Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The truth was that Spain was a poor country that made the leap into empire because it was aided at every turn by the capital and expertise and manpower of other associated peoples. It is a story that has never been fully told, and some day the historians will get round to doing it. Who were the Portuguese, from a nation with one of the smallest populations in Europe but with the greatest familiarity with the ocean, who backed the Castilians in the Canaries, in the Caribbean, in the Maluku archipelago, and who piloted their ships across the Pacific?4 Who were the Genoese whose fleets and finances anchored the Spanish presence in the Mediterranean? Who were the Africans who created the economy of the Caribbean, and defended Havana, Portobelo and Callao against the depredations of foreigners? Who were the Chinese who ran the economy of Manila, built its ships and directed its trade? The traditional image of a world empire that one day was securely in the control of Spaniards and the next had slipped out of its control, is little more than fantasy born out of intellectual lethargy. Spain never controlled the waters of the Caribbean, and even less the Pacific. In a military situation in which the decisive factor was always foreign help (the Belgian troops at St Quentin, the Italian vessels at Lepanto, the French army at Almansa) the dreams of imperial power based purely on Castilian resources were self-delusion.

  A long historical tradition, initiated by official Castilian scholars such as Nebrija, who earned their salaries from the Castilian crown, never ceased to extol the martial glory of Castile as the creator of empire. Writing in a period when doubts about the empire were most pressing, a friar in 1629 took comfort in a vision that completely re-wrote the past. For Fray Benito de Peñalosa, the power of Charles V had been constructed only by the Spaniards, who were the ‘strength and support of his armies’; the emperor's expenses, likewise, had been paid by the ‘riches of Spain’. There were no soldiers to match those of Spain: ‘we witness every day how with only a few Spaniards among the tercios of Germans, Italians and other nations, all achieve wonders, but if the valorous Spaniards were absent they would achieve nothing'. Above all, the Spaniards were invincible in Asia: ‘just four Spaniards fighting with or leading an army of Asiatics, can overcome and crush an infinite multitude of others’.5

  This image fails to accord with the reality that Castilians were more than happy to let others build the empire for them. We have seen that in the 1540s when no Castilians could be found willing to go out and colonize the Río de La Plata, the authorities were anxious to recruit foreigners as well as Moriscos. When colonists could not be found for the young settlement at New Orleans, they were sent for from the Canary Islands. When Spaniards could not be found to defend Spain itself, foreigners were brought in. ‘For the coming campaign’, wrote a Castilian commentator in 1645, prior to a campaign inside Aragon, ‘we will assemble a great army of the nations, because our own men value their home life more than duty and glory.’ In the same year the king himself could not refrain from commenting on the unwillingness of Aragonese to defend their own territory: ‘I am amazed at the fact that these people do not seem to feel their homes are any more at risk than if the enemy were in the Philippines.’6

  As we have seen (Chapter 9), Spaniards were in fact during those years making a bigger effort than ever before to defend the monarchy. But non-Castilian help to the peninsula was by 1640 impressively extensive. Castilians were sometimes only a minority even in the army within Spain.7 Philip IV's army of 24,000 men in Aragon in August 1643 included 4,000 Aragonese, 2,000 Valencians, 2,500 veterans from the tercios who had fought at Rocroi, 4,000 Neapolitans, 1,500 Belgians, 1,000 Franche-Comtois and 2,000 Andalusians. In the same way, therefore, that ‘a great army of the nations’ had been the effective instrument in Italy, Germany, Portugal and the Netherlands, so now in Lleida in 1645 soldiers came from the four points of the compass to defend the Spaniards in the peninsula against French invasion forces. Neapolitans, Germans, Irish and Belgians headed for Catalonia to defend the empire in its homeland. In the same decade the best warships from the Dunkirk fleet were ordered to come to the peninsula to defend Spain. In 1641 the Belgians sailed out into the Atlantic from their base at Cadiz and brought the silver-laden fleet from America safely home. In 1643 they performed a similar duty, escorting the America-bound ships safely out as far as the Canaries. They were active on the Catalan coast against the French in Rosas and Perpignan, and in 1647 took part in the fleet that sailed under Don Juan José of Austria to repress the rebellion in Naples.8

  Empires were transnational organizations that aimed to mobilize the resources available not only within their areas, but outside them as well.9 Whatever their origins, they owed their existence and their unity to the broad network of connections that they managed to establish. Empires managed to survive when they adequately organized and maintained this international web of connections. In an extensive power structure such as the Spanish, the transaction costs involved could be formidable and unprecedented. To move an army from one zone to another could involve prolonged diplomacy, expensive recruitment, organization of substantial transport and supplies, and a search for satisfactory financial backing. In practice, the lack of central control in an early modern empire meant that a high proportion of costs was at an initial stage borne by small entrepreneurs, notably the adelantados who in the Canary Islands, the Caribbean and mainland America accepted all the risk in return for guaranteed profits in the shape of lands and titles.

