The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  Political power in composite monarchies such as Charles’s and Ferdinand’s has to be understood as having three layers, and it is through these that the monarchy was governed. The top layer was royal power. In general, Charles’s authority was more strongly vertical than was Ferdinand’s, at least outside the Empire. Nonetheless, even in Castile where royal power was strongest, Charles’s central institutions were quite weak. In the middle layer were the organized groups such as estates and cities that had distinct legal rights and typically had to negotiate with the king over the exercise of those rights. In Spain, the regional Cortes and the cities enjoyed significant autonomy from royal power and operated much of the local government. An example of that autonomy is that in Salamanca province, two-thirds of the territory was subject to the judicial and financial authority of the Church or aristocrats. In Aragon and Valencia, the crown had jurisdiction over fewer than half of the towns, the others being free towns or under the jurisdiction of aristocrats. The bottom layer was that of the local nobility, who in both the Iberian and Danubian domains exercised almost unregulated control of their own lands. In Charles’s and Ferdinand’s time (as well as before and after), the Habsburgs’ governance was really a series of contracts between these different layers of power, farming out a great deal of administration to lower levels out of both custom and the inadequacy of central institutions. An example is the encabezamiento system of taxation, whereby town councils negotiated with the crown over the taxes they owed, but were then left responsible for collecting those taxes.

  Charles and Ferdinand both worked conscientiously with the various estates bodies in their domains, even if they found them aggravating. They tried to limit but not eliminate the estates’ influence. In Castile after the comuneros’ revolt, the estates were fairly docile, and through preferment, nobles were co-opted into the dynasty’s rule. Ferdinand’s relations with the representative bodies in the Danubian realms were much more complicated. The different parts of his dominions all maintained their own diets, from Tyrol to Carinthia and of course Bohemia and Hungary. The estates retained strong powers over raising revenue, and even the actual collection of that revenue was typically handled by the local nobility. So besides the never easy task of getting the estates to agree to taxes, Ferdinand had to ensure that not only would the taxes be collected, but that his share of the revenues would be sent to him. As further evidence of the limitations of centralized governance in the Danubian domains, Bohemia and Hungary retained separate chancelleries (executive organs) into the 1600s. The estates in these two kingdoms were simply too powerful ever to accede to a more vigorous standardization that might erode their own privileges. The estates in Bohemia were very assertive, sharing power with the king in administration, justice matters, and appointing officials. After the failed Bohemian estates revolt of 1547, Ferdinand did manage to limit some of these powers. But he was more successful in some areas than others. In Silesia, for example, he had to tolerate the continued existence of separate princely courts of justice.

  “I had great hopes—only a few have been fulfilled, and only a few remain to me,” Charles lamented at his abdication in 1555.11 Charles’s blessing was to be given greater power and possibilities than any European ruler between Charlemagne and Napoleon. His curse was that the demands on and challenges to that power were so great that failure was almost inevitable. He eventually realized this, which is why he abdicated and divided his inheritance into Spanish and Austrian domains. Where he saw his reign as full of failure, however, it is also possible to see this period as one of absurd success for the dynasty. All across Europe, Habsburg heads wore the crown. Castile and Aragon were firmly secured for the family, and therewith the rich overseas possessions. Bohemia and Hungary came into the family’s hands. The last pretense to the old ideal of universal monarchy attached itself indelibly to the dynasty. Habsburg armies won major victories against the French and the Turks. Charles and Ferdinand both elaborated reasonably effective governing structures that anchored their power base. Indeed, while so much of the focus in Habsburg history during this time is on Iberia or Germany, in the Austrian Hereditary Lands Ferdinand was furthering probably the most impressive and durable dynastic consolidation from the late Middle Ages into the early modern period. Even though Charles was so disappointed at seeing Christendom splinter, the dynasty’s handling of the religious schism cannot be counted as a complete failure. Ferdinand’s politicking was instrumental to the Peace of Augsburg, which bought the Empire a measure of religious peace for decades. Still, the Reformation was an earthquake under the Habsburgs’ feet, and for the next hundred years the dynasty grappled with its impacts.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The European superpower (1556–1621)

