Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  4. THE IMPERIAL DESTINY

  The defeat of the Comuneros and the Germanías was crucial for the future of Spain. It meant that the Habsburg succession was now firmly established both in the Crown of Aragon (where, in any event, Catalans and Aragonese had failed to come to the help of the Valencians), and in Castile, where it had previously been resisted, or, at the most, grudgingly accepted by aristocracy and towns. The royalist triumph closed in Castile a chapter that had opened with the death of Isabella in 1504. During the intervening seventeen years all the achievements of the Catholic Kings had been jeopardized – the Union of the Crowns, the curbing of the aristocracy, the imposition of royal authority on the country at large. With the victory of Charles's supporters at the battle of Villalar, these achievements were finally secured. There were no more revolts in Castile against the power of the Crown.

  Against the obvious gain to Castile in the restoration of firm government must be set other consequences of the defeat of the Comuneros, more difficult to assess. The revolt of 1520–21, while nominally a rising against an unpopular and alien government, had also displayed many of the characteristics of a civil war; and, like all civil wars, it left deep scars. The family feuds and vendettas, while momentarily curbed by the restoration of royal authority, were far from being exorcised from the body politic of Castile. Traditional enmities continued to be handed on from generation to generation, and Comunero and anti-Comunero families, no longer able to meet in open conflict, carried their obscure vendettas to the Court of the new dynasty, where, in the corridors and the council chambers, they pursued their struggle for power.

  It is difficult to determine how far there was any ideological content in these struggles, but there are signs that the Comunero families like the Zapatas continued to regard themselves as the upholders of that fervent nationalist tradition which had been defeated at Villalar. For Charles's victory was much more than the triumph of the Crown over its traditional enemies, or of the forces of order over those of anarchy. It represented also something larger – the momentary triumph of Europe over Castile.

  The Comuneros had fought to save Castile from a régime whose character and policies seemed to threaten that sense of national identity achieved amid such turmoil only a generation before. Their failure meant the definitive establishment of an alien dynasty with an alien programme, which threatened to submerge Castile in the larger entity of a universal Empire. The imperial tradition was foreign to medieval Spain, and the imperialism of Charles V awakened no ready-made response in the Castilian population at large. Ferdinand had already dragged Castile behind him into great European enterprises in support of Aragonese interests. Now, with Charles V, Castile was subjected to a fresh set of European ideas, preconceptions, and values, many of which it found hard to accept. The signs of change were everywhere. Already in 1516 the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece had been enlarged to include ten places for Spaniards, and at Barcelona in 1519 Charles held his first Spanish investiture. In 1548 the traditional Court ceremonial of the kings of Castile was replaced, to the Duke of Alba's chagrin, by the far more elaborate ceremonial of the House of Burgundy, and the Royal Household was reorganized on the Burgundian model. These changes were symbolic of the closer association between Castile and the outer world implicit in the succession of Charles of Ghent to the Spanish throne.

  In spite of the strong anti-Flemish, anti-imperial sentiments to be found in Castile, there were at least some circles in Castilian society ready to accept and welcome foreign ideas. The Court and the universities had been exposed to foreign influences during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and Spanish humanism and culture had developed under the stimulus of ideas from both Italy and Flanders. Similarly, Spanish religion had been invigorated by the spiritual currents that had come to it from the Netherlands. During the 1520s the Spanish public, which in previous decades had devoured with such enthusiasm the works of devotion of the Netherlands mystics, was to turn with no less enthusiasm to the works of the greatest of all exponents of the pietist tradition of the Netherlands – Desidèrius Erasmus.

