The Conquest of Granada in 1492 ended the last Arab state on the Iberian Peninsula and coincided with the union of Castile and Aragon and the opening of Spain’s American empire. In the book’s account, these developments helped forge a European superstate and strengthened the Crown—an institutional path that contrasted with England’s and later shaped how the two kingdoms responded to Atlantic trade.

The conquest and the formation of Spain

The conquest came at the end of the long Reconquest, the process by which Christian kingdoms ousted the Arab powers that had occupied southern Iberia since the eighth century. Granada, the last Arab state on the peninsula, fell in the same year that the marriage of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand joined Castile and Aragon. The book treats the conjunction as consequential: territorial conquest and dynastic union took place together, consolidating the political foundations of Spain.

The new monarchy’s reach expanded through dynastic inheritance. After Isabella’s death in 1504, her daughter Joanna was crowned queen of Castile. Joanna’s marriage to Philip of the House of Habsburg, son of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, placed their son Charles in line to inherit extensive territories. Crowned Charles I of Castile and Aragon in 1516, Charles added the Netherlands and Franche-Comté after his father’s death; in 1519, Maximilian’s death brought him the Habsburg territories in Germany and the title of Emperor Charles V. The merger associated with 1492 had thus become the basis of a multicontinental empire.

American expansion and royal power

The year of Granada’s fall also marked Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, on a voyage funded by Isabella and Ferdinand. The book places that expansion alongside the conquest as part of a broader transformation: the Crown’s American possessions and their wealth helped strengthen the absolutist state that Isabella and Ferdinand had begun to build.

Precious metals from the Americas supplied a material foundation for that power. Large quantities of silver were discovered in Guanajuato in the 1520s and soon afterward in Zacatecas. The conquest of Peru after 1532 added further wealth through the Crown’s share of conquest spoils—the royal fifth—and its share of mining revenues. By the 1540s, silver from Potosí was pouring additional resources into the Spanish king’s coffers. Granada’s conquest therefore sits at the beginning of a sequence in which territorial consolidation and overseas expansion reinforced royal authority.

A contrasting institutional path

The significance of the conquest becomes clearer in the book’s comparison of Spain with England. In the seventeenth century, absolutism weakened in England but grew stronger in Spain; Spain’s Cortes existed in name only. The book links this divergence to the different political distribution of Atlantic commerce: Spanish and French monarchies could monopolize much of overseas trade, whereas the English Crown could not control it all. In England, wealthy traders with fewer ties to the Crown gained from commerce and pressed for institutional change; in Spain, the monarchy and its allies were the principal beneficiaries.

This comparison makes the Conquest of Granada more than a marker of military and territorial completion. It belongs to a contingent historical sequence in which the union of crowns, imperial inheritance, and American revenues helped consolidate absolutism. The book’s wider argument is that such inherited institutional differences shaped how societies responded to later turning points, including Atlantic trade, and could lead otherwise comparable countries toward sharply different political and economic paths.