Spain's Road to Empire

by Henry Kamen

  On 9 May, even before Charles had arrived in the capital, representatives of the city of Naples came to offer him their obedience. Charles made his solemn entry into the city the next day and was proclaimed king. An Austrian force that invaded from the Adriatic was defeated by Montemar later that month. The Sicilians waited with expectation to be liberated from Imperial rule. In August a force under Montemar sailed from Naples for Sicily, and on 1 September entered Palermo and proclaimed Charles king. The Sicilians rose all over the island in support. Charles crossed over to visit them during the first six months of 1735. The Spanish Bourbons were now in control of all southern Italy as well as Tuscany. It was an astonishing achievement carried out with remarkable speed and very little loss of life. Philip V's forces had recovered all the Italian territories lost at Utrecht, with the exception of Milan. In Naples, the Bourbons initiated a great new dynastic epoch.

  In theory the Castilian élite should have been overjoyed at the recovery of the old Habsburg empire. But the change of dynasty and the thirty years of war that followed it had profoundly affected the outlook of all the participants in the story. The Castilian historical image, carefully cultivated over the centuries, was of a kingdom of Naples that had been conquered gloriously by the Spanish troops of the Great Captain, annexed to the Spanish Crown and ruled over by Spaniards. That image had nothing to do with the new conquest of Naples, organized only by Italians and Frenchmen. To make matters worse, Philip V refused to integrate Naples (‘the kingdom of the Two Sicilies’, as it was now called) into the Spanish monarchy, and instead recognized his son Charles as ruler of a wholly independent kingdom. The decision infuriated the Castilians. When news arrived in Madrid that Charles had been proclaimed king in Naples, only two grandees, both of them Italians, went to the royal palace of La Granja to congratulate Philip on the achievement.

  The succession of the Bourbons in Spain provoked a radical critique of the empire as it had been managed for two hundred years by the Habsburg dynasty. No longer constrained by the need to flatter and fawn in order to conserve their position, a few intellectuals of the new regime delivered mortal broadsides against the policies that, in their view, had brought the empire to the pass in which it found itself. Spanish economists of the period who compared the condition of their country with that of Holland, England or France experienced a deep sense of ‘backwardness, inferiority and resentment’.26

  One of the most striking of the new critics was José del Campillo, a brilliant administrator whom Philip V intended to make his chief minister but whose career was cut short by an early death. In his New System of economic government for America, which circulated among colleagues but remained unpublished until the end of the century, Campillo denounced the opportunities that Spain had lost in the New World.27 Instead of enjoying a flourishing commerce in America, he said, Spain earned less in trade from the whole continent than France earned from the island of Martinique alone. Spain had wasted its efforts pursuing ‘conquest’, when it should have been creating wealth by developing the resources of the New World. Above all, Spain had neglected the biggest resource at its disposal: the native population of America, which could have been drawn into productive schemes instead of being oppressed and exploited. Campillo, like other commentators of the early Enlightenment in Spain, did not fail to underline the contrast between the failures of the Spanish empire and the growing successes of the other West European nations, particularly the British. Always with an eye on the British formula for success, they had no hesitation in supporting a system of free trade (above all, with America) as the only way in which Spain's hidden potential might be developed.

  In reality, the critics were only one side of the picture. There were also others who looked back on the past with nostalgia and feared the outcome of the changes that appeared to be happening all round them. In Italy, the passing of the Spanish crown to a French dynasty in 1700 threatened to break the long-standing links between the ruling nobility and the Spanish crown. Those who had benefited from Spanish rule were justifiably concerned. The Venetian envoy reported from Milan in 1700 that ‘the Milanese fear passing under a rule that they describe as tyranny, and losing the liberty that they enjoyed under the present [Habsburg] government’.28 For over a century Milan had not (unlike Naples) experienced famines or riots or conspiracies. For the élite, empire had been a time of collaboration and success, not of oppression.

  But in other parts of peninsular Italy there was a sigh of relief at the disappearance of Spanish rule. In Naples during the eighteenth century the political economists Paolo Mattia Doria and Antonio Genovesi presented a reasoned indictment of the impact of Spanish domination. Their views set out a perspective that would become widely accepted among Italians, for whom the ‘problem of the south’ would be blamed largely on the negative effects of Spanish rule. It was a view that received its definitive form earlier in the same century in the writings of the lawyer and historian of Naples, Pietro Giannone, whose Civil History of the kingdom of Naples was published in 1723. The work was burnt publicly in Rome in 1726 and earned the author papal excommunication and exile. Giannone died far from home, in a Turin prison. But his book was as music to the ears of the Austrians, and the author had the honour of being able to present a copy of his study to the Emperor Charles VI in Vienna in 1723.29

  Neapolitan intellectuals, in effect, were criticizing not the Habsburg dynasty but rather the rule of Spain. ‘This country’, wrote Genovesi, referring to the two hundred years of Spanish control, ‘became a province of Spain. It was no longer governed by those who were familiar with the inhabitants, but by foreigners, nearly all of them transients and with their hearts elsewhere.’30 In his Maxims of the government of Spain, written shortly after the Austrians had occupied Naples, Doria subjected the whole period of Spanish rule to a devastating criticism. The Spaniards, he said, had deprived Neapolitans of ‘virtue and wealth and introduced instead ignorance, villany, disunion and unhappiness’. They had destroyed the roots of civilized society and introduced a tyranny that had undermined the virtue of citizens. ‘The Indies’, he claimed, invoking a standard image of the annihilation of peoples by the Spaniards, ‘are not those in America; the true Indies are here in the kingdom of Naples.’31

  In contrast to what was happening in Europe, the War of Succession seemed to have a limited effect on the Spanish empire in the New World, where Spain's friends and enemies were both well ensconced and there were few gains to be made. One of the foreign Jesuits working in the Caribbean reported that ‘although there is a war in Europe between the Spaniards and the Dutch, there is no sign of it in America’.32 The appearances were deceptive. In the vast land mass of America changes seemed less notable but were no less decisive. The anti-Bourbon nations concentrated their efforts less on territory than on trade and on disrupting the commerce of Spain and France. On the North American mainland they took advantage of the hostilities in order to ally with native Indians against what remained of the Spanish missions.

  The war offered a good opportunity for foreign vessels to enter the Pacific. Because Spaniards did not and could not control the passage round Cape Horn, they inevitably allowed other nations an unimpeded entry. The merchants of Bristol seized the chance for illicit trade and financed the sending of two well-armed frigates under the command of Captain Woodes Rogers, with a motley crew that included the irrepressible William Dampier. They rounded Cape Horn early in January 1709. On approaching the archipelago of Juan Fernández, off the coast of Chile, Rogers noticed a fire at night on one of the islands and sent a boat to investigate. The sailors, he reported, ‘returned from the shore and brought an abundance of cray-fish, with a man cloathed in goat-skins’. The wild man, whose story Rogers related in an account that was subsequently immortalized by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe (1719), was Alexander Selkirk, who had been stranded on the uninhabited island over four years earlier by the captain of his vessel. Selkirk had fortunately been left with most essentials, including clothes, beddin
g, a gun with bullets, a knife, and books. He managed to survive in the face of incredible difficulties, learning to eat without salt, and obtaining meat from wild goats, whose skins also served as clothing when his own apparel wore out.

  Rogers's own fame rests on his harassing of Spanish territory in the Pacific. He held the port of Guayaquil to ransom, and augmented his fleet with captured Spanish vessels. On the advice of Dampier they lay in wait for the Manila galleon off the coast of New Spain. After cruising about for some weeks by Lower California, Rogers's ship The Duke spied a galleon, the Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación, which had been separated from its larger companion ship, and after a short struggle captured it single-handed. Four days later, on Christmas Day 1709, Rogers and his other vessels attempted to engage the companion Manila vessel, a powerful galleon called the Begoña, but failed to capture it. The English then returned to Europe across the Pacific, stocking up for the voyage in Guam, where the Spaniards were friendly and the governor invited them to a sixty-course dinner. The captured ship was displayed to an eager public in London: it was the first Manila galleon to be brought back entire. The Bristol merchants had spent less than £14,000 financing the expedition; their profits were estimated at up to £800,000.33

