Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The tercios, however, were only a small solution to the problem created by imperial expansion. With its small population of just over five million people, no match for the much greater populations of France, Italy and Germany, Castile was at no time in a condition to produce enough manpower to service the needs of war and peace overseas. Writers complained at the time that emigration to the New World took away a good part of the male population, but that was much less significant numerically than the constant demand, from the 1560s onwards, for soldiers. Like other European governments that had no permanent army, the Castilian state could resort only to traditional feudal levies from the nobility (a practice that continued without interruption into the eighteenth century), or to contracting soldiers through voluntary or forced enlistment within its borders. It had no authority to raise troops from Catalonia, Valencia, Aragon or Navarre without the express permission of the authorities there. The export of Castilian soldiers was as a consequence substantial.37 It has been calculated that between 1567 and 1574 about forty-three thousand soldiers left Spain to fight in Italy and the Netherlands, an average of over five thousand a year.38 The impact, after many years, on the homes and countryside of Castile may be imagined. The death rate for those who served overseas in the army was impressive. It has been suggested that in the eighteen years from 1582 to 1600 possibly fifteen hundred Spaniards a year died in Flanders.39 The death rate in the 1580s may have been even higher, around fifty-five Spanish soldiers a week. Those who returned, did so (Philip III was to comment later) ‘wounded, without arms, sight or legs, totally useless’.40

  Neither feudal levies nor forced enlistment could service a world empire. Castile therefore, like other European states, contracted foreign soldiers, who were often despised as ‘mercenaries’ but were in every sense professionals and therefore always of higher quality than raw recruits. Until well into the seventeenth century ‘national’ armies were in fact recruited among many nations. The French royal army at the end of the sixteenth century was made up largely of foreign troops.41 The ‘Dutch’ army commanded by Maurice of Nassau in 1610 included not only Dutchmen but French, German, Belgian, Frisian, English and Scottish soldiers.42 Much later, in 1644, a ‘Bavarian’ regiment active in Germany included not only Germans but Italians, Poles, Slovenes, Croats, Hungarians, Greeks, Franche-Comtois, French, Czechs, Spaniards, Scots and Irish.43 In the same way, throughout the great centuries of empire Spaniards always remained a minority in the so-called ‘Spanish’ armies, which were composed largely of non-Spaniards. None of the military actions of Habsburg Spain would have been possible without the support of foreign officers and men. It was one of the most vulnerable aspects of ‘Spanish’ power. There were always more Italians and Germans than Castilians in the armies of Spain. Spaniards were seldom more than one-tenth of the total of troops that the government helped to maintain in Flanders,44 where the army usually consisted of infantry drawn from the Netherlands and Germany. Foreign soldiers were indispensable to maintaining Spanish power, but at the same time the fact that they were not political subjects of their paymaster could weaken military discipline, a problem that remained unsolved from the age of the Great Captain to that of Spinola. The only saving factor was that thanks to the great extent of the Spanish empire a high proportion of ‘foreign’ troops were also subjects of the king, so that some bond of political loyalty existed.

  It is frequently supposed that the separation of the German from the Spanish branch of the Habsburg family, at Charles V's abdication, led to a parting of the ways. This did not happen, nor could it. The Empire was, after Italy, Spain's main recruiting ground for soldiers, and Philip II was always careful to preserve good relations both with Emperor Maximilian II, who was married to his sister Maria, and with the other German princes. Spain's power in Europe was at all times backed up by German manpower. It was no accident that the duke of Alba preferred German troops over those of any other European nation, including Spain. After he came to the throne Philip's first substantial recruitment of Germans was in 1564, when three thousand Germans were ferried to Africa and made possible the capture of the Peñón de Vélez. In the year 1575 three-quarters of all soldiers recruited by the king were Germans, and in those years many German nobles also served in the armies subject to Spain.45

