Ethnic diversity and its results
Christians speaking closely related Romance languages made up the majority of the inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula, but they had long coexisted with a larger element of starkly distinct peoples than most of the other nations of Europe. Not only were the Basques in the northeast of different stock, but Iberia had been largely conquered in the early Middle Ages by Muslim Arabic speakers coming from northern Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar. In a long process of reconquest, called the Reconquista, the Iberians had gained back all of the peninsula by the late 15th century, but the Moors, as they called them, were still the majority of the population in several areas along the southern coast, and as servants, slaves, and craftspeople they were to be found in many parts of the peninsula. A substantial number of Jews had also long made Iberia their home. For many decades the Portuguese had been exploring along the coast of Africa, bringing back many Africans as slaves. By the late 15th century Africans were present in considerable numbers in Portugal and also in the south of Spain.
The Iberian Christians’ relations with the other peoples, above all the Moors, were to be the precedent for their treatment of the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. In the Reconquest (Reconquista) the Christians had pushed their rivals back through military force; those who carried out the conquests often went to settle among the Moors and were rewarded by the government with grants of land and other benefits. But the newly subjugated Muslims retained much of their organization and civilization for long periods, only gradually being Christianized and absorbed. As for the Jews, on the one hand they were resented and sometimes persecuted by Christian Iberians while on the other hand those who converted to Christianity often rose high in professional and political life and married well within Christian Iberian society.
The Africans had become a well-known group especially in the southern part of the peninsula, with accepted roles as house servants, craftspeople, and field workers. Possession of African slaves was part of general economic life and of social ambitions. Also, manumission was possible, and communities of freed Africans, many of them racially mixed, existed on the edges of society.
So much diversity represented a formidable challenge to the movement toward the creation of unified Christian nation-states that was coming to a head in the late 15th century. Those of the Jews and Moors who had refused to convert were in time forcibly expelled, and the Inquisition became active in the attempt to enforce the orthodoxy of those who had accepted conversion. Negative stereotypes concerning the other ethnicities were rife in Iberian culture, but over the centuries Iberia had seen diversity, close contact with different peoples, and their gradual absorption.