Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  When Henry IV died on 11 December 1474, Isabella at once proclaimed herself Queen of Castile. But the anti-Aragonese faction at the Castilian court had been concerting plans with Alfonso V of Portugal, who saw in la Beltraneja a bride for himself, now that death had removed the French prince as a rival for her hand. At the end of May 1475 Juana, encouraged by her adherents, duly claimed the throne. Portuguese troops crossed the frontier into Castile, and risings broke out against Ferdinand and Isabella all through the country. The war of succession which followed was a genuine civil war, in which Juana enjoyed the support of several of the towns of Old Castile and of most of Andalusia and New Castile, and could also call upon the Portuguese for help. Since Isabella was eventually victorious, the history of this period was written by Isabelline chroniclers who followed the official line in declaring that Juana was not, in fact, the daughter of Henry IV the Impotent, and contemptuously called her by her popular nickname of la Beltraneja, after her reputed father Beltrán de la Cueva. There is, however, some possibility that she was indeed legitimate. If so, it was the unlawful party that finally won.

  But the war was much more than a dispute over the debatable legal claims of two rival princesses to the crown of Castile. Its outcome was likely to determine the whole future political orientation of Spain. If Juana were to triumph, the fortunes of Castile would be linked to those of Portugal, and its interests would correspondingly be diverted towards the Atlantic seaboard. In the event of victory for Ferdinand and Isabella, Spain would mean Castile and Aragon, and Castile would find itself inextricably entangled in the Mediterranean concerns of the Aragonese.

  During the opening stages of the war, when everything still hung in the balance, Ferdinand's participation was of crucial importance. It was he who assumed command of the Isabelline party, and planned the campaign to restore order and unity to Castile. Ferdinand's military experts, imported from Aragon, instructed Isabella's troops in new military techniques. Ferdinand himself was a skilful negotiator, bargaining with magnates and towns for support of Isabella's cause. He could count already on the aid of the three most powerful families of north Castile – those of Enríquez, Mendoza, and Álvarez de Toledo (the ducal house of Alba), to all of which he was related; and his own energy and resourcefulness seemed to hold out promise of order and reformation to all those Castilians grown weary of civil war. All this helped gradually to give Isabella the advantage, as she herself gratefully acknowledged. She benefited also from the incompetence of Alfonso of Portugal, whose prestige was badly damaged by defeat at the battle of Toro in 1476. But progress was slow, and it was not until 1479 that all Castile was at last brought under Isabella's control. Her triumph was accompanied by the relegation of her rival to a convent.3 Early the same year John II of Aragon died. With Castile pacified, and with Ferdinand now succeeding to his father's kingdoms, Ferdinand and Isabella had at last become joint sovereigns of Aragon and Castile. Spain – a Spain that was Castile-Aragon, not Castile-Portugal – was now an established fact.

  2. THE TWO CROWNS

  The dynastic ambitions and diplomatic intrigues of many years had finally reached their consummation in the union of two of the five principal divisions of later medieval Spain – Castile, Aragon, Portugal, Navarre, and Granada. The union itself was purely dynastic: a union not of two peoples but of two royal houses. Other than the fact that henceforth Castile and Aragon would share the same monarchs, there would, in theory, be no change either in their status or in the form of their government. It was true that, in the person of Ferdinand, their foreign policies were likely to be fused, but in other respects they would continue to lead the lives they had led before the Union. The only difference was that now they would be partners, not rivals; as the town councillors of Barcelona commented in a letter to those of Seville ‘Now… we are all brothers.’4

  The Union of the Crowns was therefore regarded as a union of equals, each preserving its own institutions and its own way of life. But behind the simple formula of a loose confederation lay social, political, and economic realities of the kind that can upset formulae and deflect the histories of nations into very different channels from those intended by their rulers. Castile and the States of the Crown of Aragon were, in fact, lands with different histories and characters, living at very different stages of historical development. The Union was therefore a union of essentially dissimilar partners,. and – still more important – of partners markedly divergent in size and strength.

