In the circumstances of the later Middle Ages it was not surprising that the Catalans missed their opportunity in Castile. Everywhere they found themselves under mounting pressure, and battling for survival. They were hard pressed by competitors in their traditional Mediterranean markets; their normal trading relations were being disrupted by the growth of piracy, some of it Catalan in origin; and their textile industry, hampered by the limited size of the home market in the Crown of Aragon, was stagnant or declining. Increasingly afflicted by the insecurity of the times, the mercantile oligarchy began to lose its enterprise and its sense of direction. From about 1350 there are signs of a rapidly increasing investment in annuities and land at the expense of trade. The Catalan upper classes were pulling out of their great commercial undertakings, and turning themselves into a society of rentiers.
The Principality's trade, sustaining itself with increasing difficulty, began to founder in the years round 1450. These same years of economic recession and collapse saw also a recrudescence of the agrarian conflicts, and a rapid sharpening of the divergence between the upper classes of Catalonia and a King who, from his luxurious court in Naples, demanded more and more money for his imperial ambitions. Alfonso the Magnanimous, master of the Mediterranean, was becoming less and less the real master of Catalonia. While he attempted to rule the Principality from Naples by means of viceroys, effective power in the country was falling into the hands of the Generalitat But this itself was the instrument of a closed oligarchy; and even while this oligarchy was insisting with growing vehemence on the contractual character of the Catalan constitution, against a monarchy at once increasingly authoritarian and increasingly weak, it found that its own authority was being challenged from below.
At a time when the peasantry was organizing itself into ‘syndicates’ and renewing its challenge to the privileged classes in the countryside, others were beginning to challenge the domination of those classes in the towns. In Barcelona in particular there was a fierce struggle for power between two parties, the Biga and the Busca. The composition of these two groups is still far from clear. The Biga was the party of the existing urban oligarchy of rentiers and large-scale merchants; the Busca seems to have been composed of clothiers, smaller export merchants and artisans in the guilds, although, at least in the 1450s, it assumed many of the characteristics of a genuine popular movement. These men of the Busca, who regarded themselves as destined to bring justice to Barcelona, gained power in the city in 1453 and systematically set about hounding their opponents out of municipal office. At the same time they tried to meet the challenge of the economic crisis by adopting certain policies, such as protectionism and devaluation of the coinage, which threatened the most deep-seated interests of the traditional oligarchy.
Nobles and urban patriciates rallied to the defence of their interests against the mounting threat of subversion in town and country. The contest, however, was to be not two-sided but triangular, for the monarchy also was inextricably involved. The viceroy, Don Galceran de Requesens, had alienated the oligarchy by his support for the Busca; and the King, to whom the peasants had appealed for help, suspended the ‘six evil customs’ in 1455 and declared the remences free. The Corts, in session between 1454 and 1458, reacted so violently that the King was forced to suspend his decree the following year, but the royal retreat merely encouraged the oligarchy to pursue an intransigent policy. The King in turn confirmed his decree in 1457. He died in the following year and was succeeded by his brother, John II, who was already to some extent identified with the remença cause. As the oligarchy prepared to break with the new King, it found itself presented with an ideal pretext in the arrest by John II on 2 December 1460 of the ambitious son of his first marriage, Charles Prince of Viana, with whom his relations had long been strained. The arrest of the Prince of Viana, followed in 1461 by his death, which left his half-brother Ferdinand heir to the throne, was sufficient to spark off the Catalan revolution. The Generalitat, having espoused the cause of the Prince of Viana, renounced its allegiance to the King and prepared for war.
The civil war of 1462–72 was, therefore, in the first instance a struggle between the monarchy and a ruling class wedded to a contractual system of government which, however admirable in its original conception, seemed increasingly inadequate as a solution to the grave social and economic problems of the age. But it was much more than a simple constitutional struggle between king and oligarchy. Through it ran the cross-currents of Busca against Biga, of peasants against their lords, of rival families attempting to settle old scores. It was a struggle for the social as well as for the political domination of the Principality; a struggle, too, over the policies that should be adopted to meet the economic crisis. Finally, it was, or soon became, an international conflict, as the Generalitat offered the crown in turn to Henry IV of Castile, to the Constable of Portugal and to René of Anjou; while Louis XI neatly turned the situation to his own account by annexing the Catalan counties of Cerdanya and Rosselló (Cerdagne and Roussillon) in 1463.
