Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  The chain of communications that ran from viceroy to Council to King and back again to the viceroy ensured an exhaustive coverage of every item of importance in the government of the Spanish Monarchy. No States were more governed in the sixteenth century than those of the King of Spain, if government can be measured by the amount of discussion devoted to any individual problem and by the quantities of paper expended on its solution. The actual effectiveness of this government in terms of the governed is, however, much more difficult to determine. In many ways the Spanish administrative system paid a heavy price for its success. It solved the problem of maintaining central control over distant proconsuls, but only at the expense of stultifying prompt administrative action. Since everything had to be referred back to the Court for a decision, consultation tended to take the place of action, and government by discussion could easily mean no government at all. Moreover, with its own complicated built-in mechanism of an infinite series of checks and balances, the system distributed power so evenly among so many different bodies that each was ultimately reduced to powerlessness.

  Many of the defects in the system were no doubt inevitable. Problems of distance were utterly insuperable, and distance not only imposed endless delays, but also prompted the need to create administrative machinery designed as much to restrict the powers of the governors as to attend to the interests of the governed. Many other defects, however, were capable of remedy, and if they were not remedied this was largely because of the character and the calibre of the men who ran the system.

  The almost total absence of detailed studies of the Spanish bureaucracy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries means that very little is known of the thousands of officials of which it consisted. At the bottom of the scale were innumerable clerks and scribes, inspectors and tax-collectors, anonymous, unhonoured, and unsung. Above them, in ascending levels of importance, were the more senior officials of the viceregal administration, the members of the legal tribunals or audiencias, and the viceroys themselves, while at the Court were the royal secretaries, the members of the Councils, and the various secretarial officials.

  From the days of Cobos the royal secretaries tended to form something of a class apart. Their duties were of the greatest importance, since they dealt with royal correspondence and acted as the links between the Councils and the sovereign. As early as 1523 Cobos himself was secretary of all the Councils except those of Aragon, Orders, and War; and he was to devote much energy to building up a trained professional staff for the secretariats, in the knowledge that they would be the nurseries of his successors. The team trained by Cobos included several names which were to ring down the corridors of the sixteenth century: Juan Vázquez de Molina, Cobos's nephew; Alonso de Idiáquez; Gonzalo Pérez; Francisco de Eraso. These men had much the same background as Cobos himself. They came from the class of small municipal gentry, and, apart from Pérez, had neither intellectual interests nor university training. Essentially they were professional civil servants, devoted to the interests of the Emperor and to their patrón Cobos, and held together by a strong esprit de corps. Their appearance of constituting a closed caste was reinforced by the frequent practice of passing on the secretaryships from father to son or uncle to nephew, so that such names as Pérez and Idiáquez constantly recur. This had the advantage of ensuring administrative continuity, but it also tended to perpetuate routine procedures which had outlived their usefulness, and to bring about the appointment of men who sometimes had nothing to recommend them other than a knowledge of the inner workings of the bureaucratic machine.

  Members of the audiencias and the Councils had the same kind of social background as the royal secretaries. Charles V and Philip II were both careful to follow the practice of the Catholic Kings in restricting the higher nobles to army commands and viceroyalties, and in choosing for service at Court and in the legal tribunals men drawn from hidalgo families or from the bourgeoisie. Unlike the secretaries, however, these men had been educated at the universities, and had considerable experience in the Church or legal practice before they entered the royal service. Appointed to an audiencia, one or two of the fortunate ones might hope eventually to be promoted to one of the Councils at Court, with a place in the Council of Castile as the pinnacle of their ambitions. This meant that they were already relatively old men at the time of their appointment, anxious only to enjoy in tranquillity the high office they had at last attained. Nor was their considerable legal learning necessarily the best equipment for the kind of problems that now confronted them. There was very rarely an experienced man of affairs or a merchant in the Council of Finance, and a legal or theological training was perhaps not the best preparation for struggling with the extreme complexities of the Castilian economy.

