Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  The debate proved inconclusive and failed to give Las Casas the resounding victory for which he had hoped, but, in spite of this, the trend of governmental legislation continued to move, as it had for some time been moving, in the direction he desired. In 1530 a royal decree prohibited all future enslavement of Indians under any pretext, and although it was revoked under pressure four years later, it was renewed in the famous Leyes Nuevas of 1542, which also stipulated that the slave-owner must prove his claim to any slaves in his possession. The abolition of Indian slavery was not achieved in a day, and it was tragically to be accompanied by an increasing importation of negro slaves, whose fate disturbed the Spanish conscience much less than that of the Indians; but it seems to have become effective in most areas by the end of the 1560s. Meanwhile, the encomienda system was badly hit by the royal decree of 1549, which forbade encomenderos to substitute forced labour in the mines for the payment of tribute. In some regions, like Paraguay and Chile, the old system continued in spite of the decree, but in most parts of Mexico and Peru the resistance of the colonists was overborne, and forced labour in its traditional undisguised form disappeared. Since native labour was indispensable, new methods of persuading the Indians to work more had now to be found, and this led to a system of State labour, by which the Indians received wages for work exercised under official supervision. This new system, which admittedly bore obvious similarities to the old, did much to undermine the encomiendas. Once Indians began to work for the State outside their encomienda, the encomendero lost control of his Indian labour force, and the role of the encomienda in the American economy began to decline.

  The downfall of slavery and of some of the worst features of the encomienda system was a triumph for liberal and humanitarian sentiments and reflected a remarkable stirring of the public conscience inside Spain. It was a tribute also to the freedom and vigour of intellectual debate in the Spain of Charles V – a debate that raged in the universities, and in Court and government circles, and was publicized by controversial pamphlets and erudite tomes. But while the conscience of the Emperor and of influential officials was stirred by the incessant efforts of Las Casas, it is highly improbable that so much would have been achieved if the Spanish Crown had not already been predisposed in favour of Las Casas's ideals for less altruistic motives of its own.

  For a Crown anxious to assert and preserve its own control over its newly acquired territories, the growth of slavery and of the encomienda system constituted a serious threat. From the outset Ferdinand and Isabella had shown themselves determined to prevent the growth in the New World of those feudal tendencies which had for so long sapped the power of the Crown in Castile. They reserved for the Crown all land not occupied by natives, in order to avoid a repetition of the first period of the Reconquista, when abandoned lands were occupied on private initiative without a legal title. When distributing land they took care to limit the amount given to any one individual, so as to prevent the accumulation in the New World of vast estates on the Andalusian model. Similarly, they refused to grant any señoríos with rights of jurisdiction, and they were very sparing in the distribution of titles. Some of the conquistadores, like Cortés, received grants of hidalguía and nobility, but the Crown had clearly set itself against anything likely to promote the growth of a powerful territorial aristocracy in America comparable to that of Castile.

  The growth of the encomienda system, however, was perfectly capable of frustrating the Crown's intentions. There were natural affinities between the encomienda and the fief, and a real danger that the encomenderos would grow into a powerful hereditary caste. During the first years of the conquest the Court was flooded with petitions for the establishment of señoríos indianos, and for the perpetuation of the encomiendas in the families of the original encomenderos. With considerable skill the Government managed to sidestep these demands, and to defer decisions that the colonists were anxiously awaiting. As a result, encomiendas never formally became hereditary, and their value was all the time being reduced by the imposition of charges upon them whenever a vacancy occurred. Moreover, the number of encomenderos decreased as many encomiendas reverted to the Crown, and the encomenderos as a class gradually lost importance as the century advanced.

  If, then, the abolition of slavery and the weakening of the encomienda represented a triumph for Las Casas and his colleagues, they also bore witness to the remarkable success of the Spanish Crown in imposing its authority on remote territories under conditions that were often extremely unfavourable. A great hereditary feudal aristocracy did not develop in the New World. Its inhabitants were not allowed to develop Cortes or representative institutions which might one day challenge the royal power. Instead, the officials of the Spanish Crown slowly asserted their authority over every aspect of American life, forcing encomenderos and cabildos to yield before them. The achievement was all the more remarkable when it is viewed against the sombre backcloth of fifteenth-century Castile. In the middle decades of the fifteenth century the kings of Castile could not even rule their own country; a hundred years later they were the effective rulers of a vast empire thousands of miles away. The change is only explicable in terms of the greatest royal achievement of the intervening years: the building of a State by Ferdinand and Isabella.

