Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Open unrest had already broken out among the Basque population of the northern lordship of Vizcaya. Although technically part of the kingdom of Castile, and so subject to the new salt tax, Vizcaya (like Catalonia) boasted powerful privileges (fueros) and a local representative assembly (the Junta General). In 1631, during a meeting of the Junta, ‘some women from the coastal areas’ denounced the local officials who tried to impose the salt tax as ‘traitors’ whom ‘it would be better to kill’. Local officials prudently suspended both the session and the salt tax. One year later, when the magistrates of Bilbao announced their intention to collect the new salt duty, the city streets filled with rioters and once more women took the lead, ‘Saying publicly to the town elite: “Now our sons and husbands will be magistrates and officials, and not the traitors who have sold our republic … And since we are all equal in Vizcaya, our estates should all be the same: it is not right that they should be rich and us poor, that they should eat chicken and we eat sardines.”’ The crowd sacked the houses of the tax collectors. News of these events appalled the king: ‘I saw these papers and this consulta with sadness,’ he scribbled on the dossier forwarded by his council, ‘to see in Spain something unheard of for centuries’.24 Nevertheless he trod warily, dispatching mediators rather than troops; and when mediation failed, he merely imposed an economic boycott on Vizcaya until 1634, when he abolished the salt monopoly and issued a general pardon.

  The Spanish Netherlands also hovered on the edge of rebellion. Its nobles resented the loss of their political influence after 1623, when the king resolved that a small committee (made up mostly of Spaniards) should discuss and decide policy, instead of the Council of State (on which the nobles sat). For a time, Habsburg military success in Germany and the Low Countries, combined with a measure of prosperity, muted criticism; but the Dutch capture of the treasure fleet in 1628 and of ‘s Hertogenbosch the following year caused widespread disillusion. A group of South Netherlands nobles now solicited military intervention from the king of France and the prince of Orange in support of an uprising; but when the Dutch invaded in June 1632, virtually nobody stirred. The conspirators therefore turned to France again and begged the duke of Aarschot, the senior nobleman in the South Netherlands, to take the lead; but he refused and opposition collapsed.

  The defiance of Catalonia, Vizcaya and the South Netherlands nobles, coupled with the success of Gustavus Adolphus and his Protestant allies in Germany, deeply depressed Olivares. ‘You get to the mountaintop,’ he wrote despondently in autumn 1632, ‘and then everything falls, everything goes wrong. We never see a comforting letter; not a dispatch arrives that does not tell us that everything is lost because we had failed to provide the money.’ Realizing that the problems arose in part from trying to fight on all fronts all the time, Spain tried to maintain the peace in at least some areas. For example, Philip instructed the viceroy of India that he must ‘always maintain peace with the Mughal’ emperor ‘since he is our very close neighbour and his power [encircles] our territories. If he is offended, he may break off with us to the great damage of’ Portuguese India, ‘which is not in a condition to resist so great an enemy’.25 Olivares saw no need for such restraint in European affairs: instead, eager to ‘die doing something’ (as he put it), he convinced his master that sending a large army overland from Italy to the Netherlands under the personal command of Philip's brother, the Cardinal-Infante Fernando, would at a stroke drive the Protestants out of southern Germany and induce the Dutch to make peace. At first the gamble worked amazingly well. In the summer of 1634 the Cardinal-Infante crossed the Alps and joined the imperial army in Germany, where together they routed the Swedes at the battle of Nördlingen: 12,000 Protestants perished and 4,000 more, including the Swedish commander, fell prisoner. The triumphant Spaniards then marched on to Brussels while the imperialists reoccupied almost all of southern Germany. Olivares could be forgiven for hailing Nördlingen as ‘the greatest victory of our times’.26

  The count-duke, nevertheless, remained in thrall to a ‘domino theory’ – that failing to defend any imperial interest would imperil the rest. He therefore argued that ‘The greatest dangers’ facing the Spanish crown were

  Those that threaten Lombardy, the Netherlands and Germany, because a defeat in any of these three is fatal for this monarchy; so much so that if the defeat in those parts is a great one, the rest of the monarchy will collapse, because Germany will be followed by Italy and the Netherlands, and the Netherlands will be followed by America; and Lombardy will be followed by Naples and Sicily, without the possibility of being able to defend either.

