Introduction

Primitive inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula - Iberians and Tartesians - possessed alphabets; and Phoenicians, Greeks, and Carthaginians established a commercial base there. The Romans, after conquering the peninsula at the end of the third century ad, converted it into a province - Hispania - in which two emperors were born, as well as various writers: Quintilian, Martial, the two Senecas (father and son), and the elder Seneca’s nephew Lucan. In the period of Christian antiquity in Spain, there was Prudentius. The last great figure, in Visigothic times, was Saint Isidore of Seville. When the Roman empire fell, the classics took refuge in the monasteries, but in Hispania that world was destroyed in 711 by the Muslim invasion, which isolated the Peninsula from the rest of Europe. In small enclaves of the north (Asturias and Navarre), Christian groups began to organize the ‘‘Reconquest’’ of the ‘‘bull’s skin,’’ as Strabo called the peninsula with its peculiar shape. But in those dark centuries the Muslim world maintained contact with the classical tradition by way of translations of Greek and Oriental works into Arabic.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century Spain encompassed the Christian kingdoms of CastiUa-Lebn, Aragon, Navarre, Portugal, and the Muslim Al Andalus, which at that time had fragmented into small kingdoms, easily conquered by the Christians in the middle of that century. One Moorish kingdom survived until 1492: Granada. The marriage of the Catholic monarchs Isabel of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon consolidated the union of those two kingdoms, to which was annexed Navarre, while the kingdom of Portugal remained independent, although from 1580 to 1640, due to a lack of direct heirs, Philip II, King of Spain and the son of a Portuguese princess, united it to the crown of Spain.