[Edit]
Prehistory
The aboriginal peoples of the Iberian peninsula, consisting of a number of separate tribes, are given the generic name of Iberians. This may have included the Basques, the only pre-Celtic people in Iberia surviving to the present day as a separate ethnic group. The most important culture of this period is that of the city of Tartessos. Beginning in the 9th century BC, Celtic tribes entered the Iberian peninsula through the Pyrenees and settled throughout the peninsula, becoming the Celtiberians.
The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians successively settled along the Mediterranean coast and founded trading colonies there over a period of several centuries.
Around 1,100 BC Phoenician merchants founded the trading colony of Gadir or Gades (modern day Cᤩz) near Tartessos. In the 8th century BC the first Greek colonies, such as Emporion (modern Emp?), were founded along the Mediterranean coast on the East, leaving the south coast to the Phoenicians. The Greeks are responsible for the name Iberia, after the river Iber (Ebro in Spanish). In the 6th century BC the Carthaginians arrived in Iberia while struggling with the Greeks for control of the Western Mediterranean. Their most important colony was Carthago Nova (Latin name of modern day Cartagena).
Roman Empire
The Romans arrived in the Iberian peninsula during the Second Punic war in the 2nd century BC, and annexed it under Augustus after two centuries of war with the Celtic and Iberian tribes and the Phoenician, Greek and Carthaginian colonies becoming the province of Hispania. It was divided in Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior during the late Roman Republic; and, during the Roman Empire, Hispania Taraconensis in the northeast, Hispania Baetica in the south and Lusitania in the southwest.
Hispania supplied the Roman Empire with food, olive oil, wine and metal. The emperors Trajan, Hadrian and Theodosius I, the philosopher Seneca and the poets Martial and Lucan were born in Spain. The Spanish Bishops held the Council at Elvira in 306. Many of Spain's present languages, religion, and laws originate from this Roman period.
Muslim Spain
In the 8th century, nearly all the Iberian peninsula, which had been under Visigothic rule, was quickly conquered (from 711), by Muslims (the Moors), who had crossed over from North Africa, as part of the expansion of the Umayyad empire. Only three small counties in the north kept their independence: Asturias, Navarra and Aragon, which eventually became kingdoms.
Very soon the Muslim emirate split into small kingdoms. Christian and Muslim kingdoms fought and allied among themselves, with the Christians driving the Moorish forces out of the northern most parts of the peninsula within a few decades. The Muslim taifa kings competed in patronage of the arts, and the Jewish population of Iberia set the basis of Sephardic culture. Much of Spain's distinctive art originates from this seven-hundred-year period, and many Arabic words made their way into Castilian (Spanish) and Catalan, and from them to other European languages.
The Moorish capital was C󲤯ba, in the southern portion of Spain known as Andalucí¡® During the time of Arab occupation, large populations of Jews, Christians and Muslims living in close quarters, and at its peak some non-Muslims were appointed to high offices. At its best it produced great architecture, art, and Muslim and Jewish scholars played a great part in reviving the study of ancient Greek philosophy, making their own important contributions to it, and becoming one of the most important ways by which these studies were revived in Europe, with historic consequences. However there were also restrictions and imposts on non-Muslims, which tended to grow after the death of Al-Hakam II in 976, and worsened after the fall of Al-Andalus in 1031. Later invasions of stricter Muslim groups from north Africa even led to persecutions of non-Muslims, forcing some (including some Muslim scholars) to seek safety in the then still relatively tolerant city of Toledo after its Christian reconquest in 1085.
