The great peninsula of the West has much in common with the great peninsula of the North. ♦Slight relations with the Empire.♦ Save Sweden and Norway, no part of Western Europe has had so little to do with the later Empire as Spain. ♦Break between earlier and later history.♦ And in no land that formed part of the earlier Empire, save our own island, is the later history so completely cut off from the earlier history. The modern kingdoms of Spain have still less claim to represent the West-Gothic kingdom than the modern kingdom of France had to represent the Frankish kingdom. ♦Modern Spanish history begins with the Saracen conquest.♦ The history of Spain, as an element in the European system, begins with the Saracen invasion. For a hundred years before that time all trace of dependence on the elder Empire had passed away. With the later Western Empire Spain had nothing to do after the days of Charles the Great and his immediate successors. Their claims over a small part of the country passed away from the Empire to the kings of Karolingia.
♦Analogy between Spain and South-eastern Europe.♦
With the Eastern Empire and the states which grew out of it Spain has the closest connexion in the way of analogy. ♦Comparison of the effects of conquest and deliverance in each.♦ Each was a Christian land conquered from the Mussulman. Each has been wholly or partially won back from him. But the deliverance of south-western Europe was mainly the work of its own people, and its deliverance was nearly ended when the bondage of south-eastern Europe was only beginning. Again, in south-eastern Europe the nations were fully formed before the Mussulman conquest, and they have lived through it. ♦The Spanish nation formed by the war with the Mussulmans.♦ In Spain the Mussulman conquest cut short the West-Gothic power just as it was growing into a new Romance nation; the actual Romance nation of Spain was formed by the work of withstanding the invaders. ♦Analogy between Spain and Russia.♦ The closest analogy of all is between Spain and Russia. Each was delivered by its own people. In each case, long after the main deliverance had been wrought, long after the liberated nation had begun again to take its place in Europe, the ransomed land was still cut off, by a fragment of its old enemies, from the coasts of its own southern sea.
♦Extent of the West-Gothic and the Saracen dominions.♦
The Saracen dominion in the West, as established by the first conquerors, answered very nearly to the West-Gothic kingdom, as it then stood: but it did not exactly answer to Spain, either in the geographical or in the later Roman sense.[79] When the Saracen came, the Empire, not the Goth, still held the Balearic Isles, and the fortresses of Tangier and Ceuta on the Mauretanian side of the strait. On the other hand, the Goth did not hold quite the whole of the peninsula, while his dominion took in the Gaulish land of Septimania. Strictly speaking, the conquest was one, not of Spain geographically, but of the West-Gothic dominions in and out of Spain, and of the outlying Imperial possessions in their neighbourhood. ♦Two centres of deliverance.♦ It was from the lands which hindered both the West-Gothic and the Saracen dominion from exactly answering to geographical Spain that deliverance came, and it came in two forms. ♦The independent lands.♦ From the land to the north-west, which held out against both Goth and Saracen, came that form of deliverance which was strictly native. ♦The Frankish dominion. 752-759.♦ At the other end, the Frank first won back for Christendom the Saracen province in Gaul, and then carried his arms into the neighbouring corner of Spain. ♦778.♦ Thus we get two centres of deliverance, two groups of states which did the work. There are the north-western lands, whose history is purely Spanish, which simply withstood the Saracen, and the north-eastern lands, which were first won from the Saracen by the Frank, and which gradually freed themselves from their deliverer. ♦Represented severally by Castile and Portugal, and by Aragon.♦ The former class are represented in later Spanish history by the kingdoms of Castile and Portugal, the latter by the kingdom of Aragon. Navarre lies between the two, and shares in the history of both. The former start geographically from the mountain region washed by the Ocean. The latter start geographically from the mountains which divide Gaul and Spain, and which stretch westward to the Mediterranean. The geographical position of the regions foreshadows their later history.[80] ♦Later history of Aragon.♦ It was Aragon, looking to the East, which first played a great part in European affairs, and which carried Spanish influence and dominion into Gaul, Sicily, Italy, and Greece. ♦Of Castile and Portugal.♦ It was Portugal and Castile, looking to the West, which established an Iberian dominion beyond the bounds of Europe. The fact that a Queen of Castile in the fifteenth century married a King of Aragon and not a King of Portugal has led us to speak of the peninsular kingdoms as ‘Spain and Portugal.’[81] For some ages ‘Spain and Aragon’ would have been a more natural division. But the very difference in the fields of action of Castile and Aragon hindered any such strong opposition. Between Castile and Portugal, on the other hand, a marked rivalry arose in the field which was common to both.
♦The more strictly native centre foremost in the work of deliverance.♦
Of these two centres, one purely Spanish, the other brought for a long time under a greater or less degree of foreign influence, the more strictly native region was foremost in the work of national deliverance. How far western Spain stood in advance of eastern Spain is shown by the speaking fact that Toledo, so much further to the south, was won by Castile a generation before Zaragoza was won by Aragon. ♦Relations of Castile and Aragon towards Navarre.♦ But both Castile and Aragon, as powers, grew out of the break-up of a momentary dominion in the land which lay between them, and whose later history is much less illustrious than theirs. In the second quarter of the eleventh century the kingdom of Pampeluna or Navarre had, by the energy of a single man, the Sviatopluk or Stephen Dushan of his little realm, risen to the first place among the Christian powers of Spain. Castile and Aragon do not appear with kingly rank till both had passed under the momentary rule of a neighbour which in after times seemed so small beside either of them. And the name of Castile, whether as county, kingdom, or empire, marks a comparatively late stage of Christian advance. We must here go back for a moment to those early days of the long crusade of eight hundred years at which we have already slightly glanced.[82]
§ 1. The Foundation of the Spanish Kingdoms.
♦Founding of the kingdom of Leon. 753.
916.♦