Alfonso XIII, also known as El Africano or the African due to his Africanist views, was King of Spain from his birth until 14 April 1931, when the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed. He became a monarch at birth as his father, Alfonso XII, had died the previous year. Alfonso's mother, Maria Christina of Austria, served as regent until he assumed full powers on his sixteenth birthday in 1902.
Francis Xavier, SJ, venerated as Saint Francis Xavier, was a Basque Spaniard. He was a Catholic missionary and saint who co-founded the Society of Jesus and, as a representative of the Portuguese Empire, led the first Christian mission to Japan.
Manuel Azaña Díaz was a Spanish politician who served as Prime Minister of the Second Spanish Republic, organizer of the Popular Front in 1935 and the last President of the Republic (1936–1939). He was the most prominent leader of the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939.
Ramón Serrano Suñer, was a Spanish politician during the first stages of the Francoist dictatorship, between 1938 and 1942, when he held the posts of President of the FET y de las JONS caucus (1936), and then Interior Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister. A neofalangist originally from the CEDA, Serrano Suñer came to embody the most totalitarian impetus within the regime. Serrano Suñer was known for his pro-Third Reich stance during World War II, when he supported the sending of the Blue Division to fight along with the Wehrmacht on the Russian front. He was also the brother-in-law of Francisco Franco's wife Carmen Polo, for which he was informally nicknamed Cuñadísimo or the "most brother-in-law".
Marko Marulić Splićanin, was a Croatian poet, lawyer, judge, and Renaissance humanist. He is the national poet of Croatia. According to George J. Gutsche, Marulic's epic poem Judita "is the first long poem in Croatian", and "gives Marulić a position in his own literature comparable to Dante in Italian literature." Marulić's Latin poetry is of such high quality that his contemporaries dubbed him "The Christian Virgil." He has been called the "crown of the Croatian medieval age", the "father of the Croatian Renaissance", and "The Father of Croatian literature."
Leopoldo O'Donnell y Jorris, 1st Duke of Tetuán, GE, was a Spanish general and Grandee who was Prime Minister of Spain on several occasions.
Indalecio Prieto Tuero was a Spanish politician, a minister and one of the leading figures of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) in the years before and during the Second Spanish Republic.
Francis Borgia was a Spanish Jesuit priest. The great-grandson of both Pope Alexander VI and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, he was Duke of Gandía and a grandee of Spain. After the death of his wife, Borgia renounced his titles and became a priest in the Society of Jesus, later serving as its third superior general. He was canonized on 20 June 1670 by Pope Clement X.
Diego Laynez, S.J., born in 1512 and died on 19 January 1565 (Rome), was a Spanish Jesuit priest and theologian, a New Christian, and the second Superior General of the Society of Jesus after the founder Ignatius of Loyola.
Joanna of Austria was Princess of Portugal by marriage to João Manuel, Prince of Portugal. She served as regent of Spain to her brother Philip II during his trips to England to marry Mary I from 1554 to 1556, and 1556 to 1559. She was the mother of King Sebastian of Portugal.
The Spanish Republic, commonly known as the Second Spanish Republic, was the form of democratic government in Spain from 1931 to 1939. The Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931 after the deposition of King Alfonso XIII. It was dissolved on 1 April 1939 after surrendering in the Spanish Civil War to the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco.
Legislative elections were held in Spain on 16 February 1936. At stake were all 473 seats in the unicameral Cortes Generales. The winners of the 1936 elections were the Popular Front, a left-wing coalition of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), Republican Left (Spain) (IR), Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), Republican Union (UR), Communist Party of Spain (PCE), Acció Catalana (AC), and other parties. Their coalition commanded a narrow lead over the divided opposition in terms of the popular vote, but a significant lead over the main opposition party, Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA), in terms of seats. The election had been prompted by a collapse of a government led by Alejandro Lerroux, and his Radical Republican Party. Manuel Azaña would replace Manuel Portela Valladares, caretaker, as prime minister.