  After the incorporation of Granada in 1492, the Crown of Castile covered about two-thirds of the total area of the Iberian peninsula. Its area was about three times that of the Crown of Aragon, and its population was also considerably larger. Population is difficult to measure since the figures for the end of the fifteenth century, particularly for Castile, are far from trustworthy. It is possible that Castile at that time had between five and six million inhabitants, while Portugal and the Crown of Aragon each had no more than one million. Some indication of relative size and density of population, although calculated for the end rather than for the beginning of the sixteenth century, is provided by the following table: 5

  Sq. kilometres Percentage of total area of peninsula Inhabitants Percentage of total population Inhabitants per sq. kilometre

  Crown of Castile 378,000 65–2 8,304,000 73.2 22.0

  Crown of Aragon 100,000 17–2 1,358,000 12.0 13.6

  Kingdom of Portugal 90,000 15.5 1,500,000 13.2 16.7

  Kingdom of Navarre 12,000 2.1 185,000 1.6 15–4

  580,000 100 11, 347,000 100 19.6

  Perhaps the most striking fact to emerge from these figures is the superior density of the population of Castile to that of the Crown of Aragon. The awesome emptiness of the countryside in present-day Castile makes it hard to envisage a time when the population was more densely settled there than in any other part of Spain. Since the eighteenth century the peripheral areas of the peninsula have, in fact, been the most densely populated regions, but this was not true of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At that time it was the centre, not the periphery, which was relatively the more populous; and this very demographic superiority of the arid central regions may itself represent one of the essential clues to the dynamic expansionist tendencies of Castile at the end of the Middle Ages.

  It would, however, be wrong to assume that demographic superiority of itself necessarily ensures political and military pre-eminence in a period when governments still lacked the administrative resources and techniques to mobilize their populations for war. The medieval Crown of Aragon, although smaller in size and population, had displayed a vitality unequalled by Castile, and had triumphantly pursued a course of its own which was profoundly to influence the future political evolution of Spain.

  The origins of Aragon's independent history, and of the fundamental characteristics which differentiated it so sharply from Castile, are to be found in the long struggle of medieval Spain against Islam. The Arabs had invaded the Iberian peninsula in 711, and conquered it within seven years. What was lost in seven years it took seven hundred to regain. The history of medieval Spain was dominated by the long, arduous, and frequently interrupted march of the Reconquista – the struggle of the Christian kingdoms of the north to wrest the peninsula from the hands of the Infidel. The speed and character of the Reconquista varied greatly from one part of Spain to another, and it was in those variations that the regional diversity of Spain was enhanced and reinforced.

  The thirteenth century was the greatest century of the Reconquest, but it was also the century in which the divisions of Christian Spain were decisively confirmed. While Castile and Leon, under Ferdinand III, were pressing forward into Andalusia, Portugal was engaged in the conquest of its southern provinces, and Catalonia and Aragon united in 1137 – were occupying Valencia and the Balearics. The pattern of reconquest was by no means uniform. In Andalusia, Ferdinand III handed over vast areas of the newly recovered territory to the Castilian nobles who had assisted him in his crusade. T
he enormous extent of the territory and the difficulties inherent in cultivating great expanses of arid land forced him to divide it into large blocs and to distribute it among the Military Orders, the Church, and the nobles. This large-scale distribution of land had profound social and economic effects. Andalusia was confirmed as a land of vast latifundios under aristocratic control, and the Castilian nobility, enriched by its great new sources of wealth, became sufficiently powerful to exert an almost unlimited influence in a nation where the bourgeoisie was still weak, and dispersed through the scattered towns of the north. In Valencia, on the other hand, the Crown was able to exercise a much closer supervision over the process of colonization and repopulation. The country was divided into much smaller parcels, and the Catalan and Aragonese settlers formed little Christian communities dotted over a Moorish landscape – for the Moorish inhabitants of Valencia, unlike the majority in Andalusia, had stayed behind.

