Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The capture of the port of Vélez was a small but symbolic achievement. It demonstrated Spain's amazing capacity to stay on top in the Mediterranean, despite all reverses. The French noble Pierre de Brantôme took part in the siege, which left him all his life with an undisguised admiration for the Spaniards. On his return to France he mentioned to the young King Charles IX how impressive Spain's massed ships had been. ‘And what would I do with so many ships?’, the king said. ‘Don't I have enough at the moment, so long as I do not have to go to war abroad?’ ‘That is true, Sire,’ Brantôme replied, ‘but if you had them you would be as powerful at sea as you are on land, and if the kings before you had paid attention to the navy you would still have Genoa, Milan and Naples.’ ‘Sire,’ another noble chipped in, ‘Brantôme is quite right.’13 Significantly, the anecdote appears in Brantôme's account of the achievements of Andrea Doria, an unmistakable tribute to the contribution of Italians to Spain's imperial role.

  When a Turkish fleet was sighted off the south of Italy in April 1565 the first impression was that it was headed for the fortress of La Goletta. In May 1565, however, it attacked the island of Malta, which was defended principally by the knights of St John, commanded by Jean de La Valette. The knights had only 2,500 men to defend their 3 main fortresses, against the fleet with its 40,000 soldiers. The first fortress, St Elmo, capitulated rapidly, but the Turks were forced to besiege the other two. Casualties were high on both sides, among the knights, their soldiers and the civil population of Malta, as well as among the Turkish besiegers. Early in September a relief force under García de Toledo arrived from Sicily with eleven thousand men, and forced the Turks to raise the siege.14 The success brought jubilation to Christian Europe and glory to the Spanish empire, which had demonstrated that it should be taken seriously as a naval power in the Mediterranean. But there was no cause for complacency: Italy and Spain were still menaced, Spain's military strength was at a low level, and the treasury was empty. A major effort had to be made to overhaul the defences of the Christian powers.

  Spain's inability to cope with the pressures of military conflict on the monarchy derived from a situation that had no ready solution: the lack of a centralized administration and treasury, both in the peninsula and outside it.15 Down to 1700, the government relied principally on private contractors to supply both soldiers and ships. This meant that Spain's military potential was not determined by the state, but dependent on the efficiency of persons outside its control. The problem was insoluble, because the machinery of state had effective jurisdiction only in the Crown of Castile; in every other territory of the monarchy, even in the colonies, for practical or constitutional reasons power lay in the hands of local authorities. It was not a new problem, and therefore cannot be seen as a breakdown of control. The problem was there at the inception of empire, inherent in the structure of relationships between Castile and its associated territories. Because Castile was unable, despite the radical policies of statesmen later on in the seventeenth century, to change the nature of administrative control, the issue of imperial efficiency was never tackled adequately. At a time when every major European power – England, Brandenburg, Sweden, France – was moving towards State and Crown control of the army and navy, in Castile the state was impotent to harness the joint resources of a multinational community that could have become the greatest power on earth.16

  The capacity of Castile to function as an imperial power depended heavily, as we have seen, on the contribution of its allies. Historians at one time took an entirely opposing view, and held that Castile was in itself a great power. This can now be seen as an illusion. Castile had little to offer. By contrast, the creation of the world monarchy would not have been possible without the bullion of America, and the manpower, expertise and finance of other Europeans. War expenditure, moreover, made deep inroads into the availability of finance. Well before 1560, the Castilian government was deeply in debt and unable to cover its commitments. After 1560, Philip II made serious efforts to liquidate his costs but the need to augment his forces, first in the Mediterranean and then in northern Europe, upset all calculations. The king reorganized his accounting department after 1560, but never managed to create an efficient treasury. Perhaps most alarming of all, there was no state bank to handle the business of payments.17 A scheme for a network of banks throughout Spain's territories was put forward to the king in 1576 by a Flemish financial expert, but was never attempted.

  The challenge of time and distance represented a fundamental barrier to efficiency. A world empire like that of Spain could never be controlled satisfactorily so long as the distances remained insuperable, the information inadequate or out-of-date, and the officials out of reach and uncontrollable. In order to keep contact with every corner of its associated territories, ‘Spain waged an unremitting struggle against the obstacle of distance.’18 In the best conditions, letters to Madrid took just under two weeks from Brussels, over three months from Mexico. Between sending a letter and receiving a reply, an official in a faraway colony might have to wait two years before knowing what action to take in a particular matter. The situation in Europe was not necessarily better.19 Commenting on the delays in letters, Granvelle in 1562 complained that in Brussels they had less contact with Madrid than Americans did. Later, when viceroy of Naples, he quoted a previous viceroy as saying that ‘if one had to wait for death he would like it to come from Spain, for then it would never come’. Between inefficiency and delays, the evolution of events in the empire escaped the control of those in charge.

