Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  If we were to judge Spain's actions simply by the exploits of its conquistadors it would be easy to conclude, as American chroniclers like Guaman Poma did, that greed was the overriding inspiration of the newcomers. In reality, the limited military and naval capacity of Spain meant that it could not construct an empire based only on systematic rapine. The conquests had to mature. From the very beginning, there were always men from many nations who were concerned to ensure that their small investments, in land, in mining, in production, in commerce and even in the African slave trade, would perform properly and bring in dividends. Bit by bit, a patchwork of interests was created that brought together European and Asian investors. The problem arose when that investment had to be protected by force of arms, for business does not function adequately without the power to back it up.

  It was then that Spaniards, face to face with the inadequacy of their imperial power, began to have doubts about the whole enterprise on which they had embarked.

  8

  Identities and the Civilizing Mission

  Even spirits that are most opposed in the patria, become reconciled when they are outside it, and learn to appreciate each other.

  Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa (circa 1640)

  As citizens of the Roman Empire had been taught to look towards Rome, so citizens of the Spanish territories were encouraged to accept the culture and values of Spain. All empires are in some measure a process of acculturation, creating bonds that permeate the entire network of relations and establish the rudiments of a common identity. In the nascent empire of Ferdinand and Isabella a common bond was created by participation in an enterprise that was led and pioneered by Castilians, who formed four-fifths of the population ruled by the crown in the peninsula. Castilians logically formed the majority of the troops, generals, diplomats and clergy. Though sharing with other peoples of the state a sense of belonging to ‘Spain’, they felt rightly that their part in it was foremost and they put their stamp on its actions and its evolution.

  With time, the sense of belonging underwent a subtle change. The political role of the state, which was called ‘Spain’, began to grow in importance. At the same time, the growth of the empire bestowed on ‘Spain’ a significance, a role and an ethic that helped the peoples of the peninsula to realize that they now shared a common enterprise which gave them an unprecedented new identity. Perhaps the most powerful influence on this change was warfare. From the wars of Granada onwards, both soldiers and officers in the army absorbed a war ethic in which military values transcended the mere level of personal valour, and were placed at the service of the prince and the state. All soldiers in the pay of Spain, whether they were Castilians or not, were encouraged to identify themselves directly with the nation. They were told to shout for Spain. The use of a standard battle-cry helped to concentrate the enthusiasm of soldiers. During the Italian wars around the year 1500 all soldiers serving in the tercios were under the obligation to use the battle cry ‘Santiago, España!’. Castilian chroniclers reported how the soldiers in battle chanted ‘España, España!’ and ‘España, Santiago!’ as they hurled themselves at their enemies. They may not even have been aware what the words meant, but it was a phrase that served to concentrate their ferocity.

  Over the next half century the war-cry began to be heard throughout Europe. Italian troops serving in the duchy of Cleves in 1543 shouted ‘Santiago, Spagna!’, and soldiers of the tercio of Naples, serving at Mühlberg in Germany in 1547, were ordered to cry ‘Santiago, España!’ Even troops not within Spain's service were known to use the invocation. At Mühlberg the crack Hungarian cavalry in the emperor's army had to choose between the official German or Spanish battle-cries, and in view of their antipathy to Germany had no doubt in opting to cry ‘España!’ as they charged into battle.1 Considering that, as we have seen,2 over half the men in a tercio might be non-Castilian Spaniards, the cohesive effect of this essentially Castilian war-cry was undoubted. All soldiers of the peninsula were encouraged to feel that their cause was the cause of Spain.

  It was significant that the battle-cry could not, except in the Granada wars, be used within the peninsula. One could not shout ‘Spain!’ when fighting a battle against other Spaniards. The proclamation of an identity, of a loyalty to Spain, was always external and associated with imperial enterprise. Just as Basques, Extremadurans and Aragonese might feel they had a common cause against the enemy at Granada, so their joint experience outside the peninsula gave them a common bond. The humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who had direct experience of the reign of the emperor and devoted his retirement in the 1560s to writing a life of him, was among the first to originate the image of an empire that had been created by the military effort and heroism of ‘Spaniards’ alone. Describing the siege of Florence in 1530, when Charles's commander the prince of Orange was unexpectedly killed, Sepúlveda recounted for his Spanish readers how a small handful of Castilians, to cries of ‘España!’, drove the enemy back and gave courage to the German troops of the emperor.3 Long before any political reality to the concept within the peninsula, ‘Spain’ became for the soldiers outside it a vivid reality that determined their aspirations.

