Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  Ferdinand, it must be recognized, made original and important contributions to the way in which Spain's new responsibilities could be accepted by his neighbours in the international community. Two merit special comment.

  First, like the Habsburgs of Vienna he resorted systematically to marriage alliances as a way of pursuing policy aims. The marriages arranged by Ferdinand were of incalculable importance in the future accumulation of territories by Spain's empire. As the Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana recognized a century afterwards: ‘Empires grow and extend themselves through marriages. It is well known that if Spain has come to be such a vast empire, she owes it both to the valour of her arms and to the marriages of her rulers, marriages which have brought with them the addition of many provinces and even of very extensive states.’81 Alliances were made with the Tudors of England: the Treaty of Medina del Campo in March 1489 specified the marriage of the infanta Catherine to Prince Arthur, son of Henry VII. Attempts were made to ally with Portugal: the infanta Isabel married Prince Alfonso in 1490, but the groom died shortly after and the princess married Prince Manoel in 1497. Links were sealed with the Habsburg dynasty: as we have seen, in October 1496 the infanta Juana married the archduke, Philip (‘the Fair’) of Burgundy, son of the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I, at Lille in the Netherlands. In April the infante Juan married the archduchess Margaret, Philip's sister, at Burgos. These complex arrangements were all destined to come to grief, because of a series of premature deaths, the most important being that of Prince Juan, who died in October 1497 with no living issue. With his passing the king and queen were deprived of any direct heirs in the male line. The infanta Isabel then died, in childbirth, in 1498; and her infant son, who if he had survived would have inherited the thrones of all the Iberian kingdoms, died two years later. The link with Portugal continued to be pursued, for Manoel married Ferdinand and Isabella’s fourth child Maria, in 1500. She too died prematurely, in 1517, after giving birth to a son, the next king of Portugal. Manoel then married the infanta Juana's eldest daughter, Eleanor. The succession in Spain seemed to have gained nothing by the elaborate series of unions. However, the network of marriages eventually helped to produce a male heir for the Spanish thrones, in the shape of Juana's son Charles of Ghent. It also became the basis of an important and successful Spanish claim to the throne of Portugal in the last decades of the sixteenth century.

  Second, Ferdinand was one of the earliest European rulers to make use of regular diplomatic links. When the death of Henry IV of Castile in 1474 had left Isabella as the principal heir to the throne, the subsequent wars with Portugal forced Ferdinand and Isabella to keep in touch with a broad range of possible allies. This could only be done by acting through agents who travelled through Europe and sometimes resided in the places to which they were assigned.82 Though usually great nobles or high clergy, they might also be men of letters, as were the chroniclers Alonso de Palencia and Hernando del Pulgar, or the poet Gómez Manrique. Ferdinand was one of the pioneers of the European diplomatic system.83 He extended the practice of resident ambassadors, till then common only among the Italian city-states, to form part of the normal relationship between national states. By the 1490s the crown had resident diplomats in London, Brussels, and the Holy Roman Empire (Germany), as well as in papal Rome and various Italian cities, notably Venice, Milan and Genoa. Always conscious of the need for support, Ferdinand used propaganda and diplomacy to further his policies. During the Granada campaign he made sure that other states were aware of the conflict, and accepted with alacrity the sending of ammunition and soldiers by the Emperor. The queen even took French ambassadors for tours round the outside of the besieged city.84 The diplomatic contact with other nations was an essential part of projecting the monarchy's image not only around Europe but also among the Muslim states of the Mediterranean. Since Ferdinand was ruler over various states, he employed relevant nobles from all the states as agents of the crown. Castilians, Andalusians, Galicians, Basques, Catalans, Aragonese, Valencians, Sardinians, Sicilians and Neapolitans all featured as diplomats in his service.85 By the broad range of their culture, and the diversity of their languages, the different ambassadors were able to overcome the obstacle of communication, above all if (as often became necessary in the German lands) they were able to converse in Latin. They were an international group, but their loyalty was not (unless they were Spaniards) to Spain or to Spanish interests. They represented only the king and queen.

