Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The defence of Italian and Spanish interests at sea were attended to in the following years mainly by Andrea Doria and his fleet. Land operations were all but suspended, a situation that vexed the local commander at Oran, the count of Alcaudete, who from his arrival at the post in 1535 made ambitious efforts to extend Spanish authority into the kingdom of Tlemcen, but always with little success. The Ottomans were consolidating their hold on North Africa, and Tlemcen in 1552 was taken over by the Turks. In 1555 the town of Bougie, which had been in Castilian control for forty-five years, was lost to a Muslim force from Algeria. Finally, in 1558 an independent expedition made by Alcaudete, against the advice of the then king, Philip II, was wiped out by the Muslims and its commander killed.

  The peoples of Spain and the Netherlands had enjoyed a profound friendship since the Later Middle Ages. Spaniards were unfamiliar with the countries of northern Europe, to which they traded little and whose languages and culture remained for them a mystery. The big exception was the Netherlands, to which they traded directly by sea and which in turn imparted its financial expertise and cultural creativity to the Iberian peninsula. The Netherlands was also the principal foreign market for Castile's chief export, raw wool. The marriage of Juana and Philip the Fair sealed a relationship that seemed to augur a bright future when Philip became king of Castile and even more when Charles of Ghent inherited all the crowns of Spain. With the passage of years, Charles came to the firm decision that Spain and the Netherlands should identify their interests with each other, but he never offered any precise reasons for it. In February 1522, at Brussels, he signed an agreement handing over direction of the territories of the Habsburg family to his brother Ferdinand. This could in perspective be seen as an explicit separation of the Germanic lands from the rest of the inheritance, but he was still too young to have any rigid intentions on the matter.

  The collection of autonomous provinces on the northwest coastline of mainland Europe, called the Netherlands because of their low-lying topography, had formed in the Later Middle Ages the core of the state of ‘Burgundy’, whose other main component was the inland dukedom of that name (divided in the sixteenth century between Franche-Comté and French Burgundy). Lying astride the great rivers Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt, the Netherlands devoted themselves to agriculture, fishing and trading, and in the sixteenth century possessed the biggest centre of capitalist activity in Europe, the port of Antwerp. Mainly Dutch (Flemish) in language and culture, they were governed by an aristocracy that tended to come from the southern provinces, where the predominant language was French (Walloon). When the provinces passed under the rule of Charles they received the lineaments of a political constitution that bound them together.

  A form of central administration was created in Brussels, though each province also had its own government presided over by the stadholders (stadhouders, in Dutch). Charles governed his home provinces with a sternness that a father reserves only for his own family. He introduced an Inquisition to repress heresy, and personally directed the crushing of a rebellion in the city of Ghent, his birthplace, in 1539. At the same time, however, he lavished on the Netherlands a care that he gave to none of his other territories, including Spain. And when he went to Spain he took there with him everything that he most cherished: his Flemish culture, his Flemish religion and art and music, his court ceremonial (known as the ‘Burgundian’ ceremonial) and ritual (the Order of the Golden Fleece), and above all his Flemish officials, whom he appointed to the choicest posts not only in Spain but also in Italy. In time, as the demands of war in the Mediterranean and Germany occupied more of his time, he spent longer periods outside the Netherlands than in it. But it remained for him the homeland that he most cherished.

  Everything, in short, demonstrates the prior position occupied by the Netherlands in the minds of the early Habsburg rulers of Spain. The provinces, however, in no way formed part of the Spanish empire and were not subject to Spain. Their only political link with Spain was that they shared a common ruler. We have glanced at the wholly logical link between Spain and Italy. What then were the links between Spain and the Netherlands?69 Great scholars used to maintain that it was Charles's aim to ‘transfer the Netherlands into an outpost of Spanish power in northern Europe’.70 The idea is highly improbable and unsupported by any evidence. It would almost make more sense to take the reverse view, and think of Spain as an outpost of Netherlandish power – that is, economic and cultural power – in southern Europe. None of the emperor's acts suggests that he wished to subordinate one country to the other. When he crushed the rebellion in Ghent he used only local troops, four thousand Netherlanders and four thousand Germans,71 rather than soldiers from the Mediterranean.

