Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The war in northern Europe and Germany was for all practical purposes over. In reality, overtures for peace had been made long before, throughout the 1630s. In 1641 the French envoy, d'Avaux, proposed that talks be held in two contiguous cities of Westphalia, Münster and Osnabrück; the French would conduct their negotiations in the former, the Swedes in the latter. The congress formally began in July 1643, but the French delegates did not arrive until 1644 and the congress did not begin to function properly until 1645. Talks between Spain and the Dutch United Provinces were held in Münster, where the Spanish delegation arrived in 1645, under the leadership of the count of Peñaranda, Gaspar de Bracamonte. The true brains of the delegation, in reality, was the Franche-Comtois humanist Antoine Brun, who undertook most of the negotiations with other delegates and took charge of the arrangements for signing the peace. The Dutch could not have asked for a better negotiator than Peñaranda, who was of the opinion that concessions to the Dutch would not only gain their friendship but even convert them into powerful allies for the struggle against France. On 8 January 1647 all the Spanish and Dutch delegates, with the sole absence of the represen-ttative of the province of Utrecht, signed the peace agreement. The official signing of the treaty took place in the townhall of Münster on 30 January 1648.

  The treaty recognized the United Provinces as a sovereign state and accepted the conquests made by the Dutch in the Netherlands. The Dutch gave no guarantees of religious freedom for the Catholics in the Provinces, and were confirmed in possession of the territory they had taken from Portugal in Asia and America. The fate of the River Scheldt, on which the trade of Antwerp depended, was left out of the deliberations; and Dutch trade to Seville and America was implicitly accepted. On every single point in dispute, Spain gave way to the Dutch. In 1646 Antoine Brun was received in The Hague as Spain's first ambassador to the free United Provinces. One year after Westphalia the Spaniards in Manila, still unaware of the peace, attacked the Dutch post at Ternate. It was the last battle between the two world powers.

  The peace agreements at Münster and Osnabrück involved all the parties that had participated in the conflict in Central Europe, and slowly but surely helped to bring peace. Despite the treaties of Westphalia, which made a fundamental impact on the politics of Europe for nearly a century, the war between Spain and France still went on, though in a lower key. France was suddenly removed from the front line of conflict by serious domestic troubles at home, in the shape of the political troubles known as the Fronde, which from 1648 to 1653 engaged the attention of the military forces of the government in the areas of Paris and of Bordeaux. Despite enormous war debts, Spain was able to continue the war effort thanks to its two constant resources: loans from bankers – mainly Italians and Portuguese – and the manpower of the armies of Flanders and Milan. There was, however, inevitably an impact on the government in Madrid, which was faced with spiralling costs it could not control. A grim Philip IV informed the Cortes of Castile in 1655 that in the six years 1649–54 he had spent nearly sixty-seven million escudos on the wars,76 and that the enemy despite everything refused to come to terms.

  In reality the financial position was only one side of the picture, for on the military side there were many reasons for optimism. In October 1652 the Spanish army under Don Juan José of Austria recovered the city of Barcelona. In the same year the army of Milan finally secured the fortress of Casale, and in the Netherlands the army of Flanders, commanded for a while by the most famous general of his day, the prince of Condé (the famous victor of Rocroi, who succeeded later to the family title of Condé and had now been forced into temporary exile by Mazarin), recovered Gravelines, Mardijk and Dunkirk. The event that interrupted these successes and completely turned the balance of power against Spain was the intervention of England in its new role – it had just defeated the Dutch in a short war in 1652 – as a sea power.

