Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  The Spanish campaign of 1488 was therefore directed towards securing the towns to be given to Boabdil in exchange for Granada. When Baza at last fell in December 1489, El Zagal submitted to Ferdinand and Isabella, choosing rather to be subject to Christians than to his hated nephew. It was at this moment that Boabdil, never very happy in his timing, tore up his agreement with the Catholic Kings, and proclaimed his determination to fight for the remnant of his kingdom, now reduced to little more than the city of Granada. This final act of treachery by the King of Granada served only as a spur to Ferdinand and Isabella to finish for once and all with the Nasrid kingdom. During the spring of 1490 their army encamped beneath Granada, and during the following months, while elaborate preparations were being made for the siege and assault, a city was built on the site of the camp, designed on the pattern of the gridiron and bearing the name of Santa Fe. As the preparations went steadily forward, discouragement spread in the Moorish camp, and with it a feeling that honourable surrender was preferable to military conquest. Negotiations were therefore opened in October 1491. By the end of November the terms were agreed, and on 2 January 1492 Granada surrendered. Boabdil in person presented to Ferdinand the keys of the Alhambra, and the crucifix and the royal standard were raised above its highest tower.

  The terms of surrender were extremely liberal. The Moors were left in possession of their arms and property, and were guaranteed in the use of their law and religion, their customs and their dress. They were to continue to be governed by their own local magistrates, and they were to pay no more in taxes than they had paid to their native kings. These terms closely resembled those which Ferdinand's ancestors had made in an earlier age with the Moors of Valencia, and there is no reason to believe that he had any intention of breaking them. The position of the conquerors was still precarious, and it would have been absurd to alienate a population which may even have welcomed a change of masters as putting an end to the anarchy that had prevailed in the Nasrid kingdom during the preceding decades. It is not therefore surprising that the first years of the new régime were distinguished by a show of moderation on the part of a Crown still preoccupied with the overriding consideration of military security.

  In practice, the Crown benefited surprisingly little from the spoils of victory. By the terms of surrender, the habices, the revenues of certain properties traditionally set aside for religious and charitable purposes, continued to be administered by the Moorish religious authorities, while the taxes traditionally appointed for the expenses of the royal household were ceded to Boabdil, who was given an estate in the Alpujarras. This left the Crown with only the patrimonial lands of the sultanate. But some of these lands had been devastated by the advancing Christian armies, and many others had been alienated by the Nasrid kings in the fifteenth century, so that the benefit to the royal exchequer was negligible. A commission of inquiry was set up to examine the titles by which the alienated property was held, but Moorish and Christian nobles alike conspired to frustrate its work. A royal decree that no individual should acquire more than 200,000 maravedís worth of property in the conquered kingdom was systematically evaded with the connivance of the Crown's own officials, and a handful of nobles – among them Gonzalo de Córdoba and the Count of Tendilla – managed to acquire enormous estates, while only a small amount of land was recovered for the royal patrimony.

  When the King and Queen left Granada in the spring of 1492 they handed over its administration to a triumvirate consisting of Hernando de Zafra (the royal secretary), the Count of Tendilla, a member of the powerful Mendoza family, whose ancestors had been Captain-Generals of the Granada frontier since the start of the fifteenth century, and Hernando de Talavera, the first Archbishop of Granada, whose tolerant outlook and interest in Arabic studies did much to reconcile the Moors to a Christian government. The triumvirate's immediate task was to ensure the preservation of public order and to consolidate the Crown's hold over the conquered kingdom. This was a particularly difficult task in the mountainous, bandit-infested region of the Alpujarras, to which a royal official known as the Alcalde Mayor de las Alpujarras was appointed in the autumn of 1492.

  Fears of a revolt, especially in the Alpujarras, were ever-present among the Christian conquerors, and were made all the more real by the proximity of the Moors of North Africa. Moorish Spain and Moorish North Africa, for so long a unified civilization, had now found themselves suddenly and artificially divided. Fearing collusion between African and Spanish Moors unwilling to accept the new frontier, Ferdinand and Isabella did their best to protect it, by the building of watch-towers along the Andalusian coast, and the establishment of coastguard garrisons. They also did everything possible to induce the more influential Granadine Moors to leave the kingdom. Assistance was given to those who wished to emigrate, and in the autumn of 1493 the unhappy Boabdil and some six thousand Moors left the country for Africa, where Boabdil some years later lost his life in battle. After the emigration, very few aristocratic families were left in the conquered kingdom, and those Moorish nobles who still remained were carefully given posts in the royal administration in order to keep them contented.

