Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  This revolt had little in common with that of Catalonia. The long association of Portugal with the great Spanish empire should in principle have brought considerable benefits. Despite its pioneering role in world exploration and trade, however, the country remained in 1640, after a century and a half of enterprise, a poor and undeveloped land. Many Portuguese found an easy answer for this situation, and blamed the Castilians for all their ills. They lived under the illusion, which happened to be even more prevalent among Castilians, that empire brings wealth and success. When this did not happen, they moralized about the evils of the Habsburg era in their history (1580–1640) and pointed the finger at Spain. Even in the midst of the feeling of triumph engendered by the recovery of Bahia in 1625, the commander of the Portuguese fleet, Manuel de Meneses, complained of ‘the hatred of the Castilians for the Portuguese, which they demonstrate in everything, though never publicly’.57 In reality, Portugal's empire had been not much more than a passing dream of greatness. Asian trade consisted of luxury items that could not stimulate either industry or agriculture at home, and the profits of the merchant community in Asia were not reinvested in the domestic economy.58

  On one important point, the inability of Spain to offer protection against the Dutch, the Portuguese were fully justified in their complaints. The return to a state of war between Spain and the Dutch in 1621 emboldened the latter to extend their hostilities very effectively against vulnerable Portuguese interests in Asia and Brazil. In 1605 the Dutch, as we have seen, tried to displace the Spaniards and Portuguese in the Maluku archipelago. They began extending their control of Brazil from the base they had established at Pernambuco, and in 1637 (as we have seen) captured the African slave port of São Jorge da Mina from the Portuguese. In the 1630s the governor of Batavia, Antonie van Diemen, had at his disposal over eighty war vessels, which he used effectively to blockade Portuguese shipping at Melaka and Goa.59 ‘Our blockade’, he reported with satisfaction in 1636, ‘is undermining the trade of Melaka, and in consequence the trade of Batavia increases daily.’ The final coup was given when in 1640 with the help of native allies he mounted a full-scale siege of Melaka, which was obliged to surrender to the Dutch in January 1641.

  The union of the crowns seemed to have little to offer to the Portuguese, and war with France raised tensions to a critical point. Olivares's attempt to raise more taxes provoked riots in 1637 in Evora and other cities. When the Catalan revolt broke out the Portuguese nobility were, like the Castilian, asked to serve on the Catalan front. In reply, the Portuguese staged an uprising in Lisbon in December 1640, and proclaimed the duke of Bragança as king under the name of João IV. Active French support, both naval and military, was an immense help; but national energy alone can explain subsequent victories against the Dutch in Brazil and the Spanish in the peninsula. Finally, in 1668 Spain recognized the independence of Portugal. Olivares had observed at the end of 1640 that ‘this year can certainly be considered the worst this monarchy has ever experienced’. But there were further shocks to come, and not only from Portugal. There was an attempt at secession in Andalusia in 1641, and a similar plot in Aragon in 1648. They were symptoms of the dissatisfaction of local élites with the policy of Castile, and have their parallel in the revolt in 1647 of Naples, a revolt that threatened to shatter irreparably Spain's empire in the Mediterranean.

  One of the most fundamental aspects of the empire had been its relationship with the Portuguese. The Portuguese pioneered all the ocean routes and initiated all the colonial economies that the Spaniards later developed; Spanish progress in these areas is therefore almost indistinguishable from the contribution made by them. The cultivation by Portuguese of sugar in the Atlantic islands and then in Brazil, was echoed by Spain's production of sugar in the Caribbean. In the same way the resort to African slavery, later to be used also by the Spanish, gave Portugal an advantage that it never lost. Indeed, even when the slave trade was formally in the hands of others it was the Portuguese who carried off the Spanish American gold and silver to pay for the slaves. It was Portugal that established the European spice trade in East Asia. After the union of the crowns of Portugal and Spain in 1580, therefore, Spain found itself in the difficult position of having to respect Portuguese primacy in major areas of commercial enterprise. Philip II promised the Cortes at Tomar in 1580 that he would scrupulously preserve the independence of his new realm. The monarchy, he stressed, was a union of free and autonomous states that operated separately. There is no doubt that the king did his best to maintain the autonomy of Portugal. In practice, however, the interests of Spain and Portugal became closely intertwined, thanks in good measure to the Portuguese financiers who entered the service of the Spanish crown.

