Spain: A Unique History (50 page)

25. A. Torrecillas Velasco,
Dos civilizaciones en conflicto: España en el África musulmana: Historia de una guerra de 400 años (1497-1927)
(Valladolid, 2006), 345-90, and, more broadly, M. Arribas Palau,
Las relaciones hispano magrebíes en el siglo XVIII
(Madrid, 2007).

26. S. Fanjul,
Al-Andalus contra España: La forja del mito
(Madrid, 2000), 86. See also his
La quimera de al-Andalus
(Madrid, 2004).

27. For these and further examples, see chaps. five through eight of S. Payne,
Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany and World War II
(New Haven, Conn., 2008).

1. Significant Muslim populations did develop in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania, and in parts of Bulgaria.

2. In the east Mediterranean during that era, the Byzantines had succeeded in reconquering Anatolia (which had never been fully occupied and had not in that period been Islamized), holding it for two centuries before losing it to a new Muslim onslaught.

3. J. O'Callaghan,
Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain
(Philadelphia, 2003), 7.

4. J. L. Villacañas Berlanga,
La formación de los reinos hispánicos
(Madrid, 2006), 29.

5. The relationship between conversion and crusading is treated in B. Z. Kedar,
Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims
(Princeton, N.J., 1984).

6. Whereas in earlier generations the Arabs had usually tolerated Christian pilgrims, the Seljuk Turks, the most recent conquerors of the region, greeted Christian visitors with violence. Hence the immediate motivation for the Crusade.

7. The best new history of the Crusades is C. Tyerman,
God's War: A New History of the Crusades
(Cambridge, Mass., 2007).

8. The Aragonese conquest of Barbastro, with the help of French forces, in 1063 is sometimes considered the immediate precursor of the formal crusade, which is something of an exaggeration, but it did serve as an example to the papacy in developing the concept. Similarly, the occupation of Toledo in 1085, the first direct occupation of a full taifa state (and precipitated especially by internal developments in Toledo), was considered a "holy war" but certainly not a crusade, being in fact a kind of transaction between its inhabitants and the crown of Castile.

9. Given the relative weakness of Spanish historiography in analytic synthesis, for a very long time there was no single survey of the Reconquest in one volume, the first book so titled being D. Lomax,
The Reconquest of Spain
(London, 1978), still a very useful summary and guide. J. Valdeón Baruque,
La Reconquista: El concepto de España: Unidad y diversidad
(Madrid, 2006), also presents a summary, but the best brief discussions are the works by Lomax and O'Callaghan. There is considerable literature on the idea of the crusade in Western Christendom. The most recent, and probably the best, study of its background and process of conceptualization is J. Flori,
La guerra santa: La formación de la idea de cruzada en el Occidente cristiano
(Madrid, 2003). J. T. Johnson,
The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions
(University Park, Pa., 2001), seeks to compare crusade and jihad. The specific meaning and use of the institution of the crusade in Spain was first brought to the attention of historians in J. Goñi Gaztambide,
Historia de la bula de la cruzada en España
(Vitoria, 1958).

10. The best guide is A. D. Smith,
Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity
(Oxford, 2003). Smith virtually ignores Spain, though it might have provided one of his better cases.

11. B. Anzulovic,
Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide
(New York, 1999).

12. There is an extensive literature on this. See N. Berdyaev,
The Russian Idea
(New York, 1948; repr., Westport, Conn., 1979); P. J. S. Duncan,
Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After
(London, 2000); and T. McDaniel,
The Agony of the Russian Idea
(Princeton, N.J., 1996).

13. Quoted in A. A. Sicroff,
Les controverses des statuts de "pureté de sang" en Espagne du XVe auXVle siècles
(Paris, 1960), 291-94.

1. For example, M. S. Anderson,
Britain's Discovery of Russia 1553-1885
(London, 1958), and, more broadly, L. Wolff,
Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment
(Palo Alto, 1994).

