Spain: A Unique History (15 page)

Although the Spanish Habsburg empire in Europe was largely formed through a marriage alliance and dynastic inheritance, the sense of mission to defend and expand Christendom was also strongly felt, and it formed the basis of some of the most extensive and costly of the military enterprises of the sixteenth century. During that era the Castilian Cortes showed little enthusiasm for the crown's European wars, urging it to "make peace with Christian kings," but more readily accepted the struggle against the Muslims in the Mediterranean. Despite all the other obligations of the Spanish crown, it did more to combat Turkish expansion, at least down to the time of Lepanto, than did any other European power. In recent years, historians of the reign of Felipe II have tended to downplay the role of religious motivation previously imputed to Spanish policy, emphasizing more the priority of defending dynastic rights and honor and of reasons of state, "razón de Estado." This is a useful corrective, but the concept of the Spanish crown as the "Monarquía católica" par excellence had considerable importance as well. In the seventeenth century, as the burden of empire, dynastic rights, endless wars, and internal social and economic decline began to wear down Spain, some religious spokesmen referred to this as a cross that it must continue to bear as leader of the Counter-Reformation and the chief defender of the Catholic faith. Since the late fifteenth century, certain religious, political, and cultural figures had developed the concept of the Spanish as God's modern "chosen people," successor to the ancient Hebrews. In 1629 a Navarrese friar published the
Libro de las cinco excelencias del español
, which defined the Spanish vocation in terms of a sort of martyrdom (in some ways similar to the later national doctrines of Poles and Serbs). He declared that the role of the Spanish surpassed that of the Hebrews not simply because they were the new modern incarnation of the chosen people, but because they had been given a truly universal role to unify all mankind and to convert distant continents, hastening the Second Coming of Christ. If the cost of such a universal mission meant great suffering and depopulation for Spain, the wealth and population of other countries should not be envied; rather, "let them envy our depopulation, which we suffer in imitation of the work of the Apostles and the disciples of Christ."
¹³
Spain's mission was to be the living
imitatio Christi
. The majority of Spanish people at that time would probably not have agreed with him, but it would seem that some, at least, did.

The suffering and relative immiseration of the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century had a chastening effect on such attitudes, which subsequently became much more rare. By the eighteenth century the Spanish ideology was in decline, but far from dead. All of Spain's wars during the eighteenth century were preached from church pulpits as veritable crusades against the enemies of God. During the era of the French Revolution, Catholic spokesmen identified Spanish Catholics with the sufferings of the faithful in France, and compared their situation to that of the ancient Jews during the age of the prophets. The explosion of popular resistance to the Napoleonic invasion expressed popular patriotism and xenophobia, in which the clergy played a major role in articulating Spain's traditional religious values and vocation.

By that time, however, the Spanish elite were turning more and more to political liberalism, which soon constructed its own Grand Narrative — one that defined Spanish history as the history of liberty, in consonance with what was becoming known as the Western tradition. This stressed the history of rights, of the rule of law, and of popular representation, at most incorporating only selected aspects of the traditional ideology. Two different versions then existed side by side, with the emergence of the "Two Spains," though conservative liberalism made a considerable effort to join together major features of the two ideas. The traditional doctrine was revived and sustained by the Carlists, and then by the Catholic revival of the second half of the nineteenth century, incomplete though that event was. These two visions continued to clash, the liberal idea moving toward radicalism and revolutionism, until the Civil War of 1936-39 seemed to decide the issue, as during the Reconquest, by force of arms. Franco's victory led to the neotraditionalist revival of the 1940s and 1950s, whose equivalent was not to be witnessed anywhere else in the Christian world, so-called national Catholicism constituting the final major phase of traditionalist Spanish Catholicism.

