Castile

Castile — the centralising, Catholic, imperial core of Spain. It was the medieval kingdom that drove the Reconquista southward over seven centuries and, through Isabella's 1469 marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon, fused the crowns into Spain, then built the empire of the Indies and pressed its language — the Castilian now simply called Spanish — and its centralism on the whole. The arid Meseta around Madrid, austere and grand (Don Quixote, the Habsburg and Bourbon courts), it raised Madrid as a planned capital concentrating Spanish administration. It remains the unifying core against which Catalonia, the Basques and the rest define themselves, and Castilian is today the world's second-most-spoken native language.

• Existed: 1037 CE – present
• Type: Entity