The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America

by Hugh Thomas

  Charles, like all members of his family, liked music. He delighted in hearing his aunt Margaret’s violin and tambourine players, as well as her fifes and choristers. At the archduchess Margaret’s court he learned the clavichord and loved to hear good music in his chapel.28 A childhood friend, Charles de Lannoy, from a family as distinguished as the Croÿs—his grandfather, Hugues de Lannoy, had been a founding member of the Order of the Golden Fleece—remarked that to like music was effeminate. Charles challenged him and chose lances and heavy horses for the duel. The exchange was dramatic. Though Charles won in the end, his horse fell and he always bore the marks of his injuries. Lannoy continued as Charles’s chamberlain (caballerizo mayor) and, in March 1522, became Viceroy of Naples.29

  Though intellectually well prepared, in his youth Charles always associated with young aristocrats such as Lannoy; John Frederick of Saxony, the elector palatine with whom Charles’s sister was so unwise as to have fallen in love; Frederick von Fürstenberg; and Max Sforza, all of whom became his pages and all of whom considered it more important to be able to splinter a lance without losing one’s seat on a horse than to construe a Latin sentence. They would all play an important part in Charles’s life, though John of Saxony would have a tragic role in consequence of Charles’s politics.

  Though Charles had many kingdoms, he spoke only French and Flemish fluently. He began to learn Spanish in 1517, but in 1525 the clever Polish ambassador to Spain, Dantiscus, wrote that he still found that language difficult and seemed to have no German. (Poland had something like a family pact then with the Habsburgs.) He never learned Latin well, despite the lessons of Adrian of Utrecht and despite his later often-repeated belief that it was essential that his son, Philip, should know it. It was said that if someone addressed him in Latin, and he did not understand what was said, he would reply, “This man takes me for Fernando,” a reference to his grandfather, the King of Aragon. But if he did realize what had been said, he would say, “This man is without letters, he speaks a really bad Latin.”30 In the end his Spanish improved. But his German was never good. His French was always good, and he could understand Italian.

  Charles lacked in his childhood any connection with his Spanish inheritance. Courtiers such as Juan Manuel, intriguing and malicious, and friendly churchmen, such as Alonso de Fonseca, archbishop of Santiago, and Ruiz de la Mota, bishop of Palencia, had limited influence in comparison with the Archduchess, Croÿ, and Adrian of Utrecht. Santa Cruz thought that Charles found it difficult to have confidence in Spaniards.31

  But Erasmus presented him in 1516 with his Education of a Christian Prince, while Antonio de Guevara’s The Dial of Princes, published in 1529, became, according to Méric Casaubon, the most widely read book of the entire sixteenth century in Europe. For Charles, historical knowledge became “the nurse of practical wisdom.”

  Those who have the best understanding of the past may be said to have “the best title to act as advisers to Princes.”32 Guillaume Budè, the French philosopher, thought that reading history led to an understanding of the present and future as well as of the past.

  In respect of his politics, it has been said that it is hard to see whether Charles was more a monarch of the Middle Ages or one of modern times. He twice would challenge the King of France to a single combat whose outcome would have settled all their differences. Charles did not warm to nationalism, nor even patriotism, but loyalty to the Habsburg family was a different matter. He disliked the idea of having a fixed capital: “Kings do not need residences,” he once told his son, Philip, when the two had passed an uncomfortable night at the royal pavilion at El Pardo.33 In these ways, Charles seemed still a medieval monarch. But all the same he knew, from the advice of his chancellor Mercurino Arborio de Gattinara, of the benefits of an organized civil service, and his rearrangements of his governmental committees would have reflected well on a post-Renaissance Prince.

