Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The crown made its own contribution by encouraging the collection of information about native cultures. Philip II was notoriously fascinated by all aspects of American civilization, patronizing both the botanic researches of Francisco Hernández and the ethnographic studies of José de Acosta. Having spent six years in Mexico, Hernández informed the king that ‘I completed ten books of paintings and five of writings about the plants, animals and antiquities of this land.’158 At some point in the 1570s, however, official support for such work was suspended. In 1577 a royal decree prohibited further studies on native history and religion. The prohibition is a puzzle that remains to be explored, for the king had no motive for hostility to such matters. Whatever the real reason, the ban seems to have affected only one group of writers, those from the Franciscan order. The two most notably affected were Bernardino de Sahagún and Gerónimo de Mendieta.

  One of the earliest and still the most awesome attempt to bridge the cultural gap between Spaniard and Indian was that made by Sahagún, whose monumental History of the Things of New Spain, sometimes known as the Florentine Codex, was drawn up with the help of Nahua aides, who produced a text that the friar later translated into Castilian.159 Under Sahagún's direction the Nahua scribes from around the year 1547 recorded an immense amount of practical information and folk memory, including folk memory about the nature of the Spanish conquest. Only twenty years later did Sahagún begin to organize and translate the Nahuatl texts. Though he claimed and felt that he had written the account himself, it was in essence a direct product of the Nahua memory. The friar's great contribution was to have presided over one of the first authentic accounts (albeit written a generation later) of the contact between Spaniards and the people of the New World. It fell foul of the ban on writings about the natives, and remained unpublished in its full form until the twentieth century.

  The brilliant work of some of the early missionaries represented, however, only one face of the conquest. The other face of the conquest was its inevitable violence. A few Indian leaders accepted Christianity because they saw it as politically beneficial, but their peoples always had to be coaxed into the new religion by coercion. The system of teaching employed by the friars relied exclusively on the use of discipline, and any failure to observe discipline was met with the appropriate punishment, which was invariably physical. Mendieta was inflexible on this point: ‘it is a mistake to think that teaching the faith to Indians can be done in any other way. God was talking of them when he said to his servant, Compel them to come in.’160

  The most striking case of the use of violence among the early missionaries was that of Fray Diego de Landa, who accompanied his conversion campaigns in the Yucatan peninsula with a veritable reign of terror. He declared in 1562 that only punishment would make the Indians accept Christianity. ‘Though they seem to be a simple people,’ he stated, ‘they are up to all sort of mischief, and are obstinately attached to the rites and ceremonies of their forefathers. The whole land is certainly damned, and without compulsion they will never speak the truth.’ During his stay in the area over four thousand Mayas were ill-treated and tortured, and around two hundred of them were put to death for religious reasons. There could be no talk of accommodating native culture. It had to be uprooted and destroyed. The indigenous priests of the Maya in Yucatan were among the few in America who, unlike the Andeans, had access to a written culture. Their writings were wherever possible kept secret from the Spaniards, and only in the twentieth century were several texts discovered, deciphered, and given the collective name of The Books of Chilam Balam. In his campaign of repression Landa did not spare what books he could find. ‘These people’, he reported, ‘make use of certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books their ancient matters and their sciences. We found a large number of these books and we burned them all.’161

  Many colonists and clergy were strongly opposed to these violent methods. One consequence was that gradually power was taken out of the hands of the mendicant orders and transferred to the authorities. Among the friars, early optimism gave way to a measured pessimism. Mendieta looked backwards on an epoch which to him seemed like ‘a golden age’. For his part, Sahagún was already by the 1550s beginning to feel that the spiritual conquest of America had been a failure.162 He shifted his gaze beyond the New World, and saw new horizons for the empire of Christ among the peoples of the Pacific.

