Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  It contains a villainous populace, which can easily be excited to violence, and the more it is pressed, the harder it resists. For this reason, actions which would be sufficient to make the inhabitants of any other province submit to orders of any kind from above, only succeed in exasperating the inhabitants of this province, and in making them insist more stubbornly on the proper observance of their laws.39

  Extreme weather early in 1640 made the Catalans even more ‘villainous’. Following a meagre harvest the previous year, no rain fell on the fields of the hinterland in spring 1640, producing a drought so intense that the authorities declared a special holiday to allow the entire population to make a pilgrimage to a local shrine to pray for water – one of only four such occasions recorded in the past five centuries. Since still no rain fell, unless the villagers could exclude the troops, they faced starvation; but when Santa Coloma de Farners, a hamlet about 60 miles northeast of Barcelona, refused orders to quarter an approaching regiment of Castilians, the viceroy sent the same magistrate who had arrested Tamarit to intimidate them. Even loyalists felt that the viceroy had made a serious error in choosing Monrodón – a man ‘irritable by nature, hasty, arrogant, proud’ – to perform a task that required ‘guile rather than force’. They were soon proved right. On 30 April 1640, Monrodón ordered the arrest of any civilian found carrying a firearm; the villagers responded by chasing Monrodón and his officials into the local inn, which they then set on fire, chanting ‘Now you'll pay for putting Tamarit in prison.’ Monrodón and most of those inside died in the flames.40

  The villagers of Santa Coloma de Farners now rang the church bells to summon aid, and hundreds of armed men soon stood ready to protect the community. Their resistance forced a regiment travelling behind the Castilians to make a sudden detour and they took their revenge on the next village on their route, Ruidarenes, where they burnt down several houses and the church. Meanwhile, outraged by the murder of Monrodón, the viceroy ordered his troops to march back to Santa Coloma de Farners and burn it to the ground. This they accomplished on 14 May, leaving the church and most homes in ashes. For good measure, they also destroyed the rest of Ruidarenes.

  That same day, the local bishop excommunicated the troops for sacrilege, and shouts of ‘Long live the king and death to the traitors’ soon rang out as the inhabitants of some 50 villages attacked any soldiers still billeted in their area and plundered the property of royal officials and loyal inhabitants (Fig. 26). A little rain now fell, saving the harvest, but everyone feared what might happen when the segadors entered Barcelona for their annual hiring fair on 7 June 1640, Corpus Christi Day. Santa Coloma received several warnings about his safety, including one from a holy woman who predicted that ‘he would die on Corpus Christi’. Nevertheless on 6 June, on orders from Madrid, the viceroy sent the squadron of galleys that normally defended Barcelona, manned by most of the city's garrison, to fight the French. The preconditions for disaster were now all in place.41

  That night hundreds of segadors, some armed with muskets and others carrying firewood, entered the city under cover of darkness, and on the morning of the Corpus holiday circulated among the crowds amid occasional shouts of ‘Long live Catalonia’ and ‘Death to the Castilians’. Then one group sighted a servant of the late Miquel Joan Monrodón, who fled into his house with the segadors in hot pursuit. When a shot from within killed one of them, his comrades used their firewood to burn down the door, broke into the house and sacked it. Others now sought out the hated judges, who fled from one convent to another seeking sanctuary while the crowd burned their possessions and papers, smashed the windows and walls of their homes and even chopped down the trees in their gardens. The rioters spared only religious images (although they burned the frames), and when some priests tried to intervene, they angrily replied that the judges ‘had watched the Castilians burn churches and sacraments’, and although ‘they could have stopped it, they had done nothing; it was thus reasonable that they should pay for it’.42

  When the crowd – by now some 3,000 strong – came under fire from the house of a government minister, they chased its occupants to the royal shipyards, where the viceroy had taken refuge. With no galleys and a depleted garrison, the segadors soon forced an entry, seized the weapons stored in the royal arsenal, and fanned out to search for those who had fired on them. The viceroy tried to escape along the beach, but two of the pursuers intercepted him and stabbed him to death.

