Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Even so, the cost to Spain of continuing Philip's wars exceeded what his subjects could bear. Don Juan Chumacero, the minister responsible for law and order in Castile, had already warned the king that his vassals ‘cannot withstand the burden of their taxes, so that everything may collapse at the same time’. In particular, he feared that the towns will ‘shake off their yoke at the same time, through frustration’ at the endless demands of the tax collectors, especially when ‘the crops are generally poor’ because ‘storms have destroyed a large part of them, and what has been harvested is of poor quality’.78 Don Luis de Haro, Olivares's successor as chief minister, felt equally pessimistic when early in 1646 he went to Cádiz to get the Atlantic fleet to sea. ‘Everything comes down to difficulties and more difficulties’ because of the extreme weather, he complained. ‘Three months of snow and rain, and the harshest weather ever seen by Man’ had created ‘difficulties or rather impossibilities’, and he began to contemplate suicide: ‘Sire, I do not know how to deal with this, unless it is to drown myself.‘79

  These and other extreme climatic events ruined the harvest in 1646, and the following winter saw continual rain. According to a Madrid newspaper, ‘In Spain, and even they say in all Europe, the era of Noah's flood came again with a vengeance, because the rains that fell were so heavy and so continuous, and the rivers rose so excessively, that commerce and communication ceased between the cities, towns and villages. Many lives were at risk; many buildings collapsed.‘80 The inhabitants of the capital suffered in spite of an elaborate supply network created to feed them with grain from the vicinity, so that when the harvest failed again in 1647 (an El Niño year), Chumacero despaired:

  God has chosen to wear out these realms with every calamity – war, famine and plague – each one of which normally suffices to raise great anguish and a sense of panic … The population is very volatile and every day becomes more insolent, which leads to fears of some violence … Hunger respects no one, and so it is necessary to do all we can to help, and to avoid any decision which the people might regard as a burden.

  He concluded wearily: ‘There is no shortage of people who blame Your Majesty, saying that he does nothing, and that the council is at fault – as if we had any control over the weather!’ Other ministers reinforced Chumacero's point: ‘Hunger is the greatest enemy,’ they warned the king ‘and in many states the shortage of bread has provoked unrest that ended in sedition’.81 They knew whereof they spoke: adverse weather had just triggered riots in Andalusia.

  The ‘Green Banner’ Revolts

  In January 1647, following a disastrous harvest, a group of ‘over 70’ men armed with swords and clubs marched through the streets of Ardales, a mountain town inland from Málaga, shouting ‘Long live the king and down with the bad government!’ The marquis of Estepa, a local nobleman, mused that ‘the poverty of some inhabitants, and the hardship that causes when they pay taxes imposed on them’, and the greed of the tax collectors, ‘may perhaps have caused them to lose patience'; but he fully realized the extreme danger posed by domestic rebellion at a time when ‘we see our king so beset by enemies, with a real risk that the kingdom in which we live may be lost’. After two months of talks, Estepa therefore put together an army of retainers and, even though the rebels were heavily armed, they crumbled. Three of their leaders were hanged and 15 others fled. Estepa's firm action seems to have averted unrest elsewhere for a while.82

  In May 1647, just when the new grain harvest seemed safe, all over Andalusia ‘the weather turned very cold, even worse than the coldest January day’. Freak frosts killed the ears of grain and produced the worst harvest of the century. It also left little seed corn for the next year: according to a chronicler, ‘the peasants did not sow one third of what they should have sowed’. In March 1648 the senior magistrate of Granada, the third largest city in the kingdom, reported that he had never seen so many children begging in the street and noted that the Foundlings Hospital was full and could scarcely feed those already there. A loaf of bread, he noted, cost triple its usual price. There now followed ‘the most important urban uprising in Castile since the revolt of the Comuneros’ over a century before. A group of men armed with swords and clubs marched on the city hall shouting (again) ‘Long live the king and down with the bad government!’ Rumours circulated that ‘the people want to elect a king and declare a state of rebellion’, but instead they elected a respected gentleman, as the new chief magistrate: the pious (and aptly named) Don Luis de Paz (‘Peace’). The new leader did his best to bring to market all the grain stored in the city and thus assure bread at a reasonable price until the next harvest; but for several weeks Granada defied the central government.83 In Madrid, the king's ministers proclaimed that disorder should always be punished without mercy – but opined that the extreme circumstances of 1648 made moderation advisable. The troubles had arisen from ‘need and hunger’, and many vassals lived ‘on the edge of desperation'; therefore, the ministers reasoned, ‘because of the unfavourable disposition of the weather, we need to give way and dissimulate in order to avoid greater setbacks’. The king agreed: later that month he paraphrased these views in one of his breast-beating letters to Sor María de Ágreda. He favoured clemency, he told her, ‘because it is not possible to squeeze my vassals more, as much because of what they would suffer as because of the risk we would run of suffering more misfortunes’.84

