What Every American Should Know About Europe

by Melissa L. Rossi

  Catholics (including famous Spanish hero El Cid) gradually pushed the Muslims out and the occupiers’ territory shrank. Retreating from such academic centers as Toledo, the Moors lost Valencia, then Córdoba, then Seville, the favored city of musicians, until finally all that remained by the 1300s was the southern region of Granada. The long-awaited final moment of the Catholic “reconquest” occurred in 1492, when the armies of King Fernando and Queen Isabella forced out the last Moorish ruler from the spectacular hillside palace of Alhambra; it’s said that the sultan, Boabdil, took one final look at the lacy latticework and fine gardens of his home, let out a deep sigh, and departed in tears.8

  Although the armies of Isabella and Fernando ran the last Moors out in 1492, legend has it that some Moors were soon invited back. The Spaniards couldn’t figure out how to run their elaborate irrigation systems.

  Having united all of Spain under the strict veil of Catholicism—Muslims and Jews were booted unless they converted—Isabella and Fernando delved into the enterprises that made them best known: conquering the New World and introducing the Spanish Inquisition, both activities that further spread the Catholic faith and filled the treasury.

  Launched at Isabella’s behest in 1478, the brutal Spanish Inquisition lasted until 1808. At the onset, 200,000 Jews fled Spain, but some Catholics were accused of heresy as well. The accused, who had no idea who accused them, lost their property and riches upon being arrested. Subjected to grueling torture, they were burned if they still did not confess. At least 350,000 accused Spanish “heretics” died at the stake.

  EXPANDING THE EMPIRE VIA THE SEAS

  Portugal said no, France said no, and so did England and Spain, but Christopher Columbus (aka Colón), an explorer from Genoa, would not drop his idea of a western route to the East Indies—nor would he stop pestering monarchs to fund his trip. Finally, after nearly a decade of his pleading, Isabella—feeling competitive with Portugal, whose sailors kept their sea route to the Indies a secret—gave Colón his three ships and his funding in 1492. Although Colón insisted, from his first voyage to his last, that he had found the East Indies, the discoveries and maps of Amerigo Vespucci in the early 1500s showed that Colón had discovered entirely new lands, starting with the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Soon the race was on to ravage the unexplored world and steal her riches. Ponce de León claimed Puerto Rico for the crown; Velásquez took Cuba; and Balboa seized Panama. In 1519, Hernán Cortés struck the mother lode when he pushed into Mexico, killing Montezuma and claiming the gold of the Aztec kingdom of Tenochtitlan for Spain; four years later, Pizarro conquered the silver-rich Inca civilization of Peru. The most dramatic (and traumatic) voyage was that of Portuguese explorer Magellan, who sailed under the Spanish flag with five ships in a 1519 voyage that sought to find the Spice Islands by heading west. Rounding the southern tip of Chile, his ships sailed across the Pacific for three months without spotting land, and the sailors ate rodents to stay alive. After finally reaching today’s Guam, he continued on to the Philippines, where his pride got the better of him. After converting a local sultan to Christianity, he offered to show the ruler how to fight his enemies the modern, European way. He launched a battle against nearby islanders, but Magellan’s men were quickly beaten back and Magellan took a fatal poisonous arrow in the heart. The few remaining sailors pushed on, dropping anchor in Seville in 1522, with only eighteen of the original 240 crew members remaining to tell the tale of the world’s first circumnavigation.

  The brutal acts against Native Americans, who died from disease, torture, and the slave labor trade, did not go unnoticed. Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas made the indigenous peoples’ plight widely known in his 1552 book A Short Account of the Destruction of the West Indies. Still, the brutality continued until many of the original peoples were wiped out; Europeans shipped in African slaves to fill in the worker shortage.