  Inspired by a ‘western design’ to dominate the Caribbean and ‘to strive with the Spaniard for the mastery of all those seas’, the Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, at the end of 1654 dispatched a small fleet to the West Indies with the aim of seizing Hispaniola. The expedition was a failure, and succeeded only in occupying Jamaica. The action precipitated a break with Spain, which neither expected nor wished for a further conflict but after much hesitation was obliged in February 1656 to declare war. The main English squadron in Europe, commanded by Admiral Robert Blake, now approached the Mediterranean and threatened Cadiz. A small group of Blake's ships in September successfully seized the two principal vessels, worth two million pesos, of the incoming silver fleet. In April 1657 his main force surprised the remainder of the silver fleet sheltering in the harbour of Santa Cruz in Tenerife, sailed in with the tide and destroyed every vessel. The Spaniards managed to save only part of the treasure. There were no further silver fleets for two years, a calamity for imperial finances. Moreover, England in March 1657 signed a treaty of alliance with France. The result was a series of land campaigns in the Southern Netherlands that climaxed with the historic defeat of the army of Flanders at the battle of the Dunes on 14 June 1658. The victorious general was Turenne, whose army included six thousand Roundheads from Cromwell's New Model Army. It was the swan song of Spain's military power in Europe. The French conquered Gravelines, Oudenarde and Ypres. It was a series of disasters that brought to an end Spanish supremacy in the Southern Netherlands, and forced Philip IV to seek peace.

  A truce was agreed in March 1659 and peace talks began. Finally, on 7 November the Peace of the Pyrenees was signed on an island in the river Bidasoa, on the frontier between Spain and France. All Catalan territory north of the Pyrenees was absorbed permanently into France. The most important territorial changes occurred with the Belgian frontier, where France gained a broad belt of forts that extended from Gravelines, on the Channel coast, to Thionville, on the Moselle; at the same time France gave back some conquests in Belgium. A key clause of the treaty arranged for the marriage of the infanta Maria Teresa, daughter of Philip IV, to Louis XIV of France. The Peace of the Pyrenees marked the end of Spain as a great power in Europe.

  There was still unfinished business, principally the war to recover Portugal. But changes in the balance of power in Europe now made that objective impossible. The rebels had the active help of France by land and England by sea; they also received supplies from the Dutch. ‘Without strong naval forces the conquest of Portugal cannot be achieved’,77 the government recognized. But the sea was – after the battle of the Downs – under English control. Moreover, an alliance between Portugal and England had been made in 1661, by which the English agreed to contribute two thousand infantry and a thousand cavalry until Portugal achieved its freedom. The Portuguese defeated Spain's land forces at the battle of Villaviçosa (17 June 1665), and in 1668 the government finally and formally recognized their independence.

  The remaining decades of the century confirmed the growing power of France, which continued to eat away at the territory of states allied to Spain. It was a long history of wars, battles, annexations, and peace treaties that confirmed the piecemeal dismemberment of the once proud Spanish empire. And yet, despite everything, the empire stubbornly survived. It did so in great measure because it could, once again, count on the support of those who had done most to destroy it.

  The least expected consequence of French aggression was an alliance between Spain and the United Provinces.78 A rapprochement between the two antagonists had been developing for a long time. The Dutch were by no means friends of the Spaniards; on the other hand, they never ceased to be aware that ties of blood, language and economy bound them close to the Southern Netherlands. In the year of the great Armada, 1588, traders from Amsterdam were reported to be selling naval supplies to Brussels; at the end of the century Dutch ships were acquired for Spain's navy; during the years of war Dutch armaments were sold to the army of Flanders.79 No sooner had the Treaty of Münster been agreed in 1648 between the Dutch and Spain than both sides found they had seve
ral interests in common besides the peace.

  Throughout the eighty years of struggle, and despite the obvious points of conflict, a great many Spaniards had come to know and respect the Dutch people.80 Officials and ministers in Brussels encouraged the rapprochement. A section of the Dutch leadership looked for trade advantages, while the Spaniards counted on help against the Portuguese, who were in rebellion against the Spanish crown and also intent on expelling the Dutch from Brazil. Spain valued Dutch naval expertise: immediately after the signing of peace in 1648, construction began at Amsterdam of twelve frigates for the Spanish navy.81 The contact between both sides became closer when in the 1650s they found themselves at war against the England of Oliver Cromwell. In 1653 Peñaranda summarized what in his view were the relative merits of the two Protestant powers: ‘if I were to be asked which is the stronger and more solid power I would reply England under its Parliament; but if I were asked which is the better as friend, and offers both benefits and confidence, I would always reply Holland’. From 1656, when Don Juan José of Austria as governor of the Southern Netherlands opened negotiations with The Hague, the two former enemies drifted into a working alliance. A Dutch representative was in Madrid from 1656.82 No sooner had France and Spain made peace in the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 than the States General of the United Provinces sent a special diplomatic delegation to talk business with Madrid. One week before Christmas 1660, the Dutch ambassadors paid their respects to the Catholic majesty of Philip IV at the palace of Buen Retiro, addressing him in French while the king replied in Castilian. In that act, nearly one hundred years of conflict and mistrust between the two nations was undone.

