Late Middle Ages

The Iberian Kingdoms and the Reconquista

The Christian kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula in the late Middle Ages — Castile, Aragon, and Portugal, with a thicket of smaller polities — were the only major European states whose existence was defined by a centuries-long holy war. The Reconquista, the long Christian campaign against the Muslim kingdoms of the peninsula, gave Iberian kingship a sacred quality it had nowhere else in Latin Christendom, supplied the great military orders of Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcántara with a permanent role in the political system, and shaped the kind of state that emerged in 1492 under the Catholic Monarchs. The three articles in this section look at that story from three angles: the long frontier war itself, from the victory at Las Navas de Tolosa (1212) to the fall of Granada in January 1492; the personal monarchy of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who between 1469 and 1504 built the institutions of early modern Spain; and the fall of the city of Granada to the combined armies of Castile and Aragon, an event that has rightly been read as the symbolic end of the Middle Ages on the peninsula.

Eight centuries of frontier: from Covadonga to Granada

The article on the Reconquista against Muslim Granada takes the long view. The Muslim conquest of the Visigothic kingdom had been completed by 718, and the Christian enclave at Covadonga in the Asturias, dated by tradition to 722, is the conventional starting point. The Christian kingdoms worked north to south over seven centuries: the capture of Toledo in 1085, of Zaragoza in 1118, of Lisbon in 1147; the great triumph at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 that broke the Almohad empire; the systematic annexation of the Guadalquivir valley under Ferdinand III of Castile and James I of Aragon — Córdoba in 1236, Jaén in 1246, Seville in 1248. By the late thirteenth century only the emirate of Granada remained under Muslim rule, and the Nasrid dynasty that ruled it was, for two and a half centuries, a tributary vassal of Castile.

That is the context in which the Catholic Monarchs worked. The long frontier had produced a distinctively Iberian kind of kingship: a kingship of the camp, of the military orders of Calatrava, Santiago, and Alcántara, of a church whose bishops held lands in conquered territory, and of a fiscal system that ran on spoils and parias. The historiography is unusually rich. Teofilo Ruiz’s work on medieval Castile has reshaped it since the 1980s, and Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada’s surveys of late-medieval Castilian finance and of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs are now the standard reference. The Reconquista, in their reading, was not a continuous crusade but a patchwork of truces, vassalages, and tax arrangements, interrupted by spasms of conquest — most of all in 1492.

The Catholic Monarchs and the union of crowns

The article on Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs covers the personal union that made Spain possible. Isabella (1451–1504) and Ferdinand (1452–1516) were married in Valladolid in October 1469, against the express wishes of her half-brother Henry IV of Castile; she was proclaimed queen of Castile in December 1474 on the king’s death, and he succeeded his father John II on the throne of Aragon in January 1479. The two kingdoms retained separate laws, currencies, and chancelleries — a separation that would outlast both of them — but the joint sovereignty gave the Catholic Monarchs a Castilian fiscal base, an Aragonese Mediterranean fleet, and a combined diplomatic weight that no Iberian ruler since Alfonso X had commanded.

Three institutions of the 1470s and 1480s did the consolidating work. The Inquisition, established in 1478 with the bull Exigit sincerae devotionis, was first directed against the conversos of Castile. The Santa Hermandad, the old Castilian rural league against banditry, was reformed in 1476 into a salaried royal constabulary. The Council of Castile at Valladolid, formalised in 1480, gave the crown a permanent advisory body. Henry Kamen’s Spain 1469–1714 has set the terms of the older debate; Jocelyn Hillgarth’s wider surveys, and Manuel Fernández Álvarez’s work on Isabella, are the necessary counterweight. The 1480 Treaty of Alcáçovas with Portugal and the 1489 Treaty of Medina del Campo with England (confirmed in 1496) are the two diplomatic instruments that mark the consolidation of that joint sovereignty on the international stage.

1492: end of the Reconquista, beginning of empire

The article on the fall of Granada in 1492 treats the event that closes the long campaign. After a siege of nearly ten months, the city of Granada surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs on 2 January 1492, and Boabdil, the last Nasrid emir, crossed the Sierra to begin his exile in North Africa. The campaign had been prepared by the conquest of Baza (1489) and the surrender of Almería, and it was the culminating moment of an Iberian reconquest that had begun, by tradition, in 722. For Castilian chroniclers, the surrender was the symbolic end of the long war; for later historians, beginning with the eighteenth-century Jesuit Juan de Mariana, it was the hinge between medieval and early modern Spain.

The same year, 1492, saw the expulsion of the Jews from Castile and Aragon by the edict of 31 March, the surrender of Granada on 2 January, and — in the autumn — the first voyage of Christopher Columbus under Castilian letters patent from Santa Fe. The convergence is not accidental. The resources freed by the end of the Reconquista, the experienced captains of the Andalusian frontier, and the union of crowns that could direct both Atlantic and Mediterranean resources, were all necessary conditions for the Castilian claim on the Atlantic. The Treaty of Tordesillas with Portugal (1494) is the diplomatic counterpart, and the work of the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria two generations later is the legal one. Joseph Pérez’s surveys remain the standard introduction; the more recent work of O’Callaghan and Ladero Quesada has integrated the political, fiscal, and religious history into a single account. The Spain that emerged in 1492 was a national monarchy built on the wreck of the Reconquista, and would, by the 1580s, be the most powerful state in Europe.

Articles in this section

Articles in this chapter