  The battle-cry of ‘España’ stirred the emotions of combatants in favour of a ‘Spanish nation’,4 phrase employed by a chronicler of 1559. The term ‘nation’ was not new. It had been used frequently in previous decades to refer to Spaniards and others as a determined group living outside the peninsula (for example, traders living abroad were grouped in their towns of residence as a ‘nation’). It was also applied to companies within an army, to define their origins and shared language. The soldiers of the Castilian tercios in Flanders, absent for years from their homes and desperate to identify the cause for which they were sacrificing their youth and their lives, seemed to be using this term ‘Spanish nation’ in a broader, more collective sense. ‘We are from the same nation as you, all Spaniards’, wrote the soldiers serving in Holland to the mutineers in the town of Alost in 1576.5 Absence abroad was a powerful influence in creating sympathy for ‘Spain’. The word began to take on echoes of yearning, to refer to the homeland from which all peoples of the peninsula came. The most obvious example was the emigration to the New World. Settlers writing home to their loved ones habitually referred to the peninsula as ‘Spain’, and even when they were content with their new lives did not cease to long for the things that ‘Spain’ represented for them.

  The majority of emigrants to the empire were from the Crown of Castile, and spoke Castilian. For them, Castile and Spain were perceived as identical. Because of the preponderant part played by Castilians in foreign enterprises, the history of voyage, discovery, conquest and war was written up by official historians in a way that gave all the glory to Castile. In a sense this was not new, for other European nations also were in that same epoch trying to discover their own identity through an exploration of their past. Reading today the stirring historical accounts that have come down to us, it is easy to forget that they were essentially works of propaganda by Castilians who on one hand were delighted by the achievements of their citizens, and on the other were anxious to please their sponsors, who were normally (as were those of Nebrija) the government.

  One historian, who in 1559 wrote his account of the wars in Naples over half a century before, used classical models to invent suitable speeches for his dramatis personae. A military commander trying to mollify four thousand Castilian soldiers of Naples who were mutinying for non-payment of their wages is said to have used the following words to them: ‘the whole of that kingdom of Spain, of which we are sons, has its eyes fixed on you’.6 Hundreds of miles from home, the scattered towns and isolated villages from which the soldiers came, took on the lineaments of a great new identity, the ‘kingdom of Spain’. Writing fifty years later, the official historian Antonio de Herrera went so far as to present the entire imperial enterprise, both in Europe and in the New World, as exclusively a history of the deeds of Castilians. In his pages Magellan was
transformed into a Castilian, and the Imperial victory at the battle of Pavia became a conflict between French and Spaniards alone, in which the capture of the king of France was a consequence of the victory of the ‘Spanish army’.7

  His contemporary Prudencio de Sandoval, introducing his narrative of the life of Charles V, stated that ‘I am going to write about the kingdoms of Castile’, a phrase that four lines later became ‘this history of Spain’.8 The part of non-Castilians in the task of discovery and settlement was in no way glossed over by the chroniclers, but they were invariably given an identity, as ‘Spaniards’, that obscured their nationality and origins. The chroniclers described, for example, the sponsors of Sebastian Cabot's 1525 expedition simply as merchants of Seville, without the detail that they were Genoese.9 The work of the Castilian historians became perhaps the most powerful tool in the creation of the desired image of empire. Subsequent historians in their turn quoted the earlier writers, and so the notion of Spanish power was born. The contribution of non-Castilian allies was not forgotten, but simply lost to sight.

  The warlike deeds of Castilians came to be seen as superhuman and unique. Marcos de Isaba, who had served as a soldier throughout the Mediterranean, wrote proudly in the 1580s that ‘I have seen with my own eyes what the valour of the Spanish nation has achieved, and the respect, fear and renown that Spaniards have gained both in the Old World and in the New in these last ninety years. The Germans and the Swiss have admitted that they are outclassed in strength and discipline.’ The proof of such a claim, he said, could be found in the famous battle of Pavia, where ‘it is both true and accepted that just eight hundred infantry, musketeers and pikemen, won the victory, shattering the fury of the French cavalry and the greater part of their army’.10 The re-writing (and, inevitably, distortion) of history was extended to every major encounter in which Castilians participated. At the battle of Nordlingen in 1634 (see Chapter 9), where the Spanish troops constituted one fifth of the Imperial army, an account by a participating Castilian noble makes the German troops after the victory cry out ‘Viva España!’ and ‘Long live the valour of the Spaniards!’ in recognition of the outstanding role of the peninsular troops. The same author, with pride, could not avoid the conclusion that ‘all-powerful is the Monarchy of Spain, vast its Empire, and its glorious arms pulsate in splendour from the rising of the sun to its setting’.11 The Germans, who had done most of the fighting at Nördlingen, no doubt had a different viewpoint.

  The continuing emphasis on the reality of ‘Spain’ certainly helped the peoples of the peninsula to become aware of their own role in the making of the empire. From the war of Granada onward, they usually participated together in military enterprises that had a common purpose. But though ‘Spain’ became a more palpable reality both to Spaniards and to outsiders, very little changed in the immediate perception of daily life in the peninsula, where the loyalties of hearth and home, of local culture and language, maintained their primacy until well into the nineteenth century. From at least the beginning of the sixteenth century there were writers who were using the term ‘patria’ when they referred to the community – usually the home town – for which people felt an instinctive loyalty.12 ‘Spain’, by contrast, remained an abstract entity that seldom penetrated down to the most intimate local level. In the early eighteenth century the Asturian monk and scholar Feijoo affirmed roundly that ‘Spain is the authentic object of a Spaniard's love’. But his definition of ‘Spain’ referred to little more than its existence as an administrative body, ‘that body of state where, under a civil government, we are united by the bonds of the same laws’.13

  A primary consequence of Spain's imperial identity was the diffusion of the Castilian language. Generations of scholars have learnt to accept that the age of empire was also that of the flowering of Castilian language and culture, a visible fulfilment of the intuitions of Talavera and Nebrija. The fact that Castilian is in the twenty-first century the principal language of up to a fifth of the human race, is a source of continuing pride to Spaniards. At first sight, therefore, it seems evident that the successes of language would not have been possible without the existence of the empire.

