Spanish Empire

The Spanish Empire was among the largest and most powerful empires in history and one of the first truly global empires, on which it was said 'the sun never set.' Its conventional beginning is 1492, the year the Catholic Monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon completed the Reconquista by capturing Granada and sponsored Christopher Columbus's first transatlantic voyage, opening the Americas to Spanish conquest and colonisation.

Over the following decades conquistadors such as Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro overthrew the Aztec and Inca empires, and Spain established a vast colonial dominion across the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America, and later the Philippines, named for Philip II. The empire extracted immense wealth, especially silver from mines such as Potosí, which financed Spanish power and flooded into global trade, helping to integrate the world economy through routes like the Manila galleon. Under Charles V, who was also Holy Roman Emperor, and his son Philip II, Spain was the dominant power in Europe, defending Catholicism in the Reformation wars and projecting force across the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Spanish administration imposed Catholicism, the Spanish language, and new institutions across its territories, profoundly and often devastatingly transforming indigenous societies through conquest, disease, and forced labour. From the seventeenth century Spain's European dominance waned amid costly wars, fiscal crises, and competition from rising rivals. The early nineteenth century brought the catastrophic loss of nearly all the mainland American colonies in the wars of independence, and the remaining major possessions, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, were lost to the United States in 1898. The empire's long twilight ended only in 1976, when Spain relinquished its administration of the Spanish Sahara, its last significant colonial holding, marking the final dissolution of an empire that had reshaped the modern world.

Key figures