Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The harsh campaigns against ‘idolatry’ among Andean Indians in the seventeenth century drew to an end in the 1660s and may have had some effect, but it was for the most part superficial. Although clergy often used exaggerated language in their evaluations, there is little reason to reject the verdict of a priest in Peru in 1677 that ‘the idolatry of the Indians is more solidly rooted today than it was at the beginning of the conversion of these realms’. In Peru the programme of ‘extirpation’ had to be renewed in 1725, and continued till the end of the eighteenth century. The struggle against the huacas was always an uphill one, doomed to frustration. A bemused Peruvian native in the eighteenth century asked a Jesuit: ‘Father, are you tired of taking our idols from us? Take away that mountain if you can, since that is the God I worship!’150 The animistic beliefs and traditional rites were the central core of an indigenous identity, and persisted in one form or another all the way through the colonial epoch, even though modified. Natives who accepted Christianity did so at the same time as they continued with their old cultural practices. Those who refused to accept changes maintained a permanent, armed hostility. In 1700 in the peninsula of Darien the Cuna people attempted to ally with a group of Scots who had settled there against the Spaniards. One of their chiefs was captured by the Spaniards and refused to reveal the location of a gold mine even when his captors cut off both his hands. He said: ‘God sent devils down upon the earth like a fierce downpour of rain. Thanks to these demons you came to my country and your people occupied my land and ousted me from it.’151 The Cuna continued to attack the Spanish missions during the eighteenth century.

  Two priests, both foreigners in the Spanish mission field, offer interesting though conflicting testimony to the impact of the new religion after a century and a half of Spanish rule. The early hero of the missionary effort in northwestern New Spain was the Tyrolean Jesuit Eusebio Kino.152 Born Eusebius Kühn near Trent in northeast Italy, he was educated at Ingolstadt, joined the Jesuit order in Bavaria, went to Mexico in 1683 and in 1683 became the first European to reach the Pacific by an overland route. He worked for a quarter of a century in Sonora and then in Arizona among the Pima people and prepared the way for later missionary advances into Lower California. His indefatigable travels, and his revolutionary work as a geographer and explorer of the Colorado valley, distinguish him as one of the great pioneers of the Spanish empire. In 1696, after ten years of labour, he remained wholly optimistic and could still write that he was ‘received with all love by the many inhabitants’. It is likely that his lack of obsession with the persistence of ‘idolatry’ contributed powerfully to his rosy view of success.

  On the other hand his contemporary, the Jesuit Josef Neumann, a Belgian of German origin who served for an incredible fifty years, from 1681 to 1732, in the Tarahumara country of the same northwest, had a bleaker perspective. He wrote at the end of his career:

  With these people the result does not repay the hard labour. The seed of the gospel does not sprout. We find little eagerness among our new converts. Some only pretend to believe, showing no inclination for spiritual things such as prayers, divine services and Christian doctrine. They show no aversion to sin, no anxiety about their eternal happiness. They show rather a lazy indifference to everything good, unlimited sensual desire, an irresistible habit of getting drunk, and stubborn silence in regard to hidden paganism. And so we cannot bring them into the fold of Christ.153

  At almost exactly the same date, in 1730, a Capuchin missionary reported of the Guajiro tribes of New Granada: ‘It is impossible to bring forth any fruit among these Indians; they have not given rise to even the slightest hope in all the time that work has been dedicated to their conversion.’154 This view was expressed in a way that laid emphasis on the refusal of the natives to accept the Catholic religion. A quite different perspective, in that it laid the blame on the clergy, was expressed by the officials Juan and Ulloa shortly afterwards, in the 1740s, when they explained that the parish priests in Peru were guilty of ‘total neglect and failure’ to convert the Indians in their charge. ‘Although the Indians have been Christianized,’ they wrote, ‘their religious training has been so poor that it would be difficult to discern a difference in them from the time they were conquered to the present day.’

