Spain: From Reconquista to Empire

When Carlos V received the imperial crown in 1519, Spain was approaching the highpoint of it’s earthly power after centuries of occupation, oppression and warfare.

            The good people of Spain had suffered much.  In AD 711 Muslim warriors had come across the Mediterranean Sea near the Straits of Gibraltar and invaded Europe.  They quickly conquered all of the Iberian Peninsula, which at that time was ruled by the Visigoths.   In 732 their advance had finally been turned back by Franks led by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours. But the people of Spain were left under Muslim occupation.

             Over the course of eight centuries following this, Spanish Christians had founded several kingdoms in Northern Spain and enlarged them by attacking the Muslims who ruled lands to the South.  This period of time is known as the Reconquista.  Forces fighting for King Fernando and Queen Isabel finally managed to evict the last Muslim ruler from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 and unite Spain under a Christian monarchy.  This was the same year in which Christopher Columbus, commissioned by Fernando and Isabel, discovered the New World.  In 1519, after Carlos V’s election as Holy Roman Emperor,  Hernan Cortes, a Spaniard from Extremadura, began the conquest of Mexico.  Francisco Pizarro, another Spaniard from Extremadura, would conquer Peru a decade later.  While Protestant reformers stripped from Rome a few countries in Northern Europe, Catholic Spain simultaneously brought most of  two whole continents to the Catholic Church.

            In the middle of the sixteenth century, with their own king, Carlos V, on the imperial throne, the Spanish people had acquired unforeseen influence and power.  Besides the land we know today as Spain, the Spanish king also ruled southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, the Canary islands, small portions of Northern Africa, the Netherlands and most of North and South America.  This century also saw the beginning of Spanish rule in the Philippines.  In addition, members of the same family to which the king belonged ruled many other parts of Europe as well.  And Carlos V, who was both king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, possessed great influence over most of the rest of Europe.

            In 1556, Felipe II, became king of Spain while his father, Carlos V, remained Holy Roman Emperor.  Spain briefly grew even more powerful because he had married Mary I, Queen of England, in 1555.  But Mary died in 1558 and rebel Protestants put Elizabeth I on the throne in that country, removing England once for all from the Roman Catholic Church.

            In the eyes of many Spaniards, such as Don Miguel Cervantes, Spain’s greatest moment came in 1571, when the Spanish fleet, allied with the navies of Venice and the Pope, defeated the Turkish fleet at Lepanto.  This victory stopped the advance of Muslim Turks into Europe, freed 12,000 enslaved Christian prisoners who had been forced to row Turkish ships and signaled the beginning of the end for Turkish supremacy in the Mediterranean.  The victory was credited to the Blessed Virgin Mary and is commemorated in the Church on October 7, the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

            Spain would see it’s own advances deterred significantly, however, in 1588, when the Spanish Armada was first defeated in Battle with the English fleet and then destroyed entirely by storms at sea.  Though Spain remained the greatest power in the world after that failure, the event marked the beginning of a decline that would last for centuries and eventually see Spain deprived of all that it had once possessed, except it’s unity.