The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  He had done the best he could with an intelligence too cramped by education, too narrow for his empire, too inflexible for his diverse responsibilities. We cannot know that his faith was false; we only feel that it was bigoted and cruel, like almost all the faiths of the age, and that it darkened his mind and his people while it consoled their poverty and supported his pride. But he was not the ogre that the fervent pens of his foes have pictured. He was as just and generous, within his lights, as any ruler of his century except Henry IV. He was decent in his married life, loving and loved in his family, patient under provocation, brave in adversity, conscientious in toil. He paid to the full for his rich and damning heritage.

  III. PHILIP III: 1598–1621

  His heir was quite another Philip. The father, seeing the youth’s improvident lassitude, had mourned, “God, who has given me so many kingdoms, has not granted me a son fit to govern them.”37 Philip III, now twenty, was even more pious than his sire, so that gossip doubted that he had ever committed even a venial sin. Timid and meek, and quite unable to command, he handed over all the powers and perquisites of government to Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, Duke of Lerma.

  The Duke was a man of some benevolence, for he promoted nearly all his relatives to lucrative offices. He did not neglect himself; in his twenty years as chief minister he grossed so fat a fortune that popular resentment estimated it at the impossible sum of 44,000,000 ducats.38 He spared to the treasury enough to equip two armadas against England (1599, 1601); both were shattered by unsympathetic winds. Lerma had the good sense to welcome the pacific overtures of James I, and after nineteen years of war Spain and England signed the Peace of London (1604). The war in the Netherlands continued, draining gold from Spain faster than it could come from America; Lerma found it beyond his ingenuity to satisfy, out of the revenues of an exhausted country, the needs of his hampered generals and his private purse. Realizing the futility of further efforts to deny independence to the United Provinces, he signed with them a twelve-year truce (1609).

  But his next enterprise was as costly as war. He was a native of Valencia, where there were thirty thousand Morisco families; he had enough piety to hate these farmers and craftsmen, whose industry and thrift kept them prosperous amid the proud and shiftless penury of the Christians. He knew that these Christianized Moors, resenting their persecution by Philip II, maintained treasonous contacts with the Moslems of Africa and Turkey, and with Henry IV of France, who hoped to raise timely revolts in Spain.39 It was unpatriotic of the Moriscos to avoid wine and eat so little meat; in this way the burden of the taxes on these commodities fell almost wholly upon the Spanish Christians. Cervantes expressed the fear that the Moriscos, who, rarely celibate, had a higher birth rate than the “Old Christians,” would soon dominate Spain.40 Juan de Ribera, Archbishop of Valencia, presented memorials to Philip III (1602) urging the expulsion of all Moriscos above seven years of age; the disasters that had befallen Spain, including the destruction of the Armada, were (he explained) God’s punishments for harboring infidels; these pretended Christians should be deported, or sent to the galleys, or shipped to America to work as slaves in the mines.III41 Over the warnings of the Pope, and despite the protests of landlords who profited from their Morisco tenants, Lerma issued (1609) an edict that—with some exceptions—all Moors of Valencia province were to embark within three days on ships provided for them and be transported to Africa, taking with them only such goods as they could carry on their backs. The scenes that had marked the expulsion of the Jews 117 years before were now repeated. Desperate families found themselves forced to sell their property at great losses; they marched in misery to the ports; many were robbed, some were murdered, on the way or on board ship. Reaching Africa, they rejoiced to touch Moslem soil, but two thirds of them died of starvation there or were killed as Christians.42 During the winter of 1609–10 similar expulsions cleared the other provinces of Moriscos; altogether 400,000 of Spain’s most productive inhabitants were expropriated and banished. In the eyes of the people this was the most glorious accomplishment of the reign, and simple Spaniards looked forward to a more prosperous era now that God had been appeased by ridding Spain of infidels. The proceeds from the confiscation of Morisco property rejoiced the court. Lerma pocketed 250,000 ducats, his son 100,000, his daughter and son-in-law 150,000.43

