In early antiquity, the Iberian Peninsula was inhabited by Iberians, Celts, and other pre-Roman peoples. The Roman conquest of the Iberian Peninsula created the province of Hispania, which became deeply Romanised and later Christianised. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the peninsula was conquered by tribes from Central Europe, among them the Visigoths, who established the Visigothic Kingdom centred on Toledo.
In the early 8th century, most of the peninsula was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate, with Al-Andalus centred on Córdoba. The northern Christian kingdoms of Iberia launched the so-called Reconquista, gradually repelling and ultimately expelling Islamic rule from the peninsula, culminating with the fall of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada.
The dynastic union of the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragon in 1479 under the Catholic Monarchs is often seen as the de facto unification of Spain as a nation state.
During the Age of Discovery, Spain led the exploration and conquest of the New World, completed the first circumnavigation of the globe, and established one of the largest empires in history, which fostered a global trade system driven by precious metals. In the 18th century, the Nueva Planta decrees centralised Spain under the Bourbons, strengthening royal authority.
The 19th century witnessed the victorious Peninsular War (1808–1814) against Napoleonic forces and the loss of most American colonies amid liberal–absolutist conflicts. These struggles culminated in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975). With the restoration of democracy and entry into the EU, Spain experienced a major economic boom and social transformation.
Spain is a secular parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy, with King Felipe VI as head of state. A developed country, it has a high nominal GDP per capita globally and an advanced economy that ranks among the largest in the world and the fourth-largest in the EU. The official language at the national level is Spanish, the world's second-most spoken native language, although other regional languages have co-official status in their respective autonomous communities.
Etymology
The name of Spain (España) comes from Hispania, the name used by the Ancient Romans for the Iberian Peninsula during the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. The etymology of the term Hispania remains uncertain.
The Phoenicians referred to the region as i-shphan-im, possibly meaning 'land of rabbits or hyraxes', 'land of metals', or 'northern island'. Roman coins struck in the region from the reign of Hadrian show a female figure with a rabbit at her feet, and Strabo called it the 'land of the rabbits'.
History
Prehistory and Iberian peoples
Archaeological research at Atapuerca indicates the Iberian Peninsula was populated by hominids 1.3 million years ago. The Iberian Peninsula was one of the last regions of Europe where Neanderthals persisted during the expansion of modern humans, with Neanderthal populations surviving in parts of Iberia until around 40,000 years ago.
Modern humans had reached northern Iberia by around 42,000 years ago, as indicated by the appearance of the Aurignacian in the region. The best-known artefacts of these prehistoric human settlements are the paintings in the Altamira cave of Cantabria in northern Iberia, which were created from 35,600 to 13,500 BC by Cro-Magnon.
Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that the Iberian Peninsula acted as one of several major refugia from which northern Europe was repopulated following the end of the last ice age. Around 2500–2000 BC, the immigration of Bell Beaker-associated populations led to a major genetic replacement of earlier Neolithic populations in the Iberian Peninsula.
Before the Roman conquest the major cultures along the Mediterranean coast were the Iberians, the Celts in the interior and north-west, the Lusitanians in the west, and the Tartessians in the southwest. The seafaring Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Greeks successively established trading settlements along the eastern and southern coast.
The development of writing in the peninsula took place after the arrival of early Phoenician settlers and traders, tentatively dated 9th century BC or later.
The south of the peninsula was rich in archaic Phoenician colonies, unmatched by any other region in the central-western Mediterranean. They were small and densely packed settlements. The colony of Gadir—which sustained strong links with its metropolis of Tyre—stood out from the rest of the network of colonies, also featuring a more complex sociopolitical organization.
Archaic Greeks arrived on the Peninsula by the late 7th century BC. They founded Greek colonies such as Emporion (570 BC).
After the defeat of Carthage in the First Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca led an expedition to Iberia, where he hoped to gain a new empire for Carthage to compensate for territorial losses. In eight years, by force of arms and diplomacy, Hamilcar secured an extensive territory, covering around half of the Iberian Peninsula.
Hamilcar's premature death in battle (228 BC) prevented him from completing the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula.
Roman Hispania and the Visigothic Kingdom
During the Second Punic War, roughly between 210 and 205 BC, the expanding Roman Republic captured Carthaginian trading colonies along the Mediterranean coast. It took the Romans nearly two centuries to complete the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. They retained control of it for over six centuries. Roman rule was bound together by law, language, and the Roman road.
