Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  In March the pope relented to the extent of agreeing with the Imperial ambassador to accept a truce, but it was already too late. The army could not be stopped, and at the end of the first week in May burst into the Eternal City, looting, killing and burning.28 Spaniards took part equally with Germans and Italians in the destruction. When Charles received the news he was horrified, but the rest of Christian Europe laid the blame squarely on him. His adherents, and in particular the Spaniards, were quick to blame Bourbon (who conveniently for them had died of wounds at the beginning of the attack) and Frundsberg. In private there was considerable satisfaction in many quarters at the outrage perpetrated on the papacy. Political opponents felt that the pope deserved to reap the fruits of his policies, while religious reformers and humanists felt that corruption in the Church was at last being castigated. Charles's Latin secretary, the Spaniard Alfonso de Valdés, drew up a literary essay, titled Dialogue on the recent events in Rome, which circulated in manuscript among officials and received general approval. France, meanwhile, took advantage of the situation to send another army into Italy, under Lautrec. It subjected most of Lombardy except for Milan, then advanced south to Naples and in April 1528 laid siege to the capital, which was at the same time blockaded from the sea by ships under Filipino Doria, nephew of the great Genoese seafarer Andrea Doria.

  The Mediterranean sea was, as it had always been, a preserve of the Italians rather than of the Spanish. All the significant naval forces were Italian, and if the emperor undertook military campaigns he did so with a view to protecting the security of Italy. Spanish naval contingents were limited to their own coastal vessels, and to the ‘galleys of Spain’, a small fleet of around a dozen ships on contract to the crown and under the orders, in the days of the emperor, of Castile's leading sailor, the noble Alvaro de Bazán, founder of a long and distinguished dynasty of naval commanders. The vulnerable position of the emperor in the western Mediterranean was made plain in May 1528 when his fleet, under the command of the Genoese noble, Fabrizio Giustiniano, was defeated by the navy of Doria in the bay of Salerno. The former viceroy of Sicily, Hugo de Moncada, was killed in the action, and other distinguished nobles were taken prisoner to Genoa.

  The misfortune turned out to have consequences that were far from unfavourable for the emperor. Andrea Doria was in the process of defecting from his alliance with France, and in the summer he made a historic agreement with Charles's new supreme commander in Italy, the young Franche-Comtois prince of Orange, Philibert of Chalons. By this accord,29 Doria put his private fleet of twelve galleys at the service of the emperor and received in return a number of important concessions that strengthened his position in the state of Genoa. At the same time a coup led by his family placed the great financial and maritime city firmly in the Habsburg camp. The admiral returned in September to a Genoa that had been hurriedly evacuated by the French. His defection, together with subsequent military reverses suffered by Lautrec's troops, obliged France to make peace with the emperor. From this date the Doria fleet was prominent in all Charles V's expeditions of the Mediterranean.

  The Peace of Cambrai in August 1529 marked a crucial moment in the history of Western Europe, for the participating parties each withdrew from pressing claims that might have led to further war. Francis I was confirmed in control of Burgundy, which the emperor had always claimed; in his turn, he confirmed Charles's domination of Italy. The treaty also marked the end of an epoch in Charles's policy. Till that date his chief preoccupation had been in the Mediterranean. Henceforward, the affairs of northern Europe and, in particular, Germany would demand his attention.

  When he left Barcelona for Italy in the summer of 1529, he cut his hair short, in deference to the style now common in western Europe. Those of his entourage who were likewise obliged to cut their hair wept when they did so. The galleys of Andrea Doria were in Barcelona harbour waiting to escort the emperor. The distinguished admiral, now aged sixty-four, his hair long and his beard white, went along with a group of Genoese nobles to have his first personal meeting with the emperor. When he moved to take off his hat Charles stopped him doing so, and instead uncovered his own head.30 It was a gesture that in Habsburg Spain was coming to signify the granting of the rank of ‘grandee’ to the noble privileged to keep his hat on in the royal presence. ‘Most powerful Prince’, Doria said, ‘I shall say little but do much more. I can assure Your Majesty that I am prepared to carry out loyally all that will serve your interests.’ The young emperor replied: ‘I place my trust in you.’ The alliance lasted all their lives. Throughout the reigns of Charles and his son Philip II, the Genoese fleets guaranteed the superiority of the Holy Roman Empire and of Spain in the western Mediterranean.