  The public servants who worked for Charles at that time included many Flemings or Burgundians, as was indeed Gattinara, a Savoyard from near Stresa, in Piedmont, who had first been with Charles’s aunt, Margaret, as a legal adviser. Gattinara, chancellor from 1522, was the most influential of all these officials. He was clever if persnickety, being fond of disputing the finer points of the uses of the subjunctive. But he combined such detail with broad vision. He also gloried in talking of Charles’s imperial role in powerful, frequent memoranda; and his advice touched many lesser things, such as recommending Charles to have his hair cut short, and to grow a beard such as that worn by Hadrian.34

  The emperor Charles and his chancellor Gattinara were not on the kind of warm terms that a great emperor and his most important public servant should be. Charles evidently wearied of Gattinara’s continual grandiloquence. Early in 1523, in Valladolid, Gattinara wrote to his master that he thought that Charles was in danger of following the path of his grandfather Maximilian who, despite his many gifts, was called “the bad gardener” because he would never harvest his fruit in the right season. A proper budget of income and spending should be made. The cortes (parliament) in Spain should seek a new source of revenue. He, Gattinara, would draft speeches for Charles whenever necessary. But he wanted Charles to adopt a “forward policy” in Italy: “I implore you, in the name of God, that, neither in council nor elsewhere, neither in jest nor in earnest, do you make it known before your going to Italy that you intend to take personal possession of Milan. Do not hand over the citadel to the Spaniards, do not take away the town secretly from the Duke. Such things must not be spoken of, be it ever so secretly, since walls have ears and servants tongues …” And, if Charles continued to go on as if daily expecting God to work miracles for him, then he, Gattinara, would beg to be excused from further involvement in matters of finance or war. Otherwise he would like to remain in the royal service till the day that Charles was crowned in Italy. Then indeed he would be able to say “Nunc Dimittis, servum tuum domine.”35

  In April 1523, still in Valladolid, Gattinara wrote to Charles about his own position, wanting to have his powers either reaffirmed or withdrawn. He had noticed that the chancellors of England and France were paid four times what he was. He complained that he sometimes had to wait two hours for an audience with Charles, while the Emperor saw people whom Gattinara considered nonentities. The chancellorship, he feared, was being reduced to a tavern sign.36 In another note at much the same time, Gattinara told Charles: “If your Majesty were to add to all your gifts the wisdom of Solomon, you would not be able to do everything yourself.” God had even advised Moses to seek assistants. Nor should Charles embark on anything unless he could be sure of carrying it through. The ordinary costs of government should be distinguished from extraordinary costs, such as war. Gattinara, nothing if not a Lombard, believed that he who controlled northern Italy had the key to world power. The Emperor’s coronation there would put the seal on his achievements. A Roman diplomat wrote: “Let the Emperor rule Italy and he will rule the world.”37 Meantime the love of all his subjects should be for Charles an “impregnable fortress,” as Seneca had put it. Their friendship should be cultivated, their complaints heeded. Charles should arrange that, if unpopular actions were needed, others would take responsibility. The Emperor should not have to perform trivialities.

  Then Gattinara touched on policy in the Indies. He asked whether the Emperor believed that the natives should be converted to Christianity. Counselor Gérard de la Plaine (Señor La Roche), a Burgundian much used by Charles for diplomatic missions, had said that the Indians had been treated not as men but as beasts.38 That should surely not be permitted. Charles was responsive to that kind of suggestion. Had he not listened to, and largely sided with, Bartolomé de las Casas in 1518, had he not himself suggested that the Indians sent home by Cortés in 1519 should be given warm clothes cut by the best tailors in Seville?

  In July 1523, Charles held a cortes at Valladolid. As usual, representatives (procuradors) were present from half the cities of Castile. In a long speech wri
tten for him by Gattinara, Charles admitted mistakes but blamed them on his youth. He cited Caesar, Trajan, and even Titus, who all believed, so he said, that the pursuit of peace was the greatest of foreign policies. Gattinara also spoke, declaring the divine origin of the royal power. God, after all, had the heart of kings in his hand. Gattinara did not explicitly mention the Indies. But he did speak of the need to continue the conquest of Africa.39 The cortes were impressed and voted for the grant of ducats for which Charles had asked, though the quantity was smaller than on any other occasion in Charles’s reign.40

