Spain: A Unique History (16 page)

Even the apparent retrocession of Spanish strength during the height of the caliphate's power in the tenth century — the so-called iron century — paralleled similar developments in the same period in other parts of the West. During the eighth and ninth centuries the west European world was under assault from Vikings and Danes from the north, Magyars from the east and Muslims from the south, as Sicily was conquered and a Muslim toehold established in south Italy.

New consolidation then began to take place in the core areas of the West during the second half of the tenth century, crystallization of new institutions and further economic development starting only a generation or two before the balance of power started to shift decisively in the peninsula. Both the weakening under foreign assault and the strengthening near the beginning of the eleventh century roughly coincided with the broader experience of western lands.

The Reconquest also proceeded in parallel with other aspects of Western expansion, both internally and externally. The eleventh century was generally a time of decisive growth in the West. Beyond the Iberian Peninsula the southern Normans carried out the reconquest of Sicily, and the Genoese republic cleared the Muslims from Sardinia. Islamic naval dominance in the west Mediterranean was broken, making the western states stronger at sea than on land, a process that contributed to the First Crusade. The halt to the Spanish Reconquest imposed by the Moroccan invasions would then more or less coincide with the weak assistance provided to Crusader Palestine and its reconquest by the Muslims late in the twelfth century. Though subsequent crusades to regain the Holy Land failed, the Spanish Great Reconquest of the thirteenth century similarly paralleled another major phase of European expansion and of the growth of Christendom in northeast Europe, and of the expansion of the English monarchy in the northwest.
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By that point the general "medieval expansion of Europe" was under way and would never entirely cease.
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The Spanish Reconquest represented the peninsular phase of a broad process that would eventually prove decisive not merely in the history of the West but also in the history of the world.

From the second half of the eighth century, the Asturian leadership was in contact with both France and Italy, drawing a small number of specialized craftsmen from each area. Though initially papal influence was not great, Asturias strongly emphasized its Catholic orthodoxy against both Islam and Mozarab Christian accommodationism. During these early medieval centuries, all the Spanish Christian principalities structured public institutions similar to those of France and other European kingdoms. There was no Spanish "third way" equidistant between Islam and Christianity, and the same may be said for architecture, culture, and municipal development. During the course of the medieval centuries, every single key western institution would be found in the Spanish principalities, from the typical institution of monarchy to feudalism (though not equally in every principality), the structure of aristocracy, seigneurial domain, the institutionalization and structure of municipalities, legal organization, and the universities. The Spanish principalities participated in all the major movements and trends of the era, even helping to initiate one or two of them, and were leaders in religious endeavors ranging from major new orders to the crusades, and in the extension and structure of legal rights and of the first formal representative assemblies. Some of these institutions did not become as well developed in the peninsula as in the most advanced European states, but much the same might be said of a number of other regions. From the eleventh century, particularly, there was considerable immigration from France, as well as a limited amount from Italy, and foreign specialists were common, ranging from prelates of the Church to military crusaders, from merchants and skilled artisans of all types to the architects of cathedrals. Medieval Spanish society was arguably the most open of all the large areas in Europe, and very receptive to immigrants, as well as to foreign elites and specialists, from whom a good deal more "acculturation" was absorbed than from the Andalusis. This was a normal experience for the major semiperipheral lands of western and central Europe. The Normans introduced a good many new continental influences into England, helping to "Europeanize" it, and German-speaking people did the same in Hungary.

The key institution of Latin Christendom, the papacy, developed a special relationship with the Spanish principalities, as, in a different way, it did with France and Germany. This was highly complex, involving the papacy's zeal to promote the Spanish Reconquest, the concern of the newer monarchies (such as Aragon and Portugal) to obtain papal recognition and support, and the papacy's own ambition to gain special political power within the Spanish principalities, which it tended to see as "crusader states" — ones that should become politically subordinated to it. On the one hand, it promoted the unity of the Spanish principalities to expedite the Reconquest, but just as frequently it incited disunity in order to advance its own political influence.

The Catholic Church was the key institution in the development of Latin Christendom and hence of Western civilization. Not merely did it provide the religious and moral content of the culture, but it decisively influenced a broad range of developments. The Church's focus on the person was a basic element in the formation of Western individualism, even though that was not its original goal. The distinction between the spheres or swords of church and state, and the insistence on the autonomy of the Church, though not intended to free the state from the Church, was equally fundamental to the slowly evolving but ultimately decisive distinction between church and state, especially since one church had to deal with such a multiplicity of states. Catholic education helped to found the university system, the rise of Western rational thought and the medieval origins of modern science.
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The papacy provided the first example in the Western world of rational bureaucracy, stimulating the development of administration and the state. Church law, particularly canon law, demonstrated the ways in which different legal principles and approaches might be synthesized, and was fundamental to stimulating the medieval legal revolution, on which modern Western law is ultimately based.
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Catholicism also encouraged the doctrine of natural rights and of more responsible government, as the application of the later medieval doctrine of the "king's two bodies" promoted greater respect for law, morality, and the well-being of the realm, as distinct from the caesaropapist despotisms common to earlier history.
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All these influences were felt in Spain, although some aspects were more attenuated in the peninsula than in certain other parts of western Europe.