  Through their control of the slave trade, the Portuguese made important inroads into the economy of Spanish South America. In 1588 it was reported that in the trade through Buenos Aires, ‘every day [not to be taken literally] Portuguese vessels come with blacks and with merchandise’, and a few years later a decree stated that ‘through the Río de la Plata goods from Brazil enter and foreigners pass through, without anyone bothering to do anything to stop it’.60 In those years the Portuguese were in fact trading freely throughout the Atlantic coasts of South America, despite theoretical prohibitions.

  Like the Spaniards, however, the Portuguese in the new joint empire had to compete with outside finance. Italian financiers had already been prominent in contracts for trade with Asia. When Philip II in 1586 launched a new scheme to import spices from India, he granted the contract to a consortium headed by the German companies Fugger and Welser, with the Italian financier Rovalesca playing a prominent part.61 Nevertheless the Portuguese financiers managed to hold on to what was (thanks to the English and Dutch) a declining trade in spices. Many of them became resident in India, in the Portuguese metropolis of Goa. The most prominent of them were New Christians,62 that is, they were of Jewish origin. Their economic power helped to allay constant suspicions of their religious orthodoxy. Indeed by the end of the sixteenth century they were the financial mainstay of the Crown of Portugal, both at home and in Brazil and Goa. During the truce with the Dutch, which facilitated peaceful commerce in Europe though not outside it, New Christians and their Jewish contacts in Amsterdam extended their control over some sectors of Spain's commerce.63

  In a memoir sent by them to Philip IV in the 1620s they claimed that they were the chief support of the Spanish-Portuguese monarchy, ‘sending to the East Indies countless ships laden with merchandise, whose customs duties maintain the navy and enrich the kingdom; supporting Brazil and producing the machinery to obtain sugar for all Europe; maintaining the trade to Angola, Cape Verde and other colonies from which Your Majesty has obtained so many duties; delivering slaves to the Indies for their service, and journeying and trading from Spain to all the world.64 In effect their contribution was important, though impossible to quantify. For a considerable period, from 1626 to 1640, thanks to the patronage of the count duke of Olivares they also managed to obtain a privileged position as bankers of the Spanish crown in its seat at Madrid. The Portuguese penetrated the economies of Peru and New Spain, and in Asia improved their links with the Spanish traders of Manila.65 They were few in number, and controlled only certain sections of Spain's enterprises, but their activities confirm the dependence of Spaniards on the necessary services of other nations. For three-quarters of a century, until the coming of the Bourbon dynasty, Portuguese financiers of Jewish origin continued to play a crucial role in supplying the capital that helped to run the state tax system and the provisioning of the army and the navy.

  In particular, during the key decade 1631–1640 they underwrote Spanish imperial power,66 sharing with Genoese and German bankers the financing of the armies in northern Europe and the navies in the Atlantic. During the fifteen years from 1626, the year of their first great arrangement with the crown, to 1640, when Portugal declared its independence, the total value of the contracts signed by Portuguese financiers wit
h the crown exceeded forty million ducats.67 The greater part of this sum went to other banking centres in Europe to meet government expenses, over forty per cent of it to the city of Antwerp. The financiers were not merely concerned with the official business of the crown. They also participated in all aspects of peninsular trade and the trade to America. In 1640 there were said to be two thousand Portuguese resident in Seville alone, though the richer financiers tended to reside in Madrid, where they had more immediate access to the royal court. There were, moreover, many Portuguese merchants resident in the Spanish territories of South America; both directly and through their contacts they played a prominent role in the trade of the Pacific, the Atlantic and the growing colony in the Río de la Plata.68 Their wealth and influence in Peru was such that nobody could touch them except the Inquisition, which was used to prosecute them for overtly religious reasons: a bloody auto de fe in Lima in 1639 was the result. In Spain the Inquisition was also used for the same purpose a decade later, though informed opinion knew very well that the real motive was not religious but economic.