  Italian nobles as well as commoners served in the forces of the king. The crown welcomed the collaboration of local élites in military campaigns. ‘It would greatly benefit Your Majesty's service’, the viceroy of Milan informed Philip II in 1572, ‘to employ and have beholden to you these nobles of Milan.’46 The greatest families of Lombardy, among them the Gonzaga, Borromeo and d'Este, accordingly served in the campaigns of the Spanish empire, and also contributed with their own private forces. At the end of 1592, for example, the army in Milan included twenty companies of Neapolitan infantry commanded by the marquis di Trevico and ten of Lombard infantry under Barnabó Barbo. The nobles of the kingdom of Naples took part in all the military campaigns of the Habsburgs: they were present at the sack of Rome in 1527, at the defence of Vienna in 1529, and at the siege of Florence in 1530. In 1528 in Italy there were ‘many Neapolitan knights, gentlemen and honourable citizens participating in various ventures alongside the Spanish soldiers and German mercenaries’.47 When the duke of Alba marched against the pope in 1556, the Neapolitan duke of Popoli commanded the cavalry. The great names among the Neapolitans were all present at Lepanto; they also served under Alba in Portugal in 1580. A Neapolitan, the prince of Carafa, defended the city of Amiens against Henry IV of France in 1597. The ordinary soldiers of Naples became in the seventeenth century the principal cannon fodder of Spain's forces. From 1631 to 1636 alone, the kingdom provided the army of Milan with 48,000 soldiers and 5,500 horses.48

  Another example is that of the Irish. From the sixteenth century, when the English began to devastate their homeland, Irish nobles and soldiers emigrated to the continent and became a small but consistent component of Spanish armies from the 1580s. In the early years of the next century they served under their own captains, principally the sons of Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone.49 In the wars of the Netherlands about five thousand Irish soldiers were serving each year in the army of Flanders during the period 1586 to 1621, their numbers rising slightly up to the middle years of the seventeenth century.50 After that period, many of them preferred to serve directly in the Iberian peninsula: some 22,500 Irish emigrated to Spain in the years 1641–1654.51 ‘All the men of this nation’, a Spanish official wrote in 1640, ‘always serve here with the greatest courage.’52 They played a key part, for example, in repelling the French army from Fuenterrabia in 1638. In times of manpower shortage, of course, recruits from any quarter were always welcome, though with reservations. ‘Only when the supply of Irishmen, Germans, Belgians and Italians fails us should we be forced to consider the Scots’, commented a general in 1647.53

  In the circumstances, it was difficult to enforce a single religious ideology in the Spanish army. The armies of Charles V outside Spain always contained Protestants. Under Philip II, the army of Flanders recruited Protestant troops from Germany without any problems, and it is likely that Protestants could be found almost everywhere in Spain's forces in Europe. Certainly by the seventeenth century it was no longer considered outrageous to employ heretics. A Spanish official commented to his government in 1647, with respect to recruitment in Germany, that ‘the troops to be raised there will be excellent, except that they will be heretics to a man’.54 Philip IV observed in the same year that ‘soldiers of a contrary religion are more tolerated in the armies which serve me outside Spain’,55 but he did not hesitate to accept an offer to employ six thousand Dutch Protestant soldiers in Andalusia. In the event, the offer never materialized. It did not affect the reality that after the middle years of the seventeenth century thousands of Protestant soldiers were in Spanish pay in northern Europe, exactly as they had been in the high tide of empire under Philip II. They did not necessarily have to go into battle for Catholic
Spain. The manpower required for maintaining political dominance was, we should remember, seldom used on the battlefield. Though battles might often decide the outcome of war, they were exceptional events. Power was maintained rather through a military presence in the form of small garrisons distributed through key towns, token forces that were meant to deter and seldom had an ‘occupying’ role. The most typical examples of such garrisons were those on the North coast of Africa and in certain Italian cities.

  The fertile peace enjoyed by Spain under Charles V enabled the new Habsburg monarchy to establish itself, but had serious consequences for Spain's military capacity. With no call for a war effort either in the New World or in the peninsula, the country's techniques of recruitment, training and armament deteriorated rapidly. ‘As a result of the peace that has reigned here for so many years’, the Council of War admitted in 1562, ‘the exercise of arms and the habits of war have greatly diminished.’56 A leading official commented that ‘our Spain is badly in need of the practice of arms and warfare’, and that ‘since our time has been one of universal peace, military discipline is much decayed’.57 When Philip II had just come to the throne a Castilian writer lamented that ‘it is a great shame to see how the Spanish infantry is lacking in practice of the art of war’.58 Shortly after, the country's vulnerability was made evident by the complete failure of the expedition sent in 1560 to Djerba. At the end of the reign the same complaints persisted. A military official in 1593 saw too much internal peace and a neglect of military training as the reasons for Spain's incapacity in warfare.

