Iberian Colonialism and its roots in holy war

Long before Columbus set sail, Iberia had already lived through cycles of unity, collapse, and reconquest that would shape its identity for centuries. Under Rome, Hispania was a prosperous province, knit together by roads, cities, and law. When the Western Empire fell, the Visigoths inherited this framework and built a kingdom centered on Catholic faith and royal authority. In the councils of Toledo, kings sat alongside bishops, blending political and spiritual authority in a manner unusual in Europe. To be Iberian was already to see Catholicism not as a personal devotion alone, but as the backbone of national life.

This world shattered in 711. Muslim armies, led by Tariq ibn Ziyad, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and crushed the Visigothic host at Guadalete. Within a few years, the Umayyad Caliphate controlled nearly all of Iberia, founding Al-Andalus, a society of dazzling sophistication in agriculture, architecture, and philosophy. For the Christians, however, this was not merely foreign occupation but divine judgment. Their cities Toledo, Seville, Córdoba were lost to a rival civilization, and the survival of the faith itself seemed at stake.

Yet Christianity endured. In the rugged mountains of Asturias, León, and Navarre, small Christian enclaves clung to independence. From these precarious strongholds, Iberian identity hardened in struggle. Warfare became a permanent condition: raids into Muslim territory, counter-raids in return, border settlements fortified by militias. Out of this environment emerged the hidalgos, men of honor who lived for war, seeking not luxury but land, glory, and salvation. Unlike the knights of France, whose culture revolved around feudal courts and chivalric tournaments, Iberian warriors defined themselves through ceaseless frontier combat.

The Church sanctified this struggle. Clergy blessed banners before battle, offered indulgences for campaigns, and preached that retaking Christian lands was not merely a right but a divine mandate. The Mozarabic Christians who lived under Muslim rule as dhimmi, taxed and restricted but still faithful, reinforced the conviction that Catholicism must never again bow to alien rule. Iberian Catholicism thus became harsher, more exclusivist, and more militant than elsewhere in Europe. Here, religion was survival, and survival demanded the sword.

This crucible forged a culture where the throne and altar were inseparable. The Visigothic unity of king and church, tested and reforged in centuries of war, gave Iberians a worldview in which political authority and religious orthodoxy were bound together. Sovereignty and salvation were not distinct spheres but one and the same. By the time Granada fell in 1492, Iberians had cultivated an instinct that conquest was both a temporal necessity and a sacred duty. And when the last Muslim stronghold in Spain was gone, this warrior faith, restless for a new frontier, would soon find it across the Atlantic.

The Reconquista was not a single campaign but a way of life that endured for nearly eight centuries, shaping Iberian culture as deeply as Rome or Christianity itself. It began in obscurity, with tiny Christian kingdoms clinging to survival in the mountains, and it ended in triumph with the banners of Castile and Aragon flying over Granada in 1492. Over those long centuries Iberians cultivated a worldview in which warfare was sanctified, conquest was a moral imperative, and the destiny of their people was bound to the advance of the Cross.

The early Reconquista was fragmented and uncertain. The kingdoms of Asturias, León, Navarre, and Aragón struck when opportunity allowed, raiding Muslim lands and then retreating into their fortresses. Out of this frontier struggle emerged legendary figures such as Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known to history as El Cid, who fought as both ally and foe of Muslim rulers but came to symbolize the endurance of Christian arms. His story, celebrated in epic poetry, gave the Iberians a cultural archetype: the warrior of faith and honor who carved out new realms with the sword. Centuries later, conquistadors would see themselves in the same light.

By the eleventh century, the Reconquista had become more than local resistance. The Papacy granted to Iberian warriors the same indulgences and spiritual privileges as those who fought in the Holy Land. Bulls of crusade declared the struggle in Spain to be part of Christendom’s universal mission. This blessing from Rome gave the Iberians a unique sense of legitimacy. They were not merely recovering land for their kings, but waging a holy war for God Himself. The precedent was set that conquest, when sanctioned by the faith, was not only permissible but righteous.