  From about 1270 the momentum of the Reconquista slackened. Portugal, its path to the east blocked, turned westwards towards the Atlantic. Castile, overtaken by dynastic crises and by aristocratic revolts, became preoccupied with domestic affairs. The Levantine states, on the other hand, their work of reconquest done, and their kings succeeding to one another in unbroken succession, were now free to turn their attention eastwards, towards the Mediterranean.

  These Levantine states – Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia – together constituted the entity known as the Crown of Aragon. In fact, the name was misleading, because the kingdom of Aragon, the dry hinterland, was the least important part of the federation. The dynasty was Catalan, and it was Catalonia, with its busy seaboard and its energetic population, which played the preponderant part in the great overseas expansion of the Crown of Aragon. The Catalan achievement was prodigious. Between the late thirteenth and the late fourteenth centuries this nation of less than half a million inhabitants conquered and organized an overseas empire, and established both at home and in its Mediterranean possessions a political system in which the conflicting necessities of liberty and order were uniquely harmonized.

  The Catalan-Aragonese empire of the later Middle Ages was primarily a commercial empire whose prosperity was founded on the export of textiles. Barcelona, the birthplace of the Llibre del Consolat, the famous maritime code which regulated the trade of the Mediterranean world, was the heart of a commercial system which reached as far as the Levant. During the fourteenth century the Catalans won, and lost, an outpost in Greece known as the Duchy of Athens; they became the masters of Sardinia and of Sicily, which was finally to be incorporated into the Crown of Aragon in 1409; Barcelona maintained consuls in the principal Mediterranean ports, and Catalan merchants were to be seen in the Levant and North Africa, in Alexandria and Bruges. They competed with the merchants of Venice and Genoa for the spice trade with the East, and found markets for Catalan iron, and, above all, for Catalan textiles, in Sicily, Africa, and the Iberian peninsula itself.

  The success of the Catalan-Aragonese commercial system brought prosperity to the towns of the Crown of Aragon, and helped to consolidate powerful urban patriciates. These in practice were the real masters of the land, for, apart from a handful of great magnates, the nobility of the Crown of Aragon was a small-scale nobility, unable to compare in territorial wealth with its counterpart in Castile. Dominating the country's economic life, the bourgeoisie was able to hammer out, both in co-operation and in conflict with the Crown, a distinctive constitutional system which faithfully mirrored its aspirations and ideals. At the heart of this constitutional system was the idea of contract. Between ruler and ruled there should exist a mutual trust and confidence, based on a recognition by each of the contracting parties of the extent of its obligations and the limits to its powers. In this way alone could government effectively function, while at the same time the liberties of the subject were duly preserved.

  This philosophy, which lay at the heart of medieval Catalan political thought and was enunciated into a doctrine by great Catalan jurists like Francesc Eixemeniç, found practical expression in the political institutions devised or elaborated in the Catalan-Aragonese federation during the later Middle Ages. Of the traditional institutions whose power had increased with the centuries, the most important were the Cortes. Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia each had its own Cortes meeting separately, although on occasions they might be summoned to the same town and hold joint sessions as Cortes Generales under the presidency of the King. There were some variations in the character of the individual Cortes. Those of Aragon consisted of four chambers, the aristocratic estate being divided into two – the ricos-hombres and the caballeros. The Corts of Catalonia and Valencia, on the other hand, possessed the traditional three estates of nobles, clergy and towns, the latter having secured representation during the thirteenth century. The Aragonese Cortes were also unique in that, at least theoretically, unanimity was required in each estate. Meetings were held regularly (every three years in Catalonia), and the estates would deliberate separately on matters of concern to King and kingdom, considering grievances, proposing remedies, and voting subsidies to the King. More important, they had also acquired legislative power: for example in Catalonia, where this right had been won in 1283, laws could only be made and repealed by mutua consent of King and Corts. The Cortes were therefore by the end o the Middle Ages powerful and highly developed institutions which played an indispensable part in the governing of the land.

