Geography:

Modern day Portugal and Spain make up the Iberian Peninsula. Iberia is surrounded by water except for its northern boundary where the Pyrenees divide Spain and France. To the east lays the Mediterranean Sea and to the west lays the Atlantic Ocean. The southernmost point of Spain is separated from northern Africa by the Strait of Gibraltar, which is about 64 kilometres long and varies in width from about thirteen to thirty-nine kilometres.

Iberia was invaded in 711 by Muslim armies that succeeded in conquering most of the southern regions of the peninsula within seven years. This began a 700-year intermittent struggle for control over Iberia between the Christians and the Muslims who inhabited the southern portion. The most active years of conflict were between 850 and 1250. During this period the struggles were named the Reconquista and were accompanied by the religious zeal of the crusades.

The Reconquista was at once a religious crusade against the Moors, a succession of military expeditions in search of plunder, and a popular migration. Powerful members of the clergy participated fully in this Reconquista by creating popular support for the enterprise, lobbying for support from the various monarchies, and retaining their own private armies to conquer land for their Church.

The Reconquista (timeline) was also a blend of private and public enterprise. It was common for the Iberian monarchies to make contracts with the leaders of military expeditions. These contracts, known as Capitulaciones, reserved certain rights of sovereignty to the Crown over the newly conquered territories in exchange for a guarantee of mercedes, or rewards, for the leader of the expedition. Usually the mercedes consisted of the Crown granting a hereditary title that included special military powers and rights of government over the new frontier to the expedition's leader. It also included the right to any spoils of conquest such as movable property and captives.

Two essential components of the Capitulaciones were the religious purpose of Christianizing the peninsula and the royal sanctioning of the endeavour. Without these the expedition would lack any moral or legal authority. All of the parties involved benefited from placing this contract in written form in order to preserve the contract accurately to insure inheritance. The noble families that gained land under this system would have to prove their title by presenting their copy of the Capitulacione whenever there was a change in the monarchy. This system would become essential in the "New World" to defining the Crown's relationship with the various conquistadors by the sixteenth century.

The Iberian Kingdoms:

In the early fifteenth century five independent kingdoms occupied the Iberian Peninsula: Portugal, Navarre, Castile, Aragon, and the last Muslim stronghold of Granada. In 1469 the Crown of Castile was united with the Crown of Aragon through the marriage of Isabella, heiress of Castile, to Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon. In 1474 Isabella ascended to the throne and was crowned queen and by 1479 the nation we now know as "Spain" first appeared as the "Union of the Crowns." It was this union that would finally succeed in expelling the Muslims from Granada in 1492. In 1512, the union annexed the small Kingdom of Navarre and the boundaries for modern Spain were established. Now that Isabella and Ferdinand had succeeded in establishing political stability to their kingdom, they could direct their considerable resources to a policy of overseas expansion.

Iberian Society: The City, People & Economy

The City:

Valencia's Silk Exchange & Consulate of the Sea 15 c.

The city was a powerful political and economic unit in Mediterranean civilisation. Because of dynastic change and conflict within the monarchies, Iberians placed more emphasis on the regionalism of neighbourhood, city and province when defining their identity than on any nationality. Cities were bound to the territory surrounding them and important ecclesiastical, commercial, and social organisations all had their headquarters in the cities. Hence even the noble magnates, whose wealthy estates were located in rural areas, still maintained their chief residences and social ties in the cities. Port cities like Barcelona, Lisbon, Valencia, and Cartagena became thriving commercial trade centres that competed with the powerful Italian merchants of Venice and Genoa, especially in the Eastern spice trade. These port cities would be the leaders of Iberian overseas expansion with their outward focus on trade as exporters of wool, textiles, and iron, and importers of spices, silk and luxury goods.

The People:

The Nobility:

At the higher stratum of Iberian society a few great "grandee" families bore the titles of duke, marquis, or count. These elite families were the magnates who controlled the majority of the peninsula's land in the form of large estates. The families of the lesser nobility varied greatly in the extent of their wealth and were distinguished by the title of don and a family coat of arms. The lesser nobility was made up of the younger sons of the ancient families or of the recently ennobled bourgeoisie. They usually had rural estates and were involved in commercial affairs and, like the Church, they were exempt from all taxes by the Crown.

In Castile the concept of a gentleman, a hidalgo, was essentially aristocratic. A hidalgo was a man who lived for the Reconquest of Christian Iberia. He could do the impossible through sheer physical courage and a constant effort of will. He conducted himself in accordance to a strict code of honour and respected men who had won riches by force of arms rather then manual labour. Eventually this concept of the hidalgo would spread across all segments of society as the ideal of masculinity. This ideal was one that would eventually have far-reaching consequences in the New World.

