Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro)

c. 1500MajorContested

From about 1500 to Calderon's death in 1681 Spain produces Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Teresa of Avila, El Greco and Velazquez, fed by imperial wealth, humanism, printing and church and court patronage.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First stars ignite → Supernovae seed heavy elements → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → Asteroid ends the dinosaurs → Early primates → Apes split from monkeys → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Babylonian mathematics → Babylonian astronomical diaries → Thales and natural philosophy → Trial and death of Socrates → Plato's Academy → Aristotle's Lyceum → Alexander's conquests → Death of Alexander and the Hellenistic kingdoms → Seleucid Empire founded → Parthian Empire founded → Sasanian Empire → Birth of Muhammad → Muhammad's first revelations → The Hijra → Conquest of Mecca → Death of Muhammad and the Rashidun caliphate → Arab conquests → Abbasid Caliphate → Battle of Talas → Paper reaches the Islamic world → House of Wisdom → Toledo translations → Humanism → Italian Renaissance → Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro)

Contested history

Consensus: Did the 1492 expulsion cause Spain's Golden Age? No mainstream historian argues that it did. The flowering is traced to empire, humanism, printing and patronage, though several leading figures came from converso families.

The expulsion caused the Golden AgeUnsupported

No economic or cultural historian makes this case; the literary and artistic peak came generations after 1492, and Britannica dates its start to Spain's partial political unification about 1500.

Writers and mystics of converso (Jewish) descent made major contributionsEstablished

Inquisition records show Teresa of Avila's grandfather was penanced for Judaizing in 1485, Fernando de Rojas was barred in 1525 from defending his converso father-in-law, and Luis de Leon was questioned about his Jewish ancestry.

Converso tension shaped the character of Golden Age cultureDebated

Americo Castro argued that Spanish identity formed among Christians, Moors and Jews and that converso anxiety marks the period's writing; Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz and others rejected the thesis, and the argument continues.

American silver paid for the Golden AgeDebated

Earl Hamilton documented huge silver inflows and inflation from about 1535 to 1600, but much of the silver went to war and foreign creditors, and historians also stress court and church patronage and humanist schooling.

The expulsion was a heavy blow to Spain's economyDebated

Forced sales, seized debts and lost Jewish taxes were real, but Henry Kamen's 1988 study and later surveys find that at most 40,000 to 50,000 left, most Jews converted, and the economic cost now looks relatively minor.

The expulsion caused Spain's 17th-century declineMinority view

Popular accounts, echoing a remark attributed to Sultan Bayezid II, make this link, but most historians blame the decline on war, taxation, plague and fiscal crisis a century later.