  The rights and liberties of the subject were still further protected in the Crown of Aragon by certain institutions of a unique character. The kingdom of Aragon possessed an official known as the Justicia, for whom no exact equivalent is to be found in any country of western Europe. An Aragonese noble appointed by the Crown, the Justicia was appointed to see that the laws of the land were not infringed by royal or baronial officials, and that the subject was protected against any exercise of arbitrary power. The office of Justicia by no means worked perfectly, and by the late fifteenth century it was coming to be regarded as virtually hereditary in the family of Lanuza, which had close ties with the Crown; but none the less, the Justicia was, by the very accretion of time, an immensely influential figure in Aragonese life, and to some extent a symbol of the country's continuing independence.

  There was no Justicia in either Catalonia or Valencia, but these two states possessed in the later Middle Ages, as did Aragon, another institution entrusted with certain similar functions, and known in Catalan as the Generalitat or Diputació. This had developed in the Principality of Catalonia out of the committees appointed by the Corts to organize the collection of the subsidies granted the King, and had acquired its permanent form and structure in the second half of the fourteenth century. It became a standing committee of the Corts, and consisted of three Diputats and three Oidors, or auditors of accounts. There was one Diputat and one Oidor to represent each of the three estates of Catalan society, and the six men held office for a period of three years. The original task of the Diputació was financial. Its officials controlled the Principality's entire system of taxation, and were responsible for paying the Crown the subsidies voted by the Corts. These subsidies were paid from the funds of the Generalitat, which were drawn principally from import and export dues, and from a tax on textiles known as the bolla. But alongside these financial duties it acquired others of even wider significance. The Diputats became the watchdogs of Catalonia's liberties. Like the Justicia in Aragon they watched out for any infringement of the Principality's laws by over-zealous royal officials, and were responsible for organizing all proper measures to ensure that the offending actions were repudiated and due redress given. They were the supreme representatives of the Catalan nation, acting as spokesmen for it in any conflict with the Crown, and seeing that the laws or ‘constitutions’ of the Principality were observed to the letter; and at times they were, in all but name, the Principality's government.

  The Catalan Diputació was therefore an immensely powerful institution, backed by large financial
resources; and its obvious attractions as a bulwark of national liberty had stimulated Aragonese and Valencians to establish similar institutions in their own countries by the early fifteenth century. As a result, all three states were exceptionally well protected at the end of the Middle Ages from encroachments by the Crown. In the Diputació was symbolized that mutual relationship between the King and a strong, free people so movingly expressed in the words of Martin of Aragon to the Catalan Corts of 1406: ‘What people is there in the world enjoying as many freedoms and exemptions as you; and what people so generous?’ The same concept was more astringently summarized in the famous Aragonese oath of allegiance to the king: ‘We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws; but if not, not.’6 Both phrases, one emotionally, one legalistically, implied that sense of mutual compact which was the foundation of the Catalan-Aragonese constitutional system.

  It was typical of the medieval Catalans that their pride in their constitutional achievements should naturally prompt them to export their institutional forms to any territories they acquired. Both Sardinia (its conquest begun in 1323) and Sicily (which had offered the Crown to Peter III of Aragon in 1282) possessed their own parliaments, which borrowed extensively from the Catalan-Aragonese model. Consequently, the medieval empire of the Crown of Aragon was far from being an authoritarian empire, ruled with an iron hand from Barcelona. On the contrary, it was a loose federation of territories, each with its own laws and institutions, and each voting independently the subsidies requested by its king. In this confederation of semi-autonomous provinces, monarchical authority was represented by a figure who was to play a vital part in the life of the future Spanish Empire. This figure was the viceroy, who had made his first appearance in the Catalan Duchy of Athens in the fourteenth century, when the duke appointed as his representative a vicarius generalis or viceregens. The viceroyalty – an office which was often, but not invariably, limited to tenures of three years – proved to be a brilliant solution to one of the most difficult problems created by the Catalan-Aragonese constitutional system: the problem of royal absenteeism. Since each part of the federation survived as an independent unit, and the King could only be present in one of these units at a given time, he would appoint in Majorca or Sardinia or Sicily a personal substitute or alter ego, who as viceroy would at once carry out his orders and preside over the country's government. In this way the territories of the federation were loosely held together, and their contacts with the ruling house of Aragon preserved.