Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  In retrospect, it would seem that, in analyses of the ‘decline’, too much has been made of what were assumed to be exclusively ‘Spanish’ characteristics. While there were profound differences between Spain and other west European nations, springing in particular from the Afro-European character of Spain's geography and civilization, there were also marked similarities, which it is a mistake to underplay. At the end of the sixteenth century there was no particular reason to believe that the future development of the peninsula would diverge so markedly from that of other parts of western Europe as it was later to do. Habsburg Spain had, after all, set the pace for the rest of Europe in the elaboration of new techniques of administration to cope with the problems of governing a world-wide empire. The Spain of Philip II would seem to have had at least as good a chance as the France of Henry III of making the transition to the modern, centralized State.

  The failure to make this transition was essentially a seventeenth-century failure, and, above all, a failure of the second half of the century. The economic depression of the earlier and middle years of the century, although exceptionally severe in certain parts of the peninsula, was not unique to Spain. France and England, as well as Spain, were plunged in an economic crisis in the 1620s and a political crisis in the 1640s. The real divergence came only after the middle of the century, when the moment of most acute political crisis had everywhere been passed. It was in the years after 1650 that certain European States seemed to strike out on a new course, building up their power by a more rational exploitation of their economic possibilities and their military and financial resources – and this at a time when the new science and the new philosophy were beginning to teach that man could, after all, shape his own destiny and control his environment.

  This moment of exceptionally rapid intellectual and administrative advance in many parts of Europe was, for Spain, the moment of maximum political and intellectual stagnation. Castile in particular failed to respond to the challenge posed by the crisis of the mid-seventeenth century, and relapsed into the inertia of defeat, from which it took the best part of a century to recover. The immediate explanation of this failure is to be found in the disastrous events of the age of Olivares, and notably in the country's defeat in war. The strain of war had precipitated the Conde Duque into constitutional experiments which entailed a radical reorganization of the country's administrative structure, and he lacked both the military and economic resources, and the prestige that would have been conferred by foreign victories, to carry these experiments through to success. The result of his failure was even worse than if the experiments had never been tried. The frictions between the peoples of the peninsula were exacerbated by his efforts; and the extent of the failure effectively discouraged any attempt to repeat the experiment during the half-century when other States were reorganizing their administrative systems, in order to compete more effectively in the international struggle for power.

  Yet the fatal over-commitment of Spain to foreign wars at a time when Castile lacked the economic and demographic resources to fight them with success, cannot be simply attributed to the blunders of one man. It reflects, rather, the failure of a generation, and of an entire governing class. Seventeenth-century Castile had become the victim of its own history, desperately attempting to re-enact the imperial glories of an earlier age in the belief that this was the sole means of exorcising from the body politic the undoubted ills of the present. That it should have reacted in this way was not inevitable, but it was made the more probable by the very magnitude of the country's triumphs in the preceding era. It was hard to turn one's back on a past studded with so many successes, and it became all the harder when those successes were identified with everything that was most quintessentially Castilian. For had not the successes derived from the military valour of the Castilians and their unswerving devotion to the Church?

  It was one of the tragedies of Castile's history that it found itself, by the end of the reign of Philip II, in a position where it seemed that readjustment to the new economic realities could be achieved only at the price of sacrificing its most cherished ideals. However stern the warnings of the arbitristas, it was difficult for a society nurtured on war to find a substitute for the glory of battle in the tedious intricacies of mercantile ledgers, or to elevate to a position of pre-eminence the hard manual labour it had been taught to despise. It was no less difficult for it to draw on the ideas and the experiences of foreigners, especially when the foreigners were so often heretics, for Castile's instinctive distrust of the outside world had been amply reinforced by the religious revolutions of sixteenth-century Europe. By a tragic succession of circumstances, the purity of the faith had come to be identified during the reign of Philip II with a fundamental hostility to ideas and values gaining ground in certain parts of contemporary Europe. This identification had led to a partial isolation of Spain from the outer world, which had constricted the nation's development to certain well-defined channels, and lessened its capacity to adapt itself to new situations and circumstances through the development of new ideas.

  Yet the very violence of Spain's response to the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century demands a sympathetic understanding it does not always receive, for Spain was confronted with a problem more complex than that facing any other State in Christendom. It alone was a multi-racial society, in which the inter-penetration of Christian, Jewish and Moorish beliefs created a constant problem of national and religious identity. To this problem there was no obvious solution. The closing of the frontiers and the insistence on the most rigorous orthodoxy represented a desperate attempt to deal with a problem of unparalleled complexity; and it is hardly surprising if religious uniformity appeared the sole guarantee of national survival for a society characterized by the most extreme racial, political and geographical diversity. The price paid for the adoption of this policy proved in the end to be very high, but it is understandable enough that to contemporaries the cost of not adopting it should have seemed even higher.

