| Dec 24, 2011 4:18:09 GMT -5 |
Post by spain on Dec 24, 2011 4:18:09 GMT -5
Antonio "Spain" Fernández Carriedo
AVE MARIA ☨ GRATIA PLENA ☨ DOMINUS TECUM
AVE MARIA ☨ GRATIA PLENA ☨ DOMINUS TECUM
I Feel Like We're Summoning The Devil
Nickname/Alias: Toño, Tonito, Papi
Gender: Male
Character Type: Country
Country or Country of Origin: Spain
Canon or Original: Canon
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When I look into all of your stupid faces
I think how fun it will be to pound them into dust
Hair: Medium Brown
Height and Weight: 5'9", 155lbs.
Other Distinguishing Features: Light to medium tan skin, piercings in both lobes.
Overall Appearance: Antonio is not the tallest nation by any means; however, he is built with lean muscle corded throughout his figure. There is a very slight dip in his waist due to corsetting (and peascod shaping) in his now-extant garments, but it is otherwise quite strong and fit as his history of dance, warfare and seafaring can tell. His lower half is particulary thick, from his lower back through to his ankles, which has earned him an.. interesting reputation concerning his posterior.
Foremost, he is a man of comfort, preferring to wear garments which are less inhibiting; as he typically spends much of his day doing physical activities (and the rest of it eating or sleeping), he has an extensive collection of jeans, tee-shirts, simple button downs and sandals. However, this is not to say that Spain is not a man who enjoys his night life and his get-toethers. He is capable of dressing up, but he typically saves this for more social occasions. He owns many blazers, colourful dress shirts and blouses, pressed slacks and of course, various shoes and boots which zip or tie (preferrably with a low heel).
His face is angular, his nose quite straight (as many Spaniards tend to sport), and his cheeks dimple when he smiles, which is quite often.
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Man up or I'll beat you with my peace prize!
ºSkilled Cooking
ºMoney
ºSleeping
ºAntiques (particularly armaments)
ºMaritime Activities
ºFencing (as in, real destreza, not modern sport)
ºDance
ºJerez Wine (popularly known as "Sherry")
ºCafés
ºRabbits
ºLute/Guitar
ºPoetry
ºArchitecture
Dislikes:
ºFake Jewelry
ºLow-Quality Ingredients
ºBeing Slighted
ºRules
ºFrailty/Illness
ºRain
º
Strengths:
☨ A natural leader, he makes decisions quickly. Though it wasn't the largest, Spain currently holds the title of longest standing empire in the world.
☨ Regardless of his current situation, he retains an optimism that not many would come to share.
☨ He is shrewd, and particularly so in monetary matters.
☨ He laughs easily, enjoys being amused and being in the company of friends. He is eager to tell jokes and to play tricks on others.
☨ A self-proclaimed gentleman (whether it be true or false is another matter), he turns his charms on and off as it suits him; he is an engaging companion and a passionate lover.
☨ In times of war, he is loyal; in combat, he is hardened and disciplined. Believing himself a man of his word, betrayal is out of the question.
Weaknesses:
☨ He speaks freely and is thereby prone to making insensitive comments, whether he means to or not.
☨ Believing that he is a nation who does not know fear, he frequently engages in activities which can be considered foolish or dangerous by his peers. (See Bull Running, Bull Fighting, Bull Leaping, Bull Anything, Colonization of the Americas.)
☨ Catholicism is deeply rooted in Spain, and he suffers a number of religious vices and occasional bouts of guilt; to lesser company, this is veiled beneath an easygoing facade.
☨ He is carnal, and can spill blood easily when finding himself in such situations. Despite his apparent amiability in later years, his long history speaks otherwise.
☨ He is indulgent and rarely denies himself anything.
Fears:
· That he will never come out of his monetary slump.
· That because of their extensively shared history, which was not always the most pleasant by far, the Italies will one day come to truly hate him.
· That his previous colonies will always continue to view him as a snob/asshole/monster/etc.
Secrets:
|| He has a gold tooth, way in the back of his mouth.
|| Even though he is currently in a political marriage with France, he has never really ceased to have feelings for Austria.
Any Quirks/Habits:
= When preparing fruit or vegetables, he likes to line them up in neat rows before cutting them.
= He is actually one of the few nations who is not unnerved or afraid of Russia; they have a non-violent history and shared each other's views during Spain's rise to power.
= Very rarely does he go anywhere without his golden crucifix; he either wears it openly or tucks it into the collar of his shirt. He also tends to wear other gold and silver jewelry, typically earrings and rings for the fingers.
Overall Personality: To speak of the Kingdom of Spain is to speak of wine, women, leisure, revelry, sun and sea as broad as one can hope to aspire. It is, above all, a mosaic of cultures. Heterogeneous. Old and modern. Refined and popular. Holy and secular. Plural and diverse. The variety of its cultures attracts. The historic heritage dazzles. The vital power of its people fascinates. Spanish culture is extremely rich and touches upon all forms of artistic expression. From literature to painting, music to architecture, the theatre to sumptuary arts. In each of these aspects, at some point in its long history, Spanish culture has reached the highest artistic plateaus: from bygone times (with outstanding examples of cave art) until present day (a time in which Spanish architecture is universally avant-garde), culture and art in Spain are prominent features of the country.
So, too, can this be said of its incarnation; Antonio appears to be older than many of his peers, but retains the joviality and vigor of his youth. Proud, stately, charismatic, amiable—these things find their place within his many facets. He has a love of the world and worldly things that lie within it, and dared to claim them for his own in centuries past. A fondness of exploration and adventure has done him well, and others would be hard pressed to hear him dismiss any sort of challenge. He lives his life simply, preferring to surround himself with comfort and any and all manner of quaint findings, and placing happiness and longevity in high regard. In fact, to this we must add that life expectancy in Spain is one of the highest in the world (approximately 81 years).
But these things were not always true of him.
Indeed, the Spanish culture has played an important role throughout time. He was an empire of great renown, he who represented the Golden Age of men; a symbol of power, wealth and beauty in all undertakings. To his liege, he was known as the great Kingdom of Spain, the Lion of God who crushed the wicked in its incomparable maw. To his husband, he was the Guardian, the noble defender of the House of Habsburg and the conqueror of the New World which brought them influence and fortunes abound. But to those who opposed him, however, he was simply dubbed the Antique Beast; akin to a prowling predator, a devil who rose from a fathomless pit of fire, bearing a grin most maddening and an axehead which extended to the furthest corners of the earth.
It can be said that the years of his glory were similarly the years of his corruption. No man could be spared from the threat of his halberd in his quest to cleanse the land of heretics, and no land had been left unturned in his quest to satiate his lust for gold and silver. And so it came to pass that many of his conquests, which flourished in some ways beneath Spanish rule, had arrived at the point of rebellion; the breadth of the empire was expansive indeed, and though Spain faced much opposition on many fronts, he bore the strength and steely will of Rome before him for 400 years, from rise to fall of the empire on which the sun never set.
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I'm the hero!
The first settlers on the Peninsula were the Celts and the Iberians. The first testimonials written about the country date back to this period. It is said that Hispania (the name the Romans used to describe the Peninsula) is a word of Semitic origin from Hispalis (Seville). From the year 1100 A.D. and until the middle of the 3rd century A.D., commercial and cultural contact with high Mediterranean civilisations was held with the Phoenicians and Greeks. At the end of this era, both civilisations were taken over by the Carthaginians and Romans, respectively. The Roman presence in Hispania lasted for seven centuries, during which time the basic borders of the Peninsula in relation to other European towns were set up. In addition to territorial administration, many more institutions were inherited from Rome such as the concept of family, Latin as a language, religion and law. At the start of the 5th century new settlers from the North arrive and settle on the Peninsula: the Visigoths in the interior and the Swabians on the West. This Germanic people saw themselves as the continuators of the weakened Imperial power. Integration between Hispanic-Germanics was a rapid process, with the exception of the Northeast of the peninsula, inhabited by Basques, Cantabrians and Asturians, who resisted the infiltration of the Romans, Visigoths and later the Muslims.
The decomposition of the Visigoth state apparatus would lead to the successive infiltration of Arab and Berber troops from the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar at the beginning of the 8th century. In the middle of the 8th, century the Muslims had completed occupation and Cordoba became the centre of the flourishing Andalusian state. The Arab presence in Spain would last for almost seven centuries and leave an indelible mark on the Spanish cultural heritage. Following a long period of peaceful coexistence, the small Christian strongholds in the North of the Peninsula took on a leading role in the Reconquest, which ended with the capture of Granada in 1492 under the reign of the Catholic King and Queen, traditionally considered the founders of peninsular unity and the imperial management of the Spanish revival. The year 1492 also marked the arrival in the New World of Christopher Columbus, during a voyage funded by Isabella. That same year, Spain's Jews were ordered to convert to Catholicism or face expulsion from Spanish territories during the Spanish Inquisition. A few years later, following social disturbances, Muslims were also expelled under the same conditions.
As Renaissance New Monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand centralized royal power at the expense of local nobility, and the word España, whose root is the ancient name Hispania, began to be commonly used to designate the whole of the two kingdoms. With their wide-ranging political, legal, religious and military reforms, Spain emerged as the first world power.