  Contradictory and sometimes conflicting religious allegiances, political loyalties, and cultural aspirations, all formed part of the mosaic of identity in the Iberian peninsula on the eve of empire. Spaniards came from a medieval background where there was no unity of creed nor of political affiliation. As a consequence, despite efforts to do so they seldom succeeded in imposing a single exclusive vision on the lands to which they went as rulers or as settlers. Over-zealous clergy were persistently opposed by colonists who put business before salvation, ruthless settlers were opposed by clergy and even more firmly by the indigenous population. Jews, prohibited in Spain after 1492, continued to live freely in every other part of the worldwide empire.

  The countries that made up the monarchy enjoyed a richness of contrasts that may surprise those who feel that Spain's subjects laboured under a uniformly heavy hand of tyranny and superstition. In reality, the vastness of the monarchy made it impossible to impose any uniformity of vision. The only common link was the use of a single administrative language – Castilian – which offered members of the empire a shared speech and with it a recognition of the special role played by a far-off mother country, Spain, in the formation of shared traditions. Spain, in the end, was the ignis fatuus, the will of the wisp, to which people looked when they despaired of making sense of the chaos of the worldwide empire. When the aged Guaman Poma set off from his village in 1614 for Lima, bearing with him the massive manuscript of his New Chronicle, and accompanied by his young son, a horse and two dogs, he explicitly recognized that the answer to his aspirations for change in his country lay in Spain. In the same way the Jews of the dispersion continued for centuries to define their identity in terms of the country which had done most to destroy them, the Sefarad of their ancestors, the universal monarchy of Spain.

  9

  Shoring up the Empire (1630–1700)

  If Spain had spent less on war and more on peace it would have achieved world domination, but its greatness has made it careless, and the riches that would have made it invincible have passed to other nations.

  Diego Saavedra Fajardo, Political enterprises (1640) 1

  Italy continued to be the sheet anchor of Spain's power in Europe throughout the seventeenth century. Armaments, ships and men from all over Italy continued to be the essential support for Spanish-led campaigns in the rest of Europe. Meanwhile ambitious Castilian administrators (of whom the most notorious was the viceroy of Naples, the duke of Osuna) attempted by fair means or foul to maintain the initiative in Italy, where the most direct challenge to Spanish power came from the Republic of Venice. As in previous decades, the centre of attention was the army of Lombardy based in Milan. Throughout these years it had the task of keeping the Alpine passes open, and remaining permanently vigilant in respect of its three immediate neighbours: Savoy, the Swiss Confederation, and Venice, states which put their own independence first but were not above seeking French help in order to maintain it. ‘Milan’, a Venetian ambassador commented at the time, ‘is the true crucible where all the designs of the Spaniards in Italy are prepared.’2 Helped powerfully by the financial resources of its bankers, among them such leading names as Negrolo, Cusani, Spinola and Doria,3 the duchy put its credit, manpower and armaments industry at the service of the Spaniards. The most belligerent of its governors was the count of Fuentes, Pedro Henríquez de Azevedo, who in the face of enormous difficulties was able during his mandate (1600–1610) to confirm and extend Spain's position. In the long history of Spain's empire, he may with reason be counted among the most successful of all its military commanders. He consolidated the duchy's access to the Mediterranean by occupying the principalities of Finale (1602), Piombino and Monaco, and took over adjacent fortresse
s in Novara, Modena, Mirandola and Lunigiana. He also built an imposing fortress, named Fuentes after him, on a rocky hill at the mouth of the River Adda. Its purpose was to control the mountain route – the famous Valtelline – that linked Milan with the Tyrol and the Austrian Habsburgs.

  Spain's position, however, was put in jeopardy by the always independent policy of Savoy, under its duke Carlo Emanuele I, who had become Philip II's son-in-law in 1585 when he married his beautiful daughter the infanta Michaela. In 1612 he disputed control of the adjacent duchy of Montferrat, which he occupied in 1613. The move involved him in war with Spanish Milan, but he had taken care to count on the active support of France (for soldiers) and Venice (for money). The struggle lasted four years, with little profit for Carlo Emanuele, who was defeated by the Milanese forces of the then viceroy Pedro de Toledo, marquis of Francavila. This small conflict had an importance much greater than any of the participants realized. It inspired the duke of Osuna in 1618 to back a conspiracy against Venice, provoked a resurgence of patriotic anti-Spanish sentiment throughout Italy, and brought Savoy to the fore as the one great hope for the liberation of the peninsula from the yoke of Spain.