  There were, however, already men from Spain serving in northern Europe. The extent of Spanish power, it is perhaps not too obvious to mention, can be measured simply and precisely by the presence of Spanish troops. There were only a limited number of such troops active in Europe at the time of the emperor. When Charles was at war with France he brought some to the Netherlands and deployed them on France's northern frontier.72 In 1527, six thousand Castilian troops took ship at Santander for service in the northern Netherlands. Early in 1540 the emperor also arranged for two thousand troops to be dispatched from Laredo in case he needed back-up just after the Ghent revolt. This was also the period when cultural relations between Flemings and Spaniards were at their best and most positive, thanks in great measure to the vogue in the peninsula for Erasmian humanism. Everything, therefore, conspired to make it a fruitful period for co-operation. As we shall see, Flemish clergy collaborated with Castilians in the first missionary efforts in the New World. Soldiers from the peninsula continued to be transported to the north after 1540. We know that three thousand arrived in the Netherlands in 1543 and five thousand in 1544, a period that coincided also with the first disorders caused by troop indiscipline.

  Spanish soldiers also played a fundamental role in Italy, where they were the backbone of control in Naples and began after 1530 to help garrison Milan. In 15 3 2, as we have seen, they made their first appearance on a large scale against the Turks on the Danube, but returned immediately afterwards to Italy. The tercios constituted perhaps half the army of twenty thousand that invaded French Provence from Milan under the command of Leyva in 1536. The attack petered out, Leyva died at Aix, and the forces were withdrawn to Italy in September.73 Their appearance on the international scene was in the Holy Roman Empire, on the occasion of the last war between the emperor and France, which broke out in 1542. Charles used up to eight thousand tercios from Italy to serve in the armies that he launched, from his base at Metz, against the French province of Picardy in 1543 and 1544. From that decade, the tercios became a vital help to Charles's crumbling military position in the Germanic lands. Their role was always supplementary and by no means represented an extension of Spanish imperialism to Germany, where they nevertheless helped the emperor to achieve his last great victory.

  The problem that most blighted the emperor's health and prematurely aged him was the spread of the Protestant Reformation through the German lands. Throughout his military campaign in the year 1546 against the Lutheran princes who formed the Schmalkaldic League, the emperor relied heavily on troops brought in from Italy, both Italian and Spanish, together with levies made in the Netherlands. A major encounter between the two opposing forces was put off for several months, with the inevitable result that troops on both sides had to be paid off and sent home. Charles's reduced forces, however, were complemented by those of his brother Ferdinand and of his newly acquired Lutheran ally, Duke Maurice of Saxony. The Imperial army was made up of two main nations – Germans and Spaniards – under the command of the emperor and the duke of Alba. There were five thousand Spaniards constituting a fifth of the total force, and also a number of Italians.74

  In the morning of 24 April 1547 the army reached the River Elbe opposite the town of Mühlberg, where the League forces under Elector Johann Friedrich of Saxony
were gathered.75 The elector had ordered the only available bridge across the river to be destroyed and was confident that the emperor could not cross. The emperor's men, however, constructed a makeshift bridge, and a convenient ford was also discovered. The forces poured over and inflicted a decisive defeat on the surprised Saxon army. A Saxon nobleman, Thilo von Throta, captured the Elector Johann, who was trying to flee after being wounded in the battle.76 Among the Castilian nobles who served in the Imperial forces was Luis de Avila y Zúñiga, who did not doubt that the strength of the emperor's army lay in the German troops.77 He reserved his highest praise for the Hungarian cavalry, ‘who with incredible rapidity began to accomplish the victory that they were particularly capable of securing’. The Castilians played an important part in the battle, though by no means the part imagined by the official historian López de Gómara78 and subsequent Castilian scholars. The Venetian ambassador, who was there, claimed that the Spanish troops were ‘brutish, rough and inexperienced, though they are becoming good soldiers; those I have seen in Germany have all been veterans [of other wars]’.79

