The long period of expansion of the Christian kingdoms, beginning in 722 with the Muslim defeat in the battle of Covadonga and the creation of the Christian kingdom of Asturias, only eleven years after the Moorish invasion, is called the Reconquista. As early as 739 Muslim forces were driven out of Galicia, which came to host one of Christianity's holiest sites, Santiago de Compostela. Areas in the northern mountains and around Barcelona were soon captured by Frankish and local forces, providing a base for Spain's Christians. The 1085 conquest of the central city of Toledo largely completed the reconquest of the northern half of Spain.

In 1086 the Almoravids, an ascetic Islamic sect from North Africa, conquered the divided small Moorish states in the south and launched an invasion in which they captured the east coast as far north as Saragossa. By the middle of the 12th century the Almoravid empire had disintegrated. The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 heralded the collapse of the great Moorish strongholds in the south, most notably Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. Within a few years of this nearly the whole of the Iberian peninsula had been reconquered, leaving only the Muslim enclave of Granada as a small tributary state in the south. Surrounded by Christian Castile but afraid of another invasion from Muslim northern Africa, it clung tenaciously to its isolated mountain splendour for two and half centuries. It came to an end in 1492 when Isabella and Ferdinand captured the southern city of Granada, the last Moorish city in Spain. The Treaty of Granada guaranteed religious tolerance toward Muslims while Spain's Jewish population of over 200,000 people was expelled that year. At Ferdinand's urging the Spanish Inquisition had been established in 1478. With a history of no less than the invasions of three Islamic empires (Ummayad, Almoravid and Almohad), there was a fear that Muslims might assist yet another invasion. Also, Aragonese labourers were angered by landlords' use of Moorish workers to undercut them. A 1499 Muslim uprising, triggered by forced conversions, was crushed and was followed by the first of the expulsions of Muslims, in 1502. The year 1492 was also marked by the discovery of the New World. Isabella I funded the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Ferdinand and Isabella, as exemplars of the Renaissance New Monarchs, consolidated the modernization of their respective economies that had been pursued by their predecessors and enforced reforms that weakened the position of the great magnates against the new centralized crowns. In their contests with the French army in the Italian Wars, Spanish forces under Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba eventually achieved success, against the French knights, thereby revolutionizing warfare. The combined Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, long vibrant and expansive, emerged as a European great power.

The reconquest from the Muslims is one of the most significant events in Spanish history since the fall of the Roman Empire. Arabic quickly lost its place in southern Spain's life, and was replaced by Castilian. The process of religious conversion which started with the arrival of the moors was reversed from the mid 13th century as the Reconquista was advancing south: as this happened the Muslim population either fled or forcefully converted into Catholicism, mosques and synagogues were converted into churches.

With the union of Castile and Aragón in 1479 and the subsequent conquest of Granada in 1492 and Navarre in 1512, the word Spain (España, in Spanish) began being used only to refer to the new unified kingdom and not to the whole of Hispania (the term Hispania (from which España was originally derived) is Latin and the term Iberia Greek).

Until the late fifteenth century, Castile and León, Aragón 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 16th century. It was the unification of these separate Iberian empires that became the base of what is now referred to as the Spanish Empire.



By 1512, most of the kingdoms of present-day Spain were politically unified by the crown, although not as a modern, centralized state. In contemporary minds, "Spain" was a geographic term that was more or less synonymous with Iberia, not the present-day state called Spain, although today's more restricted notion of it was beginning to gain in currency. As the old states continued to exist and function with their own laws, assemblies and administrations under one monarch, the title of the reigning Habsburgs was "The King of the Spaniards", not "Spain". The grandson of Isabella and Ferdinand, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor was called Carlos I of Castille and Aragon, extended his crown to other places in Europe and the rest of the world. The short-lived unification of Iberia was complete when Charles V's son, Philip II, became King of Portugal in 1580.

During the 16th century, early Habsburg Spain (i.e. the reigns of Charles V and Philip II) became the most powerful state in Europe. The Spanish Empire covered most territories of South and Central America, Mexico, the south of North America, some of Eastern Asia (including the Philippines), the Iberian peninsula (including the Portuguese empire invaded by the Kingdom of Spain and the Duke of Alba in 1580), southern Italy, Sicily, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. It was the first empire about which it was said that the sun did not set. It was a time of daring explorations by sea and by land, the opening up of new trade routes across oceans, conquests 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, that had a great influence on the development of Europe, but the explorers, soldiers, sailors, traders and missionaries also brought back with them a flood of knowledge that radically transformed the European understanding of the world, ending conceptions inherited from medieval times. This Renaissance intellectual transformation is best seen in the influential School of Salamanca.



