Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The king had been besieging the city of Nördlingen since the end of August. A joint Protestant army, commanded by Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar and the Swedish marshal Gustav Horn, attempted to relieve it. The joint Imperial army of the two Ferdinands, totalling thirty-three thousand men, was in a commanding position in the wooded countryside before the city. Behind them, beyond the woods, were the Protestants with a force of twenty thousand. Determined to break the Imperial lines, and unaware of his inferiority in numbers, Horn ordered an attack when the first clear rays of the sun came over the hill on 6 September 1634. In the ensuing clash the Swedes suffered a crushing defeat, after five hours of battle and slaughter.17 Nearly three-quarters of the Protestant army died or were captured in the battle and pursuit. A delighted Olivares promptly hailed it as ‘the greatest victory of our times’.18 The reaction of a Spanish officer who took part in the battle was more sombre: ‘you would not believe how the fields were strewn on all sides with weapons, flags, and bodies and dead horses with horrifying wounds’.19

  Nordlingen was arguably the most important battle of the Thirty Years’ War and had decisive consequences for Germany, where it definitively destroyed Swedish power and helped the emperor to bring about an alliance of states in favour of peace. This was achieved by the Treaty of Prague (1635), agreed principally between the emperor and Saxony. An agreement for ending the war was, however, still far away. The successful battle was anything but auspicious for Spain, since it forced the enemy to seek new allies. A German Protestant ruler mused at the time that ‘in this extremity we must look to France’.20 Richelieu received the news of the battle five days later in Paris, and went to his desk, where he wrote down his thoughts. ‘It is certain’, he noted, ‘that if the Protestants have collapsed the power of the Habsburgs will be directed against France.’21 He was convinced that the Swedish defeat made it inevitable for France itself to intervene directly against the Imperial forces, instead of – as it had done until then – merely paying others to do the fighting.

  In February 1635 the cardinal signed a treaty with the Dutch, which stipulated economic subsidies and even the division of the Southern Netherlands. In March a French army under the Protestant general Rohan invaded the Valtelline and cut the vital line of communication between Milan and the Empire. Finally, France declared war with all the ritual of the Middle Ages: a herald was sent to Brussels, where in the main square on 19 May he formally declared hostilities against Spain on behalf of his master Louis XIII. Unfortunately it was raining and few came to listen to what the lonely herald was reading out in the square.

  The declaration of war by France has sometimes been interpreted as a deliberate act of aggression by Cardinal Richelieu. In reality, the interests of France and Spain had already been in conflict for many years, and with particular intensity after the Mantuan war. Already at that date the diplomats feared an inevitable outbreak of hostilities between the two giants of the West. Rubens, whose artistic interests and diplomatic activities gave him access to the major courts of Europe, expressed his thoughts in a comment that echoes down the ages in its blend of sincerity and despondency:

  There is fear of a general rupture between France and Spain, which would be a conflagration not easily extinguished. Surely it would be better if these young men who govern the world today were willing to maintain friendly relations with one another instead of throwing all Christendom into unrest by their caprices.22

  The fact is that Olivares himself had been taking several measures aimed at an undeclared aggression against the neighbour state, and at the beginning of 1635 he expressly informed the Council of State that ‘war will be declared against France’. ‘Unless they are attacked vigorously,’ he declared, ‘nothing can prevent the French from becoming masters of the world.’23 It is true that Olivares was subject to depressions and liable to see the affairs of the monarchy at times in terms of brilliant optimism, at times in terms of a most profound gloom. But there was no mistaking his reaction to the momentous decision that now pitched the two great powers of Western Europe against each other. ‘Everything’, he observed in mid-June 1635, ‘will come to an end, or Castile will be the leader of the world.’24

  The outbreak of war between the two great powers of Europe had been awaited with trepidation by many Spaniards. In Madrid a courtier wrote: ‘The cure for our ills is even more remote and out of reach.’25 The poet and diplomat Saavedra y Fajardo was convinced that the objectives of a war policy were unattainable: ‘I cannot believe that the whole world should be Spanish.’ ‘The cost has been high’, he wrote in his Political enterprises (1640), ‘of waging war in unseasonable and distant countries, where our enemies have all the advantages and we have so few that it may be doubted whether we are better off winning rather than losing.’26 Casting his eye over the dangers faced by Spain throughout the globe, Olivares in February 1635 thought that ‘the first and greatest perils are those threatening Lombardy, the Low Countries and Germany. A defeat in any of these three would be fatal for the monarchy, and if the defeat were a big one the rest of the monarchy would collapse, since Germany would be followed by Italy and the Low Countries, and the Low Countries by America.’