  Philip II attempted also to overcome the enormous gap in information. Europeans who moved outside their own cultural zone found themselves up against the problem of communicating with other people,20 and Spaniards were no exception. Castilian imperialism found itself disadvantaged by the language in which it attempted to exercise power. The words, ideas and knowledge which had sustained Castilians at home failed to respond adequately to the challenge posed by contact with the complex human universe outside their borders.21 Both in Europe and in America, many Castilians readily opened their minds to the possibilities of an open discourse with other cultures, but others clung to their ancestral heritage. The clash between supporters and opponents of Erasmus, which came to a head in Castile in the 1520s, was a crucial moment in the process. The young Philip II experienced in his own person the problems of extending the horizons of Castile, and very quickly opted to break down the frontiers between his people and the rest of the world. His tour of Europe in 1548, when he was only twenty-one but already regent of Spain, had revealed to him the wonders of Renaissance Italy, and its evident superiority in art, shipping, architecture, fortification and printing. There was everything to be learned, and he was eager to do it. When he became king he incessantly imported experts in each of these fields from Italy. The journey to the Netherlands was, if anything, even more revealing. Philip never displayed any affection for England, where he spent several months, but his passion for the Netherlands was profound and lasting, and when he returned to Spain he carried with him as much of the Netherlands as he could: paintings, fashions, ideas, books, as well as the requisite personnel of artists, gardeners and technicians.

  He also brought back knowledge, and began the task of collecting data on the empire. Before leaving the Netherlands in 1559, he commissioned the cartographer Jacob van Deventer to ‘visit, measure and describe all the towns throughout our territory’.22 The project took fourteen years to complete. In 1566 Philip told the viceroy of Naples that ‘since every day there arise matters in which for greater clarity it is necessary to know the distances of the places in that realm, and the rivers and frontiers it has’, a detailed map should be sent to him. In 1575 the viceroy was asked for ‘a survey of that realm, for business that arises here’. The same procedure seems to have been followed in all realms. In 1566 Philip ordered the preparation of a completely new geographic survey of Spain. Now preserved in the Escorial, it was the most impressive survey of its kind undertaken
in any European state of the sixteenth century.23 In 1570 he commissioned a Portuguese cosmographer, Francisco Domingues, to carry out a geographical survey of all New Spain. The following year he appointed an official ‘cosmographer-historian’ for America, Juan López de Velasco. The king was acutely conscious of the lack of orderly information on the geography and history of his realms, a situation which made it extremely difficult to plan policy. When in 1566 he was asked to make a decision concerning Legazpi's voyage to the Philippines, he was unsure what to do since he could find no maps of the area. ‘I think I have some maps’, he wrote to his secretary, ‘and I tried to find them when I was in Madrid the other day. When I go back there I shall look again.’24

  His constant interest in maps was not based on the curiosity of an amateur. He collected few of them. They were, rather, essential instruments of state. But it is a comment on the general backwardness of cartography in Spain that the king's interest did not stimulate the science among Spaniards. There were not even any reliable maps of the Iberian peninsula available. The best mapmakers of the time were foreigners, mostly Italians, and they devoted more care to Spain's coastline (for shipping) than to its interior. Philip was therefore highly satisfied to greet the publication at Antwerp in 1570 of Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum, a volume of maps dedicated to him. Other Netherlanders also made a crucial contribution to knowledge of the peninsula. Shortly after his return, Philip invited Anton van den Wyngaerde to come to Spain and make a survey of its cities.25 For lack of Castilian expertise, all the major advances made in the mapping of the Spanish dominions were the work of foreigners.26 The first street map of Madrid was done by a Fleming and published not in Spain but in the Netherlands. The results of Soto's expedition in North America were not seen on a map until Ortelius published them in 1584, and the first full atlas devoted to the Americas was produced by Cornelis van Wytfliet at Louvain in 1597.27

  From 1575 the councils began preparing the most ambitious of all the survey schemes. In May 1576 Philip issued a detailed list of forty-nine questions which were to be answered by all officials in America. The questionnaire covered every conceivable topic from botany and geography to economy and religion. The answers, the famous ‘geographic relations’, began to come in from 1577 and trickled through for ten years more.28 A similar survey was ordered for Castile. Behind all these projects, which occupy the 1560s and 1570s, it is possible to see clearly the king's desire to produce a large and encyclopedic corpus of information on his realms. No other monarch of that time sponsored, as Philip did, a general history, a general geography, a general topographical survey and a general map of his domains. As in all the projects, he wanted research to be based on the methodical use of original data. His purpose was not to impress, but to learn and to achieve. He never became, like some other rulers, a great scholar. But he was without any doubt the most creative sponsor of schemes among the monarchs of Europe.