2. Early Western civilization had no name of its own for itself. "Europe" existed as a strictly geographical term, and the Crónica Mozárabe of 754 referred to the Frankish forces that turned back the Muslims as "europeenses," but this was not broadly used at that time. The world of Latin Christendom did, of course, develop a cultural self-consciousness, and by the eleventh century employed the concept of "Christianitas," or Christendom. Europe as a general term for the political and cultural world of the West became increasingly common in the sixteenth century, and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment stressed the idea of European civilization. The contemporary usage of the West and Western civilization developed during the nineteenth century. See K. Wilson and J. van der Dussen, eds.,
The History of the Idea of Europe
(London, 1993); A. Pagden, ed.,
The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union
(Washington, D. C., 2002); and B. Geremek,
The Common Roots of Europe
(Cambridge, Mass., 1996).

3. J. Marías,
España inteligible: Razón histórica de las Españas
(Madrid, 1985). J. Pérez (
La Leyenda Negra
) and others have made much the same point.

4. The Anglo-Norman monarchy justified the partial conquest of Ireland as "extending Christendom."

5. For broad accounts, see J. R. S. Phillips,
The Medieval Expansion of Europe
(Oxford, 1988), and R. Bartlett,
The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change, 950-1350
(Princeton, N.J., 1993).

6. There is an abundant literature on this topic. See R. C. Dales,
The Scientific Achievement of the Middle Ages
(Philadelphia, 1973); L. White, Jr.,
Medieval Religion and Technology
(Berkeley, 1978); and D. C. Lindberg,
The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450
(Chicago, 1992).

7. H. J. Berman,
The Interaction of Law and Religion
(Nashville, 1974);
Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition
(Cambridge, Mass., 1983);
Faith and Order: The Reconciliation of Law and Religion
(Atlanta, 1993).

8. B. Tierney,
The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150-1625
(Grand Rapids, 1997).

9. For a brief application of this concept to modern southern Europe, see I. Wallerstein, "The Relevance of the Concept of Semiperiphery to Southern Europe," in G. Arrighi, ed.,
Semiperipheral Development: The Politics of Southern Europe in the Twentieth Century
(London, 1985), 31-39.

10. The leading historian of Poland in a Western language is Norman Davies. See his
God's Playground: A History of Poland
, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1981), and
Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland
(New York, 1986).

11. As Oswald Spengler put it, "The Western Culture of maturity was through-and-through a French outgrowth of the Spanish."
The Decline of the West
(New York, 1980), 1:150.

12. Change, new conflict, and the threat of the "subversive" in this largely traditionalist society are emphasized, perhaps excessively, in J. A. Maravall,
The Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure
(Minneapolis, 1986).

13. J. B. Scott,
The Spanish Origin of lnternational Law
(Washington, D.C., 1928).

14. The best analysis and summary will be found in A. A. Chafuen,
Christians for Freedom: Late Scholastic Economics
(San Francisco, 1986). See also M. Grice-Hutchinson,
The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory, 1544-1605
(Oxford, 1962).

15. L. J. Hutton,
The Christian Essence of Spanish Literature: An Historical Study
(Lewiston, N.Y., 1988), stresses the essential orthodoxy of classic Spanish literature. This is fundamentally correct, though there were an infinite variety of nuances; cf. R. Ornstein,
The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy
(Madison, Wis., 1965).

16. There is, of course, an extensive literature on English exceptionalism, such as the works of A. Macfarlane,
The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition
(Oxford, 1978) and
The Culture of Capitalism
(Oxford, 1987). On some of the origins, see F. Borkenau,
End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origins of the West
(New York, 1981).

1. The Real Academia de la Historia published
España: Reflexiones sobre el ser de España
(Madrid, 1997) and
España como nación
(Madrid, 2000), as well as V. Palacio Atard, ed.,
De Hispania a España: El nombre y el concepto a través de los siglos
(Madrid, 2005). One of the most cogent accounts was L. González Antón,
España y las Españas: Nacionalismos y falsificación en la historia
, rev. ed. (Madrid, 2007). Other notable titles in this debate are M. Hernández Sánchez-Barba,
España: Historia de una nación
(Madrid, 1995); J. M. Otero Novas,
Defensa de la Nación Española
(Madrid, 1998); G. Bueno,
España no es un mito: Claves para una defensa razonada
(Madrid, 2005); and J. P. Fusi's eminently sensible
España: La evolución de la identidad nacional
(Madrid, 2000). A somewhat different perspective may be found in J. Tusell,
España, una angustia nacional
(Madrid, 1999).