  The emperor's victory, certainly the most famous of his entire career, was immortalized in the superb equestrian portrait of Charles by Titian, now in the Prado. Castilian tercios were still in Germany to help him in his last disastrous campaign in 1552, at the unsuccessful siege of Metz, where they made up less than a tenth of the infantry and under four per cent of the cavalry.80 The Spanish presence in Western Europe was still in its early days and barely perceptible outside the Italian peninsula. However, it had already begun to attract comment, both favourable and unfavourable. Whereas a Castilian poet, Hernando de Acuña, greeted the possibility of a universal dominion for Charles, with ‘one monarch, one empire and one sword’, non-Spaniards were distrustful of the implications. ‘Spaniards’, wrote an English observer at the court of the emperor, ‘had now in their hands the seal of the Empire, and in their swing the doing of all things.’ Antoine Perrenot, later Cardinal Granvelle, informed Charles in 1551 that reliance on Spanish troops meant that ‘he could not remain safely in Germany after the Spaniards had gone’.81

  Down to the 1550s, there was no discernible anti-Spanish feeling in Europe, outside Italy. Europeans looked on Spaniards with interest and curiosity rather than fear. They distrusted them only because Spaniards appeared to be tools in the scheming hands of the emperor. The goodwill shown to Prince Philip (later Philip II) on his remarkable journey through Western Europe in mid-century, stands out in sharp contrast to the hostility against Spaniards that developed later during the age of religious wars. The emperor after Mühlberg was preparing to unburden himself of his political cares, and summoned his son to join him in Brussels. The prince sailed from Catalonia in November 1548, on a long and historic journey that took him through southern France, northern Italy and the Alps, Bavaria and the Rhineland, and so on to the Netherlands.82

  The only untoward incident during the journey occurred in Milan, when there were riots against some of the Castilian soldiers accompanying him. For the rest, he was treated with consideration and generosity everywhere. Philip could not have been happier. He wrote from Heidelberg that ‘I have been very well received by all these princes and cities of Germany, with great demonstrations of affection.’ In the Netherlands he made a successful official visit to every one of the seventeen provinces, and was sworn in at every principal city. The first sign of reaction against him as a Spaniard was in Augsburg, on his way back to Spain. The emperor had gathered the chief members of the Habsburg family, in order to debate the succession to their various thrones. Charles had over the years consolidated control of the hereditary family lands – mainly Austria and Bohemia – in the hands of his brother Ferdinand. The latter had since 1531 been ‘king of the Romans’, a title which gave him the right to succeed to the Imperial crown. Charles wished Philip to succeed eventually to all his realms, including Germany. Strongly supported by most German opinion, Ferdinand wished the succession, and the Imperial crown, to pass to his eldest son Maximilian, king of Bohemia and currently standing in for Philip in Spain. The Germans had no wish whatever to be ruled over by a Spaniard. Only a German, the cardinal of Augsburg declared in November, could rule Germany. The princes would prefer the Turk to Philip, reported an ambassador.

  For a long time after Columbus's landfall in the Caribbean in 1492, the impact of the newcomers was barely perceptible. Nearly thirty years – an entire generation – would pass before a substantial Spanish presence was established on the mainland of the New World. America remained a half-forgotten reality that disappointed the pioneers, because it failed to produce either immediate wealth or a route to the Spice Islands. Nearly sixty years after the Columbus expedition, an official historian, López de Gómara, asserted that the discovery of the Indies was ‘the greatest event since the creation of the world, apart from the birth and death of him who created it’.83 By that time, however, a generation of Spaniards had grown up and died, the silver mines had been discovered, and were pouring their wealth into Europe. Gómara's claim was made with obvious hindsight. Very few people were thinking in such optimistic tones at the time that Charles V succeeded to the thrones of Spain.

