Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  Apart from the terror exercised by the Council of Blood, what Netherlanders most remembered of their struggle against Spain were the excesses of the soldiery and the execution of patriots. In October 1572 Alba allowed his troops to sack and massacre in the city of Mechelen, which had supported Orange. In the next few weeks it was the turn of Zutphen and Naarden. At Haarlem, the Spaniards methodically executed the entire garrison, over two thousand persons, in cold blood.121 There were strong protests from other Spanish officials, who felt that the policy of repression was leading nowhere. A senior officer reported to the king's secretary ‘the abhorrence in which the name of the house of Alba is held’. Another Spaniard urged Philip to realize that repression had failed, despite ‘having executed over three thousand people in just over five years’.122 The failure of Alba's harsh policies in the Netherlands had been for some time apparent to Philip II, who, however, was unable to act because he saw no acceptable alternative. By contrast, the St Bartholomew's massacre for the first time seemed to offer light at the end of the tunnel. The removal of the threat of intervention by Huguenot nobles, who had always been the closest allies of Orange, opened the way to a possible adoption of a less intransigent approach.

  In consequence, the year 1573 marked a fundamental change of direction in royal policy that affected not only Europe but the whole empire. The 1573 Ordinance on Discoveries (discussed below in Chapter 6) laid down the line to be followed in future in the New World: conquest was no longer to be an objective. In the Netherlands, as we can see by the remarkable instructions to the new governor, Requesens, Philip was willing to try a policy of extensive concessions. Most of his advisers, both the hard-liners and those who were not so, supported him. From France his ambassador Francés de Álava wrote advising against the further use of force. ‘In my poor judgement’, he wrote to the king, ‘another way must be sought.’ From his position in Italy as viceroy of Naples, Cardinal Granvelle also urged the king to adopt a more flexible policy. He reflected in July 1574 that the king's advisers had not the slightest idea of the affairs of the Netherlands: ‘they do not understand nor will understand in very many years’.

  The cost to the empire in terms of men and money was in any case insupportable. The spiralling costs were the despair of Philip's financial advisers. Juan de Ovando, president of the council of Finance, drew up an estimate in August 1574 which showed that current annual income of the Castilian treasury was around six million ducats, while obligations came to eighty million. The current debt in Flanders was around four million, or two-thirds of all the available income of the government of Spain. To this one had to add the current costs there, over 600,000 ducats a month, the biggest single burden on the treasury. The monthly expense in Flanders was over ten times the cost of defence in the peninsula, and twenty times the cost of the royal household and government.

  Even while Alba complained that he was not receiving enough men or money, the king was complaining that he received too much. In February 1573 the duke wrote to the king's secretary, appealing for a diversion of resources away from the Mediterranean and towards the north. ‘I beat my head against the wall when I hear them talk of the cost here! It is not the Turks who are troubling Christendom but the heretics, and these are already within our gates… For the love of God, ask for the new supplies that I have detailed to His Majesty, because what is at stake is nothing less than the survival of his states.’ Throughout the year, he continued to rage, plead and rail against those in authority in Madrid. ‘Until those who serve in his councils are dead or sacked, His Majesty will achieve nothing here.’ Philip refused to be browbeaten. ‘I shall never have enough money to satisfy your needs’, the king wrote, ‘but I can easily find you a successor able and faithful enough to bring to an end, through moderation and clemency, a war that you have been unable to end by arms or by severity.’ In 1573 he appointed his old friend Luis de Requesens, grand commander of Castile and currently governor of Milan, to the governorship of the Netherlands.123

  The difference between the attitudes of the old and the new governor were patent from the first day. Alba told Requesens that he had advised the king to ‘lay waste in Holland all the country that our people could not occupy’. The grand commander of Castile was horrified at this typical soldier's solution. ‘From the very first day’, he was to comment later, ‘I have had the water up to my teeth.’ Apart from having to deal with the rebels, he had to search for solutions to one of the king's main preoccupations, that of acquiring naval power for Spain in the waters of the north. A substantial naval force being planned by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in the port of Santander in 1574 never got under way. The death of Menéndez that September, and an outbreak of typhus among the crews, forced cancellation.

  During 1575 further attempts were made to send naval help. In September and again in November fleets were sent out from Santander. The first was hit by storms and dispersed along the English coast. The second, crippled by mutiny and bad weather, never made it to sea. At the end of December the king decided to postpone the naval effort. Officials lamely recognized that the Dutch were far superior to them at sea.124 Outside the Mediterranean, Spain's naval power in Europe was virtually zero. To keep trade going, Philip even tolerated the transport of goods to and from Spain by Dutch rebel ships. From Seville it was reported that ‘Flemings, English and Dutch control all the trade’. In 1574 the king was offered the use of a Baltic port, on the Swedish coast, from which to strike against the rebels and cut off their wheat supplies. It was the first of several proposals of this type. The offer could not be taken up. In the north, as a consequence, Spain lost out to the maritime superiority of the Protestant powers. It was a fatal weakness that with time assured the Dutch their freedom, and created continuing problems for Spain.

