Columbus before the Queen
Emanuel Leutze, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.

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 eighth century, most Spanish territory was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate and became known as the Emirate, and eventually the Caliphate, of Córdoba. Its Arabic name was "Al-Andalus" (possibly from the Germanic Vandal tribe that had settled parts of this area during the Roman Empire.) Christian populations were fractured into a few small kingdoms in the northern part of the peninsula, including León, Castille, Navarre, and Aragon.

The Mosque (later Cathedral) of Córdoba
Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas

The Caliphate of Córdoba fractured into smaller kingdoms during the eleventh century. Its successors, the Almoravids and Almohads, practiced a more fundamentalist and less tolerant Islam, driving out many of the Jews and Christians in their lands. As the influx took place, King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille were married in 1469, uniting their realms into a single kingdom. Ferdinand and Isabella went to war with the Muslim kingdoms in the south of the Iberian peninsula, and by 1492, the final Muslim stronghold, Grenada, fell.

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. Despite both sides' religious intolerance during the fifteenth century, Spain's culture became an inseperable mix of its Christian and Arabic heritage. This is especially apparent in the influence of Arab-Andalusian music on later Spanish genres, especially flamenco.

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.