The presence of hominids in Spain, in the Iberian Peninsula dates to the Lower Palaeolithic, a period from which the remains found in the Atapuerca site (Burgos), about 800,000 years old, date. Experts are still discussing the origin of these populations, coming directly from Africa through the strait of Gibraltar or, more likely, through the Pyrenees. In any case, from that time there are in the peninsula remains of utensils and works of art corresponding to the same cultures of hunters and gatherers that followed in other areas of Europe.

Likewise, the Iberian Peninsula constitutes the western end of a process of cultural diffusion that runs, towards the fifth millennium before our era, through the Mediterranean starting from its eastern end. This process, known as the Neolithic revolution, consists of the change of a collecting economy for another producer, based on agriculture and livestock. From 5000 or 4000 BC and until the sixteenth century of our era will open another important period of peninsular history in which the Mediterranean basin and civilization will be decisive.

From about 1100 BC, and until the middle of the third century BC, commercial and cultural contact with Mediterranean civilizations will come from the hand of Phoenicians (extending from the Algarve, in the peninsular south Atlantic, to the Mediterranean Levant) and Greeks (located from the Ebro delta to the gulf of Roses, in the northeast Mediterranean). At the end of this stage, both civilizations will be displaced by Romans and Carthaginians, respectively.

Spain

In this way, between the twelfth and fourth centuries BC a substantial difference was marked between an Iberia that ran from the northeast Mediterranean to the south Atlantic, on the one hand, and an interior, on the other. The latter was inhabited by various tribes, some of them Celts, which had a primitive organization and were dedicated to transhumant grazing, consisting of alternating the pastures of the northern highlands, in summer, with those of the southern sub-plateau, in winter.

On the contrary, the coastal towns, known generically as Iberians, were already in the fourth century BC a group of city-states, such as Tartessos, remarkably similar and influenced by the most developed urban, commercial, agricultural and mining centres of the eastern Mediterranean. The first written testimonies on the peninsula date from that period. It is said that Hispania, the name with which the Romans knew the Peninsula, is a word of Semitic root from Hispalis (Seville).

Roman Hispania

The roman presence in the peninsula follows the line of the commercial basis of Greek, but was conditioned by their struggle with Carthage for control of the western Mediterranean during the second century a.c. Will be, in any case, this is the time that the peninsula will be set up as such unit in the circuit of international politics, becoming since then a strategic objective coveted because of its unique geographical position between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and of the wealth, agricultural, and mining of its southern area.

The penetration and subsequent conquest of the peninsula covers the extensive period between 218 and 19 BC. The Romans were alarmed by the Carthaginian expansion to the northeast since they considered that the Ebro River constituted the natural border of Gaul subject to its influence.

For this reason, the Second Punic War was unleashed. While Hannibal made the legendary pass of the Alps, the Roman legions raided his Spanish base, Carthage Nova (present-day Cartagena), with its port and mines. His fall at the hands of Publius Cornelius Scipio (209 BC) marks the decline of Hannibal's army in Italy and the beginning of Roman conquests in the peninsula.

Spain during Roman times

The Romans did not only intend to replace the Carthaginians but sought to extend their rule to the rest of the peninsula. There they encountered significant resistance, especially in inland Hispania.

Among the many confrontations that took place throughout the Roman conquest, the most famous was the Celtiberian-Lusitanian War, which lasted for twenty years (154-134 BC). The guerrilla tactics of the Lusitanian leader Viriato and the legendary collective suicide of the population of Numancia in the face of its Roman besiegers were celebrated by Latin historians.

The Roman presence in Hispania lasted seven centuries, during which the limits were configured in relation to other European countries. The interior divisions in which the Roman province was compartmentalized are also premonitory: Lusitania, Tarraconense, Bética. But the Romans not only bequeathed a territorial administration, but also institutions such as the family, language, religion, law and municipality, whose assimilation definitively installed the Peninsula within the Greco-Roman and, later, Judeo-Christian world.