The cultures of the pre-Roman populations were gradually Romanised (Latinised) at different rates depending on what part of the peninsula they lived in, with local leaders being admitted into the Roman aristocratic class.
Hispania, the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula, served as a granary for the Roman market, and its harbours exported gold, wool, olive oil, and wine. Agricultural production increased with the introduction of irrigation projects, some of which remain in use. Emperors Hadrian, Trajan, Theodosius I, and the philosopher Seneca were born in Hispania.
Christianity was introduced into Hispania in the 1st century AD, and it became popular in the cities in the 2nd century. Most of Spain's present languages and religions, as well as the basis of its laws, originate from this period. Starting in 170 AD, incursions of North-African Mauri in the province of Baetica took place.
The Germanic Suebi and Vandals, together with the Sarmatian Alans, entered the peninsula after 409, weakening the Western Roman Empire's jurisdiction over Hispania. The Suebi established a kingdom in north-western Iberia. The Vandals established themselves in the south of the peninsula by 420, before crossing over to North Africa in 429.
As the western Roman Empire disintegrated, the social and economic base became greatly simplified. The successor regimes maintained many of the institutions and laws of the late empire, including Christianity and assimilation into the evolving Roman culture. The Byzantines established an occidental province, Spania, in the south, with the intention of reviving Roman rule throughout Iberia. Eventually Hispania was reunited under Visigothic rule.
Muslim era and Reconquista
From 711 to 718, as part of the expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate which had conquered North Africa from the Byzantine Empire, nearly all of the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by Muslims from across the Strait of Gibraltar, resulting in the collapse of the Visigothic Kingdom. Only a small area in the mountainous north of the peninsula stood out of the territory seized during the initial invasion.
The Kingdom of Asturias-León consolidated upon this territory. Other Christian kingdoms, such as Navarre and Aragon in the mountainous north, eventually surged upon the consolidation of counties of the Carolingian Marca Hispanica. For several centuries, the fluctuating frontier between the Muslim and Christian-controlled areas of the peninsula was along the Ebro and Douro valleys.
Conversion to Islam proceeded at an increasing pace. The muladíes (Muslims of ethnic Iberian origin) are believed to have formed the majority of the population of Al-Andalus by the end of the 10th century. A series of Viking incursions raided the coasts of the Iberian Peninsula in the 9th and 10th centuries. In the 11th century, the Caliphate of Córdoba collapsed, fracturing into a series of petty kingdoms (Taifas), often subject to the payment of a form of protection money (Parias) to the Northern Christian kingdoms, which otherwise undertook a southward territorial expansion.
The capture of Toledo in 1085 marked a significant shift in the balance of power in favour of the Christian kingdoms. The arrival from North Africa of the Islamic ruling sects of the Almoravids and the Almohads achieved temporary unity upon the Muslim-ruled territory, with a stricter, less tolerant application of Islam, and partially reversed some Christian territorial gains.
The Kingdom of León was the strongest Christian kingdom for centuries. In 1188, a form of modern parliamentary session was held in León (Cortes of León), restricted to the bishops, the magnates, and 'the elected citizens of each city'. The Kingdom of Castile, formed from Leonese territory, was its successor as the strongest kingdom.
The kings and the nobility fought for power and influence in this period. The example of the Roman emperors influenced the political objective of the Crown, while the nobles benefited from feudalism.
Muslim strongholds in the Guadalquivir Valley such as Córdoba (1236) and Seville (1248) fell to Castile in the 13th century. The County of Barcelona and the Kingdom of Aragon entered into a dynastic union and gained territory and power in the Mediterranean. In 1229, Mallorca was conquered, as was Valencia in 1238. In the 13th and 14th centuries, the North-African Marinids established some enclaves around the Strait of Gibraltar.
Upon the conclusion of the Granada War, the Nasrid Sultanate of Granada (the remaining Muslim-ruled polity in the Iberian Peninsula after 1246) capitulated in 1492 to the military strength of the Catholic Monarchs, and it was integrated from then on in the Crown of Castile.
Spanish Empire
In 1469, the crowns of the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were united by the marriage of their monarchs, Isabella I and Ferdinand II, respectively. In 1492, as part of the Spanish Inquisition, Jews were forced to choose between conversion to Catholicism or expulsion; as many as 200,000 Jews were expelled from Castile and Aragon.
The year 1492 also marked the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World, during a voyage funded by Isabella. Columbus's first voyage crossed the Atlantic and reached the Caribbean Islands, beginning the European exploration and conquest of the Americas.