  The separation of Portugal from Spain in 1640 and the fall from power of Olivares had as one consequence the disgrace of Portuguese financiers in Spain. Many of them left the country, fleeing in some cases from the Inquisition. They also transferred their assets from the peninsula to northern Europe, principally Amsterdam, thus depriving the Spanish crown of their services and resources. There was a reaction against them in New Spain, where they had significant business, and the Inquisition arrested several. In Portugal, to make matters worse, the new regime arrested and in one case executed financiers who were too closely identified with the Habsburg regime. The famous Spanish asiento for supplying African slaves to America had been before 1640 in Portuguese hands. It was now suspended for over twenty years, until 1662.

  The Spanish crown, of course, was not interested in victimizing the Portuguese, many of whom had long been resident in the country and continued to offer their services to the state. In 1641 a government official admitted that ‘there would be no other bankers to whom one might entrust the provisions [of cash] in Flanders, if it were not for the Portuguese’.69 Despite their help, the government found it difficult to keep up with its debts, and in 1647 declared yet another suspension of payments. Of the thirty-three financiers mentioned by name in the decree, three were Genoese, one Florentine, one Belgian, one English and twenty-seven Portuguese, a measure of the international network that backed up the monarchy and of the preponderant role played in it by the Portuguese. However, they were on their way out. Isolated from the new independent Portugal, they also suffered from the steady collapse of Portuguese mercantile interests in Brazil and East Asia. Under the last Habsburg king, Charles II, they maintained their role in public finances, but at a more subdued level. They continued for instance in 1682 to control the slave asiento to America, but had to do it from Cadiz.

  Spain's enemies, first the Dutch and then France, did not forget the Mediterranean in their efforts to destabilize the monarchy. The task was not difficult, for after nearly two centuries of Spanish predominance few themes united Italians so much as the desire to rid themselves of their unwanted masters. In Naples and in Sicily the French helped provoke and actively supported two major rebellions against Spanish power. In July 1647 in Naples the fish-vendor Tommaso Aniello, popularly known as Masaniello, led an insurrection that was ignited by rumours of new taxes and that quickly gained wide support. Unlike previous riots of this type, the Masaniello movement managed to build on an anti-Spanish resentment felt by all classes, in both city and countryside. Without adequate means to repress the rising, the viceroy fled the city. The leaders of the revolt, relying on French help, in October declared themselves a republic independent of Spain. But the French, represented by the duke of Guise, failed to live up to their promises, and by April 1648 the Spanish were back in control. The Naples revolt exposed the weakness of Spanish rule and augured the beginning of the end of Spain's power in Italy. It was accompanied in the same year of 1647 by a serious revolt in Palermo that confirmed the alienation of the ruling classes in Sicily. When Vesuvius erupted in 1649, it was taken as a sign from heaven. ‘This eruption of Vesuvius’, announced a Sicilian friar, Camillo Tutini, ‘is a signal for the expulsion of the Spaniards from the kingdom and their total elimination.’70

  The problems of southern Italy had always been grave, and Spanish rule had not significantly improved matters. There was, however, similar disenchantment in Milan, where the Thirty Years’ War dragged the province yet again into war and aggravated discontent. The highest circles of the patriciate in Lombardy had successfully identified their careers with the Spanish presence, but they did not cease to complain of the cost of the war against the French. Their letters to Madrid in the 1640s affirm explicitly that the worst enemy of the people was the army that served in theory to protect them, whose departure for the front every year was treated as nothing less than a liberation.71 Quite apart from dissatisfaction in their own territories, the Spaniards had to reckon with the hostility of the major states of the Italian peninsula. Around 1650, according to the Spanish governor of Milan, one had to deal with the scheming of the republic of Venice, the efforts of the papacy in Rome to ensure ‘that Spain's monarchy does not expand in Italy or any other part of Europe’, the enmity of Savoy, and the unreliability of the states of Cremona, Tuscany and Mantua; of all the Italian princes only the duke of Parma could be trusted.72