  Charles and his court sailed in an imposing fleet consisting of 37 vessels and 130 transports carrying an entire army of cavalry and infantry. The news was impressive enough for the Valencian exile Juan Luis Vives to hear about it in the Netherlands and write excitedly to the humanist Erasmus that ‘Spain is in command of everything’.31 The expedition arrived in Genoa in mid-August. In the course of the six weeks that he remained there, Charles rewarded Doria with the title of prince of Melfi, which carried with it lordship over the Neapolitan city of that name. He was also reminded of the continuing corsair threat from North Africa, when in October six galleys of the Spanish fleet were destroyed by Barbarossa in a naval combat off the island of Formentera, in what a contemporary described as ‘the greatest defeat ever suffered by Spain in a combat of galleys’.32

  The emperor's visit to Italy was occupied principally with meetings with princes from all over the peninsula. The chief business was, however, in Bologna, where Charles was due to meet the pope. The meeting had been well prepared by ambassadors on both sides, with the intention of securing peace and stability in an Italy now free of the French. The Imperial court advanced slowly southwards and on 5 November 1529 made a ceremonial entrance into Bologna. The city was brilliantly decorated, with the presence of the chief princes of Italy and of Imperial troops under the command of Antonio de Leyva. The Medici pope Clement VII (victim of the horrifying sack of Rome by Charles's troops in 1527) was in poor health, but happy to welcome Charles: there were differences to settle, compromises to make, and political arrangements to secure. The prolonged talks in Bologna, which led to a famous Treaty at the end of December arranging the political complexion of all the Italian states, was the achievement above all of the Piedmontese Chancellor, Gattinara.

  The series of acts was brought to a climax early the following year, when a formal coronation of the emperor was celebrated, as completion of the ceremony carried out exactly ten years before in Aachen, when the archbishop of Cologne had crowned Charles. On 22 February 1530, Charles was solemnly invested by the pope in a majestic ceremony when the iron crown of the Lombards was placed on his head. Two days later, in a yet more magnificent ceremony in the cathedral of San Petronio, on a day that was fortuitously his birthday, the golden crown of the Empire was placed on his head.33 Four weeks later Charles left Bologna, staying in Mantua for a month before returning to Austria, where he arrived at the beginning of May.

  In those seven months since his departure from Barcelona, he had through personal contact, intensive negotiation, undoubted pressure, and extensive distribution of incentives, honours, lands and titles, consolidated his hold on Italy and helped also to achieve the security of Spanish interests there. With satisfaction Charles wrote in May from Innsbruck to his wife that ‘affairs in Italy are now quite tranquil’.34 There was only one outstanding problem, that of Florence. The city, a possession of the Medici family and theoretically subject to Clement VII, had rebelled against its masters. After eleven months of siege the defenders, among them the artist Michelangelo, capitulated to the joint Imperial-papal forces in August 1530. A few years later a Venetian ambassador, summing up the political situation in the peninsula, was able to conclude that Charles was ‘master of the greater part of Italy; there are few rulers or states who are
exempt from his control, except the Pontiff, Venice and to some degree the duke of Ferrara, all the others are either vassals or dependants and some even servants of His Majesty’.35

  The Italian territories came to have a much greater significance than Spaniards ever recognized, in the formation of their eventual power in Europe. In a very real sense, there would have been no Spanish empire without Italy. Italians detested the French as ‘barbarians’ who had attempted to take over their lands, but they soon also learned to detest the Spaniards. Their historians, for whom the decades after the invasions of 1494 were the ‘times of calamity’, felt that foreign occupation of Italy never lasted long, since it was expensive to maintain foreign troops far away from home. In this case, however, the Spaniards represented a military presence rather than a military occupation. Indeed, the number of Spanish troops based in the Italian peninsula was always (with the special exception of Milan) very small. At any given time in the sixteenth century, there were normally no more than twenty thousand Spanish soldiers in the whole of Italy, most of them based in Milan.36 The rose considerably only in the seventeenth century. Though Spain in the days of Charles V was periodically involved in military actions in the Italian states, its power there was not based on occupation and oppression but on a strong client network and on economic interest. Since the emperor seems to have decided at an early date that the destinies of his Mediterranean states were linked together, it is important to understand what those links were. Castilians of subsequent generations tended to assume that they had conquered Italy. There was no real basis for the belief.