  The occupation of key islands in the Caribbean, carried out after the elimination of sporadic native resistance, took a long time to achieve, in some cases nearly twenty years. The chief settlement was the island of Hispaniola, where the first Spanish city in the new continent, Santo Domingo, was founded. By 1500 the immigrant population of the island, exclusively male, numbered up to one thousand people. Hispaniola became centre to a wide variety of activities, nearly all predatory, such as raiding other islands for Indian labour, or fishing for pearls. Some immigrants were happy to work as farmers and till the soil. Las Casas recorded that when he had asked a farmer in Spain why he was sending his sons to live in the Caribbean, he replied that it was so they could ‘live in a free world’, and till their own land. Corn, rather than conquest, was a dominant aim.84

  But some Spaniards, dissatisfied with farming life in the Caribbean, became restless. One of them, Hernando Cortés, made the famous complaint that ‘I came here to get rich, not to till the soil like a peasant.’ The most potent early attraction was the discovery of gold, sought eagerly by Columbus and the early settlers.85 Hispaniola quickly became a producer of impressive quantities of it that were shipped back to Spain. A period of stability was introduced by the regime of the new governor of the Indies, Nicolás de Ovando, who arrived in April 1502 with a large accompaniment of 2,500 newcomers. Some of them were administrators, and others settlers and adventurers (among them Las Casas). It was a timely arrival, for the number of settlers on the island had shrunk to around three hundred, a sorry remnant. Ovando governed for seven years, and introduced all the main features of colonial rule, notably the distribution of the native population among settlers. He also treated the native population brutally, on one occasion massacring eighty-four of the Indian leaders.

  The Spanish occupation soon showed its negative side. Natives who were made to work for the settlers (through the system of labour distribution known as the encomienda) succumbed to the onerous conditions, and died in their thousands. After two decades of disruption in their traditional life, the native Arawak population rapidly diminished and disappeared. It became necessary to raid surrounding islands in order to enslave their natives and bring them to Hispaniola to work. One of the consequences was the total depopulation of the Bahamas, from which possibly forty thousand persons were transported to Spanish-occupied areas in the period 1509–1512.

  Diminishing prospects of easy wealth, however, soon induced those who had come from Spain to emigrate from Hispaniola. They were encouraged by official permission (granted by Queen Isabella in 1503) to enslave so-called ‘cannibals’, and by reports of more gold. Settlers moved to other islands: Puerto Rico from 1508; Jamaica and Cuba from about 1511. The latter island was ‘pacified’ by Diego Velázquez, its first governor, in a campaign of terror ag
ainst the largely defenceless natives (Las Casas, who was there, described them as ‘simple and gentle’) that included the murder of one of their chiefs, Hatuey. The Caribbean experience became a motor to Spanish expansion, and drove adventurers even further outward, first to the islands and then in growing numbers to the mainland. By the second decade of the sixteenth century the small Spanish population had spread out to look for riches elsewhere. In 1510 a group of them seized from local Indians the site of their village in the gulf of Urabá, on the south of the Caribbean, and established the town of Darien.86

  The depopulation of the Caribbean Islands by whites forced the Spanish government to reconsider its policy, or lack of one. The diminution in native labour was soon made up for by the import, which we shall consider presently, of blacks from Spain and Africa. But what could be done about the constantly mobile whites? Alonso Zuazo, who was sent to the islands by Cardinal Cisneros in 1517, reported that part of the problem was that Spanish immigrants were not married and therefore did not feel settled. ‘At present’, he wrote, ‘two out of three are without wives and have no permanent home.’87 Zuazo also made a proposal that would have substantially changed the eventual character of the empire. He suggested that immigration be encouraged from all parts of the world, with the condition only that those who went to America should be good Christians. At the same time more ports should be encouraged to have access to the New World. The richness and variety of the crops available in Hispaniola would, he suggested, pave the way to substantial wealth.