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Hispanic Peninsula in 800
     

6
    Spain and Portugal

    The capacity of Spain and Portugal to turn their backs on each other in modern times has been extraordinary. Given its size, Portugal has never been able to ignore Spain to the same extent that the latter ignores Portugal, but this difference is only relative. In earlier centuries, despite difficulty in communications, the Spanish kingdoms always had much more to do with Portugal, and vice versa, restricted to a large degree, to their common peninsula. After 1668 they tended more and more to go their separate ways, though with certain notable exceptions, until finally brought together again not by a peninsular entente but by the European Union in 1985.
    The initial paradox is that Portugal was not institutionally, culturally, and structurally the most singular of the peninsular principalities. That distinction would have to go to Catalonia, which was considerably more different from its counterparts than was Portugal. The earlier institutions and culture of the kingdom of Portugal were basically derived from those of Galicia and León, and there was no extraordinary innovation in type or character among the earliest Portuguese institutions.
    Spanish historians have often seen the origins of Portugal as stemming from a sort of politico-dynastic accident, and a considerable argument may be developed on behalf of this position. The establishment of what was to become an independent state and monarchy by Afonso I Henriques in 1128 was a typical political development of that era, as León was separated from Castile, Aragon became a kingdom, Navarre was associated with Aragon and then separated from it, and various efforts were made to establish Galicia as a distinct kingdom. Indeed, Alfonso VII did not view the new Portuguese principality as other than a vassal state of Castile, a further feature of the heterogeneous, "imperial" structure of his monarchy.
    The uniqueness of the case of Portugal was not any profound difference in the culture and politics of the erstwhile new kingdom compared with these other examples, but simply that subsequent historical developments made possible the full establishment and consolidation of an independent monarchy, and ultimately of a separate country. This was due to the interplay of politics and history — contingency, in effect — and not to intrinsic and profound differences. Had the right kind of effective marriage alliance been made between the crowns of Castile and Portugal, rather than between Castile and Aragon, the resultant union would have been at least as logical and effective as that developed by the heirs of the Catholic Monarchs, if not more so. This is not to deny that Portugal over several centuries developed a very firm and distinct identity and eventually formed a more united separate nation than did Spain, but rather to stress that this was the result of a complex process of historical development. It did not lie in some predetermined essence at the roots of that process. Numerous efforts have been made by historians of Portugal to identify and define unique differences in early history, and even to advance a geographical argument for Portuguese singularity, but none of these is especially convincing. 1 A unique original Portuguese "essentialism" prior to the twelfth century has yet to be discovered. This is not to deny that certain specific individual traits might be identified in nascent Portugal, but only to emphasize that these do not appear to have been any greater than equally specific and individual traits, which might have been found in the other Hispanic states, as indeed in all small medieval principalities.
    During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, León and Castile had failed to develop the levels of political and institutional coherence that were being achieved in the smaller principalities of Catalonia and Aragon, and the arrogation of independence in the southwestern territories of the crown of León by