1 00:00:01,580 --> 00:00:07,700 Ah, Spain. A land marred by the scars of its past. A land almost synonymous with empire, 2 00:00:08,099 --> 00:00:12,320 having been under the yoke of so many foreign rulers that even they began to lose count. 3 00:00:12,720 --> 00:00:17,039 A land whose very own empire would stand the test of time and dramatically change the course 4 00:00:17,039 --> 00:00:23,019 of Mesoamerican history, and yet somehow managed to avoid two world wars, all this and more in... 5 00:00:23,019 --> 00:00:59,469 So, you've probably heard that Spain was part of the Roman Empire, but before they arrived, 6 00:00:59,570 --> 00:01:03,689 the Iberian Peninsula already had several thriving civilizations, most of whom were 7 00:01:03,689 --> 00:01:08,030 thoroughly supplanted by Indo-European Celts, who had migrated south from France. 8 00:01:08,730 --> 00:01:12,609 Greeks and the Phoenicians had sailed these waters for centuries, setting up small trade 9 00:01:12,609 --> 00:01:13,530 cities and colonies. 10 00:01:14,209 --> 00:01:18,209 The Carthaginians, who were descendants of the Phoenicians themselves, set up a large 11 00:01:18,209 --> 00:01:23,829 trade empire between 650 and 300 BC, including parts of southern Spain, before coming into 12 00:01:23,829 --> 00:01:28,269 conflict with the Romans, who by the 3rd century were still a fledging republic, just toying 13 00:01:28,269 --> 00:01:31,209 with the idea of conquering outside of Italy. 14 00:01:31,209 --> 00:01:35,269 This all changed with the Punic Wars in which Rome came out on top with a slip victory over 15 00:01:35,269 --> 00:01:37,709 the Carthaginian's leader, Hannibal. 16 00:01:37,709 --> 00:01:42,109 The people of Roman Spain became thoroughly Romanized, a process accelerated by immigration 17 00:01:42,109 --> 00:01:46,769 from other parts of the empire, Roman law, religion, and the language became thoroughly 18 00:01:46,769 --> 00:01:52,810 entrenched into society and culture, because, when in Rome, I guess. 19 00:01:52,810 --> 00:01:56,849 Hispania fell to various Germanic and nomadic invaders in the 5th century, competing for 20 00:01:56,849 --> 00:01:58,230 land and dominance. 21 00:01:58,230 --> 00:02:02,769 The Suevi Vandals and Alans carved out short-lived kingdoms for themselves before being completely 22 00:02:02,769 --> 00:02:04,989 overrun by the Visigoths. 23 00:02:04,989 --> 00:02:10,750 In 587, the Visigoth king Reccared was converted from an Aryan Christian to a Roman Catholic, 24 00:02:10,750 --> 00:02:13,889 with the rest of his kingdom soon to follow. 25 00:02:13,889 --> 00:02:22,750 Visigoths fought for power and control in the region with the Byzantines, remnants of the old Roman Empire in the east, and also got pushed out of most of southern Gaul by the Franks. 26 00:02:23,169 --> 00:02:29,110 But they did manage to consolidate their hold on the whole of Iberia, save for the Basque region, by the year 624. 27 00:02:29,870 --> 00:02:41,069 But Visigoth Spain was soon to be facing a new enemy 4,000 kilometers away in Medina, where from 622 the birth of Islam began to spread through the conquest of Muhammad and the Rashidun Caliphate. 28 00:02:41,069 --> 00:02:49,409 The empire was further expanded into previously Byzantine holdings in Africa, with remarkable efficiency and speed under the Umayyad dynasty. 29 00:02:49,990 --> 00:03:02,169 In 711, a Berber army crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and conquered the fractured Visigoths, slowly invading further north, halted only by the defeat by the Franks at the Battle of Tours and the Spaniards at the Battle of Covadagna. 30 00:03:02,770 --> 00:03:08,770 The Umayyad dynasty's collapse at the hands of the Obasi allowed one Umayyad fugitive to claim the Spanish lands for himself. 31 00:03:08,770 --> 00:03:14,830 North, first as the Emory and then the Caliphate of Cordoba, also called the Al-Andalus. 32 00:03:14,830 --> 00:03:19,830 It is around the 8th and 900s that a centuries-long process called the Reconquista began in which 33 00:03:19,830 --> 00:03:24,530 Spanish Christians warred against the Muslims with the goal of driving them out of Spain. 34 00:03:24,530 --> 00:03:29,530 The Spaniards and the Portuguese saw the Muslims as outsiders, both in culture and religion, 35 00:03:29,530 --> 00:03:33,189 and very little integration happened between the two classes. 