  ‘While these events were taking place in the shipyard,’ wrote an eyewitness, ‘the segadors went about Barcelona with such fury, cries and loud noises that it seemed as though the world was coming to an end or as though the city had become the very stage of the Last Judgment’. The city militia, drawn from Barcelona's middle class which also resented the ceaseless demands of the central government, did not intervene – indeed, according to one of the judges, some militiamen said ‘“We don't have to fight against our brothers” and mixed with [the rioters] like friends’.43 One terrified official complained that ‘No one was secure in his house’ because the rioters ‘seemed possessed by the Devil’. They dragged Castilians who had taken sanctuary out of the churches and into the streets, where they murdered them. An English visitor dared not leave his house for fear of being ‘taken for a Castellano: it is not safe to speak Spanish, such is the inveterate hatred against them’.44 Similar violence occurred in other communities of Catalonia.

  26. Catalonia in revolt, May 1640.

  Even before the ‘Corpus de Sang’ in Barcelona on 7 June 1640, a large part of Catalonia was in arms, with both royal troops and outraged peasants involved in confrontations that in some cases culminated in the burning down of churches.

  News of the Corpus de Sang (‘Bloody Corpus’, as it became known) stunned Philip. ‘This is something the like of which has never been seen in any province or kingdom of the world,’ he wrote. ‘If Our Lord does not come to our aid with a rapid settlement, or else with a general peace, Spain will be in a worse state than it has been in for many centuries.’ The British ambassador in Madrid agreed: ‘It will be now a very hard matter to compose’ the revolt, he opined, ‘without discomposing the king's authority’, adding archly, ‘which might have been prevented if the business had been undertaken in time’. Nevertheless, at least one critic at court believed that Olivares could still have pacified Catalonia simply ‘by leaving it alone; by not always harrying its inhabitants’ and ‘by using temperate words and temperate actions’.45 But the count-duke knew that if he bowed to Catalan pressure and suspended recent taxes and billeting demands, other parts of the Monarchy would demand the same.

  He also knew that the Catalan cause was far from united. Many nobles remained loyal to the king; and although a few bishops joined the rebels, most did not. Likewise, although most monks and friars defied Madrid, most nuns did not. Above all, each community and each social group possessed its own agenda and many exploited the general disorder to settle old scores. In the countryside, the landless rural underclass attacked those who exploited their labour; in the cities ordinary citizens threatened the oligarchs who regulated their lives and monopolized office. Meanwhile bandits robbed and murdered anyone who crossed their path, and the feud between nyerros and cadells revived. The Diputats lamented ‘how the principality tears itself apart with domestic passions’, and worried about ‘the grave consequences if these civil wars persist’.46

  In August 1640 Olivares issued a declaration that accused the Catalans of treason and instructed the marquis of Los Vélez, from an eminent Catalan family, to mobilize an army to restore royal control. He also announced that the king would hold a Catalan Corts and restore ‘in the principality the free exercise of justice, which has been violated and made impossible by certain wicked and seditious persons’. Almost immediately, the southern town of Tortosa staged a counter-revolution, seizing the leading rebels and hanging 15 of them. Loyalists in the principality now possessed a rallying point that made possible the growth of two ‘parties’ in
Catalonia. The rebels cited the brutality and sacrilege of the king's troops in the past, and the chaos that would doubtless attend their return, while the loyalists stressed the danger of anarchy posed by the uprising – but their cause suffered a setback with the publication of some of Olivares's intemperate letters to the late viceroy, expressing his contempt for the ‘Constitutions’ and suggesting that Madrid really did intend to destroy Catalan autonomy.47