  The Erasmian invasion of Spain is one of the most remarkable events in sixteenth-century Spanish history. In no other country of Europe did the writings of Erasmus enjoy such popularity and so widespread a diffusion. In 1526 the Enchiridion appeared in a Spanish translation, and the translator was able to write proudly to the author: ‘At the Court of the Emperor, in the towns, in the churches, in the monasteries, even in the inns and on the roads, everyone now has the Enchiridion of Erasmus. Hitherto it was only read in Latin by a few scholars, who did not always understand it; now it is read in Spanish by men of all conditions, and those who had previously never heard of Erasmus now know him through this one book.’7 Erasmus's enormous popularity in Spain, which reached its peak between 1527 and 1530, seems in part attributable to the large converso element in Spanish society. The ‘new Christians’, recent converts from Judaism, were naturally attracted to a religion which had little regard for formal ceremonies, and which placed the weight of its emphasis on moral and mystical tendencies in the Christian tradition. But, beyond the appeal to the conversos, Erasmus's doctrines had the potent attraction perennially exercised on Spaniards by the north – a north which had now given Spain its king.

  Since the Imperial Court in the 1520s was also Erasmian in its outlook, finding in the universalism of Erasmus a valuable reinforcement of the Imperial idea, a natural bond of sympathy developed between some of the leading Spanish intellectuals and Charles's régime. Erasmian humanists like Luis Vives and Juan de Valdés were close to the Emperor's associates or held office in the Imperial chancery. These men saw in the government of Charles an opportunity for the establishment of a universal peace which, as Erasmus insisted, was the necessary prelude to the long-awaited spiritual renovation of Christendom.

  It would be absurd, however, to assume that Erasmianism reconciled the mass of the Castilians to the Imperial régime and the Imperial mission. Not only was Erasmianism itself soon to wither in the harsher religious climate that prevailed after 1530, but even in the days of its greatest influence it appealed to no more than a select minority. The highly influential Imperial secretary Francisco de los Cobos, for instance, knew no Latin, never showed any concern for the intellectual interests of his age, and always displayed a marked lack of enthusiasm for the whole concept of empire.

  Castile as a whole came to reconcile itself to the government of Charles V for other, less intellectual, reasons. The Emperor employed an increasing number of Spaniards in his service, and over the years he came to acquire a deep sympathy for the land and the people of Castile – so much so, that Castile eventually became a natural choice for his final retreat. At the same time, the Castilians began to discover in the doctrines of empire some features which they could usefully turn to account. Cortés's conquest of Mexico, completed a few months after the defeat of the Comuneros, had opened up unlimited possibilities, as Cortés himself was quick to appreciate. In his second letter to the Emperor, of 30 October 1520, he wrote that the newly discovered territory was so large and important that Charles could reasonably assume for his new domain a fresh Imperial title, as fully justified as his existing title of Emperor of Germany. While neither Charles nor his successors acted on Cortés's suggestion that they should style themselves Emperors of the Indies, the fact remained that a new empire had appeared in the western hemisphere, and that the existence of this empire offered an incentive to Castilian nationalism to extend its boundaries and to aim at the world hegemony to which its possession of vast overseas territories would seem naturally to entitle it. Consequently the transition was easily made from the medieval concept of empire, which held little appeal for the Castilians, to a concept of Castilian hegemony under the leadership of a ruler who himself was already the most powerful sovereign in Christendom. But even the crudest nationalism requires a mission, and this again was ready to hand in the double task that had devolved upon Charles in his capacity as Em
peror: the defence of Christendom against the Turk, and the preservation of Christian unity in the face of the new Lutheran heresy. Thus equipped with both a mission and a leader, the Castilian nationalism that had been defeated at Villalar arose phoenix-like from the ashes to greet the glittering opportunities of a new, imperial age. But a certain irony attended its resurrection, for something else had been defeated at Villalar which would not rise again: Castilian liberty, crushed and defenceless in face of the restored royal power.

  The Government and the Economy in the Reign of Charles V

  1. THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF EMPIRE

  THE Emperor Charles V ruled Spain, as King Charles I, from 1517 until his abdication in January 1556 in favour of his son, Philip. Of his nearly forty years as King he spent just under sixteen in Spain itself. These sixteen years were made up of one long stay of seven years, and five shorter visits:

  September 1517 to May 1520

  July 1522 to July 1529

  April 1533 to April 1535

  December 1536 to Spring 1538

  July 1538 to November 1539

  November 1541 to May 1543

  After 1543 he was not seen again in Spain until September 1556, when, having renounced the throne, he returned to take up residence in a small palace adjoining the monastery of Yuste. Here he died in September 1558.