  At the peak of the Franciscan effort in mid-sixteenth-century Mexico, the best-known and most intransigent of the friars, Motolinia, expressed firmly to the emperor his hopes for a convergence of religious and secular power in Mexico, and the establishment of a theocracy, as foretold in the book of the Apocalypse: ‘what I plead for is that Your Majesty place all your efforts in bringing to fulfilment the Fifth Monarchy of Jesus Christ, which is to expand and embrace the whole earth and of which Your Majesty is to be the leader and captain’.163 The great Franciscan dream, expressed in distinctive ways by Motolinía himself in his History of the Indians of New Spain, and by Sahagún and Mendieta, for the establishment of an empire founded on the reign of Christ, was certainly one of the most powerful ever to have been conceived in the early stages of an imperial enterprise. Motolinia's appeal came too late. Already the emperor, weary in body and spirit, had decided to give up the reins of power and seek the security of another, more eternal, kingdom. The universal Christian monarchy for which the clergy yearned would achieve fulfilment only under his son, who had been governing in the peninsula since the year 1543 and was destined, in the half-century that he exercised power, to bring into existence the greatest world empire that Europe had ever known.

  4

  Creating a World Power

  Although our Spain abounds in valiant men who are well fitted for employment in war, it is lacking in armaments and in the practice of arms.

  Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla, Political guide for corregidors (1597) 1

  The king of Spain in 1556, when he took the throne over from his father, was aged twenty-eight, a man of few words, of medium build, with fair hair and blue eyes. A devotee of hunting and jousting, cultured, serious and deeply religious, he had spent nearly five years travelling through the principal countries of Europe. Regent of Spain since 1543, when he was aged sixteen, he had accumulated ample experience of the problems of government.2 After several months in England with his wife Mary Tudor, he crossed over to Brussels to receive from his father in 1555 the territories that from then on constituted his inheritance. Charles did not abdicate from Sicily, Naples and Milan, for these realms already belonged to Philip, who had been given the right of succession to the dukedom of Milan as early as 1540 and was invested as its duke three years later. He also received the crown of Sicily and Naples the day before his wedding to Mary Tudor in 1554. It only remained to give the prince the Netherlands, the Crown of Castile (which included the New World), and that of Aragon together with Sardinia. Philip's right to rule remained the same as that of his father: it was dynastic, that is, based purely on the principle of inheritance in the family. His title in all his European territories continued to be dynastic. But under him a fundamental difference began to operate for the first time. Because the territories he controlled were centred on the Mediterranean, very quickly their political focus moved to Spain, since the king chose Spain as his centre. He stayed on four more years in the Netherlands, where a new war with France, provoked principally by events in Italy, demanded his attention. But it was Spain, and the men of Spain, that from now on began to make the decisions and wield the power.

  While a French army invaded Italy to attack Milan, another invaded the Netherlands. By July 1557 Philip in Brussels had assembled a defensive army of thirty-five thousand men, commanded by Emanuele Filiberto, the duke of Savoy, and William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, with cavalry under the orders of Lamoral, Earl of Egmont. Of Philip's total available forces (not all of whom took part in the battle) only twelve per cent were Spaniards. Fifty-three per cent were Germans, twen
ty-three per cent Netherlanders, and twelve per cent English. All the chief commanders were non-Spaniards. The king threw himself with energy into the campaign.3 In the last week of July he was busily arranging for the scattered Italian and German troops under his command to rendezvous at St Quentin. His duties made it impossible for him to go to the front, but he insisted to Savoy that (the emphasis is that of the king himself in his letter) ‘you must avoid engaging in battle until I arrive’. On 10 August, the feast of St Lawrence, the Constable of France at the head of some twenty-two thousand infantry and cavalry advanced upon Savoy's positions before St Quentin. The town was of crucial importance to the Netherlanders, both for blocking the French advance and for clearing the way to a possible march on Paris. Unable to avoid an engagement, Savoy counter-attacked.

  In a short but bloody action the army of Flanders4 routed and destroyed the French forces, which lost over five thousand men, with thousands more taken prisoner. Possibly no more than five hundred of Savoy's army lost their lives. It was one of the most brilliant military victories of the age. Philip's friend and adviser Ruy Gómez remarked that the victory had evidently been of God, since it had been won ‘without experience, without troops, and without money’. Though Spaniards played only a small part in it, the glory redounded to the new king of Spain, and Philip saw it as God's blessing on his reign.5 The French were forced into peace negotiations, and peace talks, which began late in 1558, ended with the signing of a treaty in April 1559 at Cateau-Cambrésis.

