Nation Blood and Gold: The Making of Spain with Simon Sebag Montefiore

In 1543, a father wrote a secret letter of wise advice

for his teenage son.

"Always follow God's will," he wrote.

"Don't take decisions in anger,

"and don't have too much sex. It can damage your health."

This was no ordinary father and son.

The father was Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain.

And the son, Philip II, would be the champion of Catholicism,

the ruler of a world empire

and King of Spain at the very apogee of its golden age.

Philip saw himself as more than just a ruler.

There was no limit to his ambitions for Catholicism and Spain.

He built this forbidding palace as the projection

of his sacred mission.

San Lorenzo de El Escorial - the headquarters of a king

who married one English queen

and sent an armada against another,

whose enduring legacy to Spain is its capital, Madrid,

and on whose global empire the sun never set.

For seven centuries, Spain was a Roman province.

For another seven centuries, it was Muslim.

Its reconquest in the name of Christendom lasted 300 bloody years.

In this final episode,

I'll take you from Spain's magnificent pinnacle under Philip II,

through its decline, to its conquest by Napoleon,

its vicious civil war fought over by Hitler and Stalin,

right up to General Franco's dictatorship and today's democracy.

God, gold and glory, beauty and death.

This is the story of how Spain was made.

Philip II was born in 1527

in the city of Valladolid, northern Spain.

His parents were Emperor Charles V and Isabella of Portugal.

Though their empire stretched across Europe and America,

they ruled on the move with no permanent capital,

but they often stayed in Valladolid

in this small palace belonging to the Pimentel family.

In 1527, in a small room upstairs,

Empress Isabella endured 13 hours of labour.

When a kindly lady-in-waiting suggested that she scream

to relieve the pain, she replied regally,

"I shall not scream. I would rather die than make any noise."

His mother died when he was 12.

His father was always away fighting.

He loved dancing, painting, he loved flirting.

Yet, Philip's vision was clear.

He was God's vice-regent on Earth

in the service of the monarchy and Catholicism.

In 1554, his father, the Emperor, asked him to make a dutiful marriage

to gain yet another kingdom for God and the Habsburgs.

It was England.

Philip's English bride was Queen Mary,

the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

She was nicknamed "Bloody Mary"

because of her fervent execution of Protestant heretics.

For Spain and Catholicism it was a favourable match.

The contract was negotiated before the couple met

and Philip was disappointed when they did.

She was squinty, pale, paunchy and plain, and missing a few teeth,

but she was thrilled with her gold-bearded young husband king.

Their wedding night was so energetic

that she spent four days afterwards resting in bed.

She wept when Philip finally left England for the Continent.

Philip, now King of England, spent months there encouraging

Mary's restoration of Catholicism,

her persecution of the Protestants

and trying to father a Catholic heir.

Both knew that they needed a child of this marriage who would then

inherit England.

Finally, she believed that she was pregnant.

Her belly swelled, but tragically it was a false pregnancy

and probably the beginning of the cancer of the stomach

that later killed her.

Mary died in 1558.

According to their marriage contract, Philip ceased to be King of England

and the throne passed to Mary's half-sister,

the Protestant Elizabeth.

For Philip, England was unfinished business.

Yet, his focus was already global.

He ruled Spain as regent until in 1556 his father, Charles V,

gout-ridden and weary, abdicated.

At 29, Philip became Philip II of Spain,

the Netherlands, Milan, Sicily, Naples and the New World.

It was the greatest empire on Earth.

This burden lay heavy on Philip's shoulders.

Yet, his ambitions were limitless.

He called himself the Prudent King,

and was determined to rule in his own way.

I'm travelling a few miles from Philip's birthplace

to the castle of Simancas.

Behind its ancient stone walls,

Philip preserved the means by which a prudent king

should rule a great empire.

With paper.

Philip ruled from his desk.

As one chronicler wrote, "He could make the world spin from his seat."

Today, Simancas houses 14 miles of royal documents.

The archive director, Julia Rodriguez de Diego,

has pulled out some of Philip's personal papers.

They reveal his driving obsession to control an empire so vast

that it might spin out of control at any time.

It's truly awesome to be here in the presence

of some actual letters of Philip II.

So, you know him so well. What sort of man was he?

IN SPANISH

Philip also crossed things out in these letters,

corrected spelling mistakes,

and in this case here, he's actually cut out a section.

