Time would prove Zúñiga right – in the seventeenth century, even an empire on which the sun never set could not ‘sustain many wars in different areas for long’ – but the extraordinary energy of his nephew initially concealed many underlying weaknesses. Olivares normally rose at five, confessed and took communion, and then roused the king from his slumbers to discuss the day's programme. He spent the rest of the day ‘receiving and dispatching letters, giving more audiences, holding meetings … until eleven o'clock at night’. The hectic routine killed four of Olivares’ secretaries, and the count-duke himself suffered from a chronic lack of sleep. This may explain the breathless quality of his state papers (which constantly referred to the matter under discussion as ‘without exception the most important thing that has happened in Your Majesty's Monarchy’) and the attraction of doing the unexpected, or doing things in unexpected ways, in part because they saved time. One ambassador considered Olivares ‘by nature very inclined to novelties, without taking account of where they might lead him’.4
At Christmas 1624, Olivares presented his master with a comprehensive programme of ‘novelties'; but almost immediately, Britain declared war and attacked Cadiz, while the duke of Savoy laid siege to Genoa, Spain's most important ally in the Mediterranean. Olivares deferred his novelties while in 1625 he not only organized the relief of Genoa and repulsed the attack on Cadiz, but also recovered from the Dutch both Bahía in Brazil and Breda in the Netherlands. ‘God is Spanish and favours our nation these days,’ Olivares crowed to a colleague; but the need to react simultaneously to attacks in so many different areas convinced him of the importance of an integrated imperial defence strategy. A few days after hearing of the relief of Cadiz, he unveiled the ‘Union of Arms’.5
The scheme aimed to create a ‘rapid reaction force’ of 140,000 men, drawn from the Monarchy's various component parts: if any part came under enemy attack, a portion of the force would immediately come to its rescue. Olivares expected that the Union would not only share the costs of imperial defence, but also ‘familiarize [the word used in government circles] the natives of the different kingdoms with each other so they forget the isolation in which they have hitherto lived'; and in January 1626, he set out from Madrid with the king to ‘sell’ the Union of Arms to the Corts (representative assemblies) of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia. Afterwards, they intended to move to Lisbon, to prepare an invasion of Ireland in retaliation for Charles I's attack on Cadiz.6
The Union of Arms had little chance of success, because Olivares used unreliable data to fix the obligations of each part of the Monarchy. Thus he calculated that Catalonia's population numbered one million, so that it should therefore provide 16,000 paid soldiers for the defence of the Monarchy; but subsequent research suggests that Philip had only 500,000 Catalan subjects.7 Moreover, by unilaterally imposing the demands of the central government on regional authorities accustomed to autonomy, the Union provided a common focus for previously separate grievances. In Aragon, where the king and his minister called for a permanent standing army of 3,333 soldiers, with a further 10,000 as a strategic reserve, tenacious opposition forced them to accept just 2,000 for 15 years. The Valencian Corts granted only one quarter of the crown's request. The Catalan Corts refused to vote anything.
Undeterred, in July 1626 Philip signed orders that put the Union of Arms into effect in Portugal, Italy and the Netherlands. He also ordered the Council of the Indies to apply it to America and the Philippines. Everywhere, the scheme provoked opposition. The governors of Portugal, charged with providing 16,000 men, claimed that the Union could not be introduced legally without a meeting of the Cortes. In Mexico, the magistrates of the leading towns demanded a special assembly of delegates to discuss the proposal, while the viceroy of Peru attempted the same tactic as the kingdom of Aragon. He reminded the king that ‘what matters to his royal service is not just the imposition of taxes but that his subjects should accept and pay them with obedience and enthusiasm. And to achieve this it would be good that some should hope for, and others feel certain of, a reward.’ When the central government rejected this strategy out of hand, the viceroy simply declined to put the Union into effect.8
The Castilian treasury therefore continued to bear the brunt of defending the Monarchy, forcing the king to issue a ‘decree of bankruptcy’ in February 1627 that froze the capital of existing loans, most of them from Genoese bankers, and suspended all interest payments. Olivares had already secured an undertaking from Portuguese bankers, almost all of them ‘New Christians’ (as people of Jewish descent were termed) to lend over a million ducats and, just as the government hoped, the emergence of these rivals led the Genoese bankers to accept low-interest bonds in repayment of their old debts, and also to provide new loans. On the very day the government finalized these generous arrangements, news arrived at court that the duke of Mantua in northern Italy had died, leaving a disputed succession. Philip and Olivares regarded the coincidence as providential and decided that, notwithstanding the numerous wars already afoot, they could afford to intervene in order to prevent a French candidate from gaining Mantua. They would soon regret their choice.
