Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  According to medieval tradition in Europe, the conversion would be the signal for the Second Coming of Christ. There were by this time few Jews in Spain. In the Crown of Aragon, by 1492 there remained only one-quarter of the Jews of a century before. Very many had converted to Christianity because of persecution: others had simply emigrated. The rich Jewish communities of Barcelona, Valencia and Mallorca, the biggest cities in these realms, had disappeared altogether; in smaller towns they either disappeared or were reduced to tiny numbers. The famous community of Girona was, with only twenty-four taxpayers left, now a shadow of its former self. In the realms of Castile, there was a mixture of survival and attrition. Seville had around five hundred Jewish families prior to 1390; a half-century later it had only fifty. By the time Isabella succeeded to the throne, Jews in Castile totalled less than eighty thousand. In 1492 Ferdinand accepted the advice of the Inquisitor General, Torquemada, and on 31 March, while they were in Granada, they issued the edict of expulsion, giving the Jews of both Castile and Aragon until 31 July to accept baptism or leave the country.42

  In reality, the ‘expulsion’ was incomplete, for well over half the Jews of Spain chose the alternative of conversion. ‘Many remained in Spain who had not the strength to emigrate and whose hearts were not filled with God’, lamented one Jewish contemporary. ‘In those terrible days’, reported another, ‘thousands and tens of thousands of Jews converted.’43 The total of Jews who left Spain for ever was relatively small, possibly no more than forty thousand, but the conversion and expulsion had significant repercussions. It reinforced the vision of the king as champion of Christendom, who would extend further the battle against Muslims and Jews and eventually liberate Jerusalem from its oppressors.

  After these ideological successes, Isabella was not inclined to tolerate Muslims in the rest of her realms of Castile. In February 1502 they were offered the choice between baptism and exile. Virtually all of them, subjects of the crown since the Middle Ages, chose baptism, since emigration was rendered almost impossible by stringent conditions. With their conversion Islam vanished from Castilian territory, and continued to be tolerated only in the Crown of Aragon. The different policy adopted in the two realms demonstrated clearly that unity of religion was not an immediate priority of the Spanish crowns.44

  It was a veritable period of policy successes for the king of Aragon, now at forty years in the prime of his life. Close to his heart was the wish to recover the Catalan counties of Cerdanya and Rosselló from France, which had occupied them thirty years before during the Catalan civil wars. Profiting from a diplomatic alliance with England in 1489 (the Treaty of Medina del Campo), Ferdinand enlisted English military support in his favour. Fortunately the French king, Charles VIII, had his eyes set on a projected campaign into Italy, and was willing to part with the counties, which were ceded peacefully to Aragon by the Treaty of Barcelona in January 1493. The Spanish crowns from that time reigned undisputedly over all the territory between the straits of Gibraltar and the Pyrenees. The French would emerge in future years as the principal enemy of Spain, and there would be continuous conflict at the frontier in the Pyrenees, but the main field of contention would be in Italy, to which we now turn.

  In order to carry out the wars in Andalusia adequately, the crown looked for new military resources. Though Castile had a long history of familiarity with the sea, it was by no means a prominent seafaring nation.45 The unquestionable pioneers on the ocean were the Portuguese, who since the early fifteenth century had prepared the way for trade to Africa and then to Asia, establishing for themselves a key role in the spice trade.46 Among Spaniards, only the Basques and Cantabrians, on the north coast, and the Catalans on the east, had been outstanding in their centuries-old dedication to the sea.47 The heartland of Castile before the acquisition of Seville in the mid-fifteenth century had no direct access to major ports. The masters of maritime navigation had been the Muslims, who used this to dominate the Mediterranean and threaten the coasts of Christian Europe. The fall of Granada, however, gave the crown an opportunity to remedy its basic weakness in sea power. In 1492 the queen seized from the marquis of Cadiz his title city, which thereafter became the base for Castile's expeditions into the Atlantic. In 1502 and 1503 she seized Gibraltar and Cartagena from their respective noble owners, giving the crown for the first time a firm access to the southern Mediterranean.

