by Hugh Thomas
As will be easily imagined in a town with an expensive if itinerant court, a large army of both black and Moorish slaves was to be found in Valladolid, as well as a colony of “new Christians” of both Muslim and Jewish descent. The section of the city called Santa María just east of the Calle Santiago was the morería, the Moors’ ghetto, and there was a substantial number of builders there working on noblemen’s new palaces, many of whom were Muslims. Nowhere in Castile did the poor get better treatment than they did in Valladolid, no doubt because there was so much work and because there were so many charitable foundations.21 Sometimes there were accusations of Muslim secret propaganda, including the suggestion that a prophet had emerged in the community.22
And the empire in America? There were two buildings in Valladolid that would remind the friars, the noblemen, and even the King that it existed. First, at the side of the great church of San Pablo stood the college of San Gregorio. It had been begun in the late 1480s, with Enrique de Egas, Juan de Guas, and Gil Siloé contributing to the design, while Philippe Vigarny made the tomb there of Bishop Alonso de Burgos, the refounder of San Pablo. Egas was a Brussels architect who had built the hostal in Santiago de Compostela, as well as reconstructed the cathedral at Toledo; Vigarny was a Burgundian. The first inspiration for the college was Diego Deza, Columbus’s friend from Zamora who afterwards became archbishop of Seville and grand inquisidor. Vigarny was the most interesting of these men. Coming to Burgos in his late twenties, in 1498, he is considered by historians of art as “one of the three foreign masters who taught the Spaniards perfect architecture and sculpture.”23 He created a chapel in the cathedral of Granada, where his “delicate chisel” sculpted the tombs of King Fernando and Queen Isabel.24 By 1520, he already had an effective partnership with Pedro Berruguete. Probably it was these two who inspired the medallions in the Italian style on San Gregorio’s, which so impressed the Flemish courtiers who accompanied King Philip the Handsome and Queen Juana when they heard Mass there in 1501.
But what drew the attention of the court to the New World, to the soldiers, explorers, and adventurers known increasingly as conquistadors, to the Renaissance man of empire, and to the modern “Americanist” was the façade of this college. It depicts hairy natives with clubs in their hands, such as those Columbus, that adopted Vallisoletano, said he had found in the Caribbean. These were referred to as maceros (wild mace-bearers). The primitiveness of the scene was compensated for by a family tree of the royal family and also one of Alonso de Burgos, as well as a depiction of that bishop kneeling before San Gregorio.
In this college, the Dominicans gave seven years’ instruction in philosophy, logic, theology, and study of the Bible. Among those who studied at the college were later famous theologians who would insist that the Indians in the New World had souls, such as Fray Francisco de Vitoria and Fray Domingo de Soto; civil servants who administered the new empire, such as Fray García de Loaisa, who would become the long-serving President of Charles’s Council of the Indies; and the first bishop of Lima, Fray Vicente de Valverde. Also among the old boys of this college would be Fray Bartolomé de Carranza, the archbishop of Toledo who was so unfortunate in his intellectual trajectory.25
The College of Santa Cruz nearby was as elegant a foundation as that of San Gregorio, but its style was dramatically Renaissance, as one would expect from a building provided by the “Third Monarch of Spain,” Pedro González de Mendoza, archbishop of Toledo till his death in 1494. But here we see no sign that the cardinal wished his students to recall the achievements of his protégé, Columbus, which he had himself so furthered. It is González de Mendoza whom we should recall as we consider Charles V’s other realm, that in New Spain, since relations of the cardinal, Mendoza upon Mendoza, would play as large a part in bringing Spanish order there as they did in bringing the Renaissance to the mother country.26
There was one more connection with the New World in Charles’s court in 1522. Among those who came to Valladolid with the Emperor was Jean Glapion, his French confessor-counselor. He had been born in La Ferté– Bernard in the province of Maine, and he had spent many years in the Franciscan monastery in Bruges. He was enlightened and austere, lighthearted and pious, a dependent of Charles’s aunt, the many-sided Archduchess Margaret at Bruges. When he became Charles’s confessor, he sought to persuade him to leave the handling of the ideas of Luther to Erasmus, to whom he was devoted. Glapion accompanied the Emperor in his meetings with the main committees that governed the realms. But then in 1520, Glapion and a colleague in the Franciscan fraternity, Fray Francisco de los Ángeles, hearing of Cortés’s discoveries, volunteered to go to New Spain to convert Indians. Pope Leo X, in his bull of April 1521, Alias Felicis, had approved. But Fray Francisco was named general of the Franciscan order and Glapion became a counselor of the Emperor as well as his confessor. Whether he would have continued to think of going to New Spain—as Mexico was then being called on the initiative of Cortés—is impossible to know. Glapion had an important role in the formation of imperial decisions from 1520 to 1522, including the nomination of officials. Alas, that fascinating Franciscan died in September 1522, leaving his place to a more conventional confessor-counselor, García de Loaisa.27 Had Glapion lived, the history of Spain, Europe, and the Catholic Church would have been more tolerant, more open to new ideas, and, indeed, more Erasmian.