Institutions developed in this crucible carried forward into the empire. Conquered lands were divided among nobles and warriors through the repartimiento, granting both soil and laborers to those who served in battle. Whole towns were resettled under fueros, charters that offered settlers privileges in exchange for defending the frontier. The military orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara fused monastic vows with knightly warfare, guarding the frontiers while also administering land, founding churches, and shaping society. These arrangements were not temporary expedients but permanent structures that bound conquest to governance, embedding war and religion into the very fabric of Iberian life.

The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 was the decisive turning point. The combined Christian armies shattered the Almohad Caliphate, opening Andalusia to conquest. Córdoba, Seville, and Valencia fell in the following century, transforming Iberia from a patchwork frontier into a victorious crusader society. From that moment the Iberians came to see themselves as a chosen people, sustained by divine favor and destined to triumph over all adversaries. The Reconquista was no longer a struggle for survival but a triumphant march toward inevitable victory.

Religion remained the engine of this advance. Mosques were transformed into cathedrals, monasteries rose over conquered ground, and dioceses were established as quickly as fortresses. The Inquisition, founded in 1478, gave lasting institutional form to the idea that faith and loyalty were inseparable. To be Catholic was to be loyal to the crown and country, and to waver in the faith was to betray both.

By the late fifteenth century, the Reconquista had become the defining experience of Iberia. Each generation was raised in the memory of El Cid and Las Navas, nobles measured their honor through campaigns of conquest, and kings proved their legitimacy through service to the Cross. When Ferdinand and Isabella united Castile and Aragon, they brought this long crusade to its climax with the fall of Granada in 1492. That same year, Jews were expelled, the Inquisition intensified its work, and Columbus sailed westward under their banner. None of these events was separate from the others. All were expressions of the same conviction: that God had chosen Iberia to conquer, to purify, and to expand His dominion. For the Iberians, the close of the Reconquista was not an ending but a transformation. The warrior faith that had reclaimed Spain was now poised to leap across the ocean and remake the world.

The Reconquista was more than a military triumph. Across centuries of conquest and resettlement, the Iberians developed institutions that fused religion, politics, and war into a single order of life. These institutions bound frontier society together, rewarded service, and enforced unity of faith. By the fifteenth century they had become so deeply ingrained that when the Iberians crossed the Atlantic, they carried them intact into the Americas. The New World was not a blank slate but the next extension of a system forged in the struggle against Islam.

One of the most important of these institutions was the repartimiento. Beginning with Alfonso VI of León and Castile in the eleventh century and perfected under Ferdinand III in the thirteenth, this system distributed conquered lands and the labor of their Muslim inhabitants among nobles, soldiers, and the Church. A man who fought for the Cross could expect not only honor but also farms, estates, and workers to cultivate them. In practice, this bound conquest to exploitation and sanctified it as a divine reward. When Spaniards arrived in the Americas, they transplanted the repartimiento as the encomienda, granting themselves rights over indigenous labor under the guise of Christian tutelage. The very language of justification was the same: the conqueror was both master and protector, the subject both servant and convert.

Alongside land distribution stood the fueros, the municipal charters that defined life on the frontier. Towns founded in reconquered territory, such as León and Cuenca, were given fueros that freed them from many royal taxes, granted rights of self-government, and bound their inhabitants to military service. These charters created corporate communities loyal to the Crown but also capable of defending themselves, a crucial necessity in contested lands. When Spaniards built towns in the New World, they did so with the same template: a central plaza flanked by church and council house, a cabildo or town council exercising local authority under a royal charter. The colonial city was not an invention but a faithful heir to the Reconquista frontier town.

