At the time of D. the Spain as a national entity did not yet exist: the region was divided into various independent kingdoms, while the southern part was still in Arab hands (kingdom of Grenade).
According to watchtutorials.org, the Spanish states named by D. are: Portugal (Pd XIX 139), Castile (XII 53-54, Cv IV XI 14, Mn I XI 12), Navarre (If XXII 48, Pd XIX 143) and Aragon (VE I VIII 9, Pg III 116, Mn I XI 12) which also included Catalonia mentioned in Pd VIII 77 to indicate all its residents.
The peninsula from one of its most ancient populations, the Iberians, had taken the name of Iberia which is encountered in Greek writers starting from the century. VI BC, and Iberi said all the populations (Phoenicians, Greeks, Ionians) who settled in the region attracted by its riches. After the middle of the sixth century. BC the Spain was under the influence of the Carthaginians, whose activity, mainly of commercial origin, was temporarily halted by the first Punic war (264-241 BC); then the Romans, between 210 and 206 BC, managed to conquer the peninsula starting a profound Romanization that will take place over the span of over six centuries. The Spain, divided in 197 BC into the two regions of Hispania citerior and Hispania ulterior, saw frequent insurrections of the indigenous people and some clashes during the civil war between Cesare and Pompeo (Pg XVIII 102 and Pd VI 64); it could be pacified only during the principality of Augustus who divided it into three provinces: Hispania citerior or Tarraconensis, Hispania ulterior or Baetica, and Lusitania (27 BC); later, under Diocletian, it was divided into six provinces.
In the middle of the third century. the Spain, where the Christian religion was already spreading, suffered the invasions of the Franks and the Alamanni (257 AD) and in the fifth century. those of Vandals, Svevi, Alani and finally of the Visigoths (415). The Visigothic domination lasted, albeit through alternating events, until 711, when the discords of the highest social classes weakened the kingdom to the point of not offering resistance to the Arab invasion: the Spain therefore became a province of the Damascus caliphate with headed by an emir. In 756, the Emir of Cordoba Abd-ar-Rahamᾱn I of the Umayyad dynasty reorganized the country, effectively removing it from the dominion of the Abassids of Damascus. There was a first attempt at Christian reconquest with Charlemagne who intervened in Spain in 778, in 785 and between 801 and 811 constituted between the Pyrenees and the Ebro la Marca Hispanica with Barcelona as its capital. From the disintegration of this formed, in the century. X, the kingdom of Aragon and the county of Barcelona; these new states joined the other northern Spanish Christian states, such as the kingdom of Asturias (later called Leon) and Navarre, in the struggle they had been leading since the eighth century against the Moors.
Although defeated several times, during the century. XI the Christians, led by Sancho Garcés III (1000-1035) of Navarre, under whom the various kingdoms had gathered, managed to achieve some successes; at his death there was a new division of kingdoms, as well as dynastic struggles, but the ‘reconquista’ continued favored by the division of the Caliphate (from 929) of Cordoba into many statarelli (1031) of which the most important were the Berber one of Granata, that the Arab of Seville and the Slavic one of Valencia. This is the era of the Cid epic (end of the 11th century). During the century XII the feudal regime spread in Spain, while the Arabs, after partial successes due to the advent of the Almohads, then weakened by the occurrence of dynastic struggles, were definitively defeated in Las Navas de Tolosa (1212). Christians therefore,
Fortuna of Dante in Spain. – Various hypotheses and interpretations have been advanced regarding the priority of Dante’s knowledge in writers of the Castilian or Catalan language, or on the most significant elements – content or formal – in identifying the presence of Dante. The perspective that we can now consider traditional is vitiated by two antithetical and excessive attitudes: on the one hand, they wanted to overestimate every data in an argumentative relationship with the afterlife and with the allegorical form, in the vain claim to reconnect elements of the Christian tradition with D. or of the culture of the Middle Ages; on the other hand, and as a reaction, there was a tendency to minimize the imitators, unnecessarily emphasizing the distance that separated them from the grandeur of the model. The possibility of the study panorama was opened by J. Amador de los Ríos (1861) with too generous exaltation, followed by his disciple C. Vidal y Valenciano (1869). With greater caution and depth, the problem was reconsidered by M. Menéndez y Pelayo (1891), but the problem fell back into carelessness with Sanvisenti (1902). A. Farinelli (1895 and 1922) extended the field with new contributions, but if he had the merit of taking full account of literature in Catalan, he submerged everything in a chaotic flat vision without lines of development. The problem of allegory is faced by CR Post (1915), who in justifiably warns against the approach that linked D. to any allegorical machine, runs the grave danger of exaggerating the French influence to the detriment of the Italian one and to excessively diminish the presence of D. in the Castilian poets of the fifteenth century. With AG de Amezúa (1922) there was an enlargement of the panorama – previously limited almost exclusively to the fifteenth century – extended now up to the Golden Age, as Hutton had already done (1908), which otherwise did not even exceed the previous results.. The most synthetic and balanced overall study is that of WP Friederich (1950), but formed only with the essence of all previous works, including the somewhat hasty and popular essays by A. Giannini (1921) and C. De Lollis (1921); the latter also gave some information relating to the following centuries which, integrated with other general sources, allowed Friederich to extend his review up to the second half of the century. XIX. With all this, two fundamental needs remained unsatisfied: to avoid the aforementioned critical extremisms, according to more considered methodological criteria, and to integrate so many dispersed data into an organic and coherent vision. Essays published around the last centenary (M. Morreale, J. Arce, C. Samonà) are proof of this critical dissatisfaction in the sphere of Hispano-Italian studies, wishing for this new avenues of research.