Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  All civilized empires tend to achieve a universalization of horizons, and Spain's empire was no exception. Like other Western nations, the Spaniards had been in touch with the Renaissance, and some – like Nebrija – went to Italy to drink at the fount of knowledge. Foreign writers, artists and printers also came to seek their fortunes in the peninsula. The first and most famous of them was Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, who was appointed official chronicler of the Indies in 1510 and made Spain his home. The two-way contact promised to drag the peninsula out of its isolation. International expansion did not serve merely to extend peninsular culture. It also aided the entry into Spain of those aspects of culture it lacked. The advent of the cosmopolitan Charles V was followed by the support of many Spaniards for European humanism and the precepts of the Dutch scholar Erasmus.

  In the event, two highly important but contradictory developments occurred.

  On one hand, Spain firmly resisted much of what the outside world offered. A dynamic culture normally extends its interest to other available horizons. This did not happen in Spain. Throughout the Habsburg centuries the existence of Spanish power fascinated other Europeans, who extended their curiosity also to aspects of Spanish culture. Their attention was highest precisely during epochs of greatest tension, when the wish to learn from the enemy was most acute. By contrast, as the master power Spain showed scant interest in the culture of other peoples, and did not extend to the rest of Europe the profound interest that it had at least evinced for Italian culture and technology. Though there were prominent exceptions, as a class the Spanish elite, nobles and clergy, had little cultural sophistication. An Imperial ambassador to Madrid in the 1570s commented that when the nobles spoke of certain subjects they did so in the way that a blind man speaks of colours. They travelled out of Spain very seldom, he said, and so had no perspective with which to make judgements.22

  The question of vernacular literature was the most revealing. Few foreign authors were translated into Castilian. Europeans, however, knew Castilian works. The Germans were no exception. In 1520 they published the Celestina, in 1540 the Amadis of Gaul, and between 1600 and 1618 nineteen popular Castilian works were issued in German.23 The Castilians translated nothing from German. The same happened with the English. The peak period for English interest was in the reign of Elizabeth I, when the two nations were in continuous covert or open conflict, and Richard Hakluyt published in 1589 his great compendium of Western (including Spanish) travel literature, The Principall Navigations. The interest continued to flourish. Until the mid-seventeenth century at least, Englishmen took an interest in Spain and its literature, translated it and imitated it.24 The Spaniards translated nothing from English. The Dutch shared an interest in the same literature: exploration, navigation, histories of America and of the Orient, as well as occasional works of literature,25 such as the famous Celestina. In the centuries covered by the present book, private and public libraries in the northern Netherlands stocked over 1,000 editions by Castilian authors, and 130 editions in translation from Castilian. In total, they stocked nearly six thousand editions of works in all languages dealing with Spain.26 By contrast, in Castile interest was virtually non-existent and limited to the highly specialized theme of the works of Dutch religious mystics, who were very seldom translated. In Switzerland the printers of Basel published 114 editions of works by Spaniards between 1527 and 1564, and a further 70 between 1565 and 1610.27

  Italy offers perhaps the most striking case of the hermetic element in Spain's intellectual evolution. Spaniards went to Italy in their tens of thousands, lived there and worked there, borrowing all the while from Italian art, music and science. But the movement of literature was overwhelmingly one-way, from Spain to Italy. The Italians translated the Celestina in 1506, and the Amadis in 1519; in the early sixteenth century 93 Castilian works were translated into Italian, in the later century 724.28 One of the pioneers of this presentation of Iberian culture to an Italian public was the Italianized Castilian Alfonso Ulloa, who served as secretary and chronicler to Ferrante Gonzaga, governor of Milan in the mid-sixteenth century. Another case was that of the great Italian collector of travel literature, Giovan Battista Ramusio, who died in 1557; the translations he published from Castilian became the model for the subsequent work of the Englishman Hakluyt. Among the works issued by Ramusio were the Decades written (in Spain) by Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, about the discovery of the New World.