What's going on in this letter?

So what do you think this naughty young priest had done?

Micromanagement was one way that Philip kept a tight control

on the sinews of so many kingdoms.

In 1561, this sensible manager saw that his government

needed a centre, just like other monarchs in Europe.

Madrid...

..now a grand European city and Spain's capital.

It's Philip's most enduring legacy

and for him, a permanent seat of government.

Until Philip, the capital of Spain had really been where the King was,

but now he decided Madrid should be the capital,

a formal capital in the middle of the country,

just as a heart is located in the middle of the body.

At the time, Madrid was a provincial backwater of narrow, squalid lanes.

Yet, for Philip, its very insignificance was its strength.

Away from the vested interests of conspiring grandees,

he would rule through his own ministers.

This map is the first map ever made of Madrid from 1656,

almost a century later.

I'm here in the Plaza Mayor.

Planned by Philip and built by his son,

it's still right at the heart of the Spanish capital.

Less than a century after the last of the Islamic rulers

were driven out of Spain,

Philip possessed the political acumen fit for the king of a golden age.

And now he wished to create a palace that radiated his faith and power.

He chose a site at the foot of the Guadarrama mountains,

north-west of Madrid.

And this is it - San Lorenzo de El Escorial.

This place is called Philip's Seat,

and the king actually used to come up here

and oversee the construction of his beloved Escorial.

He wanted it to be the eighth Wonder of the World,

and, being Philip, he micromanaged every detail,

writing hundreds of memos to his poor architects.

In one case, he started to worry about where the lavatories would be.

"I wonder if bad smells will emanate from these holes,"

he wrote to the architect.

"Are they too close to the kitchens? Send me the plans again."

For Philip, the Devil was in the details, God even more so.

El Escorial was simultaneously political headquarters,

dynastic mausoleum, personal library

and cathedral monastery,

its design a vast gridiron, to commemorate the one

on which Philip's favourite saint, San Lorenzo, was martyred,

its splendour to emulate the Temple of Solomon.

Its magnificence embodies Philip's role

as champion of Catholicism on Earth.

"God's work and mine," he said, "are the same thing."

If there's one building that came to symbolise

the glory of Imperial Spain, it's this one.

Philip II's Hall of Battles really gives you an idea of his world-view,

his need for magnificence, his Catholic mission.

Looking at this, you get a grasp of how Philip saw himself

and how he saw the world.

Although he only saw battle once, as a young prince,

Philip was a supreme warlord, commanding the best armies in Europe.

In his 42-year reign, there was just six months of peace.

Now the empire reached its greatest extent,

including the Philippines, named after him,

and through his mother, he added Portugal and its far-flung empire.

This painting here in the Hall of Battles shows his fleet

taking the Portuguese Azores.

He now had 50 million citizens under his control.

Truly, one could say, that "Non sufficit orbis," his motto -

a world is not enough.

As his armies marched across the globe

he committed himself to war on several fronts.

His first duty was to fight the infidel.

In 1571, Philip put together a holy alliance,

which annihilated the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of Lepanto.

Yet, the biggest threat didn't come from Islam.

It came from within Christendom itself...

..the tide of Protestantism sweeping Europe.

The greatest crisis, the weeping sore of his entire reign,

was the revolt of the Protestant Dutch.

He tried to crush them

but everything failed and the revolt went on.

Ultimately, the war against the Dutch Protestants would lead

to a greater war against England.

In the island kingdom where he'd once been king,

Queen Elizabeth defiantly undid all Mary's work.

She promoted Protestantism in growing opposition to Philip.

She funded his rebellious Protestant subjects in the Low Countries.

Her ships plundered Spanish colonies and fleets.

Philip had suggested marrying Elizabeth of England

but now he decided to kill her.

He declared her a tyrant and ordered her assassination or capture

and her replacement by her Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots.

For almost 20 years he planned to send an armada, a fleet,

to conquer England, and then in 1587 his mind was made up.

Elizabeth executed Mary. That was the last straw.

Now Philip excitedly ordered the building and provisioning

of the greatest fleet in history.

His secretary noted, "I've never seen the King so animated

"by any other piece of business."

And this is the desk where the Prudent King

came up with his reckless master plan to conquer Protestant England.