IsabellaThe long, convoluted period of expansion of the Christian kingdoms, beginning in 722, only eleven years after the Moorish invasion, is called the Reconquista. As early as 739, the northwestern region of Galicia, which hosted one of the most important centres of western medieval Christian pilgrimage, Santiago de Compostela, had been liberated from Moorish occupation by forces from neighbouring Asturias. The 1085 conquest of the central city of Toledo had largely brought to an end the reconquest of the northern half of Iberia. The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 heralded the collapse, within a few decades, of the great Moorish strongholds, such as Seville and C󲤯ba, in the south-west. By the middle of the thirteenth century most of the Iberian peninsula had been reconquered, leaving only Granada as a small tributary state in the south. It ended in 1492, when Isabella and Ferdinand captured the southern city of Granada, the last Moorish city in Spain. The Treaty of Granada [1] guaranteed religious toleration toward Muslims while Jews were expelled that year. A 1499 Muslim uprising was crushed and was followed by the first of the expulsions of Muslims, in 1502, from Isabel's and Ferdinand's new, combined, Christian kingdom. The year 1492 was also marked by the discovery of the New World. The queen and king funded the history changing voyages of Columbus. The defeats of the French army, by relying more on well trained regular, highly mobile soldiers and the use of hand guns and cannon against armoured knights, in the Italian Wars from 1494, saw the emergence of the new combined kingdoms as a European great power.
Renaissance in Spain
Until the late of the 15th century, Castile and L鯮, Aragon and Navarre were independent states, with independent languages, monarchs, armies and, in the case of Aragon and Castile, two empires: the former with one in the Mediterranean and the latter with a new, rapidly growing, one in the Americas. The process of political unification continued into the early sixteenth century. It was the unification of these separate Iberian empires that became the base of what is in now referred to as the Spanish Empire.
By 1512, most of the kingdoms of present-day Spain were politically unified, although not as a modern, centralized state (in contemporary minds, "Spain" was a geographic term meaning Iberian Peninsula, not the present-day state called Spain). The grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor but called in Spain Carlos I, extended his crown to other places in Europe and the rest of the world. The unification of Iberia was complete when Charles V's son, Philip II, became King of Portugal in 1580, as well as of the other Iberian Kingdoms (collectively known as "Spain" at that time).
During the 16th century, under the reigns of Charles V and Philip II, Spain became the most powerful nation in Europe. The Spanish Empire covered most territories of South and Central America, Mexico, some of Eastern Asia (including The Philippines), the Iberian peninsula (including the Portuguese empire from 1580), southern Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. It was a time of exploration, the opening up of new trade routes across oceans and the beginning of European colonization. Not only did this lead to the arrival of ever increasing quantities of precious metals, spices and luxuries, and new agricultural plants, but the explorers, soldiers, traders and missionaries also brought back with them a flood of knowledge of the outside world that radically transformed European understanding of the world.
It was also the wealthiest nation in Europe, but the uncontrolled influx of goods and minerals from Spain's colonies in the Americas ultimately resulted in rampant inflation and led to economic depression by the 17th century. Religious wars supported by the Spanish crown, especially in the Netherlands, greatly burdened the empire's economy.
In 1640, under Philip IV, the centralist policy of the Count-Duke of Olivares provoked wars in Portugal and Catalonia. Portugal became an independent kingdom again, taking with it its empire, and Catalonia enjoyed some years of French-supported independence but was quickly returned to the Spanish Crown, except Roussillon.
A series of long and costly wars and revolts followed in the early 17th century, and began a steady decline of Spanish power in Europe from the 1640s. Controversy over succession to the throne consumed the country and much of Europe during the first years of the 18th century (see War of the Spanish Succession). It was only after this war ended and a new dynasty?the French Bourbons?was installed that a centralized Spanish state was established and the first Bourbon king Philip V of Spain in 1707 dissolved the Aragon court and unified the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon into a single kingdom of Spain, abolishing many of the regional privileges and autonomy (fueros) that had hampered the Habsburgs.
Of note during the 17th century was the cultural efflorescence now known as the Spanish Golden Age stalled the monarchy.
