And so Castile and Aragon got their new joint king, but not one envisaged in the original plan. Carlos, son of Juana the Mad and Philip the Handsome, was a Habsburg, born in Flanders, educated at the Flemish court, and could barely speak a word of any of the Hispanic languages. It wouldn’t take long for the Spanish to express their disquiet.
Carlos was sixteen when finally he arrived in Spain as king. One of the first things he did was become enamoured of Ferdinand’s widow, and his own step-grandmother, Germana, who soon fell pregnant by the lusty young Habsburg. Carlos also brought most of his Flemish courtiers with him to the Peninsula, who proceeded to treat the new kingdom as a cash cow and did everything they could to steal as much as possible. As they felt little or no attachment to the lands of Castile and Aragon, such behaviour is perhaps not surprising. Carlos was the most powerful person on earth: Holy Roman Emperor, heir to the Habsburg territories scattered over Europe, lord of most of the Iberian Peninsula and now master of new and exciting lands being explored and claimed by Spanish Conquistadors on the other side of the Atlantic. But local Spanish issues quickly brought him back down to the ground.
Ordinary Spaniards quickly grew unhappy with the rapacious new court, and two simultaneous but unconnected rebellions rose up: movements known as the Comuneros in Castile, and the Germanías in Valencia. Of the two the Comuneros were the more threatening, garnering a large amount of support in the largest and richest of the Spanish kingdoms. And by declaring the imprisoned Juana as their rightful monarch, the Comuneros could claim a certain legitimacy for their cause. Several aristocratic families whose noses had been put out of joint by the arrival of Carlos and his foreign retinue sided with the rebels, and the conflict turned into another civil war to join the long list of Spanish civil wars.
But both the Comuneros and Germanías revolts failed by demanding too much. They became social movements, dominated by leaders from lower classes demanding more rights for their own kind. As a result, support for either cause began to dwindle: not enough people at the time were in favour of social revolution. And Carlos, realising that Spanish pride had been hurt by his foreign airs and ways, took the necessary measures to make sure he was better loved: Flemish courtiers were sent back home, the king made efforts to learn Castilian, and he generally went ‘native’, developing an apparently genuine love for the Peninsula which was underlined by his eventual decision to retire to the Extremaduran countryside at Yuste when, worn out from ruling half the planet, he abdicated in favour of his son Philip II.
But Carlos (I of Spain, but V of the Holy Roman Empire) never ceased to be a foreign king, linked through his lineage to the traditional Habsburg territories and the geographical centre of Europe. And it was here, with the rise of Protestantism, that the running sore which would define so much of Spain’s ‘Golden Age’ would open. Catholicism, as mentioned before, was the one unifying and identifying factor within the Peninsula, the belief system which made a political, as opposed to a purely geographical, Spain a possibility. Carlos was not the ‘King of Spain’, because no such kingdom existed, but he was the inheritor of a specifically Catholic realm which was already far into the process of ‘purifying’ itself and ridding the Peninsula of Jews, and, eventually, Muslims. So, given that Carlos was also leader of nations experimenting with new versions of Christianity, it was inevitable that Spain should be dragged into the religious wars which now ignited in the Old World. Some historians lament the arrival of Carlos and the Habsburgs, suggesting that without them Spain might have remained apart from the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and have enjoyed the wealth from the Americas for herself rather than seeing it wasted on long-running and highly costly military campaigns. But given her already intense obsession with the imposition of Catholic orthodoxy, it is hard to imagine the Spanish kingdoms remaining on the sidelines while Lutheranism and Protestantism took root in other parts of Europe. Christian Spain had long considered itself at the heart of the military wing of the Catholic faith, a role constructed over many centuries of ‘Reconquest’ and battling against the Moors. It was a part symbolised succinctly in the manifestation of the country’s patron saint, Santiago, as a warrior. Battle-hardened and devout, Spanish soldiers would inevitably have been key players in the European religious wars which dominated the sixteenth century. Fighting in the name of Rome was all they knew; the battlefield simply shifted now from their own southern borders to northern Europe, and the other side of the world.
Nevertheless, the subsequent conflicts in the Netherlands, in Germany, in France and across the Mediterranean against the Turks, put Spain under enormous pressure. To be the guardian of Catholic orthodoxy was expensive, bloody and exhausting. No sooner had treasure ships arrived at Seville from the Americas than their booty was absorbed to pay the debts brought on by multiple wars. Spain herself saw relatively little of the famed gold and silver from across the Atlantic. She was open to the world, as Carlos’s new motto for the country showed: the Nec plus ultra of antiquity which had insisted there was ‘nothing beyond’ the Strait of Gibraltar, was changed to the defiant Plus ultra – ‘Yes, there is something beyond.’ But the price for this new world-dominating role was very high.
