A student asked in class today, “But didn’t Ferdinand and Isabella care that people they ruled were living in dire poverty?”
The student is a Freshman and doesn’t yet realize that the mentality which expects “the people in charge” to be interested in whether those under their rule are starving is historically quite new and would have been entirely alien to Medieval Iberians.
Three hundred years after the times of Ferdinand and Isabella, the empire they created got into a state of such a decline that it became obvious to everybody that Spain’s model of territorial expansion was unsustainable. The times when a ruler paid a group of indifferent and shiftless mercenaries to fight a war the ruler’s subject had no interest in were gone.
It took about 120 years to design a new model. Now instead of loosely defined territories inhabited by people who had little in common, there would be nations. Nations would be united by a (completely invented) common purpose, a (completely invented) august history and venerable artistic tradition, a (completely invented) shared way of life and set of shared characteristics, and a set of symbols embodying this unity.
A comprehensive system of public education that accompanied the birth of the nation-state instilled a deep emotional attachment to these (completely invented) symbols and values. This emotional attachment would provide the very thing the creation of the nation-state pursued: free and limitless cannon fodder.
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