The First ‘Atlantic’ Empire

An Atlantic empire of sorts existed already in the thirteenth century. Of the parts of the Iberian peninsula which were conquered from the Moors in one of the most active and sustained periods of the so-called ‘Reconquest’, between the 1220s and the 1260s, the kingdoms of Valencia and Murcia constituted a substantial ‘Mediterranean front’, subjugated largely by Aragonese and Catalan forces. The conquests of Castile and Portugal, however, in the south-west of the peninsula, in lower and upper Andalusia, Extremadura, the Alentejo and the Algarve, belong to a different, Atlantic world. Their coasts were washed by the Atlantic; into the Atlantic their rivers drained. They were or became, for the most part, colonial tierras vagas : lands empty or emptied of indigenous population or, at least, where the natives were depleted or displaced. They were the seedplot of a colonial people and, in some respects, a nursery of colonial experience. They resembled the future terrains of Atlantic colonisation, but were radically unlike those of most of the Mediterranean, where native labour forces and indigenous economic systems were essential to colonial life.

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• Extension y demografia de las ciudades hispanomusulmanas

  Leopoldo Torres Balbas•Studia Islamica•1955

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