Imperial Spain 1469-1716
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PENGUIN BOOKS
IMPERIAL SPAIN
1469–1716
Sir John Elliott was born in 1930. He won a scholarship to Eton College, and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected to a Fellowship in 1954 for a dissertation on the Catalan revolt of 1640, subsequently published as The Revolt of the Catalans (1963). He was an Assistant Lecturer and Lecturer in History at Cambridge University from 1957 to 1967, when he became Professor of History and head of the History Department at King's College in the University of London. He moved to the United States in 1973 to become a Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where he remained until 1990 when he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Oriel College. He retired from the Regius Chair in 1997. He has published extensively on Spain, Europe and Spanish America in the Early Modern period, and his books include: Europe Divided, 1559–1598 (1968; 2nd edn, 2000); The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (1970); A Palace for a King (in collaboration with Jonathan Brown, 1980); Richelieu and Olivares (1984); The Count-Duke of Olivares (1986); and a collection of essays, Spain and its World, 1500–1700 (1989). He was knighted for his services to history in 1984, and has received several honours and awards in Spain. In 1999 he won the Balzan Prize for History, 1500–1800, and he is currently working on a comparison of British and Spanish colonization in America.
J.H. ELLIOTT
IMPERIAL SPAIN
1469–1716
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Edward Arnold 1963
Published in Pelican Books 1970
Reprinted in Penguin Books 1990
Reprinted with revised Foreword and Notes on Further Reading 2002
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Copyright © J. H. Elliott, 1963, 2002
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN:978-0-14-192557-8
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Prologue
1 The Union of the Crowns
(1) Origins of the union. (2) The two Crowns.(3) The decline of the Crown of Aragon. (4) Unequal partners.
2 Reconquest and Conquest
(1) The Reconquista completed. (2) The advance into Africa. (3) Medieval antecedents. (4) Conquest. (5) Settlement.
3 The Ordering of Spain
(1) The ‘new monarchy’. (2) The assertion of royal authority in Castile. (3) The Church and the Faith. (4) The economic and social foundations of the New Spain. (5) The open society.
4 The Imperial Destiny
(1) The foreign policy of Ferdinand. (2) The Habsburg succession. (3) Nationalism and revolt. (4) The imperial destiny.
5 The Government and the Economy in the Reign of Charles V
(1) The theory and practice of empire.(2) The organization of empire. (3) The Castilian economy. (4) The problems of imperial finance. (5) The liquidation of Charles's imperialism.
6 Race and Religion
(1) The advance of heresy.(2) The imposition of orthodoxy.(3) The Spain of the Counter-Reformation. (4) The crisis of the 1560s. (5) The second rebellion of the Alpujarras (1568–70).(6) The Faith militant and the Faith triumphant.
7 ‘One Monarch, One Empire, and One Sword’
(I) King and Court. (2) The faction struggles. (3) The annexation of Portugal. (4) The revolt of Aragon (1591–2).
8 Splendour and Misery
(1) The crisis of the 1590s. (2) The failure of leadership. (3) The pattern of society.
9 Revival and Disaster
(1) The reform programme. (2) The strain of war. (3) 1640. (4) Defeat and survival
10 Epitaph on an Empire
(1) The centre and the periphery. (2) The change of dynasty. (3) The failure. (4) The achievement.
Notes on Further Reading
Index
Maps
Iberian Expansion in the 16th and 17th Centuries
1. The Iberian Peninsula. Physical Features
2. Habsburg Spain
3. The Conquest of Granada
4. The Four Inheritances of Charles V
5. The Collapse of Spanish Power
Tables
1. The Union of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon
2. The Spanish Habsburgs
3. The Conciliar System
4. Imports of Treasure
5. The Portuguese Succession
Acknowledgements
THIS book was read in typescript by Professor H. G. Koenigsberger of Nottingham University, and Professor A. A. Parker of the University of London. Their numerous comments were of the very greatest value in preparing the book for the press, and I have consistently taken their cogent criticisms into account when revising the text. While they bear no responsibility for the final product, it has gained immeasurably from their suggestions, and I am deeply grateful to them. In giving his comments from the standpoint of a specialist of literature, Professor Parker has rendered an additional service, at a time when contacts between historians and literary specialists are often distressingly rare. I am especially indebted to him for showing me how fruitful these contacts can be, and how historians neglect them at their peril. As a result of his labours, I hope that this book will be less misleading to those whose prime interest is in literature, than it would otherwise have been.