  Philip returned home to Castile in September 1559, confident that the peace he had just made with the French would be a lasting one. ‘It is totally impossible for me to sustain the war’, he had written earlier that year. There were serious financial problems that needed to be resolved. In 1556 – omen of much graver events to come – a Spanish regiment in Flanders had mutinied when not paid. ‘I am extremely sorry’, Philip wrote to the duke of Savoy, ‘not to be able to send you the money for paying off this army, but I simply do not have it. You can see that the only possibility is to negotiate with the Fuggers.’ The costs of war, not only in the Netherlands but also in Italy, were already insupportable.

  Cateau-Cambrésis promised a pause. It was the end of the long dynastic conflict between the houses of Valois and Habsburg, and was sealed by Philip's marriage to the daughter of Henry II of France, Elizabeth. Seeing the vast territories he controlled, however, other powers feared the king's intentions. The Venetian ambassador at his court took a more hopeful view. Philip's aim, he reported, was ‘not to wage war so that he can add to his kingdoms, but to wage peace so that he can keep the lands he has’. Throughout his reign, the king never veered from this idea. ‘I have no claims to the territory of others’, he wrote once to his father. ‘But I would also like it to be understood that I must defend that which Your Majesty has granted to me.’6 He stated frequently and firmly to diplomats that he had no expansionist intentions. He employed officials who made clear their opposition to policies of aggression.7 On the other hand, the realities of political life made it inevitable that he should almost continuously be drawn into war situations, both defensive and aggressive. There were also serious problems to be dealt with, above all the debts accumulated by his father. The financial arrears in Flanders were very bad, he admitted to his chief minister there, Cardinal Granvelle,8 but ‘I promise you that I have found things here worse than over there. I confess that I never thought it would be like this.’9

  The nature of the ‘Spanish empire’ that came into being under Philip was unique, and calls for some explanation. The chief novelty was Spanish control. From now on the administrative decisions would emanate from a ruler resident in Spain, rather than from one who moved around his possessions. There was, however, little or no novelty in terms of the territory controlled: Philip simply took over from his father a number of states that he had already been responsible for since the 1540s. Portugal and its possessions, ruled by the Spanish king between 1580 and 1640, always retained their own autonomy and were not formally under Spanish administration. A few more territories would be added, such as the Philippines and a couple of fortresses in Italy, but the ‘empire’ was substantially complete from the moment it was born. It did not, like most other empires in history, continue to grow as the result of military adventures. Uniquely, therefore, the Spanish monarchy was not the consequence of empire building nor of an aggressive imperialism. It emerged as a fully adult being, but with serious defects of which the king was fully aware. Within two decades of succeeding to the throne, Philip took fundamental steps to restrict and define more closely the frontiers of imperial activity.

  For the first time in nearly half a century, Spain had a resident king, one who was determined to give his full attention to the state of the monarchy. It was none too soon, for the governments of the states he inherited were on the brink of bankruptcy. The Castilian treasury was in serious deficit, and Philip had already in June 1557, while in London, consolidated part of the debt into government bonds (juros). He made another arrangement of debt payments in November 1560. ‘Apart from nearly all my revenues being sold or mortgaged’, he reported in 1565, ‘I owe very large sums of money and have need of very much more for the maintenance of my realms.’10

