Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  Escobedo had been private secretary to Don Juan de Austria, then serving as governor of the Netherlands. In October, Don Juan died suddenly, aged only thirty-one.54 The king was faced with the pressing need to substitute his leading general in the field, as well as search for a likely minister to replace Pérez. Never before in the monarchy's history had there been so urgent a vacancy in both the military and the political spheres. The crisis was rendered more acute by another event during those months. In mid-August 1578 Philip, then in the Escorial, received news that the foolhardy young king of Portugal, Sebastián, had perished while leading an army against the vastly superior forces of the sultan of Morocco, Abd al-Malik. At the famous battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir, on 4 August, the flower of the Portuguese aristocracy died with their king, and ten thousand men were taken prisoner. The victory of the Sa'did dynasty of Morocco over the Christians closed for the moment a vital chapter in Spain's imperial history, for it excluded Africa as a zone of further expansion. The death of the heirless Sebastián, however, opened up at once the issue of the succession to the throne of Portugal.

  Philip II immediately sought help from servants of the monarchy outside Spain, placing his full confidence in a Franche-Comtois and an Italian. To replace Pérez, the king needed a man with experience both of Italy (Pérez's department) and of Flanders. He found him in Cardinal Granvelle, whom we have encountered already as chief minister in Brussels in the 1560 s, and who went on to serve as minister in Rome and subsequently as viceroy of Naples. Aged sixty-two when summoned to Spain in 1579, he was the first non-Spaniard ever to assume direction of the affairs of the monarchy. His profound familiarity with every area of interest to the Habsburgs, a dynasty he had served all his working life, and his perfect command of six languages, made him an exceptional phenomenon in the political life of Madrid. A striking aristocratic figure, he was known among ministers as el barbudo, ‘the bearded one’, because of his immensely long, white patriarchal beard. Granvelle was a great humanist, bibliophile, patron of the arts and prince of the Renaissance. He shone in his new environment, which, however, soon disappointed him.

  Philip confirmed as new governor in the Netherlands his nephew Alessandro Farnese, prince of Parma (born in 1545), who had been serving there under Don Juan since 1577.Son of Duke Ottavio of Parma and of Margaret, illegitimate daughter of Charles V, he had been brought up at the Spanish court and taken part in the battle of Lepanto, where he commanded three Genoese galleys. Though Italian in outlook and culture, Farnese was – like his mother – a wholly faithful supporter of the empire and turned out to be a brilliant military commander, perhaps the greatest in Spain's history. His campaigns turned the tide in the Netherlands. Together with his success on the battlefield, he showed a remarkable capacity for negotiation, and moderation in religious matters. Thanks to his efforts, the southern provinces in May 1579 signed a treaty of loyalty (the ‘Union of Arras’) to the crown. The following month he scored the first of his great military ‘successes’, the capture of the city of Maastricht.

  The siege of Maastricht, which cost the lives of very many besiegers and of even more defenders, was emblematic of the cruel struggle being waged on one of the confines of the empire, and merits some attention. When an entry though the defences was finally secured, on 29 June, Farnese was seriously ill and unable to control events; his lieutenant even wrote to the king that a substitute should be appointed as soon as possible. The triumphant Spanish and German troops poured into the city and began an indiscriminate butchery of all the inhabitants, women and children included. It has been estimated that some ten thousand people, or one third of the population of the city, were massacred.55 Writing to Philip II from the area six months later, Farnese reported that ‘the region where we are is so ravaged and laid waste that not only is there no food but the whole countryside will be a wasteland for many years. So extensive is the mortality of men and cattle, the destruction of dwellings, and the general and universal desolation, that there is no hope of any produce for a long time to come.’56