In the meantime, Spain lost all of its colonies in the Caribbean region and Asia-Pacific region during the 19th century, a trend which ended with the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines, Guam, Micronesia, Palau, Northern Marianas and Marshall Islands to the United States after the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Historically, the period of the mid 17th century to the mid 20th century was a failure for the Spanish state compared to northern Europe. The lingering decline of the Spanish empire was due in large part, ironically, to its spectacular earlier successes in the 15th and 16th centuries that led to the centuries of treasure fleets that had brought large quantities of silver and gold into the country from the American mines and spices and luxuries from Asia across the Pacific. These shipments engendered inflation that ate away at Spanish trades, and commerce, making the country almost totally dependant upon imports and thereby undermined its long term economic development. In fact some of the precursors of a modern view of economics was initiated by observations of this corrosive inflationary process by the School of Salamanca. The economy was effectively hollowed out in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, leaving the country with little capacity to adapt to the falling output of the American silver and gold mines through the 17th century. Making things worse were the constant wars defending the world empire against jealous rivals, internal splits and the European wars, especially the Thirty Years War and Eighty Years War where Spain's energies were constantly drained defending the Habsburg's dynastic and religious interests, including the Counter Reformation, burdening the people with taxes and military duties. This diverted massive resources away from economic activity and essential infrastructure such as roads. These factors led to a steep absolute economic and demographic decline in the middle and late 17th century, greatly aggravated by failed harvests and plagues. There was a period of slow recovery, throughout the eighteenth century, and expansion of the iron and steel industries in the Basque country, a spectacular growth (from a relatively low base) in general trade (after the opening up of free trade within the empire), and even the beginnings of a rapid industrialisation of the textile industry in Catalonia, in the last two decades of that century. But this late eighteenth century turnaround was shortlived, being totally disrupted by the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 19th century that soon triggered the loss of the American territories and plunged the country into endemic political instability which lasted until the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 - the fourth civil war in less than a century and a half. Pockets of relative modernity in Catalonia and the north would appear, but Spain's relative economic and political decline overall mirrored in general the fate of other regions of southern Europe such as Portugal, the Italian states, the Balkans, and much of central and eastern Europe, as much of the rapidly growing global oceanic trade, pioneered by the Iberian countries, was diverted to northwestern Europe.
Although cultural contacts with Asian and African nations across the Mediterranean enriched the cultural mosaic of the region in terms of food, music, literature, architecture they did little to solve the region's social and economic challenges. However the primary causes of the steep 17th century decline were above all due to the destructive economic effect of the prolonged flood of silver and gold from the Americas and the unyielding Habsburg's political and religious policies.
Furthermore Islam, as well as the Roman culture, placed little emphasis on technological education or sustainable economic development. For centuries, the region was full of frontiersmen from both Christian and Muslim sides looking for loot, revenge and destruction of their enemies. These influences were embodied later in a numerous nobility that wished only to serve in the military or government service and were not interested in industry or trade. Such an attitude was especially pronounced in the south, which held the trade monopoly with the overseas empire. The problem was recognised by the Bourbon reformers in the 18th century who tried to "ennoble" the mechanical trades but they met with little success. Indeed it goes back to Charles I's way of dealing with the popular uprising known as the Castilian War of the Communities (1520 - 1522), where he suppressed the uprising caused by the burdens of excessive foreign adventurism in Europe by reinstating the power and privileges of the nobility to win their support. In short, as the medieval nobility were steadily losing their influence in the rival states to the north (in France the monarchy did all it could to this end as they saw the nobility as dangerous rivals and a burden on the state), Habsburg policy led to a reversal of this social evolution within Spain itself reinforcing a class antithetical to trade, industry and modernisation. The Habsburg support of the Inquisition, in pursuing its Counter Reformation religious policy, suppressed the spread of modern thinking. This policy also led to an expansion of the church in Spain, making it a vast and wealthy land owner with privileges and exemptions, further narrowing the tax base. Many of its swarming clergy were drawn from the nobility, creating an interlocking dominant conservative class, often resented by the exploited ordinary people. This is testified to by plays and literature where the virtues of the ordinary people were often favourably compared against the vices of the nobility, and the offending nobility would then be accused by peasants of having less pure (because of having Moorish and Jewish) blood, and in criticism of the Church's hypocrisy. The beggary that grew rapidly from the late 16th century that forced many to live by their wits inspired the popular picaresque genre of literature.