After a long and confused struggle, John II gained the victory in 1472. He used it with moderation, granting an amnesty to his enemies and swearing to preserve Catalonia's laws and liberties intact. But in spite of his refusal to take revenge on his opponents, he failed to pacify the country, and a definitive political and social settlement continued to elude him. When he died, old and exhausted, in 1479 he left to his son Ferdinand a war-torn country, shorn of two of its richest provinces, and its problems all unsolved. Catalonia's contractual constitution had survived the upheaval, but it was left to Ferdinand to get it working once again.
4. UNEQUAL PARTNERS
While Catalonia had preserved its traditional constitutional structure, its economy had collapsed. The revolution and civil war had completed the ruin begun by the financial and commercial crisis of the preceding decades. Crops had been burnt, properties confiscated, workers and capital had fled the country. The Principality would need a long period of peace to restore its substance and recover its sense of purpose, and, in the meantime, its commercial competitors had already so established themselves in Catalonia's existing or potential markets that it would be extremely difficult to dislodge them.
The crippling of Catalonia inevitably had profound and lasting consequences for the entire Crown of Aragon. Although Valencia had replaced Barcelona as the financial capital of the federation, the Valencians failed to display the dynamism which might have preserved the momentum of the eastern kingdoms and carried them over the difficult period of the Catalan collapse. Failing this, the Crown of Aragon stagnated in the later fifteenth century, content to be left in quiet possession of a contractual constitutional system, time-honoured and sacrosanct, which Ferdinand, like his predecessors, had promised to preserve.
The weakness of the Crown of Aragon at the moment of union left the field clear for Castile. In spite of its civil wars and internal conflicts, fifteenth-century Castile was a dynamic, and expanding, society. If civil war had momentarily put a brake on expansion, there was no evidence that it had seriously impaired the workings of the economy, as it had in Catalonia. On the contrary, there were many signs of vitality, which promised well for the future. The wool industry continued to grow. The increasing importance of the port of Seville, and the continuing expansion of the Cantabrian fleet, strengthened the country's maritime tradition and tied Castile more closely to the nations of the north. Castile's new importance in international trade was reflected in the rise to prominence of the fairs of Medina del Campo, which already by the mid-fifteenth century were acting as a magnet to the leading merchants of Europe. Everywhere – even in the sporadic military expeditions against the Granada Moors – there was evidence of an upsurge of national energy, which contrasted sharply with the debilitating lassitude of the states of the Crown of Aragon.
If Isabella had chosen to marry the King of Portugal rather than Ferdinand, this crude, vigorous Castilian society might have found itself better matched. The dynamism of f
ifteenth-century Castile was equalled only by that of Portugal. A revolution in 1383 had brought to the Portuguese throne the House of Avis, which succeeded in forging a close alliance between the dynasty and the dynamic elements in the country's ruling class, such as had characterized medieval Catalonia in the days of its greatness. In 1385 the Castilians were defeated at the Battle of Aljubarrota, and Portugal's independence was assured. During the following decades Crown, nobles, and merchants joined forces in the great task of overseas discovery and conquest. Ceuta was occupied in 1415, an expedition was sent to the Canaries in 1425, and the Azores were settled in 1445. The union of a vigorous, expansionist Portugal to an equally vigorous and expansionist Castile would have been a well-balanced union of two nations at very comparable stages of historical development. As it was, Castile and Portugal went their separate ways, to be united only when it was already too late for the union to be durable.