  The only alternative, he argued, was a pre-emptive strike on France. He planned 11 coordinated assaults from Spain, Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and convinced himself that ‘there is no possibility that the blow can misfire’.27

  Of course the blow did ‘misfire’: no state could make large-scale preparations on so many fronts and escape detection, and so Louis XIII decided to make his own pre-emptive strike. He secured a Dutch commitment to invade the Netherlands; he persuaded Sweden not to make a separate peace with the Habsburgs in Germany; and in May 1635 he sent a herald to declare war on Philip IV. At first Olivares rejoiced, since he could now present his long-prepared ‘blow’ as a response to unprovoked French aggression. Fatefully, he selected Catalonia as the principal theatre of operations, envisaging that the king would go there in person and invade France with 40,000 men.

  In the event, another disastrous harvest in Catalonia left both the army and the civilian population starving, while a French invasion of the Low Countries tied down the Spanish troops tasked with advancing on Paris. So although Olivares had mobilized (and paid for) two fleets and 150,000 soldiers, they achieved nothing. Nothing daunted, he prepared another knock-out ‘blow’ for 1636 – and this time he came close to achieving his goal. An imperial army invaded eastern France, while troops from the Netherlands captured Corbie and came within sight of Paris. Refugees from the French capital streamed southwards until pressure from the Swedish army in Germany compelled the Habsburg forces to retire.

  The capture of Corbie convinced Olivares that France could not withstand one more assault, and to fund it he again resorted to manipulating regalian rights: he recalled all copper coins and re-stamped them at three times their face value, and he introduced papel sellado (stamp duty: another recommendation of the Committee of Theologians in 1629) (Plate 11). Once again, the Little Ice Age thwarted his efforts. According to Don Francisco de Quevedo, at this stage the government's most eloquent apologist, ‘We need to light candles at midday. No one has sown crops, nor can they, and there is no bread, Most people eat barley and rye. Every day we bring in people who have died in the streets from hunger and poverty. Misery is everywhere and terminal.’ Dearth afflicted Andalusia, and flash floods destroyed half the houses in Valladolid, a former capital. Olivares saw no alternative to reducing the cost of the cheapest stamped paper required for simple transactions from 10 maravedíes to 4, ‘because poor people were not transacting any business because of the tax’.28

  So in 1637, Olivares turned once more to Catalonia for help, ordering 6,000 men to mobilize for the defence of their fatherland, citing a ‘constitution’ known as Princeps Namque; but the Catalan authorities pointed out that this measure could be invoked only when the sovereign resided in the principality. Since Philip remained in Madrid, they declared the proclamation void. When a royal army eventually invaded France, it contained troops from various parts of the Monarchy but not a single Catalan – and few Portuguese, because a serious rebellion had just broken out there.

  The Portuguese Emergency

  At the heart of the unrest lay a dispute over who should pay for the defence of Portugal's overseas empire. Already in 1624, when the Lisbon authorities begged the king to send funds to recover Bahía in Brazil from the Dutch, ministers in Madrid complained that ‘the Portuguese are by their nature grumblers and spongers’. Some also c
onsidered that ‘Wanting to wage an offensive war in the 15,000 miles of coast of Africa and Asia, where the Portuguese garrisons are split up’ was impossibly unrealistic.29 Although on this occasion Olivares relented, organizing a massive and successful Luso-Spanish relief expedition, the Dutch capture of Pernambuco five years later led to a new dispute: Portugal begged for central funds while Madrid insisted that the Portuguese pay more to defend their empire.

  Union with Spain had never been popular with some Portuguese, but until 1620 many members of the elite studied at Spanish universities, served in the Spanish Army and administration, took Castilian spouses, and wrote in Castilian. Thereafter, however, the loss of overseas trade and territory to the British and the Dutch caused widespread resentment. As Stuart Schwartz has written, ‘More than any other single issue, the colonial situation created a sense and perception of crisis in Portugal’.30 Olivares himself contributed mightily to this ‘perception of crisis’, by terminating the profitable overland trade between Portuguese Brazil and Spanish Peru, and by encouraging the Inquisition to investigate Portuguese merchants in search of any Jewish practices (over half of the Portuguese merchant class was of Jewish descent, and many of them languished in prison while the inquisitors carried out their lengthy enquiries). These developments reduced the taxes and profits of colonial trade, which provided two-thirds of the total revenues of the Portuguese crown as well as the livelihood of most of the kingdom's merchant elite.