  Secure in their naval and commercial superiority,34 the French took advantage of the war in order to trade to the Caribbean and the Pacific. The council of the Indies reported in 1702 that ‘the French continue trading considerable amounts of clothing throughout America, and especially in Veracruz, Santa Marta, Cartagena and Portobelo. In Havana the French have been buying and dealing in almost all the sugar in the island.’ The French ambassador in Madrid, Amelot, commented on ‘the abundance of European goods which French traders have taken to the Indies via the South Sea’.35 In 1712 the viceroy of Peru accepted without opposition the entry of French trading vessels into Callao. His explanation to the government was that ‘at present the treasury is so empty that there is no way it can finance an armada in the Pacific; in view of the present state of defence of this city of Callao I gave the necessary orders permitting the French vessels currently on this coast, numbering around twelve or fourteen, to come to Callao’.36 As on many previous occasions, the entry of foreign vessels served to preserve rather than to undermine the empire, by supplying the colonies and maintaining contacts with the peninsula. A government official in Fontainebleau commented that ‘it is not surprising that the Americans have received our ships in their ports. They have brought them several things from Europe that they badly needed and which were of great value. Our ships have traded to them in the same way that the English and Dutch have traded in the Caribbean.’37

  From 1698 the Spaniards began building a small pine-log fort at Pensacola, a site which an official expedition that included the writer Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora had pronounced to be ‘the finest jewel’ possessed by the crown.38 The wild and beautiful northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico was, however, also the object of intense French interest. Despite La Salle's failure, France's minister of marine Louis Pontchartrain was in reach of a much greater prize. Early in 1699 a small French force of five ships commanded by Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, became the first European contingent ever to enter the mouth of the Mississippi from the Gulf. They built (1700) a small fort near the river mouth, about thirty miles downstream from the site of what is now New Orleans. Hardly aware of the significance of what they were doing, they had taken possession of the entrance to the greatest waterway in North America, which gave access to the interior of the continent and linked up with French possessions in Canada. The Spaniards never succeeded in identifying the correct entrance to the great river. Moreover, lack of manpower and resources made it difficult for them to take effective control of the rest of the eastern coast of the Gulf, from Tampico to Apalachee. Ventures inland were also undertaken half-heartedly: there was little motivation for moving into Texas territory, and the missions planted there among the Hasinai were short-lived. In practice, Spain's only hold on the vast central mass of the North American continent was, by 1700, the post at Pensacola. Across from them, the French were firmly entrenched at Mobile and the coast to the west.

  The establishment of the French at Fort Mississippi occurred just as France converted itself into the ally and protector of Spain. The outbreak of war shortly after made the two countries combine their resources to keep the English and Dutch out of America. French help was invaluable. French forces were put at the disposal of harassed Spanish settlements: in both Pensacola and St Augustine the survival of the Spaniards was made possible by French reinforcements. But the French also made use of their unprecedented position as imperial partners, in order to advance their own interests, with little fear of retribution from Spain. From the mouth of the Mississippi and their base further to the east at Mobile, French traders worked their way inland and made contact with interior tribes such as the Choctaws and Chickasaws. By working towards an understanding with these tribes Iberville, as French governor of the area, was doing the Spaniards a signal favour, for the alliance helped to block the relentless advance of the English colonists.