  In the first place, the emperor's power was based on dynastic control of two of the principal territories of Italy. Naples belonged to the dynasty of Aragon after Ferdinand secured it successfully in 1504. Milan, over which France had provoked wars for a generation, remained for all practical purposes in the emperor's control after the battle of Pavia, and on the death of the last Sforza duke in 1535 was integrated into Charles's territories and then passed on to his son Philip. In addition, Charles possessed the hereditary territories of Sicily and Sardinia, and control of the coastal fortresses in Tuscany. Together, these territories represented about forty per cent of the surface of modern Italy. From the date of the peace of Bologna (1530), when Charles's supremacy was recognized by the Italians and he was formally crowned Holy Roman emperor by the pope, the role of the Habsburg dynasty in Italy was firmly established. But the role was based on dynastic right rather than on military control.

  In the second place, outside the territories that were subjected directly to the crown, Habsburg dominance rested on close alliances with the élites of the leading states. In Genoa, one of the most active business and seafaring cities of Europe, the Habsburgs since the 1520s were closely allied with the great Spinola family. From 1528, when the Doria family also drifted to the Habsburgs, these gained a vital alliance that gave security to the possession of Milan. It was the same story in other city-states. We may take the example of Florence, where Charles's support for the Medici family was sealed by the marriage of his half-sister Margaret to the duke in 1536. On the duke's death, Margaret was married to the Farnese duke of Parma. The Italian nobles were happy to collaborate with the powerful Habsburgs, particularly when they could also obtain benefits and security for themselves. They were duly invited to participate in the international empire of Charles: in the chapter of the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece held at Tournai in 1531, three Italian nobles were invested as members, the marquis di Vasto, Andrea Doria and Ferrante Gonzaga.37

  At the same time, Italians and Spaniards were encouraged to enter into political alliances. Intermarriage between Italian and Spanish nobles laid the basis for co-operation between the two nations for nearly two centuries, and created in Italy a recognizable governing élite of soldiers and administrators. In the 1530s the daughter of the viceroy of Naples, Pedro de Toledo, son of the duke of Alba, married the Medici duke of Florence, Cosimo I; Toledo's son married the daughter of Vasto; Vasto's brother-in-law Vespasiano Colonna married the sister of Gonzaga; and Gonzaga's son married the daughter of Doria. In these years Toledo held the post of viceroy of Naples, Vasto that of viceroy of Milan, and Gonzaga that of viceroy of Sicily before he succeeded Vasto in Milan. The closely linked network of blood and influence served to identify the interests of the élite with those of the ruling dynasty. It was an arrangement that suited everybody. In appearance the emperor made the decisions, in practice the decisions were being made for him by the élite that held the reins of power directly.

  Thirdly, the Spanish crown employed the services of the leading banking houses of northern Italy, who had pioneered modern financial techniques and now made their expertise and resources available to the emperor. Genoese, Florentine and Venetian financiers were already well placed to control much of the trade of the Iberian peninsula.38 After 1530 they became the mainstay of Imperial policy both in northern Italy and in Naples. Genoa, where the leading political families and the principal bankers were closely allied to Spain, was a typical example of a free and independent state that in practice functioned as though it formed part of the Spanish empire.