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 achieved some years of French-supported independence but was quickly returned to the Spanish Crown after a bad experience under the French, except Roussillon.

A series of long and costly wars and revolts followed in the early 17th century, and began a gradual decline of Spanish power in Europe from the 1640s.

Of note during the 16th and 17th centuries was the cultural efflorescence now known as the Spanish Golden Age.

Spain had vast colonies in America (the continent), stretching from Chile and Argentina to Central America and Mexico, to some states in the present-day United States. These included all of Florida, California (see, in this regard, the Spanish missions in California), Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Then also parts of Oklahoma, Colorado and Wyoming. Thus, the Spanish founded cities like Los Angeles, California; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and San Antonio, Texas.



The middle and latter 17th century saw a grim decline and stagnation under the drifting leadership of the last Spanish Habsburgs. The lingering, "decline of Spain" after a long period of considerable growth since the Black Death in the 14th century, was partly due to its successes in the 15th and 16th centuries that gave rise to the treasure fleets across the Atlantic and the Manila galleons across the Pacific, which, combined with the earlier political, social and military adaptations, made Spain the most powerful nation in Europe from the beginning of the 16th century until the middle of the 17th century.

The rapid growth of these silver shipments in the second half of the 16th century, after the opening of the American mines, engendered inflation that undermined Spanish trades and commerce (never very large in the Iberian Peninsula, which wasn't highly populated, thus much of the manufactures and finance were diverted to peripheral parts of the Empire - when related to the Peninsula, that is to say - like Flanders or third countries like The Netherlands, northern Italy and other nearby countries like England or the German speaking States).

Worsening matters were the wars defending the global empire against envious European rivals, internal successions and the European wars (Eighty Years' War and Thirty Years' War) in fighting for the Habsburg's dynastic and religious interests (Counter Reformation).

Particularly the Thirty Years' War must be accounted as an on and off but almost continuous conflict which drained Spanish resources into war in Central Europe thus heavily burdening the Empire's economy. During this vast war, the Spanish Crown attempted to meet its needs by tampering with the silver content of the currency, leading to severe bouts of inflation and deflation. A steep economic and demographic decline in the Empire's overly burdened and plague ridden lynchpin (Castile), vast grants of land to the Church and the Habsburg's restoration of power to an increasingly self-serving nobility, also undermined the empire.

Reasons for this war were both dynastic and religious. It should be stressed at this point, for a better understanding of the phenomenon, that the moral commitment of the Spanish Empire to the Catholic Church by that time was total and the Spanish Kings often waged war more in terms of genuine faith against the rising Protestantism rather than based in any national interest.

A fog of officially sanctioned orthodoxy gradually smothered a once vibrant and diverse intellectual life. The resentment of ordinary peasants and labourers found expression in implicating the nobility of Moorish ancestry and the churchmen of hypocrisy. The growing beggary forced many to live by their wits, increasing the popularity of picaresque literature. This 17th century stagnation was mirrored throughout Europe, as the growing global oceanic trade that had been pioneered by the Iberian countries, was increasingly diverted to North-Western Europe.

Controversy over succession to the throne consumed what had become an essentially leaderless country with a vast empire, and much of Europe, during the first years of the 18th century.



It was only after this war ended and a new dynasty—the French Bourbons—was installed that a true Spanish state was established when the absolutist first Bourbon king Philip V of Spain in 1707 (declared in 1714) dissolved the parliamentarist Aragon court and unified the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon into a single, unified Kingdom of Spain, abolishing many of the regional privileges and autonomies (fueros) that had hampered Habsburg rule. The British abandoned the conflict after Utrecht (1713), which led to Barcelona's easy defeat by the "absolutists" in 1714. The National Day of Catalonia still commemorates this defeat.