  The other great concern, after information, was to find reliable officials. There was no imperial bureaucracy, and the king had to fend for himself in each country. Appointment to administrative posts was usually made from among the local élite, a practice which brought stability and bound local élites to the crown. But after the 1550s radical changes occurred. Later critics of Spanish power insisted often on the way in which Philip II Castilianized the monarchy and centred decision-making in Madrid. Unlike the monarchy of Charles V, that of Philip became truly Spanish, and above all Castilian. The choice of Madrid as his seat of government from 1561 was a Castilian decision. The move has been often misunderstood. It did not convert the city into the capital of Spain (that did not happen until 1714), but it gave an administrative centre to the nascent empire. When he became king in 1556, Philip made every effort to place Castilians of confidence in key posts, in order to have direct links with administration everywhere. Without such links, control would be impaired and information rendered unreliable. The policy injured sensibilities, especially in entirely autonomous states such as the Netherlands, and in the long run created serious problems. In the Italian territories the king made changes that effectively placed power in the hands of Spanish officials. In 1568 he ordered the viceroy of Naples: ‘in future, when posts fall vacant, inform us if there are any Spaniards who might be appointed’. Posts involving military security were almost invariably reserved for Spaniards.29 The changes were affirmed by the appointment of Castilian viceroys, and by inspections in 1559 to make sure the new system was functioning.

  The king, however, was not spitting into the wind, and it would be unwise to suppose that he did so. Though he tried to focus important decisions on Spain, he intervened as little as possible in the internal government of the states of the monarchy. As his father had done before him, he presided over the formation of networks that bound together the élites of other states. He also offered them employment in every corner of the empire. They served as administrators, financiers, diplomats and generals. Of course, only the more cosmopolitan (or the more influential) took up these posts. For the most part, provincial élites (as in Catalonia) 30 were far happier living in their provinces, where they knew the people, spoke the language and exercised their authority, complaining all the while of the omnipresence of the foreign Castilians. At one and the same time, then, Castilian predominance was real but so too was the active participation of many of the élites of the empire. Non-Spanish writers such as Botero and Campanella, who applauded the policy of drawing all nations into the government of the empire, were not proposing anything unconventional; they were merely recording a situation that already, in part, existed.

  An excellent example is the career of one of Philip II's closest collaborators, the Belgian noble Jean-Baptiste de Tassis. Born in Brussels in 1530, he was the youngest of six sons of the head of the emperor's postal services, who had the same name. He did not enter into the postal administration but chose his career in the army, serving the Habsburgs both in the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish empire, but above all in the Netherlands, where he held posts successively under the duke of Alba, Don Juan and Farnese. Alba recognized his many talents and employed him on several diplomatic missions. In this way, combining his diplomatic with his military career, Tassis ended by travelling throughout Europe, and undertook important diplomatic assignments in Savoy, Denmark, Scotland and England, as well as in Portugal and the Mediterranean. Along the way, he became fluent in four languages (German, Latin, Castilian and Italian) other than his native Flemish and French.31 A firm patriot of the cause of the united Netherlands, his views coincided in part with those of Cardinal Granvelle, who may be considered his mentor. But Tassis was more open-minded and flexible than Granvelle, which explains his immense popularity with people of all shades of opinion, and his great success in diplomatic initiatives. When he was on one of his periodic missions to Madrid in 1574 the newly appointed governor of the Netherlands, Requesens, pleaded that he be sent back to Brussels, for ‘he is very well liked by the people of this country and also by our people, so I beg you to order him back here at once’.32 Perhaps his last great service was as ambassador of Philip II to the Estates General of France in the closing years of the French civil wars.

  Since the time of the Great Captain Gonzalo de Córdoba, Castilian soldiers serving in Italy were grouped into infantry regiments, each numbering around two thousand men and later known as ‘tercios’. They were created during the wars of Granada and developed by the Great Captain and his commanders in the Italian wars as a response to the powerful infantry of France. Both the French and the Castilians imitated Swiss models, but the Great Captain modified the model in creating smaller, more mobile detachments.33 The ‘tercios’ did not receive a formal organization until the Ordinance decreed by Charles V in Genoa in 1536, when four specific units were created. They quickly gained fame for their efficiency in battle, since they were not conscripts but paid volunteers who chose war as a profession. Destined for continuous service in the Italian territories, they were the first permanent army
units in Europe. They also tended to be of good social class. In the case of the tercios serving in Flanders in 1567,34 at least half were of noble status, the overwhelming majority from Castile and Andalusia. As a social and military élite they were treated with due respect by their officers: ‘honourable sirs’, begins a letter from the duke of Alba to the tercios who had revolted in Haarlem during one of their periodic protests over non-payment of wages.

  Tercios were not, as a rule, employed within Spain,35 unless other forces could not be raised. Though well organized they were not numerous, and formed only a small proportion of the total forces available to the crown. During the wars in Flanders, the Spanish tercios seldom exceeded ten per cent of the total number of troops serving there in the army. Many Italian tercios also existed, recruited principally in Milan and in the kingdom of Naples, but they did not enjoy the same reputation as the Spaniards. When not paid within a reasonable time, as happened more often than not, the tercios were capable of staging mutinies. Brantôme describes how after the taking of the Peñon de Vélez in 1564 a group of four hundred soldiers from one of the tercios refused to embark at Málaga on the ships taking them to Italy, and marched instead to Madrid to demand their arrears. ‘They strolled in fours through the streets, as brave and proud as princes, bearing their swords high, their mustachios trimmed, defying and threatening everybody, in fear of neither justice nor Inquisition.’36 The king refused to take any action against the soldiers, but asked Alba to speak directly to them and explain that their salaries were waiting for them in Italy.