One example of this is provided by my treatment of the revolt of the Comuneros, which I depict as an essentially archaic and backward-looking revolt. Here I was greatly influenced by the thesis put forward by Gregorio Marañón in his Antonio Pérez. In his search for an understanding of the background to the deep ideological divisions that tore Spain apart in the Civil War, Marañón depicted the Comuneros as representing the Spanish conservative tradition, and the partisans of Charles V as the upholders of the liberal cause. If I had had at my disposal Las comunidades de Castilla, an examination of the Comunero movement by José Antonio Maravall that was published in the same year as Imperial Spain, I would have been able to compare Marañón's interpretation with a diametrically opposed interpretation, which seeks to demonstrate the ‘modernity’ of the Comunero uprising. While I am not persuaded that the revolt of the Comuneros was as forward-looking at Maravall suggests, the opportunity to compare the respective approaches of Marañón and Maravall would certainly have allowed me to present a more balanced and subtle interpretation of this extremely complex movement.
Since the 1960s there has been a transformation in our knowledge and understanding of the history of Habsburg Spain. Although much still remains to be done, especially on the second half of the seventeenth century, a vast amount of archival research has brought many rays of light to bear where darkness once prevailed. Thanks in particular to the efforts of English-speaking historians we are much better informed, for instance, about the history of the Cortes of Castile in the Habsburg era than we were when I was writing, and although I think that the Cortes were less effective a brake on royal power than they are now sometimes represented, I would certainly have painted a more positive picture of Castilian constitutionalism in the post-Comunero era than the one I paint in this book.
Similarly, a vast amount of research has been done on the Inquisition, and on important aspects of the religious history of Counter-Reformation Spain. We also have a more comprehensive picture than we had forty years ago of Spanish cultural developments in this period, and if I had been writing the book today I would not have drawn such a sharp contrast between the ‘open Spain’ of the early sixteenth century and the ‘closed Spain’ of Philip II and his successors. The metropolis of a worldwide empire can never seal itself off fully from foreign influences, and cultural borrowings from Flanders and Italy in particular remained continuous through the two centuries of Habsburg rule.
The occupational hazard of all historians is to be overtaken by the passage of time. I am naturally delighted that, in spite of this, Imperial Spain is still considered worthy of being reprinted. If written today it would obviously be a very different, although not necessarily a better, book. I have sought, by means of an updated bibliography, to indicate the general trends of advance in historical research over the past four decades, so that readers can follow up for themselves those themes on which they want further enlightenment, and, if they wish, compare my treatment of them with those of subsequent writers. The aim of the book was always to identify important issues, and to suggest ways of looking at them. If the book continues, as I hope it will, to guide readers to those issues and give them some idea of the interest and excitement to be found in the history of Spain in its age of global dominance, this new reprint for a new millennium will have amply served its purpose.
ORIEL COLLEGE,
OXFORD
23 May 2001
Map I
Prologue
A DRY, barren, impoverished land: 10 per cent of its soil bare rock; 35 per cent poor and unproductive; 45 per cent moderately fertile; 10 per cent rich. A peninsula separated from the continent of Europe by the mountain barrier of the Pyrenees – isolated and remote. A country divided within itself, broken by a high central tableland that stretches from the Pyrenees to the southern coast. No natural centre, no easy routes. Fragmented, disparate, a complex of different races, languages, and civilizations – this was, and is, Spain.
The lack of natural advantages appears crippling. Yet, in the last years of the fifteenth century and the opening years of the sixteenth, it seemed suddenly, and even miraculously, to have been overcome. Spain, for so long a mere geographical expression, was somehow transformed into an historical fact. Contemporary observers were well aware of the change. ‘We have in our days,’ wrote Machiavelli, ‘Ferdinand, King of Aragon, the present King of Spain, who may, not improperly, be called a new prince, since he has been transformed from a small and weak king into the greatest monarch in Christendom.’ Ferdinand's diplomats were respected, his armies feared. And in the New World the conquistadores were carving out for themselves an empire that could not but profoundly alter the balance of power in the Old. For a few fabulous decades Spain was to be the greatest power on earth. During those decades it would be all but the master of Europe; it would colonize vast new overseas territories; it would devise a governmental system to administer the largest, and most widely dispersed, empire the world had yet seen; and it would produce a highly distinctive civilization, which was to make a unique contribution to the cultural tradition of Europe.
How all this can have happened, and in so short a space of time, has been a problem that has exercised generations of historians, for it poses in a vivid form one of the most complex and difficult of all historical questions: what makes a society suddenly dynamic, releases its energies, and galvanizes it into life? This in turn suggests a corollary, no less relevant to Spain: how does this same society lose its impetus and its creative dynamism, perhaps in as short a period of time as it took to acquire them? Has something vital really been lost, or was the original achievement itself no more than an engaño – an illusion – as seventeenth-century Spaniards began to believe?