To use the language of Immanuel Wallerstein, Spain formed what should be termed "the semi-periphery of the core" of Latin Christendom.
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It was a part of that core but not at its center, and also not a periphery external to that core. A true periphery partly extraneous to the core would only develop during the overseas expansion, primarily in central and southern America, and also to some extent in Russia, where it formed a related yet distinct civilization, based on Eastern Orthodoxy rather Roman Catholicism.

Geography, the legacy of Reconquest particularism and also the extraneous political interests of the papacy, all combined to retard political unity equivalent to that of France or England. Italy and Germany, however, were just as divided as Spain, if not more so, while the institutions of Catholic Poland-Lithuania would later prove weak in the extreme, however progressive part of their content may have been.
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One feature of the last phase of the Middle Ages was the growth of ethnic (and to a certain extent of racial) discrimination in the West during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The two most striking innovations associated with the united monarchy of the Catholic Monarchs — the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews — constituted the extreme Spanish version of a broader trend. They represented attempts to remedy existing anomalies of Spanish life and achieve a political and religious unity approximately equal to that of France and England. These two core Western countries had never had a Jewish population at all proportionately equivalent to that of Spain, and both had ended up expelling all their Jews by the beginning of the fourteenth century. Thus what made the Spanish monarchy seem so "different" stemmed from the efforts of its leaders to be "the same."

Spain arrived at the center of European power, politics, culture, and religion in the sixteenth century, for the first time functioning as part of the west European core. While historians nowadays distinguish carefully between the activities and priorities of the Spanish Habsburg crown and those of Spain proper, the strengths and achievements of Spain would always remain the key basis of the crown's power. Not merely was the latter for a century the strongest state and military power in western Europe, but Spain was also a major player in the European economy and for the only time in its history a major influence in European culture, religion, and even in such things as clothing styles. Moreover, that influence was not exerted on behalf of some exotic "Mozarabic" set of cultural values but was fully within the traditional framework of European Catholicism and culture. This influence was not at first carried out merely in the name of rigid traditionalism, for it also featured an effort to create a more liberal Catholicism under Carlos V. After that had failed, Spain became the single most important force in the Catholic Reformation, the most crucial transformation of the Church for centuries. All these matters have been extensively studied by historians. The key point is that Spain's role in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was not that of a semi-oriental periphery, but was intrinsic to the core culture of Europe at that time.

At this juncture there began to emerge the greatest paradox, or singularity, of the history of Western civilization — the rise of a second cycle of a related but in some respects crucially different cultural era within Western civilization itself, what we generally call the modern era or the modern West, as distinct from medieval and traditional culture, sometimes termed the old West. Of all the civilizations in world history, the West is the only one to have generated two different cycles of culture, the second bearing novel characteristics sometimes profoundly at odds with the former. The old West was traditionalist, monarchist, and Catholic, not primarily dominated by material values. The modern West has become increasingly antitraditional, egalitarian, subjectivist, and materialist, and for centuries was largely led by Protestants, even though most of the germs of its culture might already have been found in the old West.

It is not possible to divide simply and neatly the two different epochs of Western culture, since the roots of the modern West lie deep in the old West, and the latter has continued in certain key ways to influence the former. The role of Spain with regard to the two cultural eras has been the most unique of all the major European lands, for in no other has the relationship to the two eras been so sharp and distinct, even though Spanish culture participated in both cultural epochs as well as in the transition between the two. What was special about Spain was that its Golden Age had by the middle of the seventeenth century achieved the highest development of most, though not all, major features of the traditional Western culture to be found in any land, but it found itself poorly positioned for the transition to the modern era. The only other country in which the culture of the "Old Regime" was more highly developed than that of Spain was the France of Louis XIV, but that in turn had relied on Spanish culture, and conversely also possessed more initial features of the new modern epoch.
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It would be a mistake, however, to see the Spanish culture and society of the Habsburg era as merely high-level traditionalism bereft of modernizing tendencies. The latter were in fact fairly numerous, though distinctly weaker than in the French society of the same period. In the late sixteenth century Spanish society generated a high level of urbanization and also of educational development, with the first glimmering of mass society and urban mass culture.
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There was an astonishing volume of cultural creativity in literature, the fine arts, religious thought, in philosophy, and in law.
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Nothing was more potentially transitional than Spanish Late Scholastic economic theory of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its market-oriented calculations on value, price, wages, justice, profits, and banking — in some respects more sophisticated than what was then found in the economically more dynamic north European (mainly Protestant) societies.
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In general, however, Spanish culture, despite its multifaceted creativity during this era, still fit within the traditionalist framework, something perhaps most easily demonstrated by comparing one of its major new forms, the theater of the Golden Age, with the other major theater of the period, in Elizabethan-Jacobean England. Both theaters developed significant new techniques and styles, and examined many different facets of human behavior. Spanish drama and theater, however, never stepped very far beyond the orthodox cultural framework, whereas that of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and their English successors much more broadly inhabited a new and uncertain, often agnostic, potentially amoralist landscape, definitely nearer the modern sensibility.
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Moreover, as a result of the Reformation and the conflicts that ensued, there took place in Spain a partial cultural withdrawal from Europe, symbolized by the crown's decree of 1569 forbidding study abroad in most European universities. Similarly, the Inquisition placed boundaries on new thought and inquiry, although it did not block the flourishing of high culture.