From Civil Conflict to Crusade: Mobilisation and National Identity in the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

For decades after its conclusion, the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) was officially described by the newly imposed dictatorship as a Crusade. However, the appropriation of a mythologised medieval past was not just the product of post-war legitimisation. This article explores how, using “crusade” as a placeholder for Reconquista, the rebel army and its supporters responded to three distinct developments: a reaction to Republican anticlericalism; the imposition of a national identity in which Catholicism was understood as an essential element of Spanishness and the basis for its greatness; and a very practical need for popular mobilisation both at home and abroad. However, as this study demonstrates, the adoption of a crusading rhetoric and medieval mythology was a transnational development, in which distinct anti-Bolshevik campaigns, with origins in Rome and Spain, fed off each other and intersected, sometimes in intricate and hidden ways, within the increasingly polarised international context of the 1930s.