  The tragedy of Maastricht was no different in its nature and excesses from many similar horrors that had been occurring in the Netherlands over the preceding twelve years, nor were Spanish troops uniquely responsible for what took place. The case serves, however, to demonstrate that the integrity of Spanish power was being achieved now by ‘victories’ that were, like Alba's victories, at the expense of the civilian population. It confirmed the provinces of the Union of Arras in their insistence that Spanish troops be withdrawn from the Netherlands. At Easter 15 80, as agreed in the terms of the Pacification, the foreign troops were at last sent home. The Germans went back to Germany, the Spanish tercios began their journey through Lorraine and the Rhineland, reaching Milan in June. Farnese was faced with the task now of recruiting a wholly Belgian army, with few experienced troops and many totally raw recruits. Meanwhile he could also count on the presence of some Italian and Albanian light cavalry. With these he struggled on, scoring amazing successes for two more years, never ceasing to lament that his campaigns would be more satisfactory if he had more foreign troops with him. ‘Many already regret the departure of the Spaniards’, he informed the king at the end of 1580, ‘and realize that without them it is impossible to continue the war.’ ‘What I need’, he wrote a short while later, ‘are the Spaniards.’57

  In the spring of 1582 the southern provinces finally agreed to the return of a limited number of foreign troops, five thousand Spaniards and four thousand Italians. With these tried veterans to count on, Farnese was able to score further successes in the field. He had a good supply of soldiers, sixty thousand men by the summer of 1582. Ypres, Bruges and Ghent surrendered in 1584, and Brussels in March 1585. Finally, in August 1585 he achieved the capitulation of Antwerp.58 A condition of the surrender was that the Spanish and Italian troops not be allowed within the walls. The king, at the time in Aragon, was in bed when the news arrived. Overjoyed, he burst into his daughter Isabel's room at midnight to wake her. Cardinal Granvelle was present at court to witness his enormous joy: ‘Not for the battle of St Quentin nor for Lepanto nor for the conquest of Portugal nor for any other past success, has His Majesty shown such contentment as for this of Antwerp.’

  Some years before the recovery of Antwerp, Philip added Portugal to his territories. It is often easily forgotten that the king, with a Flemish father and a Portuguese mother (the Empress Isabella), was not Castilian. He had been brought up in a Portuguese circle at court, his nurse was Portuguese, and Portuguese was perhaps the non-Castilian language he most understood. From the beginning of his reign in Castile his chief confidant was the Portuguese noble Ruy Gómez, Prince of Eboli, a close collaborator of his sister Princess Juana, mother of King Sebastián of Portugal. When young Sebastián perished in the battle of al-Qasr al-Kabir in the North African desert in August 1578, Philip emerged as the candidate with the firmest dynastic claims to the vacant throne.

  There were, however, obvious international obstacles, since both France and England would oppose the union of the Iberian crowns. Philip could not therefore count solely on the strong support he already enjoyed within Portugal, and had to consider the possibility of armed intervention in order to assure his candidature. The possession of Portugal was too rich a prize, from every point of view, for him to risk losing it.59 His peaceful strategy took three forms. First, leading jurists from all over Europe were employed to write in support of his cause, so as to convince not only the Portuguese but other European powers. Second, his representatives in Portugal, most notably his special envoy the Portuguese Cristobal de Moura, attempted to win over individuals as well as cities. Finally, selective bribes were used. Moura orchestrated a brilliant campaign to win support for his master. He talked to nobles and clergy, collected information on Portuguese defences, and distributed money liberally. Despite all these preparations, both the king and his advisers were convinced that the use of an army could not be avoided.

  The campaign of Portugal, prepa
red at a stage when Philip II was notoriously in financial difficulties, was made possible by aid from Italian allies. The king was attempting to escape from the talons of the Genoese financiers. The bills for the war, he instructed early in 1580, were to be sent to the grand duke of Tuscany, Francesco de’ Medici.60 They included invoices for ten thousand arquebuses, two thousand muskets, and bullets for both, all from Italian manufacturers. They also covered the costs of recruiting five thousand German troops, and of recalling four thousand Spanish troops from Flanders via the Milan route; as well as the expenses of the five galleys of the Doria fleet that were to transport both men and munitions to the peninsula. The duke collaborated generously, even to the extent of paying some cash to the disgruntled Spanish tercios who had not yet been paid – such were Philip II's debts – for the previous campaign in which they had served. In Lisbon Philip continued to work with Italian and German financiers, but also collaborated closely with a group of Portuguese merchants who were making their fortunes in Asian commerce.