  Philip II, in short, inherited an empire without the means to defend itself. ‘Not even when the country was conquered by the Moors’, an army officer grumbled to the king, ‘has Spain been in its present state. There are no horses in the country, nor armour, arquebus or pike, nor any other type of weapon, nor anyone who knows how to handle them.’59 It was not entirely exaggeration. A major revolt of the Granada Moriscos in 1569–71 exposed the fragility of peninsular defence, and the bulk of supplies for the campaign there had to be imported from abroad, mainly from Italy and from Flanders.60 The peninsula had many natural resources in terms of raw material for armaments, but they were inadequately or badly exploited. In the 1560s the only effective cannon foundry, at Málaga, functioned because German and Belgian technicians directed it.

  Spain was almost totally dependent on imports from abroad for artillery, armour, gunpowder, cannonballs and arquebuses.61 Logically, the army abroad also drew its supplies largely from foreign sources. The duke of Alba in the 1560s in Flanders received some supplies from Málaga, but the rest came from Milan, Hamburg and even England.62 Despite attempts at reform, the country was unable to produce the substructure to support its role as a great power. On the eve of the invasion of Portugal in 1580, when Spain was theoretically at the peak of its might, the country still had an unreformed military establishment, no national militia, no equipped armouries, incomplete coastal defences and inadequate supplies of artillery and munitions.63 In the mid-1580s a Spanish soldier lamented the ‘absence in the realms of Spain of a city or town specializing in making and fashioning arms, in the manner of Milan, Brescia, Augsburg, Ulm and Frankfurt. Since Spain lacks these things, certain foreign nations take full advantage of it’.64

  In the course of Philip's reign the problem of armament supplies received attention. Spain could offer bullion to suppliers; in return they began to export materials to the peninsula. In time the import from the Baltic of timber and pitch for ships, copper for coinage, and grain for food became a standard part of Castilian trade; Hamburg, Gdańsk and Lübeck joined the Iberian trade system. At the same time the king, who had been deeply impressed by the standard of fortifications in the months that he visited Italy, took care to import the best military engineers from there. The experts included the Bologna engineer Francesco di Marchi, who came to Spain in 1559 and stayed fifteen years, and Gian Battista Antonelli, who came at the same time. At certain periods, the only military engineers to be found in the Iberian peninsula were from abroad. In 1581 an official reported to the king that of the royal engineers available ‘all are foreigners. I know of no Spaniard who is equal to them.’ The problem of producing armaments continued to be difficult, chiefly because of the lack of Spanish experts. In 1572 the king wrote urgently to Italy for two experts to be sent to Madrid because of ‘the great shortage of cannonballs in these realms’, and because ‘there is no one here who knows how to make them’. In order to make bronze cannon (which would not rust, like iron cannon) Spain had to import virtually all the necessary copper from the Baltic. With time, copper sources were identified in Cuba and also in the peninsula, but no Castilians knew how to fuse copper and iron correctly, so the king in 1594 appointed a German to take control of the problem.65

  The deplorable situation of military and other supplies logically affected every part of the monarchy. It is tempting to accept the optimistic rhetoric of the writers of that time, about Spain planting the royal banner in every continent of the world. The reality is that a government without reliable military or naval power had never been in a position to conquer any overseas territories or plant its banner anywhere. In the early years of the sixteenth century the problems of defending American territories that had never been ‘conquered’ in the first place, became apparent. In the 1520s French corsairs attacked Santo Domingo and Havana. It was the beginning of a long and difficult struggle to maintain control not only over American territory, but also over the shipping that crossed the Atlantic from the peninsula.

