The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

With a feudal army forming the prototype of state power, the monarchy and warrior aristocracy retook possession of the land during the fight against the Moors. In order to continue the Reconquista, the aristocracy needed money, not food. The cash crop which could provide it was Merino wool. Common land was seized for sheep grazing, which not only had a catastrophic effect on the peasants’ food supply, but also led to soil erosion, ruining what had once been known as the ‘granary of the Roman empire’. Few people were needed to tend the sheep and the only alternative to starvation was the army and, later, the empire. In the Middle Ages Spain was estimated to have a population of about fourteen million. At the end of the eighteenth century it was a little over seven million.

Castilian authoritarianism developed from a feudal-military emphasis to one of political control by the Church. During the seven centuries of the Reconquista’s uneven course, the Church’s role had been mainly that of propagandist for military action, and even of participant. Then, in Isabella’s reign the warrior archbishop was superseded by the cardinal statesman. Nevertheless, the connection between Church and army remained close during the rapid growth of Spain’s empire when the crucifix was the shadow of the sword over half the world. The army conquered, then the Church integrated the new territories into the Castilian state.

The power which was exerted over the population was an irresistible force, backed by the threat of hell and its earthly foretaste in the form of the Inquisition. A single denouncer, an anonymous whisper from a jealous enemy, was often enough for the Holy Office, and the public confessions extracted before autos-da-fé provided a striking foretaste of the totalitarian state. In addition the Church controlled every aspect of education and placed the entire population in a protective custody of the mind by burning books to keep out religious and political heresy. It was also the Church which vaunted Castilian qualities such as endurance of suffering and equanimity in the face of death. It encouraged the idea that it was better to be a starving caballero than a fat merchant.

This Spanish Catholic puritanism had been guided by Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros, the ascetic friar promoted by Isabella to be the most powerful statesman of the age. It was basically an internal reformation. The papacy was being rejected because of its corruption, so Spain had to save Europe from heresy and Catholicism from its own weakness. As a result the clergy practised what it preached, with the exception of forgiveness and brotherly love, and sometimes issued pronouncements on property which were almost as subversive as the original teaching. Nevertheless, the Church provided spiritual justification for the Castilian social structure and was the most authoritarian force in its consolidation.

The third strain of conflict, centralism against regionalism, also developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first major revolt against the united kingdoms had a distinctly regionalist element. The rising of the comuneros in 1520 against Isabella’s grandson, the Emperor Charles V, was provoked not only by his use of the country as the treasury of his empire and by the arrogance of his Flemish courtiers but also by his disregard for local rights and customs. Much of the country had been assimilated into the Castilian kingdom through royal marriage and the Spanish Habsburgs preferred to let the Church act as the binding force of the realm.

These three determining attributes of the Castilian state, feudal, authoritarian and centralist, were strongly interlinked. This was particularly true when it came to the regional question. Castile had established a central authority in Spain and built the empire, but its administration rigidly refused to acknowledge that feudal economic relationships were growing out of date. The wars in northern Europe, the fight against the French in Italy and the destruction of the Armada meant that the imperial power, developed in less than two generations, had started to decline almost immediately. Castile had the unbending pride of a newly impoverished nobleman, who refuses to notice the cobwebs and decay in his great house and resolutely continues to visualize the grandeur of his youth. This capacity for seeing only what it wanted to see made the Castilian ruling order introverted. It refused to see that the treasures from the Americas in the churches fed nobody and that the vast quantities of precious but useless metal only undermined the country’s economic infrastructure.