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The University High School Band
The History and Theory of Music

The Reconquista

Columbus Before the Queen by Emanuel Leutze (1843)

To understand the Spanish Inquisition it would be necessary to discover two things that we have never dreamed of bothering about; what Spain was and what an Inquisition was.

- G. K. Chesterton

Ancient Spain was originally inhabited by Celts and Iberians before coming under the control of Carthage. After the Punic Wars in the second century BC, Spain became a Roman provice called "Hispania." When the Western Empire collapsed in the fifth century, Hispania came under the control of the Visigoths. Although the Visigoths occasionally sparred with the Franks and Romans, Spain became firmly established as a Visigothic Christian kingdom.

In the seventh century, most Spanish territory was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate and became known as the "Emirate of Córdoba," or in Arabic, "Al-Andalus," which means "Land of the Vandals." (The Vandals, you'll recall, were one of the Germanic tribes that had invaded the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries.) After the Muslim conquests, Christian populations remaining in the northern part of the peninsula fractured into a few small kingdoms: León, Castille, Navarre, and Aragon.

In the twelfth century, the Emirate of Córdoba began aggressively persecuting those who did not convert to Islam, causing a large population migration of Jews and Christians into the northern kingdoms. Through their marriage in 1469, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille united the various Spanish realms into a single kingdom, and the Caliphate was pushed entirely off the Iberian peninsula by the end of the fifteenth century. The last Muslim stronghold, Grenada, fell in 1492.

Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, requiring Spanish subjects to convert to Catholicism or depart the country. People who openly converted but continued practicing a different faith in secret were targeted by the Spanish Inquisition; those convicted were exiled or, in some cases, executed.

Now feeling rather secure, Ferdinand and Isabella decided to fund a risky mission proposed by the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus, who believed he could sail all the way around the world and open a western trade route to India and China to replace the Silk Road, from which Europe had been cut off after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Columbus failed to do this, but wound up doing something far more important, initiating the first sustained contact between the Western and Eastern hemispheres.