  The empire, however, was not alone. One of the secrets of its survival had always been the ability to call on help from those who were apparently its enemies but who benefited in a thousand ways from its existence. And it was from the ranks of its enemies that Spain drew one of its greatest defenders, an obscure Dominican friar from Calabria, in the south of Spanish Naples, named Tommaso Campanella. Born in 1568, Campanella entered the Dominican order when he was still very young, in 1582. He proved to be a restless spirit who developed a profound interest in philosophy, Hermetism27 and the occult. Constantly in conflict with members of his own order, he left Calabria and moved from one convent to another but was persistently harassed by his colleagues in Naples, Rome, Padua and Venice, and accused repeatedly of heresy. He returned in 1597 to Calabria, a marked man. Unperturbed, by 1599 he was preaching sermons that foretold great ‘upheavals’ and seemed to be fomenting unrest. When a small uprising actually occurred, he was arrested by the local Inquisition,28 accused of plotting to overthrow Spanish rule in the realm and transferred with a hundred and fifty other prisoners to the military fortress at Naples. There he was brutally tortured (in part to discover whether the madness he manifested was real) and condemned in 1603 to imprisonment for life. He spent his next twenty-five years moving between various prisons in Naples. ‘For eight years’, he wrote from prison in 1607 to the king of Spain, ‘I have been in a dungeon where I see neither light nor sky, always chained, suffering from bad food and worse sleep, with water oozing from the walls in summer and winter.’29

  Campanella had already in the 1590s been preparing the draft of a book, the Monarchy of Spain (Monarchia di Spagna), which he began to write in his cell in Naples in 1600. It was an astonishing defence of the empire from one of its notable victims, and reflects clearly the fascination and fear inspired by the power of Spain. But Campanella was not defending the empire that he knew. Rather, his occult imagination conjured up a vision of an even greater and more powerful Spain that, by adopting a more judicious policy, would be capable of covering the earth and bringing universal peace and prosperity. The corrupt and inefficient empire would be replaced by a new, purified world monarchy. A relevant question is why he, an Italian, should see in Spain the great hope for a bright future. The answer lies in his occult imagination and conviction that all the evidence of past and present history and prophecy pointed to God's decision to elevate Spain. ‘It is impossible’, he warned, ‘to resist this monarchy.’ The rise of Spain to world status seemed to him nothing less than a miracle, which suggested the hand of God. Spain's empire, he pointed out, ‘more than all others is founded upon the occult providence of God and not on either prudence or human force’.30

  The aspirations, of course, were millenarian dreams rather than subversive or imperialist. But they were also rooted in the re
ality of how Spaniards actually ran the empire. When Campanella called for a monarchy (i.e. an empire) that would employ citizens of all nations,31using Genoese for navigation for naigation, Germans for technology and Italians for diplomacy, he was quite simply describing a situation that had already served to create the empire of Spain. The work was smuggled out of his cell and became known through manuscript copies to a wider public. The Spanish writer Juan de Salazar read it at some time before 1619, but in Italy; it appears to have gone unperceived in Spain. The original text was never published at the time: a German version (with passages added) came out in 1620, a Latin version in 1640 and an English one in 1654.

  In the 1620s Campanella's prison conditions in Naples were improved and finally he was released in May 1626. Almost immediately he was arrested again, this time by the Inquisition of Rome, in which city he was confined for eight years. Finally, in October 1634 he was placed secretly by order of the pope on board a ship bound for France. Campanella's fame had preceded him and he was received by Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, who sought his advice on Italian affairs. It was shortly before the outbreak of war between Spain and France in 1635. Campanella was sufficiently aware of the implications of France's entry into the European conflict to change his perspective totally. In 1635 he published three works (as well as a Latin version of his most famous study The City of the Sun) in which he argued that the mystical role of Spain as the future world power would be henceforth assumed by France.32 This universal power, of course, was to be understood not in a territorial but in a spiritual sense. As a philosopher Campanella was seldom taken seriously by his contemporaries (Descartes refused to see him). But his instinctive reasoning over the processes that had made the Spanish empire great and would now precipitate its fall, continues to astonish by its prophetic accuracy.

  The large and complex war machine built up by Philip II had at least one grave defect that commentators were not slow to recognize: the inability of Spain to supply enough experienced officers to command its troops. In medieval times the nobles had been the natural leaders of small local forces engaged in defence or warfare. Under Ferdinand and Isabella they had contributed notably to the armies of the Crown, in particular through the vassals and alliances they could summon up. But they always made it clear that their role was voluntary, not obligatory. Increasingly after 1500 they emphasized that their duties lay in defending their own localities, not in going off to fight outside their own lands. The province of Catalonia, for example, produced a few eminent soldiers for imperial service, most notably Philip II's friend Luis de Requesens, who headed the army of Flanders. But the most notable military service rendered by Catalan nobles was always in the defence of their own frontiers,33 not in the armies of Castile. They were prominent, for example, in the 1503 Rosselló campaign, and again at the recovery of the fortress of Salses in 1640. Apart from those families that made war their career, a high proportion of Spanish nobles gradually ceased to have practical experience of war. Even fewer had sufficient experience to serve in the navy. A considerable number continued to serve the crown brilliantly, but the government – as in many other European states – became obliged to recruit its officers from outside the ranks of the traditional nobility of the nation.