36 00:03:33,189 --> 00:03:37,289 The Reconquistas saw the Christian domains in the North increase in size and the southern 37 00:03:37,289 --> 00:03:41,830 Muslim kingdoms fracture into the Taifa state, until the Almohads united them again in the 38 00:03:41,830 --> 00:03:43,289 12th century. 39 00:03:43,289 --> 00:03:47,610 The Almohads put what would be the last nail in Muslim Spain's coffin when they implemented 40 00:03:47,610 --> 00:03:52,469 a strict kill-or-convert decree throughout their domains, causing a mass exodus of Jews 41 00:03:52,469 --> 00:03:56,210 and Christians from Cordoba into the northern Christian kingdoms. 42 00:03:56,210 --> 00:04:01,169 A crusade was led against the Almohads from 1212 to 1250 by an alliance of Spanish kingdoms 43 00:04:01,169 --> 00:04:04,210 driving the Moors to a land known as the Granada. 44 00:04:04,210 --> 00:04:08,469 Castile and Aragon, two of the most powerful kingdoms in Hispaniolia, united with the marriage 45 00:04:08,469 --> 00:04:12,710 of Ferdinand and Isabel to create the Kingdom of Spain, which also conquered their last 46 00:04:12,710 --> 00:04:16,829 remnant of Muslim Granada and the Basque Kingdom of Navarre. 47 00:04:16,829 --> 00:04:20,410 Around the same time, an Italian sailor was bumping around from country to country seeking 48 00:04:20,410 --> 00:04:22,829 sponsorship for a voyage to the East Indies. 49 00:04:22,829 --> 00:04:27,370 Finally, on meeting Isabel and Ferdinand, and after about two years of indecisiveness, 50 00:04:27,370 --> 00:04:32,310 King Ferdinand agreed to fund Columbus' voyage, in which he discovered the Americas. 51 00:04:32,310 --> 00:04:37,389 by discovered you mean after Viking life Ericsson and the people who already lived there. 52 00:04:37,389 --> 00:04:41,569 The Spanish Empire in the Americas would change the world forever, at first propelling Spain 53 00:04:41,569 --> 00:04:43,370 to superpower status. 54 00:04:43,370 --> 00:04:46,949 But as soon would become evident, the discovery of new lands and the building of an empire 55 00:04:46,949 --> 00:04:51,009 wasn't enough to occupy the minds of the Spanish crown, and so turned their attention 56 00:04:51,009 --> 00:04:52,889 to religious hegemony. 57 00:04:52,889 --> 00:04:56,569 First decreeing the expulsion of Jews and soon followed by the Muslims, the so-called 58 00:04:56,569 --> 00:05:01,329 converteric spell laws in Spain laid the foundations of the Spanish Inquisition. 59 00:05:01,329 --> 00:05:06,149 nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. This period of Spanish history is notoriously bloody, 60 00:05:06,449 --> 00:05:11,610 even by European standards. The Habsburgs had cemented their claim on Spain as soon as they 61 00:05:11,610 --> 00:05:16,089 could by marrying into the Spanish family. The Habsburgs ruled over large swaths of Europe in 62 00:05:16,089 --> 00:05:20,569 a concerted and somewhat neurotic attempt to keep inheritance within the family, and they were 63 00:05:20,569 --> 00:05:25,889 notorious for their high decree of inbreeding. Habsburg Spain was also a political failure, 64 00:05:26,370 --> 00:05:30,990 drowning in inflation from an influx of American raw materials. Constant warfare and 65 00:05:30,990 --> 00:05:35,189 piracy took its toll on the empire, which lost its early lead for dominance in Europe 66 00:05:35,189 --> 00:05:38,449 to France, Britain, and Russia. 67 00:05:38,449 --> 00:05:42,209 The Habsburgs lost their hold on Spain after the War of Spanish Succession, in which a 68 00:05:42,209 --> 00:05:45,990 French house, the House of Bourbon, took over the Spanish crown. 69 00:05:45,990 --> 00:05:50,629 During the Napoleonic Wars in the 19th century, the Spanish army found themselves ill-prepared, 70 00:05:50,629 --> 00:05:54,790 as they had funneled their entire war treasury into preparation for a naval engagement with 71 00:05:54,790 --> 00:05:57,170 Britain, its main economic rival. 72 00:05:57,170 --> 00:06:01,129 The Spanish army was so soundly defeated by Napoleon that in the end they amounted to 73 00:06:01,129 --> 00:06:05,329 nothing more than unorganized skirmishes and guerrilla warfare. 74 00:06:05,329 --> 00:06:09,490 Napoleon briefly had his brother crowned king of Spain, but with his defeat in 1813 the 75 00:06:09,490 --> 00:06:14,329 monarchy was restored, with rejection of the first Spanish constitution. 76 00:06:14,329 --> 00:06:18,290 This led to a turbulent time in Spain, with revolutions and counter revolutions for the 77 00:06:18,290 --> 00:06:20,290 next half century. 