Cultures are immersive experiences and languages are part of that culture, which is something Robert Goodwin learned on his first visit to Spain when he was 18 years old. Goodwin did not speak Spanish growing up in London, but Seville made enough of an impression on him that when he returned home, he learned the language.
“It’s difficult to imagine how depressing a place London was in 1986,” Goodwin says from London, where he was getting ready for the U.S. launch of his new book, Spain: The Centre of the World, 1519-1682. “I went to Spain on holiday, and everyone was happy. I thought I had better learn Spanish because I wanted to know why all of those people were smiling. As people were having conversations about Cervantes or Velázquez, I wanted to be able to participate with a similar level of knowledge. I wanted to have an easier time hanging out with people in Spain.”
Twenty-five years later, Goodwin is a research and teaching fellow at the University College of London and splits his time between teaching in London and researching at the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, the city in Spain where most of the archives of Spain’s New World exploration and trade are located.
“Seville is an absolutely fabulous place to work and live,” Goodwin says. “It’s southern and warm and full of warm-natured people. The archives open at 8 o’clock in the morning and close at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, at which point you can go have a leisurely lunch. I’ll often have a long lunch with friends or other historians. And then you can have a nice long siesta.”
Seville is located 50 miles from the Atlantic Ocean on the Rio Guadalquivir and was the trade center for the Spanish Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. Traders would bring gold, silver, spices, and tobacco by ship from the New World and sell them in Seville.
“All that gold and silver from Mexico and Peru poured into the city, and lots of foreigners came there to find work and do business,” Goodwin says. “It’s an excessively obvious metaphor, but Seville was kind of the New York City of its day. It was an international, cosmopolitan place with lots of people chasing pesos.”
Spain is a history of the Spanish Empire in all its dimensions—a political history of an expansive and in many ways progressive empire that fused much of what is now modern Europe, a history of Europe’s growing trade with the New World and how it transformed the Old World, and Spain’s deep cultural influence on what was to become the modern West, which included the birth of the novel with Cervantes’ Don Quixote and master artists like El Greco and Velázquez.
The political history of Spain is largely untapped compared to the English and French monarchies—which the Spanish monarchy occasionally intersected—and has grandiose, adventurous, eccentric, ambitious, and even crazy kings and queens whose stories hold up well against the likes of the more familiar Henry VIII and Louis XIV.
The stories of the Spanish monarchy during the 16th and 17th centuries show Spain assimilating internally even as it was expanding internationally. When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sent an Italian explorer-for-hire named Christopher Columbus to find a new trade route across the Atlantic Ocean to the East Indies in 1492, there was no Spain as we would recognize it today.
“You have Portugal, which was a separate country,” Goodwin says. “You had Leon and Castile, which is the hot land. You had Andalucía in the south, which became part of Castile but traditionally had been Muslim….Spain was very fragmented. That history only started to simplify following the marriage between Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.”
Goodwin’s Spain starts with the next generation of the monarchy. Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughters would figure into both the English and Spanish monarchies. One daughter, Catherine of Aragon, was the first wife of Henry VIII. The other, Juana la Loca, was the wife of Philip I; their progeny would rule Spain for nearly two centuries, and it was an empire fueled by gold.
“Gold fundamentally changed the way rulers and their governments engaged with the world,” Goodwin says. “The importance of all of that gold is essentially the point at which the western world was born. All of the economic and political issues that contribute to the formation of western values and trade and colonialism all arose in this period, and Spain experienced them all.”
Scott Porch is an attorney and contributes to Kirkus Reviews and The Daily Beast. He is writing a book about social upheaval in the 1960s and '70s.