Valladolid was in 1522 already a great metropolis. Places like it would soon be under construction throughout the Americas. There would soon be, in the New World, the same confusion of palaces and churches, monasteries and markets, squares, and streets, often with the same names as those in Valladolid. Spain carried to the Indies the urban tradition of Rome and the Mediterranean. It remains.
3
Charles, King and Emperor
History is “a great mistress,” a leader “even among our great teachers,” and our surest guide to an honest and virtuous life.
ERASMUS, QUOTED IN QUENTIN SKINNER, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, VOL. 1
The emperor Charles had been named after his great-grandfather Charles the Rash (le Téméraire), the last Duke of Burgundy, a Christian name familiar in France but almost unknown then in Spain.1 He was born in 1500, on February 25, then the day of Saint Matthew, the evangelist who played a part in his life: Charles often sought protection in that saint’s memory.2 His birthplace, Ghent, had once been the capital of the medieval counts of Flanders and the center of a cloth industry as well as of the Burgundian principality. As Charles of Ghent, the Emperor had learned to behave in his childhood and youth as a Burgundian nobleman. Burgundy was in those days a complex international organization: It was the premier French duchy, with a German monarch and a Flemish heart. Flemish was Charles’s first language.
Charles was an international man but among his thirty-two immediate ancestors, there was only one German, a Habsburg, alongside a great gallery of Castilians, Aragonese, and Portuguese. He even had an English forebear, in John of Gaunt (Ghent), Duke of Lancaster, “time-honoured Lancaster” in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Still, multinational though he seemed, Charles’s childhood had been Flemish. His Spanish mother, Joanna the Mad (Juana la Loca), lived a long way away in Tordesillas, Castile; his father, Philip von Habsburg, the Fair, died suddenly in 1506. But Charles had in his father’s clever sister, Margaret, an effective substitute for a mother. Regent of the Low Countries—in effect queen—she was twice widowed, having married the infante Juan, the son and heir of the monarchs of Spain, and then the Duke of Savoy, whose memory, along with her own, she would preserve in the exquisite church of Brou, near Bourg-en-Bresse.3 She had a palace in Malines (Mechlin), which boasted the first Renaissance façade in the Netherlands, a building where the transition from late medieval Gothic to the Renaissance can be most clearly seen, for the styles stand in relation to each other in almost perfect symbolical balance.
In the shadow of the large cathedral of Saint Rombout, Margaret maintained an elegant court surrounded by poets, m
usicians, and painters. She collected pictures and unusual, beautiful, and exotic objects. She painted, wrote poems, and played chess and backgammon, and her library was famous as one of the first great collections of books after the recent invention of printing. Her librarian was a poet. She knew that in courts there had to be painters, and hers included the excellent Bernard van Orley from Brussels and the magnificent Albrecht Dürer from Nuremberg, not to speak of the prince of tapestry-makers, Pieter van Aelst, from Enghien. Margaret was confirmed by her nephew, Charles, in her semi-regal place, and she signed herself to him as “your very humble aunt.” Her influence over Charles was profound. While she was suspicious of France, she also taught her nephew, above all, that a court could be a salon.4
Charles was subject to at least two other influences. First was the tutor whom Margaret had found for him, Adrian of Utrecht, dean of Saint Peter’s in Louvain, a member of the order of the Brethren of the Common Life, a pious, ascetic society founded in the northern Low Countries at Deventer at the end of the fourteenth century. Proto-humanists, perhaps they might be described as. Adrian was the son of a ship’s carpenter and could tell Charles how ordinary people lived. From Adrian, “Charles acquired the popular easy-going and simple ways which made him so beloved by his Flemish subjects.”5 The Brethren of the Common Life was one of those new Catholic bodies determined to simplify the Church’s life, which, had they enjoyed greater success, might have rendered the Reformation unnecessary. The order had a cult of indigence, a deprivation of which Adrian sought to remind his famous pupil.6 Some of the most remarkable men of the time were brethren—such as Mercator, the inventor of mapping,7 and Thomas à Kempis, who was close to the order with his Imitation of Christ.
