#since Cádiz was the main launching pad of the Spanish Armada | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

intricatecaprice · 11 months

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Capitán Armando Salazar's Spain:

(circa War of Spanish Succession)

One of the things I didn't know when I first started writing fanfic for Capitán Salazar was that technically, Spain wasn't really a single unified country in his lifetime.

If you had asked them where they were from, the men of La María Silenciosa would have been more likely to tell you they were 'Castilian', or 'Aragonese', or any number of the smaller regions across the country.

To give a brief history, from the 700s-1500s AD, Spain was called Al-Andalus, and was under the control of Muslim states. You can still see a great deal of architecture from this time period especially in the South of Spain, the most famous being Alhambra palace (Granada):

But Christianity started to spread rapidly from the 1400s onwards, and by 1502 all Muslims were ordered to either convert or leave (this royal edict is still criticised today, with many debating if the edict was largely responsible for the eventual decline of Spain's economy and population).

Over the centuries, the cultures of each Spanish region became so significantly different from one another that it is not unlikely to have caused tension aboard Salazar's ship.

Southern regions retained strong Moorish influences due to their geographical proximity to Morocco, but this kept them divided culturally and politically from their Northern neighbours.

Catalonia and Aragon (North East) hated the taxes they'd been forced to pay to the new king Philip V in the early years of the war of Spanish Succession. They fought against their neighbours when the King attempted to send Castilian soldiers through their territory. The King punished those who rebelled by taking their homes and lands away - leaving them with nothing.

All of this would definitely have played heavily into the personal identity of each of the men aboard La María Silenciosa: not all of them would necessarily have shared the same language, manners, or way of looking at themselves and the world around them.

It's interesting to me, therefore, that the colour the men of La María Silenciosa wore was grey.

Not the yellow and red stripes of the Catalonian flag. Not the blue and gold coat of arms of King Philip V. No, the colour is deliberately neutral. As if by donning the grey, every man aboard La María Silenciosa is acknowledging that no matter their differences, under Capitán Salazar's command they are one.

#historical spain #capitán armando salazar #potc 5 #pirates of the carribean: dead men tell no tales #potc headcanons #i've always kind of headcanoned that Guillermo Lesaro's family are generational farmers from near the french border #Gui is all too aware of his uneducated 'lower' class roots #miguel magda 100% has royalty in his bloodline #and he knows it #but let's hope for his sake it's not Hapsberg blood #i've been playing with the idea that bracero's grandmother was an italian who first settled in the Aragon region after she married #and I headcanoned that Capitán Salazar's grandfather escaped a plague in Valencia to move to Cádiz as a boy in the 1650s #a move which permanently affected the Salazar family #since Cádiz was the main launching pad of the Spanish Armada

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