  One of the first things he did on returning home was to reorganize the accounting system of the treasury (known as the Hacienda). He had to attend to serious problems involving the threat from Muslim power and the discovery of groups of possible Protestants in Castile. But there were promising factors as well. In the middle years of the sixteenth century Spain was basking in the warm sunshine of success.11 Thanks to the link with America and to its key position in the European political system, Castile was enjoying an unprecedented expansion. Between 1530 and 1580 the population levels in Castile in both town and country rose by some fifty per cent; Seville, exceptionally, tripled its population between 1534 and 1561. Production rose. To the demand created by expanding population was added the demand from America for food and manufactured goods. Treasure when it arrived gave merchants more cash to invest in trade, manufacturers more money to invest in production. Agriculture expanded: ‘even the wilderness disappeared’, the chronicler Florián de Ocampo observed in 1551, ‘as everything in Castile was dug up for sowing’. The woollen industry at Segovia and other Castilian towns, the silk industry in Granada, expanded and flourished. Foreign finance (the Genoese, for example, handled the valuable export of silks to Italy) played a key part in expansion. Half a century of internal peace – we have seen that Spain took little direct part in any of the wars of the emperor – helped to consolidate the gains made by the economy.

  There were, certainly, negative aspects. Contemporaries were worried about the rapid increase in prices, which they found hard to understand and usually blamed on profiteers. ‘Thirty years ago’, Tomás de Mercado wrote in 1568, ‘a thousand maravedís of money was something, today it is nothing.’ They were concerned about the activity of foreign merchants, whom they blamed for taking silver and gold out of the country in exchange for imports. ‘Foreigners who bring merchandise to these realms must give a surety to take back merchandise and not money’, demanded an irate member of the Castilian Cortes in 1548. ‘Spain has become an Indies for the foreigner’, claimed another in the same session. The reactions were typical of an attitude that found it difficult to adjust to the complex realities of imperial expansion. By contrast, Philip II attempted to concentrate on the positive aspects of Castile's capacities, in order to stabilize and strengthen the government.

  No sooner had peace been made with France than Spain had to turn its attention to the pressing threat from the Muslim powers of the Mediterranean. At approximately the same time that Philip's envoys were negotiating the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, the emperor Ferdinand was concluding a truce with the Turkish army before Vienna. In the eastern Mediterranean the Turkish navies continued their relentless push westwards. From 1558 to 1566 Philip II was concerned principally with the Muslim allies of t
he Turks, based at Tripoli and Algiers, the bases from which North African forces under the corsair Dragut preyed on Christian shipping.

  In 1558, while he was away in Brussels and therefore unable to make all the decisions, the regency government under his sister sanctioned an ill-prepared expedition to the coast of Oran, led by the count of Alcaudete. It was, as we have seen, wiped out by the troops of Algiers. In June 1559, still in Brussels, he gave his approval to a largely Italian expeditionary force designed to capture Tripoli, an idea of the duke of Medinaceli, viceroy of Sicily, and Jean de La Valette, grand master of the knights of Malta. The huge force was made up of some ninety vessels, under admiral Gian Andrea Doria, with twelve thousand men under the viceroy. They left the rendezvous, Syracuse, in early December 1559, but bad weather forced them back and it was not until March 1560 that they set sail and occupied the strategic island of Djerba, off the Tripoli coast. The delay enabled the Turks in Istanbul to put together a relief fleet, which attacked Djerba in May. Half the Christian fleet was sunk and the soldiers, led by their officers, fled in panic. Doria and Medinaceli managed to escape, but the Turkish ships trapped the remnant of the force. Over ten thousand men surrendered in July and were led in triumph through the streets of Istanbul.12

  It was the biggest disaster ever suffered by Spain and its allies. ‘You would not believe’, reported the French ambassador from Toledo, ‘how much this court, and Spain, have felt the loss and how ashamed they are of it.’ Djerba brought home to Philip the need to reform the disposition of of Spain in the Mediterranean. In 1561 Dragut destroyed seven more of Spain's galleys. Then in 1562 a freak storm wrecked another twenty-five off the Málaga coast. Spain's limited naval power in the western Mediterranean was crumbling rapidly. While the king tried to keep himself informed about Turkish intentions, he put in hand a major programme of shipbuilding, still with an eye on Africa. In August 1564 the newly appointed commander of the Mediterranean fleet, García de Toledo, managed to put together a force that captured the rocky fortress (Peñon) of Vélez de la Gomera on the North African coast.