There are paradoxes here which baffled contemporaries, as they have continued to baffle ever since. No history of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain – least of all one so brief as this – can hope to resolve them. Nor is this a very favourable moment for such an enterprise. Outside one or two relatively specialized fields, the study of Spanish history lags several decades behind that of such countries as France and England, and the detailed monographs which would place the history of Habsburg Spain on a really solid foundation remain unwritten. This means that any historian of the period is faced with the alternative either of writing a narrative account which would lean heavily towards traditional political and diplomatic history, or of producing a more interpretative synthesis, which would attempt to incorporate the results of recent researches on social and economic developments, but which is bound in large part to remain speculative and perhaps superficial. I have chosen the second of these courses, partly because competent narratives already exist, and partly because the state of the subject would seem to demand a general survey which is prepared to raise some of the problems that seem relevant in the light of modern historical interests. Consequently, I have devoted little space to Spanish foreign policy, preferring to reserve it for less well-known aspects of the history of the age. I have also said very little about intellectual and cultural developments, not because I consider them unimportant, but because they require, for satisfactory treatment, far more space than I can give them, and have on the whole received considerable attention elsewhere. All that this book attempts to do, therefore, is to write the history of Habsburg Spain in such a way as to focus attention on certain problems that seem to me to be interesting and relevant, while indicating how much remains to be done before we can confidently claim to have found the answers.
The Union of the Crowns
1. ORIGINS OF THE UNION
ON the morning of 19 October 1469 Ferdinand, King of Sicily and heir to the throne of Aragon, and Isabella, the heiress of Castile, were married at a private residence in Valladolid. The events leading up to the wedding were, to say the least, unusual. The eighteen-year-old Princess, threatened with arrest by her brother, Henry IV of Castile, had been rescued from her home at Madrigal by the Archbishop of Toledo and a body of horse, and conve
yed to a city where she would be safe among friends. Her bridegroom, a year younger than herself, had reached Valladolid only a few days before the ceremony after an even more eventful journey. With a handful of attendants disguised as merchants, he had travelled from Zaragoza by night through the hostile country, and had narrowly escaped death from a stone hurled by a sentinel from the battlements of Burgo de Osma. After reaching Valladolid he met his bride for the first time on 15 October, four days before the ceremony. The couple were so poor that they were compelled to borrow to meet the wedding expenses; and since they were marrying within the prohibited degrees, they required, and duly received, a papal bull of dispensation, later discovered to be a spurious document concocted by the King of Aragon, the Archbishop of Toledo, and Ferdinand himself.
There was some excuse for both the secrecy and the deceit. Many people were anxious to prevent the ceremony from taking place. Among them was Louis XI of France, who saw a grave threat to his own country in a union of the reigning houses of Castile and Aragon. But there were also enemies nearer home. Many of the powerful Castilian grandees were bitterly opposed to a matrimonial alliance which promised to strengthen the Crown's authority in Castile. Hoping to dispossess Isabella, they were now rallying to the cause of Henry IV's alleged daughter, Juana la Beltraneja, whose claims to
Map 2
the throne had recently been set aside in favour of those of his sister, Isabella. While Henry himself had been induced by the Isabelline faction in September 1468, as the price of peace, to recognize Isabella as his heiress in place of the daughter whose paternity was universally doubted, he was a vacillating and unreliable character, fully capable of going back on his word; and the pressures upon him were great. The Prince and Princess were therefore wise to seize the earliest possible opportunity of formalizing a union which would do much to strengthen Isabella's position in Castile.
Neither Ferdinand nor Isabella, however, was by nature precipitate, and their marriage was the outcome of arduously reached decisions, partly made for them, but which they ultimately made for themselves. Inevitably there was about the marriage a dynastic logic which reached back to a period long before they were born. Fifteenth-century Spain was divided among three Christian Crowns, Castile, Portugal, and Aragon. The great medieval line of the kings of Aragon had come to an abrupt end in 1410 with the death of Martin I; and in 1412 the problem of the Aragonese succession had been settled by the Compromise of Caspe, which placed on the Aragonese throne a junior branch of the Castilian house of Trastámara. From the time of the accession of Ferdinand I d'Antequera in 1412, therefore, the neighbouring Crowns of Castile and Aragon were ruled by two branches of the same, Castilian, dynasty. Might not a judicious marriage one day unite these two branches, and so bring together beneath a single monarch two of the three Christian blocs within the Iberian peninsula?
While a Castilian-Aragonese union had for some decades been an obvious possibility, it was far from being an inevitable development. There was no irrefutable economic or historical argument to bring the two Crowns together. On the contrary, the strong mutual antipathy of Aragonese and Castilians made any prospect of union unattractive to both, and the Castilian royal favourite, Don Álvaro de Luna, who was virtual master of the country from 1420 to 1453, could command the support of a Castilian nationalism which had been exacerbated by the intervention of the Infantes of Aragon in Castile's domestic affairs.