  While the policies adopted by Philip II made the task of his successors incomparably more difficult, they did not make it impossible. Certain aspects of the career of Olivares suggest that there was still room for manoeuvre, and that Castile still retained some freedom of choice. This freedom was lost in the half-century after 1640, partly because of the tragic events of the Olivares era, and partly because of the unredeemed mediocrity of the Castilian ruling class at a moment when the highest gifts of statesmanship were required if the Monarchy were to escape disaster. There was here a failure of individuals, over and above the collective failure of a society so profoundly disillusioned by its unbroken series of reverses that it had lost even the capacity to protest.

  The degeneracy of the dynasty played an obvious part in this failure, but there is also a striking contrast in the calibre of the ministers, the viceroys and the officials who ran the Monarchy for Charles V, and those who ran it for Charles II. The over life-size figure of the Conde Duque de Olivares appears in retrospect the last of that heroic line which had shed such lustre on the sixteenth-century Monarchy: such men as the diplomat, poet and commander Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503–75), or Francisco de Toledo (1515–82), the great viceroy of Peru. The insistent references of Olivares to the ‘lack of leaders’ suggests a sudden collapse of the country's ruling class, as the last great generation of Spanish proconsuls – the generation of the Count of Gondomar (1567–1626) -finally passed away. But a satisfactory explanation of this collapse has yet to be given. Is it to be found in the excessive inter-breeding of an exclusive aristocratic caste? Or in the failure of the country's educational system as its mental horizons narrowed, for was not Diego Hurtado de Mendoza as much a product of the ‘open’ Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella as the Duke of Medinaceli was a product of the ‘closed’ Spain of the seventeenth century? The men of the seventeenth century belonged to a society which had lost the strength that comes from dissent, and they lacked the breadth of vision and the strength of
character to break with a past that could no longer serve as a reliable guide to the future. Heirs to a society which had over-invested in empire, and surrounded by the increasingly shabby remnants of a dwindling inheritance, they could not bring themselves at the moment of crisis to surrender their memories and alter the antique pattern of their lives. At a time when the face of Europe was altering more rapidly than ever before, the country that had once been its leading power proved to be lacking the essential ingredient for survival – the willingness to change.

  4. THE ACHIEVEMENT

  The drastic failure of Habsburg Spain to make the vital transition should not, however, be allowed to obscure the extent of its achievement in the days of its greatness. If the failures were very great, so also were the successes. For nearly two centuries, Spain had sustained a remarkable creative effort, which added immeasurably to the common stock of European civilization. In the Europe of the mid-seventeenth century the influence of Castilian culture and customs was widespread and fruitful, upheld as it was by all the prestige of an empire whose hollowness was only just becoming apparent to the outside world.

  It is all too easy to take for granted what was perhaps the most remarkable of all Spain's achievements – the ability to maintain its control over vast areas of widely scattered territories, at a time when governmental techniques had scarcely advanced beyond the stage of household administration, and when the slowness of communications would seem at first sight to have made long-distance government impossible. While in course of time the failings of the Spanish governmental system made it the laughing-stock of the world, no other sixteenth- or seventeenth-century State was faced with so vast a problem of administration, and few succeeded in preserving over so long a period such a high degree of public order in an age when revolts were endemic.

  The soldiers, the lawyers, and the administrators who made this achievement possible possessed in full measure the defects generally associated with a conquering race, but the best of them brought to their duties a sense of dedication which sprang from an unquestioning acceptance of the superiority of their society and of the absolute rightness of their cause. Nor did it seem in the sixteenth century as if this confidence was misplaced. Few nations had experienced such spectacular triumphs as the Castile of the Catholic Kings and of Charles V, and Castilians could be pardoned for thinking that they had been singled out for special favours by a God who had chosen them to further His manifold purposes.

  It is this supreme self-confidence which gives Castilian civilization of the sixteenth century its particular quality, just as it was the sudden failure of confidence that gave a new and more poignant character to Castilian civilization of the seventeenth. Tremendous challenges faced the sixteenth-century Castilian and he rose to them with a kind of effortless ease which seems in retrospect deeply impressive. He had to explore, colonize, and govern a new world. He had to devise new methods of cartography and navigation – work that was done by such men as Alonso de Santa Cruz, the inventor of spherical maps, and Felipe Guillén, who perfected the compass in 1525. He had to study the natural history of the newly discovered American continent – the achievement of Bernardino de Sahagún, and of botanists like Francisco Hernández and José de Acosta. He had to improve the primitive techniques of mining and metallurgy, and to pioneer, like Pedro de Esquivel, new methods of geodesy. And he had to solve novel problems of political and social organization, and to grapple with the moral questions connected with the establishment of government over uncivilized and pagan races.

  This last work, accomplished by the theologians of sixteenth-century Spain, and in particular by the great school of Salamanca led by the Dominican Francisco de Vitoria, illustrates one of the most striking characteristics of the Castile of Charles V and Philip II: the constant and fruitful alliance between theory and practice, between the man of action and the man of learning, which provided intellectuals with a strong incentive to formulate their theories with clarity and precision, and to direct their attention to the pressing problems of the day. The inherent tendency of the Castilian mentality to concern itself with the concrete and practical was thus encouraged by the demand of Castilian society that the scholar and the theologian should contribute to what was regarded as a collective national effort. Yet, at the same time, the need to meet this social demand led to no sacrifice, at least among the better scholars, of their independence of judgement and intellectual integrity. There is something deeply moving about the characteristic forthrightness and independence of the Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1535–1624), still campaigning for constitutionalism in a Castile where constitutionalism was fast dying, and steadfastly refusing to accept anything on trust. ‘Nos adoramus quod scimus’, he wrote to the Archbishop of Granada in 1597, at a time when the discovery of some mysterious lead books in Granada had convinced many of his gullible contemporaries that they had found irrefutable evidence for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and for the visit of St James to Spain. There could have been no better motto for the scholars of the Spanish Renaissance.