  Though the king recognized in 1574 ‘that it is not possible to make progress on Flanders through a policy of war’,125 the attempt at a policy of moderation in the Netherlands failed to pay off. When Requesens, who had been unwell for some time, died in March 1576, he was replaced as governor by Don Juan of Austria. The 1575 bankruptcy had by now accelerated the disorder in the Netherlands, where the regiments that had not received their pay were mutinying and deserting. In a long tirade against his own men Requesens declared ‘that it is not the prince of Orange who has lost us Flanders, but soldiers born in Valladolid and Toledo whose mutinies have cost us money, confidence and reputación!’.126 Towards the end of 1576 an army that numbered sixty thousand men on paper had sunk in fact to no more than eight thousand.127 The core of the army under Spanish control mutinied and in November 1576 sacked the great commercial city of Antwerp at a cost of some six thousand lives and a large amount of property.

  This bloody ‘Spanish Fury’ confirmed the resolution of the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands, assembled at Ghent in the States-General, to decide their own destiny. They negotiated a general peace (the Pacification of Ghent, November 1576), demanding that Philip accept the current religious position and withdraw all Spanish troops as a precondition of settlement. Don Juan was forced to accept. ‘There seems little hope of avoiding’, he complained in December, ‘the situation we are going through, and all at my cost, for I am struggling from seven in the morning to one o'clock at night. These people are so out of their minds, that the only thing they can think of saying is, “The Spaniards must leave, the Spaniards must leave”.’128 In February 1577 he issued a so-called Perpetual Edict and withdrew the army. When the Calvinists failed to respect the religious truce, Don Juan recalled the troops under Alessandro Farnese, prince of Parma, and in 1578 at Gembloux defeated the forces of a Netherlands now wholly united in revolt under William of Orange. Gembloux was both a rout and a massacre: the small army of the States-General, unprepared for an attack, retreated rapidly but lost, in dead and prisoners, six thousand of its seven thousand infantry. When Don Juan died of illness in October his place was taken immediately by his lieutenant Farnese.

  The obvious failure of Alba's policies
has tended to overshadow his reputation. Though by no means the most successful of all the generals ever to serve the Spanish empire, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, third duke of Alba, was certainly the most distinguished.129 A close collaborator of the young Charles V, he gained the emperor's confidence, received the Golden Fleece in 1526, and served him in all his theatres of war, principally in Germany, where he participated in the victory of Mühlberg as well as in the final reverse at Metz. He commanded the armies of Philip II in Italy, and was appointed viceroy of Naples before being chosen for the governorship of the Netherlands in 1567. The campaign there made his reputation as an efficient and ruthless commander, but it also unmade his health and his career, for the king never again put his trust in purely military solutions. Unfortunately, Alba came to represent for contemporaries (as well as for future generations) the unacceptable face of Spanish imperialism, brutal and merciless. A tall, stern and honourable aristocrat, Castilian from the roots of his hair to the tips of his boots, Catholic and cultured, he tended to despise the citizens of the empire who were not as he was. Brantôme, who knew him in his mature years, described him in his last days as still full of energy, ‘neither more nor less than a fine, grand, old tree, still putting out small, green branches to show that it had been in former times the pride of a great forest’.130

  Alba played a fundamental role both as general and as head of the group of nobles and officials who reflected his political interests. But he was also one of the great constructors of the empire inherited by Philip II. As member of the Council of State, general and viceroy, he travelled to every corner of the territories ruled over by the Habsburg dynasty: he was at ease equally in Vienna, Brussels, London, Rome, Naples and Madrid, and his adequate command of French and Italian, together with an elementary knowledge of German, enabled him to speak on equal terms with leaders of every nation. Travelling between his assignments, he became the lynch pin for major decisions affecting the functioning of the monarchy, a sort of imperial executive with responsibilities in all matters concerning politics, war and finance. ‘For the campaign in Milan and Piedmont’, he wrote in 1555 from Brussels to a fleet commander in the Mediterranean, ‘we need to have a good supply of gunpowder, cannonballs and saltpetre; when you reach Naples in the galleys you will need to send me five hundred quintals of gunpowder’. In the same month, still in Brussels, he assured Charles V, who was in Vienna, that troop recruitment for Italy was going well: ‘speaking of the Spanish troops, I have no doubt that Germans will be sufficient for now and will be very good. When I arrive in Italy I shall do what seems necessary, and shall try to raise troops from the appropriate nations and in the number required.’131