  Finally, Italy became the fundamental basis of the naval and military power of the monarchy in the Mediterranean. The forces of Italy and Spain together could dominate the western Mediterranean almost effortlessly. Writing to the empress in February 1530 from Bologna, Charles stressed that Castile was in a position to underwrite his power in two main ways, through ships and money.39 In practice, however, the bulk of Charles's resources normally came from Italy. Barely two months after the referred letter, he wrote to his wife from Mantua in April 1530, explaining that he had decided to rely almost wholly on Italy for the items he would need for his planned descent on Africa, against Barbarossa.40 The soldiers he would use would be from those (Germans, Italians and Spaniards) serving in Italy, ‘on account of their efficiency and experience’. He preferred not to use any from Spain, because the Spaniards recruited would be ‘raw and inexperienced’. For the same reason, ‘I have decided that the fleet be prepared here.’ He hoped to have fifty galleys available, all of them from Italy and France, though he hoped that vessels currently being constructed in Barcelona would be available. Castile, certainly, must supply some of the money needed, but it should be sent to the Genoese, who would see to the rest. They would make available in Genoa ‘artillery, ladders, tools, gunpowder, arquebus fuses and other items’. As for victuals for the expedition, ‘I have written to Naples and Sicily and Sardinia for them to prepare over there a quantity of biscuit, meat, wine, vegetables and other provisions for the fleet.’ The Castilians of course must also contribute supplies, to be stored in Málaga; he would need ‘ten thousand quintales of biscuit, a hundred casks of wine, a thousand barrels of anchovy and sardine, three hundred quintales of gunpowder and five hundred cannonballs’.

  Italy, in effect, remained for Spaniards the overriding imperial experience of the period marked out by the reign of the emperor. Though Charles in his last years was almost wholly preoccupied with German problems, brought on by the convulsions of the Lutheran Reformation, Spaniards had their vision fixed rather on Italy. One of the emperor's faithful soldiers, writing his memoirs during his years of retirement in his home town of Córdoba, looked back on the Italy of those days as a sort of great harlot lusted over by the military power of France, Germany and Spain. Tens of thousands of foreign soldiers had died there in the wars, evidence of the international nature of Charles's power. After leaving Rome in the spring of 1536, the emperor ordered his forces to move north to block any possible entry of the French into Italy. The army was commanded by a Spaniard, Antonio de Leyva, but its composition was, in the emperor's own words, ‘fifteen thousand Germans, two thousand Spaniards together with a few Swiss who have come to serve us, and a good quantity of Italians’.41 In fact, this was only the core of the army, for the emperor hoped to contract up to thirty thousand Germans in order to keep the French at bay. In this w
ay, decade after decade the fighting men of Europe descended on helpless Italy. Our retired soldier, drawing on his own experiences as well as on estimates made by contemporaries, calculated that in the years that he had served there, from 1521 to 1544, the emperor had employed a total of 348,000 soldiers, of whom 44 per cent had been German, 30 per cent Italian, 15 per cent Spanish, and 5 per cent Swiss.42 The figures are a fair reflection of the contribution made by the respective nations to the maintenance of Imperial hegemony in Italy.

  Despite their limited contribution in Italy, Spaniards would rightly remember the Italian experience as the last great age of the traditional type of military hero.43 Their outstanding commanders included Antonio de Leyva and Fernando de Alarcón, but in the popular mind the names that most stood out were the ordinary soldiers of the tercios, whose feats continued to perpetuate a bygone age of chivalry. Among them was Juan de Urbina, who made himself famous during the wars around Milan, for having risked his life rescuing a fellow soldier from five Italians who were attacking him; and Diego de Paredes, who made himself famous in the duel against Bayard at Trani, and went on to figure in other exploits both in Italy and during the march of the tercios to Vienna. The Navarrese general Pedro Navarro would undoubtedly also have figured among the great heroes of Spain, had his defection to France not earned him immediate oblivion among the historians. Perhaps the supreme moment of individual achievement in the Italian wars was at the battle of Pavia, when three members of the tercios were among those fortunate enough to seize the person of Francis I of France.

  An Italian territory that was directly affected by the international commitments of the emperor was the kingdom of Naples. Ruled directly by the king of Aragon after 1504, Naples continued in theory to be a realm wholly autonomous from Spain, with its own laws and institutions. In practice, it began to be absorbed into Spain's imperial network. The first significant changes in its constitution took place in 1506–1507, when Ferdinand the Catholic visited the realm and relieved the Great Captain of his command. Instead of being the seat of a king, Naples thereafter was to be governed only through the king's representative, his ‘viceroy’. It was also to be administered after 1507 by a Collateral Council, which was to take precedence over indigenous tribunals and included Spaniards. The process went through its most crucial phase under the most important of the viceroys appointed by Charles, Pedro de Toledo. During Toledo's period as viceroy, steps were made to turn the territory into one of the great naval construction centres of the Mediterranean.44 In the late 1530s, the Naples galleys were a key component of the defence forces available to the crown of Spain.