The Formation of Spanish Identity and Its Adaptation to the Age of Nations

Abstract

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.