3 - Spain: a history of divisions and democracy

Summary

The sacred transitional representations that emerged and penetrated Spanish society after Franco's death were rooted deep in Spanish history. This is a history rife with religious, regional, and class divisions, and long epochs of political instability.

Early Spanish history

The Iberian peninsula has been inhabited and reinhabited by many different peoples in the last 5,000 years, and overall, as Strabo first noted, the Iberian peoples have tended to be “bad mixers.” In the third century, Roman legions came and captured the peninsula (which had been inhabited by Nordic Celts in the upper third of the Peninsula and tribes from Africa in the south) and dominated it for four centuries. The Romans were followed by various Germanic tribes, until the Arabs came and defeated the Germanic Visigoths in ad 711 and dominated the peninsula throughout the Middle Ages.

The Arabs failed however, to conquer the least Romanized peoples of the remote areas of the Cantabrian mountains. And it was in these mountains that the eight-century-long “Reconquista” or “Reconquest,” of the Iberian peninsula began. The Reconquista fused the two great driving forces of medieval times – war and religion – into one mammoth religious war. According to Crow, no other European country experienced a similar period.

In 1480, King Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic attempted to complete the religious unity of Spain by setting up the infamous Spanish Inquisition.