Cádiz wrote a constitution and promulgated it on 19 March 1812. It separated executive from legislative power. It provided for a Cortes elected by universal suffrage, exercised indirectly, with one member for every 70,000 people, and annual sessions the king could neither convene nor prorogue. Ferdinand VII returned in 1814 and rejected it. An expedition bound for the colonies mutinied at Cádiz in 1820 under Rafael del Riego and forced him to accept it again, and three years later a French army restored him as an absolute monarch.

How the American colonies broke away

The colonies did not wait for any of this to resolve. Cut off from Spain by the British blockade and governed by juntas out of touch with the mainland, the American territories broke away in a series of revolts between 1808 and 1826, and the last Spanish forces on the continent were defeated at Ayacucho in southern Peru in 1824. Cuba and Puerto Rico remained.

Why the century ended in coups

The question of what kind of state Spain was stayed open. The death of Ferdinand VII in 1833 started the First Carlist War over the succession, which ran until the Convention of Vergara in 1839; a second Carlist rising, in Catalonia, was suppressed by 1849. Isabella II was driven into exile by the Glorious Revolution of 1868, an Italian prince was crowned in 1871 and abdicated after declaring the Spanish ungovernable, and the First Republic lasted from 1873 to 1874. The Restoration that followed in December 1874 ran on turnismo, an arrangement under which two dynastic parties alternated in office with the outcome of elections agreed in the capital in advance and delivered locally through caciquismo.

Then 1898 took the remainder. The Cuban war of independence, revived in 1895, ended in Spanish defeat by the United States, and Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines were ceded for $20 million; the remaining Pacific islands were sold to Germany in 1899. In the summer of 1921 about 9,000 Spanish soldiers were killed at Annual and every position taken in Morocco since 1912 was lost. General Miguel Primo de Rivera took power by coup in September 1923 with the king's tacit endorsement and governed until bankruptcy and unpopularity forced his removal in early 1930. The municipal elections of April 1931 were treated as a plebiscite on the monarchy, urban voters went to republican parties, the king left the country, and a republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931.

What the Republic gave the regions back

The Second Republic called a constituent election for June 1931 and approved a constitution on 9 December 1931. Women voted in a Spanish general election for the first time under it. It devolved substantial self-government to Catalonia, whose statute of autonomy dates from 1932, and for a brief wartime period to the Basque provinces as well.

Politics polarised quickly, and the Church was the axis it turned on. On the left it was seen as the chief obstacle to a modern Spain; on the right as the protector of Spanish values. Reform of the armed forces, undertaken by Manuel Azaña first as war minister and then as prime minister, earned the generals' private contempt without removing them, and a coup led by José Sanjurjo in 1932 was quelled easily. Troops under Francisco Franco suppressed a miners' rising in Asturias in 1934. The election of 16 February 1936 returned a Popular Front government supported by most of the parties of the left and opposed by the parties of the right and what remained of the centre.

How the Civil War produced a dictatorship

A planned military uprising began in garrison towns on 17 July 1936. By 21 July the rebels held Spanish Morocco, the Canary Islands, the Balearics except Minorca, and the country north of the Guadarrama mountains and the Ebro, apart from Asturias, Santander, the Basque provinces and Catalonia. The rising failed in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Bilbao. A coup that takes half a country produces a war, and this one produced a war of two years and eight months.

Who supported which side

Both sides organised their territory and repressed opposition inside it. The standard reference account holds that Republican violence occurred mainly in the early stages, before the rule of law was restored, and that Nationalist violence was part of a conscious policy of terror whose toll was the higher of the two; the same account records that how many were killed remains contentious. Foreign involvement was open from the first months of the war in 1936. Germany and Italy sent troops, tanks and aircraft to the Nationalists, the Soviet Union sold equipment to the Republicans for gold, about 40,000 foreigners fought in the International Brigades with 20,000 more in medical and auxiliary units, and in August 1936 Britain, France and twenty-seven other states signed a non-intervention agreement that the Germans, Italians and Soviets ignored.

The Condor Legion bombed Guernica on the afternoon of 26 April 1937. The Nationalists took the whole northern coast that year, reached the Mediterranean in April 1938 and cut the Republic in two, and moved on Catalonia in December. By February 1939, 250,000 Republican soldiers and about as many civilians had crossed into France. Madrid fell on 28 March 1939. Estimates of the dead differ by a factor of two: Nationalist forces put the figure at 1,000,000, and more recent estimates have been closer to 500,000 or fewer.

