Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The end of the fifteenth century was in Europe a time peculiarly propitious to imaginative movements seeking a golden age, a millennium, located in the future. Prophetic and mystical ideas, with their roots in the Middle Ages, found receptive minds all over the continent and no less in Renaissance Italy, where the monk Savonarola earned the hostility of both Church and State by his fiery denunciations of corruption. Visionary impulses guided both rich and poor. They served to inspire the famous prophetic Centuries, published a generation later in France by the seer Nostradamus. The impulses also influenced the young king of France, Charles VIII, when he led his armies across the Alps into Italy in 1494,109 and was greeted by his Italian supporters – among them Savonarola – with enthusiasm. The Iberian peninsula was not exempt from these millennial influences, which for some contemporaries seemed to reach their fulfilment with the events of the year 1492.

  Christopher Columbus was in the front line of visionary inspirations. In his Book of Prophecies (1501) he saw himself as a kind of pioneering liberator, a ‘bearer of Christ’ (‘Christo-ferens’ in Latin) to the lands of Asia.110 It is possible that even a pragmatic person such as King Ferdinand allowed himself to make decisions based on prophetic visions, for he paid attention to the statements of a holy woman known as the Beata de Piedrahita. Virtually all Europeans lived in a social environment that was profoundly imbued with religious ideas, aspirations and dreams. The mentality carried over into political attitudes. Men claimed to be defending their religious hopes when they went into battle, and above all when they fought against the traditional foe of Christian Europe, the Muslims. When Ignatius Loyola was wounded at the siege of Pamplona and became incapacitated for further service in the war, he quickly turned his martial thoughts towards the Muslims and the Holy Land as objectives of his aspirations. Clergy looked beyond the world around them, to visionary expectations and the advancement of spiritual frontiers. Prominent among them was the cardinal archbishop of Toledo, Cisneros. A Franciscan friar with a profound knowledge of the spiritual literature of his time, he was a devotee of mysticism and in particular of the ideas of Savonarola, whose works he published in Castile.

  The aspirations and visions of Ferdinand, of Columbus, of Cisneros and of Ignatius were real and powerful motives that shaped their personal lives and public achievements. Those who could read, a tiny minority, were readily influenced by the learned literature at their disposal. Scholars could point to the writings of a Spaniard of Roman times, the philosopher Seneca, who had stated prophetically that ‘in the last ages of the world there shall come a time when the ocean sea will loosen its bonds and a great land will appear and a navigator like him that guided Jason will discover a new world, and then the isle of Thule will no longer be the final limit of the earth’.111 But the dreams of a few were acted out against a background of the many who did not read, had no learned culture, knew no society beyond their own region, and had no profound contact with the religious beliefs of the Church. It is still all too commonly believed that the offensive of Spaniards against their Muslims and Jews reflected a confident religious spirit that inspired them to carry the banner of the true faith out to the world. The real condition of religion in the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella, however, was substantially different.

  Long before the outbreak of the Reformation or the expansion of Europe into overseas territories, Church leaders in Spain were profoundly aware of the defects in their own religious culture, and the need to bring true religion to their own people.112 In the first decade of the sixteenth century Dominican missionaries were active among the mountains of the northwest of Spain. Councils of bishops and clergy, led by one held in Seville in 1512, emphasized the need to teach the gospel and encourage people to go to church. Far from being confident and militant, they were concerned to remedy their own shortcomings. Ferdinand and Isabella attempted some reform of the religious orders of Castile, but it was an almost complete failure. In the epoch of Columbus and his successors, Spain still had one of the most backward and unreformed Churches of Christendom, with an inadequate and ignorant priesthood and laity.113 Nevertheless there were a few clergy in this Church who, full of zeal but as yet unequipped to improve the religion of their own people or to attempt the conversion of the Muslims of Granada, greeted the new frontiers opening up before them with enthusiasm.

  Clergy, intellectuals and nobles in Renaissance times shared the challenging vision of spiritual advancement. They wished to destroy the enemies of the faith (not yet perceived as ‘heretics’, for the Reformation had not taken place), liberate the Holy Land, and achieve the fulfilment of perennial prophecies. Such were the ideas that influenced a Catalan poet to acclaim Ferdinand as the king who would convert the ‘realms of Spain’ into a universal monarchy, and the Valencian doctor who saw him eliminating Islam and Judaism in Spain and conquering Africa, the Middle East and Jerusalem.114 They were visions that influenced the thinking of those Spanish leaders, among them the king and queen, who felt that the struggle against the Granada Muslims, the French, and the savages of other lands was simply a preparation for the great and prophetic imperial mission of liberating the Holy Land itself. Columbus always insisted firmly to the king and queen that ‘the matter of France and of Italy’ was of little or no importance compared to the grand design being offered them by destiny. In 1510 the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes wrote to assure Ferdinand that he was chosen by providence, that he could achieve the recovery of Jerusalem with little effort and the conquest of all Africa up to Egypt. Others claimed that the king would soon liberate Constantinople. At the dawn of the sixteenth century, it seemed, political and military events in Spain were beginning to fit into a messianic and imperial scheme of unforeseeable dimensions.115

  2

  The Early Western Empire

  The discoveries and conquests were necessary in order to extend and augment states, which have in consequence become great and their rulers have become powerful and gained respect.