Red Terror is the name given by historians to various acts of violence committed from 1936 until the end of the Spanish Civil War by sections of nearly all the leftist groups involved. The May 1931 arson attacks against Church property throughout Spain and the determination of the Republican Government to never compromise upon and strictly enforce its ban against classical Catholic education were the beginning of a politicidal campaign of religious persecution against the Catholic Church in Spain. No Republican-controlled region escaped systematic and anticlerical violence, although it was minimal in the Basque Country. The violence consisted of the killing of tens of thousands of people, including 6,832 Roman Catholic priests, the vast majority in the wake of the rightist military coup in July 1936, the Spanish nobility, small business owners, industrialists, conservative politicians, and known or suspected supporters of the right-leaning parties or the anti-Stalinist Left, and the desecration and arson attacks against monasteries, convents, Catholic schools, and churches.
The background of the Spanish Civil War dates back to the end of the 19th century, when the owners of large estates, called latifundios, held most of the power in a land-based oligarchy. The landowners' power was unsuccessfully challenged by the industrial and merchant sectors. In 1868 popular uprisings led to the overthrow of Queen Isabella II of the House of Bourbon. In 1873 Isabella's replacement, King Amadeo I of the House of Savoy, abdicated due to increasing political pressure, and the short-lived First Spanish Republic was proclaimed. After the restoration of the Bourbons in December 1874, Carlists and anarchists emerged in opposition to the monarchy. Alejandro Lerroux helped bring republicanism to the fore in Catalonia, where poverty was particularly acute. Growing resentment of conscription and of the military culminated in the Tragic Week in Barcelona in 1909. After the First World War, the working class, the industrial class, and the military united in hopes of removing the corrupt central government, but were unsuccessful. Fears of communism grew. A military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in 1923, and he ran Spain as a military dictatorship. Support for his regime gradually faded, and he resigned in January 1930. There was little support for the monarchy in the major cities, and King Alfonso XIII abdicated; the Second Spanish Republic was formed, whose power would remain until the culmination of the Spanish Civil War. Monarchists would continue to oppose the Republic.
Francisco Gómez-Jordana y Sousa, 1st Count de Jordana, was a Spanish soldier and politician who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs during the rule of Francisco Franco.
The Cárcel Modelo massacre was the execution of roughly 30 politicians and soldiers by anarchist militiamen who occupied a Madrid prison on 22 August 1936, in the opening months of the Spanish Civil War.
Juan Simeón Vidarte Franco-Romero was a Spanish lawyer and socialist politician. He was deputy secretary general of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party between 1932 and 1939, and secretary of the Congress of Deputies during the first legislature of the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1933). After the Spanish Civil War, he went into exile in Mexico.
The anti-clerical riots of 1835 were revolts against the religious orders in Spain, fundamentally for their support of the Carlists in the civil war that began after the death of King Ferdinand VII at the end of 1833, and which took place during the summer of 1835 in Aragon and, above all, in Catalonia, within the context of the uprisings of the Spanish Liberal Revolution that sought to put an end to the regime of the Royal Statute, implemented in 1834 by the regent María Cristina de Borbón-Dos Sicilias, and to give way to a constitutional monarchy with the reestablishment of the Constitution of 1812.
The massacre of friars in Madrid in 1834 was an anti-clerical riot that took place on July 17, 1834, in the capital of Spain during the regency of Maria Cristina and the first Carlist war (1833-1840) in which several convents in the center of Madrid were assaulted and 73 friars were killed and 11 were wounded, because of the rumor that spread through the city that the cholera epidemic that had been ravaging the city since the end of June and that had worsened on July 15 had occurred because "the water in the public fountains had been poisoned by the friars". "The result of little more than twelve hours of violence" was a "party of blood and vengeance". "It was the first time that the Church had been subjected to the uncontrolled actions of its own believers. As contemporaries observed, these events demonstrated, above all, the loss of prestige of the religious in Catholic Spain, as was happening in other countries".
