[LINK] Far Outliers on the Two Spains

[rfmcdonald]

Far Outliers' Joel has recently posted two excerpts from the recent Imperial Spain: 1469-1716, implicitly contrasting the nature of the two polities--the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of Aragon--that united to form Spain. Aragon was Mediterranean, mercantile, constitutional; Castile was none of these things.

First, a representative paragraph on Castile.

The Reconquista was not one but many things. It was at once a crusade against the infidel, a succession of military expeditions in search of plunder, and a popular migration. All these three aspects of the Reconquista stamped themselves forcefully on the forms o Castilian life. In a holy war against Islam, the priests naturally enjoyed a privileged position. It was their task to arouse and sustain the fervour of the populace – to impress upon them their divinely appointed mission to free the country of the Moors. As a result, the Church possessed an especially powerful hold over the medieval Castile; and the particular brand of militant Christianity which it propagated was enshrined in the three Military Orders of Calatrava, Alcántara, and Santiago – three great creations of the twelfth century, combining at once military and religious ideals. But while the crusading ideal gave Castilian warriors their sense of participating in a holy mission as soldiers of the Faith, it could not eliminate the more mundane instincts which had inspired the earliest expeditions against the Arabs, and which were prompted by the thirst for booty. In those first campaigns, the Castilian noble confirmed to his own entire satisfaction that true wealth consisted essentially of booty and land. Moreover, his highest admiration came to be reserved for the military virtues of courage and honour. In this way was established the concept of the perfect hidalgo, as a man who lived for war, who could do the impossible through sheer physical courage and a constant effort of the will, who conducted his relations with others according to a strictly regulated code of honour, and who reserved his respect for the man who had won riches by force of arms rather than by the sweat of manual labour. This ideal of hidalguía was essentially aristocratic, but circumstances conspired to diffuse it throughout Castilian society, for the very character of the Reconquista as a southwards migration in the wake of the conquering armies encouraged a popular contempt for sedentary life and fixed wealth, and thus imbued the populace with ideals similar to those of the aristocracy.

Next, one on Aragon.

It was typical of the medieval Catalans that their pride in their constitutional achievements should naturally prompt them to export their institutional forms to any territories they acquired. Both Sardinia (its conquest begun in 1323) and Sicily (which had offered the Crown to Peter III of Aragon in 1282) possessed their own parliaments, which borrowed extensively from the Catalan-Aragonese model. Consequently, the medieval empire of the Crown of Aragon was far from being an authoritarian empire, ruled with an iron hand from Barcelona. On the contrary, it was a loose federation of territories, each with its own laws and institutions, and each voting independently the subsidies requested by its king. In this confederation of semi-autonomous provinces, monarchical authority was represented by a figure who was to play a vital part in the life of the future Spanish Empire. This figure was the viceroy, who had made his first appearance in the Catalan Duchy of Athens in the fourteenth century, when the duke appointed as his representative a vicarius generalis or viceregens. The viceroyalty – an office which was often, but not invariably, limited to tenures of three years – proved to be a brilliant solution to one of the most difficult problems created by the Catalan-Aragonese constitutional system: the problem of royal absenteeism. Since each part of the federation survived as an independent unit, and the King could only be present in one of these units at a given time, he would appoint in Majorca or Sardinia or Sicily a personal substitute or alter ego, who as viceroy would at once carry out his orders and preside over the country's government. In this way the territories of the federation were loosely held together, and their contacts with the ruling house of Aragon preserved.

The contrast may exaggerate the differences between the two polities, but difference there actually was. Arguably modern Catalonian nationalism is one of the more notable consequences of the difference.