  He has been portrayed as a tyrant, a fanatic, a megalomaniacal warmonger plotting the takeover of Europe from the sinister fastness of his monastery-palace El Escorial. This, thanks to the Black Legend, is the popular image of Felipe II, the most misunderstood of all Habsburg rulers. According to this old calumny, Felipe II was merely the most ferocious of the whole degenerate line of Spanish Habsburgs, who ruled over a Spain trapped in obscurantist backwardness, terrifyingly powerful but condemned to a long, agonizing decline. This much is true: Felipe II in particular, and his dynasty in general, lost the media war. The Spanish Habsburgs failed to counter the negative propaganda in their own time, and it has tainted their image ever since. In fact, government in Castile-Aragon was never so authoritarian or absolutist as has been alleged; Felipe II believed in rule by law more than most contemporary sovereigns. And while the religious culture of the monarchy did become more virulently Catholic during his reign, that was in keeping with trends throughout Europe, where religious splits were widening and intolerance intensifying. Similarly, the Spanish Inquisition was never as nefarious nor as ham-fisted as, say, the Monty Python depiction of it. The image of hordes of heretics being burned at the stake is wrong, and torture was not standard practice. Spain was also never so benighted and sealed off as has been assumed. Censorship was not any more widespread there than in other European countries of the day, and the Iberian realms retained deep and long-lasting cultural and economic links to Italy, the Low Countries, and even to France.

  Felipe II was thus not a villain, but a tremendously hard-working monarch with tremendously great wealth because of Castile’s taxes and the New World’s silver. As his resources expanded, so too did his strategic vision. He contended with a rebellion in the Netherlands, opposition and unrest in France, Turkish assaults in the Mediterranean, piratical depredations in the Atlantic and Caribbean, and a feisty adversary in Elizabeth I’s England. Habsburg Spain was the first truly global power, and so Felipe had enemies everywhere. He chose to take them all on, to the lasting detriment of his Spanish subjects and of his reputation. Yet he felt he had no choice: he was steeped in dynastic thinking that impelled him to defend his rights as monarch and to protect the Catholic faith. Correcting the misunderstandings of Felipe II requires a recognition of his motivations, his many positive accomplishments, but also of his many disasters. His son, Felipe III, was but a pale shadow of the father, a king as dilettante rather than ruler.

  Felipe II (1527–98)

  Felipe was a slight, fair-haired man of below average height. He spoke quietly, and rarely displayed more emotion than a faint smile. Because of this intensely reserved outward image, he was something of a mystery to his contemporaries and to later commentators. But it is a mistake to assume that the image is the man. Felipe’s famously frigid demeanor was the wall he put up between his inner self and the public figure that, as the king, he had to be. He did feel intense emotions, perhaps above all in his love for his family, but also in the strength of his commitment to his faith. He was not the bloodless, coldly calculating sovereign, but rather strove to project an image of the king as rational, fair, and diligent. His sense of duty to his subjects, to his realm, and to his dynasty was immense, even crushing. He nearly always strove to do what he deeme
d legally and morally right by the interests of his state and his house. He venerated his father and felt bound to continue his policies and match his majesty. But Felipe (Figure 4.1) was not a battlefield commander. His brand of leadership was from behind the desk, and from there he worked harder than any other monarch of his day. It is true that his bureaucratic attention to the minutest details created massive logjams of paperwork. His indecisiveness, though, would have afflicted any prudent person faced with such weighty decisions, shifting scenarios, and scanty information. Felipe’s job was to rule the most expansive empire the world had ever seen, and in many ways he was swallowed by that job.