  The talks, however, were less about accords than about commerce. In effect, the United Provinces needed the support of the Spanish empire in order to maintain their own economy and protect themselves against the encroaching interests of the English and the French. And the Spanish reciprocated. Antoine Brun informed the Dutch Estates General in 1651 that ‘nowhere in the world have your merchants and commerce received better welcome than in the territories of my master’.83 From the 1650s Dutch commerce with the peninsula increased, and developed into a profitable trade to the Mediterranean.84 They brought grain, fish, timber and naval stores from the north; in return they collected from the peninsula silver and more silver, with some wool, olive oil, wine and occasionally salt. They gained an advantage from Spain's wars against England in 1655–60 and against France in subsequent years, stepping in to trade in goods that were forbidden to nationals of these two countries. Dutch vessels carried most Spanish wool exports to northern Europe or to Italy. In subsequent decades the Dutch made available the capital required for financing the slave trade to America.85 The Spanish empire, in its turn, benefited from the military protection of what was still the world's biggest maritime power. Dutch vessels escorted Spanish trading ships around the coasts to protect them against the enemy. The appearance in 1657 of sixteen Dutch warships at anchor in the bay of Alicante, Spain's largest Mediterranean port, was a sight that soon became familiar in the major ports of southern Spain. Spanish merchants were happy to trade with their former enemies. ‘All the English merchants upon the coast’, reported an English official visiting Spain in the 1660s, ‘complain of the Spanish partiality towards the Dutch.’86

  In 1670 Spain confirmed its intention of reaching an understanding with the Dutch, who were now the chief guarantors of the integrity of the Southern Netherlands. In Madrid Peñaranda stuck firmly by the alliance, driving the English ambassador to observe that ‘here they all desire extremely to assist the Dutch, and would do it without any hesitation even though the French were yet more powerful than they are’.87 Unfortunately for the Dutch, their friendship with Spain was soon called upon. In 1672 two enormous French armies (some eighty thousand men under the command of Louis XIV and Turenne, and another thirty thousand under Condé) advanced from Charleroi and Sedan respectively and descended on the Provinces following the line of the Meuse. The French invasion, which had carefully avoided touching Belgian territory, helped to bring the Dutch and Spanish closer together, a policy which had been taken yet further in those years by Spain's ambassador in The Hague from 1671 to 1679, the brilliant diplomat and thinker Manuel de Lira. The desperate situation of the Dutch and the evident threat to the Spanish forced both to come at last to a formal agreement, which took the form of the Treaty of The Hague (30 August 1673).88 True to its accord, Spain instructed its governor in Belgium, the count of Monterrey, to declare war on France that same month.

