Thank you for the map, you have reminded me of a happy train journey between Barcelona and Madrid before they opened the high speed line.  Probably took about 7 hours but the food and wine was good and the scenery better.  I do wonder if spending all that money has been worth it.

> Madrid is bang in the middle.

Thereby dooming Spain to not becoming a vibrant Atlantic imperial power in the mould of then-not-yet-really-up-and-coming Holland and England, according to one historian I read at university.  (J.H.Elliott?) Not the only reason, of course, but one of. Philip II’s decision, apparently. JH reckoned he should have picked Lisbon, thus also forestalling Portugese independence.

Alan

Thanks.  Fascinating.  I didn’t know that either.

When did Portugal become independent?, I wonder.

Here:

“Portugal became independant in 1139 1143.”

???  A gradual process, presumably.

“It was later annexed by Spain in 1580 as a protectorate and became independent again in 1640.”

Blog and learn.

Slightly scarily, I have been to 23 of the 30 cities on that map - 27 if merely passing through on a train counts. I haven’t caught a single high speed train in Spain in doing so, however. (Train travel around western Europe was something I did in the 1990s. These days I mostly fly or drive). The train in Spain falls mainly on the European treasury. I think a fair chunk of this railway building has been the French and German governments subsidising their own engineering firms, though. (Both national governments are absolutely dreadful in this regard). The way in which the award of contracts seems to alternate between buying French and buying German is either amusing or depressing.

Spain as a nation more or less came into being when Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castile in 1469 and subsequently the crowns of Aragon (which included the County of Barcelona) and Castile were merged. The capital was initially moved to Valladolid, which I suspect also had the benefit of being neither Toledo (capital of Castile) or Zaragosa (capital of Aragon) and was in fact in between them.

Phillip II moved the capital from Valladolid to Madrid in 1561, apparently, which was essentially a new city in the middle of nowhere that was once again not Toledo or Zaragosa. (This really reminds me of the foundation of Canberra in Australia, which is not Sydney or Melbourne, is somewhere in between, and is in a particularly useless inland location in a nation where most people live by the sea).

Philip then became King of Portugal as well as Spain in 1580, and died in 1591. (It was a “dual monarchy” - technically two crowns worn by the same king). Portugal regained its independence in 1640. There were apparently various Portuguese uprisings in the 60 years of the dual monarchy. Would moving the capital have helped? I don’t know. Spain was (and possibly is) in essence a Castilian empire. Possibly keeping the capital in the centre was necessary to control Aragon, Navarre, and other regions in the north and east.

On the other hand, perhaps moving the capital would have made Spain less a Castilian empire and this would have made it more stable rather than less. Or perhaps it would have fallen apart.

Spain has always been a hard country to hold together, and this is obviously still so. The capital being kept in Madrid probably suggests that Philip II was determined more to holding the centre than to being a vibrant Atlantic imperial power. The difficulty of holding that centre is what prevented Spain from becoming that imperial power, rather than the location of the capital, perhaps?

Brian, I think you and I posted comments at the same time.

Approximately, in the early 12th century the Count of the small County of Portugal (which was a small fiefdom under the Kingdom of Leon in the north of today’s Portugal) died with an heir (Alfonso Henriques, the first king and founder of Portugal) who was then a minor. His wife allied herself with a prince of Galicia, and the boy ran away, not liking this. Eventually he grew up, raised an army, defeated his mother and that Galician prince, and then a battle against their ally the King of Leon and Castille. He then declared himself independent and took to expelling the Moors from the bulk of today’s Portugal. By the time he died in 1185 his armies had expelled the Moors from most of the territory of today’s Portugal (excluding the Algarve), but this was done entirely independently of the expulsion of other Moors further east by the Castilians.

The prestige gained from doing this was a large factor in gaining recognition from the Pope and other countries, supposedly, although it was probably more that he was not someone you would want to fight a war against personally.

That’s approximately the foundation myth of Portugal, anyway. It’s probably mostly true.

And if what I was told in Lisbon is true, the Portuguese are very proud of the fact that theirs is the only country in Europe never being occupied by a foreign power (except for those 60 years).

... and everything north of Lisbon by the French circa 1811

Yes, but pretending you were not conquered by the French around 1811 is something half of Europe does. The Swiss, for instance. I think the capital not being conquered is a fairly strong claim that the country wasn’t conquered, anyway.

I’m in Lisbon now, actually. It has a very different character to Madrid - obviously originally a mercantile city with politics and an Empire placed on top of that. Practically destroyed by an earthquake in 1755 though, and a lot of its subsequent history seems a consequence of that.

And as an addition to that mercantile + politics + empire feel, or because of that, I consider Lisbon to be the European city whose character is more like London than any other I know.

Michael - take a ride in a tram for me.
I envy you…