  As in Castile, Olivares initially decided to increase revenues by manipulating regalian rights, above all by imposing the media anata and a salt monopoly, and asked the Portuguese Cortes to approve them. When they refused he forced the Vicereine, the king's cousin Margaret, duchess of Mantua, to introduce other fiscal ‘novelties’ to pay for imperial defence. On his orders she withheld one-quarter of all payments due in pensions and bond interest; extracted forced donations from the towns; required nobles to raise troops for the crown; increased excise duties by 25 per cent; and imposed a tax on meat and wine known as the real d'água, previously levied by towns (not the crown) as an emergency measure. She also prepared to impose a tax on capital and rents, and ordered officials throughout Portugal to register the possessions of every household, however poor. In August 1637 a crowd gathered outside the house of the mayor of Évora, the third largest city in the kingdom, and instructed him to stop the compilation of the new registers. When he refused, boys began to throw stones and, after a while, the crowd stormed his house and made a bonfire of his furniture. They then ransacked the houses of those compiling the registers and those who had collected other new taxes (such as the real d'água), burning their papers and possessions. Posters appeared in the streets signed by ‘Manuelinho’, formally the town's simpleton but now hailed as ‘secretary of the young people, ministers of divine justice’, that threatened the ‘tyrant Pharaoh’ (King Philip) and his agents with death because they had imposed new taxes without popular consent. Within a few weeks, some 60 places in southern Portugal had also rebelled. Some would defy Madrid for six months (Fig. 25).31

  Despite the fact that wheat at Évora hit its highest price of the decade in 1637, Olivares insisted that the opposition was ‘not about food but about the fueros’, claiming that the Portuguese ‘pay less [in taxes] than anyone else in Europe’. He added: ‘they are not asked for, nor do we want from them, revenues beyond those that pay for their own needs’. The count-duke feared that if Philip gave the rebels of Évora what they wanted, ‘not only the rest of Portugal but also all His Majesty's realms in Europe, in America and in India would want the same – and with very good reason, because they would risk nothing in doing so since they would know that one miserable town, just by rebelling, had obliged its king to agree to terms favourable to them’. Nevertheless, recognizing the need to settle the matter before either the French or the Dutch intervened, Olivares declared himself ready to offer a pardon based on ‘the most generous models; and to that end we are studying what we did in Vizcaya’.32 The king, too, could not decide how to proceed. He gave orders to prepare 10,000 troops to invade if necessary, adding that ‘I will go there, even on foot and in the depths of winter, because nothing on this earth will stop me from taking care of my vassals and saving them from perdition’. However, he recognized that ‘although these rebels are prodigal sons, they are still “sons”’, he suspended collection of the real d'água. This combination of stick and carrot worked well: by the end of 1637 all the towns in revolt had submitted and the king issued a generous pardon – which was indeed modelled on that for Vizcaya – that condemned only 5 rebels to death and another 70 to the galleys.33

  Olivares at Bay

  The pacification of Portugal temporarily salvaged Olivares's reputation, as did the repulse of a French attack on the port of Fuentarrabía in 1638; but elsewhere Spain's enemies triumphed. In Germany, French forces captured Breisach on the east bank of the Rhine, cutting the ‘Spanish Road’ used by troops and treasure travelling from Lombardy to the Netherlands. In west Africa, the Dutch took São Jorge da Minha, the oldest Portuguese colony in the Tropics; in India, they blockaded Goa, the capital of Portuguese India; in Brazil, they attacked the viceregal capital, Salvador, with a large fleet, and the citizens only just managed to repel them. Therefore, in 1639 Olivares sought to regain the initiative with two characteristically dangerous and expensive gambles. First, he appointed the relatively inexperienced count of La Torre as ‘Governor and Captain-General on sea and land of the State of Brazil’, entrusted him with ‘the largest fleet that ever entered the hemisphere’ (46 ships and 5,000 men), and instructed him to bring the Dutch to battle.34 Second, he decided to launch another invasion of France from Catalonia with the express intention of forcing the Catalans to become ‘directly involved, as up to now they seem not to have been involved, with the common welfare of the Monarchy’. He therefore sent troops raised in Castile, in Italy and in the South Netherlands to the principality, expecting the Catalans to feed, lodge and pay them. When this move provoked complaints he smugly reassured the count of Santa Coloma, his viceroy in Barcelona, ‘Better that the Catalans should complain, than that we all should weep.‘35

  25. The revolt of Portugal, 1637.

  An epidemic of revolts against Spanish rule affected almost all the southern half of the kingdom, in some areas lasting six months.