  In politics, Charles was as much a mixture as he was in blood. At one moment he seemed liberal, humane, tolerant. At other moments he seemed to bridle at the slightest criticism. His consideration of the defeated rebels after the war of comuneros in 1522 was a model of toleration for any age: Fewer than a hundred died in Castile, and some of those died of disease in prison.41 The high point of this second stay of Charles in Valladolid was a ceremony outside the church of San Francisco on All Saints’ Day, 1522, when he proclaimed a general pardon for all who had been engaged in that conflict—except for twelve “exceptuados” to whom Charles retained an aversion. Considering that the rebels had mounted, for whatever reason, a serious attack on the authority of the Crown and had even offered power to the King’s poor, nervous mother, Juana, such clemency was remarkable.

  In the 1520s, Charles was convinced, above all by his chancellor Gattinara, that he had a superhuman position in Christian society. Gattinara had hailed Charles in 1519 as the “greatest Emperor since the division of the empire in 843.” He was assured, and came himself to think, that God had chosen him to be the supreme universal monarch. Charles believed that he was the second sword of the Christian Commonwealth, with the Vicar of Christ, the pope, the first. He knew “the confessional nature of his Crown.”42 The empire implied an inalienable mission, one over other kings, and a right to demand their support for his declared crusade against Muslims—either the Sultan’s army in Hungary or the fleet of Barbarossa at sea. He was told by Gattinara that the climax of the universal monarchy was at hand. The chancellor said that he hoped that Charles would lead the entire world back to a “single shepherd,” presumably as in Roman days.43 The rest of the world would be conquered or fall into a subservient place.44 Gattinara’s powerful dreams were intoxicating. They sometimes convinced Charles, but often they were rejected by him.

  The idea that Charles had a grand place in what Pope Julius II had called “the World’s Game” was widespread. Cortés in 1520 would urge that Charles should think of himself as a “new Emperor” of New Spain, no less than of Germany.45 He would go further in 1524 by referring to Charles as “Your Majesty to whom the whole world is subject.”46 In the 1530s, a bishop of the remote see of Badajoz would pray that the Christian Princes “would all join with Your Sacred Majesty as monarch and Lord of the world in order to exterminate and persecute the pagans and infidels.”47 Thus even in Mexico/New Spain, a conquistador of no great importance, Juan de Ortega, from Hernán Cortés’s hometown of Medellín, in testimony on behalf of his leader in 1534 spoke of the emperor Charles as “his Majesty the Lord of the world.”48 Earlier, at the time of his election as Emperor in 1519, Charles’s friends had argued that his greatness, resting on such mighty foundations as the Crown of Spain and the empire, might mean that, having achieved the imperial Crown, he could make all Italy and a great part of Christendom into “a single monarchy.”49

  Charles’s attitude to the Church was ambiguous. He saw himself first and foremost as the first protector of Christianity. Thus he was always a devoted, even a rigid, Catholic. He heard Mass daily, sometimes twice.50 But he was not very interested in dogmatic matters and often quarreled with popes—even when, as in 1522, that dignitary was an old friend of his own. He would even urge war against popes, as he did against the second Medici pope, Clement VII, in 1527. In his early days, he had quite radical views about Church reform. He read with apparent pleasure such destructive dialogues on the papacy as those of Alfonso de Valdés, a brillant new secretary from Cuenca.

  Valdés was a public servant of quality. He was in 1522 still merely a notary in Gattinara’s office, but he would soon become controller-general of the entire secretariat. He had been a protégé of Peter Martyr and had a quasi-religious enthusiasm for Erasmus. His dialogue Mercury and Charon, written at the end of the 1520s, relates how the first-named thought that the fact that all Christendom seemed to be at war was the consequence of the machinations of the Emperor’s enemies. But Mercury’s reflections were constantly interrupted by the arrival of souls ferried across the river Styx by Charon. These souls were mostly ignorant, not evil, and were astonished to find themselves on the way to damnation after a life of nothing worse than conventionality. Perhaps Valdés was influenced in choosing his theme by the great painting of Charon crossing the Styx done by the Flemish master Joachim Patinir a few years before?51 It was a rare example of a classical theme at the service of Christianity.