  When the government took over the risk, however, it had to oversee a much broader business than that which individual adelantados had handled. Those who invested in the enterprises of the government, namely the bankers who themselves had to insure against risk by reaching agreements with other European colleagues, were also unwilling to throw their money away on badly managed adventures. The banking families – the Fugger, the Welser, the Spinola – dedicated themselves to ensuring that their business investment was run efficiently. When possible, as with the Welsers in Venezuela, they participated directly in the enterprise. It became necessary to create with government sponsorship an interconnected conglomerate, that is a business called ‘empire’, which could increase the flow of resources, rationalize costs, and regulate the disputed rights to property.

  For empires were very much about property. All the concepts to be found in the traditional view of empire involve property: conquest, colonization, settlement. These concepts involved claims by some people over the property of others. It had not been a problem in the local communities of traditional Europe,10 or in the Philippines or in Inca Peru; in all these places, people customarily continued to share property rather than seize that of others. From the moment it confronted the notion of ‘conquest’, however, the Spanish empire had to think seriously about the rights of property. Many Spaniards, relying on Roman precedents, tended to take the view that the empire was one of dominion, in which property of the conquered passed into the hands of the conquerors. Others, like the political theorist Vitoria or like Philip II, tended to think rather that the empire was a commonwealth in which the subjected peoples retained their rights and property provided they did not forfeit them by rebellion.

  The concern of the Dominican professors at Salamanca university about property rights, a concern shared by many Renaissance intellectuals including Charles V, made them develop a number of ideas that have since been accepted as a pioneering contribution to the theory of international law.11 Their highly important work, transmitted in part through the well-known labours of Las Casas has too often been configured in a way that stands on its head the solemn reality of what took place in the period of empire.12 A number of professors, missionaries and administrators were indeed concerned to make Spanish imperialism function according to ethical and European rules. But the ‘theory of empire’, even though it served to guide legislators (such as Philip II in his Ordinance of 1573), had small influence on the real world. The different views over property had little effect on practical politics, for they did not touch or alter the basic conviction that th
e empire existed in order to make a profit. The inherent property rights of a black man, for example, were recognized and often respected, but did not modify the institution of black slavery. When slavery was essential to make the business prosper, it was used. Throughout Spanish America, slavery of the native Indian through the institution known as the encomienda continued to be practised long after it had been theoretically abolished. In the same way the notion that the supra-national empire should be rationally organized in economic terms, was constantly undermined by the essentially predatory policies of the central government in Madrid.

  In the pre-industrial world, property took the form above all of land. Wherever the Spanish empire established itself, it searched inevitably for wealth – that is, gold or silver – but even more surely it searched for land, land on which to live, and from which to provide the necessities of life and the basis for commerce. Cortés is famous for having declared in Cuba that ‘I came here to get rich, not to till the soil like a peasant.’ But five years after making the statement he was already the biggest landowner in the Western hemisphere, with thousands of Indians available to till the soil for him. Transformation of the soil was far and away the most direct impact of the coming of empire. By the peak of empire in the early eighteenth century the richest cultivable lands of America were in the hands of strangers. This may have been of small concern at a time of falling population, but when the population expanded during that century the Indians had to reconcile themselves to being landless. In the twenty-first century the plight of the landless native continues to be the primary social problem in the empire that the Spaniards once ruled.

  Above all, access to bullion helped to create the empire and allowed it to survive. Sir Walter Ralegh, one of the great humanists of his day, whose life was cut short because the Spanish ambassador asked for his head, wrote an account of his expedition to the Orinoco in 1595 with the title of The Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana. In it he saw clearly that the Spanish empire's ‘abilities rise not from the trades of sackes and civil Orenges. It is his Indian Golde that indaungereth and disturbeth all the nations of Europe.’ The gold and silver of the colonies was beyond all doubt the sheet anchor of Spain's power, even though Spaniards quickly recognized that its benefits were two-edged.

  It is common to accuse Spain of frittering away its advantages. A distinguished historian has written that ‘for two centuries Spain squandered its wealth and manpower’.13 If the present book has indicated anything, it is that Spain had very little of either, and would have been hard put to squander what little it had. Castilians were very certain that if they really had wealth they would spend it wisely. But from the beginning of the imperial experience they saw themselves being plunged into a scenario where the profits were in fact being managed by others. The wealth and the manpower belonged in great measure to non-Spaniards, who invested it in the ongoing business of empire and reaped the appropriate rewards. Spaniards, particularly Castilians, Basques and Andalusians, made their own distinctive contribution, and enjoyed the honour of being managers of the enterprise. But the enterprise itself belonged to all.

  One of the fundamental problems of Spanish power, an element of the problem of contact between Castilians and the outside world, can to some degree be subsumed in the problem of communication. In an attitude that had been common among medieval conquerors, such as the English in Ireland,14 Castilians assumed that they were superior and insisted that the imposition of order had to be done through their language, which was the only means of communication they accepted. They left the learning of the autochthonous languages to a select few, such as missionaries. As Talavera had hinted to Queen Isabella, language would be a means of domination. The Castilian speech carried to the empire was a language in continuous evolution which contained within itself elements of the speech of all the peninsular provinces, including Portuguese. Eventually, the strains that most dominated in the New World were those of Toledo and Madrid, which were the centres of administration, and that of Seville, the centre of emigration to the colonies.