78 00:06:20,290 --> 00:06:24,769 In 1873 the monarchy was abolished and the first Spanish republic founded. 79 00:06:24,769 --> 00:06:30,050 The Italian king they borrowed, famously abdicating while declaring the Spanish ungovernable. 80 00:06:30,050 --> 00:06:34,089 But with the Spanish-American War and the Cuban Ten Years War, Spain became a shell 81 00:06:34,089 --> 00:06:38,449 of the empire it once was, losing all its holdings in America and the Philippines. 82 00:06:38,449 --> 00:06:43,269 With the outbreak of World War I, Spain declared neutrality and experienced an economic boom, 83 00:06:43,269 --> 00:06:47,209 stifled only by the Spanish flu and insurrections in Morocco. 84 00:06:47,209 --> 00:06:50,949 The instability and lack of centralized control would eventually lead to the Spanish Civil 85 00:06:50,949 --> 00:06:56,670 war, between competing factions of nationalists and republicans who split the nation in two. 86 00:06:56,670 --> 00:07:01,310 The civil war is a long and grueling topic that has such complex motives and ideologies 87 00:07:01,310 --> 00:07:04,370 not unlike those happening in the rest of Europe in the 1900s. 88 00:07:04,370 --> 00:07:08,149 So complex in fact that it deserves its own video, which is why you should go to my friend 89 00:07:08,149 --> 00:07:11,509 over at Feature History who has made just that. 90 00:07:11,509 --> 00:07:15,730 Francisco Franco and his dictatorship which presided over the second world war created 91 00:07:15,730 --> 00:07:21,410 what we now call Nationalist Spain, an ideology not unlike Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, 92 00:07:21,410 --> 00:07:25,829 conceding however the official neutrality of Spain during the war. 93 00:07:25,829 --> 00:07:31,230 With his death in 1975, he decreed the restoration of the monarchy with full autocratic powers, 94 00:07:31,230 --> 00:07:35,589 but was marred in King Juan Carlos' decision to seek a constitutional monarchy for the 95 00:07:35,589 --> 00:07:37,269 kingdom. 96 00:07:37,269 --> 00:07:41,850 Spain joined the European Union in 1986, which helped stabilize the economy and industry 97 00:07:41,850 --> 00:07:43,129 in the new government. 98 00:07:43,129 --> 00:07:47,110 The boom in tourism and economic growth in Spain were unprecedented at one point, becoming 99 00:07:47,110 --> 00:07:49,990 Europe's fourth largest economy. 100 00:07:49,990 --> 00:07:54,430 This came to a grinding halt with the 2008 global recession, which saw a property bubble 101 00:07:54,430 --> 00:07:59,649 burst in Spain in particular, creating a devastating long-term economic hardship. 102 00:07:59,649 --> 00:08:03,689 Spain also currently has a few other issues on its plate, including a secessionist movement 103 00:08:03,689 --> 00:08:08,310 in Catalonia, a historically distinct culture region on the southeast, and the European 104 00:08:08,310 --> 00:08:11,290 migrant crisis beginning in 2015. 105 00:08:11,290 --> 00:08:16,370 Modern Spain is still a haven of tourism with millions visiting each year, as well as an 106 00:08:16,370 --> 00:08:21,589 important political entity in Western Europe, working hard for industrial growth and slowly 107 00:08:21,589 --> 00:08:28,139 healing the wounds of its recent history. 108 00:08:28,139 --> 00:08:32,440 Thank you so much for watching everyone, firstly I want to thank Feature History for collaborating 109 00:08:32,440 --> 00:08:36,879 with me on this one, we've had our channels grow side by side since the very beginning 110 00:08:36,879 --> 00:08:41,519 and he covers topics way better than the kind of short summaries that I do and he's probably 111 00:08:41,519 --> 00:08:44,820 what you're looking for if you really enjoy great topics with a good depth of 112 00:08:44,820 --> 00:08:49,279 history. I'll include a link to his video down below which I collaborated on. Also 113 00:08:49,279 --> 00:08:52,919 be sure to like and subscribe and follow me on Twitter. Also there's been some 114 00:08:52,919 --> 00:08:56,500 requests for some of my characters to be on t-shirts and things like that so I've 115 00:08:56,500 --> 00:09:01,980 opened up a merchandise store which will be updated slowly each month with each 116 00:09:01,980 --> 00:09:05,279 country that I cover and with some of the characters that are on the channel. 117 00:09:05,279 --> 00:09:09,679 So far we've had France and Germany up available now and there'll be more 118 00:09:09,679 --> 00:09:16,299 coming soon. I'll have all the usual links down below. Until next time guys.