  The Ordering of Spain

  1. THE ‘NEW MONARCHY’

  THE late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries are commonly described as the age of ‘the new monarchies’: an age in which such forceful monarchs as Henry VII of England and Louis XI of France consolidated the power of the Crown and devoted their efforts to the creation of a unified and centralized State under royal control. If, as is generally assumed, Ferdinand and Isabella conformed to the contemporary pattern, then it would be natural to expect the imposition of unity and the centralization of government to be the theme of their life work. Yet in practice the Spain created by Ferdinand and Isabella diverged in so many respects from the theoretical model of the ‘new monarchy’, as to make it appear either that it must be entirely excluded from the European model, or alternatively that the model itself is at fault.

  The work of the Catholic Kings (a title conferred on Ferdinand and Isabella by Pope Alexander VI in 1494) deserves to be judged in the context of their own ideals and intentions, rather than in terms of the theoretical characteristics of the Renaissance State. There was little or nothing new about these ideals. Ferdinand and Isabella believed in royal justice, in good kingship, which would protect the weak and humble the proud. If they had a high sense of their own rights, they also had a high sense of their own obligations, and these included the obligation to respect the rights of others. Their divinely appointed task was to restore order and good governance, reestablishing by the exercise of their monarchical power a society in which each could freely enjoy the rights that belonged to him by virtue of his station.

  The whole outlook of Ferdinand and Isabella was informed by this concept of a natural coincidence between the Crown's exercise of a God-given authority and the subject's enjoyment of his traditional rights. These rights, and the laws which guaranteed them, naturally varied considerably in Castile and Aragon, but the fact that the two Crowns were now united did not in any way imply that their legal and constitutional systems should be brought into line. Isabella, for instance, showed herself consistently unwilling to allow the smallest deviation from the succession laws of Castile. By the marriage contract of 1469, Ferdinand's personal authority in Castile was sharply restricted, and Isabella was declared, on her accession in 1474, to be the reina propietaria – the Queen Proprietress – of Castile, in spite of her husband's efforts to claim the throne for himself on the grounds that a female succession was invalid. In 1475 it was determined that royal documents should be headed ‘Don Fernando and Doña Isabel, by the grace of God sovereigns of Castile, León, Aragon, Sicily…’, but this was not intended to imply any fusion of the various territories, any more than the decision to place the arms of Castile before those of Aragon was intende
d to imply the subordination of Aragon to Castile. Each state remained in its own compartment, governed by its traditional laws; and this fact was emphasized by Isabella's will of 1504. By the terms of the will, Ferdinand, after thirty years as King of Castile, was to be stripped of his title on his wife's death, and the Crown of Castile was to pass to their daughter, Juana, who was declared to be Isabella's successor as señora natural propietaria.

  The future development of the Spanish Monarchy was to be profoundly influenced by the essentially patrimonial concept of the State to which both Ferdinand and Isabella clung. The strength of this patrimonial concept is vividly illustrated by their handling of two outstanding problems: jurisdiction over America, and the political reorganization of the Principality of Catalonia. Both of these questions might have been regarded as matters of general Spanish concern, and handled from this standpoint. But in practice they were treated respectively as Castilian and Aragonese questions, just as they would have been treated if the Union of the Crowns had not occurred.

  Although the subjects of the Crown of Aragon played some part in the discovery and colonization of the New World, the Indies were formally annexed not to Spain but to the Crown of Castile. The exact circumstances in which this occurred are by no means clear, but it seems that Alexander VI in his bull of 1493 conceded the Indies personally to Ferdinand and Isabella for their lifetime, with the intention that America should become a Castilian possession after their death. Contemporary chroniclers report that it was Isabella's wish that only Castilians should be allowed to go to America, and her will affirmed that as the Canaries and America had been discovered ‘at the cost of these my kingdoms and by natives of them, it is right that trade and commerce with them should belong to these my kingdoms of Castile and León’. While there were apparently no legal restrictions on the passage of natives of the Crown of Aragon to the Indies, it was made plain that

  A Castilla y a León

  Mundo nuevo dió Colón

  and that the presence of Aragonese and Catalans was not welcome (although momentarily after Isabella's death, licences for Aragonese emigrants were more freely given than-hitherto). Castile was determined not to let the fabulous riches of the New World slip through its hands, and the granting in 1503 of a monopoly of American trade to the port of Seville ensured that, even if the Aragonese and Catalans enjoyed a nominal right to take part in the colonization of America, the exploitation of American wealth would in practice remain the exclusive prerogative of Castile.

  It may well be that conditions in the Crown of Aragon in the late fifteenth century were such as to stifle interest in the New World, and that Castile alone was ready to seize the great opportunity afforded by the discoveries. All the same, it was very unfortunate that the colonization and subsequent exploitation of the New World should not have been undertaken jointly by Castilians and Aragonese. A close association in the common task of colonization might have done much to bring the two peoples closer together, and to break down the barriers which continued to divide a theoretically united Spain.