  Some years later, during the Mantuan crisis, Rubens observed with an uncanny prescience that ‘I have the feeling that the duke of Savoy will be the brand that sets all Italy afire.’4 The poet Alessandro Tassoni, in two tracts of 1614 titled Filippiche contro gli Spagnuoli, called on Italians to unite against the barbarians: ‘no nation in the world could be so base as to allow itself to be endlessly dominated by foreigners’. The poet Fulvio Testo proclaimed that Savoy was the only hope for a free Italy. In the streets of Naples a poster was discovered, addressed to ‘Italy’ and announcing that it would ‘soon be a united state’.5 With good reason did Rubens comment that ‘the hatred of the Italians for Spanish domination outweighs every other consideration’.6

  The army of Milan was less successful during the subsequent ill-fated war of the Mantuan Succession (1627–31), an apparently small struggle like so many others in which Spain had allowed itself to be involved in the past. In December 1627 the duke of Mantua and Montferrat died with no direct heir. The strategic importance of the duchies, which included in Montferrat the fortress of Casale, made outside intervention inevitable. Spain laid claim to Mantua, while France supported the claims of Charles de Gonzague, duke of Nevers and a French subject. Olivares recognized that ‘the duke of Nevers is the legitimate heir to all the Mantuan estates, and simple justice is undoubtedly on his side’.7 However, he opted in favour of a rapid conquest of the duchy by the army of Milan. The problem was that the Spaniards soon had to face the intervention of a French army, which forced them to raise the siege of Casale. They also had to deal with the alliance between Carlo Emanuele and France. Unable to hold on, they appealed for help from Germany. In the summer of 1629 units of Wallenstein's army, under the command of the Italian generals Gallas and Piccolomini, entered Italy through the Valtelline and besieged Mantua, while Spinola was sent from Brussels to take over the governorship of Milan and direction of the siege of Casale. The apparently limited and local conflict had become an international war, with the principal armies of France, Spain and the Empire tied down in the north of Italy. It was a scenario that Spain proved unable to dominate.

  The death through ill-health at Casale in 1630 of Spinola, last of the great captains of Spain's imperial epoch, was an ominous prelude to the collapse of the military machine in Europe. Through his financial resources, his recruitment abilities, and above all his brilliant generalship, Spinola had held together the entire network of military administration that stretched from Italy through the Rhineland to the Low Countries. In Brussels, according to Rubens, ‘he alone is powerful, and possesses more authority than all the others together’.8 He was, beyond all doubt, Spain's greatest general of the seventeenth century, and richly deserved the honours bestowed on him. But his failure to capture Casale rapidly had been frowned on in Madrid, where they thought a Castilian would serve better. Olivares's ungenerous treatment of the great general was notable. ‘Since his intervention in Italy’, he complained of Spinola, ‘he has been able to achieve nothing more than loss of reputation, so that we are now in danger of defeat both in Italy and Flanders because we paid too much attention to his counsels.’9 On hearing that he had been replaced by the marquis of Santa Cruz, Spinola was unable to conceal his disgust. He protested to the young papal diplomat, Giulio Mazarini, who was at the siege trying to negotiate an agreement between both sides, that ‘they have dishonoured me’. He took to his sickbed and died in September 1630. Mazarin (as he shortly became known when he entered the service of France) was at his bedside and reported that with his last breath Spinola kept murmuring repeatedly ‘honour and reputation, honour and reputation’.10 Rubens commented sadly that ‘Spinola was tired of living. He was disgusted by the hostile feeling shown him in Spain. I have lost one of the greatest friends and patrons I had in the world.’11 The artist's fine portrait of the resolute, commanding general dates from Spinola's great period of power in the court at Brussels.