He ordered that the Duke of Medina Sidonia would sail from Spain

with 130 ships, 20,000 men, along the English Channel

and join up with the 30,000 men of the Duke of Parma,

waiting at Dunkirk in the Low Countries.

Both commanders hated this plan.

How on Earth would you coordinate the two forces joining hands

at the mercy of the hostile English Navy?

But Philip swept aside all objections.

"Human prudence may suggest uncertainties," he said,

"but God will remove them. After all," he added, "I do God's work."

As Spain waited, the royal family knelt in prayer, night and day.

By 6th August 1588, Medina Sidonia

and the armada were moored off Calais.

At the same time, the Duke of Parma and his men

were embarked on ships at Dunkirk,

but fatally and predictably the message hadn't reached him in time.

It was too late and the armada were sitting ducks.

Many of them were attacked by English ships.

GUNFIRE

A storm scattered them and some of them had to sail

all the way around Scotland and Ireland to get back to Spain.

It was disaster. A third of the ships never made it home.

15,000 men died.

God had not smiled on Philip's divine enterprise.

After the failure of the armada, Philip's health deteriorated.

The man in black retreated to his rooms,

exhausting himself on his paperwork, while devoting himself to prayer.

As he lay here, priests would bring in his beloved relics

and lay them on his aching limbs and open sores.

As he sunk into unconsciousness,

the only way his daughter had to rouse him

was to pretend that someone was near those relics and might touch them.

"Don't touch the relics," she'd say, and he'd suddenly wake up.

But people in the kingdom started to say,

"If the King of Spain doesn't die soon, the kingdom will."

And finally, on 13th September 1598, he did.

As he took his final breath, the choristers were singing Morning Mass

in the monumental basilica next to his bedroom.

Philip II left the monarchy still at the zenith of its power,

the achievement of a ruler of impressive diligence and acumen.

There were failures, like the armada, yet, after Philip,

every Spanish ruler would try to emulate his greatness.

The challenge now was for Philip's heirs to maintain

the power of this expensive empire,

an empire so vast, even the gold of the Americas couldn't cover it.

It was constantly teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

And there was another problem.

In 1621, Philip IV inherited the throne.

He was 16 but he lacked the talent to rule in his own right.

Instead, he needed to choose a trusted courtier to rule for him.

These favourites were called the validos.

The validos were hated for their power and corruption.

They were compared to mushrooms that grew up suddenly overnight

out of a bed of excrement.

But the greatest of them all was Gaspar de Guzman,

the Count of Olivares.

Olivares knew that to rule Spain he needed to rule Philip IV.

I've come to the Prado Museum in Madrid

to find out about Philip and his favourite,

through the work of THE court painter of the day, Diego Velazquez.

Here's Philip IV painted astride a rearing horse.

More than anything, he wanted to be seen as a soldier king,

though his real hobbies were hunting duck and chasing actresses.

Velazquez's assessment of the young Philip was that he

"mistrusts himself, and defers to others too much".

But when you look at his face in this portrait,

there's something in the eye, something in the face

that shows how nervous he was.

He wanted to be a great king but he wasn't quite sure how.

Right next to Velazquez's Philip IV

is his portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares.

The compositions complement each other, yet here the eyes betray

no hint of doubt.

On Philip's accession to the throne,

Olivares declared, "Now everything is mine."

This is the man who taught Philip IV how to be a great king.

He was larger than life, swaggering, flamboyant, neurotic,

hypochondriacal, hysterical, explosive,

but also brilliant. He was eccentric.

He wandered the corridors of power late into the night

with documents stuffed into his hat, his pockets, even his boots.

But he was a supreme courtier too.

Once, when a young Philip was annoyed with him

and shouted that he was sick of him,

Olivares simply kissed the brimming royal chamber pot and withdrew.

He would take the young king on boisterous male escapades

in the backstreets of Madrid,

but really Olivares was all about business.

This is how he saw himself,

international strategist

and supreme commander of the greatest power on Earth.

Olivares was in power for just two years before his statesmanship

was dramatically tested by the arrival of visitors from London.

It was the start of one of the strangest diplomatic crises

in European history.

On 17th March 1623, there was a knock at the door

of the British Ambassador's residence in Madrid.

KNOCKS ON DOOR

An Englishman, who gave his name as Mr Thomas Smith,

insisted on speaking to the ambassador in person.