  Early in 1556 the theme was money. ‘It is three months since I have heard from Your Majesty’, he wrote in a letter from Portofino, ‘and I go about begging for news of what is happening at Your Majesty's court. The matter of money is in such straits that I do not know what can be done this summer if Your Majesty does not send to Spain at once for some supply.’ ‘When I was in Livorno’, he wrote to Prince Philip, ‘I made two contracts with Niccolo di Grimaldo for 110,000 escudos; I used 70,000 of it to pay off the wages owing to the men in the army of Tuscany and Orvieto up to the end of 1555, and sent the remaining 40,000 to Milan to pay the Germans.’132 Between supervision of recruitment, wages and supplies, and the very many other matters requiring his attention, Alba made sure that the various realms of the monarchy contributed together to the common effort. The task had never been done adequately before, and now called for serious attention. Historians have too easily assumed that the duke had only to put himself at the head of the famous Spanish military machine for it to function smoothly. There was in reality very little machine, and it barely functioned. ‘I arrived in Italy’, he wrote in 1556 to the Regent of Spain, Philip's sister Juana, ‘and found the army was due 1,200,000 escudos. What was supposed to come from Spain has never arrived, and I have had to wage war for a whole year with an army that is almost always mutinous and disobedient.’ Nor was the shipment of troops to Italy any comfort. Vessels bringing tercios from Sardinia to Naples in February sank at sea, with the loss of one thousand men, a major disaster. At New Year 1557 he had little reason to be satisfied with the new troops sent to him. ‘The galleys have arrived with the Germans and the Spaniards, but they are all in such a condition that we cannot expect much from them. Over half the 2,300 Germans are sick, and two-thirds of the 700 Spaniards are moribund. I am here without men and without money.’133

  Spanish expansion had been made possible by the use of private contracting in every possible sphere. It was the only way a poor nation could exploit the opportunities made available to it. Moreover, public financial enterprise was as yet little known in the peninsula. Certain cities, notably Barcelona, had public banks of limited scope.134 The crown, by contrast, had no fund of money on which it could draw for its schemes. Experience showed that private contracting was an unreliable instrument, and that it very often exacted a high price. Philip II began the monarchy's attempts to distance itself from conquistadors and adventurers. For the first time, empire became a serious business in which the crown – that is, the public sphere as against the private – decided to extend its initiative.

  But what was the role of Spain and its crown in this new international community? Philip II gave priority to two aims: affirming the authority of the crown, and ensuring adequate finances.135 From the beginning of his reign he pursued both objectives consistently in dealing with the New World. Spanish imperialism was neither more nor less than the power of the crown. By affirming his own authority, Philip rejected the old view that based the Spanish presence in America on papal donation. When he accepted the surrender of the independent Andean state of Vilcabamba, by the agreement imposed on Titu Cusi Yupanqui in 1565, he made it clear that the submission was to his authority. It was not a repetition of what Pizarro had imposed on the Incas, a submission based on the requerimiento. The formal rejection of the papal donation bore fruit in special meetings of government committees from the year 1567 onwards. In 1568 the king convened an important committee to discuss the government of America; there were members from all the councils, among them Juan de Ovando, president of the council of the Indies, as well as the viceroy-designate of Peru, Francisco de Toledo. Its work was meant to round off the recently completed codification (1567) of the laws of Castile and Léon, known as the ‘Nueva Recopilación’. Among the many important results of the 1568 committee, perhaps the most significant was the Ordinance on Discovery and Population of 1573, which we shall consider later (Chapter 6).

  The tenure of Francisco de Toledo as viceroy of Peru was in many ways symbolic of the way that Philip II proposed to run the overseas empire. Toledo had been a distinguished diplomat and soldier before he was sent out as viceroy in 1569, armed with elaborate instructions from the king. He was to give priority to the condition of the majority population, in terms of their religion and the nature of their labour obligations. He was also to make sure that order was restored in the production of silver and the collection of the taxes due to the crown. His term of office, a highly successful twelve years, coincided with the ordering of the mining industry in South America, changes in the administration, and the establishment of tribunals of the Spanish Inquisition in the New World. The coming of the Inquisition, which was in operation from the 1570s, had little impact on the colonial world. But it signalled an important change in the sphere of religion, for it was part of a package that included the introduction of reforms decreed in Europe by the Council of Trent, and signified for those friars who had been working in America an end to their dreams of an autonomous American Church under their control.

  The most memorable of Toledo's achievements was the capture and execution of the last Inca, Tupac Amaru, youngest son of the Manco Inca of the time of the Pizarros. It was an act that encapsulated both the philosophy and practice of Spanish imperialism, and requires our attention. The neo-Inca state created in the mountain f
ortress of Vilcabamba by Manco Inca coexisted with the Spanish presence in Peru for decades. Now and then, the Indians would come down from the mountains to make raids against the Spaniards and their allies. But there were deep divisions among them. When the Spaniards set up a puppet Inca – a brother of Manco – in Cusco, many Indians deserted Vilcabamba and followed the new ruler. Then in 1545 a group of Almagro's followers, who had been befriended in the fortress by Manco, murdered their host. The confusion was not resolved until power passed to a natural son of Manco, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, in 1560. The people of Tawantinsuyu found themselves at the parting of the ways between the old order and the new. What would they do? In 1565 rumours circulated that Titu Cusi aimed to stir up a general rebellion and restore the empire of the Incas. The Spaniards decided to try the way of negotiation and an emissary, accompanied by Spanish soldiers and Cañari Indians hostile to the Incas, went up to have talks with Titu Cusi. The latter accepted baptism and promised to call off the threatened uprising. It seemed that a modus vivendi between the Spanish and the Inca states would be reached. Christian missionaries were allowed to preach in the territory controlled by Titu Cusi.