  The marriages and the diplomatic agents, in other words, were by no means a sign that Spain, and exclusively Spain, was on the road to imperial power. The reality of the power of Ferdinand and Isabella was always dynastic, involving the authority of their persons but not necessarily that of their states. After the battle of Ravenna in Italy in 1512, Ferdinand, who was at the time in Burgos in Spain, wrote to his ambassador in Rome expressing thanks for ‘his’ victory.86 It was no expression of presumption. The victory, assuming always that it was one,87 had not been won by Naples or Sicily or Aragon or Castile. It had been won by Ferdinand alone, using soldiers from his different states. To get anything important done, the rulers had to do it in a personal capacity. Ferdinand's presence in Italy was therefore essential to the affirmation of his authority there. In the same way, great decisions at the time had to be decided face to face, as in the interview held between the two kings at Savona. Ferdinand insisted continually to his agents that they must keep him informed, for only he was in a position to act. In 1507 he protested to his ambassadors in Rome that ‘I am very surprised that, even though you are there, the matters I should learn about directly through you, come to my knowledge first through other channels.’88 But these were the early days of European diplomacy. The routes were slow and insecure, the mail irregular, and the bureaucracy small. Communication of every sort was unreliable, and the king was seldom sure that he had the information necessary to make the right decisions.

  Co-operation among the élites and dominions of the crown was essential, above all in the field of finance. ‘The money from our realms alone’, Ferdinand explained in 1509, ‘would not be sufficient to maintain so big an army and fleet against so powerful an enemy.’89 The Hispanic realms, as we have seen, had a deficient economy. In consequence, they also lacked the financial resources for imperial expansion. Who could pay for the guns, the soldiers, and the ships? Ferdinand and Isabella certainly could not. The civil wars had left them deeply in debt, and the deficit continued to grow.90 They had, moreover, no central treasury to run their finances and no reliable tax income. Like all medieval rulers, they opted for the solution of making individual contracts for each project, and invited the collaboration of financiers if they themselves lacked the means. In this way Italian financiers fortunately made it possible to launch imperial enterprises. The expedition to conquer the island of La Palma in the Canaries, for example, was organized as a business enterprise financed by a Genoese and a Florentine financier.91 The wars in Italy, above all, were made possible only by Italian finance. In 1503 the treasurer of the Great Captain's army complained from Naples that ‘there are great problems in finding money, of which there is very little even with the taxes from Castile, and it is absolutely essential to get from elsewhere the greater part of what is needed for the many payments we have to make’.92 The solution came in the form of bills of exchange extended by financiers in Venice and Rome. The contact with Italian financiers was to prove of mutual benefit in following years both to financiers and to the Spanish Crown. Without the services of Italian bankers, the crown would have been unable to pay the diplomatic agents it maintained throughout Europe.93

  Italian, Flemish, French and English traders had been interested since medieval times in the produce of the peninsula, particularly raw wool. In the south of the peninsula they helped to finance the war against the Muslims. Genoese financiers around the year 1500 – among them the Doria, Grimaldi, Spinola, Centurione and Sopranis – were the chief buyers of the rich olive oil and wine of the Seville region.9
4 No less than 437 merchants of Genoa appear in the notarial documents of Seville in the period 1489–1515.95 Many of them extended their activities to other goods, above all the purchase of raw wool and silk, which they exported abroad and also sold to Castilian manufacturers. When Málaga was captured from the Muslims in 1487 it immediately became the chief port available to the monarchy on that coast, its commerce principally in the hands of the Centurione family.96

  The Genoese were in a good position to take advantage of the early trade links with the newly discovered lands of the Caribbean. ‘In Cadiz’, reported an Italian traveller in 1516, ‘there are more foreigners than native inhabitants, but the majority are Genoese.’97 They had to compete, of course, with the local Andalusian traders, the second largest group of merchants in the area of Seville and Cadiz. These were followed closely, in number and importance, by the merchants of Burgos, and then by English merchants.98 The king and queen were only too pleased that others could take on the costs of the operation. ‘Almost never’, the historian Fernández de Oviedo wrote later, ‘do Their Majesties put their income and cash into these new discoveries, all is paper and fine words.’99

