Aragon, not Castile, had held the medieval Iberian overseas empire

Evidence

Because the world empire that Spain acquired in the sixteenth century was constitutionally run as a Castilian concern, we may think of Castile as the outward-looking, ambitious, and dynamic element in the Hispanic royal consortium, whereas the Crown of Aragon may appear to us to have been lacking (or as being free from?) that consuming drive for imperial domination that took Spanish rule so far round the world so fast. Yet in the Middle Ages it had been the Crown of Aragon that was the Iberian power with a great overseas empire. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 422

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the standard Castile-centric narrative of Spanish empire; parallels how the reader’s earlier material on composite monarchies treats constituent kingdoms.