Iberian Union

The Iberian Union, the Hispanic Monarchy, was the sixty-year personal union that put the whole Iberian Peninsula under one king from 1580 to 1640. After Portugal's succession crisis and war, Philip II of Spain took the Portuguese crown as Philip I, and for three reigns the Spanish Habsburgs ruled Castile, Aragon and Portugal with all their overseas empires, the widest sea power and territory on earth. The kingdoms stayed independent states sharing only a monarch, with their own laws, currencies and governments, worked through six councils for Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Italy, Flanders and the Indies, with viceroys where the king could not be, Lisbon kept three courts with her high board of justice, and the court even weighed moving the capital there, and for stretches Portugal kept her own viceroy. A Spanish-Portuguese fleet retook Bahia in 1625 amid the Dutch wars. Portugal chafed, revolted, and in 1640 acclaimed John of Braganza, closing the union and reopening the peninsula's oldest border.