Kingdom of Spain

The **Kingdom of Spain** or **Habsburg Spain** refers to Spain over the 16th and 17th centuries, when it was ruled by kings from the House of Habsburg.

The current king is Charles II of Spain, who is married to Marie Louise d‘Orléans.

## Dystanies and Kings

### **House of Habsburg (1516 – 1700)**

***Kings of Spain***

* Charles I (1516-1556)
* Philip II (1556-1598)
* Philipp III (1598-1621)
* Philipp IV (1621-1665)
* Charles II (1665-1700)

### **House of Bourbon (1700 – *present*)**

***Kings of Spain***

* Philip V (1700–1746)
* Louis I (1724)
* Ferdinand VI (1746–1759)
* Charles III (1759–1788)
* Charles IV (1788–1808)
* Ferdinand VII, *El Deseado* (1808, 1813–1833)
* Isabella II (1833–1868)
* Alfonso XII (1874–1885)
* Alfonso XIII (1886–1931)
* Juan Carlos I (1975–2014)
* Felipe VI (2014–present)

## History

Under the Habsburgs, Spain dominated Europe politically and militarily for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but experienced a gradual decline of influence in the second half of the seventeenth century under the later Habsburg kings.

The Habsburg years also ushered in the Spanish Golden Age of cultural efflorescence. Among the most outstanding figures of this period were Teresa of Ávila, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Miguel de Cervantes, El Greco, Domingo de Soto, Francisco Suárez, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Vitoria.

Arms of Charles I, representing his territories in Spain (top) and his other European possessions (bottom) “Spain" or "the Spains" in this period covered the entire peninsula, politically a confederacy comprising several, nominally independent kingdoms or realms in personal union: Aragon, Castile, León, Navarre and, from 1580, Portugal. In some cases, these individual kingdoms themselves were confederations, most notably, the Crown of Aragon (Principality of Catalonia, Kingdom of Aragon, Kingdom of Valencia, and the Kingdom of Majorca).

The marriage of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1469 had enabled the union of two of the greatest of these kingdoms, Castile and Aragón, which led to their largely successful campaign against the Moors, peaking at the conquest of Granada in 1492.

Isabella and Ferdinand were bestowed the title of Most Catholic Monarchs by Pope Alexander VI in 1496, and the term Monarchia Catholica (Catholic Monarchy, Modern Spanish: Monarquía Católica) remained in use for the monarchy under the Spanish Habsburgs. The Habsburg period is formative of the notion of "Spain" in the sense that was institutionalized in the 18th century. From the 17th century, during and after the end of the Iberian Union, the Habsburg monarchy in Spain was also known as "Spanish Monarchy" or "Monarchy of Spain", along with the common form Kingdom of Spain.

Spain as a unified state came into being de jure only after the Nueva Planta decrees of 1707 (that were a unilateral Royal edict) from the contested successor to the multiple Crowns of its former realms. After the death in 1700 of Charles II and with it the extinction of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, the Spanish Succession war lasted for many years between its contesting dynasties from France and Austria and their respective supporting allies, until the ascension of Philip V and the inauguration of the Bourbon dynasty when this centralizing legal vehicle for new State formation, without legal precedent in the Iberian realms (or the ratification of the dismissed Courts of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, whose Laws were not sworn in order to be crowned) and of clear foreign origin, in all comparable after those in France under the Old Regime Absolutism, were established after de facto.