Religious-military orders further shaped Iberian society. Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara commanded vast estates, guarded key strongholds, and acted as both warriors and governors. They stood as living proof that in Iberia, faith and arms were inseparable. Their example was carried into the Americas, where the Franciscans, Dominicans, and later the Jesuits took up the same dual role. They preached, converted, and baptized, but their missions were also forts, schools, and instruments of governance. In Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru the missionary settlement was the echo of the fortified monastery of Castile.

The Inquisition and the doctrine of limpieza de sangre added a final, decisive element. After centuries of coexistence and conflict with Muslims and Jews, Iberian Catholicism hardened into an exclusivist creed. It was not enough to profess the faith; one’s ancestry had to be free of non-Christian blood. This obsession with purity of lineage would later find expression in the Americas in the rigid casta system. Spaniards of “pure” European descent were placed at the top, while mestizos, mulattos, and indigenous peoples were consigned to ever-lower ranks. The colonial fixation with blood and race was nothing new. It was the transposition of Iberia’s own centuries-old struggle to define who truly belonged to the community of the faithful.

By the time Granada fell, the Iberians possessed a complete arsenal of institutions: the repartimiento that rewarded conquest with land and labor, the fueros that bound towns to crown and faith, the military orders that fused religion with war, and the Inquisition that enforced unity through fear and purity. These were not ad hoc measures but a worldview embodied in law and custom. When the ocean opened before them, Iberians did not invent a colonial system. They extended the Reconquista to a continental scale. The Americas became not a new beginning, but the continuation of an old mission: to conquer, to settle, and to sanctify in the name of God and King.

The year 1492 was not the end of an age but the hinge of Iberian destiny. In January, Ferdinand and Isabella’s banners were raised over the towers of the Alhambra, as Boabdil, the last Nasrid ruler of Granada, handed over the keys of the city. Chroniclers described priests singing the Te Deum as Christian soldiers marched through the gates, a scene celebrated as the final triumph of a mission begun eight centuries earlier. For the Catholic Monarchs, this victory was not merely political. It confirmed that God had chosen them as defenders and expanders of His faith.

That same year, the monarchs issued the Edict of Expulsion, forcing Spain’s Jews to convert or depart. The logic was the same as the one that had driven the Reconquista: unity of faith was the foundation of unity of realm. To the Iberians, there could be no divided loyalties, no alternative confessions. Sovereignty demanded homogeneity, and the sword of the state would enforce it. At the very moment Granada’s minarets were being crowned with crosses, Spain was purging its own interior of all who stood outside the Catholic order.

The completion of the Reconquista coincided with a new horizon. In October, Columbus reached the Caribbean, sailing under the same royal banner that had flown over Granada. To Ferdinand and Isabella, his voyage was no mere adventure but the continuation of the sacred mission. The papacy confirmed this interpretation. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued the bull Inter Caetera, granting Spain dominion over newly discovered lands on the condition that their inhabitants be converted to the faith. Just as the Reconquista had joined war with salvation, so too did this papal blessing make discovery inseparable from conversion.

The leap across the Atlantic did not come from nothing. Portugal had already been building a maritime empire along Africa’s coasts, conquering Ceuta in 1415 and establishing bases in Madeira, the Azores, and São Tomé. These Atlantic outposts served as laboratories of the empire. In the Canary Islands, the Guanche people resisted Iberian conquest much as the Muslims of Andalusia had, only to be subdued through sieges, forced baptisms, and the repartimiento of their lands. On Madeira and São Tomé, sugar plantations worked by enslaved Africans created the model for the Caribbean economy. The New World would not be an invention, but an expansion of systems already tested on Atlantic frontiers.

The transition from Reconquista to conquest of the Americas was also personal. Many conquistadors were the sons and grandsons of Granada’s veterans, heirs of the hidalgos who had fought for centuries on Iberian soil. Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro were products of this culture, raised in households where honor, faith, and warfare were one. To them, the voyage westward was not a break with tradition but its continuation. The Indies were simply a new Andalusia waiting to be taken.