Following the wars at its commencement the 18th century saw a long, slow recovery, with an expansion of the iron and steel industries in the Basque Country, a growth in ship building, some increase in trade and a recovery in food production and a gradual recovery of population in Castile. The new Bourbon monarchy drew on the French system in trying to modernize the administration and economy, in which it was more successful in the former than the latter. In the last two decades of the century, with the ending of Cadiz's royally granted monopoly, trade experienced an extraordinary growth (from a relatively low base) and even witnessed the initial steps of an industrialization of the textile industry in Catalonia. Spain's effective military assistance to the rebellious British colonies in the American War of Independence won it renewed international standing.

The reformatory efforts of Charles III and his ministers Ensenada and Floridablanca led to a profound gap between partisans of the Enlightenment (Afrancesados) and the partisans of the Old Spain. The subsequent war with France in 1793 (French Revolutionary Wars) polarized the country in an apparent reaction against the Gallicised elites. The "Afrancesados" were a minority, with a vast portion of Spain firmly attached to the "Old Order" (even though they distrusted the persons formally representing it, Charles IV, his wife Maria-Luisa de Borbon Parma and her favourite Manuel Godoy). The disastrous Spanish economic situation (and, more specifically, the ambiguous and controversial relations with the juggernaut that was Napoleonic France), led by Godoy, ended with his overthrow at the Mutiny of Aranjuez on March 17th 1808 and forced the abdication of Charles IV and his son Ferdinand, Prince of Asturias, in Bayonne later that year, in favour of Joseph Bonaparte (aka Jose I or Pepe Botella). The abdication was masterminded by Napoleon, who distrusted the uncertain ally that was House of Bourbon Spain and detested the House of Bourbon. The Afrancesados had high expectations of the nomination of Joseph Bonaparte as king, even though he was not of royal blood and a foreigner, while the rest of Spain regarded him with scorn. The new, meek, monarch was sincere in his desire to reform the country for the benefit his subjects but the fast pace of events overwhelmed him. In May 2, 1808, the people of Madrid rose in arms against the French army, commanded by Marshall Joachim Murat (the uprising was immortalized by Goya in his masterpiece The Third of May 1808). Since this was the first and sole time in Modern Spain's history that the country was in foreign hands, it can be regarded as Spain's first nationalistic rebellion. The ensuing repression was swift and merciless, but it could not avoid the fact that Napoleonic rule in Spain would be anything but peaceful. A massively destructive war known to the Spanish as the War of Independence and to the English as the Peninsular War followed, savaging the country with its cruelty. With the exception of the Battle of Bailen (July 18-22, 1808), where the Spanish army was the first to defeat a Napoleonic army in Europe, there were few ranged battles. Napoleon was forced to personally intervene, bringing the Spanish army to its knees and driving the Anglo-Portuguese forces out, but triggering a massive guerrilla war as a result. The guerrillas, aided by Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese army, were effective, their action combined with Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia, led to the ousting of the French from Spain in 1814, and the return of king Ferdinand VII (aka El Deseado).

The French invasion had numerous consequences for Spain. The war proved disastrous for Spain's economy, reversing the improvements of the late 18th century. It also brought a political and territorial legacy, but would also leave a deeply divided country prone to great political instability for over a century. In 1812, the Liberal Courts of Cádiz redacted a Constitution, bringing to the country a new form of government, and one by which future monarchs would have to rule, more or less willingly. The power vacuum between 1808 and 1814 had enabled local juntas in the Spanish colonies in America to rule independently. Starting as early as 1809, the continent started freeing itself from Spanish rule; by 1825 with the exceptions of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and a number of Pacific Islands Spain had lost all its colonies in Latin America. The Trienio Liberal (1820-1823).

At the end of the 19th century, Spain lost all of its remaining old colonies in the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific regions, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines, and Guam to the United States after unwittingly and unwillingly being thrust into the Spanish-American War of 1898. In 1899 Spain sold its remaining Pacific possessions to Germany.

"The Disaster" of 1898, as the Spanish-American War was called, gave increased impetus to Spain's cultural revival (Generation of '98) in which there was much critical self examination, and relieved it from the burden of its last major colonies. However, political stability in such a dispersed and variegated land, caught between pockets of modernity and large areas of extreme rural backwardness and strongly differentiated regional identities and deep divisions over legitimacy originating from the Napoleonic period, would elude the country for some decades yet, and was ultimately imposed only by a brutal dictatorship in 1939.