My wife has compiled the index, and has helped in the preparation both of the tables and of the maps, which were drawn by Miss Joan Emerson; and Dr R. Robson of Trinity College has again generously devoted his time to reading a colleague's proofs.
TRINITY COLLEGE,
J.H.E.
CAMBRIDGE.
27 March 1963
Foreword
All historical works are the product of their time, and Imperial Spain is no exception to this rule. In the late 1950s, some time after I had completed my doctoral dissertation on the origins of the revolt of the Catalans in 1640 and had been lecturing at Cambridge University on the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, I was approached by the publishers Edward Arnold, who asked me if I would be interested in writing a textbook based on my Cambridge lectures. At that time the only available textbook in English on Spanish history of this period was R. Trevor Davies, The Golden Century of Spain, 1501–1621, first published in 1937. The opportunity seemed to me an interesting one, and I decided to accept the challenge.
It proved more of a challenge than I had anticipated. Although the study of Spanish literature was flourishing in British and American universities, Spanish history was relatively neglec
ted. Anglo-American historians with a specialist knowledge of the history of Habsburg Spain were almost non-existent, and in Spain itself, in the difficult post-Civil War years, few historians were in a position to engage in sustained archival research. Following the Second World War, the dominant force in European historical writing was the French school of the Annales. In 1949 Fernand Braudel published his monumental work La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II, which revolutionized the traditional approach to Early Modern European history, and encouraged a new generation of historians, especially French historians, to embark on research into certain well-defined themes in the history of the Iberian peninsula. Traditionally, the writing of Spanish history had been slanted towards political narrative, but Braudel turned his back on political and diplomatic history, the history of mere ‘events’, in favour of the history of economic and social developments. By the end of the 1950s this Annales approach, although too marxisant to be acceptable in the repressive political climate of Franco Spain, was injecting new life into the writing of Spanish history.
While attracted by many aspects of the Braudelian revolution, I could not share all its assumptions and preconceptions, which seemed to me to imply a downgrading of the role of human agency, and, consequently, of the influence of power, politics and personality in the historical process. Although it was clear to me that the book I had been commissioned to write should give as much weight as possible to the findings of the new social and economic history, I was also anxious to provide the framework of political narrative that my publishers rightly regarded as indispensable for an Anglo-American readership likely to be largely unfamiliar with the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. The challenge that faced me was therefore to combine political narrative and social and economic analysis in a synthesis that would be both plausible and accessible.
The challenge was all the greater because of limitations of space, and this inevitably involved a number of difficult choices. In order to make space for those aspects of economic and social history that were deepening our knowledge and understanding of the period, I was compelled to cut down on more traditional themes. These included detailed discussion of foreign policy and diplomacy, which bulked large in standard works like Roger B. Merriman's The Rise of the Spanish Empire in the Old World and the New – at that time easily the best account of the period for English-speaking readers, although the first volume had appeared as long ago as 1918. Not surprisingly, a Spanish reviewer of Imperial Spain would take me to task for failing even to mention the victory of Charles V over Francis I at Pavia in 1525. But if I felt, with some justification, that battles had been overdone in the writing of Spanish history, I greatly regretted not being able to devote more space to Spain's conquest and colonization of America. It was already clear to me that Spanish history was not fully comprehensible if its American dimension was not taken into account. Even now, nearly forty years after the publication of my book, we lack a history of Early Modern Spain which effectively integrates the history of the two sides of the Spanish Atlantic into a single narrative. This remains a challenge for the next generation of historians.
Other decisions about the structure of the book were also affected by the question of space. The publishers asked me to begin with the age of Ferdinand and Isabella, rather than with the reign of Charles V. I did not regret this, since I had already decided that my over-arching theme should be the rise and decline of Spanish power, a theme that required close attention to the creation of ‘Spain’ in the age of the Catholic Kings. This, however, reduced the amount of space available for the period covered by my own research interests: the seventeenth century, traditionally known (and therefore comparatively neglected) as the age of Spain's ‘decline’. Initially I hoped to obviate the effects of this by ending the book in the middle years of the seventeenth century, with the passing of Spain's European hegemony to the France of Louix XIV. This would also have allowed me to evade the problem of discussing the reign of Charles II, which was – and remains today – a black hole in our knowledge of Spanish history. In the event, the publishers were adamant that I should continue the book to the end of the Habsburg era, and in order to do this I devoted less attention than I should have liked to the age of Olivares, which seemed to me a critical turning-point, and about which I was to write extensively in the future.