1492 was therefore not a moment of closure but of transformation. The fall of Granada, the expulsion of the Jews, and the discovery of the New World were all chapters of the same story: a kingdom purified at home and expanding abroad, convinced that God had chosen it for a universal mission. The soldiers who had stormed Granada’s walls now found new cities to besiege across the ocean. The institutions that had ordered life on the frontier repartimiento, fueros, the military orders, the Inquisition, and limpieza de sangre, crossed the Atlantic with them. For the Iberians, the Reconquista had not ended. Its battlefield had simply shifted from the hills of Andalusia to the continents of the New World.

When Spanish conquistadors set foot in the Americas, they did so not as explorers in the modern sense, but as heirs to the Reconquista. Their fathers and grandfathers had fought at Granada, and they inherited the crusading psychology that centuries of holy war had burned into Iberian identity. The campaigns they undertook were not conceived as voyages of discovery but as conquistas, a deliberate echo of the Reconquista itself. For them, the New World was not a land of strangers but a new frontier of the same mission: to conquer, baptize, and sanctify in the name of God and King.

The conquistadors embodied the hidalgo ethos. Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, and their companions sought glory, honor, and salvation through arms, just as their ancestors had. Cortés in Mexico fashioned alliances with native peoples against the Aztecs in the same spirit that El Cid had once fought with and against Muslims, maneuvering amid shifting loyalties while always proclaiming service to Christendom. When Cortés besieged Tenochtitlán in 1521, the campaign echoed the sieges of Córdoba and Granada: starvation, blockades, bombardment, and finally the toppling of temples and their replacement with churches. The great Templo Mayor of the Aztecs was razed, and in its place rose the Metropolitan Cathedral, just as the mosque of Córdoba had become a cathedral centuries earlier.

The symbols of the Reconquista crossed the ocean intact. Conquistadors marched under banners of the Cross and invoked Santiago Matamoros, “Saint James the Moor-Slayer,” the same patron saint who had been credited with leading Christian armies at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. Now his name was shouted as Spaniards stormed the causeways of Tenochtitlán and scaled the walls of Inca fortresses. The continuity was not symbolic alone; it was a lived experience. Many conquistadors were direct descendants of Granada’s veterans. For them, the ocean was not a barrier but a bridge, carrying their ancestral war into a new theater.

Institutions reinforced this crusading worldview. The encomienda, transplanted directly from the repartimiento, granted conquerors not only land but the labor of native peoples. This was justified as a sacred trust: the encomendero was to protect, instruct, and convert his charges, even as he extracted their work. Town councils, or cabildos, were modeled on the fueros of frontier Spain, complete with plazas dominated by churches and council houses. The Inquisition, which had enforced religious conformity in Iberia, soon took root in Mexico City and Lima. And limpieza de sangre, the old doctrine of purity of blood, found new life in the rigid caste system of the colonies, sorting populations by ancestry into an inflexible hierarchy.

Even the rituals of conquest bore the imprint of the Reconquista. The Requerimiento, solemnly read in Spanish or Latin to peoples who could not understand it, demanded submission to the Catholic faith and obedience to the Spanish Crown. If accepted, the natives would be spared; if refused, war, enslavement, and death would follow. However absurd in practice, this ritual carried the same spirit as the old demands made of Muslims and Jews in Iberia: accept baptism or suffer the consequences. It was a sacrament of conquest, fusing law, faith, and war into one act.

Missionaries completed the picture. Franciscans, Dominicans, and later Jesuits accompanied soldiers as naturally as friars had followed knights in Andalusia. They baptized en masse, built monasteries that doubled as forts, and sought to root out idolatry with the same zeal that the Inquisition had shown against heresy. Some, like Bartolomé de las Casas, condemned the abuses of conquest, yet even they never doubted the divine imperative to Christianize the peoples of the Americas. In their eyes, as in those of the conquistadors, the New World was another chapter in the Reconquista: a land to be purified, a people to be remade.