2. G. Bueno,
España frente a Europa
(Barcelona, 1999).

3. In some of the first documents it was also rendered as "espagnon," arguably a more typically Aragonese or Pyrenean form. J. A. Maravall, "Sobre el origen de 'español,'"
Estudios de historia del pensamiento español
(Madrid, 1999),1:7-23.

4. Alfonso el Batallador, king of Aragon in the early twelfth century, frequently used the title
Rex et Imperator Hispaniae
, but only in connection with his claim to be king of León.

5. In medieval usage, "prince" was a common title for a ruler, sometimes equivalent to king, sometimes used in principalities that did not claim the full status of "kingdom."

6. A. Sánchez Candeiras,
El regnum-imperium leonés hasta 1137
(Madrid, 1951).

7. A classic discussion is R. Menéndez Pidal,
El Imperio hispánico y los Cinco Reinos
(Madrid, 1950), though many historians would not entirely agree with this formulation today. A. García Gallo,
Curso de historia del Derecho español
(Madrid, 1950), insists that all this has been greatly exaggerated, and that there never really was a medieval Spanish empire. This last point is certainly correct, but there nevertheless existed a medieval discourse of empire and emperor in Asturias-León-Castile. For a recent interpretation of medieval empire in the peninsula, see G. Bueno,
España frente a Europa
(Barcelona, 1999).

8. For a reading by the Hispanists, see R. Collins,
Early Medieval Spain: Unity in Diversity, 400-1000
(New York, 1983), and B. F. Reilly,
The Medieval Spains
(Cambridge, 1993).

9. They also, of course, asserted sovereignty over Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

10. Alfonso's attitudes and policies regarding the other religions have recently been examined in H. Salvador Martínez,
La convivencia en la España del siglo XIII: Perspectivas alfonsíes
(Madrid, 2006).

11. For a highly favorable reading, see F. Márquez Villanueva,
El concepto cultural alfonsí
(Barcelona, 2004).

12. Cf. R. Brague,
Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization
(South Bend, Ind., 2004).

13. In my judgment, the best study of the cultural, intellectual, and political ambitions of Alfonso el Sabio will be found in J. L. Villacañas Berlanga,
La formación de los reinos hispánicos
(Madrid, 2006), 591-702. For a full biography, more favorable to the king, see H. Salvador Martínez,
Alfonso X, el Sabio: Una biografía
(Madrid, 2003).

14. See P. J. Geary,
The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe
(Princeton, N.J., 2001); C. Beaune,
The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France
(Berkeley, 1991); and the studies reviewed in D. Bell, "Recent Works on Early Modern French National Identity,"
Journal of Modern History
68.1 (March 1996): 84-113.

15. L. Colley,
Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 
(New Haven, Conn., 1992); F. Welsh,
The Four Nations: A History of the United Kingdom
(New Haven, Conn., 2,003); R. Coils,
Identity of England
(Oxford, 2002).

16. Maravall,
El concepto de España
, 488.

17. So far as I am aware, the last major occasion on which the Portuguese crown contested the terminology of "crown of Spain" or "monarchy of Spain" for the rulers in Madrid was at the time of the Peace of Utrecht in 1714.

18. H. Kamen,
Philip of Spain
(London, 1997), 227.

19. See C. Jago, "Habsburg Absolutism and the Cortes of Castile,"
American Historical Review
, 86.2 (April, 1981): 307-26; R. Mackay,
The Limits of Royal Authority: Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth-Century Castil
e (Cambridge, 1999); J. B. Owens,
"By My Absolute Royal Authority": Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age
(Rochester, N.Y., 2006); and, more broadly, N. Henshall,
The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy
(London, 1992).

20. For the broader European usage, much the same as in Spain, see R. von Friedeburg,
'Patria' und 'Patrioten' vor dem Patriotismus: Pflichten, Rechte, Glauben and die Rekonfigurierung europaischer Gemeinwesen im 17. Jahrhundert.
(Wolfenbüttel, 2004).