The Clergy:

The clergy were divided into the secular hierarchy and the regular orders. The secular hierarchy represented the parish priest up to the cathedral chapter. The seculars were very loosely organised with members accepting the assignments that suited them. They often had to rely on their own economic activity to support themselves, and operated under the loosest supervision. By contrast, members of the regular orders were better educated, recruited from wealthier and nobler families and held considerable disdain for the seculars. They were strictly organised, better endowed, and each order was fairly autonomous from the others. Often this led to conflict and competition between the orders creating well-known rivalries like the one between the Franciscans and the Dominicans.

The Church itself was immensely powerful and shared with the nobility the privilege of exemption from the taxes levied by the Crown. Bishops, abbots and cathedral chapters all owned large demesnes that financed the building of fortresses and the maintenance of private armies. The church was militant in nature and involved itself directly in the struggles that surrounded the throne. This militant nature evolved over the 700 years of the Reconquista when the Church played a major role in the settlement of the lands reclaimed from the Muslims.

The Commoners:

Commoners made up 90 per cent of the Iberian population. At the lowest level were the small farmers or herds men who were unskilled and paid various rents and duties to their lords: nobles, clergy or the Crown. In the coastal kingdoms, like Portugal or Aragon, where there were long seafaring traditions, Captains were a part of the middle level of commoners. Skilled agricultural workers, artisans, shopkeepers, and petty traders also belonged to the middle level of commoners. Above this group were the professionals and the merchants, "persons of independent means." The professionals were recruited from the lesser nobility or were members of the wealthy bourgeois families. They were trained for the Church, the law, or medicine. Most had university degrees or held bureaucratic office. They shared the attitudes and the lifestyles of nobility and could generally gain noble status if they did not already have it. Merchants, unlike the petty traders of the lower commoners, were usually involved in the long distance wholesale trade. They were literate and propertied, and aspired to merging into the nobility.

The Economy:

The Iberian Peninsula is dominated by mountains and lacks arable land except in a few plateau areas and in some coastal regions. Hence the Iberian kingdoms could not produce enough cereal crops. They became dependent on imported grain and manufactured goods from the Genoese and north Europeans in exchange for speciality goods like wool, wine, fruit, cork, olive oil, salt, and fish.

The Kingdom of Castile in the interior of Iberia was primarily a pastoral economy and a producer of high-quality wool. Traders from the Italian republic of Genoa monopolised the Castilian wool exports and this trading relationship between Genoa and Castile foreshadowed the large role that the Genoese would play in Iberian exploration. An example of this was Christopher Columbus, a native of Genoa who worked in the Portuguese sugar trade long before his voyage of exploration for the Spanish in 1492. Coastal kingdoms like Portugal and Aragon engaged in significant overseas trade thanks to the thriving port cities of Lisbon, Valencia, Barcelona, Oporto, and Cartagena. In the early fifteenth century Portugal began its voyages of exploration and benefited from the slaves, gold, ivory, and sugars that these voyages supplied.

The basic unit of this overseas trade was the "company." The "company" was a mercantile institution was primarily a partnership between an investor, who would stay at home and the other partner known as the "factor," who would travel to do the buying and selling of usually a single lot of merchandise. If a venture were successful the investors would probably reinvest and continue their partnership. Often the partners were related by familial ties or regional loyalty, and involved members of all the social classes.

Once overseas expansion began in the Atlantic and along the African coast, the institution of the company developed a subsidiary institution known as the "factory." During the Portuguese push down the African coast they established a number of factories that were small trading forts usually located on islands, garrisoned by a few Portuguese that offered the various companies' factors a safe place to carry out trade with the local people. The factory system was an excellent way of establishing a permanent commercial presence in an area without the cost of conquest or settlement.

When the Portuguese did pursue colonisation and settled in an area they used a system known as the donatary captaincy. The Spanish used a similar system in the "New World" called the encomienda. Both systems drew upon the medieval precedent of the Iberian lordly domain (senhorio) but adapted it to the new imperial goal of capitalistic agricultural development. A nobleman would be granted the hereditary title to the land, economic concessions, and a certain amount of political and judicial autonomy; in exchange he agreed to administer and develop that territory. The Crown worked closely with individuals and companies alike because the factory and the donatary captaincy/encomienda cost the Crown very little at the initial and most risky stage of exploration and development. Thus all three commercial institutions provided time-tested mechanisms for investing capital, financing the expeditions, and development of new territories that would drive the explorations and colonisation of Africa, the Atlantic, Asia, and eventually the "New World."

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