  Castilian speech was a crucial focus of identity because it became in some measure the language of empire. Spaniards used it everywhere in order to communicate with other Spaniards. It became the medium used by travel writers, clergy, diplomats, and officers in the international armies of the crown. Latin as an imperial language was never a competitor, for few understood it or read it. It was taught in church and village schools, but for most people and even for clergy it was a virtually dead tongue. As a consequence, a powerful tendency among the European élite opposed using it for purposes of communication.14 The rise of Spanish power, by contrast, favoured the use of Spain's main language. A Navarrese professor at the Portuguese university of Coimbra published a book in 1544 in Castilian, with the comment that ‘Castilian is understood now in most Christian nations, whereas few dedicate themselves to reading Latin since they have not studied it.’15

  Moreover, thanks to the existence of the empire the Castilian tongue enjoyed advantages available to none other in Europe. Printing presses in the two most developed European nations, Italy and the Netherlands, made their resources available to Castilian authors.16 Unlike the English, who could expect to publish a book in English only in their own country, Castilians had the choice of publishing in any of the realms of the peninsula, as well as in the other states of the monarchy and in France and Portugal. By the 1540s, more books by Spaniards were being published outside than inside the peninsula. They appeared mainly in Antwerp, Venice, Lyons, Toulouse, Paris, Louvain, Cologne, Lisbon and Coimbra.17 When Philip II in the 1560s wished to print quality books, he published for preference in Antwerp and Venice. The standard of presses outside Spain was much better, and controls were less onerous.18 The wide diffusion of printed Castilian literature resulted in the rapid transmission to the rest of Europe of the great Castilian writers and also of a genre that soon bred imitations, the picaro novel. Needless to say, Castilian literature also crossed the Atlantic, to a continent where the art of writing was unknown, and where it definitively shaped the early American mind.

  The literary achievement, of which later generations were justifiably proud, was indubitable. But the success of printed literature obviously had a very limited impact in a world where very few people read books, illiteracy was overwhelming, and all significant cultural contact was oral rather than written. The situation in the Iberian peninsula was typical. Spanish works might be the best sellers in Barcelona bookshops, but in the streets nearly everyone spoke Catalan. ‘In Catalonia', claimed a priest from that principality in 1636, over one hundred years after the beginning of the Habsburg dynasty, ‘the common people do not understand Castilian.’19 The situation could be found elsewhere in the coastal provinces of Spain. As late as 1686 regulations for shipping in Guipúzcoa had to stipulate that vessels carry a Basque-speaking priest, since among the seamen ‘the majority do not understand Spanish’.20 The absence of a common national tongue was, of course, a fairly normal phenomenon in most European states at that time. In Spain it was particularly striking. Castilian was not understood at all by a good part of the natives of Andalusia, Valencia, Catalonia, the Basque country, Navarre, and Galicia.21 The problem was brought home forcibly to missionaries who tried to communicate with congregations in these parts of the country. In the formerly Muslim areas where Arabic still survived as a spoken tongue, the missionaries tried in vain to learn Arabic and to bring their message home to the people. In Catalonia all the non-Catalan clergy made efforts to learn the local tongue, and the Jesuits, for example, took care to appoint only Catalans to work in the province. Throughout the Habsburg epoch, Castilian was most commonly used but the plurality of languages within the peninsula was necessarily recognized and accepted.

  The problem existed throughout the length and breadth of the empire. It is doubtful whether Castilian was spoken as p
rincipal language by more than a tenth of the visible population in the colonial New World, where the vast majority of the people continued to maintain their own society, culture and language, and for the most part had no regular contact with Spaniards. Even the black slaves tended to conserve their own African languages rather than speak the alien tongue of the slave masters. The picture was the same in the lands where the Spaniards lived in Asia (Chapter 10).

  Nebrija's prediction, therefore, never bore fruit. The Castilian language was spoken by Spaniards wherever they went, and was even used by Basques in northern Mexico as a common lingua franca, although many of course continued to use their own native tongue. On the New Mexico frontier, pidgin Spanish was employed as a lingua franca among the indigenous peoples, and European words entered their daily vocabulary. But the language of the Spaniards never in colonial times attained universal status, except in administrative matters when it became the only practical one to use. In any other sense, within the empire during the period of Spanish rule more people in the Philippines spoke Chinese than Castilian, within South America more people spoke Quechua (and associated languages) than Castilian, and within Europe the dominant cultures in the Spanish monarchy were as much Italian and French as Castilian.