  The fall of Granada left thousands of soldiers without ready employment, but there were conflicts enough awaiting them in the Mediterranean. The outbreak of war in Italy soon offered them scope for action. Spain was concerned with bringing order into its own affairs and had little interest in acquiring other territories, yet events conspired to drag it into adventures just beyond its borders, principally in Italy. The Crown of Aragon had traditional dynastic interests in the western Mediterranean. At the death of King Alfonso the Magnanimous of Aragon in 1458, his extensive domains were divided in two: the kingdom of Naples went to his illegitimate son Ferrante, and the Catalan-Aragonese crown went to Ferdinand's father Juan. In 1476 Ferrante married Ferdinand's sister Juana, a union that continued the close association between the two branches of the family. In subsequent years Ferdinand, who had his hands full with Spanish politics, found himself involved repeatedly in Italian affairs, and always on behalf of his family in Naples.

  Like the territories that came to be called Spain and France, ‘Italy’ was a conglomerate of small states with few interests in common, divided by the lack of a shared culture, language or traditions. It was repeatedly involved in local conflicts that tended to involve outsiders, since the northern regions of the peninsula (notably the duchy of Milan, a state that extended over one third of northern Italy) were politically distinct, forming in theory part of the Holy Roman Empire. The most powerful (and wholly independent) Italian state was the Republic of Venice. All the others, even the extensive territories of the Holy See, were usually at the mercy of predators both internal and external. Outsiders through the centuries had traditionally invaded Italy from the north, by way of the Alps, and normally withdrew after leaving a trail of ruin in their wake. In the late fifteenth century a yet more pressing threat materialized from the sea, in the shape of the Ottoman empire and its North African allies, which raided the coasts of the Adriatic and the western Mediterranean. But it was France that ignited the flames of an enduring war. Its young king, Charles VIII, barely twenty-two years old and his head full of strange millennial fantasies, laid claim to the throne of Naples. In August 1494, at the head of an army twenty-two thousand strong, he crossed the Alps and invaded Italy. He had assured his alliances, especially with the duke of Milan, and in December was in Rome, where the pope was powerless to resist. In February 1495 he entered Naples to the cheers of the crowds and the helplessness of the reigning king, Ferrante II.

  Since the year 1494 Ferdinand of Aragon had been trying to form an international diplomatic alliance against France. The rapid advance of the French into territory that had belonged to his family singled him out as a possible defender of the Italian states. Fruit of these negotiations was the League signed at Venice in March 1495 between the pope, the emperor, Venice, Milan and Spain ‘for the peace and tranquillity of Italy’. Meanwhile in December Ferdinand had sent ships and soldiers, under Admiral Galceráà de Requesens, to his kingdom of Sicily, and in spring 1495 sent a further detachment of two thousand men under Gonzalo de Córdoba. By June the Spanish troops had transferred to Calabria, where their mission was to help Ferrante against the French. The king of France had by now withdrawn to the north, leaving ten thousand French to defend his claims in Naples. In the subsequent campaigns against the French the Castilian troops were at their best, and Gonzalo de Córdoba's exploits earned him the name among his men of ‘the Great Captain’. By the end of 1496 the Neapolitans and Castilians had together succeeded in expelling the French forces, but Ferrante died at this juncture and was succeeded by his uncle Federigo. He was the fifth monarch to occupy the throne within three years,
and did little to justify hopes of a stable government in the kingdom, which was relentlessly falling into chaos. In early 1497 a truce was agreed between the two foreign belligerents, France and Spain, and confirmed formally in November by ambassadors at the Castilian town of Alcalá de Henares. By then the first hint had arisen of a plan by which the two states would occupy and divide Naples.