  ‘I have great hopes’, Moura wrote to the king from Lisbon, ‘that though the swords are ready there will be no need to draw them.’61 Philip went ahead with his plans for a possible military and naval intervention. In the spring and summer of 1579 the galleys of Spain were assembled, and a further number of ships brought from Italy under the command of Admiral Doria. The joint force, totalling some sixty galleys, was assembled off the coast of Andalusia, under the command of the marquis of Santa Cruz. The ships from Italy brought with them detachments of Italian and German soldiers, as well as a force of Spanish tercios, veterans of the war in the Low Countries. Intensive recruitment of Spanish troops took place in Andalusia and the provinces neighbouring Portugal. The cavalry troops were in October put under the command of the Flanders veteran Sancho Dávila. The duke of Medina-Sidonia, seconded by other nobles whose estates bordered Portugal, was to help raise troops for a land invasion. The mobilization was in theory secret, but Philip made sure that the Portuguese knew of it. ‘Even if it doesn't come to a use of force’, he informed Moura in April, ‘it would be all the more helpful to press ahead with negotiations while keeping up the threat of arms.’62

  Philip already possessed (or had bought) the support of the majority of clergy and nobles in the Portuguese Cortes held at Almeirim in January 1580.63 But the situation was no longer simple. The Portuguese claimant to the throne, Antonio of Crato, had active support among very many Portuguese, who hoped for help from abroad, particularly from France. The longer the delay, the greater the risk of foreign intervention. Cardinal Granvelle, in control of the administration in Madrid, advised him that the army must be sent in as soon as possible. To this end the 73-year-old duke of Alba, in forced retirement because of a disagreement with the king, was appointed as commander. Philip's advisers were of the unanimous opinion that Alba's reputation as a merciless general was essential to a successful campaign.

  In June 1580 the army of invasion, forty-seven thousand strong, was reviewed by the king and Alba at Badajoz in Extremadura. The file-past, which went on all day, left admiring observers almost speechless. ‘It is something to see, even as I am writing this’, reported one.64 Half the army consisted of Spanish soldiers and veterans from Flanders, the other half were German and Italian troops.65 On 27 June the army crossed the frontier in force. There was little effective resistance. Inevitably plunder, outrages and brutality occurred throughout the process of occupation. Setúbal, besieged by land and sea, capitulated on 18 July. The fleet under Santa Cruz sailed in two days later and gave support to the land forces. In Lisbon there was stiff street-by-street resistance, but the city eventually surrendered in the last week of August. On 12 September Philip was proclaimed king in the capital. He recognized that Alba had played a crucial part in the successful campaign of Portugal. But the veteran soldier did not long survive his last triumph. He was seriously ailing, and died in 1582 in Lisbon. The king visited him during his illness and listened to his last words of advice.

  The annexation of Portugal was a supreme moment in the history of the monarchy. It was (apart from the virtually effortless occupation of Navarre in 1512) the first, and arguably the last,66last,66 time that a Spanish army would enter and take over a foreign country. The fact that Portugal's parliament supported Philip's accession served to disarm any accusation of ‘aggression’, though no one could deny (and Alba tried to avoid) the killings and outrages that took place. For the first time since the days of the Romans, the peninsula was united under a single ruler. In medieval times the term ‘the Spains’ had sometimes been used as a way of referring to all the states of the peninsula that had formerly been the Roman ‘Hispania’. Philip was the first ruler ever to issue (in Lisbon) a decree for ‘these realms of Spain’, a term in which Portugal was also included. Unity of the peninsula betokened unity of the empire. When the king entered Lisbon in 1581 one of the arches erected for him in the street carried the verse, ‘Now will be fulfilled the prophecies of the wise, that you will be sole king and sole shepherd on earth.’

  The triumph unleashed among Castilians a flood of jubilation.67 A poet in Madrid68 expressed the now commonplace hope of seeing a world with ‘un pastor solo y una monarquía’ ‘one sole shepherd and monarchy’. There was every reason for imperial pride. Peace had come to the Mediterranean: a three-year truce was agreed with the Turks in January 1581. In northern Europe the richest and most populous provinces of the Netherlands had made their peace. The Spaniards were firmly established in the Philippines. Viceroy Toledo had put an end to Inca resistance in Peru, expeditions were moving up from New Spain further into southern North America, and in the south Atlantic the adventurer Juan de Garay had re-founded the city of Buenos Aires on the Río de la Plata. It was in every sense the high tide of Spain's power.69 With the absorption of Portugal, Philip's authority now extended into India, Indonesia and China. The king's old companion-at-arms, the poet Alonso de Ercilla, who had served with him in the campaign of St Quentin and had then gone to Peru, was during these months in Castile composing his famous narrative poem on the Araucanian war. Looking back to all that had been achieved by Spaniards, he could still envisage with irrepressible optimism the possibility of further ‘conquests in distant lands we have never seen’.