  Profiting from Spinola's transfer to the Mantuan front, the Dutch succeeded in capturing 's-Hertogenbosch (1629) and so initiated a slow but successful campaign to consolidate their military gains. In Brazil, as we have seen, they succeeded in gaining their first serious hold on the mainland, by the capture of Pernambuco (1630). Olivares had no option but to seek a negotiated settlement in Italy, using the good offices of the papacy to make approaches to France. The result was the treaty of Cherasco (1631), which decided the Mantuan succession in favour of France. It was the first major achievement of the new chief minister of the French royal council, Cardinal Richelieu, who had in 1630 routed his rivals at court and begun his ascent to power.

  The success of the Swedish armies in Germany also threatened to destroy the entire chain of alliances on which Spanish security in the north depended. Help came when it was least expected. The Swedish king Gustav Adolf was killed leading a cavalry charge at the battle of Lützen in November 1632. It was a Swedish victory, but the loss of the king was an irreparable blow and changed the entire situation. The generals who succeeded Gustav were unable to command the same support among the German princes, who made moves to distance themselves from the foreign forces in their country. Shortly afterwards there was also a change of leadership in the court at Brussels, where the atmosphere had been anything but favourable to Spaniards. Ambassador Oñate commented at the time that ‘anyone who remembers the way the rebellion began will see that we are going through the same stages’. In 1632 a plot in favour of the Dutch and against Spain by the former commander of the army of Flanders, Count Hendrik van den Bergh, was discovered. He was arrested, together with the head of the treasury, the count of Warfusée.12 Other nobles were also plotting with Cardinal Richelieu. The obvious threat from France, which had led to the humiliating peace at Cherasco, and the continuing problems in northern Europe, induced Spain to allow the army of Lombardy to take part in the German campaign for, as Olivares commented, ‘the answer to everything must come from Germany’.13

  As a result, Spain made perhaps its most notable intervention in the German theatre of the Thirty Years’ War, during the years 1633–4. On the death of Archduchess Isabella in December 1633, Philip IV appointed as her replacement his younger brother the infante Ferdinand, who had been originally destined for the Church and created cardinal, but at the time was serving as governor of Milan. The preceding governor, the duke of Feria, Gómez Suarez de Figueroa, was sent to Germany in August 1633 at the head of an army in order to league up with the forces of the duke of Bavaria and free the Rhineland from the menaces of the French. Feria's force of twelve thousand five hundred men (12 per cent Spaniards, 32 per cent Germans and 56 per cent Italians) 14 entered the Holy Roman Empire through the Valtelline and linked up at Ravens-burg with the Bavarian forces under their commander, the Luxemburger general Johann von Aldringen. In October the joint army relieved the key fortre
ss of Breisach from the besieging French. ‘I am extremely happy’, Feria wrote, ‘to have served Your Majesty and in particular to have relieved Breisach, in view of its great importance and because it now opens the road between Italy and Flanders.’15 The route had to be made safe for the cardinal infante to reach Brussels and take up his post. However, Feria's army was reduced in number and resting in winter quarters; the duke himself fell ill during the bitter cold of the winter, and died in Munich in January 1634. If the cardinal infante wanted to go to Brussels, he would have to recruit an army of his own to accompany him.

  Ferdinand had extreme difficulty in raising yet another army, and it took him five months to do so. By then the objectives of his journey had also been modified. His mission was to take up the appointment in Brussels, but his primary assignment was a specifically military one, to take reinforcements to help the Austrian Habsburgs against the still powerful Swedes. He left Milan in June 1634 at the head of an army of eighteen thousand men made up largely of Italian officers and soldiers but with a small contingent – around one fifth of the force – of Spanish ▓infantry.16 He took the route through the Valtelline, having agreed in advance with the commander of the Imperial forces, his cousin Ferdinand king of Hungary, to rendezvous with him at the Danube. When they met on 2 September a few miles from the city of Donauworth, the cousins dismounted from their horses and embraced each other. Ferdinand of Hungary, later emperor as Ferdinand III, was then aged twenty-six years, one year older than the cardinal, to whose sister he was married. Their meeting was a unique moment, never achieved before and never to be repeated, of active military alliance between the two branches of the Habsburg family. The joint retinue of officers and nobles, some eight hundred persons in all, went on to celebrate the meeting with a grand reception.