The Portuguese New Christians expected repayment of their loans from the silver bullion scheduled to arrive in Spain from America, but in September 1628 a Dutch fleet ambushed the entire treasure fleet and captured its cargo intact. Even a year after the disaster, Philip admitted that ‘whenever I speak about it my blood boils in my veins, not for the loss of money, because I pay no attention to that, but for the reputation that we Spaniards lost’.9 The king's bankers, however, did not share his insouciance: without the anticipated silver they defaulted on their loans, so that Philip's armies abroad received no funds for several months. In the Netherlands, Spain's unpaid troops failed to prevent the Dutch capture of the heavily fortified city of ‘s Hertogenbosch and almost 200 surrounding villages. In Madrid, some councillors feared catastrophe because ‘once the Netherlands are lost, America and other kingdoms of Your Majesty will also immediately be lost with no hope of recovering them’. In Italy, Spain's unpaid troops could not prevent Louis XIII with a large army from crossing the Alps to Italy to support the French claimant to Mantua. Olivares predicted (with uncanny accuracy) that France had just started a war that would last for 30 years.10
So many setbacks might have disposed some rulers towards peace, but Philip gushingly reassured his councillors that ‘none of these losses that I have suffered and continue to suffer have afflicted or discouraged me, because God Our Lord has given me a heart that has room for many troubles and misfortunes without becoming overcome or fatigued’. All his wars must therefore continue. One month later, he announced his intention to travel first to Italy and then to the Netherlands to take personal command of his armies. Realizing that his great adventure would involve enormous costs, he invited each of his ministers to suggest ways of funding it.11
Characteristically, the king appointed a ‘committee of theologians’ to evaluate the proposals received. The theologians immediately rejected every suggestion that called for reduced spending (that the king should stay in Spain; that he should make peace in Italy in order to have more money to fight in the Netherlands; that he should make ‘the best peace treaties possible, postponing until a better occasion the royal intentions of Your Majesty in the hope that God will return to fight for His cause’). Instead they approved three proposals for new taxes: stamp duty on all official documents (papel sellado); a national salt monopoly (estanco de la sal); and retaining part of the first year's salary of every newly appointed office-holder, secular and ecclesiastical (media anata). They also made the radical suggestion that the new taxes should be imposed universally throughout the empire, and not just in Castile.12
Olivares welcomed the theologians’ report, praising in particular the ‘universal measures, that will affect all kingdoms’, because they would ‘give Your Majesty the means and resources to lay down the law to the whole world from your watch-tower and thus to contro
l personally, by your orders, the fleets, armies, wars and peace treaties, that Your Majesty considers justified’. He therefore ordered ministers to draw up plans to introduce each new tax, payable by everyone, even the clergy, throughout Castile and Portugal.13 Although some ministers warned about the dangers inherent in such innovations – ‘This is a matter, Sire, on which we must embark with great caution because every novelty brings with it great inconveniences’ – the king pressed ahead with the media anata at once, signing letters that imposed it first on Portugal and Spain and later on Italy and America, with the solemn promise that it would be used exclusively ‘for the wars against heretics and infidels’.14
Open Opposition Begins
The new taxes pleased Olivares in part because they were the king's ancient ‘regalian rights’, which could be imposed and changed at will; but since the precedents for most of them lay deep in the past (many had not been levied for decades if not centuries), government apologists ransacked historical works for justifications. Opponents of the taxes therefore searched for counter-precedents that restricted or precluded each royal initiative. In Naples, several scholarly books condemned government by a viceroy as an unjustified novelty and extolled the city's ‘republican’ past when a ‘doge’ had maintained parity between the nobles and the ‘people’. They called upon the king of Spain to restore the ‘ancient constitution’. In Catalonia, lawyers published historical accounts of the ‘fundamental laws’ or ‘constitutions’ of the principality that no ruler could violate; clerics published tracts defending the duty to preach in Catalan (not Castilian, as the central government insisted); and trade officials wrote discourses in favour of protecting economic goods produced in Catalonia against imports (especially from Castile). All three groups of writers fostered a sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, and a distrust of everything that emanated from Madrid.