The Treaty of Granada guaranteed religious tolerance towards Muslims, for a few years before Islam was outlawed in 1502 in Castile and 1527 in Aragon, leading the remaining Muslim population to become nominally Christian Moriscos. About four decades after the War of the Alpujarras (1568–1571), over 300,000 moriscos were expelled, settling primarily in North Africa.
The unification of the crowns of Aragon and Castile by the marriage of their sovereigns laid the basis for modern Spain and the Spanish Empire, although each kingdom of Spain remained a separate country socially, politically, legally, and in currency and language.
Habsburg Spain was one of the leading world powers throughout the 16th century and most of the 17th century, a position reinforced by trade and wealth from colonial possessions and became the world's leading maritime power. It reached its apogee during the reigns of the first two Spanish Habsburgs—Charles V/I (1516–1556) and Philip II (1556–1598).
This period saw the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires, the Italian Wars, the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, the War of the Portuguese Succession, clashes with the Ottomans, intervention in the French Wars of Religion, and the Anglo-Spanish War.
Through exploration and conquest or royal marriage alliances and inheritance, the Spanish Empire expanded across vast areas in the Americas, the Indo-Pacific, Africa as well as the European continent, including holdings in the Italian Peninsula, the Low Countries and the Franche-Comté. The so-called Age of Discovery featured explorations by sea and by land, the opening-up of new trade routes across oceans, conquests and the beginnings of European colonialism.
Precious metals, spices, luxuries, and previously unknown plants brought to the metropole played a leading part in transforming the European understanding of the globe.
The cultural efflorescence witnessed during this period is now referred to as the Spanish Golden Age. The expansion of the empire caused immense upheaval in the Americas as the collapse of societies and empires and new diseases from Europe devastated American indigenous populations. The rise of humanism, the Counter-Reformation and new geographical discoveries and conquests raised issues that were addressed by the intellectual movement now known as the School of Salamanca, which developed the first modern theories of what are now known as international law and human rights.
Spain's 16th-century maritime supremacy was demonstrated by the victory over the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and over Portugal at the Battle of Ponta Delgada in 1582, and then after the setback of the Spanish Armada in 1588, in a series of victories against England in the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1604.
In the middle decades of the 17th century, Spain's maritime power went into a long decline with mounting defeats against the Dutch Republic (Battle of the Downs) and then England in the Anglo-Spanish War of 1654–1660. By the 1660s, Spain was struggling to defend its overseas possessions from pirates and privateers.
The Protestant Reformation increased Spain's involvement in religiously charged wars, forcing ever-expanding military efforts across Europe and in the Mediterranean. By the middle decades of a war- and plague-ridden 17th-century Europe, the Spanish Habsburgs had enmeshed Spain in continent-wide religious-political conflicts.
These conflicts drained Spain of resources and undermined the economy generally. Spain managed to hold on to most of the scattered Habsburg empire, and help the imperial forces of the Holy Roman Empire reverse a large part of the advances made by Protestant forces.
Spain was finally forced to recognise the separation of Portugal and the United Provinces (Dutch Republic), and eventually suffered some serious military reverses to France in the latter stages of the immensely destructive, Europe-wide Thirty Years' War. In the latter half of the 17th century, Spain went into a gradual decline, during which it surrendered several small territories to France and England; however, it maintained and enlarged its vast overseas empire, which remained intact until the beginning of the 19th century.
18th century
The decline culminated in a controversy over succession to the throne, which consumed the first years of the 18th century. The War of the Spanish Succession was a wide-ranging international conflict combined with a civil war, and cost the kingdom its European possessions and its position as a leading European power.
During this war, a new dynasty originating in France, the Bourbons, was installed. The Crowns of Castile and Aragon had been long united only by the Monarchy and the common institution of the Inquisition's Holy Office. A number of reform policies, the so-called Bourbon Reforms, were pursued by the Monarchy with the overarching goal of centralised authority and administrative uniformity.
They included the abolishment of many of the old regional privileges and laws, as well as the customs barrier between the Crowns of Aragon and Castile in 1717, followed by the introduction of new property taxes in the Aragonese kingdoms.
The 18th century saw a gradual recovery and an increase in prosperity through much of the Spanish empire. The predominant economic policy was interventionist, with the State driving infrastructure development, abolishing internal customs, and reducing export tariffs. Projects of agricultural colonisation with new settlements took place in the south of mainland Spain. Enlightenment ideas began to gain ground among some of the kingdom's elite and monarchy.