  At the same time the resources of each realm could be called upon to aid a common enterprise. Early in 1508, when Ferdinand declared that he was preparing an expedition into Africa, he explained that ‘we have asked for a large amount of wheat and biscuit and other supplies from Naples and Sicily, of which a part is already on its way, and as for the provinces of these our realms of Spain we have sent out our captains to raise as many infantry and soldiers as they can’.100 Over two years later, in the Christmas of 1510, he wrote to Hugo de Moncada, the viceroy of Sicily, explaining to him that roughly half the supplies and men to be used for a projected expedition to Africa would be from his realms of Italy. The African dream, which Italians no less than Castilians would nurture in subsequent centuries right down to the epoch of Franco and Mussolini, was already, with Ferdinand, part of an undertaking that the two Mediterranean communities were meant to share.

  They were, as it happened, already engaged together in another great dream, far away across the western ocean.

  Christopher Columbus, born in 1451 in Genoa, spent his early career as an agent of the Genoese banking house of Centurione, and from his base in Lisbon made short voyages during which he became convinced that the ocean route to the west would lead to Asia. His attempts to find backing for an expedition were unsuccessful until he obtained in 1492 the contract at Santa Fe, made possible by the financial support of the Aragonese converso Luis de Santangel. Both then and later, there were financiers willing to risk their money on the enterprise: Genoese and Florentines turned out to be the majority backers.101 The Santa Fe contract promised him, in the event of success, noble status, the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, and extensive privileges over the territories he might discover. His three little ships, with a total crew of ninety, sailed from Palos, near Cadiz, on 3 August 1492. After a four-week stop in the Canaries they set out over the western sea and arrived on 12 October in the Bahamas, making landfall at an island that received the name of San Salvador (now identified with Watling Island). Further travel took them to Cuba at the end of the month, and early in December they touched on Hispaniola, destined to be the focus of Spanish settlement over the following decades. In January 1493 Columbus began the return voyage, was forced by the weather to put into Lisbon and arrived at Palos on 15 March. He set out at once to report to the sovereigns, then in Barcelona. Ferdinand and Isabella lodged Castile's claim to the new territories with Pope Alexander VI, who issued a number of bulls, one of them the famous Inter caetera (1493), confirming the title. The wording of the bull was too vague and too much of a threat to Portuguese discoveries to be acceptable. The rulers therefore negotiated directly with Portugal and by the Treaty of Tordesillas (June 1494) agreed to set a line of demarcation 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. All discoveries to the west of the line would go to Castile, all those to the east to Portugal. In the event, the line passed through enough of the American mainland to give Portugal its title to Brazil.

  The news of Columbus's return had at first little impact on Spaniards. Like any novelty it was seized upon by a few writers – notably, in Spain, by Peter Martyr – and given diffusion among the curious in Europe. Columbus's first report (or ‘letter’) on his voyage was printed nine times in 1493, and eleven more times by 1500. In the discoverer's mind there was an inevitable confusion between what he had encountered and what he had hoped to find. ‘The means of communicating with the natives were poor’, an historian has pointed out, ‘and he supplied what he did not understand from his imagination.’102 The gold samples he brought back spoke, however, for themselves, and stimulated the sending of a second, more serious, expedition, which left Cadiz in September 1493. This time there were seventeen vessels with twelve hundred men including twelve priests but no women. The purpose was to settle Hispaniola, but the vessels also made an exploration around other islands of the Caribbean. The admiral returned home in June 1496, taking with him some inhabitants of Hispaniola as slaves. He made two more voyages to America. In 1498–1500 he reached Trinidad and the mainland (or Tierra Firme) of South America, and in 1502–1504 he scouted the coast of Honduras and the Isthmus of Panama. But after the first of these he and members of his family were sent home in irons, as a consequence of serious disputes among the settlers of Hispaniola. And the final sailing was conspicuous by its failure to discover anything significantly new.