  One way of furthering Spanish unity was to allow the natives of the peninsula equal participation in the benefits of empire. This way was rejected. But there was also another way: the imposition of a uniform administrative and legal system in every part of Spain. It has often been believed that this was indeed the intention of Ferdinand and Isabella in their government of the Crown of Aragon. The traditional contractual constitutions of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, their powerful Cortes and their strongly entrenched liberties, naturally seemed irksome to a ruler accustomed to exercising a wide degree of personal power in Castile. In 1498, for instance, Isabella was so angered by the recalcitrance of the Aragonese Cortes that she declared that ‘it would be better to reduce the Aragonese by arms than to tolerate the arrogance of their Cortes’.1 This angry outburst, however, is not necessarily to be taken as an expression of royal policy; and in any event, Isabella's personal role in the government of the Crown of Aragon was small.

  Catalan historians have traditionally tended to assume that Ferdinand, no less than his wife, was anxious to destroy the liberties of the Crown of Aragon, and to bring the legal and political structure of the Levantine states into conformity with that of Castile. It has been argued that a typically Castilian outlook informed the policies of Ferdinand towards the Crown of Aragon, and in particular that his reorganization of the Principality of Catalonia after the anarchy of the civil wars was skilfully devised to smooth the way for its reduction to conformity with Castile. It is, however, far from clear that Ferdinand had any such intention. Although he came from a Castilian line, he was by upbringing more Catalan than Castilian in his outlook. His early political experience had been acquired in Catalonia and Valencia; his library was full of chronicles and judicial works which expounded the Catalan-Aragonese theory of the contractual constitution; and it would be surprising if he had not imbibed in the intellectual climate of fifteenth-century Catalonia something of the political ideals of the Principality's governing class. However regal Ferdinand's concept of his own position, this was not necessarily incompatible with a genuine willingness to accept and perpetuate the Aragonese constitutionalism which he, like his predecessors, had sworn to preserve.

  Even if Ferdinand had intended to destroy the traditional liberties of the Catalans, he was scarcely in a position to do so. On the death of his father in 1479 he was faced with the gigantic task of ending the long period of civil discord in Catalonia, and this could only be achieved with the help of a moderate party among the Catalans, who were bound to insist, as the price of their support, on a guarantee by Ferdinand of their customary laws and liberties. This, apart from anything else, was likely to ensure that Ferdinand's reorganization of Catalonia would be carried out on essentially moderate and conservative lines.

  The most novel part of Ferdinand's reorganization of Catalonia was his agrarian settlement. By the famous Sentencia de Guadalupe of 1486 he provided a typically moderate solution for the hitherto intransigent problem of the relations between peasants and their lords, which had disturbed the Catalan countryside for over a hundred years. The remença peasants, who had been tied to the land, were freed; the ‘six evil customs’ exacted by the lords were abolished in return for monetary compensation; and while the lord remained legally the ultimate owner of the land, the peasant remained in effective possession of it, and could leave it or dispose of it without obtaining the lord's consent. This Sentencia was to become the rural charter of Catalonia, and was to remain so for many centuries. It provided a firm foundation for the Principality's agrarian life, and led to the establishment of a class of peasants who were proprietors in all but name, and whose existence gave a new and much-needed element of social stability to a war-torn land.

  Ferdinand's work of reconstruction was carried over also into the Principality's institutional life. After much trial and error, a lottery system for public office was introduced into both the Generalitat and the municipal government of Barcelona, in order to rescue these institutions from domination by a small self-perpetuating clique. These reforms in themselves help to suggest the way in which Ferdinand's mind was working. His plan was not to abolish old institutions and replace them with new ones, but simply to bring the old institutions back into proper working order. Either by conviction or by force of circumstance he had come to the conclusion that the only feasible solution to Catalonia's troubles was to get the Principality's medieval constitutional system properly functioning once again. Accordingly, in the Catalan Corts of 1480–81, he accepted the Principality's traditional political system in its entirety, and capped it with the famous constitution of Observança, whereby the constitutional limitations on royal power were specifically recognized, and a procedure was laid down for action by the Generalitat in the event of any infringement of the country's liberties by the King or his officials.

  The fact that Ferdinand restored peace to Catalonia by reinvigorating its traditional institutions, rather than by
creating new ones, was of enormous significance for the future. So far from using the occasion to bring the Principality into closer conformity with Castile, Ferdinand chose instead to perpetuate a constitutional system which contrasted sharply with Castile's increasingly authoritarian governmental structure. Where the foundations were being laid in Castile for absolute royal power, in Catalonia the old medieval contractual State was scrupulously restored. Whether this was really the form of government best suited to the needs of a new age was apparently not considered. The history of Catalonia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was indeed to make it painfully clear that a revival of traditional forms of government did not automatically ensure a revival of the spirit that had originally infused them. But in the general air of lassitude that pervaded the Principality in the late fifteenth century this was not yet apparent. It was a source of profound satisfaction that peace had at last been restored to Catalonia. For the time being this was enough and the future could look to itself.