How did the Spanish Empire Arise?
The year 1492 was a transcendental one for Spain and for the world. That year, Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain and on October 12, after 32 days at sea, landed on an island in the Caribbean he called San Salvador, which most scholars locate in the Bahamas. Over the next few years Columbus made three more voyages of discovery to America (the New World), opening the European colonial era and ushering in globalization.
Columbus’s first voyage coincided with the publication of Antonio de Nebrija’s Castilian Grammar, the first grammar book of any modern European language. When Queen Isabella asked Nebrija what it was for, he replied: 「Language, your majesty, is the companion of empire.」 The conquistadors imposed the Spanish language and Christianity on vast territories and populations that far exceeded those of Spain.
Spain was the preeminent and first truly global power during the 16th and most of the 17th centuries. It controlled most of what is today Latin America (with the main exception of Brazil, which was part of the Portuguese empire), parts of the United States, the East Indies (including the Philippines), and various European territories, including the Low Countries (the modern countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), the greater part of Italy, and some parts of modern France and Germany. It also established naval ascendancy in the Atlantic and Pacific and most of the Mediterranean.
Titian and studio, Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto, 1572-75.
Source: https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/philip-ii-offering-the-infante-don-fernando-to/d1f2bea9-0d59-495e-9fb5-6efe7762798d
In 1571, Spain was part of the Holy League of Catholic maritime states that defeated the Ottoman Turks at the battle of Lepanto (present-day Nafpaktos) in the Corinthian Gulf, dealing a severe blow to Muslim expansionism, the main threat to Western Christianity.
Spain was at the height of its global power during the 1516-1598. During this time it also experienced a flowering of literature and fine arts, known as the Siglo de Oro (the Golden Century)—although the period lasted more than 100 years. Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), author of Don Quixote, Fernando de Rojas (1465–1541), author of Celestina, the dramatists and poets Lope de Vega (1562–1635) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), the painters El Greco (1541–1614), Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1618–1682), among the most well-known artists of the time, brought another kind of glory to Spain. The sharp contrasts between imperial grandeur and gradual decline at home can be read into Don Quixote. Like Cervantes’s hero, Spain’s elite had lost touch with reality.
The Holy Trinity by El Greco
Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Greco#/media/File:Trinidad_El_Greco2.jpg
Las Meninas (1656) by Velázquez
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez