Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  The War of the Succession, which commenced in 1702 and went on for some twelve years, developed into a virtual world war, with military and economic repercussions that stretched from Russia to Peru. The combatants on both sides swore that they were moved by the wholly unselfish intention of preserving for the Spaniards an empire that the other side was trying to destroy. In the English colonies of North America, where the conflict against contiguous Spanish colonies took on serious proportions, it was known as ‘Queen Anne's War’ (see Chapter 9). When the French began to suffer military reverses, it became obvious that the task of establishing the Bourbon dynasty was going to be an uphill one. In Milan, the French army found itself at a stalemate against the Imperial forces under Prince Eugene.

  One of the first acts of Louis XIV during his grandson's reign was to order a detachment of French warships, under Admiral Châteaurenaud, to escort the annual convoy of the Spanish treasure fleet across the Atlantic from Cuba. The vessels made a safe entry into the port of Vigo, but were not prepared for a state of war in Europe. Shortly after their arrival at the end of September 1702 they were attacked in the inner reaches of the bay by a joint Anglo-Dutch fleet. The French and Spanish vessels were wiped out: all, save half-a-dozen seized as prizes, were destroyed and sunk. Finally, during 1704 the conflict reached into the peninsula itself, when the Portuguese attempted an invasion by land and in August a British fleet under Admirals Rooke and Byng captured the fort of Gibraltar. For the first time in history the Iberian peninsula was invaded by tens of thousands of foreign troops, half of them Protestant, with the specific aim of overthrowing the ruling dynasty. There was no way for Spain to defend itself adequately. Because of the country's constitutional system there was no national army for defence purposes, nor any navy.

  From this point onwards, the role of Spaniards in the defence of their empire became wholly secondary. During two centuries of Habsburg rule, Spain had been able to display an astonishing ability to conjure up men, munitions and ships from all parts of the world monarchy. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, by contrast, it was cut off from access to all its sources of supply outside the peninsula, and quickly found that its own resources were not sufficient to maintain the struggle. The main obstacle was the British, whose superiority at sea was responsible for the disaster at Vigo, the capture of Gibraltar and subsequently of the principal cities on the Mediterranean coast, above all Barcelona. At no stage during the conflict did the French navy attempt seriously to engage them, and as a result Spain was effectively isolated from any contact with its traditional lifeline, the Italian states. A persistent historical tradition has claimed that Spain's helpless situation was now one of ‘decline’. The claim is, put simply, meaningless. Spain was no worse off in 1700 than it had been in 1600 or in 1500; indeed, its economy and population were now in better shape than ever. The difference was that its success as an imperial power had depended on the collaboration, both as allies and as enemies, of the major states of the West. The War of Succession changed all that fundamentally.

  Philip V now remained entirely dependent on one power alone, France, for his tenure of the crown and the prosecution of the war. The first detachments of French troops sent to help the king entered the peninsula in February 1704, under the command of the duke of Berwick. They helped Philip to launch the first real military campaign to be undertaken within Spain for half a century, against the allied army of twenty-one thousand men which invaded from Portugal. Deficiencies in Spanish supplies soon showed. ‘I see such great shortages among the troops’, Philip reported in 1704, ‘because of lack of bread and non-payment of wages, that troops are deserting on all sides.’ Supplies, munitions, guns, tents and uniforms were ordered in their tens of thousands from France. The entire war machine of Castile was put into the hands of the French, who came to a country that had been accustomed for two centuries to fight its wars abroad rather than at home. The commanders now appointed to direct the war in the peninsula were for the most part French. The leading generals of Philip V – the marquis of Bay, the count del Valle, the prince of T'Serclaes Tilly, the marquis of Castelrodrigo, the duke of Popoli – were all foreigners, and their superiors were – like the dukes of Vendôme, Berwick and Orléans – always French. Only French control could make it possible to coordinate military and naval strategy, in a theatre where support from the sea was of immense importance. Spanish armies benefited from foreign advice, which rationalized their methods of recruitment, organization and equipment. French manufacturers supplied the war material needed to fill the enormous gaps in Spanish equipment and resources.6 The French, above all, secured for Philip V one of the most resounding military victories in the history of the empire: the battle of Almansa.

  The years 1705–6 were particularly unfortunate for the Franco-Spanish forces in the peninsula. At the end of 1705 the British navy made possible the capture of the cities of Barcelona and Valencia, then in the summer of 1706 the Portuguese army occupied Madrid. It was a moment of triumph for the Portuguese soldiers, who could hardly believe that they had overthrown the great Spanish monarchy. Fearing the worst, in February 1706 Louis XIV made Berwick a marshal of France and sent him to Spain once again to conduct the campaign against the Portuguese; a year later he sent a further quantity of French troops, under his nephew the duke of Orléans.

  James FitzJames, first duke of Berwick, was the illegitimate son of the last Catholic king of England, James II, and of the sister of the duke of Marlborough. Now aged thirty-four, he had been in the service of France as a general since 1693. In the spring of 1707 he found himself at the head of the united French forces in the peninsula, in a campaign intended to recover the city of Valencia. He was challenged by the British and Portuguese forces led by the earl of Galway and the marquis das Minas. At daybreak on the morning of 25 April, Berwick had drawn up his army on high ground overlooking the plain before the town of Almansa.7 It was noon before Galway's forces reached the plain and aligned themselves about a mile from the Bourbon position. The Franco-Spanish forces, commanded by Berwick, Popoli and d'Asfeld, amounted to somewhat over twenty-five thousand men; half were French, there was also an Irish regiment, and the rest were Spanish. Galway and Minas had a considerably smaller force of about fifteen thousand five hundred men, of whom half were Portuguese, one-third English, and the rest Dutch, Huguenot and German; there were no Spaniards. The battle, which began early in the afternoon and went on for two hours, resulted in the total defeat of Galway's forces. The allies lost at least four thousand killed (mostly English, Dutch and Huguenots) and three thousand prisoners. The losses would have been higher but for the flight of most of the Portuguese at an early stage of the battle. Berwick's total casualties in dead and wounded were also substantial, about five thousand men.8 Orléans arrived the day after the victory, too late to share its glory. Berwick, who always felt himself to be English and avoided fighting Englishmen wherever possible, invited the captured enemy officers to a large banquet which he held in their honour two days later.

  The importance of Almansa, the one decisive battle of the War of the Succession in the peninsula, is beyond dispute. By it, Valencia was permanently recovered for Philip V, the principal allied army was shattered, vital moral initiative was regained, and the archduke was compelled to rely solely on the resources of his Catalan supporters. At Almansa, the marshal duke of Berwick saved the Bourbon succession. Years later, Frederick the Great of Prussia described it as the most impressive battle of the century. The most important internal consequence of the victory was the revocation of the fueros (or autonomous laws) of the realms of Aragon and Valencia. The recovery of the rest of the eastern part of the peninsula was completed several years later with the capture in 1714 of Barcelona.

  In those same weeks of the year 1707, the tide of events outside the peninsula was not so favourable. Italy, which had long aspired to be free of Spain, seized the opportunity of the war with alacrity. The military balance was swung in favour of the Austrians when Pr
ince Eugene in 1706 returned from a three-year absence in Vienna. He brought with him an army that joined the forces of the duke of Savoy and decisively defeated the numerically superior army of the French outside Turin on 7 September. The victory sealed the fate of Spanish power. France withdrew most of its troops and in March 1707, by the Convention of Milan, agreed to abandon the whole of northern Italy. From this date Savoy, which since the seventeenth century had been the focus of Italian nationalist aspirations, began to emerge as the dominant power in the north. The peninsula lay open to the Austrian army, which under the command of Field Marshal Daun swept triumphantly southwards and occupied Naples in July 1707. The campaign was made to pay for itself: former Spanish allies such as Genoa, Parma, Tuscany and Lucca were forced to contribute huge sums of money to sustain the troops. In their new territories the Austrians settled down to enjoy their gains and profit from the Mediterranean sunshine. Like the Spaniards before them, they made few changes in government, confirmed the existing élites in power, and invited Italian intellectuals and musicians to go to the north and teach them about culture.9

  The military operations in Europe determined the future shape of the Spanish empire. But Spain had no part whatever in the decisions taken. When negotiations for peace with the Allies were opened, they were conducted by France alone. Philip V busied himself sending agents to talk to the opposite side but had no plenipotentiaries at the peace conference. The other great contender for the crown of Spain, the archduke Charles, had now succeeded to the Imperial throne as the Emperor Charles VI. He managed to have his representatives at the peace talks, but his demands were not accepted by the other powers and in the end he did not sign the peace treaty. In August 1712 hostilities between Great Britain, the United Provinces, Portugal, France and Spain were suspended. On 11 April 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht (in reality there were several treaties signed on that date and in later weeks, but they are normally referred to as though they were one) was formally concluded. It was certainly the most important accord in the entire history of the empire, whose shape it altered radically for the first time since the early sixteenth century.

  By the terms of the peace agreed between France and Great Britain, Spain and the Indies were guaranteed to Philip V who, in turn, reaffirmed the renunciation of all his rights to the French throne. A treaty between Spain and Britain was not in fact concluded till 13 July, when Philip's plenipotentiaries at last took part. By this agreement, Spain ceded to Great Britain the fort of Gibraltar and the island (captured by the British in 1708) of Minorca; gave up the kingdom of Sicily to the duke of Savoy; and granted to Britain the asiento for the slave trade to America as well as the right to send one ship a year to trade legally with the colonies. The peace treaty between France and the Dutch provided, among other things, for the eventual transfer of the southern Netherlands from Bavaria, which had controlled it for over a decade, to the Emperor. Louis XIV had long been aware of the need to make concessions, but his problem had been to try and convince his grandson. As early as October 1706 he was warning Amelot that ‘the king of Spain must be prepared for great dismemberments of the monarchy’. Even more forcibly, in 1711, when Philip was refusing to accept the loss of Gibraltar and Minorca, Louis told his grandson directly that ‘there are occasions when one must know how to lose’. Spain made peace with the Dutch in June 1713, with the British and Savoy in July the same year, and with Portugal in February 1715.

  The concessions of territory made in 1713 were painful ones. Gibraltar had been captured in August 1704 by an Anglo-Dutch expeditionary force, and its loss was a bitter pill that the Spanish government always refused to accept, for it wounded national dignity. Never since the medieval Arab invasions had the Spaniards ceded a fortress on their own territory to a foreign power. On the other hand the British had spent effort and lives in capturing the town and later in resisting the various sieges that took place during the war. Though it had no strategic or commercial value, Gibraltar became a symbol of victory that no British government would contemplate relinquishing. The loss of Minorca was of a different order. The island was invaded in September 1708 by General Stanhope and Vice-Admiral Leake, and reduced after just over a week. Its importance was immediately recognized by Stanhope, who wrote to his government that ‘England ought never to part with this island, which will give the law to the Mediterranean both in time of war and of peace.’10 These were the only losses of metropolitan territory, but they were enduring. Minorca flourished quietly under British rule and was given back to Spain a century later; Gibraltar remains British.

  The dismemberment of the European empire continued after Utrecht, and was fated to be total. Sicily, a kingdom that had been an integral part of the Crown of Aragon since before the days of Ferdinand the Catholic, was at Utrecht ceded to the duke of Savoy. But the other Mediterranean possessions remained to be disposed of. Their arbiter was the Emperor Charles VI, who had refused to accede to the Peace of Utrecht and was therefore not only still at war with Spain (and France) but also in effective occupation of all Spanish territory in Italy. The year after Utrecht, therefore, on 7 March 1714 France and the Empire agreed on conditions for peace in a treaty signed at Rastatt, on the right bank of the Rhine just north of Strasbourg. The actual treaty of peace between the two was not signed until 7 September, at Baden in Switzerland. The French agreed to transfer to the emperor all Spanish territory in Italy, including Naples, Sardinia, Milan and the fortresses of Tuscany; the Spanish Netherlands were ceded to him at the same time. With Minorca and Gibraltar in English hands, and Italy under Austrian control, Spain found itself deprived at one blow of its control of the western Mediterranean. Utrecht and Rastatt opened a new era in Spanish history, leaving the peninsular monarchy utterly alone in Europe and subordinated to the dictates of the two emergent world powers, France and Britain.

  The conditions imposed at Utrecht were to remain in force for nearly a century, and in theory regulated the relations between the great powers. But it was a system that had been imposed by force on Spain, which therefore made repeated attempts to overturn it. The Treaty at Baden did not include peace between the Empire and Spain, leaving the latter free to question the new arrangements in the Mediterranean. Over the next half-century the two powers, still formally at war, continued to fight for control of Italy.

  Supported from 1700 by the protecting hand of France, the Spanish crown was able to take stock of its position in the world, and did not like what it saw. The great commercial empires of Britain and the United Provinces had seized every advantage afforded them by their naval supremacy. Was it possible to salvage what remained of the world empire?

  The mines of New Spain were now increasing their production of silver, thanks to receipts of Spanish mercury from Almadén. Production figures of five million pesos a year at the opening of the century doubled by the 1720s, and remained at that level during the reign of Philip V. By contrast, in the viceroyalty of Peru both population and production declined. The great silver mining centre of Potosí in Bolivia lost over two-thirds of its population in the century after 1650. The city of Lima in the same period lost half its population. No small role was played by the earthquake which in 1687 destroyed a good part of the city and provoked a tidal wave that wiped out the port of Callao. America still continued to feed its wealth into the European market, where the Iberian peninsula acted as an essential link in the trading system. A Nantes merchant resident in Cadiz in 1726 saw American silver as ‘the public and common treasure of all nations’.11 From 1700, bullion that came to Cadiz from the Spanish colonies (including gold from the increased production in New Granada) was supplemented by substantial quantities of gold that came to Lisbon from Brazil.12 Spain continued to be the centre of an international market, but its role in respect of colonial wealth had changed radically: it now became a centre for the re-export of precious metals. From 1640 to 1763, almost all the bullion reaching the peninsula was re-exported to other European countries and to Asia.13

  Aware that Am
erican produce, whether in goods or in bullion, was going largely to non-Spanish markets, the new management in Madrid looked closely at possible solutions. In American ports, vendors inevitably sold their produce to ships from other nations if there were no Spanish vessels to make the purchase. In the opening years of the eighteenth century over two-thirds of the goods traded from Peru went to France, mainly to the port of St-Malo.14 The immense ‘contraband’ trade was of long standing and impossible to control. An attempt to revive the old fleet system failed to produce results.