  In 1712 a new governor was appointed for French Louisiana in the person of Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac, who had been serving in the north of the continent, where he founded the town of Detroit in 1701. In 1713 there came into his hands a letter (sent from Coahuila province, on the New Spain side of the Rio Grande, over two years previously in January 1711!) from a Franciscan friar, Francisco Hidalgo, asking for help in sending missions to the Tejas Indians in northern New Spain. Cadillac felt it was an ideal opportunity to use the current alliance with the Spaniards in order to promote French interests. He sent a Canadian lieutenant, Louis de Saint-Denis, to Mexico City to offer help to the Spaniards and their missions. As a result, in 1716 a small party of seventy Spaniards (including eight Franciscans) led by St Denis crossed the Rio Grande and eventually during the summer, at a spot between the Trinity and Neches rivers, set up a fort (in Spanish ‘presidio’) and four mission centres among the Hasinai Indians.39 The area was ideal, for it was only a short distance away from the French fort at Natchitoches, on the Red River. Relying on Spanish support, the French could trade, which was their principal intention. The Spaniards, in their turn, had decidedly returned to east Texas, a development made possible only by French protection. Once again, as in 1691, a ‘governor’ was appointed.

  Over the next few years a handful of French traders and agents managed to extend into the north the area of their operations. In doing so, however, they also stimulated the New Spain authorities to resist French influence by setting up posts and missions deep into Tejas territory. It was there that in 1718 the defence post of San Antonio, and its mission (later known as the Alamo), was set up by the new Spanish governor. Despite the unremitting rivalry between France and Spain, the two nations coexisted side by side for a while in North America while they extended their imperial frontiers.40 The normally good relations between the Bourbon rulers of France and Spain protected the territories of both in America. The French in Louisiana were tolerated by the Spaniards, who had no means with which to dislodge them, and therefore survived without problems. In 1718 a settlement called New Orleans, after the Regent of France (the duke of Orléans), was founded on the shores of the Mississippi near the Gulf and became the capital of the territory which the French called Louisiana.

  A break in this peaceful coexistence, however, occurred suddenly in 1719, when events in Europe dictated that the French and Spaniards were now officially enemies. The French troops in Louisiana without any effort seized Pensacola in May 1719. The comic dimensions of the ‘war’ in these territories may be judged by the ‘attack’ made by the French detachment at Natchitoches on the Spanish settlement of Los Adaes. Seven French soldiers with their officer presented themselves one day in the town and informed the sole defending soldier that they were taking over. When the viceroy in Mexico City was apprised of the state of war, he sent off a troop of eighty-four men to str
engthen the Spaniards in San Antonio. A more serious and substantial force took twelve months more to raise, for volunteers were difficult to find. Consisting of five hundred men and led by the marquis of Aguayo, it left Mexico City in October 1720 and reached San Antonio after seven months. It then continued eastward and reached the missions at the River Neches. In all this time there was no sign of the French. By the time that Aguayo and his force reached the Neches in June 1721, they were informed by the French (whose postal system was more rapid) that peace had been made in Europe.

  The Aguayo expedition was not as useless as may appear. Though it seemed to have failed in its purpose of expelling the French, it succeeded in something more substantial: affirming the presence of Spaniards, however fragile, on the Texas frontier. When he retired from Texas, it has been pointed out,41 Aguayo left behind him 10 missions where there had been 7, 4 forts where there had been 2, and 268 soldiers (whom he dropped off at each fort on the journey back) where there had been only 60 in the whole province.

  In reality, the Spanish frontier in North America continued to be little more than a number of small, isolated forts with an insecure existence because they were both undermanned and vulnerable to the attacks of hostile Indians, who were usually organized by other Europeans. The main post in Texas, for example, was that of Los Adaes, dignified with the status of capital of the Spanish province. Throughout its existence the post was wholly dependent on the French in Louisiana for supplies and armaments.42 Indeed, the entire Spanish frontier from New Spain to the Atlantic owed its continued existence to the protection of other Europeans, who used the Spanish posts to further their own trade and communication lines. Spanish Pensacola supplied itself from the French in Mobile, and Spanish St Augustine bought its arms from the English in Carolina. Without the presence of other Europeans as suppliers, the Spaniards would have been unable to survive. Attempts to encourage settlers to immigrate from Spain failed. In one instance, the settlement at San Antonio was maintained only by bringing fifteen Canary Islander families overland from Veracruz.43 There were occasional ambitious expeditions into the interior by missionaries and soldiers, but with few positive results.