  Columbus died rich but disappointed in 1506. The new lands seemed to offer no quick route to Asia, as he had hoped; and the available wealth included gold and a few slaves but no spices. This was a small return for one who had expected to discover ‘the new heaven and earth foretold by Our Lord in the Apocalypse’. Peter Martyr referred to the western lands as a novus orbis, a New World, and Spaniards generally called them ‘the Indies’, an echo of the illusion that they were part of Asia. For most Europeans the name that stuck was ‘America’, derived from a popular account of his voyages by the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci. The name first appeared on the map of the world published in 1507 by the Swiss mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller.

  The little information available about the new lands was enough to stimulate curiosity. The discovery of gold during the first voyage, by Martín Alonso Pinzón and the men of his ship the Pinta, became a dominant obsession. In the Journal that he kept, Columbus was conscious of some of the possibilities offered by the discoveries. He found the natives of Hispaniola to be peaceable and obedient. ‘They are without arms, all naked, and without skill at arms, a thousand running away from three [Spaniards], and thus they are good to be ordered about, to be made to work, plant and do whatever is wanted, to build towns and be taught to go clothed and accept our customs.’ From the beginning, and without any attempt to assess the cultural level of the natives, he thought that they could be easily enslaved: ‘all can be carried to Castile or held as captives on the island’.103

  The logical consequence of Columbus's observations was that the Spaniards did not need to use force against the Arawaks of the northern Caribbean. There was, literally, no conquest of the islands.104 The natives accepted the coming of the strangers, and made way for them, as they continued to do when the strangers reached the mainland. Later on they offered resistance, but that was after the strangers had begun to seize their lands and women. In the early days the Caribbean offered all the advantages of a peaceful, tranquil society where there was no shortage of native food, no war, no pestilence, and curiously no use of alcohol. In 1498 Columbus could still write from Hispaniola that ‘this land abounds in everything, especially in bread and meat. There is no lack of anything except wine and clothing. Of our people here, each has two or three Indians to serve him and dogs to hunt for him and, though perhaps it should not be said, women so handsome as to be a wonder.’105 During the second voyage, in 1494, there were risings of local Indians protesting against mistreatment by Spani
ards. This motivated the seizure and transportation to Spain of around five hundred slaves, of whom half died shortly before arriving in Spain early in 1495 and were thrown into the sea. The resort to violence and coercion, with the corresponding response from the native population and the beginning of serious rivalry among the Spanish settlers, set the pattern for a deterioration in the life of the Caribbean community.

  It is common to think of the Caribbean as a paradise to which the Europeans flocked. There was certainly a great deal of interest in the exciting novelties brought back by Columbus. Peter Martyr recorded the king's delight on tasting his first pineapple, ‘a fruit which has become his favourite’.106 In reality, there was no rush to go to the new lands, for the voyage across was long and hazardous and the conditions of life in the New World uncertain.107 For as long as a quarter of a century after the Columbian voyages, it continued to be difficult to attract Spaniards to the new lands. A high proportion of the early settlers died because of the climate, lack of food and clashes with natives. Already in 1497 plans were being made to deport criminals to the islands since there were few volunteers willing to emigrate. The prospects were by no means inviting. Hispaniola offered no opportunity for wealth (the early signs of gold vanished, and the Spaniards had not yet begun mining), and there was not even any acceptable food available. Settlers on the island survived simply because the Indians fed them. Many returned home to Europe as soon as they could, and those who stayed simply died: it has been estimated that of the twelve hundred who came in Columbus's second fleet in 1493 barely two hundred survived in the Indies twenty-five years later. 108 At the end of 1498 Columbus actually helped three hundred colonists (among them the father of Las Casas) to return to Spain, because they saw no future in the islands. His optimistic letters to the government, painting a rosy picture of the opportunities, failed to convince. The admiral's years of control in the islands ended in failure for everybody. The report he made of his last voyage, in 1502, was a confused account. His reiterated insistence that he had reached Asia and his apocalyptic fantasies about the import of his discoveries, represent the negative side of his achievement. On the other hand, his positive contribution to the expansion of the European and Iberian horizons was immense, and his achievement in navigation was pioneering. Through his voyages, Spaniards were for the first time inspired to risk their lives and fortunes in exploration and conquest across the ocean.