On the other side of the street, another figure lurked in the shadows.

When the ambassador came down, he was amazed to discover

that Tom Smith was none other than

the Marquis of Buckingham, King James I's minister and favourite,

and John Smith, hiding across the road,

was Charles, the Prince of Wales.

Both were in full disguise and wearing false beards.

This absurd, reckless escapade

was the culmination of years of negotiations

for Protestant Charles to marry the Catholic infanta, Mariana,

hugely complicated by the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War

between Europe's Catholics and Protestants.

Charles and Buckingham were playing with fire.

These vain popinjays, on a romantic adventure, had placed themselves

in the power of the ruthless Count Olivares,

who, like everyone else in Madrid,

expected that Charles would never have travelled

halfway across Europe if he was not willing to convert to Catholicism.

These shenanigans would infuriate Olivares, bewilder Philip

and reduce Charles' father, James I, to senile weeping for his wee boys.

Prince Charles regarded himself as a chevalier in pursuit

of his passionate prey, the infanta.

Olivares finally allowed him to see her in a carriage,

and there he thought her maidenly ardour was expressed

in little blushes that he thought he saw on her face.

In fact, the infanta had no intention of marrying a heretic,

a Protestant.

Olivares appreciated these perilous complexities.

Unless he could win the prize of a Catholic England,

he was determined to derail the match.

He now demanded that all Catholics in England be liberated,

their rights restored,

and this was much more than Buckingham and Charles

could ever deliver.

Soon the negotiations became dangerously fraught.

The two favourites, Buckingham and Olivares, hated each other,

insulted each other, and soon they were at daggers drawn.

Charles found himself a prisoner in Spain for over six months.

He only got away by pretending to agree to Olivares' terms.

Charles didn't get his bride.

Olivares was now more trusted by Philip IV than ever.

Olivares could now launch his master plan, which was, in his words,

"to resuscitate Your Majesty's monarchy".

This popular Madrid park was the setting

for a great pleasure palace built by Olivares.

There are few vestiges of the colossal Buen Retiro Palace itself

but this was the spectacular expression of Olivares' dream

of a resurgent Spain.

I'm about to see its forgotten throne room.

There are no tourists here.

It's all that remains of Olivares' mission to glorify the monarchy

and its young king.

This is it - the Hall of the Kingdoms in all its faded grandeur.

Here, on these walls,

Olivares celebrated the far-flung territories of his king...

..each name a story from the annals of Spanish history.

There is Granada.

There is Milan, for example, and Naples.

There is Flanders, the Low Countries.

There is Sicily, Peru, Mexico, Portugal.

This was the Spanish Empire in its late, great phase.

Olivares' ambition was to unite these kingdoms

in a military Union of Arms to fund the empire and its wars.

Yet, his vision of Spanish greatness meant entering

the devastating Thirty Years' War.

As an overstretched monarchy began losing the war,

Olivares' scheme didn't unite Spain.

It brought it to the verge of destruction.

The Portuguese rebelled. Catalonia rebelled.

Olivares' dream, Olivares' gamble had failed.

He was finished.

After over 20 years in power, Olivares' enemies were circling.

Finally, Philip IV had to break up

their strange father-son relationship.

In January 1643, he dismissed the valido.

Olivares, obese and neurotic,

went almost mad with bitterness and regret.

The Inquisition started to investigate him.

He was close to being arrested and possibly executed,

but he died aged 58 before that could happen.

King Philip was finally a man

but the Spanish Empire was now a wounded giant.

And, after over a century of rule,

the Spanish Habsburg dynasty was in trouble.

It was not merely the hubris of empire.

Its nemesis came from within.

San Lorenzo de El Escoria celebrated the Habsburgs'

elevated view of their own peerless royalty.

But now the dynasty would perish

precisely because of that haughty pride.

Down these steps, deep under the altar of the basilica,

is the sacred Pantheon of Kings,

the final resting place of the monarchs of Spain.

I come to find the tomb of the last of the Spanish Habsburgs.

Philip's son, Charles, known as "the Bewitched"

because of his grotesque appearance,

including a jaw so huge that he could barely eat.

His plight was the result of generations of family intermarriage.

The Habsburgs were made by marriage, and destroyed by it.

I'm meeting geneticist Professor Gonzalo Alvarez.