  Bernardo de Vargas Machuca,

  Militia and description of the Indies (1599) 1

  In the second decade of the new century, when Ferdinand of Aragon died, the open Atlantic was virtually a virgin sea, barely touched by the handful of vessels that had ventured into it. The pioneers were in principle the Portuguese, who established the first European overseas empire,2 but the active participants in naval enterprise came from all nations, and included Italians, Basques, Catalans and French. From the fifteenth century the chief attraction of the sea-route southwards was the possibility of obtaining gold from Africa. By the end of that century sailors had struck out westwards across the ocean to Madeira and the Azores, and had obtained a fair knowledge of the winds and currents in the area. Columbus's voyage in 1492, and that of Vasco da Gama round the south of Africa six years later, gave Europeans a decisive initiative in the western and south Atlantic.

  On Ferdinand's death in 1516 the thrones of Castile and Aragon passed to his grandson the archduke Charles of Habsburg, son of Juana and of Philip the Fair. Born in 1500 in Ghent and brought up in the Netherlands by his aunt, Charles was an archetypal Renaissance prince, cultured, pious and trained in the arts of warfare. He was proclaimed in Brussels in 1516 as joint ruler of the Spanish realms (his mother, still legally queen of Castile, was treated as such down to her death). Charles sailed for his inheritance in the fall of 1517. A foreign ruler with little knowledge of the Castilian language, he came surrounded by his advisers, most of them from the Netherlands. Misunderstandings with his new subjects provoked a range of grievances that soon, in Castile, flared up into rebellion. By then, in 1520, the new king had left Spain on his way to Germany, where he had been elected Holy Roman emperor and was crowned as such at Aachen in October.

  Charles's title as emperor made Spain a partner in his universal destiny. He now united in himself a greater number of realms than had ever before been accumulated by any European ruler: the entire Burgundian inheritance, centred on the Netherlands; the immense heredi
tary Habsburg lands, including Austria within the Empire and Hungary outside it; the whole of peninsular Spain as well as the Italian territories of Naples and Sicily; and the continent of America. His duties took him everywhere: at his abdication in Brussels in 1555 he recalled that he had made expeditions by land and sea to every state in Western Europe as well as to Africa; and that he had made eleven voyages by sea. He spent one out of every four days of his reign travelling: ‘my life’, he said later, ‘has been one long journey’.

  Charles's empire, however, was not Spain's, and Spaniards were well aware of it. Castilians in particular made their attitude felt clearly during the revolt of the Comuneros (1520). They had recently had a foreign king, Philip the Fair, so their objection was not to Charles as an alien. Rather, they objected to what they saw as excessive privileges given to foreigners. Above all, after the omnipresence of Ferdinand and Isabella they objected to the travels of the king in foreign parts. A ruler, they insisted, should reside in his territories: the theme recurs in every Cortes of Castile during the reign. ‘Your Majesty's protracted absence from your Spanish dominions’, wrote the admiral of Castile in 1531, ‘is a thing to which your subjects can hardly reconcile themselves.’ With time, Castilians and Spaniards began to accept their international destiny, and Charles himself became in some measure Hispanized (he selected only Spaniards as confessors, for example). Spaniards were introduced to the political and cultural world of Europe. They became eligible for foreign honours: from 1516 ten places in the famous Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece were reserved for them. The king made the important gesture of learning Castilian, which soon became his second language after his native French.

  For most of Charles's reign, the Spanish realms continued with the limited Mediterranean role that they had inherited from Ferdinand the Catholic, and refused to get drawn into an Imperial role in northern Europe, which they did not understand and for which they were not equipped. After his visit to Germany to become emperor, Charles returned to the peninsula in July 1522 and remained there for seven years, the longest of his stays with his Spanish subjects. In Seville in April 1526 he married his cousin, the beautiful Princess Isabella of Portugal, who in May 1527 gave birth at Valladolid to her only male child, Prince Philip.

  During the emperor's absences Isabella assumed, in six of the ten years before her early death in 1538, the daily tasks of government. Her correspondence with Charles reveals clearly the horizons that still defined the world-view perceived from Castile.3 The Netherlands are almost entirely absent from her letters, and the New World is barely alluded to. The lands of the Crown of Castile are referred to as ‘these realms’, and those of the Crown of Aragon as ‘those realms’. The world outside is perceived almost exclusively in terms of the Mediterranean, its ports, shipping, and defences. There are no references to the world of the northern peninsula: Spanish Cantabria or the Basque country or the seas towards northern Europe. And the only insistent theme is the empress's concern for her husband, his absences, his safety, his wars and – inevitably – the paucity of his letters. She asks him (in 1531) to ‘please take care in future not to let so much time pass without writing to me, so that I hear from Your Majesty at least once every three weeks’.