  The normal Castilian reaction to this outside interest in Spain's activity was to affirm with some reason that Spain had a great deal to offer other nations. The rest of the world could learn from Spain, whereas Spain did not need to learn from anybody else. ‘All the world serves her’, a proud chronicler of the town of Madrid proclaimed in 1658, ‘and she serves nobody.’29 A French traveller in Madrid in 1666 came to the conclusion that Spain's vision of the world was limited only to that part of it controlled by Spain, ‘which in their view is a world apart, and all other nations exist only to serve them’.30 Castile's own intellectual environment therefore remained (as very many Spaniards were aware) almost impervious to change, even though Spain's place in the world scheme had expanded to an unprecedented degree.

  On the other hand, and in virtual contradiction to the tendency we have just noted, some sections of the élite welcomed the new windows into the outside world. Spain had every opportunity to become a centre of universal culture, for there was no closing of frontiers in the imperial age, only an opening. The foreign dynasties that ruled in Spain – the Habsburgs were German, the Bourbons French – stimulated tastes that in time became more widely accepted. In the transfer of specific aspects of culture, including music and in particular art, ‘Spain was the recipient, accepting exterior models, making them her own, and adapting them to different circumstances of every type: religious, social, economic and intellectual.’31 The age of empire was when some Spaniards took maximum advantage of the creative activity of other nations in their orbit. Philip II was perhaps the most outstanding example of this trend.32 As a passionate collector of the arts he imported to Castile the best that Europe and the New World had to offer. The work of European artists piled up in the royal collections. A subsequent monarch who shared the same passion was Philip IV, friend and patron of Velázquez and Rubens, and zealous purchaser of foreign works of art.33

  Since the peninsula depended on book imports for much of its literature in both Spanish and Latin, and many Spanish authors (as we have seen) preferred to publish abroad, there was a considerable and continuous flow of books into the peninsula. In Castile the trader Andrés Ruiz during the years 1557–64 brought in over nine hundred bales of books from Lyon and over one hundred from Paris. By the early seventeenth century there was a virtually free flow of books from French presses into Spain, most of it across the Pyrenees. The holdings in many Barcelona bookshops consisted almost exclusively of imported books, including Spanish authors who had been published abroad. Despite a great deal of bureaucratic interference, most of it on the part of the Inquisition, and a constant vigilance against heretical literature, no significant hindrance to imports took place. From 1559, when a shipment of three thousand books destined for Alcalá was seized on a French vessel in San Sebastián, booksellers in Spain had to put up with wholesale embargoes of their precious imports. However, the shipments were neither confiscated not censored. They were simply delayed until the bureaucracy had decided that no illegal imports were taking place. In 1564 the Inquisition ordered its officials in Bilbao and San Sebastián to send on to booksellers in Medina del Campo 245 bales of books imported from Lyon. Three years later the books were still in the ports. Embargoes apart, books continued to enter freely. ‘Every day’, the inquisitors of Catalonia reported in 1572, ‘books enter both for Spain and for other parts.’ The imports were substantial and in no way impeded by censorship.34

  It would appear, then, that Spain's frontiers were open to the world's culture. In practice, this was not so. Imported books tended to be in Latin, the l
anguage of scholars, and dedicated to subjects – theology, medicine, classical history – that appealed to only a tiny élite, whose curiosity seldom extended to the culture of other European states. The few imported works in foreign languages tended to be in Italian during the sixteenth century and in French during the seventeenth and eighteenth; in all cases they were a minute proportion of the books entering Spain. A case in point is the store of the Barcelona bookseller Joan Guardiola, who in 1560 imported ninety per cent of his stock directly from publishers in the French city of Lyon, of which less than one per cent happened to be books in French; virtually all his imports were in Latin.35 Spain therefore tended to remain open only to cultural contact diffused through the medium of Latin, and then only in a limited way. A leading expert on literature has come to the conclusion that Spain ‘withdrew behind her borders, clinging to the culture pattern that she held dear’.36 This was strange conduct indeed for a power that controlled the most extensive monarchy on the face of the earth.

