Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The first of his innovations was to make capital mobile on an international basis.9 The supply of money, which will concern us in more detail later on (see Chapter 7), was obviously fundamental. The emperor brought his own bankers with him when he came to Spain, so for the moment there was no undue pressure on peninsular resources. Castilians soon discovered, however, that they had to contend with powerful financial interests among the courtiers. Ferdinand the Catholic had managed his affairs with a small team of bankers who followed him around everywhere and made sure the cash could be found when he wanted it. With Charles the bankers and their business took on an entirely new dimension. The case of Spain under the Habsburgs is the fullest and clearest example of the imposition of foreign, international, capital and capitalists on the government.10 Charles's initial contacts were with the Germany-based banking houses of Fugger and Welser. Later, from around 1560, the bankers of Genoa entered powerfully into the picture.

  The second major innovation was concerned with the problem of communications. Vital decisions on war, politics, and commerce were, in the pre-modern world, delayed and frustrated by the problems of making information arrive in good time. Water, horse or coach were the three means of transport, and their efficiency varied. All were slow, but even worse they were uncertain. In Brussels the government from the 1490s had employed as postmaster a remarkable man, François de Tassis, member of a most remarkable family, the Tasso, who came originally from near Bergamo, in northern Italy. In the fifteenth century members of the family were established in both the Netherlands (where their surname was spelt Tassis) and Germany (where it was spelt Taxis). Around 1450 they had organized for the emperor mail links from Vienna to Italy and Brussels. By around 1500 their success in financing postal communications had earned them wealth and noble rank. On succeeding to the throne of Spain in 1516 Charles confirmed Tassis and his business associates (who were members of his family drawn directly from Italy) as postmasters general for all the territories he governed. It was an immense monopoly. The Cortes of Valladolid in 1518 protested strongly against conceding the service in Castile to foreigners, and objected that ‘foreigners should not be granted employment, posts, high office, governorships or naturalization papers’.11 There were similar protests against the Tassis in Aragon. The family continued undisturbed in their privileges, maintaining a huge postal network that linked Vienna, Brussels, Rome and the Spanish dominions all the way down to Naples. In Castile they became distinguished members of the aristocracy. The Spanish were learning that an international enterprise such as communications required more expertise and resources than they alone possessed. The tasks of empire were global, and called for global solutions. Though the Tassis never lost their prominent position, they were soon joined by Spanish postal agents,12 who took part with officials of other nations in the common enterprise of transmitting news and information from one part of Europe to the other.

  At the same time it was essential to develop and expand contacts with other states, through ambassadors who could speak for the emperor and keep him informed. Charles's diplomatic service was centred on the Netherlands, but his agents were drawn from every section of his territories. The Spaniards, inevitably, played only a small part in the Europe-wide network. Charles took over those who had served Ferdinand,13 but his principal agents during the reign tended to be from Burgundy (that is, what are now the territories of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Franche-Comté and several areas that form part of France and Germany) or from Italy. Until Philip II created the structure of a specifically Spanish empire, Castilian diplomats (who seldom spoke any contemporary language other than their own) played a secondary role in international affairs.14 The emperor's military and administrative élite tended to be at first exclusively from the north of Europe, leading a Spanish army officer in Naples to complain to the marquis of Pescara that ‘the emperor only promotes Netherlanders, and grants the leading posts only to them, so that Spaniards and Italians need not expect great favours from him’.15 But Spaniards and Italians soon proved their value, and rose to the highest posts in the military hierarchy.

  The third major area of government innovation lay in the spreading of business risk, by offering the resources of the state as a guarantee to traders and financiers. However, it was the financiers themselves who, by accepting the conditions and high credit rates, were able to put money to work in a way that had been unknown in the medieval world. It was already becoming common in commercial circles for shipowners to be able to pay premiums to cover their risks at sea. Financiers likewise needed to protect themselves against governments that did not honour their debts. Charles was in the perhaps unique position of being able to offer them the security of not one government alone, but many. In his later years he came to rely more and more on the money that came from America, but in the early decades of his reign the non-Spanish realms contributed heavily to costs and therefore to spreading the risk. As his viceroy in Naples, Lannoy, reminded him, ‘since you left Spain [in 1520] you have drawn silver only from here and from Flanders’.16

  Once the crown's commitments took on global dimensions, it became a priority to defend them. The small, local and temporary armed forces employed by Ferdinand the Catholic became hopelessly inadequate for the task of international policing. Fortunately, the European territories of the monarchy were normally able to cope with their own defence; they raised men and money as required, and allowed the crown considerable scope in using both. Castilians were proud and happy to participate in the emperor's enterprises. The soldiers and nobles who had served in the Italian wars now made themselves available for campaigns elsewhere. This did not mean that Spaniards were pushed into a military role. Quite the reverse, the reign of the emperor was for Spaniards one of unexpected tranquillity. It is a fact all too easily forgotten. Apart from occasional clashes with North African corsairs, there were no wars. The end (1504) of the first phase of the Italian struggle brought to both Castile and Aragon a long period of domestic peace. During the entire half-century that followed, no serious military threat emerged to peninsular Spain, leaving the state to pursue specific commitments without being dragged into a general conflict. The dynastic conflict in Europe between the Habsburg family and the Valois dynasty of France implicated Spanish troops but barely touched the peninsula and produced only a few border skirmishes in the Pyrenees, mainly around Perpignan. In Castile the Cortes was willing (as in 1527) to finance war against the Turks, because they were at Spain's back door. On the other hand it refused (as in 1538) to finance war against the Turks when these were far away, in Vienna.