As the situation worsened, so the strain began to be seen particularly in Castile, which paid the largest amounts in tribute and provided the majority of fighting men required for the armed forces. From being the most populated part of the Peninsula, with its rich merino wool trade, the kingdom became increasingly depopulated over the sixteenth century, the wool markets shrinking in size and importance. Wealth may have existed in great abundance on the far side of the world, but with religious wars raging on many different fronts at the same time, a black hole had effectively been created which could never be filled.
By the mid-sixteenth century, Spain was becoming stuck in an international quagmire with no easy way out. Carlos’s response was to take early retirement. Philip, his son, would have to sort out the mess.
1 Margaret, his wife, went on to give birth to a stillborn daughter. She later married Philibert II of Savoy, who also died after three years of marriage, at which point Margaret tried and failed to commit suicide by throwing herself out of a window. Other possible husbands were suggested, including the widowed Henry VII of England, but Margaret refused ever to marry again. She later became regent of the Netherlands, in which position she is generally regarded to have excelled.
HUMAN RIGHTS
Was a Spaniard one of the founding fathers of the international human rights movement?
In 1550, two of the different versions of Santiago – the Slayer and the Seeker – met at Valladolid to hold a debate. The first was represented by a Cordoban philosopher named Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the second by a Dominican from Seville, the Bishop of the Mexican diocese of Chiapas, Bartolomé de las Casas. The debate was arranged by order of Carlos V and the question on the table was, how to treat the indigenous populations of the New World.
Less than sixty years after Columbus’s discovery, the Spanish territories in the Americas had grown enormously. Spain was the most powerful nation in the world, a great empire stretching over several continents; nothing quite like it had ever existed before. And the subject peoples it had conquered had suffered enormously through warfare, disease and enslavement. De las Casas had seen this first-hand and had written about it in his A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. He had been one of the early colonisers in Mexico, but then turned his back on his former life in the face of growing moral doubts over the treatment of local peoples. He had taken these doubts directly to the emperor himself, advocating much gentler treatment.
Carlos’s reply was to arrange the debate.
The Amerindians, de las Casas argued, had souls. As such they should not be enslaved. Nor should they be forced to adopt Catholicism. Rather – in the way that Cardinal Talavera had argued following the conquest of Moorish Granada – they should be encouraged through argument and good works to com
e to the Christian fold voluntarily. Above all, their mistreatment by Spanish colonisers should stop.
The Pilgrim – gentle, seeking, finding new territories, seeing things in a new way – had made his pitch.
But the Slayer now had his say.
Sepúlveda had never been to the Americas. But like his fellow Cordoban of four hundred years before, Averroes, he was well versed in the theories of Aristotle. And the Philosopher made everything clear in Book I of his Politics:
Those whose condition is such that their function is the use of their bodies and nothing better can be expected of them, those, I say, are slaves of nature. It is better for them to be ruled thus.
What’s more, Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism were proof that Mexicans were not as ‘human’ as the Spanish. Which meant that they should continue to be enslaved while useful, and killed when not.
The debate continued for several months. Both sides claimed victory. And on the ground little really changed. Spain continued its conquests, further extending its territories and bringing new populations under its rule.
But a precedent had been set: for the first time a colonial power had asked itself a moral question about the people it was subjugating. Other European empires would take centuries to do the same, some never doing so at all.
De las Casas became celebrated for raising the question in the first place. There are those who would have him made a saint. Yet he is controversial: at first, his proposed solution to the manpower shortage caused by freeing Amerindian slaves was to import new slaves from Africa instead. Later in life he changed his position, insisting that Christ’s message was true to all humans. Yet some blame him for kickstarting the mass importation of Sub-Saharans to the New World. Others say the African slave trade was already under way and that de las Casas’s early arguments made no difference.
So is he Santiago the Seeker? Or actually another Slayer?
The two manifestations of the saint wrap around each other so tightly it is not always easy to untangle the one from the other. As if they were one and the same thing.
Which, of course, they are.
THE INSIDER
Carlos was a man of the flesh, a lusty, gluttonous warrior who found relief from his arduous imperial duties in delighting in sensual pleasures. His heir, Philip II, could hardly have been more different, a cripplingly shy and punctilious control freak who hid himself behind the mountains of paperwork now being produced by his increasingly bureaucratic domains. Philip had inherited the larger share of the Habsburg territories from his father – Spain and its American conquests, as well as southern Italy and Sicily, Milan and the Netherlands. He was master of a vast empire, yet by nature he was a micro-manager, indecisive, stubborn and superstitious. He marked the turning point in the country’s international fortunes: from the world’s most powerful nation (even while it had yet to become a ‘nation’ itself), Spain embarked on a slow, staggered decline during Philip II’s reign.
Unlike Carlos, Philip was Spanish-born and Spanish-speaking, and his successes as monarch were mostly limited to domestic, Iberian, affairs. Under him, Spain – still more a geographical than a political reality – took further, if hesitant, steps towards becoming a united country. He established Madrid as a de facto capital, breaking with the tradition of moving the administrative centre around the various regions in order to keep everyone happy. He subdued a rebellion by Moriscos in the Alpujarra area south of Granada, a final whip in the tail of the centuries-long Reconquista wars and the last battle between Moors and Christians. Likewise, a revolt by the Aragonese was successfully put down. And in a coup de main Philip managed to claim the crown of Portugal for himself in 1580 when his nephew, King Sebastian, died without an heir. For the first time since the Visigoths, the whole Peninsula was united under one Catholic monarch.
