Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [184]
When I consider well, most illustrious Queen, and set before my eyes the antiquity of all the things which remain written down for our record and memory, one thing I find and draw as a most certain conclusion, that always language was the companion of empire, and followed it in such a way that jointly they began, grew, flourished; and afterwards joint was the fall of both.
Antonio de Nebrija, opening words of the preface to his Gramatica de la lengua castellana, 1492
Portrait of a conquistador
The beginnings of the global spread of European languages came just as printing presses and publishers were asserting the existence of vernaculars, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, English, Dutch and German, over the body of a Latin that was gradually being drained of life. The languages that spread were those of the successor states of the western Roman empire; and so their educated elites were no strangers to the ideal, and indeed the romance, of vast, multinational empires. They had been brought up on the histories of Rome and Alexander; and they were filling their imaginations with tales of chivalry, conquest and adventure in strange lands, of Amadís de Gaula (hero of a popular romance of the fifteenth century, published in Zaragoza in 1508), his son Esplandián (1510), and many, many others.* History was about to make their dreams come true.
The country that would play the leading role in the conquest and colonisation of the New World already felt itself entering a golden age. A century of uncertain intrigue had been resolved in the peaceful union of Spain’s competing kingdoms, Castile in the north and centre, and Aragon in the east: Castile had come to Isabella in 1474, and Aragon to Fernando in 1479; princes already joined in marriage, they were so acceptable to the Pope that they went on to be granted the title of ’Reyes Católicos’. They were to reign together for another twenty-five years, during which they completed the Christian conquest of Spain. The last Moorish kingdom, Granada, fell on the second day of 1492, but the ten-year war had stretched the Spanish treasury to its limit.
Linguistically, Spain was an alliance of three major Romance languages, Galician (gallego) in the west, Castilian (castellano) in the centre, and Catalan (català) in the east.† Catalan is much more similar, as a language, to Occitan or Provençal, as spoken in southern France. It is possible to see part of the origins of the Spanish three in the different Germanic groups who took control of Iberia in the fifth century, the Suevi in the north-west, Visigoths in the centre and south.§ At any rate, Castile established itself as the most powerful state in the region, having absorbed the western kingdom (ruled from León) in 1230. Aragon, in parallel, had come to dominate the west, uniting in a fairly equal partnership with Catalonia in 1140.
The linguistic effect of the union of Castile and Aragon, with Aragon as the junior partner, was to make Castilian the de jure standard for the whole of Spain, just before the flowering of literature in the early seventeenth century. And as Christians went on to replace Moors in the southern reaches of Andalusia, they recolonised the south of Spain with speakers of this Castilian. Henceforth, although Galician and Catalan retained their independence and still have their own literary traditions, Castilian became a synonym for ‘the Spanish language’, as it is to this day.
The Spanish approach to Christianity emphasised high-level authority as a guarantee of orthodoxy, and led all Christendom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in vigorously prosecuting this belief. The Inquisition had been founded in 1480, and in 1492 the extraordinary measure was taken of expelling all Jews from the kingdom. Then, in 1502, all practice of Islamic faith was abruptly banned, although it had been explicitly guaranteed in the terms of the Muslims’ surrender of Granada ten years before. There was a sense