  In this bare list of Charles's visits to Spain lies one of the essential clues to the character of his empire and to the pattern of Spanish history during the years of his government. The fears of the Comuneros were largely fulfilled: Spain's first Habsburg sovereign was an absentee king. Moreover, he was a king with numerous other commitments, which would always make it necessary for him to weigh up against Spain's national interests the wider interests of Imperial policy. In spite of the great, and growing, importance of Spain in the balance of Charles's empire, it always took second place in any conflict of interest, yielding precedence to considerations of Imperial prestige and authority which the majority of Spaniards found it difficult to grasp.

  The necessary absenteeism of Charles, the number of his dominions and the extent of his commitments, all posed enormous problems to which solutions had somehow to be found. There was the immediate question of who was to rule Spain during Charles's frequent absences, and, beyond this, the more difficult question of Spain's status and its obligations in relation to the various territories which together composed the Imperial patrimony. Whatever answers were found, they were bound to demand administrative and fiscal readjustments, which in turn reacted upon the whole structure of Spanish society and the Spanish economy.

  During Charles's long stay in Spain from 1522 to 1529, his principal adviser, at least in name, was the Imperial Grand Chancellor the Pied-montese Mercurino Gattinara. As Grand Chancellor, however, Gattinara would naturally accompany the Emperor on his travels, acting in particular as his chief adviser in matters of foreign policy. The revolt of the Comuneros had made it quite clear that Spain could not be governed from elsewhere, but Juana was obviously unfit even to take nominal charge of the country's government in the absence of her son. In 1526, however, Charles married his cousin Isabella, the daughter of Emmanuel of Portugal. The marriage, which was a logical continuation of the policy pursued by the Catholic Kings to bring about a closer association of Castile and Portugal, gave Charles a son, Philip, in the following year. It also gave him, in Isabella, the perfect Empress, a magnificently regal figure, who acted as Regent in her husband's absence, until her early death in 1539.

  The effective government of Spain, however, lay for twenty years or more in the hands of a man of humble origins from the Andalusian town of Úbeda –Francisco de los Cobos. Cobos had originally secured a post in the royal secretariat through the patronage of the Queen's secretary, Hernando de Zafra. After rising slowly, but steadily, in the service of Ferdinand, he took the crucial decision of his career in 1516, when he left Spain for Flanders on Ferdinand's death. A competent, extremely industrious man, more distinguished for his general affability and good humour than for any very striking traits of personality, he arrived in Flanders with the recommendation of Cisneros and the additional advantage of being one of the very few royal officials arriving from Spain who had no taint of Jewish blood. With his usual capacity for pleasing the influential, he managed to secure the favour of Chièvres, who appointed him secretary to the King. From this moment his career was made. His experience in the various departments of the government of Castile stood him in good stead when the Emperor came to Spain, and the fact that he was steadily gaining in royal favour marked him out as an increasingly obvious rival to the Grand Chancellor Gattinara. The year after 1522 saw a struggle for power between the two men to secure control of the machinery of government – a struggle that had already been won by Cobos when Gattinara died in 1530. Between 1529 and 1533 Cobos travelled abroad with the Emperor, acting as his principal adviser along with Nicholas Perrenot de Granville; but later, his expertise in financial affairs, and perhaps also his lack of sympathy for Imperial policies, caused him to remain in Spain, where he enjoyed great power and influence until his death in 1547.