Harnessed instead to Aragon – to a society in retreat – Castile was free to seize the initiative in the work of building up the Spanish Monarchy of the sixteenth century. It is true that its freedom of action was to some extent restricted by the very nature of the union. The Crown of Aragon was well protected by its traditional laws and liberties from the strong exercise of royal power, and in consequence the union represented an uneasy yoking of two very different constitutional systems, of which the Aragonese would seriously restrict the King of Spain's authority. But if, in some respects, the Crown of Aragon seemed to constitute a drag upon its partner, it also provided Castile with certain precious assets which helped it to make the most of its new opportunities. The history of Spain in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries was to consist of a continuing, and fruitful, dialogue between periphery and centre, between Aragon and Castile. The Crown of Aragon may have been weak and exhausted, but if it could contribute little in the way of men and resources to the conquest of empire, it could still draw upon a vast repository of experience which proved invaluable for the organization and administration of Spain and its newly-won territories. In the Union of the Crowns, youth and experience walked hand in hand. The dynamism which created an empire was supplied almost exclusively by Castile – a Castile whose vigour and self-confidence gave it a natural predominance in the new Spanish Monarchy. But behind Castile stood the Crown of Aragon, rich in administrative experience, and skilled in the techniques of diplomacy and government. In this sense at least the Union of the Crowns was a union of complementary partners, to which the Crown of Aragon contributed far more than might have been expected from its unhappy condition in the later fifteenth century. The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, so furtively arranged and incongruously celebrated, proved, in fact, to be the prelude to a vital process: the process by which medieval Castile assumed the leadership of the new Spain, and went on to acquire an empire.
Reconquest and Conquest
DURING the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Crown of Castile, freed at last from the plague of civil war, was to launch out on a career of conquest both in Spain itself and overseas. If any one year can be taken as marking the beginning of Castilian imperialism, that year was 1492. On 6 January 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella made their victorious entry into the city of Granada, wrested after nearly eight centuries from the grasp of the Moors. On 17 April, three months after the completion of the Reconquista, agreement was reached at the Christian camp town of Santa Fe, six miles from Granada, on the terms for the projected voyage of exploration of the Genoese Christopher Columbus. His fleet of three caravels set sail from Palos on 3 August, and departed from the Canaries on 6 September on its voyage into the unknown. On 12 October land was sighted, and the ships anchored off an island of the Bahamas. Columbus had discovered the ‘Indies’.
The conquest of Granada and the discovery of America represented at once an end and a beginning. While the fall of Granada brought to an end the Reconquista of Spanish territory, it also opened a new phase in Castile's long crusade against the Moor – a phase in which the Christian banners were borne across the straits and planted on the inhospitable shores of Africa. The discovery of the New World also marked the opening of a new phase – the great epoch of overseas colonization – but at the same time it was a natural culmination of a dynamic and expansionist period in Castilian history which had begun long before. Both reconquest and discovery, which seemed miraculous events to contemporary Spaniards, were in reality a logical outcome of the traditions and aspirations of an earlier age, on which the seal of success was now firmly placed. This success helped to perpetuate at home, and project overseas, the ideals, the values and the institutions of medieval Castile.
The conquest of Granada and the discovery of America represented at once an end and a beginning. While the fall of Granada brought to an end the Reconquista of Spanish territory, it also opened a new phase in Castile's long crusade against the Moor – a phase in which the Christian banners were borne across the straits and planted on the inhospitable shores of Africa. The discovery of the New World also marked the opening of a new phase – the great epoch of overseas colonization – but at the same time it was a natural culmination of a dynamic and expansionist period in Castilian history which had begun long before. Both reconquest and discovery, which seemed miraculous events to contemporary Spaniards, were in reality a logical outcome of the traditions and aspirations of an earlier age, on which the seal of success was now firmly placed. This success helped to perpetuate at home, and project overseas, the ideals, the values and the institutions of medieval Castile.
1. THE RECONQUISTA COMPLETED
During the domestic troubles of the fifteenth century Castile's Reconquista had nearly come to a halt. But the fall of Constantinople in 1453 revived the crusading enthusiasm of Christendom, and Henry IV of Castile dutifully responded to papal appeals for a new crusade by resuming the Reconquista in 1455. Six large-scale military incursions were made into the kingdom of Granada between 1455 and 1457, but they achieved nothing of importance, and no serious battles were fought. The King looked upon the crusade primarily as a useful pretext for extracting money from his subjects under papal auspices, and the real crusading zeal was found not at Court but among the ordinary Castilians, who had to be restrained in 1464 from leaving the country in large numbers to join in a crusade against the Turk.