  Valdés wrote, as an Erasmian, not against the principles of Christianity but against the Church and the Curia. He looked on himself as the proselytizing councillor52 of the monarch, the Erasmista who sought to convert his master into an enlightened despot. Rebellion against bad Kings was always necessary. About this time, Charles obtained a great concession from the papacy, in the bull Eximiae devotionis affectus of 1523, which gave him and his successors, as kings of Spain, the right of presentation and patronage of all archbishops and bishops of Spain and its empire.53

  Charles always had a tolerant side: Even in his last will, written at a time when pain and exhaustion caused him to seem unbending, he would suggest that inquisitors should be given canonries and so would not have to live off goods confiscated from accused persons.54 He often seemed an Erasmian inclined to compromise with the Reformation: In theology, he was even prepared to yield on the matter of the articles of the faith, the doctrine of justification, the use of the chalice for the laity, even the idea of marriage for priests.55 But he never wanted it to seem that he had been advised to these things by people such as Valdés. He always thought that the popes were mistaken not to interest themselves in the internal reform of the Church, which his preceptors in Flanders had taught him was necessary and which most German princes, including most Catholics, wished to see.

  As for the Church in Spain, Charles would soon appreciate the “tremendous efficacy” of the power of the Inquisition at the service of the Church and the Crown. Charles came to realize the benefit of a tribunal that sought to guarantee the unity of the Christian faith, thus making possible the secular utopia of the universal Christian empire. But in 1522 that was not so; he was unenthusiastic about the Inquisition and remembered that his father, Philip, had toyed with the idea of the abolition of the institution and had actually requested Pope Leo X to finish with it. Then Charles seems to have thought that the Inquisition could be put to good use.56

  A new inquisitor general, Alonso Manrique de Lara, was following Charles’s ideas in these actions despite the opposition of his new confessor, the Dominican García de Loaisa. In his last years, however, Charles regretted having given a free pass to Luther at Worms in 1520 and would murmur in Spanish “Muerto el perro, muerta la rabia.” (“If you kill the dog, you finish with the rabies too.”)57 He allowed García de Loaisa and other conventional prelates to push Manrique de Lara to one side, persuading him to devote all his time to his archbishopric of Seville and leave the business of the Inquisition to the council to manage.58

  Already in 1522 people talked constantly to Charles of his need to marry. An heir was necessary. It seems possible, however, that he had a mistress in Spain in the surprising shape of Germaine de Foix, the pretty young widow of his grandfather Fernando the Catholic. Had not that grandfather requested in his will that Charles should concern himself with her? The conclusion that there was at the least an amitié amoureuse between the two was argued by Melchor Fernández Álvarez, while Lorenzo Vital recalled
that the Emperor had a little wooden bridge made from his lodgings to hers, which enabled him to visit her secretly.59

  In 1522, after Charles had left Flanders, a girl whom Charles had casually seduced in the Netherlands, Joanna van der Gheest, daughter of a tapestry-maker of Oudenaarde, gave birth to a baby girl, who was recognized by Charles as his daughter. This was the future Margaret of Parma who, having been looked after and educated by her namesake the Archduchess, would thirty years later become Regent in Brussels.

  Two other girls were apparently born to Charles at this time: first, Juana de Austria, daughter of one of the ladies attached to Henry of Nassau, who would be brought up in the convent of Augustinians in Madrigal de las Altas Torres; and second, Taeda, an Italian daughter of Ursolina della Penna, “the beauty of Perugia” who reached the imperial court of Brussels in 1522. Juana remained a nun in Madrigal; Taeda lived in Rome, being still alive in 1562.60 There is also a possibility that Isabel, daughter of Germaine de Foix, King Fernando’s widow, was the child of the Emperor. She was still living in 1536.61