  In November 1641 the cardinal infante died of smallpox at the early age of thirty-nine. During his short career he had done more than any commander since Spinola to maintain the power of Spain in northern Europe. Command of the army of Flanders devolved on to a new governor of the Netherlands, Francisco de Melo, marquis of Torde-laguna, a Portuguese soldier who had served Spain with distinction as viceroy of Sicily, ambassador to Germany, and colleague of the cardinal infante in the government at Brussels. In the spring of 1642 he led his men successfully against the French forces in the south of his territory, defeating them at the battle of Honnecourt, which he described to the king as ‘the most signal victory of our times’.

  The following spring, 1643, he took the entire army, some twenty-five thousand strong, across the border and laid siege to the French town of Rocroi, in the Ardennes on the road to Champagne. His chief commanders were the count d'Isembourg, the count of Fuentes and the duke of Alburquerque. On 18 May the French army on the Netherlands front, consisting of twenty-three thousand men commanded by the twenty-one-year-old duke d'Enghien (who was substituting at the last minute for Louis XIII, then gravely ill), arrived on the scene and at once attacked. The engagement proved indecisive, and was called off for the night. On receiving information that the enemy would be receiving reinforcements at ten o'clock the following morning, Enghien decided to give battle before dawn the next day, the 19th.

  ‘The armies were large,’ reported the French newsletter Le Mercure françOis, ‘the shock of their encounter was great, the stubbornness with which both sides resisted was scarcely credible, the outcome was miraculous.’73 In the ensuing combat the Flanders army was annihilated, and Melo's infantry were scattered. The last resistance came from the tercios, in which the Italian, Spanish and Belgian units were virtually destroyed; a remaining German tercio arrived too late to be of use. ‘Six thousand Spaniards were slain’, stated the Mercure françois, ‘5,737 were made prisoner. The booty taken by the French consisted of the baggage of the entire army, twenty cannon, 172 banners, fourteen standards and two pennants. But the French lost two thousand men killed.’ Enghien himself was lightly wounded, while on the opposing side the count of Fuentes was killed. For the first time in its history, Europe's most élite military machine had been smashed. The defeat shattered the legend of Spanish invulnerability and brought utter gloom to the government in Brussels. ‘The truth is’, a depressed Melo reported to Philip IV, ‘that we did not take the war seriously enough. But war is real, it makes and breaks empires.’74 Spain's c
hief minister commented some months later that ‘it is a matter which I never bring to mind without great melancholy’.75 In perspective, non-Spanish historians tended to see it as the end of Spain's imperial power. This is possibly an over-dramatic interpretation of an event that certainly influenced the campaigns of the next few months in the north, but – like the battle of the Downs – had no significant impact on the resources of the empire.

  Rocroi, certainly, gave an initiative to the victorious French forces that they did not lose. The next year Cardinal Mazarin, successor to Cardinal Richelieu, put an even more capable commander at the head of the troops on the Rhine. This was Marshal Turenne, at the time France's most distinguished soldier, and, by a strange irony for Spain, grandson of the hero of Dutch freedom, William of Orange. By September 1644, thanks to the co-operation of two armies led by Enghien and Turenne respectively, the whole left bank of the Rhine from Breisach to Coblenz, a route fundamental to Spain for the movement of troops from Italy, was in French hands. The following year the two generals, again working jointly, defeated the troops of the Emperor at Allerheim, near Nordlingen, on 3 August 1645. Sometimes referred to as the ‘second battle of Nördlingen’, it could be seen as a revenge for the first one; but it was a pyrrhic victory, for French losses were heavy. Over the same years France's Dutch allies had also been collaborating in the campaigns. Admiral Tromp's fleet was in effective control of the Channel, cutting off by sea the only other route available for sending troops to the army of Flanders from the Mediterranean. In September 1646 the key port of Dunkirk, which for over a decade had been the centre of the deadly naval attacks directed against the Dutch, surrendered to the French army under Enghien and the Dutch navy under Tromp.