2002/01/01 by José Álvarez Junco · 39 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Accession #Ancient history #Art #Early Modern Spanish Literature #European union #Fifteenth #Hispanic-African Historical Relations #History #Identity (music) #Law #Medieval and Early Modern Iberia #Period (music) #Political science #Politics #Power (physics) #Throne #Victory
paper · doi:10.1353/ham.2002.0006
published in History and Memory 14(1), 13-36 (Indiana University Press)
openalex publication_date 2002/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/29
Any consideration of the emergence of a collective “Spanish” identity in the modern period must first take into account a salient historical fact: the union of kingdoms achieved by the “Catholic Kings,” the Trastámara cousins Ferdinand and Isabella, at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth. Following their marriage in 1474, Isabella’s victory in the subsequent Castilian civil war and Ferdinand’s accession to the Aragonese throne, the royal couple broadened their dominions with the conquest of Granada—the last Muslim kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula—and Navarre, incorporated by Ferdinand after his second marriage. This policy of absorption created a political conglomerate whose borders have remained basically stable for the last half millennium, a very remarkable fact when compared with the fragile and shifting European boundaries throughout the same period. What we today call “Spain” very closely resembles the structure of power accumulated by the Catholic Kings, which makes it one of the oldest political units in Europe, along with France and Britain.