What was unique about Spain was not the existence of national ideology, but that it continued to exist in related form for well over a millennium, even though the emphasis changed fairly significantly over time. The traditional Spanish idea was not a constant factor, waxing and waning frequently over the centuries, but constituted probably the longest semicontinuous concept of religious identity and mission, of war and empire, to be found anywhere in Europe. The equivalent in France was both more attenuated and more discontinuous, and its traditional form largely ended with the French Revolution.

Whereas "identity" has become a matter of controversy for Spaniards only comparatively recently, the identity, character, or image of Spain has been a polemical issue outside of Spain for nearly half a millennium. The Black Legend found its earliest expression in Italy at the close of the fifteenth century and would later be cultivated with especial fervor by the Dutch and the English. Italian detractors liked to denounce the Spanish as a bastard blend of Moors and Jews, not proper Christians or even Europeans; conversely, the principal northern libelers of the Spanish postulated a hyper-Catholic identity of unique sadism and malevolence, a few echoes of which persist today.

Stereotypes concerning the Spanish shifted emphasis and content several times between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. When the notion of "romantic Spain" developed, it also portrayed the Spanish as extremely different, but now as a uniquely pre-modern people motivated by honor, personal courage, and an archaic style of life, as distinct from materialism and achievement, a semi-"oriental" people strongly configured by North Africa and the Middle East. Residues of this idea linger down to the present.

The only other major European people who have become the object of equivalent attitudes are the Russians, for whom identity became a very major issue again in the 1990s, just as it had become for Spaniards.
¹
In Russia, however, nationalism has won out, whereas a unique aspect of modern Spanish culture is the extent to which the Black Legend has been internalized by the Spanish themselves. Since 1985 Europe has become a kind of panacea, almost what the anthropologists would call a "cargo cult" for Spaniards, and there is no denying that membership in the European Union has been economically beneficial for Spain, at least until the recession of 2008.

An underlying feature of such attitudes has had to do with what is often considered to be the non-Western or extra-European identity of the country and its culture. To what extent can this be justified by empirical analysis, as distinct from subjective political, cultural, or ideological projections?

Hispania was clearly a normal and integral part of the Roman empire — the "West" (or, more precisely, partial pre-West) of its time. The main parts of Roman Hispania, Bética (the south), and the Tarraconensis (the northeast) were among the most Romanized and Latinized parts of the empire, producing several emperors (while none came from Gaul). Indeed, Hispania played an important role in sustaining the "Latinity" of the empire, or, more precisely, of its western half, against the Greek and east Mediterranean identity of the eastern half. The Visigothic kingdom eventually took shape as the heir of Rome, at least according to its self-conception. The religious and cultural identity that it developed as a "Catholic kingdom" was by the seventh century proclaimed as the quintessence of Western Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Visigothic Spania maintained a cultural life second only to that of Italy and played a leading role in ecclesiastical development, despite the marked decline of the Roman world from the fifth century on.

That decline was not exactly "the first decline of the West," as Julián Marías puts it, since Rome was only the predecessor of Western civilization, but its decline marked a kind of cultural and civilizational catastrophe that could be only very partially averted in Visigothic Spania. Out of the ashes of the empire (whose end was never fully accepted for another half millennium) there arose "Europe," as the term eventually came to be used, in the form of the Germanic kingdoms, which began to shift the weight of affairs more and more decisively toward the north.
²

This became fundamental for the history of the former Hispania, whose greater world for a millennium and more had consisted of the Mediterranean, an orientation toward the east (and to a minor degree toward the south) that from the late fifth century on would be replaced by an orientation increasingly toward the north. Visigothic dominion had originally been established north of the Pyrenees, and even as Leovigildo centered the new kingdom in the peninsula, Septimania in southwestern France remained part of it. Both politico-military competition and general relations with the Frankish kingdom were closer than relations with Italy and Rome.

Visigothic Spania in fact seemed by the seventh century to represent the first successful new merging of the Germanic and the Roman, which was to be the basis of "Europe" and the subsequent "West." By comparison, Italy remained too Roman and France too Germanic. Italy had perhaps a higher level of culture but was less unified politically. The Frankish kingdom achieved a higher level of political unity but was in some respects less advanced culturally and ecclesiastically. For a moment, Visigothic Spania was the first, most successful "European" or "Western" country of that era.