Even after the 1898 war was over much of the previous legacy was deeply entrenched in Spanish culture and made it poorly compatible with the rest of Europe. As the flow of silver and gold from Latin America vanished at the start of the nineteenth century Spain had nothing to offer in return. However "the Disaster" of 1898, as Spanish-American War was called, led to Spain's cultural revival in which there was much critical self examination, relieved it from the burden of the last major colonies of its old empire and once again restarted the slow and difficult process of modernisation that had begun haltingly in the eighteenth century, but political stability in such a variegated land, caught between pockets of modernity and large areas of extreme rural backwardness, would elude the country for some decades yet, and was ultimately achieved only by a brutal dictatorship.
20th century
The 20th century initially brought little peace; colonization of Western Sahara, Spanish Morocco and Equatorial Guinea was attempted. A period of dictatorial rule (1923 - 1931) ended with the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic. The Republic offered political autonomy to the Basque Country and Catalonia and gave voting rights to women. However, in July 1936, against a backdrop of increasing political polarization, anti-clericalism and pressure from all sides, coupled with growing and unchecked political violence, the Republic was faced with an attempted military coup d'etat led by right-wing army generals. Although the coup initially failed, the ensuing Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 with the victory of the nationalist forces led by General Francisco Franco and supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Spanish Civil War has been called the first battle of the Second World War. After the civil war, General Francisco Franco ruled a nation exhausted politically and economically. During the Second World War Franco, under extreme pressure (Hitler had brought his army to the border of Spain after invading France), opted to remain neutral arguing that Spain could not afford a new war, but, as a concession to his civil war backer, authorised volunteers to go to the Russian front to fight the Soviet Union in an anti-Communist crusade in what came to be known as the Blue Division. The resentment of Franco's brutality towards the more modern pro-Republican regions of Catalonia and the Basque country, whose distinctive languages and identity he suppressed during his long reign, continues to fuel strong separatist movements to this day.
The only official party in Spain at the time of Franco?s regime was the Falange party founded by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. Primo de Rivera denied his party was fascist, calling fascism fundamentaly false. His political philosophy was based on Catholicism, saying that man "carries eternal values" and carries "a soul that is capable of damning or saving itself". He called for "the greatest respect for...human dignity, for the integrity of man and for his liberty." Primo de Rivera called for what he called "organic democracy". Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera was executed in Alicante in 1936.
After World War II, being one of few surviving fascist regimes in Europe, Spain was politically and economically isolated and was kept out of the United Nations until 1955, when it became strategically important for U.S. president Eisenhower to establish a military presence in the Iberian peninsula. This opening to Spain was aided by Franco's opposition to communism. In the 1960s, more than a decade later than other western European countries, Spain began to enjoy economic growth and gradually transformed into a modern industrial economy with a thriving tourism sector. Growth continued well into the 1970s, with Franco's government going to great lengths to shield the Spanish people from the effects of the oil crisis.
Upon the death of the dictator General Franco in November 1975, his personally-designated heir Prince Juan Carlos assumed the position of king and head of state. With the approval of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 and the arrival of democracy, some regions ? Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia and Andalusia? were given far-reaching autonomy, which was then soon extended to all Spanish regions, resulting in one of the most decentralized territorial organizations in Western Europe. However, the radical nationalism in the Basque country and the terrorist group, ETA, continue to be pressing problems facing Spain.
Adolfo Suá²¥z Gonzᬥz, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo Bustelo, after an attempted coup d'é´¡t in 1981, Felipe Gonzᬥz Má²±uez (when Spain joined NATO and European Union), José arí¡ Aznar L󰥺 and José Œuis Rodrí§µez Zapatero have been prime ministers of Spain.
21st century
On March 11, 2004, a series of bombs exploded in commuter trains in Madrid, Spain. These resulted in 191 people dead and 1,460 wounded. It also had a significant effect on the upcoming elections in Spain, due in part to the ruling government's insistence that the ETA was the prime suspect in the bombings, even as the evidence of Muslim extremist terrorism rapidly emerged from the police investigation and the press.