  Charles's principal administrator in the peninsula, Francisco de los Cobos, was resolutely opposed to the emperor's expensive commitments in Germany, and tacitly supported the constant refusals of the Castilian Cortes to give financial aid.4 Long after the defeat of the Comuneros and more than a generation after the voyages of Columbus, most Spaniards seemed to have little interest in the new horizons that were opening up in Europe and across the Atlantic. Only a few humanists, those in the service of the crown (such as the Catalan adviser Mir or Charles's confessor Pedro de Soto), grasped eagerly at the new opportunities for international contact. Despite the prevailing indifference, the emperor's reign was of decisive importance to Castile, for it created all the mechanisms that later enabled his son Philip II to define the outlines of specifically Spanish imperial power. It also served to give primacy within the peninsula to Castile, which became, as state documents of the time affirm, the ‘head of these realms’, a place where the emperor's administrators resided, and on which the crown depended for money and for troops. Castile's enhanced role made it somewhat more amenable to the broader international activity of Charles V. There was, moreover, a development that quickly gave it an importance it had never expected: the regular import of precious metals from the New World, the territories known in official terms as ‘the Indies of Castile’.

  Charles drew his title of emperor only from Germany; in the rest of his realms he ruled according to the power accorded him in each realm. The factor binding all his territories together was (as had been the case with Ferdinand before him) dynastic right; it was by the same right that he was able at the end of his reign to apportion his territories out to members of his family. As he found when he came to negotiate with the various Cortes of his peninsular realms in 1517, Spain had few financial resources, and none to help him with his international enterprises. From the first he had to rely on European rather than peninsular businessmen. The big centres of European banking were in the Netherlands, central Germany and northern Italy, and it was to these places that Charles looked in order to raise loans, which he could repay later from the tax income of each of his realms. Although he had just commenced his reign, he quickly accumulated debts, particularly in Germany where he was attempting to smooth the way to his election as emperor in 1519. He also obtained help from leading Flemish nobles, who gave him sums in exchange for privileges in the New World. Members of his court obtained speculative rights in the New World and in trading concerns. Within a few months of Charles's accession, Castile's horizons began to expand to unforeseen limits thanks to the help of international finance.

  Very slowly, Spaniards began to identify themselves with a broader destiny. Some, like his officials, bishops and historians, did so because they were paid to serve the emperor. Charles's Latin secretary, Alfonso de Valdés, presented his master as the fulfilment of the aspiration for peace and unity among peoples: ‘that there be one flock and one shepherd’, he wrote. Others in the streets gave vein to a genuine popular enthusiasm in the same sense. When the emperor visited the city of Seville for his marriage to Isabel, a triumphal arch proclaimed that ‘the campaign which brought you here will also lead you to Jerusalem’. As the years passed, publicists addressed to Charles the very same appeals they had addressed to Ferdinand. The town of Gibraltar in 1538 affirmed that it was the king's destiny to liberate Jerusalem, ‘as holy men have foretold’.5

  Castilians came to see Charles as their own emperor, one who spoke in their tongue, which he learnt quickly and well. However, though they accepted the emperor they had serious doubts about the idea of an ‘empire’. The reality was that Charles himself never had a grandiose image of what his territories might signify, and left the formulation of ‘imperialist’ theory to his advisers, notably lawyers like his Chancellor, the Piedmontese noble Mercurino Gattinara. For Gattinara, an admirer of the achievements of the Romans, the word ‘empire’ meant the capacity to exercise sovereign power without limits. But it never had any connotations of international expansion. Indeed, Gattinara appears not to have considered the New World a relevant part of his master's ‘empire’.6 In their turn, Castilian writers followed the precedent set by Nebrija and energetically rejected the pretensions of the ‘German’ empire. It was a way of claiming autonomy for Spain within the universal monarchy of Charles. Many members of the Dominican order in Spain continued for a long time to oppose the concept of universal monarchy if it threatened the integrity of their homeland.7

  Contemplating in 1525 the magnitude of the task facing him, the young Charles was conscious that he must not fail himself. ‘I am well aware that time is passing, and ourselves with it, and I have no wish to let it go by without leaving some mark of my reputation. With all this in mind, I see nothing that stands in the way
of my achieving something great, if the grace of God allows me to enjoy peace and tranquillity’.8

  He did not take seriously the idea of a group of administrators who might oversee general policy; the Council of State, which might have played such a role, was purely honorific. On the other hand, he was deeply concerned with the efficient management of transactions between his states. He had three fundamental priorities: for money to be obtainable when and where necessary, for reliable communication of his orders and correspondence, and for fighting men to be made available. All this required the creation of an international network, without which imperial power could not function. The limited resources available to Ferdinand the Catholic were not enough, and Castile alone could not carry out the task. There was even less likelihood of Germany, a sprawling territory of thousands of little princes with no central administration, helping him. The emperor's attention to necessary tasks of government was not merely pioneering, it represented an enormous step forward in the organization of European society, and made it possible for his very limited resources to cope with the seemingly impossible task of controlling territories that stretched over the surface of half the known world.