Adrian had, however, found himself able to accept worldly appointments. From being a mere doctor of theology at the University of Louvain, he became its chancellor. From being tutor to Charles, he became, first, the Flemish ambassador to Castile and then Regent there, in Charles’s absence, after May 1520. Though he was unable to control the revolution that followed in that year,8 something extraordinary then occurred. For in January 1522, the cardinals in Rome unexpectedly named him pope. The Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini, who lived at the time, recalled that Adrian had been proposed “without anyone having any inclination to elect him but just to waste the morning. But then came several votes in his favour, the Cardinal of San Sisto began to speak in support of him in an almost perpetual oration, whereupon several cardinals began to move to his cause.” Others followed, “more by impulse than by deliberation, with the result that, that same morning, he was elected pope by a unanimous vote, those who chose him not being able to give any reason why, amidst so many travails for the church, they should elect a foreigner from a ‘barbarous country’ who had not won any favour either because of his achievements in the past or from conversations, which he might have had with cardinals, who scarcely knew his name, and who had never been in Italy.”9 Adrian himself wrote to a friend that he “would have preferred to be a canon of Utrecht than become Pope.”10
Elected in January, Adrian took a long time to reach Rome. Indeed, he only arrived at the end of August, and a plague began immediately: a bad omen, it was understandably thought. Adrian was mocked in the Vatican because he liked beer more than wine and because he refused to commission Cellini, the great Tuscan jeweler and sculptor, to do anything. He caused consternation by refusing to countenance nepotism. A large placard was placed on the door of the Vatican announcing “This palace to let.” Another poster denounced the cardinals who had elected Adrian as “robbers, betrayers of Christ’s blood” and asked, “Do you not feel sorrow to have surrendered the Vatican to German fury?” “This pope of ours knows no one,” wrote a courtier, Girolamo Negri, “the whole world is in despair.”11 Adrian was called the munidor of the pope’s election, the beadle. The cardinals had voted for him because they thought that they would do well to have a tutor of the new emperor in the Vatican. But Charles had not tried to back him. Indeed, he seems to have preferred the English cardinal Wolsey.
Adrian was a politically stupid choice. He saw the classical antiquity that surrounded him in Rome as the debris of paganism. He would have preferred a simple, small house to a palace. He had other concerns: One of his first decrees was to forbid the wearing of beards in the Vatican.12 True, he celebrated Mass daily and spoke Latin well, if without polish. But he was inexpert in politics. Ludwig von Pastor, the historian of the popes, wrote that “Adrian’s single-hearted anxiety to live exclusively for duty was to Italians of that age like an apparition from another world, beyond the grasp of their comprehension.”13
A third influence on the emperor Charles in his early years was Guillaume de Croÿ, Sieur de Chièvres. Coming from a powerful Flemish family that had served all the great dukes of Burgundy in the preceding century, he became Charles’s “governor and grand chamberlain” in 1509. His influence was a contrast to that of Adrian, but it was considerable, for he stood for the Burgundian tradition even more than did the archduchess Margaret. “The truth is,” Charles told the archbishop of Capua, “as long as he lived, Monsieur de Chièvres governed me.”14 He slept in Charles’s bedroom and had his eyes on him all day. Charles told a Venetian ambassador to Spain, Gasparo Contarini—a writer and a future cardinal—that he had early learned the value of Chièvres and “for a long time subordinated his will to his.”15 Chièvres was artful but observant, a hard master. When asked by the French ambassador, Genlis, why he made Charles work so hard when only fifteen years old, he replied: “Cousin, I am the defender and guardian of his youth. I do not want him to be incapable because he has not understood affairs nor been trained to work.”16 Trained to work! Can there be anything more important to gain from an education?