He's made an analysis of Habsburg intermarriage across 16 generations

and its fatal effect on the bloodline.

The most famous characteristic of the Habsburg family

was the Habsburg jaw.

Was this the result of their notorious interbreeding?

IN SPANISH

So what were the mental and physical effects

on poor Charles II of interbreeding?

How closely related were his parents?

When Charles II finally died, his autopsy made pitiful reading.

His brain was full of water, his veins had no blood,

and his single testicle resembled a black coal.

With two possible cousins as his heir, one Austrian, one French,

Charles chose the French.

That plunged Europe into the War of Spanish Succession,

which put a new dynasty on the Spanish throne -

the Bourbons of France.

They brought French Enlightenment and a more informal style,

and for the first time they united the separate kingdoms into one

Kingdom of Spain.

In 1789, the French Revolution

overthrew their Bourbon cousins in Paris.

As the monarchs of Europe tried to suppress the revolution,

Spain needed a strong monarch.

Unfortunately, the king was Charles IV,

nicknamed "the Hunter" because he did very little else.

It was the Queen, Maria Luisa, who was the real ruler of Spain.

And the man she wanted at her side was not the King.

He was an ambitious young upstart, a handsome royal guardsman,

Manuel Godoy.

Godoy almost certainly became the queen's lover,

and at the age of 25, she appointed him Chief Minister.

Spain was now ruled by a menage a trois.

The Queen herself proudly referred to it as "the Earthly Trinity".

It was certainly earthly.

The menage a trois was more of a foursome,

because Godoy's favourite mistress was Pepita,

whom he had painted twice by Goya.

He was very proud of her

but he was even more keen to show her at her best,

and he would show this portrait in a tiny private room.

He would pull a curtain

to reveal Pepita in all her dazzling sensuality.

Godoy wasn't just juggling powerful women.

First, he backed the monarchies of Europe

as they tried to crush revolutionary France,

and then he joined France in a plan to conquer England's ally, Portugal.

This is the residence of Godoy.

He revelled in his splendour, but his timing was unfortunate.

It happened that he coincided with the greatest soldier statesman

of all European history, Napoleon Bonaparte.

In 1808, Godoy and Napoleon agreed to cooperate

in the carve-up of the Kingdom of Portugal,

but when the French troops arrived in Madrid, they never left.

100,000 French troops poured into Spain.

Godoy, his king, his queen and mistress had to flee.

But rumours spread that the rest of the royal family

were about to be murdered.

On May 2nd 1808, a mob gathered here outside the Royal Palace.

A locksmith named Jose broke in and appeared on the balcony.

"Death to the French," he cried.

"They've already stolen our royal family - our king and our queen.

"Now they wish to take the rest of them to Paris!"

The mob went crazy.

They turned on the French troops, pelting them with rocks,

pouring boiling water on them from the rooftops, and all hell let loose.

The French opened fire randomly on the crowds. Hundreds were killed.

French and Spanish blood ran in the gutters of Madrid.

The French general ordered immediate and ruthless reprisals.

Men were rounded up almost at random, a gardener, a singer, even a priest.

As they were marched through the streets,

some builders on a scaffolding threw rocks at the French troops.

They too were arrested and added to the party.

The next day, the 3rd of May, all 43 men were executed by firing squad.

GUNFIRE

Their deaths were immortalized by Goya

in his famous painting The Third of May 1808.

Under the incongruous shadow of cable cars,

in the tiny cemetery of La Florida in Madrid, they lie buried,

43 ordinary men who stood up for Spain's national pride.

Their actions were glorious, yet futile...

..as Spain became a mere province of the French Empire.

Napoleon forced the Bourbon royal family to abdicate

and he appointed his own brother, Joseph, as King of Spain.

Emperor Napoleon came here himself to defeat the Spanish army.

But the Spanish people rose up against the French.

They launched the first guerrilla war.

The word itself, "guerrilla", comes from this conflict.

As Napoleon's brother, King Joseph, tried to rule from the Royal Palace,

Spain got help from the old enemy.

Britain sent Sir Arthur Wellesley, its best general.

He defeated the French, earning the title the Duke of Wellington.

He drove King Joseph Bonaparte out of Madrid

and in 1814 invaded France, contributing to Napoleon's downfall.

Spain was left weakened and divided.

A liberal constitution, promising democracy,

delighted half the country,

but the other half preferred Catholic absolutism.

