Catholic Monarchy & Minority Expulsions

Castile and the unified Spanish monarchy.

1 chapter

1085 - 1492

After Toledo fell to Castile in 1085, La Mancha became a militarized frontier governed by the Orders of Calatrava and Santiago—religious-military institutions that were not just armies but territorial administrators who shaped settlement, agriculture, and the religious calendar of frontier towns. Calatrava la Nueva, the Sacro-Convento perched on Cerro Alacranejo, became headquarters of the first Hispanic military order. The Monastery of Uclés served as the Caput Ordinis of Santiago. The Castle of Sigüenza, built by bishops over a former alcazaba, illustrates how ecclesiastical and military power merged on the frontier. Mudéjar communities continued building in Islamic styles under Christian rule, producing the hybrid architecture visible in Toledo's churches. Meanwhile, Toledo's Jewish community thrived as a "third culture"—two major synagogues, a rabbinic school, and a judería that made the city the "Jerusalem of Sephardic Jewry." Walk the judería and you step through a coexistence that the next era would violently end.

1614 - 1700

After the Morisco expulsion completed in 1614, Castilla-La Mancha entered a Baroque festival culture shaped by Counter-Reformation spectacle. The Corpus Christi procession became the primary stage for communal identity: in Camuñas, the Pecados y Danzantes evolved as a ritual drama where masked "Sins" attack the Custodia before repenting, followed by the Danzantes' choreographed dance. A "Judío Mayor" figure presides—officially an Auto Sacramental allegory, but anthropologist Molinié reads it as crypto-Jewish code. The meaning remains contested; what is certain is that the ritual structure encodes a dialogue between suppression and survival. The Corral de Comedias in Almagro—the only surviving 17th-century theater structure in Spain—hosted the plays that fed this Baroque imagination. The auto sacramental, performed outdoors during Corpus Christi, became the dominant dramatic genre for public religious performance. Stand in the Corral's courtyard and you occupy the exact space where Golden Age audiences experienced the theatrical machinery that shaped festival culture until the Bourbon prohibition of 1765.

711 - 1085

Islamic rule reshaped the region's geography and language permanently. Arabic toponymy embedded itself in the landscape: al-Manxa (

1700 - 1936

The Bourbon dynasty brought French-inspired economic centralization and enlightened reform. Fernando VI established the Real Fábrica de Seda in Talavera (1748) as part of a state manufacturing system designed to modernize Spain's economy; the factory building survives as a reminder of imposed industrial policy on a rural region. The 1765 prohibition of autos sacramentales marked a deliberate break from Baroque festival culture, pushing ritual drama out of public squares and into church interiors—a top-down reshaping of how communities could perform their beliefs. Windmills—Mediterranean tower-mill technology documented since the 14th century but widespread by the mid-16th—were the region's pre-industrial grain-processing infrastructure on the Mancha plain. Cervantes' 1605 novel later mythologized them into "giants," but their real significance is technological: they transformed wind into flour for bread, the staple of every festival table. The Consuegra and Campo de Criptana windmills stand as the most legible survivors of this food-processing network.