On 2 January 1492, the Spanish royal couple Ferdinand and Isabella received the surrender of Granada, the last Muslim principality in Western Europe.
On the same occasion, a Genoese adventurer, Christopher Columbus, finally managed to persuade the two rulers to finance an expedition to approach India from the west.
The year 1492 is one of several used to mark the exact date of the transition between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, pointing to the Great Discoveries as the beginning of a new epoch, the European dominance of the rest of the world, which has lasted until the present.
The conquest of Granada may be regarded in the same way, marking the beginning of Spain’s era of greatness and forming an example of a second revolution, the military one, already discussed, that led to this result: the formation of a professional infantry army equipped with muskets and cannons. Receiving the capitulation, Ferdinand and Isabella were dressed in Moorish attire and the enemy were also given generous terms, both in accordance with the traditional multiculturalism in Spain. The following period, however, showed that this attitude had come to an end; from now on, Spain joined the common European intolerance and became the centre of Catholic orthodoxy, directed at Islam as well as against Christian heresy.To the two Catholic monarchs, the conquest of Granada and the following discovery and exploitation of America probably represented a further step towards the expansion of Catholic Christendom. However, less than three decades later, a third revolution occurred that resulted in a deep split in Christendom and the loss of most of its northern part by the Catholic Church. In 1517, Martin Luther directed his first attack on the Church and in a few years created a movement that rejected papal primacy and the central tenets of Catholic doctrine.
Four years before Luther attacked the indulgences, in 1513, the Florentine Niccolo Machiavelli composed The Prince, which may be considered equally revolutionary in the political sphere as Luther’s theses in the religious one, although it did not have the same immediate effect. It marks the beginning of the ‘realistic’ understanding of politics, emancipating it from religion and ethics, and introduces a new empirical approach to knowledge which eventually found parallels in other fields as well.
Although the distinction between the Middle Ages and the early modern period is more open to discussion today than it used to be in the nineteenth century and we have already dealt with several aspects of the early modern development, the changes listed above are important and will form the theme of this chapter. It will deal with the Renaissance movement and its intellectual and political consequences, with the religious divisions and their background in the previous development of the various kingdoms and with the Great Discoveries, which in turn will address the discussion of the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world.