  Spanish ships, heavy with riches, were continually raided by pirates off Africa’s northern coast and by other Europeans, particularly the British; hundreds of others sank in storms at sea. Enough of the silver and gold nevertheless made it into Spain’s treasury to make Spanish rulers the world’s richest for a time. Under King Philip II, Spain kissed off her dominance of the sea, particularly as she kept losing ships in wars with the English and French—and in 1587, Sir Francis Drake sneaked into Cádiz and sank all the vessels in port. The most crushing blow: the loss of her formidable fleet the following year, when Spain’s attack on England backfired, and her mighty armada, thanks to Drake’s fighters and a nasty storm, was reduced to splinters on the rocks. New ships were built and new lands—including Naples, Sicily, and Portugal—were added to the empire’s roster, but the problems of corruption and weak leadership continued.

  THE NOVEL IDEA OF MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA (1547–1616)

  For a man who was the world’s first bestselling novelist, Miguel Cervantes spent a lot of time in prison. In 1575, he was captured in Algeria, where he spent five years behind bars until ransom was delivered; other times he was rounded up for his dodgy practices as a tax collector. But prison served him well. Some say he wrote Don Quixote behind bars, while others say he merely conceived of the idea of a parody of a chivalrous knight there—but most agree that the book he produced was Europe’s first novel when it appeared in 1605. Readers so adored his book that part II soon followed, selling equally well, but that only infuriated Cervantes. The “sequel” was a fake, written by an unknown using both his characters and established plot. The author quickly followed up with his own part II in 1615.

  Devastating wars, rebellions in the colonies, and (literally) imbecilic leadership continued to hack away at Spain’s power—and by 1648, when the Thirty Years War drew to an end, France had shoved Spain aside to become the dominant European country. Spain simultaneously lost her holdings in the Netherlands. (See “The Netherlands: History Review,” page 178.) Another blow: in 1704, Britain captured the Rock of Gibraltar, which lies off the south of Spain, a loss that infuriates Spain to this day. But what really did Spain in as a global power: Napoleon, whose army invaded in 1808. The Spanish military was called back from the New World to fight the French, and the South American colonies saw a chance to escape.

  THE SPANISH WAR OF INDEPENDENCE (1808–1813)

  Few Spaniards liked King Carlos IV (b. 1748, reigned 1788–1808), including his son. And while Prince Fernando VII (b. 1784, reigned 1813–1833) was unsubtly trying to grab the crown off padre’s head—his father had had him arrested in 1807 for attempted murder—Napoleon saw his chance. In 1808, the French emperor kicked the royal family out, ordered his armies in, and placed brother Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throne.

  That was the easy part. The rest was hell—so hellish that the Bonapartes were shocked, as no other country had reacted the same way. Before Joseph was fully seated on the throne, the people—from the peasants to the upper classes—rebelled, launching what the Spanish call the War of Independence, what the British (who dropped in to help) call the Peninsular War, and what the Bonapartes called an absurdité.

  Spaniards loathed the wine-swilling Frenchman, whom they called Pepe Botellas—Joe Bottles—and who really annoyed most of them when he diminished the power of the church. Besides, they did like Prince Fernando VII—who for about one minute in the confusion had been king—and they wanted Fernando back, but he was imprisoned in France.

  Fighting for his return, the feisty people formed their own government—from the local level to the national—and refused to listen to anything Joe Bottles said. It was the biggest popular struggle of the day, finally unifying the assorted Spanish peoples who fought in Fernando’s name. Their new government, while fighting off the French, even wrote a liberal constitution that was widely embraced by the Spanish people—or at least by those who could read.

  When the French finally departed in 1813, Spain was economically wiped out but poised to be a truly united country for the first time, with all anticipating the return of their bel
oved new king Fernando. Alas, Fernando came back and ruined the fantasy.

  In 1808, Joseph Bonaparte abolished the Spanish Inquisition, which had been going on for 330 torturous years.

  New King Fernando was in a foul mood. He’d been humiliated by Napoleon, who’d invited him to France and then tossed him in jail for five years. When Fernando returned to Spain in 1813, he flicked off the adoration of his people who’d fought off the French for him. He appreciated the little constitution they’d prepared even less: he ripped it to shreds. That didn’t endear him to the masses, nor were they thrilled about what was happening overseas. One by one, Spain’s New World holdings dropped off: Chile declared independence in 1810, followed by Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, and Uruguay. Spain waged wars to keep the territories roped in, but fifteen years later only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained of Spain’s empire in the Americas. Already going downhill, Spain plummeted to new depths over the next century and a half, as regionalism, value differences, and depression ripped the country apart.

  For all the wealth it brought the Spanish Empire, colonization and the country’s extreme religiousness actually set Spain back. Devout Spaniards ignored the scientific revolution, and Spain was not a land that produced many inventors. Like a child raised in wealth who doesn’t learn job skills, Spain did not evolve with the rest of Europe, shrugging off the Industrial Revolution and the changing textile market. By doing so, Spain set herself back centuries.

  Spain’s national identity was further deflated in 1898, the year of el desastre—the disaster. The United States had long been eyeing the Spanish colony of Cuba—and since the days of Thomas Jefferson had made numerous offers to buy it. After a mysterious explosion on the USS Maine was dubiously blamed on the Spanish, the U.S. declared war. The modern American navy easily blew the Spanish rust buckets out of the water. Spain was devastated, economically and spiritually, after losing Cuba and Puerto Rico, her last colonies in the New World, as well as the Philippines. The national mood was downbeat, but at least one person benefited from the Spanish-American War of 1898: Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. After their foreign investments dried up, Barcelona’s elite decided they had best throw their money into the architectural riches of their own city.

  ANTONI GAUDÍ (1852–1926)

  Barcelona was always an iconoclastic city that thumbed her nose at Madrid, including with unconventional architecture that competed with Madrid’s neoclassical splendor. So it was fitting that an eccentric architect imprinted a style that would make Barcelona, a city where anarchists designed utopian neighborhoods and eighteenth-century inventors sank fortunes into constructing submarines, stand out all the more. Spiritual Antoni Gaudí drew his inspiration from nature, eschewing right angles and straight lines. His daring creations of swirls and meandering squiggles look like shells or storm-tossed sands, skulls or slayed dragons, candied ice-cream cones or icing-heavy cakes topped with strange details—such as dizzying ghostlike figures twirling up from terraces. Industrialist Eusebi Güell and the Catholic Church were his two most important employers. Güell kept the architect busy for thirty-five years with projects including Güell Park, a tile-happy, color-jumbled park complex of gingerbread-house buildings topped with domes, originally planned as a living community for Güell’s workers. Another huge project came from the church: the Sagrada Família. During his final twelve years, Gaudí worked on nothing but the Swiss-cheese-textured temple of slender domes, becoming obsessive and going broke in the process. His habit of teaching trolley cars to stop for pedestrians did him in one morning in June 1926, when one ran him down. So ragged-looking was the then-impoverished architect that the hospital refused to take him in, mistaking him for a bum, but when he died three days later, most of the city turned out to mourn his loss. Now the biggest draw to the Mediterranean city, Gaudí’s Sagrada Família still isn’t done—completion is scheduled for 2023—but 2 million visitors in 2002 came to see the work in progress. A man who failed in love and threw himself passionately into architecture and religion, Gaudí is now in line to be Spain’s next saint.

  By the twentieth century, Spanish intellectuals were calling their country “irrelevant,” and politics were a mess. Regionalism and religion split Spain, as did growing divides between wealthy and working class. Liberals were sick of having a monarch. After workers’ strikes and armed uprisings, the beleaguered king consented to a democratic vote in 1931 and the left won; a rash of anarchists, Communists, and Socialists overtook Las Cortes. Parliament soon declared that Spain was a republic, and the king fled. The left released all political prisoners, taxed the landed rich, and outlawed the Fascist Party (the Falangists) of a rising military star, General Franco. Before long, the country blew up in a heinous civil war.