Spain was tortured by these conflicting visions

and a humiliating international decline.

Professor Jose Alvarez Junco is an expert on the 19th century.

One of the biggest effects of the Napoleonic Wars

was not in Spain but was abroad. What happened to the Spanish Empire?

Between 1810 and 1825,

90% of the American Empire declared its independence from Spain.

The Spaniards lived on a fantasy,

that they were still an imperial power

because they kept Cuba and Filipinas and Puerto Rico

but in 1898, they finally lost that also.

What was the effect on Spain itself of this loss of empire?

The effect was enormous, tremendous.

Spain had been a big power between, let's say, 1500 and 1800,

between the Catholic kings and the Napoleonic Wars,

and they suddenly realised

that they were not a great power, they were not a "superior race".

What was the effect of the struggles and wars of the 19th century?

There were constant military coups. There were civil wars,

the socioeconomic inequality, particularly in the rural world.

Another was the Catholic Church in Spain was widely hated.

It was disastrous, and that led, for instance,

to the impossibility to have common symbols.

The Spanish national anthem has no words. We don't agree.

Conservatives would like to sing the glories of the Spanish Empire

and the defence of Catholicism,

and liberals, or lefties, would like to sing the defence of freedoms.

So, in the end, there are no words.

Sometimes, funny things have happened.

For instance, players of the national soccer team,

when they have won a championship and the music has begun,

they sing things without any meaning. For instance...

-TUNE OF SPANISH NATION ANTHEM:

-# Choon-da, choon-da

# Ta choon-da, choon-da, choon-da Choon-da, choon, choon, choon... #

Because they need to sing something.

That's extraordinary. That's totally extraordinary.

Early in the 20th century, Spain managed to stay out of World War I.

Yet, economic depression reinforced its schisms,

and the hapless King Alfonso XII

was discredited when he appointed a general as dictator.

In 1931, he was deposed. Spain was a republic

and after 200 years, the Bourbons went into exile.

The Republic was the first time in Spanish history

that the country had been ruled by a leftist, moderate government

elected in a true democracy,

and it brought in many progressive measures - votes for women,

workers' rights and water in working-class districts,

like this fountain here that still bears the date 1934

and the Spanish Republic.

Yet, the right, from landowners to industrialists,

believed that the Republic was a communist conspiracy

to destroy traditional Spanish values.

Its anti-Catholic measures proved to its enemies,

the generals, the Church and the growing fascist militias,

that it was an anathema.

They were determined to stop it.

In 1936, the Socialists won elections that were the last straw.

Tit-for-tat killings by leftist and fascist death squads

meant the generals had an excuse.

They reached for their guns.

The Republic was doomed.

The generals planned a nationalist coup.

Among them was the 43-year-old commander of the Canary Islands,

a Spanish outpost 1,000 miles away.

He emerged as their leader.

He was extremely uncharismatic.

He was a dreary, notoriously bad speaker, with a high, womanly voice.

He was paunchy, small and balding, but he was not all he seemed.

Francisco Franco had been Europe's youngest general since Napoleon.

He'd made his name as the brutal commander in the colonial war

in Morocco, where even his Moroccan troops

regarded his bloodthirstiness with reverence.

He loathed socialists, Marxists, Masons, Jews,

and believed they should be annihilated like aliens.

Above all, he possessed the will to power.

But for now, he watched and waited.

His time had almost come.

In July 1936, Franco left the Canary Islands

for Spanish Morocco in North Africa.

He planned to deploy his devoted Moroccan Legion

to crush the Republic.

Yet, he lacked transport to get his legionaries across

to mainland Spain.

He appealed to the fascist dictators Hitler and Mussolini.

They saw a way to promote fascist power.

Hitler sent the planes and, ever the fan of Wagner,

he named this operation Operation Magic Fire.

MUSIC: Magic Fire Music by Richard Wagner

While Britain and France chose to remain neutral,

the extreme ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and communism,

began a war of annihilation and a tournament of power

in the bloody bullring of Spain.

LOUD EXPLOSION

As Franco marched north, the killing started all over Spain.

20,000 were executed in the first days of the coup.

Franco's nationalist forces headed for the capital.

It would have fallen.

Instead, Franco diverted troops to Toledo,

once the capital of Visigothic Spain, which was under siege.

