Looking back at the war during his later exile, Napoleon rued his mistakes. ‘War in Spain ruined me,’ he wrote. ‘The Spanish war destroyed my reputation in Europe, increased my embarrassments and provided the best training ground for the English soldiers. I myself trained the English army.’

The joint presence of Christianity, Judaism and Islam made fifteenth-century Spain almost unique in Western Europe. Yet this tolerance was never as consistent or harmonious as it is frequently depicted.

Twenty-three of the thirty-three most densely populated square kilometres in Europe are in Spain, in major cities like Barcelona and Madrid.

Elsewhere in Europe, the first stirrings of scientific investigation were helping to push Christians towards a more secular set of values. All this, in the words of the French historian Joseph Perez, was happening ‘without Spain’s help, and against Spain’s will’. Without the creative tension between competing Christian creeds that drove change

In an attempt to belittle their southern neighbours, nineteenth-century French commentators had claimed that ‘Africa starts at the Pyrenees’, and Spaniards fretted that this still summed up Europe’s view of their country.

Saint Isidore of Seville came from one of the old Hispano-Roman elite families who thrived under the Visigoths. He was a churchman, politician, theologian, cornerstone of the early medieval church and incorrigible collector of wisdom. Isidore’s achievements are so vast that, were his work not still available, it might be thought the stuff of

pomegranates, spinach, artichoke, rice and sorghum established as crops. Some of the irrigation systems built to support this agricultural revolution survive around Valencia and Granada. They appear to copy those constructed around Damascus and have proved long-lived, with Valencia’s Water Tribunal – founded by the first caliph – still meeting

Women gained so much in so little time, indeed, that they skipped some key battles, leaving them in charge of the home and subject to rampant machismo in their new jobs. ‘Spain has leapt from pre-feminism into post-feminism without having really experienced the feminist upheaval which elsewhere took place in between,’ the Guardian correspondent

a monarchy led by Joseph Bonaparte might have been a great success. His regime had planned reforms that only revolution and bloodshed had won for France. They would have meant creating a two-chamber parliament, abolishing the Inquisition, defanging the excessively powerful landowners and the church while, for the first time, sending most children