In spite of this antipathy there were, none the less, certain forces at work which might under favourable conditions prove conducive to a closer association of the two Crowns. The very presence of a Castilian dynasty on the Aragonese throne had itself multiplied contacts between them, especially since the Aragonese branch of the Trastámara owned large Castilian estates. There were also certain intellectual aspirations towards a closer unity. The word Hispania was in current use throughout the Middle Ages to describe the Iberian peninsula as a geographical unit. The native of medieval Aragon or Valencia thought of himself, from a geographical standpoint, as an inhabitant of Spain, and fifteenth-century sailors, although coming from different parts of the peninsula, would talk about ‘returning to Spain’.1 Even if loyalties were overwhelmingly reserved for the province of origin, growing contacts with the outer world did something to give natives of the peninsula a feeling of being Spaniards, as opposed to Englishmen or Frenchmen. Alongside this geographical concept of Spain there also existed in certain limited circles an historical concept deriving from the old Roman Hispania; a vision of the time when Spain was not many provinces but two, Hispania Citerior and Ulterior, united beneath the rule of Rome. This concept of the old Hispania was particularly dear to the little humanist group gathered round the imposing person of Cardinal Margarit, Chancellor of Ferdinand's father, John II of Aragon, in his later years.2 Some of those closest to the Aragonese Court thus cherished the idea of re-creating Hispanic unity – of bringing together Hispania Citerior and Ulterior beneath a common sceptre.
Although a marriage alliance was, in fact, sought more eagerly by the Aragonese than by the Castilian branch of the Trastámaras, the reason for this is ultimately to be found in the grave political difficulties of the Aragonese kings, rather than in the inclinations of a little group of Catalan humanists bent on the restoration of Hispanic unity. John II of Aragon (1458–79) was faced not only by revolution in Catalonia but also by the expansionist ambitions of Louis XI of France. With inadequate resources to meet the threat on his own, his best hope seemed to lie in the assistance of Castile, and this could best be secured by a matrimonial alliance. It was, therefore, primarily the international situation – the ending of the Hundred Years' War and
Table 1 THE UNION OF THE CROWNS OF CASTILE AND ARAGON
the consequent renewal of French pressure along the Pyrenees – which made a Castilian alliance both desirable and necessary to the King of Aragon. The securing of this alliance became the principal object of John II's diplomacy.
The crucial months, which were to determine the whole future of the Spanish peninsula, came between the autumn of 1468, when Henry IV recognized his half-sister Isabella as heiress, and the spring of 1469. The recognition of Isabella made her marriage a question of international concern. There were three leading candidates for her hand. She might marry Charles of Valois, the son of Charles VII of France, and so reinvigorate the old Franco-Castilian alliance. She might, as her brother intended, marry Alfonso V of Portugal, and so link the fortunes of Castile to those of her western neighbour. Finally, she might marry Ferdinand, son and heir of John II of Aragon, and thus formalize a Castilian-Aragonese alliance for which John II had been so vigorously manoeuvring. By January 1469 she had made her choice: she would marry Ferdinand.
Isabella's decision was of such transcendent importance that it is unfortunate that so little is known about the way in which it was finally reached. Strong pressure was certainly brought to bear on the Princess to choose the Aragonese match. There was a formidable Aragonese party at the Castilian court, headed by the Archbishop of Toledo; the King of Aragon's agents were very active, bribing Castilian nobles to support their master's cause; and the papal legate had been induced to use his good offices on Ferdinand's behalf. It also appears that prominent Jewish families in both Castile and Aragon were hoping to buttress the shaky position of Castilian Jewry by working for Isabella's marriage to a prince who himself, through his mother, had inherited Jewish blood. But Isabella, although highly strung by temperament, was a woman of great character and determination. She knew her own mind, and she made a choice which, both personally and politically, must have seemed the most desirable in the circumstances. Alfonso of Portugal was a widower, much older than herself, and quite without the many personal attractions generally ascribed to Ferdinand. Added to this was the fact that, since John II and Ferdinand were in no position to bargain, she could expect to dictate a settlement virtually on her own terms. The very form of the marriage contract, signed at Cervera on 5 March 1469, showed the overwhelming strength
of her position. Ferdinand was to live in Castile and fight for the Princess's cause, and it was made clear that he was to take second place in the government of the country. The terms were humiliating, but the prize before Ferdinand seemed so great and the necessity so urgent that refusal was out of the question.
The wisdom of Isabella's choice very soon became apparent. Ferdinand, wily, resolute and energetic, was to prove adept at forwarding the interests of his wife, and the couple could count on the great political experience and sagacity of Ferdinand's father, John II. Isabella needed all the help she could get if she was ever to succeed to her dubious inheritance. Her marriage had precipitated a struggle for succession to the Castilian throne which was to last for a full ten years, culminating in open civil war between 1475 and 1479. Isabella's brother, Henry IV, had been upset by the news of his sister's marriage, and Louis XI now induced him, in defiance of his agreement with Isabella, to acknowledge the rights of Juana la Beltraneja, who was to be given a French husband. In this delicate situation, all Ferdinand's skill was required, and the first five years of the marriage were spent in fostering Isabelline sentiment among the gentry and the towns, while at the same time attempting to secure a reconciliation with the King.
Imperial Spain 1469-1716 Page 2
