schooling for the poor. Philosophy,
astronomy, mathematics, and medicine
were all studied; literature, art, and archi-
tecture flourished. The Moors irrigated
arid lands and encouraged trade. Among
the elements they introduced to Spanish
culture were oranges and rice, lutes and
paper, Islamic musical and architectural
styles, and landmarks like the fortified
palace Alhambra, which still stands in
Granada.Completion of
the ReconquestIn 1036, the Umayyad dynasty ended,
with the caliphate splitting into rival king-
doms. The Christian kings in the north
took advantage of the Moors’ growing
disunity to expand into the south. In 1094,
the great national hero El Cid (Rodrigo
Díaz de Bivar) captured Valencia in south-
eastern Spain from the Moors. At the
battle of Navas de Tolosa in 1212, the
Christians under King Alfonso VIII of
Castile defeated the reigning Moorish
rulers, the Almohads, and Islamic control
of southern Spain mostly disintegrated.
Moorish rule continued in the kingdom of
Granada in the south but was increasing-
ly threatened by Christian unification. In
the 1480s, Ferdinand V of Aragón and
Isabella I of Castile, who had unified most
of Christian Spain following their mar-
riage in 1469, waged a sustained war
against Granada. In 1492, Granada fell.
After more than 700 years, Moorish rule
of Spain was over.
Ferdinand and Isabella centralized
authority, taking power away from the
nobles and putting it in the hands of the
monarchy. Viewing themselves as
guardians of the Roman Catholic faith
against heresies and false religions, they
established the Spanish Inquisition in
1478 to search out heretics, and in 1492
they required all Jews to convert or leave;
Muslims faced the same demand in 1502.
About 150,000 Jews left Spain, eventual-
ly settling in such places as the
Netherlands, the Middle East, and the
Americas. Most Muslims converted to
Christianity. But both Muslim and Jewish
converts, known as conversos, were sus-
pected of secretly retaining their former
beliefs, and as such remained targets of
the Inquisition. Infamous for its ready use
of torture and capital punishment, theInquisition was not abolished until 1834.
Determined to make Spain a great
power, Ferdinand and Isabella wanted to
build trade with East Asia, especially
China, India, and Indonesia, known col-
lectively as the Indies. To that end, they
financed the exploratory voyage of Italian
mariner Christopher Columbus, who
embarked westward in 1492 and first
brought the Spanish into contact with the
Americas. (More will be said about
Columbus later in this chapter and in
chapter 2.)
Spanish society on the eve of the
birth of Hispanic America was a unified,
autocratic, stratified, and expansionist
society, fresh from a great military victo-
ry against a rival religious and political
power, and zealously dedicated to the
preserving and expanding the reach of the
Roman Catholic faith. Yet it was also a
society that was built on millennia of
ethnic intermingling, with a unique stew
of cultural influences, a wide array of
regional differences, and a long history of
interregional conflict.THE NATIVE AMERICAN
HERITAGENative Americans are those people whose
ancestors lived in the Americas and devel-
oped indigenous societies before the
arrival of Columbus. They are also called
American Indians, in commemoration of
Columbus’s mistaken notion that the
American territories he reached were part
of the Indies, or East Asia.Origins
How the ancestors of modern Native
Americans—Paleo-Indians—arrived is
shrouded in mystery. The traditional
view is that they came principally from
the northeast Asian region of Siberia,
across what is now the Bering Strait
between Siberia and Alaska. During the
last ice age, from about 20,000 to 14,
years ago, glaciers locked up large quan-
tities of water, lowering sea levels enough
to create a land bridge, known as
Beringia. The first Americans, according
to this view, walked across Beringia from
Siberia to Alaska, spreading from there
across the Americas. Though this view is6 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY