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These preparations included the signing of contracts for the purchase of large quantities of weapons.
#ROME TOTAL WAR SPAIN SERIES#
The coup was prepared through a long series of contacts between its leaders and the Italian government. 6 Some weeks before the coup took place, the Rebels were already receiving support from the fascist powers. The massive Italian intervention in Spain, which must be understood in the broader context of supremacist interventionism in Europe, followed the failure of the Spanish military Rebels’ attempt to seize power through a coup d’état in July 1936. As this article will demonstrate, these military and political aspects provide us with the most important means of understanding fascist participation in the Spanish Civil War. However, it has also has tended to overlook the development of the intervention itself, and to ignore its military and political dimensions.
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The predominantly political and diplomatic historiography of Italian involvement in the Civil War has contributed substantially to our knowledge of Italian motivations from the perspective of international geostrategic considerations and Italian foreign policy. 5 In fact, it played a decisive role in the evolution and outcome of the conflict. This re-evaluation of Mussolini’s war in Spain is based on the premise that the Italian fascist intervention which took place from 27 July 1936 up to the end of the Civil War was far from inconsequential. On the few occasions where its historical importance has been acknowledged, its relevance has been confined to the period between July 1936 and March 1937: between the sending of the Savoia airplanes and the battle of Guadalajara. 4 Apart from the classic works by Coverdale, Saz, Heiberg or – more recently – Viñas, the CTV has rarely been taken seriously by historians of the Spanish Civil War.
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3 In political terms, most historians have underlined the low levels of fascist devotion among the CTV’s combatants and the Duce’s supposed failure to implant fascism in Spain. Militarily, historians have suggested that the force never recovered true prominence after the much-discussed defeat at Guadalajara in March 1937. In geostrategic terms, it has been observed that the CTV was unable to control the Western Mediterranean. This insignificance has been defined as threefold: geostrategic, military and political. Much of the historiography on international intervention in Spain – whether written from diplomatic, military, geostrategic or memorialist perspectives – has either celebrated Mussolini’s support for Franco in a completely acritical way, or relegated this support to a position of complete insignificance. 2 According to the CTV anthem, the corps was created to liberate Spain and to inaugurate a new history there, to bring a smile back to the faces of a people oppressed by ‘the Reds’, and to build a fascist Europe. The fascist salute accompanied by a steel blade was the symbol of the Corpo di Truppe Volontarie (CTV), the expeditionary corps composed of over 78,000 Italians sent by Mussolini to fight in the Spanish Civil War. ‘ In alto il pugnale’, with the dagger raised, as is depicted in so many photographs.