  Philip showed no such restraint towards the duke of Híjar, a discontented courtier who aspired to be king of Aragon. The Híjar conspiracy stemmed from the succession crisis left by the death from smallpox of Crown Prince Balthasar Carlos in 1646. The prince's mother had died two years before, leaving Philip IV with only one legitimate descendant: his daughter María Teresa, aged eight. As Don Luis de Haro pointed out to his master: ‘Without a royal male to succeed, the Monarchy is in critical danger of passing under the control of foreign rulers. It is a circumstance that places the whole future of Spain at risk.’ Haro studiously avoided mentioning that this ‘circumstance’ also placed his own future at risk, since the identity of the princess's husband would determine whether or not he remained at the helm.85 A change of ministers already appealed to some courtiers – especially to those who had hoped for some reward upon the fall of Olivares but found their ambitions thwarted by the rise of Haro, the count-duke's nephew. One of those disappointed was the duke of Híjar, with extensive estates in Aragon. During the king's ‘spiritual summit’ (page 279 above), one of the prophets apparently told Híjar that he would rule Aragon after Philip IV died, leading the duke to prepare genealogies to justify his claim to the throne and to seek out ‘astrologers and mathematicians, so that they would tell him what would happen’. He also spent time – too much time – discussing with others at court possible strategies to overthrow Haro. A servant betrayed these indiscretions, and Philip immediately ordered the arrest of Híjar and others. Under torture, they revealed two separate (and incompatible) plots. Both started with the abduction of Princess María Teresa, who would be taken either to Paris to marry Louis XIV (with Catalonia and Navarre as her dowry) or to Lisbon to wed John IV's heir (with Galicia as her dowry); and both ended with the grateful princess making Híjar king of Aragon. Philip IV himself considered that ‘[what] they plotted (or wanted to plot) against my crown was so ridiculous that they seem fools rather than traitors’ – but in December 1648 he sentenced the duke to life imprisonment and executed the rest. He would face no more aristocratic rebellions.86

  The king settled for good two other issues that same year – the count of Peñaranda, Spain's chief negotiator at the Congress of Westphalia in 1648, signed treaties that ended the long-running wars in both the Netherlands and Germany (see chapter 8 above) – but he stopped short of concluding a general peace. Although Peñaranda observed pointedly, ‘I leave it to the superior intelligence and prudence of Your Majesty to consider if this is the right moment’ to settle with France or ‘to remain at war while all Europe makes peace’, the outbreak of the
Fronde revolt led Philip to miss his chance (see chapter 10 below); but the continuation of extreme weather prevented him from exploiting to the full his rival's weakness.87 In October 1648 the town council of Cádiz lamented that ‘the grape harvest of this year is ruined’ and the following month that ‘for several days the butchers have had no meat’. The following spring, torrential rains and gales battered Seville so severely in Holy Week that participants could not leave their homes to take part in processions: ‘The darkness, wind and rain on Maundy Thursday’ were the worst ever known in the city, one chronicler recorded; ‘it was as cold as January,’ wrote another. One-third of the city lay under water, making it impossible to bring in sufficient food and flour to feed the population. To complete the misery, a devastating plague epidemic carried off half the city's inhabitants before spreading eastwards, ravaging one coastal city after another. Although a strict quarantine spared the rest of Castile from the epidemic, even in Madrid in the mid-century births plunged, deaths soared, and infant mortality reached levels never equalled in early modern times (Fig. 27).88

  27. The subsistence crisis in Madrid, 1647–8.

  The registers of the parish of Santa María de la Almudena, a poor parish in the heart of Madrid, shows that burials peaked while baptisms and marriages plunged in 1647–8, just as the granaries of the capital ran out of flour.