  SPANISH CIVIL WAR (1936–1939)

  Even those involved in this military debacle weren’t entirely sure what it was about. Some say the Spanish Civil War was a class war; others claimed it was the result of the country’s identity crisis when Spain’s historical greatness was erased after losing her colonial holdings. Still others claim it was a violent illustration of the old issue of Spanish regionalism. What led up to it, at least, is clear: after the leftist National Parliament pushed out the king in 1931, a powerful faction of the country was furious, all the more so with reports of clergy being attacked by the left. The assassination of a right-wing politician by leftist police gave the right-leaning army cause to revolt. General Franco led a 1936 army uprising in Morocco that spread and brewed into war. The monarchists, Fascists, clergy, aristocrats, and army rebels fought as nationalists battling Republicans, a coalition of Socialists, Communists, anarchists, antimonarchists, anticlerics, and assorted liberals. Factions of the Republicans—for whom George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway fought—sometimes battled each other as well. Fighters were poorly armed—crooked forty-year-old rifles and rusty bullets were the norm—and military strategy was pathetic, but there was horrific brutality. Republicans lined up priests against church walls and shot them, and nuns were gang-raped. Nationalists attacked villages by night and left them filled with corpses by morning; they blocked food to Republican-held areas, starving residents to death. Both sides sought outside help: the Republicans sneaked the treasury’s reserves of gold—about $600 million worth—off to the Soviet Union for safekeeping and as a credit against arms,9 although the Soviets took all the money and supplied them with overpriced second-rate weapons left over from WWI. Franco invited Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists to try out their new weaponry, most famously in the Basque country, where in 1937, they dropped dozens of incendiary bombs on the sacred town of Guernica, wiping out almost all 7,000 residents in waves of fire and smoke. Nazis and Fascists—Italian fighters alone numbered 60,000—and their modern armies tipped the balance, as they bombed cities from Seville to Madrid. By the time the foreign forces split for WWII, Spain had pretty much knocked herself out.

  The war that more “happened” than it “began” and which “stopped” more than it was “won,” effectively wiped out Spain within three years, and by the time Franco and his nationalists took power in 1939, millions across the country were starving, war widows walked the streets as prostitutes, and villagers set up slums of lean-tos outside major cities. At least 500,000 died during the war, although some say it was closer to a million, and the killing didn’t stop when the war was over. Franco bore a grudge against those who had fought against him, and went on to kill at least 100,000 more Republicans, mostly in the Basque country and in Catalonia. Thousands were deported, thousands were turned into prisoner-of-war laborers, and thousands are still turning up in mass graves.

  Nazis for hire: Picasso’s disturbing painting Guernica is his tribute to the Basque town firebombed by the Nazis’ Condor Unit in April 1937. The attack that killed most of the inhabitants in a city-wide blaze is a continuing symbol to the Basque separatist movement of their treatment at the hands of the central government in Madrid. Picasso refused to allow the wall-size painting to hang in Spain
until Franco was dead. In 1981, it finally arrived in Spain, where it is mounted at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. A tapestry of it hangs outside the meeting room of the UN Security Council.

  Spain’s pitiful state spared her from being brought into the Second World War, when as in WWI, Spain remained neutral. Hitler didn’t even bother to annex her. Although Franco sometimes infuriated the Führer by making him wait an hour while the Spaniard took a siesta, Franco is believed to have given safe haven to Nazis. So cozy was Franco’s relationship with Hitler, at least from the Allied perspective, that Spain was slapped with economic sanctions after the war ended. Thus Spain was not eligible for U.S.-offered Marshall Plan funding. As a result, Spain fell under an economic shadow that lingered into the 1960s. One of the few things that kept the country going: loans from Argentina’s President Juan Perón.

  Perhaps Franco and Hitler were not as chummy as Allies believed. Franco did not enact anti-Semitic laws, and according to some reports he offered Spain as a sanctuary to at least 60,000 Jews.10

  Franco had a vision: one Spain, with one national identity and one political party—his. Other parties were banned, regional languages and celebrations were prohibited, the media was censored, and dissidents and those who had fought on the “wrong” side were eliminated. After the first few years of Franco’s thirty-six-year reign, the country simply crawled off from the rest of the world.

  Franco so feared rebellion that groups of three or more were not allowed to congregate in public spaces—he made sure there were few public spaces, as well—and the Spanish were literally kept under lock and key. Apartment buildings were maintained by doormen who kept the keys to all apartments and reported to the government on the comings and goings of the residents.