GUNFIRE

He was making a point.

In 1085, King Alfonso VI had taken the Muslim city of Toledo

to launch the Christian reconquest of Spain.

Franco felt that he was doing the same thing.

Now he declared, "This is not a civil war. This is a holy war.

"We are the soldiers of God."

The Church blessed Franco's cause and portrayed him

as the saviour of Spain.

In November 1935,

after taking Toledo, Franco's crusaders broke into the capital.

The Nationalist rebel forces,

spearheaded by their battle-hardened Moroccan legionaries,

fought their way right into the centre of Madrid,

right to these university buildings.

These bullet holes tell their own story.

RAPID GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS

The fighting was ferocious.

GUNFIRE

The Republic desperately needed arms and men.

The arms came from Stalin in Soviet Russia

and the men came in the form of the International Brigades,

who rushed here, individual volunteers from all over the world,

united in the fight to stop fascism.

Madrid held out for three years,

the ultimate symbol of Republican resistance.

Franco fought on, now backed by 80,000 troops sent by Mussolini

and Hitler's Nazi Condor Legion,

which invented terror bombing and devastated Guernica.

LOUD EXPLOSIONS

Sensing that this was a rehearsal for the coming World War,

writers poured in to cover the agony of Spain.

It caught the imagination of a generation.

The most famous of them all was Ernest Hemingway,

and he was a regular at this bar.

He used to sit right over there.

"It was full of smoke," he wrote, "singing men in uniform

"and the smell of wet leather coats. And they were handing out drinks

"over a crowd that were three-deep at the bar."

Hemingway saw this as a war against fascism

and he helped publicise the desperate glamour of the Republican side.

His novel For Whom The Bell Tolls

is one of the great war novels of all time,

and it captures the folly, the heroism

and the sheer chaos of the Republican side.

It's still a timeless read

and some of the romanticism that is attributed

to this most vicious of conflicts

is down to Hemingway's masterpiece.

The reality was savage.

For an unglamorised version,

I've driven 200 miles to the site of one of its bloody battles.

Belchite in Zaragoza -

a ghost town left exactly as it was at the end of the Civil War.

It's still haunted by the atrocities perpetrated by both sides.

For the Republican side,

the greatest symbol of hatred was the Church.

This is just one of the many they destroyed,

and across Spain they exhumed the bodies of nuns and priests,

mocked them and exposed them to public view.

But much worse, they also killed 13 bishops and 6,000 clergy

in what became known as "the greatest clerical blood-letting in history".

Altogether, the Republicans killed 55,000 people.

Republican death squads, often led by communists,

organised mass killings.

The Nationalists were better organised in every way.

"I will occupy Spain," said Franco, "town by town, village by village."

Half of the Spanish people were to be treated as aliens

and annihilated on sight.

Anyone suspected of socialism, atheism, liberalism,

communism were hunted down by right-wing death squads and executed.

Altogether, during the war,

200,000 people were murdered by the Nationalists.

In March 1939, the Republicans finally disintegrated.

Franco marched into Madrid and declared total victory.

In the next five years, he ordered further killings,

an estimated 200,000 people, executed as enemies of Spain.

There was no reconciliation. There were no pardons.

With his regime secured,

Franco was keen to promote his place in Spain's imperial history.

On the first anniversary of the Nationalist victory

he announced the plan to build a monument

to those who fell for the cause.

He chose this valley - we're just coming into sight now -

because right next door, just over there, is the Escorial,

the magnificent palace monastery of Spain's greatest king, Philip II.

You can see exactly the way his mind was working.

Franco saw himself as among the great, heroic conqueror kings

of Spain's history.

Dominated by its 500-foot Holy Cross,

the Valley of the Fallen encapsulates Franco's Spain,

a strange mix of Catholic, imperial and conservative,

fascist and nationalist...

..Christian symbolism infused with fascistic imagery.

"Such are the dimensions of our crusade," said Franco,

"that we cannot commemorate this with simple monuments.

"We must raise stones that resemble the grandeur

"of the monuments of old that defy time."

Well, whatever we think of Franco,

we must say,

he succeeded at least in that.

As Europe plunged into the Second World War,

Franco identified with Hitler and Mussolini.

He called himself "El Caudillo" - the leader, the warlord -

to match the Fuhrer and the Duce.