  Charles VIII died of an unexpected accident at Amboise in France in April 1498.48 His successor, Louis XII, did not lose sight of the claim to Naples but set himself a new objective: possession of the duchy of Milan, which he claimed through his grandmother. In 1499 the French invaded Milan, but the Spaniards kept out of the conflict. Instead they took part in a small force sent late in 1500 to help the Venetians against the Turks who were attacking Cephalonia. The expedition, consisting of eight thousand men-at-arms and three hundred cavalry in four ships and numerous transport vessels, was commanded by Gonzalo de Córdoba and sailed from Messina in September 1500, heading for the eastern Mediterranean.49 At Zante it was joined by a French ship, and then by the main Venetian fleet carrying ten thousand men. The main body of Turks hastily withdrew, but the Christian forces laid siege to Cephalonia, where their main achievement was the capture of the poorly defended fortress of St George. By that date an important new step had been taken in Spanish policy.

  On 11 November 1500, in the Treaty of Granada, agents of France and Spain agreed (as they had informally done three years before) to divide Naples between the two countries. It was the inevitable consequence both of political instability in that realm, and of the contending dynastic claims of the two signatories. The agreement was accepted the following year by the pope, whose permission was necessary since he was formally feudal lord of Naples. Subsequent Italian writers were, with good reason, bitterly critical of the decision. The Great Captain was unhappy about it, and Spanish diplomats at foreign courts were hard put to defend its reasons. All the same, French troops from Milan under d'Aubigny invaded Naples from the north in July 1501, and Spanish troops under Gonzalo de Córdoba invaded from the south. The city of Naples surrendered without a fight, and King Federigo was sent off to exile in France. His son, Ferrante the duke of Calabria, who gallantly defended the city of Otranto against the Spaniards, surrendered in March 1502 and was sent off to exile in the kingdom of Valencia, where he was treated with the honour befitting his rank.50

  Inevitably, the victors soon fell out among themselves, and the projected occupation turned into a direct war between the French and the Spaniards in Naples. The next two years were historic ones for the evolution of Spain's empire. For the first time ever, full-scale battles were fought by Castilian troops outside the Iberian peninsula. There were moments of pure medieval pageantry, as in the famous mounted combat of eleven French against eleven Spanish knights outside the walls of the city of Trani in 1502–3. A crowd of thousands watched the tournament, and Venetian observers were appointed to judge the result. The leading knight on the French side was the famous Chevalier Bayard, le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, and on the Spanish side Diego García de Paredes. At the end of the combat, the participants embraced each other. It was still an age when firearms were not widely used, and the gallantry of medieval chivalry continued to occupy an important place in warfare.

  The more substantial and bloody side of the war was fought in pitched battles, in which the French during the first months had a clear advantage. In December 1502 d'Aubigny's forces defeated the Castilians at Terranova in Calabria. But a few months later, on 28 April 1503, the troops of the Great Captain won a victory at Cerignola, and in May they entered the city of Naples in triumph. The French held out at Gaeta, and from Milan sent a force under La Trémoille to recover Naples. The final months of 1503 were occupied in a series of engagements between the French army and the Spaniards along the river Garigliano, ending in the withdrawal of the former after a decisive encounter on 28 December. Years later the French soldier Brantôme visited the site, where his father had died. ‘It was evening’, he wrote, ‘towards sunset, when the shadows appear more ghostly than at other hours of the day, and it seemed to me that the gallant souls of our brave Frenchmen who died there rose up from the earth to speak to me.’51 The French were unable to hold on and finally, their garrison at Gaeta surrendered in January 1504. In March, France made a formal treaty recognizing the sovereignty of Ferdinand of Aragon over the whole of Naples.