  The government of Spain ran so smoothly under the gentle guidance of Los Cobos that it almost seems as if for twenty or thirty years the country had no internal history. The terrible storms that had shaken it in 1520 and 1521 had all died away. An almost unnatural calm descended upon the political life of Castile, where the reiterated complaints of the Cortes about the long absences of the Emperor and the heavy expense of his policies were almost the only outward signs of that deep uneasiness about the future which had originally inspired the revolt of the Comuneros.

  While the country's tranquillity can partly be attributed to the skill of Los Cobos in the handling of a nation weary of civil war, it is also to be ascribed to the essentially static character of Charles V's imperialism. The Empire consisted of a number of hereditary possessions – Habsburg, Burgundian, and Spanish – acquired by the dynasty at different periods and governed by it under conditions that varied greatly from one country to the next. Charles's concept of his numerous and widespread territories was patrimonial. He tended to think of each as an independent entity, governed by its own traditional laws in its own traditional manner, and unaffected by the fact that it was now only one among many territories ruled by a single sovereign. His territories themselves also tended, by their own attitude, to reinforce this concept. None wished to be considered of merely secondary importance just because its king happened also to be Holy Roman Emperor and the ruler of other states: Spain, for instance, extracted from Charles in September 1519 the promise that the placing of the title of Emperor before that of King of Spain was in no way to be understood as prejudicing the liberty and exemptions of these kingdoms’.

  The association of Charles's various territories was therefore similar in character to the association of territories that together formed the medieval federation of the Crown of Aragon. Each continued to enjoy its own laws and liberties, and any alteration in those laws to bring the constitutional systems of the differing territories into closer conformity to each other would be regarded as a flagrant violation of the ruler's hereditary obligations to his subjects. The traditional view was well expressed by a seventeenth-century jurist: ‘the kingdoms must be ruled and governed as if the king who holds them all together were king only of each one of them’.1 The king of all remained primarily the king of each, and was expected – in cheerful disregard of all the formidable obstacles imposed by space and time – to behave in accordance with this principle. To the Aragonese, Charles was King of Aragon; to the Castilians, King of Castile; to the Flemings, Count of Flanders; and if they occasionally allowed themselves a certain feeling of pride that their King was also the ruler of many other territories, this was generally outweighed by annoyance at the demands made upon him by those territories, to the consequent neglect of their own particular interests.

  Two important consequences followed from this concept of Charles's empi
re as a mere aggregation of territories almost fortuitously linked by a common sovereign. In the first place, it led to the ‘freezing' of the various constitutional systems in these territories. Each was alert to any real or implied threat to its traditional status, and this in turn inhibited the development of any common institutional organization for the empire as a whole, such as Gattinara would probably have liked, but which Charles himself seems never to have considered. Secondly, it prevented the growth of a closer association of the various territories for either economic or political purposes, which might in time have helped to produce an imperial mystique, a sense of participation in a common enterprise. In the absence of any such mystique, Charles's dominions continued to think exclusively in terms of their own interests, and to resent their involvement in wars which seemed to be little or no concern of theirs.

  So far as Castile was concerned, many of Charles's policies seemed to Castilians to deviate sharply from the traditional policies pursued by his predecessors. His feud with the King of France, his war against the Protestant princes of Germany, appeared to have little or nothing to do with the promotion of Castilian interests, and hardly seemed to justify the use of Castilian manpower and the expenditure of Castilian money. Even his Italian policy, culminating in the acquisition of the duchy of Milan2 and the winning of Spanish dominance over the peninsula, had strong critics among those Castilians like Juan Tavera, Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, who looked back to the days of Isabella and Cisneros. To Tavera and his friends, Spanish involvement in Italy was a perpetuation of the ‘Aragonese' foreign policy of Ferdinand, and was bound to lead Castile into European conflicts, whereas Castile's interests required peace in Europe and a continuation of the crusade against the infidel along the shores of Africa. It remained for the no less ‘Castilian’, but more realistic, Duke of Alba to grasp the fundamental strategic importance of Italy for the preservation of one of Castile's primary spheres of interest – the central and western Mediterranean basin, increasingly threatened by the Turkish advance.