The 20th century initially brought little peace; Spain played a minor part in the scramble for Africa, with the colonization of Western Sahara, Spanish Morocco and Equatorial Guinea. However the area assigned to Spain was mostly abrupt terrain populated by warlike tribesmen with an age-old history of fighting outsiders. A poorly planned and led advance into the interior due to political pressure led to military disaster in Morocco in 1921. This contributed to discrediting the monarch and worsened political instability. A period of dictatorial rule under General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–1931) ended with the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic. The Republic offered political autonomy to the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia (where the autonomy did not have any effect due to the civil war) and gave voting rights to women.

In the elections in February 1936, the left-wing coalition Popular Front won a narrow victory over the right-wing National Front coalition, but tension continued to mount with the destruction of Church property and an increasing number of politically-motivated murders, including that of prominent right-wing leader José Calvo Sotelo. In July, a number of generals attempted a military takeover which they had been planning for months. The coup failed to topple the government and the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) ensued. After nearly three years of bitter struggle, Nationalist forces led by General Francisco Franco emerged victorious with the support of Germany and Italy. The Republican side was supported by the Soviet Union and Mexico, but was crucially left isolated through the British-led policy of Non-Intervention. The Spanish Civil War has been called the first battle of the Second World War. Spanish involvement in the Second World War was in fact a continuation of its civil war, as the ideological conflicts involved had much in common (but also some important differences), despite Franco's official policy of neutrality and non-belligerency during the years of Axis success. In 1940, Francisco Franco and his brother-in-law, the foreign minister, Ramón Serrano Súñer, met Adolf Hitler in Hendaye (then in German-occupied France) to discuss Spanish participation in World War II as part of the Axis. This short trip across the border was the only time Franco left Spain during his long dictatorship. No agreement was reached and Spain remained neutral though sympathetic.

Over a hundred thousand highly motivated Spanish Civil War veterans were to give both sides the benefit of their experience throughout the Second World War in Europe, the Eastern Front and North Africa. A number of the most effective forces in the French Resistance were Spanish as was the 9th Armoured Company that spearheaded Général Leclerc's 2nd Armoured Division's liberation of Paris. On the other side, about 40,000 Spaniards fought against the Soviet Union in the Wehrmacht's División Azul (Blue Division).

The only legal party under Franco's regime was the Falange española tradicionalista y de las JONS formed in 1937 by the forceable fusion of the pseudo-fascist Falange and the monarchist Carlist movement. The party emphasized anti-Communism, Catholicism, nationalism, and imperial expansion and was one of the regime's major instruments of internal control.

After World War II, being one of few surviving authoritarian regimes in Western Europe, Spain was politically and economically isolated and was kept out of the United Nations until 1955, when it became strategically important for US president Eisenhower to establish a military presence in the Iberian peninsula. Eisenhower, signed a treaty with Franco in 1953 to build the military air base in Torrejón de Ardoz (this base had nuclear weapons) some 20km east of Madrid, the naval base of Rota, Cádiz (also with nuclear weapons in submarines), and the air bases of Morón de la Frontera, Seville, and Zaragoza. This opening to Spain was aided by Franco's opposition to Communism. In the 1960s, Spain began to enjoy economic growth (Spanish miracle) which gradually transformed it 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 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, Navarra— were given complete financial autonomy, and many — Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia and Andalusia— were given some political autonomy, which was then soon extended to all Spanish regions, resulting in what is regarded as the most decentralized territorial organization in Western Europe. In the Basque Country, moderate Basque nationalism coexists with radical nationalism supportive of the terrorist group ETA.



On January 1 1999 Spain adopted the Euro as its national currency.

Ever since the current Constitution was passed in 1978, Spain has had 5 Presidentes del Gobierno (Prime Ministers) as of September 2006: Adolfo Suárez González (1977-1981) who won the election for the Unión de Centro Democrático (UCD, now extinct), Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo Bustelo (1981-1982) also for the UCD (under his presidency there was an attempted coup d'état on 23 February 1981), Felipe González Márquez (1982-1996) who won four consecutive elections heading the Partido Socialista Obrero Español ticket (PSOE), during his administrations Spain joined NATO and European Union) and then José María Aznar López (1996-2004) who won two consecutive elections for the Partido Popular (PP). Last in this list is current Presidente del Gobierno José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-Incumbent) again for the PSOE.