  Olivares overlooked not only the strength of Catalonia's institutions but also its geographical unsuitability for major military operations. In the north, the frontier with France ran through high mountains and arid plateaux. In the west, a barren wasteland separated Catalonia from Aragon, while in the south the vast Ebro delta prevented easy communication with Valencia: all of them geographical barriers that made it hard to launch a Habsburg invasion of France. Even within the principality, the steep hills and deep river gorges made interior communications a labyrinth. Finally, the unpredictable climate limited agricultural yields in many upland areas, leaving little surplus to feed an army even in good years. As a senior minister of Philip IV observed ruefully some years later:

  War in Catalonia is the most expensive and most difficult to sustain, because the countryside cannot provide support as other areas do, and it lacks the long-distance trade that facilitates the use of bills of exchange and letters of credit, so that there is no way to maintain armies except with ready money; and where that is lacking, since the need to eat brooks no delay, it gives rise among the soldiers to robbery, plunder, violence, rape, much licence and no discipline.36

  Contingency created a new political obstacle to Olivares's decision to turn Catalonia into the principal theatre of operations in 1638. Once every three years, a small boy stood beside a silver urn containing 524 slips of paper, each one bearing the name of an eligible member of the Corts, and drew out slips until he had the names of two clerics, two nobles and two burgesses. These six men immediately began a three-year term as the Diputació, or Standing Committee of the Corts, whose main task was to ensure that their ruler respect
ed and obeyed the ‘Constitutions’ of the principality. In 1638 the small boy drew from the silver urn a slip of paper bearing the name of Pau (or Paul) Claris, a canon of Urgell Cathedral and a trained lawyer, who became the senior clerical Diputat, followed by another bearing the name of Claris's cousin Francesc de Tamarit, who became the senior noble Diputat.37

  Unfortunately for Madrid, both the new Diputats possessed a passionate and uncompromising devotion to their native land and its ‘Constitutions’, seeing the Catalans as God's chosen people and condemning every political innovation as tyranny. Since Olivares's decision to bring the war to Catalonia was bound to produce innovations, the stage was set for political confrontation. For example, after the French captured the frontier fortress of Salces in 1639 the judges in Barcelona received orders to ignore their oath to observe the Constitutions whenever they conflicted with the needs of the army. ‘[If] the Constitutions do not allow this,’ Olivares informed Viceroy Santa Coloma, ‘then the Devil take the Constitutions’. Neither the viceroy nor the judges dared to remind the all-powerful Favourite that this attitude would surely drive the new Diputats to protest; instead, in the words of a perceptive observer, they preferred to ‘write, consult, doubt and obey’. In less than a year, almost all of them would pay for this complicity with their lives.38

  The Revolt of the Catalans

  Early in 1640, thanks to relentless pressure by the judges and naked blackmail by Santa Coloma (who promised a patent of nobility to all landholders who spent 30 days with the army), the Catalans recaptured Salces – but the victory impressed neither the royal commanders in Catalonia, preoccupied by the need to lodge and feed their victorious troops, nor Olivares, who now issued orders to raise 6,000 new troops in the principality for service in Italy. Anticipating trouble, Santa Coloma forbade any lawyer to take up complaints lodged by peasants against soldiers; and when the Diputats protested at this further innovation, Olivares ordered a magistrate, Miquel Joan Monrodón, to arrest Tamarit (the senior noble of the Diputació) and commanded the church authorities to prosecute Claris (the senior cleric). An eyewitness underscored the dangers inherent in such arbitrary policies, ‘because in truth the greatest grief of the downtrodden is removing their ability to ask for redress’, and (he continued ominously) ‘Amid the distress to which human misery reduces us, there is almost nothing men would not do’. One of Olivares's own agents in Catalonia drew the same conclusion. The principality, he remarked, ‘is very different from other provinces’.