  The empire, so extensive as to stagger the imagination, was the biggest ever known in history. Philip's own decision to restrict imperial expansion, in the Ordinance of 1573, seemed now to be of small moment in a scenario where he was to all appearances the most powerful ruler on earth. He was also, it seemed, the richest: he controlled the production of New World silver; his saltpans in Portugal and the Caribbean produced most of the marine salt consumed in the West; through Brazil he controlled most of the sugar available to Europe. Rejecting the term ‘monarchy’ that Spaniards had always used to refer to their commonwealth of nations, the Castilian writer Pedro Salazar de Mendoza felt that the right term now was ‘empire’: ‘the monarchy of Spain covers one third of the globe. America alone is three times greater than Europe. The empire of Spain is over twenty times greater than that of Rome was.’70

  The enthusiasm of those months must be seen within their context. Castilians felt that the universe was theirs. It did not mean that they wished for the universe. It has been suggested that Philip II was aiming for ‘global mastery’, and that he had a ‘grand strategy’ to that end.71 He has also been presented as the knight-errant of militant Catholicism in these years.72 Certainly his many enemies at the time saw him as a powerful antagonist. But the king's own correspondence suggests that his priority was always peace. No imperialist fever reigned at the king's court.

  A Venetian observer of around 1584 was impressed by the power of Spain.73 At that date, he calculated with surprising accuracy, the monarchy had twenty thousand infantry in Spain, sixty thousand in Flanders, twenty-four in Naples and the rest of Italy, and fifteen thousand in Portugal. In an emergency it could raise as many as two hundred thousand infantry throughout the empire. It also h
ad around fifteen thousand cavalry in Spain, two thousand in Sicily, nine thousand in Portugal and two thousand in Flanders. In the Mediterranean it had thirty-four galleys ‘of Spain’, twenty-six of Naples and Sicily, and eighteen of other Italian princes. Its war fleet in the Atlantic, devoted mainly to protection of the American convoys, consisted of eight large ships and six galleons. There is no doubt that, with the occupation of Portugal, Spain's empire had reached the peak of its success.

  The king had the satisfaction of watching from the window of his palace in Lisbon as the great galleons came in from the ocean. The Spanish fleets to America could now use Lisbon as a departure point. On one occasion, in April 1582, the king actually ‘accompanied the fleet out of the harbour’ on its first stage to the New World. ‘He breakfasted on board his royal galley, and passed the whole day at the mouth of the port.’ He took special interest in plans to form a company to organize the trade in pepper from Asia. Asia became a reality. He was proclaimed king in Goa in 15 81. To his other titles, at the end of his reign, he was proud to add that of ‘king of Ceylon’.74 Excited by the new dimensions opening up for Christianity, in 1582 he appointed an Indian from Malabar as one of his chaplains. In practice, it was the possibility of finding new sources of income, through Portugal, that absorbed most of his time. He did not have to tax the Portuguese themselves, since overseas commerce brought in good returns. Half of all Portuguese government revenue came from the lucrative trade to Asia, and a third from trade to Europe and America.75 The Atlantic trade was booming, thanks to the development of Brazil.

  In August 1580, only a week after Lisbon capitulated, the king wrote to Alba suggesting that the professional troops, rather than being sent to Italy where most of them were based, be employed in pursuance of what the pope had pressed on him ‘insistently many times: the conquest of England’.76 The ease and success of the Portuguese enterprise stimulated him to believe it could be repeated against Elizabeth. The first requirement both for success against the Dutch and for a possible strike against England, was adequate naval power. But the sea was now drifting out of Spain's control, as could be seen by Drake's successful raids on both sides of the Atlantic in 1585 (Chapter 6). The greatest, the most costly, and the most memorable of Spain's enterprises by sea soon turned into its greatest imperial disaster. This was the Great Armada sent against England in 1588.