The aboriginal peoples of the Iberian peninsula, consisting of a number of separate tribes, are given the generic name of Iberians. This may have included the Basques, the only pre-Celtic people in Iberia surviving to the present day as a separate ethnic group. The most important culture of this period is that of the city of Tartessos. Beginning in the 9th century BC, Celtic tribes entered the Iberian peninsula through the Pyrenees and settled throughout the peninsula, becoming the Celtiberians.
The seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians successively settled along the Mediterranean coast and founded trading colonies there over a period of several centuries.
Around 1,100 BC Phoenician merchants founded the trading colony of Gadir or Gades (modern day Cᤩz) near Tartessos. In the 8th century BC the first Greek colonies, such as Emporion (modern Emp?), were founded along the Mediterranean coast on the East, leaving the south coast to the Phoenicians. The Greeks are responsible for the name Iberia, after the river Iber (Ebro in Spanish). In the 6th century BC the Carthaginians arrived in Iberia while struggling with the Greeks for control of the Western Mediterranean. Their most important colony was Carthago Nova (Latin name of modern day Cartagena).
Roman Empire
The Romans arrived in the Iberian peninsula during the Second Punic war in the 2nd century BC, and annexed it under Augustus after two centuries of war with the Celtic and Iberian tribes and the Phoenician, Greek and Carthaginian colonies becoming the province of Hispania. It was divided in Hispania Ulterior and Hispania Citerior during the late Roman Republic; and, during the Roman Empire, Hispania Taraconensis in the northeast, Hispania Baetica in the south and Lusitania in the southwest.
Hispania supplied the Roman Empire with food, olive oil, wine and metal. The emperors Trajan, Hadrian and Theodosius I, the philosopher Seneca and the poets Martial and Lucan were born in Spain. The Spanish Bishops held the Council at Elvira in 306. Many of Spain's present languages, religion, and laws originate from this Roman period.
Muslim Spain
In the 8th century, nearly all the Iberian peninsula, which had been under Visigothic rule, was quickly conquered (from 711), by Muslims (the Moors), who had crossed over from North Africa, as part of the expansion of the Umayyad empire. Only three small counties in the north kept their independence: Asturias, Navarra and Aragon, which eventually became kingdoms.
Very soon the Muslim emirate split into small kingdoms. Christian and Muslim kingdoms fought and allied among themselves, with the Christians driving the Moorish forces out of the northern most parts of the peninsula within a few decades. The Muslim taifa kings competed in patronage of the arts, and the Jewish population of Iberia set the basis of Sephardic culture. Much of Spain's distinctive art originates from this seven-hundred-year period, and many Arabic words made their way into Castilian (Spanish) and Catalan, and from them to other European languages.
The Moorish capital was C󲤯ba, in the southern portion of Spain known as Andalucí¡® During the time of Arab occupation, large populations of Jews, Christians and Muslims living in close quarters, and at its peak some non-Muslims were appointed to high offices. At its best it produced great architecture, art, and Muslim and Jewish scholars played a great part in reviving the study of ancient Greek philosophy, making their own important contributions to it, and becoming one of the most important ways by which these studies were revived in Europe, with historic consequences. However there were also restrictions and imposts on non-Muslims, which tended to grow after the death of Al-Hakam II in 976, and worsened after the fall of Al-Andalus in 1031. Later invasions of stricter Muslim groups from north Africa even led to persecutions of non-Muslims, forcing some (including some Muslim scholars) to seek safety in the then still relatively tolerant city of Toledo after its Christian reconquest in 1085.