  Age, and a certain narrowness of background, were, however, the least of the troubles that afflicted the Councils. There were constant complaints of venality and corruption among royal officials, and not least among the councillors. The scrutiny of an official's activities by means of visitas and residencias imposed a certain check on corrupt practices, but opportunities for gain were considerable, and the temptations difficult to resist. Cobos, whom Charles V believed to accept no bribes of importance, started life without a penny and ended it with an annual income of some 60,000 ducats a year, which put him on the same level as the richest nobles in Castile. Much of this wealth came from grants made by the Emeror in gratitude for his services, but it was easy enough for a man in Cobos's position to use his official influence to swell his private income.

  While the career of Cobos vividly illustrates the opportunities that awaited a successful royal official, it also hints at some of the pressures upon him. In the hierarchically-ordered societies of sixteenth-century Europe the supreme aspiration was to find acceptance among the ranks of the aristocracy. Even a man of the humblest origins might eventually achieve this ambition through wealth and the King's favour; and both might be acquired in the royal service, if not always by strictly orthodox methods. Since the mark of a true aristocrat was his display, there was a constant pressure on the ambitious royal official to spend, which in turn produced a constant pressure to gain. Cobos acquired land and built himself palaces. He bought tapestries and pictures and jewels, and surrounded himself with all the appurtenances of aristocratic living; and in the end he secured the recognition he desired. His daughter married the Duke of Sessa, his son became Marquis of Camarasa, and a new noble dynasty was founded. But it was a giddy spiral staircase he had climbed, and only a few would follow him to the top.

  The temptation to mount was, however, irresistible. Yet the orthodox steps for mounting were few and far between. Cobos had been fortunate in that he was a constant recipient of royal favours, so that his upward path was relatively smooth. But the majority of officials were rarely singled out for special favours, and the salaries on which they were supposed to depend were absurdly small and very often in arrears. Although the smallness of official salaries was the inevitable result of the Crown's financial necessities, it was also the outcome of deliberate royal policy, since it was assumed that an official with a small salary would work all the harder in the hope of eventual mercedes or rewards. The theory was ingenious, but the practical results disastrous. Caught between his expensive social commitments and the impossibility of meeting them out of his salary, the official was compelled to have recourse to irregular money-raising methods, for which the Spanish administrative system made generous provision.

  The opportunities for corruption among the members of the Councils reflect the character not only of the Spanish system of government, but also of the society that lay behind it – a society with many more resemblances to other sixteenth-century European societies than is often allowed. Organized in the form of a pyramid with the King at its apex, Spanish society looked naturally towards the King as the source of patronage, which would be percolated downwards through the various social layers by means of the usual clientage system. But a king with so many subjects in so man
y different territories could not confer his favours from the personal knowledge of the recipients to the extent that was still possible in a small society like that of Elizabethan England. It was at this point that the Councils had an exceptionally important function to fulfil. Innumerable petitions would flood in to the King from all those who, in the customary terminology of the age, claimed to have rendered him certain servicios, for which they duly requested mercedes or rewards. This concept of service and rewards – a survival from an age of much closer personal relations between a king and his subjects – had inevitably to be institutionalized in the changed conditions of the sixteenth century. This was done by channelling the petitions through the Councils, which would sift them and pass on their recommendations to the King.

  Since the King would generally act on his Councils' advice, the councillors acquired enormous powers of patronage, which they naturally attempted to exploit to the full. Applicants for mercedes – for places of profit and honour and titles of nobility – would take certain obvious precautions to ensure that their petitions received prompt – and, if possible, favourable – consideration, and underpaid councillors were hardly likely to resist their overtures. There could be no better illustration of the kind of problem likely to arise from the grafting of a modern-style bureaucratic system on to a society that was still essentially medieval, for it was because the councils had inherited the mantle of medieval kingship, with its obligation to confer favours as well as to dispense government and justice, that the opportunities for corrupt practices were so great. Corruption itself, therefore, was only one further aspect of the enormous problem that confronted sixteenth-century Spain: the problem of constructing a modern state-system on economic and social foundations that were proving increasingly obsolete.

