T he Monarchy in its different conceptions and modes, has been the prevalent form of government or the institution holding the utmost political power in Spain and its adjacent territories throughout history. Hence the political and institutional history of Spain, like that of other European countries, is, in part, the history of its Monarchy and its kings and queens.
Willem Blaeu. Dating back to mythical kingdoms in antiquity, such as Tartessos in the south of the mainland, or the peoples traditionally settled all over Iberia since the Metal Ages Iberians, Celts and others largely employed monarchical forms of government and of defining power and structure.
The Roman civilisation on the mainland at the end of the 3rd century B. This was a political construction that was ostensibly monarchical from the full incorporation of Hispania in the times of the first emperor, Augustus.
Hispania gave Rome some of its most important emperors, such as Trajan who enlarged its frontiers from the British Isles to Mesopotamia, including what is today Romania ; Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, famous for the cultural, philosophical and artistic inheritance they bequeathed; or Theodosius the Great, who split the empire into two parts, thus enabling the existence and continuity of a great State bearing the Greek-Latin mark in the eastern world, the Eastern Roman Empire, commonly known as the Byzantine Empire, until the dawning of the Middles Ages midway through the 15th century.
The collapse and disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, largely fostered by the incursion of Germanic tribes, also organised monarchically, led to the articulation of independent kingdoms in the former Roman provinces. In the 5th century AD, Hispania became home to the Visigoths, a people indigenous to the north of Europe that had been migrating through Roman territory for several centuries. Subsequently, in the 6th and 7th centuries, after defeating some rival powers such as the Suebi Kingdom, settled in the Northwest of the mainland, and after unifying legal codes to govern all the inhabitants regardless of whether they were of Roman or Goth origin and achieving religious unity in Catholicism after Arianism had been eventually pushed aside, a form of political, territorial, legal and religious unity was achieved in Hispania with King Leovigildo and his successors.
The Hispanic-Goth Monarchy, which was acknowledged politically and legally as the heir and successor to Rome on the Peninsula, was the first effective realisation of an independent Kingdom or State of wholly Hispanic territories and scope. Its crown or utmost leader was appointed by election, its monarchs being selected from within a particular lineage. The collapse of the Hispanic-Goth Kingdom, due to its internal conflicts and the Muslim conquest gave rise to the process conventionally and historically known as the Reconquest.
Several Christian hubs in the north of the mainland, particularly in Asturias, founded kingdoms and monarchically governed spaces which, gradually and without respite, went on to recover the mainland, their figurehead being the extinct Hispanic-Goth Kingdom and their object its full restoration to power.
Hence the mainland and islands saw the founding of other kingdoms, such as Portugal, Valencia and Majorca. Worthy of mention is the fact that both in Christian Hispania, heir of the Hispanic-Roman and Hispanic-Goth tradition and in al-Andalus, institutions were founded with monarchic competencies of the highest level existing at that time. The culmination of the Reconquest at the end of the 15th century resulted in the disappearance of the Spanish-Muslim space and the political and territorial convergence of the most important Spanish crowns Castile and Aragon under the same monarchs, the Catholic Monarchs, Isabel and Fernando.
In , when Juan Carlos was thirty-one, Franco summoned him and informed the young man of his decision to make him his successor, with the title of King of Spain. He went out of his way to promote a democratic transition that reduced his own powers but turned Spain into a constitutional monarchy.
Over the course of the next several decades, despite persistent rumors of his philandering and corruption, Juan Carlos could officially do no wrong. Probing stories were routinely suppressed. In , I wrote a Profile of Juan Carlos for The New Yorker in which I mentioned rumors about his receiving commissions on international business deals involving Spanish companies.
They obeyed. One day, during my time on the edges of the royal circle, a courtier showed me around the palace—a mansion set in rolling parkland outside Madrid.
After breaking his hip in a fall during the trip, Juan Carlos had been rushed back home for surgery. At the time, he was the honorary president of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund. In a first step toward damage control, King Felipe VI announced that he would renounce his personal inheritance from his father and that his father would no longer receive his royal allowance.
But this turned out to be untrue. It is difficult to recall a modern-day monarch who has fallen into disgrace more precipitously and entirely than Juan Carlos. His downfall has thrown the future of the Spanish crown into question. Since then, the political instability has continued, with Spain holding four general elections between and The Catalan separatist movement has presented another challenge, with the unauthorized referendum on independence on October 1, , prompting King Felipe to make a public call for unity.
While Cristina escaped punishment, Urdangarin ended up in prison for embezzlement , among other charges. He is still serving his sentence. His sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews were left out of the family. Reminding the public that the infantas were no longer members of the royal family was of no use. The infanta Cristina is officially resident in Switzerland. Juan Carlos I, meanwhile, has been living in Abu Dhabi since last August , when he fled Spain as allegations of financial wrongdoing mounted against him.
In the last couple of months, he has made multi-million-euro payments to the Spanish Tax Agency in a bid to regularize his tax situation and avoid prosecution. Making matters worse, Elena was seen entering La Zarzuela the day after the scandal over her vaccination in Abu Dhabi broke out.
The infanta Elena, meanwhile, distanced herself from her brother after she was excluded from the royal family, a move which meant she could no longer represent the monarchy in institutional events.
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