In the Americas, the Reconquista reached its global climax. The fall of Tenochtitlán echoed the siege of Granada; the construction of cathedrals upon temple ruins mirrored Córdoba; the cry of “Santiago!” rang out once more across battlefields. The institutions of Iberia, encomienda, fueros, limpieza de sangre, and the Inquisition, were reborn across an ocean. For the conquistadors, there was no rupture between Old World and New. There was only the continuation of an ancient war, carried now to the ends of the earth.

The Iberian conquest of the Americas was not a rupture with the past but the extension of a pattern that had been centuries in the making. The Reconquista did more than define medieval Spain and Portugal; it gave birth to institutions, mentalities, and hierarchies that crossed the Atlantic and left their mark on Latin America for centuries to come. The legacy of that crusading age was not erased with Spain’s decline, nor even with independence. It shaped the very foundations of colonial society and lingered long after Iberian political power had faded.

The union of throne and altar, central to Visigothic Spain and sanctified in the Reconquista, became the organizing principle of colonial rule. In Mexico City and Lima, bishops sat in councils of government, monasteries doubled as centers of administration, and the Inquisition scrutinized the faith of Spaniards and natives alike. Universities founded in 1551 in both Mexico and Peru placed theology at the core of learning, ensuring that intellectual life was bound to the Church. This was no accident. It was the natural extension of a society that had for centuries equated sovereignty with orthodoxy and saw political loyalty as inseparable from Catholic identity.

Social hierarchy, too, carried forward with intensified rigidity. In Iberia, limpieza de sangre had separated “Old Christians” from conversos and moriscos. In the Americas, this became the elaborate casta system, immortalized in colonial paintings that catalogued mixed ancestries with obsessive precision. Peninsulares and criollos stood at the top, mestizos and mulattos filled the middle ranks, and indigenous and African peoples bore the heaviest burdens. The colonial obsession with ancestry was not innovation but inheritance. The same anxieties that had once divided Iberians by blood now divided an entire hemisphere.

Economically, the extractive spirit of the Reconquista reached its peak in the New World. The repartimiento and encomienda placed indigenous peoples in the mines and fields, supplying silver from Potosí and Zacatecas that enriched Spain but consumed millions of native lives. Just as conquered Muslims in Andalusia had been bound to labor under Christian lords, so too were the peoples of the Americas compelled to serve their encomenderos. Wealth flowed upward to the crown and merchants in Seville, leaving the colonies dependent, hierarchical, and brittle. Unlike the English colonies, which fostered mercantile capitalism and local self-government, the Iberian system prized obedience, tribute, and orthodoxy above initiative or innovation.

The cultural imprint of the Reconquista was triumphal yet fragile. Victories were celebrated as signs of divine favor, from Granada to Tenochtitlán, but this very triumphalism fostered inflexibility. A society founded on conquest and purity could not easily adapt to pluralism or reform. Even after independence in the nineteenth century, the shadow of the old order remained. Caudillos echoed the hidalgo ethos of personal honor and military authority. Haciendas reproduced the logic of encomiendas, vast estates worked by dependent laborers. The Church continued to dominate education, charity, and social life, much as it had in the age of Ferdinand and Isabella.

The Reconquista thus lived on across the Atlantic. Its institutions encomienda, cabildo, Inquisition, limpieza de sangre shaped colonial rule. Its psychology, the fusion of faith and arms, the glorification of conquest, the demand for purity defined Iberian missions abroad. And its consequences: the rigid hierarchies, clerical dominance, and extractive economies remained embedded in Latin America long after Spain and Portugal’s power receded.

The Americas, then, were not a “New World” in Iberian eyes. They were the next frontier of an old crusade. The fall of Granada and the conquest of Tenochtitlán were chapters of the same story, written on different continents but guided by the same ethos. In Latin America’s cities, cathedrals, social orders, and even its bloodlines, the Reconquista still echoes. What began as a medieval war to reclaim Iberia became the template for an empire that spanned the globe, and its shadow endures to this day.