a brief History
Humans inhabited the Balearic archipelago as early as 5000
b.c. , having most likely journeyed to the islands from the coast of
mainland Spain. Neolithic islanders lived in caves and rock shelters,
examples of which can still be seen on both Mallorca and Menorca, and
hunted the only large animal on the islands, a type of mountain goat,
now extinct. Many of the Balearic Islands are strewn with rocks and
boulders, and these early peoples built simple stone houses and cleared
fields by piling the stones into dividing walls.
Another skill with stones was evident in the islanders’
deadly use of the sling, which brought them onto the world stage and
into written history. Indeed, the name Balearic may come from the Greek
ballein, “to throw. ” The Carthaginians absorbed the islands into their
trading empire and founded the main ports, but they quickly learned to
respect the slingers, eventually recruiting thousands into their
armies. By 123 b.c. the Romans had pacified most of Spain and sent out
an invading force. Having conquered the islands, they named them
Balearis Major (Mallorca) and Balearis Minor (Menorca).
The Romans built roads and established towns, including the
towns of Palmaria (Palma) and Pollentia (near present-day Alcúdia). In
the fifth century, as the Empire crumbled, tribes called barbarians by
the Romans — Goths, Vandals and Visigoths — poured into Spain. The
Vandals, who destroyed almost all evidence of the Roman occupation,
settled in North Africa, becoming a sea power. A Byzantine expedition
from Constantinople ousted the Vandals from the Balearics in 534.
The Tide of Islam
Ignited in the Arabian peninsula by the teachings of the
Prophet Muhammad, Islam spread like wildfire, with its armies reaching
the Atlantic coast of Morocco by 683. Determined to impose their new
religion in Europe, a predominantly Moorish army led by the Arab
general Tarik landed on the Iberian peninsula in 711. In just seven
years nearly all of Spain was under Moorish rule.
The Muslim world, which reached from Baghdad to the
Pyrenees, soon fragmented, with Spain becoming an independent
caliphate. Under tolerant rulers, the capital city Córdoba was
transformed into one of Europe’s greatest centers of scholarship and
the arts. At first the caliphs were content to accept tribute from the
Balearics, without imposing Islam. But by 848 disturbances in the
islands prompted the Moors to deploy their newly expanded navy; the
Emir of Córdoba conquered both Mallorca and Menorca at the beginning of
the tenth century. By the 11th century, the caliphate had splintered
into a mosaic of fractious states — 26 at one point, and the Balearics
became an independent emirate.
The Reconquest
The aim of the Crusades in Spain was the eviction of the
Muslims. After the recovery of Jerusalem in 1099, it took four hundred
years of sieges and battles, treaties, betrayals, and yet more battles,
before Christian kings and warlords succeeded in subduing the
Moors.
On 10 September 1229, a Catalan army led by King Jaume I of
Aragón and Catalunya took the Mallorcan shore near the present-day
resort of Santa Ponça. The defenders retreated inside the walls of
Palma, but on the last day of 1229 the city fell, and pockets of
resistance throughout the island were also defeated. Jaume I proved to
be an enlightened ruler who profited from the talents of the
Moors — converted by force to Christianity — as well as of the island’s
large Jewish and Genoese trading communities. Mallorca prospered.
The Moors on Menorca speedily agreed to pay an annual
tribute to Aragón and were left in peace. The island’s tranquility
lasted until 1287, when Alfonso III of Aragón, smarting over a series
of humiliations at the hands of his nobles, found a pretext for
invasion. The Moors were defeated and expelled or killed. In contrast
to Mallorca, Menorca’s economy was devastated for decades.
Jaume I died after reigning in Aragón for six decades, but
he made the cardinal error of dividing between his sons the lands he
had fought for so long to unite. At first this resulted in an
Independent Kingdom of Mallorca, under Jaume II, followed by Sanç and
Jaume III. But family rivalry triggered the overthrow of Jaume III by
his cousin Pedro IV, who then seized the Balearics for Aragón.
Attempting a comeback, Jaume was killed in battle near Llucmajor in
1349.
A newly unified Christian Spain under the Catholic
Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, completed the Reconquest, defeating
the only Moorish enclave left on the Iberian peninsula, Granada, in
1492. However, the centralized kingdom failed to incorporate the
Balearics politically or economically.
The Spanish Empire
As one tumultuous age ended, one of glory and greed began.
Christopher Columbus, the seafaring captain from Genoa (whom at least
three Mallorcan towns claim as their own) believed he could reach the
East Indies by sailing westwards. In the same year that Granada fell,
Columbus crossed the Atlantic, landing in the Caribbean islands.
Spain exported its adventurers, traders, and priests, and
imposed its language, culture, and religion on the New World, creating
a vast empire in the Americas. Ruthless, avaricious
conquistadores extracted and sent back incalculable riches of silver
and gold. The century and a half after 1492 has been called Spain’s
“Golden Age. ” However, the era carried the seeds of its own decline.
Plagued by corruption and incompetence, and drained of manpower and
ships by such adventurism as the dispatch of the ill-fated Armada
against England in 1588, Spain was unable to defend her expansive
interests. Burgeoning trade in the Balearics was interrupted by
marauding pirates based in North Africa as well as by the powerful
Turkish fleet.