  In September the Diputació summoned some 250 clerics, nobles and burgesses to Barcelona, where they drew up a formal refutation of Olivares's charge of treason, asked for support from Valencia, Aragon and Mallorca, and took steps to mobilize resistance. Meanwhile Claris secretly requested French protection for a possible ‘Catalan Republic’. His envoys met with a cool reception because (in the words of France's chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu) ‘most disorders of this type are normally a brush fire'; but eventually Richelieu instructed a relative, Bernard de Duplessis-Besançon, to travel to Barcelona and promise the Catalans that France would supply gunpowder, muskets and artillery as well as 6,000 French infantry and 2,000 cavalry in return for three guarantees: that the munitions would never be used against France; that the Catalans would never make a separate peace with Philip; and that they would hand over three ports and some hostages. Even after an agent of the Diputació signed a draft treaty conceding all these points, Richelieu remained sceptical: the Catalans ‘have no leader of much stature, and no religious disagreement’ with Castile, he noted, and so he doubted that their resistance would last long.48

  The cardinal's caution was understandable – albeit ill-founded. Although at this stage few Catalans contemplated reneging on their oath to obey Philip IV, they were unwilling to fight for him. Olivares's policies had alienated every major social group in Catalonia. The nobles resented the appointment of non-Catalans to lucrative military commands and the repeated demands for military service without pay or reward; the clergy resented the appointment of non-Catalans to plum posts and the imposition of heavy taxes; while the town oligarchs resented the ceaseless pressure from Madrid to provide loans which they knew would never be repaid and to implement policies, such as billeting, which earned them the hatred of their citizens. The Diputació now administered an oath of loyalty to the new regime – over 300 citizens took the oath on the first day; over 1,000 had done so within a week – and began to raise both troops and money. They also summoned a special committee of theologians to debate the legality of their policies (and published its favourable findings); and commissioned and distributed pamphlets depicting themselves as lawful subjects enforcing a contractual relationship with their ruler, and as the ‘avenging hand of God’ against the royal troops who had profaned His churches. One tract, the Universal Description of Catalonia by Francesc Martí i Viladamor, a lawyer, not only listed each occasion on which Olivares had breached the ‘Constitutions’ but also suggested for the first time that the principality might secede from the Spanish Monarchy.49

  Claris and his colleagues sent copies of these publications to Madrid, Naples, Valencia, Zaragoza and other outposts of the Monarchy, as well as to Paris and Rome, where they soon won support for the rebellion. As soon as news of the 'revolution in Catalonia’ arrived in the Dutch Republic, the States-General set up a special committee to organize support, recognizing their ‘common interest’ with all other rebels against Philip IV – but only France actually sent assistance, and by the end of 1640 it numbered only 3,000 foot and 800 horse.50 Likewise, in Barcelona, a public bond issue raised 1.2 million ducats with purchasers from among all sections of the population – but, even with taxes on the clergy and increased excise duties, that sum sufficed to pay only 8,000 soldiers. Even the strategic advantages conferred by geography seemed unlikely to protect the principality against the royal army of 23,000 infantry, 3,100 cavalry and 24 artillery pieces that the marquis of Los Vélez reviewed on 7 December 1640, just six months after the Corpus de Sang.

  At first the campaign went very well for the king. Cambrils, the first major stronghold in the path of his army, resisted for only three days before it surrendered 'at discretion’. Although Los Vélez pardoned the French defenders, he argued that ‘neither oath nor word oblige the king when dealing with his vassals’, and therefore hanged several Catalan officers while his troops massacred about 500 other defenders in cold blood. This example of strategic terror encouraged several other towns to surrender.51 The royal army lived on the ample supplies found in these captured towns, especially Tarragona (captured on 23 December), supplemented by food and munitions received by sea. The revolt of the Catalans seemed doomed – until news arrived of a revolution in Lisbon.