Philip made history, yet his success was an illusion. His Iberian realms were still separate kingdoms with independent administrations. The revolts he quashed were reminders that holding the many different parts of Spain together was still the near-impossible juggling act that it had always been, no matter who was in charge or what religion they professed. Where one challenge to central authority was put down, another would soon take its place, and within sixty years Portugal would break away again, while Catalonia would simultaneously attempt to do the same. At this moment of its greatest ‘unity’, Spain remained an ever fragile concept.
If Philip’s record domestically was mixed, on the international level it was disastrous. Victory over the Turks at the great sea battle of Lepanto in 1572 (in which Cervantes was wounded) was celebrated at the time as having checked Ottoman expansion westwards, yet it ultimately failed to give Spain control over the Mediterranean. Ships from Muslim ports – ‘pirate’ vessels in Spanish eyes – continued to harry Christian merchantmen for centuries to come. Meanwhile, in northern Europe, Philip engaged in further wars which brought few, if any, results, and deepened the bottomless financial pit which no amount of treasure arriving from the Americas could ever fill.
Philip’s problem was that when it came to matters of religion, he was intransigent. His contemporary, Henri of Navarre, was pragmatic enough to swap his Protestantism for Catholicism in order to take the French capital and thereby end his country’s religious civil war. ‘Paris,’ in Henri’s words, ‘was worth a mass.’ And so he became Henri IV of France and founder of the Bourbon dynasty.
For Philip, such an attitude was anathema. ‘I would rather lose my states than rule over heretics,’ he declared. God had shown his pleasure with Spanish militant Catholicism by granting victory over the Moors. Defeating the new face of heresy, Protestantism, was merely a continuation of a divinely given role. And as head of state, Philip had a specific part to play.
The result was that Spain became entangled in long-running conflicts with northern European Protestant states that drained its resources. England had briefly been an ally when Philip had married his first cousin once removed, Queen Mary. But Mary died childless, and when her half-sister Elizabeth acceded to the throne and made England Protestant again, the two countries were set on a collision course. The Spanish Armada of 1588, with its one hundred and thirty ships intent on invading England and conquering it for the Catholic faith, turned into a well-known disaster, and a huge shock for Spain.1 Philip’s response was to send two more armadas over the coming years, convinced that England would eventually fall. But made up largely of lighter ships suited to the calmer waters of the Mediterranean, they fell foul of more virulent Atlantic conditions.
The defeat of the Armada and the actions against Spanish ports and ships by el pirata Drake, as Sir Francis is known to this day in Spain, still rankle, centuries on. But the really damaging war during Philip’s reign was the conflict against the Dutch Protestants, heretics within his own territories who threatened the Catholic hegemony of his kingdoms. The Dutch Revolt would become ‘Spain’s Vietnam’, a long, costly and eventually unsuccessful war against a native population intent on expelling a foreign superpower. For decades Spanish tercios – among the most feared troops in Europe at the time – would make their way from the Peninsula across Philip’s lands in Italy northwards to combat the rebels. The result was a bloody quagmire, a conflict Spain could never win yet from which it could not extricate itself; the more men, money and national pride it poured in, the deeper it got stuck. The Dutch wars emptied Spain of its wealth, contributing to three bankruptcies during Philip’s reign. And it also drained her of a vital energy which only recently had made her the most powerful country on earth. The result was defeat: Holland and her Protestant allies eventually gained their independence, but at the expense of a running sore which continued to bleed through the seventeenth century, long after Philip had gone.
In 1598, when Philip died, Spain still had an empire, it had taken tentative steps towards becoming a politically unified nation, and it was still a player in Europe, albeit a diminished one. Yet beaten in its struggles against the Dutch and the English, st
ill threatened by the Turks, and increasingly isolationist as the Inquisition and Counter-Reformation stifled intellectual curiosity, it was listing, a country already in decline. The seventeenth century would tell the tale of its final collapse, while simultaneously sowing the seed of its eventual unification as a country.
1 An interesting side effect of Spanish ships smashing against Atlantic rocks during the ill-fated Armada voyage was that, according to legend, the Irish were introduced for the first time to a New World food found on board – potatoes.
CAPITAL CAUSE
It’s freezing in winter and suffocatingly hot in summer. The river which passes close by (and which doesn’t even run through the centre) is unnavigable and barely warrants the name, being little more than a muddy stream. It has no great cathedral – even the locals are underwhelmed by the one they have – nor an abundance of monumental architecture to boast of. And sitting at some 650 metres (c. 2,100 feet) above sea level, it is, by most measurements, at mountain height. Yet Madrid is Spain’s capital, and is at once a symbol of the unity and division within the country.
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