He felt he was on history's winning side

and he didn't want to miss out on the prizes.

Yet, Spain was weak and ruined.

By 1940, Europe shook with the triumphs of Hitler's blitzkrieg.

Franco wanted to emulate the style, the ideology and the conquests

of Hitler and Mussolini, his brother fascist dictators.

He created an anti-Semitic fascistic party, and he declared,

"We have conquered the scum of the communist-Masonic-Jewish conspiracy."

He wanted to create a new Spanish Empire

but only Hitler could give it to him.

After German forces had conquered even France,

Franco wanted to join the war, but he had his price.

On 23rd October 1940, Franco and Hitler

met at Hendaye Railway Station,

near the Spanish border in France, to discuss terms.

It started well. "Delighted to see you, Fuhrer."

"Finally, an old wish of mine fulfilled, Caudillo."

And then they repaired to Hitler's train, Erika, to begin the talks.

Franco started to demand a long shopping list

of imperial territories he wanted for Spain.

Gibraltar and Portugal, of course, but also bits of French Catalonia,

French Morocco, swaths of Algeria and West Africa.

Hitler was outraged. He despised Franco.

He said that Franco's whining voice resembled the muezzin,

the Muslim call to prayer.

He called him a "Jesuitical swine".

He lost his temper.

He treated Franco to one of his foam-flecked rants.

He stood up to end the talks but was persuaded to return.

But it didn't end well.

He said he'd prefer to endure three or four teeth being pulled out

than to spend another minute with Franco.

Spain didn't get its empire.

Germany didn't need Spanish help.

Franco stayed neutral.

But when Hitler fell, he adapted,

swiftly dropping his fascist style,

embracing a Catholic authoritarianism.

For over 30 years, he lived here at the El Pardo Palace.

His name appeared on stamps and coins.

He was protected by a Moroccan bodyguard.

He could even appoint people to titles

and gave away dukedoms and marquises.

He was king in all but name.

He never actually abolished the monarchy.

His plan was to restore the Bourbons after his death

in a new hybrid regime, a Francoist monarchy.

In the '40s, he allowed the young Prince Juan Carlos

to return to be educated in Spain.

In 1969, he finally announced his decision.

He would be succeeded by Juan Carlos as king on his own death.

But, while he thought he was playing the prince,

the prince was also playing the old dictator.

BELL TOLLS

As he planned the succession, Franco knew where he would be buried,

at the Valley of the Fallen, within the giant basilica

like a warrior king.

It really is an extraordinary place.

It's impossible not to be impressed by it,

but also horrified.

It's pervaded by death.

I feel I've entered a sacred political theatre

orchestrated by Franco himself from beyond the grave.

On 20th November 1975, aged 82,

the last dictator of the '30s died.

BELL TOLLS

Was this the requiem for the age of dictators,

or the overture for an enduring tyranny?

When the lights went out, and the bells rang

and the choir sung,

I wouldn't have been surprised if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

had clattered into the hall.

Two days after Franco's death, the young Bourbon, Juan Carlos,

took the oath as King of Spain.

He never intended to be the figurehead for the Francoists,

and after 40 years of tyranny,

the nation was hungry for freedom and democracy.

The young king immediately started to move towards a new Spain.

He oversaw the dismantling of the dictatorship

and the creation of parliamentary democracy

without a drop of blood being spilt.

Within 18 months,

Spain held its first democratic elections in 41 years.

Today, democracy is established. Spanish society is diverse.

Spain has offered citizenship to the descendants of Jews expelled in 1492.

It was the third country in the world to allow same-sex marriages.

Catholicism still has its place, yet no longer dominates the state.

For many millennia, Spain has been the borderland,

the crossroads, the battlefield of empires, faiths and peoples.

Its extreme position at the edge of Europe has intensified

the extremity of its rages, its furies, its conflicts.

Carthaginians versus Romans,

Muslims versus Christians,

Catholics versus Protestants,

fascists versus communists.

Spain has always been, throughout history,

the cauldron of civilisations, the furnace of faiths.

Today, the scars of civil war are still raw.

Juan Carlos abdicated.

His son is now king and regionalism remains strong.

Blood and gold, from the caliphate to the kingdom,

this is the story of how Spain was made.

If this story has inspired you and you'd like to find out more,

go to the address given on-screen

and follow the links to the Open University.