IsabellaThe long, convoluted period of expansion of the Christian kingdoms, beginning in 722, only eleven years after the Moorish invasion, is called the Reconquista. As early as 739, the northwestern region of Galicia, which hosted one of the most important centres of western medieval Christian pilgrimage, Santiago de Compostela, had been liberated from Moorish occupation by forces from neighbouring Asturias. The 1085 conquest of the central city of Toledo had largely brought to an end the reconquest of the northern half of Iberia. The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 heralded the collapse, within a few decades, of the great Moorish strongholds, such as Seville and C󲤯ba, in the south-west. By the middle of the thirteenth century most of the Iberian peninsula had been reconquered, leaving only Granada as a small tributary state in the south. It ended in 1492, when Isabella and Ferdinand captured the southern city of Granada, the last Moorish city in Spain. The Treaty of Granada [1] guaranteed religious toleration toward Muslims while Jews were expelled that year. A 1499 Muslim uprising was crushed and was followed by the first of the expulsions of Muslims, in 1502, from Isabel's and Ferdinand's new, combined, Christian kingdom. The year 1492 was also marked by the discovery of the New World. The queen and king funded the history changing voyages of Columbus. The defeats of the French army, by relying more on well trained regular, highly mobile soldiers and the use of hand guns and cannon against armoured knights, in the Italian Wars from 1494, saw the emergence of the new combined kingdoms as a European great power.
Renaissance in Spain
Until the late of the 15th century, Castile and L鯮, Aragon and Navarre were independent states, with independent languages, monarchs, armies and, in the case of Aragon and Castile, two empires: the former with one in the Mediterranean and the latter with a new, rapidly growing, one in the Americas. The process of political unification continued into the early sixteenth century. It was the unification of these separate Iberian empires that became the base of what is in now referred to as the Spanish Empire.
By 1512, most of the kingdoms of present-day Spain were politically unified, although not as a modern, centralized state (in contemporary minds, "Spain" was a geographic term meaning Iberian Peninsula, not the present-day state called Spain). The grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor but called in Spain Carlos I, extended his crown to other places in Europe and the rest of the world. The unification of Iberia was complete when Charles V's son, Philip II, became King of Portugal in 1580, as well as of the other Iberian Kingdoms (collectively known as "Spain" at that time).
During the 16th century, under the reigns of Charles V and Philip II, Spain became the most powerful nation in Europe. The Spanish Empire covered most territories of South and Central America, Mexico, some of Eastern Asia (including The Philippines), the Iberian peninsula (including the Portuguese empire from 1580), southern Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. It was a time of exploration, the opening up of new trade routes across oceans and the beginning of European colonization. Not only did this lead to the arrival of ever increasing quantities of precious metals, spices and luxuries, and new agricultural plants, but the explorers, soldiers, traders and missionaries also brought back with them a flood of knowledge of the outside world that radically transformed European understanding of the world.
It was also the wealthiest nation in Europe, but the uncontrolled influx of goods and minerals from Spain's colonies in the Americas ultimately resulted in rampant inflation and led to economic depression by the 17th century. Religious wars supported by the Spanish crown, especially in the Netherlands, greatly burdened the empire's economy.
In 1640, under Philip IV, the centralist policy of the Count-Duke of Olivares provoked wars in Portugal and Catalonia. Portugal became an independent kingdom again, taking with it its empire, and Catalonia enjoyed some years of French-supported independence but was quickly returned to the Spanish Crown, except Roussillon.
A series of long and costly wars and revolts followed in the early 17th century, and began a steady decline of Spanish power in Europe from the 1640s. Controversy over succession to the throne consumed the country and much of Europe during the first years of the 18th century (see War of the Spanish Succession). It was only after this war ended and a new dynasty?the French Bourbons?was installed that a centralized Spanish state was established and the first Bourbon king Philip V of Spain in 1707 dissolved the Aragon court and unified the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon into a single kingdom of Spain, abolishing many of the regional privileges and autonomy (fueros) that had hampered the Habsburgs.
Of note during the 17th century was the cultural efflorescence now known as the Spanish Golden Age stalled the monarchy.