  3. THE CASTILIAN ECONOMY

  The hardest task facing sixteenth-century Spain was to adapt its essentially medieval political, social, and economic organization to the unprecedented demands made upon it by the responsibilities of world-wide empire. To a very considerable extent it was successful in meeting these demands on the institutional level, partly perhaps because of the experience gained by the Aragonese in tackling similar problems in the preceding centuries. But could it achieve a comparable success in meeting the economic challenge presented by the acquisition of potentially rich and productive overseas possessions? In other words, did the Castilians have the determination and the capacity to exploit their American conquests in such a way as to further the economic growth of their own country?

  The New World could be a source of benefit to Castile as a supplier of commodities that were scarce or unavailable at home, and as a market for Castilian products. In the first flush of excitement caused by the discoveries, there was naturally much uncertainty as to the best means of exploiting the glittering opportunities of transatlantic trade. The first instinctive reaction to the discoveries was to treat the New World as an exclusive Castilian preserve, and in 1501 the passage of foreigners to the Indies was formally prohibited. Then in 1503, the famous Casa de Contratación was set up in Seville. This organization, which was probably inspired by the Consulado of Burgos and by the monopolistic trading system of the Portuguese, was designed to exercise absolute control over trade with the New World; but a few years later the principle of a Sevillian, and even of a Spanish, monopoly of the American trade came to be openly questioned. Already in the time of Cisneros it had become apparent that Spain would need foreign capital for its expensive colonizing ventures, and in the 1520s, in the first intoxicating years of Charles's imperialism, there occurred a passing phase of liberal legislation. In 1524 Charles V, under pressure from German banking houses, allowed foreign merchants to trade with the Indies, although not to settle in them. In 1525 and 1526 subjects from any of the Emperor's dominions were given the right of entry into America; and in 1529 the Crown went so far as to allow ten Castilian ports to trade directly with the New World, although their ships had to put into Seville for the registration of their cargoes on the return journey. But this decree, revoked in 1573, seems to have remained virtually a dead letter, possibly because the winds and currents were unfavourable to direct navigation between north Spain and the Indies. The earlier decrees also ran into trouble, as a result of growing indignation among Spanish merchants at the extent of foreign competition; and in 1538 the entry of all foreigners into America was ágain prohibited, although many would still continue to obtain passages, either by securing special licences or by acquiring naturalization as Castilian citizens.

  In spite of various loopholes in the legislation, it is clear that, from the end of the 1530s, the principle of monopoly had triumphed: a monopoly favourable to the Crown of Castile, and most of all to the port of Seville. From now until 1680, when it yielded its primacy to Cadiz, Seville was the mistress of the Spanish Atlantic. At Seville would be congregated goods for shipment to the Indies from Spain and abroad, and back to Seville would come the galleons bearing the products of the New World. The most highly prized of the imports from America – which included dyestuffs, pearls, and sugar – were, of course, gold and silver. The quest for precious metals, of which Europe had run desperately short by the end of the fifteenth century, had been the principal driving force behind the colonial ventures, and in America the faith of the conquistadores was to be amply rewarded. In the very first years of the discoveries, small quantities of gold had been found in the Antilles – sufficient to whet the appetite for more. The conquests of Mexico and Peru brought in their train the discovery of gold and silver mines, culminating in 1545 in the finding of the fabulous silver mines of Potosí, to the south-east of Lake Titicaca. The exploitation of the enormous resources of Potosí on a really large scale only began, however, in the years around 1560, when a new method was invented for the refining of silver by an amalgam of mercury, of which the principal source of supply at this time was the Almadén mercury mines in Spain. From this moment, the production of silver far outran that of gold, and over the 160 years between 1503 and 1660 some 16,000,000 kilograms of silver arrived at Seville – enough to triple the existing silver resources of Europe – as against 185,000 kilograms of gold, which increased Europe's gold supplies by one-fifth.