The unification of the crowns of Aragon and Castile laid the basis for modern Spain and the Spanish Empire. Spain was Europe's leading power throughout the 16th century and most of the 17th century, a position reinforced by trade and wealth from colonial possessions. It reached its apogee during the reigns of the first two Spanish Habsburgs – Charles I (1516–1556) and Philip II (1556–1598). This period saw the Italian Wars, the revolt of the comuneros, the Dutch revolt, the Morisco revolt, clashes with the Ottomans, the Anglo-Spanish war and wars with France.
The Spanish Empire expanded to include great parts of the Americas, islands in the Asia-Pacific area, areas of Italy, cities in Northern Africa, as well as parts of what are now France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. It was the first empire of which it was said that the sun never set.
This was an age of discovery, with daring explorations by sea and by land, the opening-up of new trade routes across oceans, conquests and the beginnings of European colonialism. Along with the arrival of precious metals, spices, luxuries, and new agricultural plants, Spanish explorers brought back knowledge from the New World, and played a leading part in transforming the European understanding of the globe. The cultural efflorescence witnessed is now referred to as the Spanish Golden Age. The rise of humanism, the Protestant Reformation and new geographical discoveries raised issues addressed by the influential intellectual movement now known as the School of Salamanca.
In the late 16th century and first half of the 17th century, Spain was confronted by unrelenting challenges from all sides. Barbary pirates under the aegis of the rapidly growing Ottoman empire, disrupted life in many coastal areas through their slave raids and renewed the threat of an Islamic invasion. This at a time when Spain was often at war with France.
The Protestant Reformation schism from the Catholic Church dragged the kingdom ever more deeply into the mire of religiously charged wars. The result was a country forced into ever expanding military efforts across Europe and in the Mediterranean.
By the middle decades of a war- and plague-ridden 17th century Europe the Spanish Habsburgs had enmeshed the country in the continent-wide religious-political conflicts. These conflicts drained it of resources and undermined the European economy generally. Spain managed to hold on to most of the scattered Habsburg empire, and help the imperial forces of the Holy Roman Empire reverse a large part of the advances made by Protestant forces, but it was finally forced to recognise the separation of Portugal (with whom it had been united in a personal union of the crowns from 1580 to 1640) and the Netherlands, and eventually suffered some serious military reverses to France in the latter stages of the immensely destructive, Europe-wide Thirty Years War.
In the latter half of the 17th century, Spain went into a gradual relative decline, during which it surrendered a number of small territories to France. However it maintained and enlarged its vast overseas empire, which remained intact until the beginning of the 19th century.
The decline culminated in a controversy over succession to the throne which consumed the first years of the 18th century. The War of Spanish Succession was a wide ranging international conflict combined with a civil war, and was to cost the kingdom its European possessions and its position as one of the leading powers on the Continent.
During this war, a new dynasty originating in France, the Bourbons, was installed. Long united only by the Crown, a true Spanish state was established when the first Bourbon king, Philip V, united the crowns of Castile and Aragon into a single state, abolishing many of the old regional privileges and laws.
The 18th century saw a gradual recovery and an increase in prosperity through much of the empire. The new Bourbon monarchy drew on the French system of modernising the administration and the economy. Enlightenment ideas began to gain ground among some of the kingdom's elite and monarchy. Military assistance for the rebellious British colonies in the American War of Independence improved the kingdom's international standing.
In 1793, Spain went to war against the new French Republic, which had overthrown and executed its Bourbon king, Louis XVI. The war polarised the country in an apparent reaction against the gallicised elites. Defeated in the field, peace was made with France in 1795 and it effectively became a client state of that country; In 1807, the secret treaty of Fontainebleau between Napoleon and the deeply unpopular Godoy led to a declaration of war against Britain and Portugal. French troops entered the kingdom unopposed, supposedly to invade Portugal, but instead they occupied Spanish fortresses. This invasion by trickery led to the abdication of the ridiculed Spanish king in favour of Napoleon's brother, Joseph Bonaparte.
This foreign puppet monarch was widely regarded with scorn. The 2 May 1808 revolt was one of many nationalist uprisings against the Bonapartist regime across the country. These revolts marked the beginning of what is known to the Spanish as the War of Independence, and to the British as the Peninsular War. Napoleon was forced to intervene personally, defeating several badly coordinated Spanish armies and forcing a British army to retreat. However, further military action by Spanish guerrillas and armies, and Wellington's British-Portuguese forces, combined with Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia, led to the ousting of the French imperial armies from the Spain in 1814, and the return of King Ferdinand VII.
The French invasions devastated the economy, and left Spain a deeply divided country prone to political instability. The power struggles of the early 19th century led to the loss of all of its colonies in the Americas (which stretched from Las Californias to Patagonia), with the sole exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Amid the instability and economic crisis that afflicted Spain in the 19th century there arose nationalist movements in the Philippines and Cuba. Wars of independence ensued in those colonies and eventually the United States became involved. Despite the commitment and ability shown by some military units, they were so mismanaged by the highest levels of command that the Spanish–American War, fought in the Spring of 1898, did not last long. "El Desastre" (The Disaster), as the war became known, helped give impetus to the Generation of 98 who were already conducting much critical analysis concerning the country. It also weakened the stability that had been established during Alfonso XII's reign.
