Kingdom of Castile

The Christian kingdom that did most of the fighting of the Reconquista and eventually swallowed the others. Castile began as a frontier county of Leon, named for the castles built along the Duero against raiding from the south, and became a kingdom in its own right in 1065. Its history for the next two centuries is a border moving one river valley at a time. Alfonso VI took Toledo in 1085, the old Visigothic capital and the largest city in Christian Spain, which brought a population of Arabic-speaking Christians, Muslims and Jews under a Latin king and produced the translation schools that carried Greek and Arabic science into Europe. It also frightened the taifa kings into inviting the Almoravids across from Africa, which is the pattern of the whole period: each Christian advance called in a harder opponent. Alfonso VIII lost the worst defeat of the Reconquista at Alarcos in 1195 and then assembled the coalition that won its most decisive victory at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, where Castilian, Aragonese, Navarrese and Portuguese forces broke the Almohad army and opened Andalusia. He also founded the first Spanish university, at Palencia. Castile and Leon were united and separated repeatedly by inheritance until Ferdinand III joined them permanently in 1230 and went on to take Cordoba and Seville. The kingdom that resulted - the Crown of Castile - carried the language, the law and the institutions that later governed Spain and its empire, which is why Castilian is what most of the world means by Spanish. Castile's institutions were shaped by the frontier. Towns founded on conquered land were given charters granting personal freedom and land to anyone who would settle and fight, which produced a population of small freeholders unlike anything in northern Europe. The Cortes met from 1188 with representatives of those towns sitting beside the nobles and clergy, one of the earliest parliaments anywhere. And the herding of sheep across the emptied land became the Mesta, a crown-protected guild whose wool exports funded the monarchy for four centuries.

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