  The bullion consignments arriving at Seville belonged partly to the Crown and partly to private individuals. (See Table 4.) In accordance with laws of Alfonso X and Alfonso XI of Castile, any mines discovered in lands belonging to the king were considered to form a part of the royal patrimony; but the risks and difficulties inherent in the exploitation of the American mines induced the Spanish Crown to renounce its rights and to rent or dispose of the mines, in return for a proportion of the yield, finally fixed at one-fifth. The Crown's share of the bullion arriving at Seville, which seems to have averaged about 40 per cent of the total consignment, therefore consisted partly of this proportion, known as the quinto real, and partly of the sums sent back in payment of the taxes introduced by the Crown into the Indies. Of the private share of the consignment, part belonged to individuals who had made their fortune in the Indies and were bringing it back to Spain, but most of it was probably being remitted to Sevillan merchants by their American colleagues in order to pay for cargoes shipped to the New

  Table 4

  TOTAL IMPORTS OF TREASURE IN DUCATS (375 maravedís) BY FIVE-YEAR PERIODS

  (Based on the table, given in pesos of 450 maravedís, in Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650, Harvard University Press, 1934, p. 34.)

  Period Royal Private Total

  1503–1505 116,660 328,607 445,266

  1506–1510 256,625 722,859 979,484

  1511–1515 375.882 1,058,782 1,434,664

  1516–1520 312,261 879,575 1,191,836

  1521–1525 42,183 118,821 161,004

  1526–1530 326,485 919,640 1,246,124

  1531–1535 518,833 1,461,445 1,980,277

  1536–1540 1,621,062 3,104,408 4,725,470

  1541–1545 909,346 5,035,460 5,944,80
6

  1546–1550 1,911,206 4,699,247 6,610,453

  1551–1555 4,354,208 7,484,429 11,838,637

  1556–1560 1,882,195 7,716,604 9,598,798

  1561–1565 2,183,440 11,265,603 13,449,043

  1566–1570 4,541,692 12,427,767 16,969,459

  1571–1575 3,958,393 10,329,538 14,287,931

  1576–1580 7,979,614 12,722,715 20,702,329

  1581–1585 9,060,725 26,188,810 35,249,534

  1586–1590 9,651,855 18,947,302 28,599,157

  1591–1595 12,028,018 30,193,817 42,221,835

  1596–1600 13,169,182 28,145,019 41,314,201

  1601–1605 7,823,863 21,460,131 29,283,994

  1606–1610 10,259,615 27,426,634 37,686,248

  1611–1615 8,655,506 20,778,239 29,433,745

  1616–1620 5,217,346 30,917,606 36,134,952

  1621–1625 5,869,387 26,543,427 32,412,814

  1626–1630 5,542,561 24,402,871 29,945,432

  1631–1635 5,680,589 14,852, 435 20,533,025

  1636–1640 5,629,564 13,947,959 19,577,522

  1641–1645 5,723,394 10,944,169 16,516,563

  1646–1650 1,998,135 12,126,521 14,124,656

  1651–1655 26866 60686 8220

  1656–1660 727,829 3,305,515 4,033,339

  Totals 1503–1660 140,863,304 396,521,815 537,385,119

  World. For, in spite of the almost exclusive concentration of posterity on the spectacular bullion imports, Spain's trade with the Indies was at all times a two-way trade.

  The first Spanish settlers in America needed almost everything from home: their arms, their clothes, their horses, their corn and their wine. Even after the colonists had become established in their new surroundings, they continued to remain heavily dependent on the metropolis for many of their essential supplies. Although European crops were rapidly introduced, agriculture in the Indies was slow to develop, and demand was outpaced by the growth of the white or partially coloured population. Figures are still largely a matter of guesswork, but there may have been some 118,000 colonists in the New World by 1570. These colonists clung nostalgically to Spanish ways of life; they wanted the luxuries of the Old World, its textiles, its books, its foodstuffs. Some of these would in time be produced in the New World itself, but meanwhile the ships would leave Seville laden with Castilian or Catalan cloth, and with wine, oil and corn from Andalusia, and would bring back silver and other desirable colonial produce in return.