  The best creativity produced by the imperial experience emanated, it may be argued, less from within Spain than from those writers who, like Miguel Cervantes, went beyond the peninsula and out into the limitless reaches of the monarchy in order to absorb influences and inspiration. The verse, memoirs, narratives, treatises and fiction created during the centuries of Spanish world power were proof that many Castilians, despite the restricted horizons in the peninsula, were capable of responding to the enriching contact with the world outside.

  There was one important exception to this picture. While Castilians enjoyed almost unlimited political horizons, they contracted their cultural perspectives by defining in a wholly exclusive sense what it meant to be a ‘Spaniard’. Unlike the Roman Empire before them and the British Empire after them, they attempted to exclude from their midst all alternative cultures, beginning with two of the great historic cultures of the peninsula. From the year 1492, which marked the capitulation of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews, both Islam and Judaism were effectively excluded from the Spanish concept of the universe. It was not a sudden move. Hostility to the two cultures was of long standing and the year 1492 was by no means a final date. The few Jews expelled at that moment were allowed back if they changed their religion, and Muslims did not suffer serious constraint until after 1500. The pattern, however, was set, and repression in the peninsula was extended to other parts of the empire. There were important negative consequences of anti-Semitism, not least in the linguistic sphere, where Hebrew and Arabic ceased to form part of the Hispanic heritage. The symbol of this repressive face of empire was the Inquisition, which from its bases in the Iberian peninsula extended its activities to America, Manila and Goa, identifying its enemies always with those who were Jews or Muslims.

  As Américo Castro once observed, however, Spain is the only nation capable of verbally maintaining one idea while practising entirely the opposite. Even while the official policy was one of almost fanatical exclusivism directed against Semitic cultures and deviation of belief, the Spanish empire proved completely incapable of imposing the rigid attitudes it maintained in theory. This arose out of the ‘permanent characteristic of the Hispanic condition’, as Castro saw it,37 of creating many laws but observing none of them, a peculiarity still common in the Spain of today. Though Jews were forbidden to reside in Spain after 1492, for example, they lived freely in most territories of the empire long afterwards. The fort of Oran, governed directly by the Spanish crown, was a curious case of this ambivalence. One hundred years after the expulsion of Jews from Spain, there was a small Jewish community in Oran, numbering seventy persons. At the end of the reign of Philip II, his officials seem to have persuaded him to purify his territories of Jews and moves were made to expel them from Oran as well as from the duchy of Milan. In the event nothing happened, and Jews continued to be tolerated in Oran until the end of the seventeenth century. In the same way there were laws forbidding Muslims to be employed in the Spanish army, but it was evident that Oran could not survive without Muslim support, and they were recruited to join the defence force there.38

  For years, decades and centuries after the so-called expulsion of Jews from the Iberian peninsula, they continued to play a significant role in the evolution of the Spanish empire. The peninsula – Sefarad – was, and would continue to be seen as, their home. The yearning for Sefarad brought a new generation back to the land of their fathers, and families of Jewish origin returned from Portugal and sometimes from France. As we have seen, they were active in business through the converso financiers who placed contacts for the crown and helped to back naval and military expeditions overseas. In 1628 Philip IV granted the Portuguese financiers freedom to trade and settle without restriction, hoping thereby to win back from foreigners a section of the Indies trade. Thanks to this, the New Christians extended their influence to the principal trading channels of Spain and America. They achieved particular success during the decades that the Dutch occupied a portion of Portuguese Brazil. In the Caribbean they managed to set up small communities, composed originally of poor migrants, in the areas taken over by the Dutch and English. In the late seventeenth century Sephardic Jews were resident in territories such as Curaçao, Surinam, Martinique and Jamaica. When they faced problems in Spain, mainly on account of persecution by the Inquisition, many conversos emigrated to one of their best-known refuges, the city of Amsterdam. Of a sample of around one thousand Jews who married in the city during the seventeenth century, at least one fifth had been born in Spain and two-fifths in Portugal.39 From their base at Amsterdam the Iberian Jews continued to invest, in a small but by no means insignificant way, in the fortunes of the empire.