Olivares's opponents had no difficulty in recruiting university-trained historians and lawyers, because early modern Spain and Italy, like other European countries, possessed a surfeit of them. By 1620 some 20,000 students attended university in Castile, representing more than one-fifth of their age cohort. The majority studied law and what today would be called ‘liberal arts’. Only a small proportion of these students entered government service: rather more devoted their learning to researching and writing critiques of government policy.
The government's critics gained strength when extreme weather caused a series of catastrophes throughout the Spanish Monarchy. In 1626–7 the worst floods ever recorded inundated Seville; in 1629 disastrous floods left much of Mexico City under water for the next five years (see page 64); Spanish Lombardy suffered from a drought-induced famine and plague, which killed about one-quarter of the population in 1628–31 (see chapter 14 below); in 1630–1, according to a contemporary chronicler, Lisbon ‘lacked everything, especially grain’ because of drought.15 Castile also suffered from the climatic downturn. The magistrates of Madrid sent officials as far as Andalusia and Old Castile to requisition additional grain – a measure without parallel in the seventeenth century – and in 1630–1 the capital's granaries distributed 1.5 million bushels of wheat: twice as much as in any other year. The rural population was less fortunate. To take a single example: at the village of Hoyuelos, near Segovia, the tithe yield (a fixed percentage of the harvest) fell from 19 fanegas of wheat in 1629 to 2 in 1630 and to only 1 in 1631. Shortfalls like this decimated the population: some towns and villages lost half of their inhabitants and the king's ministers warned that, owing to ‘the shortage of grain, Your Majesty's vassals find themselves in great need and incapable of serving you as they would wish’.16
Olivares ignored these warnings of catastrophe and instead began a massive recruiting drive throughout Castile to create armies capable of winning his foreign wars. The minister in charge of this operation protested that ‘I see this kingdom exhausted, and especially Old Castile, where most communities have failed to grow even a little barley with which to make bread, and so they are losing their population. If recruiters arrive, it will complete their destruction.’ In any case, he continued relentlessly, they would find few recruits,
Because with the constant levies of troops for America, the Netherlands, Italy, the garrisons and the fleet, and with those who die and are drowned, the kingdom is very short of men. So it would be good to decide which of these two inconveniences would be less damaging: raising fewer men or doing universal damage to Castile?17
Olivares ignored this warning, too, expecting the salt monopoly to fund everything; but, as with the Union of Arms scheme, the lack of accurate demographic data doomed the venture.
This time, ministers tried to estimate the total size of Castile's population, and thus to project the total consumption of salt, on the basis of the number of religious indulgences distributed in recent years; but this failed to take account of the death and migration of so many ‘consumers’, which sharply reduced the demand for salt. Once he realized the scale of the shortfall, Olivares demanded that every household declare under oath their anticipated salt consumption for the coming year, which would cost 69 reales per fanega – a figure that included no less than 58 reales of tax. Consumers could acquire more salt at the price of 176 reales, but they could not take less. Local officials registered before a notary each householder's estimate of his or her expected consumption; and every four months they recorded the amount of salt purchased by each family, to ensure that they had bought their quota – and thus paid their huge new tax burden in full (see Plate 10).