  Charles V gave Felipe quite explicit instructions for how to rule in a famous letter of 1543. One mark of Felipe’s sense of duty to his family is how deeply these instructions shaped the monarch he became. Charles told Felipe always to keep God highest in his mind, to listen to his most trusted advisors, not to show anger, not to offend the Inquisition, not to allow heretics into his realms, and to dispense justice without corruption. Religion really did suffuse most aspects of Felipe’s decision making. Contrary to some depictions, this did not make him either a fanatic nor the lap dog of the pope. Many rulers were swayed by religious thinking in this time, and Felipe readily bucked the papacy when he thought it necessary. But he believed that he did have a duty to God to rule justly, and by doing his duty to his God he was also doing his duty to his subjects. Felipe’s meticulousness certainly could become counterproductive micro-management. As one example, while he was absorbed in the preparations for the 1588 Armada, he was also corresponding with the pope about how the clergy in Spain dressed.

  FIGURE 4.1 Felipe II, by Sofonisba Anguissola (after 1570). In the collection of the Museo del Prado. Image courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library.

  Felipe’s bureaucratic, desk-bound style stemmed partly from his personality, since he was generally uncomfortable dealing with people. He preferred instead to deal with papers and a small circle of people he knew he could trust. That he was quite firmly rooted in Spain (which he never left after the age of 32), with a more stationary capital in Madrid, grew from his style of rule. It also contributed greatly to the Habsburgs becoming more Castilian, which they had not truly been under the cosmopolitan Charles V. This “Castilianization” of Felipe was actually an intentional plan through the first decade or two of his life. Partly to rebut earlier allegations that the dynasty was “too foreign,” Felipe stayed in Spain until he was 21 and was always surrounded by Spanish advisors. One outcome of this process was actually that Felipe became “too Castilian,” since he spent very little time in his other realms and did not know them well. Related is the fact that he only learned to speak Castilian fluently.

  That Felipe was almost constantly engaged in wars major and minor stems not from any Castilian imperialism. In fact, he hardly ever waged a war for conquest, and his policies cannot legitimately be called expansionist. As a Venetian ambassador observed, in words that accurately expressed the king’s own thinking, Felipe sought “not to wage war so he can add to his kingdoms, but to wage peace so that he can keep the lands he has.”1 Here again Felipe’s actions are attuned to the instructions Charles left him, namely to keep the dynastic territorial complex intact, and not to permit heresy in those lands. These goals led Felipe to define his (and hence his monarchy’s) interests in ways that could provoke wars, and which indeed could seem aggressive to his opponents. He fought so often because his interests stretched farther across Europe than any other sovereign’s of his time, and like any other sovereign he tried to defend them. But neither Felipe nor Spain itself were particularly militaristic.

  Moreover, Felipe’s empire was not merely “Spanish.” It was actually a collaboration between Castilians, Catalans, Portuguese, Dutch, Italians, Germans, and others. Though Castile was the home turf of his monarchy, and supplied a large portion of revenues and manpower, Castile itself was an insufficient base for all the major actions Felipe undertook beyond Spain’s borders. Accordingly, the power of Spain during Felipe’s reign, while much greater than that of any other European state in this time, was never as great as hindsight and Felipe’s propagandizing opponents made it out to be. Some of those major actions were quite ludicrously audacious given the limitations of Felipe’s power—but they nonetheless stand for good or ill as the signs of the much-feared (though never realistic) Habsburg hegemony of Europe. The boldness and size of his projects very closely correspond to the income from American silver. An increase in silver inflows in the middle 1560s gave Felipe the means to respond with a military crackdown in the Netherlands, and then in the 1580s another large silver inflow gave impetus to such projects as the first, famous Armada of 1588, as well as the subsequent, forgotten ones. In addition to these major conflicts, there were also ongoing skirmishes particularly with English, French, or Dutch pirates. Though Felipe’s foreign policy seems dominated by disasters, particularly in the Netherlands and with the failed Armada, there were some notable successes too, as with Lepanto and the acquisition of Portugal.