  The sea was both the strength and the weakness of Spain's empire. By developing reliable sea-routes, Spain and its collaborators could penetrate to almost any point of the globe, establishing settlements in and trading to every continent. Defending these scattered territories was, however, the main problem. In the Mediterranean, the Spanish crown possessed a handful of galleys, but relied mainly for naval warfare on the galleys it could contract from Italian nobles in Genoa (the famous Doria family) and in Naples. A further small flotilla, largely in private hands, operated off the Andalusian coast. In the 1550s, two-thirds of the Mediterranean galleys employed by the crown were contracted from private owners, the majority Italians.66 The situation in the Atlantic was quite different; there, for the first two-thirds of the sixteenth century, the crown had no vessels at all. Fleets to America consisted exclusively of private vessels sailing under charter. A generation after the accession of Charles V had given birth in theory to the world's biggest empire, the government of Spain had neither an army nor a navy, and was unequipped to fulfil its imperial role.

  Under Philip a naval system for the Atlantic came into existence.67 For reasons of security and in order to exercise more financial control, the government in 1564 decreed measures to regulate the Atlantic crossing. From now on, ships crossing to America could only do so as part of two organized annual convoys from the river at Seville. One sailed in April bound for New Spain, the other in August for the isthmus of Panama. After wintering in America, the fleets would return with their respective cargoes to a common rendezvous at Havana, then return together through the Bahamas channel before the beginning of the hurricane season, and arrive in Spain in the autumn.

  The Piedmontese ex-Jesuit Giovanni Botero in 1596 wrote a survey of the states of the world in which he commented favourably on Spain's capacity to use sea power in uniting its different possessions. ‘With two armadas’, he claimed, ‘one in the Mediterranean and one in the Ocean, the Catholic King maintains united all the members of his empire in Europe and in the New World.’68 In particular, he commented on the contribution made by the Catalans, Basques and Portuguese and Genoese to imperial seamanship. Botero's analysis was both wrong and right. It was wrong because his treatise, coinciding with the stunning defeat of the great Armada sent against England, ignored the fact – quite obvious to councillors of state in Madrid - that Castile was unable to protect the vital sea-routes in northern Europe or in the Caribbean. It was right
because it drew attention to the enormous contribution made to imperial sea power by the non-Castilian peoples of the monarchy.

  Three obvious cases stand out: the Portuguese, the Basques and the Belgians. Basque ships and sea captains, as we shall have occasion to note again later, dominated the ocean crossings to the New World.69 It is often forgotten that the Basque sea-going community also successfully exploited an important corner of the empire by establishing a claim to the cod fisheries of Newfoundland in the 1540s. They were the first west Europeans to venture into the area,70 but continued to play an important role in the fisheries in the 1570s and 1580s. In 1578 nearly one hundred Basque fishing-boats were active in Newfoundland, and there were up to fifty whalers. It has been estimated that by the late sixteenth century more ships and men were crossing the North Atlantic each year to fish and to hunt whales, than were sailing between Spain and its colonies in the New World.71 By contrast Castilians did not favour the sea, and Castilian society looked down on the navy. The army was accepted as a route by which one could gain honour and glory, but not the navy. This may have been a fundamental reason why the navy, despite its vital importance for Spain, never developed as it did in other European states.72

  Navigation across the world's seas could not have been done without a team of international pilots, for Castilians knew the Mediterranean but few had the necessary experience of other oceans. For the world's seas, they necessarily depended on the Portuguese who had preceded them. The first Castilian ship's manual, Pedro de Medina's Art of Navigation (1545), drew on Portuguese experience, as did Martin Cortés's Short summary of the art of navigating (1551). However, a Spanish official in the 1550s commented on the ‘ignorance’ of Castilian pilots, and Gian Andrea Doria in the 1580s went so far as to describe them as ‘hopeless’.73 Hopeless or not, they piloted the majority of Spain's ships.74 There were, of course, outstandingly good pilots, such as Andrés de Urdaneta, who went to the East Indies in 1525 with the fleet of Juan García Jofre de Loaysa, which ended up in the Maluku archipelago having lost most of its ships and men (one of them Sebastián del Cano). Urdaneta, with other survivors, remained for eight years in Maluku, where he picked up valuable knowledge of the islands. He returned to Spain and then lived in Mexico, before being prevailed upon in 1565 to guide Legazpi's expedition to the Philippines. Over subsequent decades the sailings to and from Manila used French, Portuguese, Italian and even English pilots when they could not find suitable Spaniards. When the great Armada sailed against England in 1588, no Castilian or Portuguese pilots could be found with experience of the Channel coasts, and French pilots had to be sought.75