  The Italian experience laid the foundations of Castile's military reputation, which received high praise from an otherwise hostile Machiavelli in his Art of War. In turn, a soldier of the Great Captain, Diego de Salazar, copied and imitated Machiavelli's text in order to produce his Treatise on Warfare, the first modern Castilian treatise on the subject. The impressive series of battles with the French in Italy inspired a spate of treatises by Castilians about their own heroic exploits, gave dignity to the profession of war, and established an enduring legend about Castilian military superiority.52 The legend was, of course, based on experience of the continuing conflict in Italy between French and Spaniards. A case in point was the bloody battle at Ravenna in April 1512. The French suffered severe losses, but it was in effect their victory and cost the lives of five thousand Spaniards together with the capture of Ferdinand's generals Pedro Navarro53 and the Neapolitan marquis of Pescara. The king comforted himself with the opinion, which he obtained from reliable witnesses, that ‘in this battle the French have learned to fear the Spaniards’.54 The Castilians had certainly improved their military reputation,55 and continued to do so in subsequent engagements. When the parliament (Cortes) of Catalonia expressed satisfaction about the annexation of Naples to the Crown of Aragon, King Ferdinand reminded them firmly that they had contributed almost nothing to it and that all the glory redounded to the soldiers of the Crown of Castile.

  Because of its superior manpower resources the Crown of Castile occupied incontestably the principal role in the military enterprises of Spain. But the Castilian achievement would have been impossible without the help of other Spaniards. The contribution of Catalans, for example, cannot be overlooked. While the campaigns continued in Naples, Ferdinand returned to Barcelona in April 1503 after an eight-year absence in the realms of Castile. He then put himself at the head of a small army that went north to relieve the fortress of Salses, under siege by the French. The force was largely Catalan in composition,56 but heavily reinforced by troops from Castile. The victory that they gained when they drove the French back from Salses in October was undoubtedly in part also a Catalan victory.

  The Castilians built on the work of their predecessors in order to establish their military expertise.57 The chief innovations in European warfare of the fifteenth century were in the technique of fortification, and in the infantry reforms pioneered by the Swiss. The superb work of Swiss mercenaries hired by the crown in the Granada wars seems to have inspired Ferdinand to reform his infantry by imitating them. Decrees in 1495 and 1496 laid the foundations for improvements in technique. The civilian population was encouraged to maintain public order: in 1495 it was directed that ‘all our subjects, of whatever rank, should possess suitable offensive and defensive weapons’. During the spring of 1497 the use of the pike was adopted in the army, and troops were formed into ‘tercios’, infantry units with specific roles that were defined over the next few years in the light of their practical experience in Italy.58 At the same time the troops began to be armed with muskets (arquebuses), an increasingly essential aspect of their new role in battle. The experience of Granada, moreover, encouraged the Castilians in Italy to make use of heavy cannon, which the French were also using to great effect. But there were few major changes in the methods of war within the Iberian peninsula, and it is difficult to identify any military revolution taking place in Spain.59

  If the Granada wars were Spain's first step towards empire, the Italian wars were the first step towards international expansion. Spaniards dominated Italy for the next three hundred years, with profound consequences for the h
istory of that peninsula. But, despite the treaty of Granada of 1500, they did not come as imperial conquerors. Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth century wrote proudly of a ‘conquest’ of Naples. An exhilarated poet in 1506 claimed that

  Not only do we dominate

  The lands we have conquered,

  We also sail across

  Unnavigable seas.

  We are almost invincible.60

  The propagandists conveniently forgot that it was the Neapolitans who had invited the Spaniards in the first place, and who made the Spanish victories possible. Castilian soldiers helped their Neapolitan allies against France, and the major battles of the campaign were fought not against Italians but against French forces. Many years later, in 1531, the parliament of Naples reminded their then ruler, the emperor Charles V, ‘that without their help the French army would never have been thrown out and defeated’.61 Ferdinand was reluctant to extend his activities further into Italy. When in March 1504 his ambassador in Rome wrote to him suggesting that the troops in Naples march northwards ‘with the aim of liberating Italy’ from French occupation, Ferdinand admitted that it was a good idea but that it would not help a rapid peace agreement.62 That same month, France recognized Ferdinand's sovereignty over a Naples that had proved to be politically unstable and incapable of governing itself. Thereafter the kingdom became a dynastic possession of the king.63 It was governed by his viceroys, but belonged to him and by no means to ‘Spain’. It did not even belong to the Crown of Aragon, and remained, like the Kingdom of Sicily, an autonomous realm under his direct rule.64