As we approach what is today known as indigenous people’s day, it is important that we reflect on all that was happening in 1492 and what it meant for Spain.
1492 was the year that Columbus sailed to the Bahamas and touched off the rape and pillage of the Americas. But his adventure also brought together human populations that had been isolated from one another for millennia, bringing tomatoes, potatoes, corn, and avocados to Europe along with the gold and silver stolen from the Aztecs and the Incas.
But for Spain 1492 also brought the final reconquest of Moslem Andalucia after seven centuries where European Christianity had been replaced by Islam. In so doing Spain was faced with the question of what to do with the Convivencia that had been established in many parts of the country between Christianity, Islam, and the Jewish population that had been settled in Spain by the Roman following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
The Moors brought to Spain advanced study of classical Greek and Roman texts, as well as advances in mathematics, architecture, and agronomy. The Jews led the establishment of some of the earliest universities in Europe with significant contributions in medicine, philosophy and finance.
In 1492 a triumphant Christian Spain stood at the precipice of a golden age that would thrust Spain into a dominant position as the first real global power reaching from Spain to the Netherlands, Italy, Africa, the New World and the Philippines. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabelle of Castille united Iberia politically as no prior state had done since the time of the Romans. The New World, political unity and reconquest together constituted what the Spanish came to believe was a Year of Miracles.
But instead of embracing the diversity of cultures that had brought it success, Spain chose to turn inward. The Inquisition sought to seek out and burn those individuals who persisted in following their religions , either Judaism or Islam, or no religion at all. Jews and later Moors were expelled from the country or forced into conversion as conversos who were always suspect of heresy. As the fires of the auto de fe swept across the peninsula, they consumed not only the human bodies of heretics but the ideas that elsewhere in Europe would give rise to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Science and capitalism advanced across Europe, but not in Spain. It became a backwater, preyed on by imperialists like Napolean and the rise of fascism until a bloody civil war in the 1930s cemented its pariah state status.
While Spain is nothing like that today, the lessons for our own suffering country are obvious. If we truly do want a golden age, it must be an age that provides miracles for all of us.
David Parrella lives in Buckland.