Despite the success of the Islamic conquest in most of the peninsula, the invasion was firmly rejected by the Christian resistance societies in the north, to the extent that J. Marías and others have seen the Spanish as not the most marginally Western of the West European peoples, but rather as the most determined of the Western societies in being Western, Christian, and European. Unlike its counterparts in France and England, early Spanish society had to make a special choice to be Christian, independent and Western, fighting for centuries to sustain and validate that choice. According to this point of view, Spain developed not as a typical "intra-European" core society and culture but as a kind of "trans-European" society and culture, rooted in Latin Catholicism and the basic Western institutions, as they developed, but living on the semiperiphery in contact with Islam, North Africa, and — later — America, developing its own national variant of the Western culture. Holland is quite different from Hungary, and every European or Western country is European or Western in its own way.
³

The dramatic transformation that took place in the Iberian Peninsula during the eighth century seems at first glance a uniquely Spanish development, but in fact it may also be seen as the special and extreme peninsular expression of broader transformations taking place in the west European and greater Mediterranean worlds of that time. There is no absolute agreement among historians regarding exactly when Late Antiquity ended and early Western civilization began, but a certain consensus that the key early formative period was the eighth and ninth centuries. Edward Gibbon contended that what he called "modern history" began with the formation of the Carolingian empire. The eighth century also saw the renascence of the Byzantine empire following the grand Arab onslaught, while farther east the Abbasid dynasty established its capital in Baghdad, inaugurating what would become the Islamic golden age. Charlemagne, who would later be considered "Europae pater," saw himself as continuing and reviving the Roman world, but a series of decisive new changes occurred in the Western world during the eighth and ninth centuries. From the eighth century significant amounts of new land were being brought under cultivation, and by 900 an agricultural transformation was under way that eventually would make the northern lands of western Europe more productive than the Mediterranean for the first time. The cultural revival of the Carolingian era, building on assistance from Ireland, England, Italy, and also the Visigoths would create the very first phase of the new Western culture. The first Western empire was established by Charlemagne, creating a new sense of the unity of Latin Christendom, while by the end of the ninth century Alfred the Great had built the institutions of Anglo-Saxon monarchy with strong government, the beginning of a major system of royal law, efficient new administration, and the use of vernacular language. During the same period, the primacy of Rome was reestablished in the West, with the full "Latinization" of the papacy (excluding Greek candidates). The founding of the kingdom of Asturias thus took place during a time of important change and innovation in western Europe and the broader Mediterranean, so that the first historically continuous Spanish institutions roughly coincided with the first phase of the new Western civilization itself.

The eighth century established the permanent southwestern frontier of Western civilization in the Iberian Peninsula, for the limits of Islam would mark the boundary of the West, even though Muslim assaults and depredation would continue in one form or another for an entire millennium. They would cease only when the European powers became strong enough not merely to crush the depredation but also increasingly to dominate the Islamic world. As soon as that domination receded, depredation was resumed in the form of Islamist terrorism. Spain would remain the direct cynosure of the "polemical dialogue" between Europe and the Islamic world for a thousand years, a hinge on which Europe depended.

The nascent kingdom of Asturias soon looked beyond the Pyrenees to the Frankish monarchy for support and was not disappointed, Charlemagne intervening in the peninsula in the latter part of the century, ending the Muslim threat to Septimania and securing Christian society in the eastern Pyrenees and as far south as Barcelona. The "Marca Hispánica" then developed as the most European part of the peninsula, the part most closely connected to French and Italian culture, but this was a matter of degree as much as of kind, for in early Catalonia the conscious sense of continuity was as strong as in Asturias and sometimes emphatically expressed, the early Catalan elite often calling themselves
gothi
.