  The confrontation between Felipe’s monarchy and Muslims—whether the Ottoman Turks or the morisco population within Spain—was a frequent point of concern for the first 20 years of his reign. The concern was justified, since the Turks regarded Spain as their chief adversary in Europe, and utilized a variety of means to weaken it. For instance, the problems with the North African pirates that had plagued Charles V continued under Felipe. These pirates, who were allied with the Ottomans, raided Felipe’s lands unremittingly, whether in Iberia or Italy. In 1561, for example, they assaulted shipping around Naples, in 1566 off Málaga. They made raids into the interior of Andalusia, too, carrying off thousands of captives. In response to such attacks, Felipe began a long-term plan of building up the Spanish navy. Spanish naval power in the Mediterranean faced a serious test in 1565 when the Turks launched an all-out attack on the Knights of St. John on Malta. The victory of the Christian powers in this battle was a minor miracle. There was also the serious challenge of the Islamic population inside Spain itself. These people were the remnants of the former Moorish kingdoms that had ruled in the peninsula for hundreds of years until 1492. The moriscos ostensibly had converted to Christianity, but in very many cases they continued practicing Islam and even speaking Arabic.

  Though their existence had been begrudgingly tolerated, with the growth of the Turkish threat in the western Mediterranean the Muslims within Spain came to be seen as a serious security problem. This was not without reason, since some among the moriscos did serve as Turkish spies or coordinate raids for the North African pirates. There was even a scheme associated with the attack on Malta to use them as a foothold from which to attack Spain itself. These fears led to a campaign of repression that forbid the use of Arabic, traditional dress, and even customs such as their baths. The moriscos rose in revolt from 1568–70 in what is known as the rebellion of the Alpujarras, the latter a name for villages in the mountains of Granada that were an epicenter of the revolt. Some 25,000 of this population had taken to arms by 1569. Suppressing the revolt proved difficult because most of Felipe’s armies were active in the Netherlands. Since he did not have a standing army in Spain, he had to resort to conscription in the form of the old feudal levy, which raised only 16,000 troops instead of the 40,000 he had hoped for. Finally he called in his half-brother Don Juan de Austria, who led a systematic, brutal campaign, at one point killing the entire population of the town of Galera, some 2,500 people including women and children. Starting in 1570 more than 100,000 of the surviving moriscos began to be resettled elsewhere in Spain, dispersing them away from the areas nearest the coast. The final solution to Spain’s morisco population came only in 1609, during the reign of Felipe III, when they were actually expelled from Spain.

  The Alpujarras revolt also played into the major engagement with the Turks during Felipe’s reign, the naval battle of Lepanto. The Turks had taken Cyprus from Venice in 1570. The Venetians then beseeched Pope Pius V
for help, who in turn beseeched Felipe. Felipe had to be convinced, and he was not enthusiastic for a crusade against Islam. But in 1571 the papacy, Venice, and Spain formed the Holy League, which that spring began assembling a huge fleet with the original intention of retaking Cyprus. Don Juan was put in supreme command, in which task he performed admirably despite being only 24 years old. In October 1571, off the Greek coast at Lepanto, the Turkish and Christian fleets met: Don Juan had approximately 207 ships, 70,000 men and superior firepower, while the Turks had around 250 ships and 75,000 men. Miguel de Cervantes fought in this battle, which proved a historic rout: the Turks lost around 150 of their ships and some 30,000 men killed or wounded, compared to the Holy League’s loss of 17 ships and some 7,500 men. The great victory set off a wave of jubilation throughout Christendom, and began a myth that Lepanto had conclusively annihilated Turkish sea power. In fact, the Ottomans rebuilt their fleet by the next year, and the Christian powers never managed to retake Cyprus. Nonetheless, by the later 1570s Spain and Turkey basically agreed to disengage. Turkey turned eastward to its fight with Persia. Spain turned west and north to the Atlantic and the Netherlands, and the Mediterranean was no longer a major theater of conflict.