Medieval Spain

 When it comes to medieval studies, the big three are Britain (mostly England), France, and Germany.  Medieval France and England were both countries with a single king, located within borders that bear a resemblance to where they are today, and with medieval languages that are the origins of modern French and English (English by the fourteenth century anyway).  Germany is more complicated, and in practice the territory we now think of as German had more centers of governance and more language variation, but it still works as a topic of study.

As I've noted before, medieval Italy doesn't get a whole lot of attention between the collapse of the Roman Empire of antiquity and the Renaissance, and it's sort of off in its own world anyway (though of course there was plenty of interaction between Italy and the rest of medieval Europe, after all, the pope was there).  And as I'll discuss today, the same (relative) neglect affects medieval Spain.  Spanish medievalists study a history usually untouched by those who focus on the Big Three.

For one thing, to study medieval Spain it really really helps to know Arabic.  Muslims from north Africa overran the Spanish peninsula in the seventh-eighth centuries, and indeed some crossed the Pyrenees into France, to be defeated by Charles Martel, Charlemagne's grandfather.  Although Christians started pushing back in the ninth century, the so-called Reconquista, it was a slow process.

Little kingdoms and principalities were established in the northern part of the Iberian peninsula.  One of the most important was the county of Barcelona, where the counts acted as kings.  The kingdom of Aragon was adjacent, and the kingdom of Castile included much of the north coast.  Portugal was over to the west.  Andorra is left over from those days.  From these kingdoms and principalities, Christians slowly worked their way south, dividing the peninsula into long strips.  Portugal is the only one of these strips left intact, as the others are all part of the modern Spanish kingdom (though Catalonia, with its capital of Barcelona, still remembers its independent medieval past).

For a long time Christians, Muslims, and the large local Jewish population more or less got along.  They didn't like or trust each other, and there would be periodic local wars, but they had to work out ways to live next to each other.  Some, like the legendary warrior El Cid, would fight on whichever side paid the best.  A lot of Arabic words (like "algebra") and Middle Eastern foods entered Europe via Spain.  A lot of Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle, that had been translated into Arabic long since, was translated into Latin in Toledo and eagerly sought by Europe's growing universities.

At the end of the Middle Ages, the two largest Spanish kingdoms, Castile and Aragon, were combined when their kings married, respectively Isabelle and Ferdinand.  They completed the long Reconquista, driving the last Muslims out in early 1492, as well as expelling the Jews.  They referred to themselves as the Catholic Kings, announcing they were more Christian than the pope.

Having a sudden shortage of projects in 1492, they decided they might as well sponsor the harebrained scheme of the Italian Cristoforo Colombo, to reach the East by sailing west.  The rest as they say is history.

Incidentally, medieval Spain still has a higher proportion of its medieval documents surviving than does most of the rest of Europe, in spite of the Spanish Civil War and Franco.  The churches never had the large-scale documentary losses that marked England's dissolution of the monasteries or France's Revolution.  But studying them is definitely helped by knowing Arabic as well as Latin and Spanish.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on  medieval religion and politics, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.