Nearly ninety years ago Karl Marx observed that the knowledge of Spanish history in his time was altogether inadequate. ‘There is perhaps’, he wrote, ‘no country except Turkey, so little known to and so falsely judged by Europe as Spain.’ And he went on to explain that this was because historians ‘instead of viewing the strength and resources of these peoples in their provincial and local organization have drawn at the source of their court histories’. These remarks still have a good deal of truth in them. The standard histories of the Peninsula give a false impression of the events they describe. And this is due chiefly to one thing. Spain, both economically and psychologically, differs so greatly from the other countries of Western Europe that the words of which most history is made – feudalism, autocracy, liberalism, Church, Army, Parliament, trade union and so forth – have quite other meanings there to what they have in France or England. Only if this is made clear, only if each piece of the political and economic machine is separately described, only if the provincial questions are fully gone into and the interactions of all the local and sectional organizations on one another are brought to light will anything like a true impression be arrived at.

The first point to be noticed is the strength of provincial and municipal feeling. Spain is the land of the patria chica. Every village, every town is the centre of an intense social and political life. As in classical times, a man’s allegiance is first of all to his native place, or to his family or social group in it, and only secondly to his country and government. In what one may call its normal condition Spain is a collection of small, mutually hostile or indifferent republics held together in a loose federation. At certain great periods (the Caliphate, the Reconquista, the Siglo de Oro) these small centres have become infected by a common feeling or idea and have moved in unison: then when the impetus given by this idea declined, they have fallen apart and resumed their separate and egoistic existence. It is this that has given its spectacular character to Spanish history.