  By 1618 the greed and carelessness of Lerma, the extravagance of the King and the court, the venality of officials, and the disruption of the economy by the Morisco exodus had reduced Spain to a condition where even the fainéant King saw the need of a change. In a flurry of resolution he dismissed Lerma (1618), only to accept Lerma’s son, the Duke of Uceda, as chief minister. Lerma retired gracefully, received a cardinal’s hat, and lived seven years more in piety and wealth. In 1621 the Council of Castile warned the King that his realm was being “totally ruined and destroyed owing to the excessive burdens, taxes and imposts,”44 and it besought him to moderate his expenditures. He agreed—and then marched off on a royal progress lavishly equipped and maintained. In that same year he died, leaving to his son a realm enormous and impotent, a government corrupt and incompetent, a populace reduced to destitution, beggary, and theft, a nobility too proud to pay taxes, and a Church that had stifled the thought and broken the will of the people, and had transmuted their superstitions into hoards of gold.

  IV. PHILIP IV: 1621–65

  The son differed from his father in everything but extravagance. We know him externally from the many portraits of him by Velázquez: in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York he is nineteen (1624), handsome, blond, already expanding; in the National Gallery at London he is blithe and confident at twenty-seven, stout and somber at fifty; in the Prado we can see him in five stages of glory and decay; he is also in Florence, Turin, Vienna, Cincinnati—he must have spent half his life in Velázquez’ studio. But those portraits show only his official features; he was not really so solemn and proud; we imagine him more justly by studying his children in Velázquez’ portraits; presumably he loved them beyond reason, as we do ours. In reality he was a kindly man, generous to artists, authors, and women; no semi-saint like his father, but enjoying food and sex, plays and pictures, the court and the hunt, and resolved to get the most out of life even in a dying Spain. Perhaps because he savored life so fully, poetry and drama, painting and sculpture flourished under him as never in Spain before or again. When his pleasures seemed too promiscuous he multiplied his prayers, and he relied on his good intentions to pave the road to heaven. He had thirty-two natural children, of whom he acknowledged eight.45 Having little time left for government, he delegated his powers and tasks to one of the predominant personalities in the diplomacy of the seventeenth century.

  The career of Don Gaspar de Guzmán, Count of Olivares, ran remarkably parallel and counter to Richelieu’s. For twenty-one years (1621–42) the great Count played against the wily Cardinal a bloody game of wits and war for the hegemony of Europe. Velázquez has revealed Olivares to us without fear and without reproach, in all the pugnacity of power, his prim mustachios curling like some ferocious scimitar, his robes and bands and chains and keys of state proclaiming authority.46 His faults of imperial pride, quick irritability, and stern implacability alienated all but those who knew, too, his dedicated zeal and industry in serving Spain, his forthright honesty in a venal milieu, his contempt of worldly pleasures except as devices to bemuse the King, his frugal board and simple private life, his warm support of literature and art. He strove sincerely to abate abuses, to stop corruption, to recapture past peculations for the treasury, to moderate the cost of the royal establishment, to enjoin economy and modesty in dress and equipage, even to check the cruelty of the Inquisition. He took upon himself all the burdens of administration, policy, diplomacy, and war. He began his day’s labors before dawn and continued them when prostrate with fatigue. It was his curse that Richelieu, with equal devotion, was slowly, subtly, inexorably sapping the Hapsburg power in Austria and Spain. To mee
t that deadly challenge armies were needed in Catalonia, Portugal, France, Naples, Mantua, the Valtelline passes, and the Netherlands, and in the vast and bloody trough of the Thirty Years’ War. But armies needed money, and money required taxes. The alcabala, or sales tax, was raised to 14 per cent, choking trade; and the collectors embezzled two thirds of the taxes before the remnant reached the treasury. So, with patriotic resolution, Olivares bled Spain of her economic life to save her political power.

  We must not follow all the moves of that sanguinary chess; they add nothing to our knowledge or estimation of mankind. It was a contest of strength, not of principles, each side shelving religion for military victory: Richelieu financing Protestant armies in Germany against Catholic Austria, Olivares sending 300,000 ducats yearly to the Duke of Rohan to prolong the Huguenot revolt in France.47 In the end Spain was crushed; her power on the seas was ended by the Dutch in the battle of the Downs (1639), and her power on land was ended by the French at Roussillon (1642) and Rocroi (1643). In Spain’s debility Portugal and Catalonia wrenched themselves free (1640); and for nineteen years the Catalán Republic, aided by France, waged war against Castile. At last the amiable King, who had trusted his minister through a hundred calamities, reluctantly dismissed him (1643). Olivares fled from hostile Madrid to voluntary exile in distant Toro; and there, two years later, he died insane.