  It seems probable that Granada would have remained peaceful, and reasonably satisfied with its new rulers, had it not been for the question of religion. Hernando de Talavera was always scrupulous in observing the agreements of 1491, which guaranteed to the Moors the free exercise of their faith. Impressed by the Moorish cultural achievement, and by the emphasis placed by the Moors on practical works of charity, he entertained no belief in, or sympathy for, a policy of forcible conversion. His ideal was gentle assimilation, from which Spaniards, as well as Moors, would find that they had something to gain: ‘We must adopt their works of charity, and they our Faith.’1 Conversion, then, must be brought about by preaching and instruction, which itself required that the Christian clergy learn Arabic and attempt to understand the customs of the society entrusted to their charge.

  While Talavera's policy achieved some remarkable successes, it unfortunately aroused strong opposition among several of his Christian colleagues, for whom the rate of conversion was insufficiently rapid. The principal advocate of a more forceful policy was Archbishop Cisneros of Toledo, 2 who came to Granada with Ferdinand and Isabella in 1499. With the blinding unawareness of the zealot, he quickly pushed aside the mild Talavera, and launched out on a policy of forcible conversion and mass baptism. His activities soon yielded predictable results: the Moors became nominal Christians in their thousands, and, in November 1499, an ill-concerted rising broke out in the Alpujarras, the densely populated slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Ferdinand advanced into the Alpujarras in March 1500; the revolt was crushed, and the Moors, on surrendering, were allowed to choose between emigration and conversion. Since the mass of the population had little alternative but to stay, this meant that, from the publication in February 1502 of a pragmatic ordering the expulsion of all unconverted adult Moors, the Moorish population of Granada became automatically ‘Christian’.

  The aftermath of the edict was to be unsatisfactory for the Christians and barely tolerable for the Moors. Convinced that the agreements of 1491–2 had been perfidiously broken, they clung with all the fervour of resentment to their traditional rites and customs, practising surreptitiously what was formally forbidden. The Spaniards insisted that the conversions had not been achieved by force, since the Moors had been allowed the option of emigration, but even the most zealous among them had to admit that the conversions left a good deal to be desired. But the deficiencies could only be made good by assiduous instruction, and the Andalusian clergy proved to be sadly wanting in both the skill and the desire to attend to the needs of their Moorish flocks. Since the Andalusian Church lacked the determination to convert, and the Morisco population lacked the will to be converted, deadlock was reached. During the first half of the sixteenth century an uneasy compromise prevailed in Andalusia, whereby the Moors, while nominally Christians, remained Moorish in practice, and the government re
frained from enforcing the pragmatics issued in 1508 for the prohibition of their traditional dress and customs.

  2. THE ADVANCE INTO AFRICA

  The dangers of rebellion among the sullen inhabitants of Granada, aided and abetted by their North African kinsmen, inevitably gave fresh impetus to a long-cherished project for the continuation of the Castilian crusade across the straits into Africa. This would be a natural sequel to the conquest of Granada, and one for which the times seemed especially propitious. The North African state system was in an advanced state of dissolution by the later fifteenth century. There were divisions between Algiers, Morocco, and Tunis, between the mountain-dwellers and the plain-dwellers, and between the traditional inhabitants and the recent émigrés from Andalusia. It was true that North Africa was difficult campaigning country, but the inhabitants were unacquainted with the new military techniques of the Castilians, and their internal feuds offered as tempting possibilities for the Spaniards as the faction struggles in the Nasrid kingdom of Granada.

  Alexander VI gave his papal blessing to an African crusade in 1494, and, more important, authorized the continuation of the tax known as the cruzada to pay for it. But the crusade across the straits was postponed for a fateful decade. Spanish troops were heavily engaged in Italy during much of this time, and Ferdinand was in no mind to turn his attention elsewhere. Apart from the capture of the port of Melilla by the Duke of Medina-Sidonia in 1497, the new front with Islam was neglected, and it was only with the first revolt of the Alpujarras in 1499 that the Castilians really awoke to the dangers from North Africa. The revolt led to a great resurgence of popular religious enthusiasm and to new demands for a crusade against Islam, ardently supported by Cisneros and the Queen. When Isabella died in 1504, however, nothing had yet been done, and it remained for Cisneros to champion her dying request that her husband should devote himself ‘unremittingly to the conquest of Africa and to the war for the Faith against the Moors’.