Chièvres was interested in promoting his family interests. All the same, it was he who gave Charles the chivalrous education that meant so much to him, and who told him about the use of arms, about riding, and about such heroic writings as that of the elaborate courtier Olivier de la Marche. La Marche, an official from Franche-Comté, had been captain of the guard to the still much regretted Charles the Rash. He wrote notes about the etiquette and ceremonial of the court, giving pride of place to the Order of the Fleece. He also composed an allegorical poem about Charles the Rash in 1482, Le chevalier délibéré (The Resolute Knight). He also wrote memoirs, which were much read in the early sixteenth century.
La Marche was the author of a book describing codes of behavior in different countries of Europe, which was read by Charles’s maternal grandfather, the emperor Maximilian, and probably was also studied by Maximilian’s well-educated daughter Margaret. La Marche, who seems to have seen life as one long challenge with recurrent dangers, recalled the memory of Charles the Rash as important in the young emperor Charles’s makeup—for “no one,” wrote the Dutch historian Huizinga, “had been so consciously inspired by models of the past or manifested such a desire to rival them” as that duke.17 The same could have been said of Charles the emperor. Like his ancestor, Charles was also proud of the famous order of the Golden Fleece, which gave him a sense of the importance of valor, loyalty, piety, and even simplicity.
In Valladolid in 1522, Charles still seemed the lanky, gangly, curiously featured youth with the ever open mouth, painted often by his aunt Margaret’s favorite portraitist, Bernard van Orley. He had a pronounced Habsburg jaw.18 He was thin. The Venetian Contarini describes him “as of a middle height neither tall nor short, more pale than rubicund, a fine leg, good arms, his nose rather sharp but small, restless eyes with a serious look neither cruel nor severe.”19 He was certainly not yet the wise man we see in the masterpieces of Titian—the standing figure with the dog, the seated monarch wearing the Golden Fleece, much less the armored knight at the battle of Mühlberg. But then Charles remained contradictory in his physique, as he did in other things.
When he was a young man, his negative qualities seemed to dominate him. His confessor Glapion told Contar
ini that Charles remembered too much the injuries that people gave him; he was not able to forget easily.20 Talking seemed to bore him, and it seemed to be something he could not do without difficulty.21 Alonso de Santa Cruz said of him that he was “a friend of solitude and a critic of laughter.”22 One ambassador thought that it looked as if his eyes had been pasted on to a too long face. To one courtier, de Longhi, his temperament seemed in the 1520s a mixture of passivity and impatience. Charles impressed his contemporaries with what Ramón Carande, the Spanish historian of the early twentieth century, would describe as “his extraordinary psychological penetration.”23
He had begun to impress people. His magisterial biographer, the German Karl Brandi, thought that he became eventually “imperial in word and deed, in look and gesture … Even those who have long been in attendance on him were astonished not only at his youthfulness, but at his energy, severity and dignity.”24
He began to seem, when on the throne, to courtiers and civil servants, to be magnanimous, liberal, generous. If still apparently unhealthy, and slow in his movements as in his speech, even ugly in person, Charles had something powerful about him, the weight of a leader. He never moved among men with natural ease, but his personality was beginning to reflect his high sense of honor and his sureness of purpose. As his brief volume of memoirs suggests, he had already become earnest and questioning. Some of this was evident at Valladolid in 1522.25
Charles was a Burgundian nobleman thanks to Chièvres. Adrian of Utrecht made him pious. His aunt Margaret gave him a sense of politics and of art, as well as a concept of public service, which all the Habsburgs had. This combination of influences gave him, as Karl Brandi put it, “serious principles and a desire to confirm them; a courtly bearing; the ideal of knightly honour and that of fighting for the Christian faith in the style of the code of the Golden Fleece.” Burgundy also made him conscious of the political benefit of a rigorous court ceremonial. Thus he seemed extremely dignified when, on his first visit to England in 1513, he was considered a possible bridegroom for King Henry’s sister Mary, the widow of King Louis XII of France. Already he had by 1522 an appetite for stylish dressing; he seemed “muy rico y galán.” He was a good sportsman, and his grandfather, Maximilian the emperor, had said that “he was glad that he was making such progress as a huntsman for, were it not so, it might have been supposed that the boy was a bastard, not his grandson.”26 From early in life, he expected to be buried at the beautiful charterhouse of Champnol, outside Dijon, the site of the tombs of his ducal Burgundian ancestors designed by Nicholas Sluter. He hoped always to be able to win back from France that part of Burgundy; he would tell Philip, his son, “never to forget our duchy of Burgundy which is our ancient heritage.”27