The 20th century brought little peace; Spain played a minor part in the scramble for Africa, with the colonisation of Western Sahara, Spanish Morocco and Equatorial Guinea. The heavy losses suffered during the Rif war in Morocco helped to undermine the monarchy. A period of authoritarian rule under General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–1931) ended with the establishment of the Second Spanish Republic. The Republic offered political autonomy to the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia and gave voting rights to women.
The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) ensued. Three years later the Nationalist forces, led by General Francisco Franco, emerged victorious with the support of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Popular Front government side was supported by the Soviet Union and Mexico and International Brigades, including the American Abraham Lincoln Brigade, but it was not supported officially by the Western powers due to the British-led policy of Non-Intervention.
The Civil War claimed the lives of over 500,000 people and caused the flight of up to a half-million citizens. Most of their descendants now live in Latin American countries, with some 300,000 in Argentina alone. The Spanish Civil War has been called the first battle of the Second World War.
The military victory of General Franco gave way to a long dictatorial period that would last until 1975; it was an era characterised by an iron control of interior politics and isolation from the international environment, which did not however prevent an incipient economic development in the sixties. Following the death of General Franco, the Spanish people peacefully made the transition from dictatorship to democracy in a process known as 'the Spanish model'. Don Juan Carlos I, as King of the Spanish people, became the chief of a social and democratic state of law, which moulded the Constitution of 1978.
On 30 May 1982 Spain joined NATO, following a referendum. That year the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) came to power, the first left-wing government in 43 years. In 1986 Spain joined the European Community; what became the European Union. The PSOE was replaced in government by the Partido Popular (PP) after the latter won the 1996 General Elections; at that point the PSOE had served almost 14 consecutive years in office.
On 1 January 2002, Spain ceased to use the peseta as currency replacing it with the euro, which it shares with 15 other countries in the Eurozone. Spain has also seen strong economic growth, well above the EU average, but well publicised concerns issued by many economic commentators at the height of the boom that the extraordinary property prices and high foreign trade deficits of the boom were likely to lead to a painful economic collapse were confirmed by a severe property led recession that struck the country in 2008/9.
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You've got it backwards! Backwards!
Hurry up and throw it! If you don't hurry up and throw it, you'll go "boom"!
"...Alfredo?"
It had only been three years since the most recent presidential election; since the words Obama had spoken to Prime Minister Zapatero, uniting them beneath a common goal for relations between their two countries that were 'more intense, and more productive'.
Since that time, the Spanish nation in question had seen much more of his former territory (now a strong country in his own right), due to the prompting of his own governmental leaders to get along and spend time. Their shared past was both arduous and filled with longing as well as loathing, and in many ways the two were very much alike; too much so, some might argue. However, there were also a plethora of differences both cultural and personal, which they were now here endeavouring to overcome.
Antonio had arrived in Florida the day prior to their meeting, and arrangements had been made for the two of them to meet in the city of Saint Augustine after the Spaniard's arrival from Jacksonville via private shuttle. It had been a while, indeed, since he had seen the city which had traded hands to England and then to America, but he had discovered that a small part of himself had felt satisfaction once his fort had been restored to its original name of Castillo de San Marcos and had been so carefully preserved by the Americans as a historical monument.
It was with this thought that Spain had emerged from the shuttle, shielding his eyes from the midday sun as the salted sea wind blew in from the shore. He was clad that day in a predominantly white button-down with copper pinstripes, the sleeves rolled and the first few buttons left unfastened in order to reveal the small golven crucifix that hung between the hollow of his sunkissed clavicle, gleaming when the light had struck it along with the two small hoops which decorated his earlobes of the same precious metal. Faded blue denim clung to his legs, the pantlegs rolled up just beneath his knees to reveal the low tops of his white adidas shoes beneath his ankles.
"Were you thinking about something? Come and help me with these.."
His angular features had not changed since the day that he had found the little boy with hair the colour of straw on the sandy beaches, he himself sat atop the back of a proud Andalusian; his once fierce and proud gaze was now easy and unassuming, and where once he had looked down, he found himself instead looking up into the face of Alfred Jones who had surpassed him in height and breadth of stature. He had felt pride at the swift growth of his territory, once upon a time; even now, the embers of satisfaction dared to flicker in his chest, which he promptly quelled as he stooped to gather some of his luggage in his arms.
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I Summon thee from far away lands, come forth!
You called?
Timezone: GMT-8
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