In the meantime, Spain lost all of its colonies in the Caribbean region and Asia-Pacific region during the 19th century, a trend which ended with the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines, Guam, Micronesia, Palau, Northern Marianas and Marshall Islands to the United States after the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Historically, the period of the mid 17th century to the mid 20th century was a failure for the Spanish state compared to northern Europe. The lingering decline of the Spanish empire was due in large part, ironically, to its spectacular earlier successes in the 15th and 16th centuries that led to the centuries of treasure fleets that had brought large quantities of silver and gold into the country from the American mines and spices and luxuries from Asia across the Pacific. These shipments engendered inflation that ate away at Spanish trades, and commerce, making the country almost totally dependant upon imports and thereby undermined its long term economic development. In fact some of the precursors of a modern view of economics was initiated by observations of this corrosive inflationary process by the School of Salamanca. The economy was effectively hollowed out in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, leaving the country with little capacity to adapt to the falling output of the American silver and gold mines through the 17th century. Making things worse were the constant wars defending the world empire against jealous rivals, internal splits and the European wars, especially the Thirty Years War and Eighty Years War where Spain's energies were constantly drained defending the Habsburg's dynastic and religious interests, including the Counter Reformation, burdening the people with taxes and military duties. This diverted massive resources away from economic activity and essential infrastructure such as roads. These factors led to a steep absolute economic and demographic decline in the middle and late 17th century, greatly aggravated by failed harvests and plagues. There was a period of slow recovery, throughout the eighteenth century, and expansion of the iron and steel industries in the Basque country, a spectacular growth (from a relatively low base) in general trade (after the opening up of free trade within the empire), and even the beginnings of a rapid industrialisation of the textile industry in Catalonia, in the last two decades of that century. But this late eighteenth century turnaround was shortlived, being totally disrupted by the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 19th century that soon triggered the loss of the American territories and plunged the country into endemic political instability which lasted until the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 - the fourth civil war in less than a century and a half. Pockets of relative modernity in Catalonia and the north would appear, but Spain's relative economic and political decline overall mirrored in general the fate of other regions of southern Europe such as Portugal, the Italian states, the Balkans, and much of central and eastern Europe, as much of the rapidly growing global oceanic trade, pioneered by the Iberian countries, was diverted to northwestern Europe.
Although cultural contacts with Asian and African nations across the Mediterranean enriched the cultural mosaic of the region in terms of food, music, literature, architecture they did little to solve the region's social and economic challenges. However the primary causes of the steep 17th century decline were above all due to the destructive economic effect of the prolonged flood of silver and gold from the Americas and the unyielding Habsburg's political and religious policies.
Furthermore Islam, as well as the Roman culture, placed little emphasis on technological education or sustainable economic development. For centuries, the region was full of frontiersmen from both Christian and Muslim sides looking for loot, revenge and destruction of their enemies. These influences were embodied later in a numerous nobility that wished only to serve in the military or government service and were not interested in industry or trade. Such an attitude was especially pronounced in the south, which held the trade monopoly with the overseas empire. The problem was recognised by the Bourbon reformers in the 18th century who tried to "ennoble" the mechanical trades but they met with little success. Indeed it goes back to Charles I's way of dealing with the popular uprising known as the Castilian War of the Communities (1520 - 1522), where he suppressed the uprising caused by the burdens of excessive foreign adventurism in Europe by reinstating the power and privileges of the nobility to win their support. In short, as the medieval nobility were steadily losing their influence in the rival states to the north (in France the monarchy did all it could to this end as they saw the nobility as dangerous rivals and a burden on the state), Habsburg policy led to a reversal of this social evolution within Spain itself reinforcing a class antithetical to trade, industry and modernisation. The Habsburg support of the Inquisition, in pursuing its Counter Reformation religious policy, suppressed the spread of modern thinking. This policy also led to an expansion of the church in Spain, making it a vast and wealthy land owner with privileges and exemptions, further narrowing the tax base. Many of its swarming clergy were drawn from the nobility, creating an interlocking dominant conservative class, often resented by the exploited ordinary people. This is testified to by plays and literature where the virtues of the ordinary people were often favourably compared against the vices of the nobility, and the offending nobility would then be accused by peasants of having less pure (because of having Moorish and Jewish) blood, and in criticism of the Church's hypocrisy. The beggary that grew rapidly from the late 16th century that forced many to live by their wits inspired the popular picaresque genre of literature.
