Spain in 1490: Crusading Spirit and Foreign Ambitions
A Country on the Edge of Something
In 1490, Spain was less than a country and more than a kingdom. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469 had joined two crowns, but their lands kept separate parliaments, customs and currencies. What welded them together was a shared project: the ‘Reconquista’, the eight-century-long campaign to drive Muslim rulers out of the Iberian Peninsula. By 1490 only the emirate of Granada remained, and Ferdinand and Isabella were closing in on it. Spain in 1490 was therefore a country in the final phase of a holy war — militarised, religiously confident, and about to free up tens of thousands of soldiers and lesser nobles with no enemy left to fight.
Spain in 1490 was a newly unified, militantly Catholic state on the verge of finishing the Reconquista, locked in commercial rivalry with Portugal, and home to thousands of fighting men ready for new ventures.
The Catholic Monarchs and Religious Unity
Ferdinand and Isabella were known as the Reyes Católicos (the ‘Catholic Monarchs’) — a title later confirmed by Pope Alexander VI in 1494. Their rule fused crown and altar. In 1478 they won papal approval for the Spanish Inquisition, which policed the orthodoxy of conversos — Jews who had converted to Christianity. Tomás de Torquemada became its first Grand Inquisitor in 1483. The aim was a single-faith kingdom. The pace quickened in 1492: in January, Granada surrendered; in March, the monarchs ordered the expulsion of all unconverted Jews; in August, Columbus sailed. To contemporaries these felt like one connected story of Christian triumph.
This fervour mattered for what came next. The ‘crusading spirit’ was not a slogan. It was a worked-out belief that conquest and conversion went together, and that fighting unbelievers was a service to God that earned both salvation and lawful spoils. When the Reconquista ended, that mindset did not simply switch off — it looked for somewhere new to go.
Students often write that Spain in 1490 was already ‘the most powerful country in Europe’. It was not. Castile and Aragon were still legally separate. The treasury was thin, the nobility unruly, and the navy unimpressive next to Portugal’s. What Spain had was potential: a unifying ideology, a young war-veteran population, a confident monarchy and a commercial rival (Portugal) blocking the obvious route to wealth. That combination — not pre-existing greatness — explains why Spain backed Columbus.
Foreign Ambitions: The Portugal Problem
Spain’s economic horizon in 1490 was hemmed in by Portugal. For nearly a century, Portuguese captains had been pushing down the West African coast under royal sponsorship: Cape Bojador in 1434, Cape Verde in 1444, the Equator by the 1470s, the Cape of Good Hope rounded by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488. Portugal had built forts, traded for gold and enslaved Africans, and had a papal monopoly over the African route. Spices from Asia — pepper, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg — were the wealthiest trade in the world, and Portugal looked set to corner it.
For Spain, this was both an embarrassment and an opportunity. If the African route was closed, the only way to reach Asia was either north (around Russia, untested) or west across the open Atlantic. Sailing west to reach Asia became, for Spanish minds, a way to outflank Portugal without breaking treaty. It also fitted the crusading mindset: spices and gold could fund another holy war — a crusade to retake Jerusalem was openly discussed at Isabella’s court.
Money, Wool and War
The economic backdrop pushed in the same direction. Castile lived off its wool economy, with the Mesta — a powerful sheep-owners’ guild — driving merino flocks across the kingdom. Aragon controlled active Mediterranean trade through Barcelona and Valencia. Both crowns needed cash. Wars against Muslim Granada and (intermittently) against France had drained the treasury. Conquering Granada in 1492 added land and tax revenue, but it also unloaded a generation of unemployed soldiers and lesser nobles — hidalgos — who lived for honour and loot. They became the human raw material for the conquistador generation: men who knew warfare and were not interested in farming.
Castile’s wool economy and Aragon’s Mediterranean trade left Spain rich in fighting men but short of cash — gold and a route to Asia would solve both problems at once.
Older histories — including J.H. Elliott’s Imperial Spain 1469–1716 — framed Spain’s rise around the leadership of Ferdinand and Isabella. More recent work, including Matthew Restall’s Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, foregrounds the structural conditions: a militarised population, a commercial rival, and a state ideology of religious unity. Top-band Edexcel answers can hold both views together — leadership turned conditions into action, but the conditions had to exist first.
A Country Pointed Outwards
Pulling these threads together: by 1490 Spain was politically unified under two confident, devout monarchs; it was about to finish a centuries-long religious war that had militarised society; it had a commercial rival blocking the African route to wealth; and it had a class of men whose entire training had been for conquest and conversion. None of these on their own would have produced overseas empire. Together, they explain why Columbus’s pitch — rejected by Portugal, England and France — finally found backers in Castile in 1492.