  The absence of war meant that there was little need for a substantial military establishment within Spain. Instead, Castile maintained a military presence in Europe without any need to be at war. This was done through the famous tercios. We have seen that these units had come into existence under King Ferdinand. Charles V needed troops and garrisons in Italy and the tercios supplied them. They were subsequently given a set of regulations that determined their organization and discipline (Chapter 4). Spanish troops would continue throughout the reign of Charles V to be a small but essential component of the Habsburg army. They were not necessarily better than other troops, but they had the advantage of continuity of service and better discipline, which meant that they had considerably more experience. Not without reason were they referred to in later years as ‘veterans’, a description they wore with pride. They constituted less than a fifth of the army that sacked Rome in 1527, and less than a sixth of the troops serving Charles in Germany in 1547. At the siege of Metz, which was directed in part by a Spanish general, the duke of Alba, the Spanish detachments made up barely nine per cent of the infantry and just over three per cent of the cavalry.17 Beyond these campaigns there were armed detachments in specific locations, principally the African forts, and from the year 1536 there were troops in Milan. Spain's effective contribution was always small.

  The long years of peace in Spain undoubtedly bored those noble
s who retained an interest in warfare, the perennial basis of the noble ethic. Most empires are based on active co-operation with the nobility, who normally supply the investment and services required for imperial power. The nobles also pioneer colonization and command the armies.18 In the case of Spain, which was not directly involved in war at any moment of the emperor's reign, the nobles were limited to a defensive role on the frontier against the French and on the coasts against Barbarossa and the Turks. The more enterprising therefore took up with enthusiasm the possibility of serving outside the peninsula. A good example of a nobleman who made war his career was Antonio de Leyva, prince of Ascoli, whom Charles appointed as his governor of Milan in 1525. Leyva paid his own way, but kept his bills which he later presented to the emperor for reimbursement.19 In 1532, when the Turks penetrated deep into Habsburg territory on the Danube, so many Castilian nobles solicited permission to go to Germany that the empress was seriously concerned. ‘With so many leaving the kingdom and taking so many horses and so much money’, she reported, Castile would be deprived of its defences. The emperor was, of course, delighted: ‘I would be glad if they all came’, he wrote.20

  The emperor's reign presented Spaniards with a challenge to which, like the Comunero rebels, they reacted in a highly equivocal way. Their disagreements and doubts were expressed openly at every level, both in the Cortes and in the countryside. The Castilian Cortes complained incessantly of the emperor's absence. The people complained of the money he took away for his wars. The historian Sandoval reported that once, while hunting in the Montes region of Toledo, Charles got lost and fell into conversation with a peasant who did not recognize him. The old man said that he had lived to see five kings in Castile. When Charles asked him which of these was the best and which the worst, he replied that Ferdinand the Catholic was certainly the best and the present king the worst. Pressed to explain, he said that the king had abandoned his wife for foreign parts, had carried off with him the treasure of the kingdom, and that he was ruining the peasants with taxes.

  A generation after the emperor's reign, Castilians had overcome the distrust of the Comunero period and came to take pride in his achievements. But they were highly selective in their support. They approved the emperor when he was in conflict with those who appeared to be also Spain's enemies: the Turks, the French, heretics. Actions against these could be regarded as defensive, and acceptable. By contrast, they remained indifferent to the aspects of the Habsburg inheritance that they did not understand. As a result, they consistently refused to grant money for foreign enterprises, including Italy. ‘In Spain’, Charles wrote from Bologna to his brother Ferdinand in 1530, ‘they dislike my spending any of their money in Italy.’21

  In subsequent decades, Castilian historians reconciled themselves to the Habsburg dynasty so completely that they presented in their writings a Castile which had become, in the words of the emperor to the Cortes of Valladolid in 1523, ‘the head of all the rest’ (he meant the rest of the peninsular realms). An image came to be created of a worldwide and trans-oceanic monarchy that Charles V, with the help of Castilian armies and the Castilian navy, had brought into existence. The sober reality, however, was that this Hispanic empire did not come into existence until some time after the emperor's death. Spain was an important but also a limited resource for the needs of Imperial policy. Certainly, Castile was the only realm in the peninsula that contributed generously to crown finances. The English ambassador to the emperor observed in 1520 that ‘nervus belli est pecunia, which he will not have without Spain’.22 And the Castilians, despite repeated criticisms, continued on the whole to be generous. But Charles never gave them any special place in the organization of his various territories, which he continued to treat on an equal basis. He explained to the 1523 Cortes that ‘we intend, as is reasonable, to be served conjointly by all the nations of our realms and dominions, preserving to each of them its laws and its customs’.