  The Jews had yet another role to play, one to which they were well accustomed. Ever since the anti-Semitic fervour that culminated in the expulsion of 1492, Spanish religious zealots contemplated with fear and suspicion the presence of Jews outside Spain. The whole imperial enterprise of Castile was considered by one or two imaginative spirits to be under threat of Jewish subversion. As a consequence there was periodic persecution of conversos in the New World and other parts of the empire. Above all, Jews were considered responsible for the fall of Brazil to the Dutch in the early seventeenth century. Both Portuguese and Spaniards were united in believing that Jews were stabbing the empire in the back. A Castilian grandee did not hesitate to claim that Pernambuco had been lost in 1630 ‘through the Jews’.40 This was the decade when, partly in reaction against Olivares's patronage of Portuguese converso financiers, anti-Semitic sentiment was rampant in Madrid. Some clergy and intellectuals, notably the poet Francisco de Quevedo, actively propagated the stab-in-the-back theory. If the empire was crumbling, these people claimed, the Jews were to blame, above all the Jews who were backing their long-time enemy the Dutch. ‘With the help of Jews’, a priest informed the king in 1637, ‘the Dutch rebels have prospered.’41 In practice the anti-Semitic current of opinion, which has continued to be active down to our own day, was always treated with disdain by the politicians who held the reins of power.

  The simple logic of numbers converted Spaniards into a minority in their empire. In small colonizing enterprises, settlers could use their numerical superiority to impose their way of life. In extensive empires, such as those of Rome and Great Britain, this was impossible. The limited population of Spain, which began to diminish by the end of the sixteenth century, affected the capacity to project its culture on to other peoples. In the New World, where the indigenous population continued (despite demographic disaster) to dominate the landscape, Spaniards were proportionately always very few, and were moreover soon joined by a good number of other immigrants. A Portuguese New Christian who lived in Lima in the early seventeenth century reported that the wealthiest merchant in the city was Corsican (the family of the famous Gian Antonio Corso), and that resident foreigners included French, Italians, Germans, Flemings, Greeks, Genoese, English, Chinese and Indians from India.42 The foreign community numbered around four hundred families, of w
hom fifty-seven were Corsicans. At the same period the viceroy of New Spain reported – with undoubted exaggeration – that he feared a threat to security from the numerous Flemish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and other non-Spanish Europeans resident in his jurisdiction.43

  ‘What was the role of the non-Spaniards,’ a leading historian of Latin America has asked, ‘the Portuguese, Germans, Flemings, Italians, Greeks and English who went to Spanish America as adventurers, traders, miners or simply settlers?’44 Though their numbers were limited, foreigners were valued for their expertise. The four Frenchmen licensed to travel from Seville to New Spain in 1538 were required for the quality of their cuisine.45 Germans could be found everywhere in the mining industry. From the 1590s the authorities in New Spain tolerated the presence of foreigners by inventing a tax, a ‘composición’, that permitted them to reside there. A French merchant travelling to the Río de la Plata in the 1650s reported that in Buenos Aires there were ‘a few Frenchmen, Hollanders and Genoese, but all of them pass for Spaniards’.46The contact with Asia also made a crucial contribution to the profile of the New World population. It has been suggested that some six thousand Orientals entered New Spain from Manila during each decade of the early seventeenth century.47

  Because the Portuguese were in command of a colonial empire that functioned in parallel, it is often forgotten that they too contributed on a major scale to the existence and success of Spanish power. As the pioneers, they invited both imitation and competition. Portuguese experience in shipping, cartography and navigation, as well as in contact with the cultures of Africa and Asia, was exploited with profit by those who came after them. The colonization of the Canaries would have been unrealizable without Portuguese help, and the search for spices in Asia would have been impossible for Spaniards without the existing trade network created by the Portuguese. The Portuguese were also the main suppliers of African slaves, and continued to be so throughout Spain's imperial history. Well into the eighteenth century, Spanish settlers in South America relied for slaves on suppliers from Brazil. Finally, as subjects of the Spanish crown between 1580 and 1640 the Portuguese were not excluded from participation in Spanish enterprises, though in practice their empire continued to be run as an autonomous entity. By the 1630s, they were, for example, well installed in the viceroyalty of Peru.48 The consequence of all this was that they played a continuously significant role in the functioning of Spain's territories.