Such heavy reliance on ‘regalian rights’ provoked widespread opposition. Some Castilian taxpayers resisted the salt monopoly passively, either declaring that they would consume no salt or giving improbably low estimates; others organized protests.18 In Seville, the cathedral chapter claimed that the salt monopoly infringed their traditional exemption from lay taxation, and the papal nuncio authorized them to suspend all church services if the king's ministers tried to force their compliance. The yield of the salt tax therefore continued to fall. The decline proved particularly serious because, apart from the need to sustain wars in Italy and the Netherlands, in 1630 a Dutch expeditionary force landed in Brazil, where they brought the province's sugar-rich coastal plain under their control (see chapter 15 below). Meanwhile, storms sank some treasure ships returning from America, with the loss of over six million ducats. ‘Given the present state of the royal treasury and our foreign commitments,’ Olivares glumly informed a colleague, ‘we can assume that this Monarchy is about to collapse suddenly and that His Majesty's crown is at stake’.19
Philip now convened the Cortes of Castile, and called on the delegates to ‘give the last drop of blood in your veins, if necessary, to uphold, defend and preserve Christianity’. He provided them with details on each recent campaign, and its cost, and warned them that Spain now faced ‘the greatest, the most urgent and desperate situation that has arisen or could arise’. The assembly responded that the extreme weather, failed harvests and high mortality precluded raising any new taxes – unless the king agreed to abolish the salt monopoly. Reluctantly, he did so.20
Olivares and his master therefore decided to make another personal attempt to persuade Catalonia to participate in the Union of Arms. To the count-duke, the principality seemed ‘of all provinces in the Monarchy the one least burdened with taxes, and … the most extensive, abundant and populous’.21 Nothing could have been further from the truth. Even in good times, Catalonia seethed with social tensions and lawlessness. The town-dwellers clashed constantly with those who lived in the countryside over agrarian policies (the former wanted cheap grain while the latter welcomed high prices); ancient rivalries divided the rural nobility, some of whom used bandit gangs to conduct feuds with their neighbours; in the background lurked the segadors (reapers) who depended on finding enough employment during the harvest every summer to sustain them through the rest of the year. Many of the feuds across the principality were interconnected, and their protagonists assu
med the names of two rival families: the Nyerros (followers of the lords of Nyer, although in Catalan ‘nyerro’ also meant ‘pig’) and the Cadells (after the family of that name, which in Catalan also meant ‘dog’). Since each faction numbered almost 200 principals, and since a census of firearms in the principality revealed some 70,000 weapons – one for almost every household – confrontations between the Nyerros and Cadells usually left a considerable trail of dead and wounded. These feuds even penetrated the principality's government: according to the viceroy, ‘all the ministers, from the big ones to the small, have within them the original sin of being cadells or nyerros, so that members of one faction cannot be entrusted with anything that conflicts with its interests’.22
Catalonia, like the rest of the Iberian Peninsula, had also suffered a series of natural disasters. During the winter of 1627–8, in the words of a diarist, ‘the earth and sky seemed made of brass’, and the clergy of Barcelona led no fewer than 34 processions to pray for rain. Their prayers were answered with storms that washed away another harvest. Then in 1630 a new drought caused food prices to rise sharply while trade and industry slumped. Barcelona introduced bread rationing and, although the authorities foiled a plan by the segadors to storm the customs house, starving citizens attacked the city's granaries, pulled half-baked loaves from the ovens, and devoured them.23 Coming on top of such hardships, the demand in 1632 for new taxes to fund the Union of Arms rallied virtually all Catalans around their ‘Constitutions’ and so, as in 1626, even the presence of the king and his chief minister failed to persuade the Corts to vote any new taxes. They departed empty-handed once again.
Global Crisis Page 44