  Deputies in the Cortes lamented ‘the calamities that surround us: kingdoms lost, vassals impoverished, wars, plague in Andalucía, locusts which destroy the fields of Castile, and other signs of the wrath of God'; while a royal minister expressed concern that the ‘complaints of the Monarchy are so numerous that I fear they may suck us under’, but then added more positively that ‘if we can capture Barcelona, stoke the fire in France, and save the Low Countries, then it will all have been worth it and all can be saved’.89 This seemed absurdly optimistic. In November 1651 the government debased Castile's copper currency in the hope of making a profit of 12 million ducats, but according to a chronicler in Seville, ‘even without the effects of the devaluation, the scarcity of all foodstuffs would have sufficed to cause dearth'; as usual, tampering with the coinage disrupted all market transactions. By April 1652, a loaf of bread cost more than a working man could earn in a week. A new wave of insurgency started in Córdoba the following month, when several hundred men from a poor parish took to the streets armed with ‘arquebuses and other weapons’ and, ‘encouraged by the women’, shouted ‘Long live the king and death to the evil government!’ They found huge quantities of grain hidden in the houses of the rich and, to avoid further disorders, the clerical and lay leaders of the city set up an interim government charged with supplying cheap bread. Desperate to avoid any confrontation that might compromise his ability to fund his wars, the king ordered the immediate dispatch of 6,000 bushels of grain from Madrid to Córdoba; and, as in the case of Granada in 1648, he accepted that the rioters had not ‘intended to forget their obedience to me’ but had rather acted through ‘the anguish caused by hunger, their lack of foresight in not laying by the wheat required for their sustenance, and the exploitation of many people who sold wheat at excessive prices’. Philip therefore pardoned them all.90

  Such leniency created a dangerous precedent: everyone could see that collective violence had ‘worked’ in Córdoba, because the city turned into an oasis of plenty. Starving people from all over Andalucía therefore arrived to consume the grain graciously provided by the king, while a wave of insurgency, known as the ‘Green Banner’ revolts, eventually affected some 20 Andalucían towns and probably involved more people than the revolt of the Catalans (Fig. 28). Seville was the first city to follow the example of Córdoba. In May 1652 rioters attacked the houses of those suspected of hoarding grain while others entered the city's arsenal and distributed armour, weapons and even artillery. Others still broke into the prisons and freed the inmates. The magistrates made haste to restore all copper coins to their former value, abolished recent royal taxes (including excise duties on food and the hated papel sellado) and proclaimed – falsely – that the king had issued a general pardon. These measures pacified the situation until, a month later, a large force of city merchants and gentlemen suddenly attacked the headquarters of the rebels. Lacking the expertise to use their artillery, they surrendered. The cycle of Green Banner revolts ended as suddenly as it had begun.91

  The Spanish Phoenix?

  Against all the odds, the year 1652 turned out well for Philip IV. His troops recaptured Dunkirk, the principal port of the South Netherlands; Casale, reputedly the most formidable fortress in Italy; and Barcelona, whose surrender led almost all of Catalonia to submit. Although French forces, assisted by a few Catalans, retained the northern areas, after 12 years of savage and continuous war Madrid again controlled most of the principality. Philip IV's ability ‘to overcome not only my enemies but also storms at sea, epidemics on land and the domestic unrest of the towns of Andalusia’ astonished Pietro Bassadonna, the Venetian ambassador in Spain. Back in 1647, he recalled, rebellion had reigned in Naples, Sicily and Andalusia; Híjar planned to create an independent Aragon; a devastating plague epidemic raged; while ‘the king's revenues were alienated; his credit was exhausted; his allies were either declared enemies or neutral or undecided’. In short, the Spanish Monarchy had then resembled ‘the great Colossus [of Rhodes] which had been for so many years the wonder of the world until brought down by an earthquake in just a few minutes.’ Despite several ‘earthquakes’, Bassadonna noted, the Spanish Colossus remained almost intact. Nevertheless, he continued, in large part this reflected ‘the present commotions of the kingdom of France, which has chosen to turn its victorious arms against its own breast, and exchanged a glorious war for a dreadful slaughter of the French themselves’.92 He predicted that the ‘earthquakes’ would resume as soon as the French stopped slaughtering each other.