The Romans settled on the coasts and along the rivers. The permanent significance of cities such as Tarragona, Cartagena, Lisbon, and Mérida, as well as the enormous deployment in public works (roads, bridges, aqueducts, temples, arches, theatres, amphitheatres and circuses) give an idea of the geographical sense of the Roman population. However, at the beginning of the fifth century, the population map began to change significantly. It is then that various Germanic peoples, as invaders some, as allies’ others, burst into the Peninsula to settle. The Visigoths will do so in the interior regions and the Swabians in the west. In parallel, and since the third century, is accentuating a reduction process of the urban population, of walled populations, extension of the property latifundista, of insecurity in the fields, and of the weakness of the state institution, as compared with the increase of power of the oligarchies local, which provide security in exchange for loyalty. Especially important phenomenon of that period is the beginning of the Christianisation of Hispania that remains still dark. The presence of Saint Paul between the years 62-63 and the persecutions of the third century, narrated by Prudentius, seems probable, already speak of dioceses and martyrs. After Constantine's religious freedom, the first Council of the Hispanic Church took place in 314.

The peninsular history of Spain

The Visigothic Kingdom, first attempt at peninsular union

In the fifth century the Visigoths were already a Romanized people who saw themselves as the continuation of the extinct imperial power. Towards the middle of the 500 the triple pressure of Swabians in the west (Galicia), Cantabrian-Pyrenean shepherds, from the north, and Byzantines in the south (la Betica), inclined them to establish the capital in Toledo, centre of the Peninsula.

The integration between Visigoths and Hispano-Romans was a rapid and successful process that was notably facilitated by the conversion of King Recaredo to Catholicism at the III Council of Toledo (589). This made the Church acquire a preponderant role and control of political activity through the celebration of the successive councils of Toledo and by similar social structures collected in the Bíber Iudicorm of Recesvinto. Common to both was the existence of an aristocracy of foundations and another ecclesiastical and effectively both institutions favoured the autonomy of the nobility at the expense of the royal power. that is why Visigoth politics will oscillate between the inclination to placate the nobles, tolerating the progressive feudalization of the State, and the tendency to strengthen the royal power, exposing itself to noble uprisings.

The Muslim stage in Spain

It will be precisely one of the delayed noble clans, the Witiza family, who at the beginning of the eighth century caused the collapse of the Visigoth state by asking for help from Arab and Berber troops on the other side of the strait of Gibraltar. The degree of decomposition of the Visigothic state apparatus allowed the Muslims to make isolated pacts with a semi-independent aristocracy and disaffected with the Crown.

By the middle of the eighth century, the Muslims had consummated their occupation and the Umayyad prince Abd Al-Rahman was proclaimed in Cordoba of a new independent State of Damascus. In the first third of the tenth century, one of the Hispanic Umayyads, Abd Al-Rahman III, would restore and extend the Andalusian state of Spain and become the first Spanish caliph.

The proclamation of the caliphate had a dual purpose. In the interior, the Umayyads wanted to strengthen the state of the peninsula. Abroad, they sought to consolidate the trade routes that, through the Mediterranean, would secure the economic relationship with the eastern basin (Byzantium) and guarantee the supply of gold. Melilla was occupied in 927 and, in the middle of the same century, the Umayyad caliphate controlled the triangle between Algiers, Siyilmasa and the Atlantic. The small Christian strongholds of the north of the Peninsula became modest feudatories of the Caliph, whose superiority and arbitration they recognized as Spain.

The foundation of the Andalusian hegemony rested on a considerable economic power based on an important trade, a developed artisanal industry, and a much more efficient agricultural use than that of the rest of Europe.

The Cordovan state in Spain was the first urban and commercial economy to flourish in Europe since the demise of the Roman Empire. And the capital of the caliphate and main city, Córdoba, had about 100,000 inhabitants, which made it the most important European urban concentration of the time.