  This was not difficult. All the provinces of the empire had a ruling aristocracy that wished to earn distinction in war, particularly if the war was in their own territory. The nobles in Italy and Flanders felt with good reason that they had the sole right to command the armies based there. Since in practice the crown had few armed forces active outside those two areas, non-Castilian nobles came to dominate the ranks of serving officers. Italians and Belgians distinguished themselves in the service of Spain, and went on with even greater success to serve other masters. During the Thirty Years’ War, Belgian generals served with distinction in every corner of the Germanic lands. The practical consequences for the Madrid government were serious. If the majority not only of serving soldiers but of officers in the armies of Spain, was not Spanish, one of the fundamental bonds of cohesion in the army – loyalty – could not be guaranteed. The composition of the army of Flanders in the seventeenth century is an indication of the problem. In 1608, for example, only 17 per cent of its infantry was Spanish, but 45 per cent German, 15 per cent Belgian and 12 per cent Italian.34 In 1649, the same army had 23 German tercios, 11 Belgian and 4 Italian, against only 6 Spanish.

  The problem was present already in the epoch of the Great Captain in Italy. At that time German regiments in the service of Spain mutinied because they had not been paid, but the Castilians under their Castilian officers remained loyal. In Flanders, immediately after the victory of St Quentin non-Castilian regiments mutinied for the same reason, but the Castilians did not. A reliable and professional officer class (as the British discovered two centuries later) was the key to maintaining multinational armies under discipline. Philip II recognized the importance of this, and attempted to appoint Castilians to key positions in all his armies. There were, however, few qualified personnel. Continuous mutinies in the Army of Flanders from the 1570s demonstrated the gravity of the situation.

  The bitter experience of the wars in the north certainly helped to create a reaction in Castile, among both nobles and commoners, against military service. ‘Nowadays’, was the comment in 1599 of Vargas Machuca, who had been a professional soldier in Italy and the New World, a career in arms ‘is looked down upon, everybody laughs at a man who enters the army, and they not only laugh but consider it crazy to do so’.35 One century later the situation had not changed at all, if we may judge by the report of a Spanish bishop to the king that ‘among the nobles there is scarcely one who wishes to serve Your Majesty in the war’.36 The reaction became a serious problem for recruitment in Castile, which had to supply about one fifth of the men serving in its armies in Europe. Villages, towns, nobles and clergy in Castile constantly made objections that their men were unsuited to war and that taking them would impoverish the community. The city of Madrid in 1636 considered it ‘impossible to fulfil this demand to raise and transport one thousand men to the state of Milan, because the money must be available to pay and feed the men and the city does not have it’.37 If the greatest city of the monarchy could not supply men, it may readily be imagined that lesser towns could not either. Castilian towns consistently obstructed recruiting officers sent to their area. The archbishop of Burgos, explaining why three hundred men could not be raised in his diocese, claimed that ‘this is the poorest and most miserable land in all Spain, and the number of needy people consumed by hunger is infinite’. Even when men could be raised, over much of Spain there existed a traditional right, strictly observed in Catalonia but operative also in Castile, that they did not have to serve ‘outside Spain’.

  Reluctance to serve was also common, as we have noted, among the noble class, and consequently affected the quality of available Spanish officers. The Council of State in 1600 criticized the qualifications of the upper nobility: ‘they have little military experience’. It also commented that ‘the lack that we now suffer of qualified persons to command in the army is going to get worse’.38 It is significant that in 1633 not a single regiment in the army of Milan was commanded by a Castilian. In those months, with the prominent exception of the governor of Milan, the duke of Feria, all the military commanders were foreigners, principally Italians and Belgians.39

  The problem of manpower was no less acute when it came to the navy. All European countries until the eighteenth century had immense difficulties trying to recruit sailors, and Spain was no exception. When in 1641 the royal officials tried to use impressment in the coastal zones of Asturias and Vizcaya, the men in the villages simply absented themselves and refused to appear.40 In practice, throughout the century warships had to go to sea with only about half the crew they needed. The normal solution was to employ foreign seamen. In 1597 the fleet sent against England was manned mostly by Belgian sailors, with some English and French prisoners to help them. It was
a practice that could not be avoided, and the capture of enemy seamen was always welcome. Fadrique de Toledo's victory at Bahia in 1625 was certainly owed to the Portuguese and Spaniards serving under him, but it was the captured Dutch seamen from Brazil who made it possible for his ships to return home.41 The fleets of Spain, like those of England and France, were completely multinational. Unemployed foreigners readily came to serve under the Spanish flag. This explains why Bosnians and Slovenes could regularly be found in Spanish fleets, and eventually, under the leadership of the Masibradi family from Ragusa, served as an important unit in the Atlantic fleet.42

  None of this calls in question the outstanding effort made by Spaniards in the 1630s and 1640s to defend the empire. In that decade the nations of the peninsula, among them the Valencians and Basques, sent considerable numbers of men to serve the crown. Aragonese sent more men than ever before to serve abroad in Germany and Italy. ‘In over a century’, commented the Castilian diarist José Pellicer, ‘no one has seen so many Spaniards together on campaign.’43 He estimated (there is no reason to trust his figures) that around 133,000 Spaniards were serving at that date in the various war zones of the world monarchy.