Sublime

There was no imperial ‘grand strategy’ to make Spain the centre of a world economy: indeed, such a plan would have been futile. Instead, Philip II devoted the ‘royal fifth’ – the monarchy’s share of the silver stream – to the struggle to uphold Spain’s pre-eminence in Europe against rivals and rebels.

The reconquest of Spain from Muslim rulers by the mid thirteenth century had encouraged the opening of a regular sea route between the Mediterranean and the ports of the English Channel and the North Sea. Lisbon, Seville and later Cadiz became the connecting links between the Atlantic and Mediterranean systems. Long before Columbus, Atlantic Iberia

While Spain at the western end of the Mediterranean was establishing its dominion in the Americas, the Ottomans had carved out, against much tougher opponents and on a far grander scale, a vast tri-continental empire, assembling in Busbecq’s awed phrase ‘the might of the whole East’.

Writing in 1533, Rodrigo Manrique, himself the son of an inquisitor general, seems to have understood that the logic his father (and so many others) had championed, rather than freeing Spain from Judaism, had instead convicted vast areas of its thought and culture as Jewish. As he put it in a letter to his exiled friend, the humanist Luis Vives, in

“Spain is not pleasing,” wrote Europe’s leading intellectual, Desiderius Erasmus in 1517, because it is full of Jews.

The royalists soon retook Toledo, and the bachelor was hanged in the public square. His treatise became a founding document of the Castilian ideology of “purity of blood,” hence of importance to anyone interested in the history of racial ideologies.

As far as her enemies were concerned, Spain’s unprecedented evangelical success had created a “Jewish” empire threatening the world with its tyranny.45