The idea of the crusade, with its popular religious and emotional overtones, was therefore ready at hand for Ferdinand and Isabella. A vigorous renewal of the war against Granada would do more than anything else to rally the country behind its new rulers, and associate Crown and people in a heroic enterprise which would make the name of Spain ring through Christendom.
The attack began in 1482 with the Castilian capture of Alhama, and was conducted thereafter in a series of methodical campaigns designed to detach one segment after another of the Moorish kingdom until only the city of Granada remained. The character of the war – which provided valuable experience for the later campaigns in Italy of Gonzalo de Córdoba – was determined by the mountainous character of the terrain, which did not lend itself to cavalry operations. This was essentially a war of sieges, in which the role of artillery and infantry was pre-eminent. The infantry was drawn partly from mercenaries and volunteers who had come from all over Europe, and partly from a kind of national militia levied in the towns of Castile and Andalusia. The Castilian soldier already showed that capacity for endurance in extremes of heat and cold that was to make him such a redoubtable figure on the battlefields of Europe and the New World; and the Granada war, with its surprise attacks and constant skirmishes, did much to train him in the individualistic type of warfare in which he was soon to excel.
Map 3
The Granada war, however, was won almost as much by diplomacy as by Castile's sustained military effort. The Nasrid kingdom was rent by internal feuds, which Ferdinand exploited with his customary skill. The family of Mulay Hassan, the aged King of Granada, was divided within itself, and in July 1482 Boabdil and Yusuf, the sons of Mulay Has
san by his first marriage, fled to Guadix, where Boabdil was recognized as king. When the city of Granada followed the lead given by Guadix, Mulay Hassan and his brother, El Zagal (‘the valiant’) were compelled to retire to Málaga, and war broke out between the two halves of the kingdom of Granada. In spite of these domestic troubles El Zagal scored a great victory against an attacking Christian expedition in 1483, and his nephew Boabdil, from his own half-kingdom, rashly attempted to emulate his uncle's example by invading Christian territory. Boabdil, however, was no warrior, and his expedition ended in his defeat and capture at the battle of Lucena on 21 April.
The capture of Boabdil by the Count of Cabra proved a turning-point in the Granada campaign. Its immediate consequence in Granada itself was to reunite the kingdom under Mulay Hassan, who was later deposed and replaced as king by El Zagal. But its most important result was the establishment of a secret understanding between Boabdil and Ferdinand, by which Boabdil, in return for his freedom, pledged himself to become a vassal of the Spaniard, accepted a two-year truce, and promised to engage in war against his father, in which he would receive Spanish help. Boabdil was in practice to prove a vacillating and unreliable ally, but since he was periodically in need of Ferdinand's assistance against his powerful relatives, he continued to maintain communications with the Spaniards, and this allowed Ferdinand to strengthen his contacts with the opponents of Mulay Hassan and El Zagal in the kingdom of Granada.
After Boabdil's return to his own land, the Spanish attack was directed against the western half of the kingdom, where Boabdil's father and uncle enjoyed their strongest support. By the end of the 1485 campaign, much of western Granada had fallen to the Spaniards, in spite of all the efforts of El Zagal. Boabdil and his uncle were now temporarily reconciled, but when Boabdil was again captured, on the occasion of the fall of Loja in 1486, he was once more quick to place himself under the protection of Ferdinand and Isabella, whose help he needed in order to keep his throne. While civil war was raging between the two Granada factions, the Spaniards completed in 1487 their conquest of the western half of the kingdom with the capture of Málaga. The fall of Málaga meant that Granada itself would sooner or later become untenable, and Boabdil now declared himself willing to surrender it, and to exchange his royal title for that of a Castilian magnate, in return for jurisdiction over Guadix, Baza and one or two other towns still loyal to El Zagal.
Imperial Spain 1469-1716 Page 5