  28. The ‘Green Banner’ revolts in Andalusia, 1647–52.

  The extent of these urban revolts has been seriously underestimated by historians: they probably involved more people and places than the revolt of Catalonia. All the towns and cities named on the map experienced rebellions in these years.

  Bassadonna failed to foresee another setback for Spain: the British Republic declared war in 1655 (see chapter 12 below). This development profoundly depressed Philip IV. He assured Sor María de Ágreda that the situation was worse ‘than any that this Monarchy has ever seen, particularly since we lack the means to withstand even one part of such a great storm'; but, as usual, he refused to contemplate a negotiated settlement. Even when Cardinal Mazarin sent a secret envoy to Madrid in 1656, and the parties agreed that France would end all assistance to Portugal and in return retain all its conquests in Catalonia and the Netherlands, the talks foundered on the status of the prince of Condé, Louis XIV's cousin and the victor of Rocroi, who had defected to Spanish service. The king refused to abandon his ally. The war therefore continued, and Spain lost more ground. Meanwhile Castile experienced exceptional precipitation throughout the 1650s, reducing the yield of one harvest after another.93

  The unending sequence of disasters alarmed Philip's advisers, who warned him in January 1659 that peace with France, whatever the price, ‘is absolutely essential for the conservation of the Monarchy of Your Majesty’ – adding that ‘experience has shown that the more we delay it, the more we lose, and the more difficult recovering it becomes’. The king declared his willingness both to sacrifice Condé (on the grounds that ‘when one places in the balance the conservation of the Monarchy, the importance of this necessity cannot be compared with that of the prince of Condé’) and to marry his daughter María Teresa to Louis XIV (although in making this concession he compared himself with Abraham sacrificing Isaac). Later that year, the peace of the Pyrenees ended 25 years of continuous war.94

  Now, Philip could at last concentrate on the reconquest of Portugal, but almost two decades of independence had allowed the Bragança regime to consolidate its position both at home and
abroad. Above all, Portugal controlled Angola and Brazil, generating both trade and tax revenues, while French and British troops arrived to defend the frontiers. Nevertheless in 1663, after signing a fourth and final decree of bankruptcy, Philip launched a powerful invasion of Portugal which captured Évora. Its fall provoked rioting and an attempted coup in Lisbon; but an Anglo-Portuguese army mounted a successful counter-attack. The councillors of Philip IV summed up the futility of the situation perfectly. ‘A truce with Portugal is the only way to ensure that we will not lose everything and to repair the desperate state in which we find ourselves,’ they lamented – only to continue lamely that ‘considering that the army is already on campaign, and that it would not be right to sacrifice all the treasure it has cost, or to despair of some happy outcome, it seems we should wait and see what happens’.95 Only the king's death in 1665 opened the path to peace.

  Of the vast Lusitanian empire that Philip IV had inherited, the heralds could proclaim his sickly 4-year-old son ‘Carlos I of Portugal’ in only two tiny outposts: Ceuta and Tangier. After two more inconclusive campaigns, the regents for the young king accepted English mediation, and in 1668 they signed a peace that recognized Portugal as an independent kingdom and ‘restored everything to the state it had enjoyed before the union with Spain’. They returned all the property confiscated from Spaniards who had sided with Bragança, and even the duke of Medina Sidonia received the lands confiscated from his father after his conspiracy to create an independent Andalusia in 1641. It was the most humiliating treaty ever signed by the Spanish Habsburgs – and it still did not bring peace.