Even after the 1898 war was over much of the previous legacy was deeply entrenched in Spanish culture and made it poorly compatible with the rest of Europe. As the flow of silver and gold from Latin America vanished at the start of the nineteenth century Spain had nothing to offer in return. However "the Disaster" of 1898, as Spanish-American War was called, led to Spain's cultural revival in which there was much critical self examination, relieved it from the burden of the last major colonies of its old empire and once again restarted the slow and difficult process of modernisation that had begun haltingly in the eighteenth century, but political stability in such a variegated land, caught between pockets of modernity and large areas of extreme rural backwardness, would elude the country for some decades yet, and was ultimately achieved only by a brutal dictatorship.
20th century
The 20th century initially brought little peace; colonization of Western Sahara, Spanish Morocco and Equatorial Guinea was attempted. A period of dictatorial rule (1923 - 1931) ended with the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic. The Republic offered political autonomy to the Basque Country and Catalonia and gave voting rights to women. However, in July 1936, against a backdrop of increasing political polarization, anti-clericalism and pressure from all sides, coupled with growing and unchecked political violence, the Republic was faced with an attempted military coup d'etat led by right-wing army generals. Although the coup initially failed, the ensuing Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 with the victory of the nationalist forces led by General Francisco Franco and supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Spanish Civil War has been called the first battle of the Second World War. After the civil war, General Francisco Franco ruled a nation exhausted politically and economically. During the Second World War Franco, under extreme pressure (Hitler had brought his army to the border of Spain after invading France), opted to remain neutral arguing that Spain could not afford a new war, but, as a concession to his civil war backer, authorised volunteers to go to the Russian front to fight the Soviet Union in an anti-Communist crusade in what came to be known as the Blue Division. The resentment of Franco's brutality towards the more modern pro-Republican regions of Catalonia and the Basque country, whose distinctive languages and identity he suppressed during his long reign, continues to fuel strong separatist movements to this day.
The only official party in Spain at the time of Franco?s regime was the Falange party founded by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera. Primo de Rivera denied his party was fascist, calling fascism fundamentaly false. His political philosophy was based on Catholicism, saying that man "carries eternal values" and carries "a soul that is capable of damning or saving itself". He called for "the greatest respect for...human dignity, for the integrity of man and for his liberty." Primo de Rivera called for what he called "organic democracy". Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera was executed in Alicante in 1936.
After World War II, being one of few surviving fascist regimes in Europe, Spain was politically and economically isolated and was kept out of the United Nations until 1955, when it became strategically important for U.S. president Eisenhower to establish a military presence in the Iberian peninsula. This opening to Spain was aided by Franco's opposition to communism. In the 1960s, more than a decade later than other western European countries, Spain began to enjoy economic growth and gradually transformed into a modern industrial economy with a thriving tourism sector. Growth continued well into the 1970s, with Franco's government going to great lengths to shield the Spanish people from the effects of the oil crisis.
Upon the death of the dictator General Franco in November 1975, his personally-designated heir Prince Juan Carlos assumed the position of king and head of state. With the approval of the Spanish Constitution of 1978 and the arrival of democracy, some regions ? Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia and Andalusia? were given far-reaching autonomy, which was then soon extended to all Spanish regions, resulting in one of the most decentralized territorial organizations in Western Europe. However, the radical nationalism in the Basque country and the terrorist group, ETA, continue to be pressing problems facing Spain.
Adolfo Suá²¥z Gonzᬥz, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo Bustelo, after an attempted coup d'é´¡t in 1981, Felipe Gonzᬥz Má²±uez (when Spain joined NATO and European Union), José arí¡ Aznar L󰥺 and José Œuis Rodrí§µez Zapatero have been prime ministers of Spain.
21st century
On March 11, 2004, a series of bombs exploded in commuter trains in Madrid, Spain. These resulted in 191 people dead and 1,460 wounded. It also had a significant effect on the upcoming elections in Spain, due in part to the ruling government's insistence that the ETA was the prime suspect in the bombings, even as the evidence of Muslim extremist terrorism rapidly emerged from the police investigation and the press.