  The predicament for Spaniards was how to communicate easily with the polyglot nations they wished to dominate. The Castilian élite during the great age of empire found it difficult to cope with the problem of languages. This profoundly affected its relationship with all the peoples it encountered. In the century or more that Castilian policy dictated the political and military life of the Netherlands, it is rare indeed to find any Castilian noble with knowledge of the Dutch language. By contrast, very many cultured members of the Netherlands élite had a perfect grasp of Castilian. No Spanish ambassador to the England of Elizabeth I could speak English; conversely the queen, riding out one day with the ambassador, was able to speak to him in Castilian, ‘showing me [reported the ambassador] great pleasure both in the horse and in the language’.15 Several kings of France (notably Henry IV) spoke Spanish perfectly; no king of Spain spoke French.

  As the empire extended its ambit and power, its ability to make contact directly with its peoples decreased. The language barrier came to affect residents of the peninsula, where knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic rapidly disappeared in the wake of the expulsion of the relevant minorities in 1492 and 1609. When officials of the Spanish Inquisition occasionally discovered suspicious books written in these tongues, they were unable to read them. This had serious consequences for government policy, diplomacy and culture. Philip II put together for the Escorial the largest collection of Arabic manuscripts of that time, yet nobody could read them and he had to call on the services of a Morisco. The prohibition of books in Arabic had formed part of the repression of Morisco culture, and when the Moriscos disappeared so too did the residue of the Arabic tongue. The pretensions to disseminate the Catholic faith among the Muslims of North Africa vanished before the reality that there was no way to communicate with them. In 1535 the governor of Oran wrote to Charles V that ‘in the whole town of Oran there is not a single priest who is able to expound in their language a single word of our faith’.16 Other languages also suffered at the hands of official policy. From the 1560s the Inquisition in Catalonia ceased to accept judicial evidence given in Catalan or French. The scribes used by the inquisitors were ignorant of Latin, so that all other languages had to be translated into Castilian, with the corresponding danger (as the Catalan authorities pointed out) of distortion of meaning.17 An imperial power in this way found itself unable to communicate with or understand the peoples of the empire, save through the mediation of interpreters. This created an enormous and insuperable obstacle. When at a key moment in Netherlands affairs in 1577 a document written in French arrived in Madrid, none of the ministers could read it and it had to be set aside until someone could be found to translate it.18 Rulers and ruled moved effectively in separate universes that failed to understand each other; the rulers cut themselves off from the people they governed.

  Castilians dismissed the problem as a false one, ostentating instead their great pride that their tongue had now attained universal status and that everyone spoke it. It had become, as we have seen (Chapter 6), ‘the language of empire’, used everywhere in the administration. It was a valid point of view but also an erroneous one, for non-Castilians used the language only when Castilians were unable to use theirs. Because Castilian diplomats, for example, were normally unfamiliar with foreign languages, others had to speak theirs. In Charles V's privy council in 1527 the count of Nassau, Gattinara and the emperor himself, spoke in Castilian for the benefit of the Castilian members, otherwise they would have spoken French, their own language. In the emperor's day the humanist élite often spoke several tongues: Charles himself spoke German acceptably even though, as he confessed once (in German) to the Polish ambassador, ‘I do not speak it very well.’19

  When the Spanish empire came into being, however, it was more difficult to find qualified diplomats with a knowledge of tongues. In the early sixteenth century the common diplomatic language of Europe was Latin, but already by mid-century the lang
uage was little known in Spain. In 1574, when the government was searching for a high-ranking noble with knowledge of German to serve as ambassador in Vienna, it could find none. Nor could it find anyone who could speak Latin, the necessary alternative to German.20 By contrast, Austrian ambassadors to Madrid were uniformly fluent in Castilian. For generations, Spain conducted diplomatic relations with its principal protagonist in the Mediterranean, the Ottoman empire, through third parties and not through its own officials, because of the language barrier. From the time of Ferdinand the Catholic the leaders of the Jewish community in Oran served as chief interpreters to the Crown for negotiations with Arab states, and were used in this capacity by both Philip II and Olivares.21 The solution, in short, was to employ in the diplomatic service persons who came from areas where it was normal to speak more than one language. As a consequence, citizens of the Netherlands and Franche-Comté figured prominently as diplomatic spokesmen for Spain in foreign courts such as Warsaw, The Hague and London. In the seventeenth century the Spanish ambassador in Vienna, Castañeda, communicated with his German allies through the good services of a Belgian noble, Jean-Henri de Samrée.22 The problem continued in force throughout the age of empire. The Spanish negotiators at the Peace of Westphalia, for example, could not speak the languages of their opposing numbers, and had to employ Franche-Comtois agents. Occasionally, of course, there were diplomats who proved to be competent in Italian and French; in the seventeenth century some even became devotees of French language and culture.23 It is particularly notable that in the early eighteenth century foreigners played a predominant role in the diplomatic service. Over half of Philip V's ambassadors were foreign: among them were four Englishmen, two Dutchmen, one Belgian, and fifteen Italians.24