  Spaniards made an important contribution to the defence of their own frontiers against the French and the Turks, but they had little experience of a broader military role, except in Italy. And it was in Italy that the Spaniards and their tercios continued to consolidate the military reputation they had begun to gain under Ferdinand the Catholic. For over half a century after 1494, Spain and France continued to struggle for supremacy in the Italian peninsula and in the process earned the unmitigated hostility of its peoples.

  Ferdinand's motives had been dynastic rather than imperialist. He aimed to preserve his rights rather than extend his territory, and he demanded no more than security for his realm of Naples, in whose internal affairs he made little attempt to interfere. By contrast, Charles V urgently needed financial help for his policies in other parts of Europe, and sought it not only in Naples but all over Italy. The states of northern Italy had traditionally formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, and the emperor logically considered them to be within his zone of influence. His first military intervention in Italy was against the French, possessors of the duchy of Milan, which was a feudal dependency of the Holy Roman Empire.

  In the summer of 1521 an army of over twenty thousand troops under the command of Prospero Colonna, the pope's leading general, marched on the emperor's behalf against the French. Though the soldiers were mainly Italian and German, a small Spanish contingent of two thousand men from Naples accompanied them, under the command of the Neapolitan general Ferran d'Avalos, marquis of Pescara, and the Spaniard Antonio de Leyva. It was an important step forward for the Spaniards, who for the first time made their presence felt in an area outside the traditional zone of Aragonese influence. The war also introduced Milan as an objective of possible interest to the Spaniards. After the death of Colonna in December 1523, Charles appointed as his commander the Flemish Viceroy of Naples, Charles de Lannoy, who reinforced the army with more troops from Naples. Lannoy was himself subject to the orders of the constable of France, Charles de Bourbon, who was nominally the head of the armies of France but in 1523, as a result of a quarrel with his king had formally transferred his allegiance to the emperor. The Spanish troops under Pescara and his nephew Alfonso d'Avalos, marquis di Vasto, became a key element in the international army serving the emperor.

  The Imperial troops under Bourbon invaded France and penetrated as far as Marseille. They were unable to make further headway and retired to Lombardy at the end of September 1524, in a disastrous retreat during which, according to the memoirs of the Franche-Comtois soldier Féry de Guyon, they fed off the orchards of Provence, ‘for a whole week, with the enemy always on our tail and attacking us constantly’.23 It was now the turn of the new French king, Francis I, to make a dramatic move. In October 1524, when it was clear that the Imperialists were no longer a threat to France, he personally led his army through the Alpine passes into the plains of Lombardy and occupied the city of Milan without much opposition. Bourbon's forces withdrew to the city of Lodi, while the king moved his army forwards and laid siege to the city of Pavia, defended by German troops under Leyva. After three months of siege, at the end of January 1525 Bourbon and Lannoy brought their men back in an attempt to shift the French. At the end of February they decided that the stalemate should be resolved by a battle, despite the undeniable superiority of the French in cavalry and artillery.

  The Imperial army, of over twenty-four thousand men, included fourteen thousand Germans, some five thousand Italians, and five thousand Spanish infantry under the command of Pescara.24 An attack on the French positions began in the evening of 23 February 1525, and by dawn next day the Imperial victory was complete. On the field of battle a group of soldiers from the tercio of Naples – three Castilians and a Franche-Comtois – captured the king,25 who surrendered formally to Lannoy. The victory was due, in the opinion of witnesses, to the efficacy with which the German infantry, the Landsknechte, attacked the Swiss infantry serving France, and to the mortal firepower of the arquebuses of the Castilian soldiers from Naples.26 ‘I can testify to what the Spaniards did’, wrote
a Castilian participant in the battle, ‘for I saw it with my own eyes.’ It was a historic episode in the emergence of the Spaniards as a military force. A generation later, when Brantôme discussed the French defeat with the duke of Guise, one of France's leading commanders, the latter agreed that the Castilian arquebuses had probably been an important element in the Imperial victory.27

  The battle of Pavia was won for the absent Charles on his twenty-fifth birthday, 24 February, and had profound consequences for Spain's emerging role in European politics. Castilians seem to have had little interest in the campaign. Not a single soldier went from the peninsula to take part in it, and as a consequence there were no public celebrations when the news became known. It was not every day, however, that the most powerful king in Europe was taken prisoner in battle. Francis I was brought to Madrid, where he arrived in August 1525 and was treated with full honours but kept under guard. The two monarchs met alone and often for long periods, yet for Francis the entire stay was an unpleasant and humiliating experience. He was eventually released in March 1526 and his place taken by his two sons, both subsequently ransomed by the terms of the Peace of Cambrai of 1529. The prestige gained by Spain rapidly vanished in the general European reaction against Charles's absolute victory over France. No sooner had the French king regained his liberty than he engineered in May 1526 at Cognac an alliance with the pope to ‘put an end to the wars devastating Christendom’, in other words, to curtail Charles's successes in Italy. The new coalition failed to achieve anything in the shape of military action, and early in 1527 the Imperial detachments, commanded by Bourbon and by the German general, Georg von Frundsberg, joined forces at Piacenza and began to move south towards France's ally Rome.