  The Revolt of Portugal

  The Portuguese rebellion – the only one in mid-seventeenth century Europe to achieve permanent success – originated in 1634, when three Portuguese gentlemen (fidalgos) visited the Royal Armoury in Madrid and viewed with disgust the collection of trophies secured when Spanish forces invaded their country to enforce the union of crowns in 1580. There and then they took an oath to restore Portugal's independence, but by 1637 only five fidalgos had joined the plot: they therefore failed to exploit the revolt in Évora, and many other places, that year (pages 263–4 above). Duke John of Bragança, Portugal's premier aristocrat, also stood aloof. He possessed enviable fiscal, ecclesiastical and military resources and, unique among Europe's aristocracy, he could create nobles himself. He maintained a permanent representative in Rome as well as Madrid and closely monitored political developments, but his principal political aim was ‘conservation’: to maintain and consolidate what he already owned. He scrupulously avoided any entanglement that could put his inheritance at risk. He lent full-hearted support to the central government against the rebellion of Évora; and when, in 1638, Cardinal Richelieu offered to send French troops if he rebelled (and threatened to support a rival claimant to the Portuguese throne if he did not), the duke did nothing.52

  Nevertheless in 1639 Arthur Hopton, the British ambassador in Madrid, predicted that the ‘unquietness’ of Portugal ‘is not yet settled, the minds of the people being as ill-disposed as ever’. He believed that only the improvidence of the nobles, whom royal favour shielded from bankruptcy, stood in the way of another rebellion.53 Olivares shared this analysis and, in the wake of the Évora riots, summoned 80 members of the Portuguese elite (though not Bragança) to Madrid – ostensibly to advise him on how to improve relations between the two kingdoms but in effect to keep them under surveillance. He did not seem to realize that removing them from the kingdom weakened, rather than strengthened, government control.

  Meanwhile two of Olivares's henchmen – Miguel de Vasconcelos, the principal minister in Lisbon, and his brother-in-law Diogo Soares, secretary for Portuguese affairs in Madrid – established a stranglehold on the administration of Portugal. They controlled all patronage, packed the administration with their relatives and clients, and sold offices and titles of nobility to the highest bidder. In addition, despite virulent anti-Semitic feeling in the kingdom, they protected the ‘New Christian’ bankers on whose loans Philip's armies and navies depended. Despite widespread hostility (and an assassination attempt), Vasconcelos and Soares managed to marginalize all their rivals, but they remained dangerously isolated. As Vasconcelos warned his brother-in-law in September 1640, ‘anything might provoke a great conflagration’:

  Truly, I do not know how to isolate the seditious without provoking a storm, because even exiling them would create a scandal. Should we get His Majesty to summon them? It has already been done and they did not obey. To announce that His Majesty will grant those who go [to Catalonia] the land of those who refuse to go would only increase the frustration … I tell you the truth, dear colleague: I don't know what to do.54

  Vasconcelos's misgivings were well founded. Few Portuguese now saw any benefit in the union with Castile; nor did vassals living overseas. When a new viceroy of India arrived at Goa early in 1640 he found the entire population ‘disheartened’.
The ‘constant presence of the Dutch naval squadrons over the past four years’ and the ‘lack of relief from Portugal’ had paralyzed trade and led to the loss of many outposts in Sri Lanka. Worse, the Dutch had laid siege to Melaka, the key to all seaborne trade between south and east Asia, and the viceroy lacked the resources to save it. Moreover, in Japan, the shogun had just expelled the Portuguese and forbade them to trade further. Although Philip was not responsible for this setback, he refused all requests for Portuguese Macao to trade directly with Spanish Manila – a measure that would have provided some relief to the exposed outpost.55 The Portuguese settlers in Brazil were even more ‘disheartened’. In June 1640 the leading citizens of its capital, Salvador, wrote an urgent letter begging Philip, their ‘father, king and lord’, to send help because their colony was about to collapse. Because they lived ‘in a faraway place, persecuted for so many years with the losses of war, with the robberies and cruelties of our enemies’, the colonists felt ‘in immediate and eminent danger’. The need to fortify their borders deprived them of the labour of their slaves on the plantations; while the native population helped the Dutch, showing them routes to the interior, killing planters and burning sugar mills. Worst of all, the ‘people from Guinea [their African slaves] seem on the brink of rebellion’. When the colonists heard about ‘the events in Catalonia’ most of them despaired, because their needs would now inevitably move further down the list of imperial priorities, causing further ‘delays in sending us relief’.56