But if an extension of the book to include the last gasp of the Habsburgs and their replacement by the Bourbons gave rise to its own special difficulties, it also had one great advantage. My doctoral research into the history of Catalonia during the first half of the seventeenth century had made me acutely aware that the history of Early Modern Spain was much more than the history of its dominant region, Castile. My study of Catalan history and Catalan society, much of it conducted in Barcelona with the encouragement of the most important Spanish historian of the twentieth century, Jaume Vicens Vives, had opened my eyes to the vital importance of the often tense relationship between Castile and the non-Castilian regions of the peninsula in determining the trajectory of Spanish history. At the time I was writing, this was a highly sensitive subject in Spain, where the type of official history sponsored by the Francoist regime equated the history of Spain with the history of the Spanish state.
By continuing my narrative up to 1716, the year in which the Bourbons abruptly terminated the semi-autonomous status traditionally enjoyed by the Catalans, I was able to give full play to the other central theme of Imperial Spain: the interaction over two and a half centuries of centre and periphery. This was a theme glossed over in textbooks of the Franco era, with their insistence on Spanish unity and the triumph of the centralizing state. At that time, Isabella the Catholic, Philip II and General Franco were the figures of honour in the national pantheon, linked across the centuries in a great historical enterprise devoted to the perpetuation of a set of transcendental Spanish values. When Imperial Spain appeared in a Spanish edition in 1965, therefore, its appearance caused something of a sensation. Although bearing a title that (although I had not appreciated this when I selected it) was resonant of the regime's propaganda, the book presented what was in effect an alternative history of Spain to the new generation of Spanish university students.
While there are certain points relating to the theme of centre and periphery which I would have expressed differently if I had been writing the book today, the passage of the years has, I believe, vindicated my decision to build much of my narrative around it. Indeed, the decision itself may go some way towards explaining the book's longevity. Now that power in the modern and democratic Spain of the post-Franco era has been devolved to the distinctive nations and regions of which the peninsula is composed, the alternative history that Imperial Spain to some extent anticipated has become the acceptable face of the Spanish past. As each region concentrates on its own past, ‘Spanish history’ itself is increasingly fragmenting into a series of national and regional histories. This has greatly deepened our local knowledge, but its general tendency seems to me in some respects as unfortunate as the Francoist identification of the history of Spain with the history of the Spanish state. Spanish history is, as I see it, the story of the interplay over time of the forces making for aggregation and those making for disaggregation, and neither should be neglected if we are to achieve a balanced account of the Spanish past. This is the story that I attempted to provide in Imperial Spain, and which I believe to be no less relevant today than it was when the book was published.
If certain aspects of the book have maintained their relevance, others have inevitably been outdated by the advance of research and the development of new approaches to the past. Readers interested, for instance, in the history of gender in Spain will have to turn elsewhere, although the book was perhaps unusual for its time in devoting as many as two paragraphs to women. It contains, however, not a word on witchcraft, and although it seeks to analyse aspects of collective consciousness, especially in relation to the problem of decline, it
obviously falls short of what is now expected by readers who have grown accustomed to the reconstruction of mentalités by the new cultural history, and to the granting of a privileged insight into private worlds through micro-historical studies.
The bringing of new perspectives to bear on the past makes such limitations and deficiencies unavoidable, although it should also be borne in mind that the fashionable themes in today's historical writing will not be those of tomorrow. More difficult, perhaps, for a new generation of readers to appreciate is how relatively little information was available to me about many aspects of the story I had to tell, at the time when the book was written. Time and time again I was hampered by the lack of serious historical research on many of the topics which I was attempting to analyse and explain. In spite of the enormous richness of Spain's archives, topics of major importance either remained unexplored or had received inadequate and unsatisfactory attention by the standards of contemporary European historical scholarship. Where historians of France or England, for example, could draw on a large number of historical monographs of high quality when writing accounts for the general public on the Early Modern history of their own countries, the same could not be said for Spain. All too often when writing this book I found that the absence of monographs on subjects of critical importance left me without the information that could provide answers to the questions I wished to raise. Outside the early seventeenth century, where to some extent I could fall back on my own archival investigations, I was therefore necessarily dependent on a relatively small number of authorities, some of whose conclusions have since been challenged or rejected in the light of further research.