  Though the Spanish government recognized that its presence in the Southern Netherlands was essential if it were to maintain its status as a European power, it had few resources in men or money with which to uphold that status. In 1664, when the number of effective Spanish troops garrisoned there barely exceeded six thousand, the new Spanish commander on his arrival was horrified to find that the men were (in his opinion) ‘unclothed, unshod, dirty and begging’.89 Thanks to the need for collaboration against a common enemy, the United Provinces managed to secure from Spain a concession that it considered absolutely necessary to its own survival. A limited number of Dutch troops were allowed to garrison select fortresses on the frontier between the Southern Netherlands and France. The defence of the most conflictive territory in the great Catholic monarchy was therefore, after the 1670s, left in the hands of heretics and ex-rebels. At the same time, Spain's principal naval force in the Mediterranean was, as we shall see, entrusted to the supreme command of a Dutch admiral. It was perhaps the most astonishing development in the entire saga of the empire, which was now underpinned by the resources of nations that in former times had been its most bitter enemies. Dutch Protestant generals now commanded Spanish troops, and Dutch Protestant admirals directed the Spanish navy. In the Netherlands Spain put all its troops under the command of the prince of Orange, who declared that ‘the foremost of my concerns is to find out how to prevent the Spanish Netherlands falling into the power of France’. In November 1673 the prince at the head of an army of Dutch and Spanish troops captured the Rhine fortress of Bonn, forcing the French to withdraw from Belgian territory. His forces then went on to distinguish themselves against the French at the battle of Seneff in August 1674.

  Events in the Mediterranean were, however, uniformly disastrous for the Spaniards. In 1674 the city of Messina rose in revolt against Spanish rule.90 Spain sent a fleet of thirty vessels to deal with the rebels, who were able to count on the support of France. A French fleet of twenty ships was sent to encounter the Spaniards, who on 11 February 1675 were defeated in an engagement off Lipari. The Dutch immediately despatched a naval force of eighteen warships under Admiral Martijn de Ruyter, their most prominent commander. They were not the best ships available, and De Ruyter was by no means happy with the commission. The French admiral Duquesne sailed from Toulon with twenty ships of the line and encountered the Dutch in January 1676 off Strom-boli, forcing them to withdraw. Then on 22 April 1676 Duquesne engaged the joint Dutch and Spanish forces off Agosta in Sicily. In the ensuing action De Ruyter was mortally wounded and died four days later. The defeated Dutch-Spanish fleet withdrew for shelter to Palermo, but on 2 June the French sailed in and inflicted heavy losses on them. Twelve warships were destroyed, and both the Dutch commander Vice-Admiral De Haan and the Spanish commander Diego de Ibarra were killed in the action. The Dutch bitterly criticized the inadequacy of the Spanish navy, which they accused of having ‘few ships, and those poorly manned’.91 The decisive naval defeats converted the western Mediterranean into a French lake.

  Alliance with the Dutch was of undeniable benefit to Spain but could not stop the might of the French military machine, now the biggest in Europe. At the peace of Nijmegen (September 1678) which ended the war, Spain recovered some of its fortresses in the Netherlands but ceded to France Franche-Comté, Artois and several major cities including Cambrai. The loss of Franche-Comté, all that remained to the empire of the territory of medieval Burgundy, was a profo
und blow. The next two decades were ones of unremitting disaster. A short war in 1683–4 ended with the invasion of Catalonia and the cession to France at the Peace of Ratisbon (1684) of the duchy of Luxembourg. The subsequent major conflict, the Nine Years’ War of 1689–97, was brought to an end by the Treaty of Rijswijk, in which Haiti (the other half of the island of Hispaniola) was ceded to France. In Europe, fortunately for Spain, the terms of the peace allowed Dutch troops to occupy and protect vital Belgian fortresses, such as Namur, against the danger of French invasion. The Catholic empire, wilting under the attacks of Europe's leading military power, took shelter under Protestant protection.

  At the end of Philip III's reign, a naval officer urged the king to ‘adapt to the practices of the English and the Dutch because though they are men of less valour than the Spanish they have been victorious over Your Majesty's armadas’.92 The defeat of the Armada in 1588 encouraged the government to solve problems that were by no means the fault of Spain. Originally a sea power based on the galleys of the Mediterranean, Spain had had to adjust to the open oceans and build ships that were useful both for trade and for defence. It was an uphill task.93 On one hand, naval advisers were aware that the Dutch and English had ship designs that were more effective in those seas and should be imitated; on the other, they were convinced that nothing could beat a powerful, well-armed galleon of the traditional type. For the next century or so, therefore, the Spaniards continued a dual policy of imitating (or buying from) their enemies, and pressing ahead with their own shipbuilding. In practice, more and more they were compelled to buy ships from their enemies.