How Franco governed after the war

Up to 150,000 people were executed between 1939 and 1943, and the count by the historian Gabriel Jackson of victims of the repression in those years, including deaths from hunger and illness in prison, is 200,000. Around 500,000 refugees escaped to France. Franco then governed for thirty-six years on the emergency war powers his fellow generals had granted him as head of state and of government in 1936. The first decade brought military tribunals, political purges and a policy of autarky under which national income fell back to the level of 1900.

Spain was kept out of the United Nations until 1955. An agreement with the United States in 1953 traded financial aid for four American military bases. A stabilisation plan in 1959 and a development plan in 1963 abandoned autarky for a market economy open to foreign investment and tourism, growth ran above 7% a year between 1962 and 1966, and the share of the working population engaged in agriculture fell from about two-fifths in 1960 to about one-fifth by 1976.

The regime's treatment of the parts of Spain went the other way. Its record is described as the promotion of a unitary national identity, National Catholicism, and discriminatory language policies. Basque nationalism developed an armed wing, ETA, founded in 1959; the Burgos trials of Basque militants in 1970 discredited the regime abroad, and ETA killed the prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco in December 1973. In 1971 the Assembly of Catalonia united the opposition around two demands, democratic institutions and the restoration of the autonomy statute of 1932.

What the constitution settled and what it left open

Franco died on 20 November 1975 and Juan Carlos acceded as king. The transition that followed used the legal instruments of Francoism to dismantle Francoism. Adolfo Suárez, a former Francoist minister, replaced Carlos Arias Navarro in July 1976, persuaded the Francoist Cortes to pass the Law for Political Reform in November 1976, and legalised the Communist Party in April 1977 against the wishes of the armed forces. In the elections of June 1977 his Union of the Democratic Centre won 165 seats, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party 118, the Communists 20 and the right-wing Popular Alliance 16.

The territorial settlement was already under way before the constitution existed. In about eighteen months from 1976 the Francoist parliament dissolved itself, parties were legalised, elections were called, pacts on the economic crisis were signed, and the Generalitat of Catalonia and other pre-autonomy regional regimes were restored. The constitution was ratified by referendum in December 1978, and the record dates the current Spanish state from 29 December 1978.

Its second section states both halves of the quarrel in one sentence.

The Constitution is based on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation, the common and indivisible homeland of all Spaniards; it recognizes and guarantees the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions of which it is composed and the solidarity among them all.

The third section makes Castilian the official language of the state, which all Spaniards have the duty to know and the right to use, and provides that the other Spanish languages are also official in their respective autonomous communities in accordance with their statutes. Seventeen autonomous communities and two autonomous cities were created, and six of the seventeen have named a co-official language.

What the amnesty law left alone

The settlement left the war itself alone. The Amnesty Law of 1977 allowed people from Franco's institutions to remain inside them without consequence, and it covered perpetrators of crimes committed during the transition, among them the killings at Vitoria on 3 March 1976 and at Atocha in 1977.

Democracy was tested once by force. On 23 February 1981 Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero and members of the Civil Guard occupied the Congress of Deputies and held the government and the deputies for eighteen hours; the coup failed, and the king's public support for the constitution is the reason usually given. Spain joined NATO in 1982 and confirmed the membership in a referendum on 12 March 1986, entered the European Economic Community on 1 January 1986, joined the World Trade Organization in January 1995 and the Schengen area in March 1995, and exchanged the peseta for the euro in 1999. Bombs on Madrid commuter trains killed 191 people on 11 March 2004. ETA dissolved in May 2018.

Why Catalonia reopened the question

The Catalan government held an independence referendum on 1 October 2017 which the Spanish state held to be unlawful, and the Parliament of Catalonia voted to declare independence on the day the Spanish Senate was debating direct rule. On 27 October 2017 the Senate voted for the first time to invoke article 155 of the constitution, which gave the central government the power to remove the government of an autonomous community for acting against the constitution of 1978; the Catalan parliament was dissolved and a new election called. No state recognised Catalonia. This catalogue records that the dispute exists and takes no position on it.