Spanien

Seneca, Trajan, Hadrian and Quintilian were Hispanic. Twelfth-century Toledo was the workshop where Jews, Christians and Muslims translated Aristotle into Latin; Santiago de Compostela was, with Rome, one of the two poles of Western pilgrimage; Salamanca founded the law of nations there.

Hispania was Romanised from the second century BC and gave the Empire two emperors and several of its greatest Latin authors. The Visigoths founded a Christian kingdom there whose councils of Toledo shaped the Western Church.

From 711 the Muslim conquest created al-Andalus. For eight centuries the peninsula was a shifting frontier but also the main intellectual contact point between Islam, Judaism and Latin Christendom: the Toledo school of translators gave Europe back Aristotle, Euclid and Galen.

1492 was a pivotal year: the fall of Granada, the expulsion of the Jews, Columbus's first voyage. Spain became a world power, then went through three centuries of relative decline, a civil war and a dictatorship. The democratic transition of 1975-1978 and Community accession in 1986 re-anchored the country in Europe.