French and British Ties and Occupation
The daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella married the son and
heir of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian of Hapsburg. The Spanish
crown duly passed to the Hapsburgs, and Spain remained in their hands
until the feeble-minded Carlos II died in 1700, leaving no heir. France
seized the chance to install the young grandson of Louis XIV on the
Spanish throne.
A rival Hapsburg claimant was supported by Austria and
Britain, who saw a powerful Spanish-French alliance as a major threat.
In the subsequent War of the Spanish Succession (1702 –1713) most of
the old kingdom of Aragón, including the Balearics, backed the
Hapsburgs. Britain seized Gibraltar — in the name of the Hapsburg
claimant — and retained it when the war was over. In 1708 Britain
captured Menorca, and the magnificent harbor of Mahón (Maó), for the
Royal Navy. England clung to it even when Bourbon forces captured
Mallorca at the end of the war.
Menorca changed hands between Britain, France, and Spain
five more times in less than a century. Britain finally ceded the
island to Spain in the year 1802, under the terms of the Treaty of
Amiens.
By 1805, Spain was once more aligned with France, and
Spanish ships fought alongside the French against Nelson at Trafalgar.
Napoleon came to distrust his Spanish ally and forcibly replaced the
king of Spain with his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte. A French army
marched in to subdue the country. The Spanish resisted and, aided by
British troops commanded by the Duke of Wellington, drove the French
out. What British historians call the Peninsular War (1808–1814) is
known in Spain as the War of Independence.
In the 19th century, practically all of Spain’s possessions
in the Americas broke away in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, and the
few that remained were lost at the end of the 19th century. The
Balearics, further neglected, were beset with poverty and outbreaks of
disease. However, toward the 20th century, things began to improve on
the islands, with Mallorca reaping the rewards of successful
agricultural crops and Menorca launching an export shoe industry.
The beginning of the 20th century in Spain was marked by
still more crises, assassinations, and near anarchy. The colonial war
in Morocco provided an almost welcome distraction, but a disastrous
defeat there in 1921 led to a coup in which the general Primo de Rivera
became dictator. The dictator fell in 1929, and when the elections of
1931 revealed massive anti-royalist feeling in Spain’s cities, the king
followed him into exile.
The Republic and Civil War
The new republic was conceived amid an orgy of strikes,
church-burnings, and uprisings of the right and left. In February 1936
te left-wing Popular Front won a majority of seats in the Cortes, but
across Spain new extremes of violence displaced argument.
In July 1936, most of the army, led by General Francisco
Franco — with the support of the monarchists, conservatives, the
clergy, and the right-wing Falange — rose against the government in
Madrid. Aligned on the government’s side were the Republicans,
including liberals, socialists, Communists, and anarchists. The ensuing
Spanish Civil War was brutal and bitter, and support for both sides
poured in from outside Spain. Many saw it as a contest between
democracy and dictatorship, or, from the other side, between order and
Red chaos. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany backed Franco’s Nationalists,
while the Soviet Union supported the Republicans (although less and
less towards the end of the war). Volunteers from Britain and the US
arrived to fight on the side of the Republicans. The war lasted three
years; perhaps one million Spaniards lost their lives.
Mallorca and Menorca found themselves on opposite sides
during the war. Menorca declared itself for the republic, and stayed
with it to the bitter end. Mallorca’s garrison seized it for Franco’s
Nationalists. Early in the war, the Republicans used their one
battleship to support an invasion of Mallorca, but it ended in failure.
A decisive factor was the presence in Palma of Italian air squadrons,
used to bomb republican Barcelona.
New Horizons
Exhausted after the Civil War, Spain remained on the
sidelines during World War II and began to recover economically under
the oppressive, law-and-order regime of Franco. There had been a
foretaste of elite foreign tourism in the 1920s, but it was the late
1950s when the rest of Europe began sun-seeking pilgrimages to Spain.
Tourism exploded into an annual southern migration, transforming the
Spanish economy, landscape, and society. Eager to capitalize, the
country poured its soul into mass tourism, which triggered a rash of
indiscriminate building on the southern and eastern coastlines, with
scant regard for tradition or aesthetics. But after so many years
closed off from the rest of Europe, of equal significance was the
injection of foreign influences into Franco’s once hermetically sealed
Spain. Mallorca and Menorca in particular saw explosive growth in
tourism; by the 1970s, the Balearics were one of Europe’s most popular
holiday destinations.
Franco named as his successor the grandson of Alfonso XIII,
who was enthroned as King Juan Carlos I when the dictator died in 1975.
To the dismay of Franco diehards, the king brilliantly managed the
transition to democracy, then stood back to allow it full rein, even
intervening during a brief attempt at a military coup. After many years
of repression, new freedoms and autonomy were granted to Spanish
regions, including the Balearics, and their languages and cultures
enjoyed a long-desired renaissance.
More a part of Europe than ever before, Spain joined the
European Community (now European Union) in 1986, giving further boost
to a booming economy. The tourist industry continued to expand, and
though it became one of the top two income earners in Spain, a
realization that unrestricted mass tourism was leading to damaging
long-term consequences also began to grow. By the late 1990s, a new
emphasis on quality and, especially in the Balearics, on safeguarding
the environment had finally taken root—too late for many
environmentalists, but hopefully still in time to preserve much of the
natural beauty and unique character of the Las Islas Baleares.