  Paradoxically, however, alongside this empirical approach, there seems to have existed in many sixteenth-century Castilians a highly developed awareness of another world, beyond that cognizable by the human senses. Saint Teresa of Avila, that most practical of mystics, seemed to be entirely at home in both worlds – worlds that were caught and held in a strange juxtaposition by El Greco when he painted in 1586 the ‘Burial of the Count of Orgaz’. The sombre, withdrawn faces of the witnesses to the miracle are the faces of men who seem only half to belong to the terrestrial world, because they feel themselves simultaneously to be citizens of another.

  The mystical movement of the later sixteenth century possessed a degree of intensity which inevitably made it a transient phenomenon: it was all too easy for the mystical to degenerate into the mannered, and for the unpremeditated combination of the natural and the supernatural to degenerate into something that was merely arch. But at moments of apparently excessive strain Castilian art and literature had a capacity for self-revival by drawing fresh inspiration from the springs of popular tradition. The Castile of Cervantes resembled the England of Shakespeare in this ability of its writers and artists to synthesize the traditions of the populace with the aspirations of the educated, in such a way as to produce works of art simultaneously acceptable to both.

  To some extent this ability disappeared during the course of the seventeenth century. The conceptismo of Quevedo and the culteranismo of Góngora were perhaps symptoms of a growing divorce between the culture of Court and country, which itself seemed to symbolize a slackening of the previously close-knit texture of Castile's national life. The arbitristas with their practical solutions went unheeded by the Court; the universities closed in on themselves; the men of letters and the men of action were drifting apart. One of the most marked intellectual repercussions of this was to be found in the realm of science, more dependent than the arts on a collective effort and a continuing tradition. In the early seventeenth century the continuity had barely been established, and society and the State had lost interest; and Castilian science, as a result, was either extinguished or went underground, to be pursued in secrecy by a few dedicated spirits in a mental climate totally uncongenial to their efforts

  The arts, on the other hand, continued to prosper, enjoying as they did the patronage of the great. Wide as was the gulf between Court and country, it could still be bridged by an artist of the calibre of Velázquez, drawing his inspiration impartially from both. But that fusion of the classical and the popular which had inspired so many of the greatest achievements of the Golden Age, was overlaid in the works of Velázquez by an extra dimension of awareness, peculiarly characteristic of the disillusioned Castile of Philip IV. For Velázquez caught in his paintings the sense of failure, the sudden emptiness of the imperial splendour which had buoyed up Castile for more than a century.

  There is no doubt a certain paradox in the fact that the achievement of the two most outstanding
creative artists of Castile – Cervantes and Velázquez – was shot through with a deep sense of disillusionment and failure; but the paradox was itself a faithful reflection of the paradox of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Castile. For here was a country which had climbed to the heights and sunk to the depths; which had achieved everything and lost everything; which had conquered the world only to be vanquished itself. The Spanish achievement of the sixteenth century was essentially the work of Castile, but so also was the Spanish disaster of the seventeenth; and it was Ortega y Gassct who expressed the paradox most clearly when he wrote what may serve as an epitaph on the Spain of the House of Austria: ‘Castile has made Spain, and Castile has destroyed it.’

  Notes on Further Reading

  I. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL AIDS

  The standard bibliographical guide to Spanish history is B. Sánchez Alonso, Fuentes de la historia española e hispanoamericana (3rd ed., 3 vols., Madrid, 1952). Since 1953 new books and articles on the history of Spain and Spanish America have been listed, with critical comments, in a quarterly periodical, Indice Histórico Español (University of Barcelona).

  2. EARLY MODERN SPAIN: GENERAL

  Several general histories are now available, covering part or all of the period studied in this book. For readers of Spanish there are the massive illustrated volumes, of very unequal value, of the Historia de España Ramón Menéndez Pidal (ed. José María Jover Zamora), and the more manageable Historia de España (ed. Manuel Tuñón de Lara), of which vol. 5, La frustración de un imperio (Barcelona, 1982), by several hands, covers the years 1476–1714. The Spanish historian who over the last half century has made the greatest contribution to our knowledge of Early Modern Spain is Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, whose The Golden Age of Spain, 1516–1659 (London, 1971) introduced his work to English readers, but whose other books, including El antiguo régimen: los Reyes Católicos y los Austrias (2nd ed., Madrid, 1974), have not been translated. An up-to-date survey of the period in French can be found in the second section of Joseph Pérez, Histoire de l'Espagne (Paris, 1996).