  Philip now for a time took personal charge. He reduced his own expenditures and devoted himself conscientiously to government. But the causes of Spain’s decline were beyond his understanding or control. War continued, taxes were not lowered; production and population fell. At the Peace of Westphalia (1648) Spain was helpless, and had to concede independence to the United Provinces after nearly a century of wasted war. The Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) gave official sanction to French ascendancy in Europe. Amid these disasters Philip’s loyal and patient wife, Isabel of Bourbon, died (1644); and two years later she was followed by her sole surviving son, Don Baltasar Carlos, whom Velázquez had pictured so alluringly. The King was left with only one legitimate child, María Teresa, whom he gave in marriage to Louis XIV. Longing for an heir, Philip, aged forty-four, married (1649) his fourteen-year-old niece, Mariana of Austria, who had been betrothed to Baltasar. She rewarded him with two sons: Philip Prosper, who died at the age of four, and the future Carlos Segundo, Charles II. The tired King, racked with gallstones, weakened with hemorrhages, and harassed by magic-mongering monks, resigned himself to death (1665), comforted with the thought of an heir and spared the knowledge that his half-idiot son would bequeath all Spain to France.

  V. PORTUGAL: 1557–1668

  Three events marked these years in Portugal: she lost and rewon her independence, and Camões wrote The Lusiads.

  She shared with Spain the ecstasy of expansion and the ferocity of dogma, and preceded her in decline. The rapidity of her colonial development had drained overseas her most enterprising sons; agriculture was neglected or left to spiritless slaves; Lisbon reeked with corrupt officials, covetous merchants, and penniless proletaires, all living ultimately on imperial exploitation or foreign trade. Young King Sebastian, inspired by the Jesuits with religious zeal, proposed to his uncle, Philip II, a joint conquest and Christianization of Morocco. Philip demurred, having his hands full; Sebastian proposed to undertake the enterprise unaided; Philip warned him that the resources of Portugal were too small for such a campaign; when Sebastian insisted Philip said to his Council, “If he wins, we shall have a good son-in-law; if he loses, we shall have a good kingdom.”48 Sebastian invaded Morocco and was overwhelmed and killed (1578) at the battle of Al-Kasr-al-Kabir (Alcázarquivir). A dedicated celibate, Sebastian left no heir; the throne was taken by his great-uncle, Cardinal Henry; but Henry himself died without issue in 1580, ending the royal Aviz dynasty that had ruled Portugal since 1385.

  This was the opportunity that Philip had waited for. As grandsons of King Manuel of Portugal, he and Philibert Emmanuel of Savoy were the most direct heirs to the vacant throne. The Cortes of Lisbon recognized Philip; some rival claimants resisted his entry; the redoubtable Alva overcame them; and in 1581 Philip II entered Lisbon as Philip I of Portugal. By courtesy and bribery he strove to win the friendship of the nation. He forbade his armies to pillage the countryside, and Alva hanged so many of his troops for such offenses that he feared a shortage of rope. Philip promised to keep Portuguese territory under Portuguese administrators, to appoint no Spaniards to office in Portugal, and to maintain the privileges and liberties of the people. These promises were kept as long as he lived. So, with astonishing ease, Philip inherited the Portuguese navy and the Portuguese colonies in Africa, Asia, and South America. The old papal line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese possessions disappeared; and the most powerful of European kings, now made more powerful still, was ready to destroy himself by invading England.

  While Portugal’s empire was passing to Spain and the Dutch, her greatest poet was singing the glory of her conquests. Again the barriers of nationality and language defeat our desire to understand. How can those who were not bred on Portuguese history, and who do not feel the sense and music of Portuguese speech, do justice to Luiz Vaz de Camões—our Camoëns?

  He lived his song before writing it. One of his ancestors was a soldier-poet like himself; his grandmother was a relative of Vasco da Gama, who is the hero of The Lusiads; his father, a poor captain, was shipwrecked near Goa, and died there shortly after Luiz was born in Lisbon or Coimbra. The youth probably studied at the university, for his poem rings with echoes of Catullus, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. His personal romance began in a church, in a moment of adoration: he saw a beautiful woman with “snow-white face and hair of gold,” and was stirred to poetry. Some of his lines must have offended the court; he was banished to a village on the upper Tagus, and there dreamed of an epic that “should increase the glory of Portugal and make Smyrna envious despite her being the birthplace of Homer.”49 The unappreciative government sent him into exile or military service in Ceuta, where, in battle or quarrel, he lost an eye. Back in Lisbon, he defended some friends in a brawl, stabbed a courtier, was jailed for eight months, and was released probably on his promise to enlist for foreign service. On March 26, 1553, aged twenty-nine, he sailed for India as a common soldier on the flagship of Fernão Álvares Cabrai.

  He bore the tedium of humid nights on the half-year voyage by composing the first of two cantos of The Lusiads. In September his ship reached Goa, the Portuguese Sodom in India. He took part in many campaigns: on the Malabar Coast, off the shores of Arabia, at Mombasa, in the East Indies, and at Macao, the Portuguese Sodom in China. He describes himself as brandishing a sword in one hand and a pen in the other; his comrades called him Trincafortes—the Swashbuckler—and probably respected his sword more than his pen. A grotto at Macao is still shown as the place where Cames wrote part of his poem. An uncertain story pictures him as brought back from Macao in chains, having been arrested for causes now unknown. Another story (shedding his chains) tells how his ship was wrecked off the Cambodian coast and Luiz swam ashore with his epic between his teeth;50 in that wreck, however, he lost his beloved Chinese concubine. After months of misery he found his way to Goa, only to be cast into prison. Released, he was jailed again, this time for debt. A friendly viceroy freed him, and for a brief interlude the poet could enjoy life and a kaleidoscope of diversely colored mistresses. In 1567 he borrowed money and took passage for Portugal; his funds ran out in Mozambique, where he dallied in destitution for two years. Some transient friends paid his debts and his fare and brought him at last (1570) to Lisbon. His only possession was his poem. King Sebastian gave him a modest pension; the poem finally reached print (1572), and Camões was allowed to live in penurious peace for eight years. He died in Lisbon in 1580, and was buried with other plague victims in a common grave. Portugal celebrates his anniversary, June 10, as a memorial holiday, and cherishes as its national epic Os Lusiadas, whose title means “the Portuguese.” Camões took the term
Lusia from the old Roman name for the western part of Spain, Lusitania.

  The meandering narrative winds itself about the historic voyage (1497–99) of Vasco da Gama from Portugal around the Cape of Good Hope to India. After an invocation to King Sebastian and the “nymphs of Tagus,” the story proceeds with da Gama’s fleet up the east coast of Africa. Feeling an obligation to imitate Homer and Virgil, the poet pictures a conclave of the gods debating whether they should allow the expedition to reach India. Bacchus votes No, and rouses the Moors of Mozambique to attack the Portuguese who are landing for water. Venus intercedes with Jupiter in the sailors’ behalf; the Moors are repulsed, and Mercury bids da Gama to get along. The fleet stops on the Kenya coast and is hospitably received; the native king falls into Camões’ plan by asking Vasco to tell him the history of Portugal. The admiral responds at length, recounts the tragedy of Inés de Castro, describes the fateful battle of Aljubarrota (1385), where the Portuguese first won their freedom from Spain, and ends with the sailing of his own expedition from Lisbon. As the new Argonauts cross the Indian Ocean Bacchus and Neptune stir up a typhoon against them, and Camões, having lived through such a storm, rises to an exciting description. Venus stills the waves, and the fleet triumphantly reaches Calicut.

  On the return voyage Venus and her son Cupid arrange a feast for the weary crew; at her bidding lovely Nereids rise out of the sea, load palace tables with delicacies and flowers, and comfort the sailors with food and drink and love.

  What famished kisses were there in the wood!