  Cisneros's militant fervour was once again to carry all before it. An expedition was fitted out at Málaga, and set sail for North Africa in the autumn of 1505. It succeeded in taking Mers-el-Kebir, an essential base for an attack on Oran, but Cisneros's attention was at this moment diverted to affairs nearer home, and it was not until 1509 that a new and stronger army was dispatched to Africa and that Oran was captured. But the beginning of the occupation of the North African coast in 1509–10 only served to sharpen the differences between Ferdinand and Cisneros, and to reveal the existence of two irreconcilable African policies. Cisneros, imbued with the spirit of the crusader, seems to have envisaged penetrating to the edges of the Sahara and establishing in North Africa a Spanish-Mauretanian empire. Ferdinand, on the other hand, considered North Africa a much less important theatre of operations than the traditional Aragonese preserve of Italy, and favoured a policy of limited occupation of the African coastline, sufficient to guarantee Spain against a Moorish attack.

  Cisneros broke with his sovereign in 1509 and retired to the university of Alcalá. For the rest of the reign it was Ferdinand's African policy that prevailed: the Spaniards were content to seize and garrison a number of key points, while leaving the hinterland to the Moors. Spain was to pay a heavy price for this policy of limited occupation in later years. The relative inactivity of the Spaniards and their uncertain command of no more than a thin coastal strip allowed the Barbary corsairs to establish bases along the coast. In 1529 the Barbarossas, two pirate brothers who had originally come from the Levant, recaptured the Peñón d‘Argel, the key to Algiers. From this moment the foundations were laid for an Algerian state under Turkish protection, which provided the ideal base for corsair attacks against Spain's vital Mediterranean routes.

  The threat became extremely grave in 1534 when Barbarossa seized Tunis from Spain's Moorish vassals, and so secured for himself the control of the narrow seas between Sicily and Africa. It was obviously now a matter of extreme urgency for Spain to smoke out the hornets' nest before irreparable harm was done. In the following year Charles V undertook a great expedition against Tunis and succeeded in recapturing it, but he was unable to follow up his success with an immediate assault on Algiers, and the opportunity for destroying the Barbary pirates was missed. When the Emperor finally led an expedition against Algiers in 1541 it ended in disaster. From now on Charles was fully occupied in Europe, and the Spaniards could do no more than hold their own in Africa. Their policy of limited occupation meant that they failed to secure real influence over the Maghreb, and their two protectorates of Tunisia and Tlemcen came under increasing Moorish pressure. By the time of Philip II's accession, Spanish North Africa was in a highly precarious state, from which the new King's efforts were unable to rescue it. Control of the Tunisian coast would have been an invaluable asset to Spain in its great naval war of 1559 to 1577 against the Turk, but although Don John of Austria was able to recover Tunis in 1573, both Tunis and its fortress of La Goletta were lost to the Moors in the following year. The fall of La Goletta was fatal to Spain's African hopes. Spanish control was gradually reduced to the garrison posts of Melilla, Oran, and Mers-el-Kebir, to which were later added the African remnants of the Portuguese Empire. Sadly, but not surprisingly, Cisneros's heroic vision of a Spanish North Africa had run to waste in the sands.

  The most obvious reason for Spain's failure to establish itself effectively in North Africa lay in the extent of its commitments elsewhere. Ferdinand, Charles V, and Philip II were all too preoccupied with other pressing problems to devote more than fitful attention to the African front. The cost of failure was very high in terms of the growth of piracy in the western Mediterranean, but it is arguable that the nature of the land and the insufficiency of Spanish troops in any event made effective occupation impossible. It is conceivable, however, that the formidable natural difficulties would not have been insuperable if the Castilians had adopted a different approach to the war in North Africa. In practice they tended to treat the war as a simple continuation of the campaign against Granada. This meant that, as in the Reconquista, they thought principally in terms of marauding expeditions, of the capture of booty and the establishment of presidios or frontier garrisons. There was no plan for total conquest, no project for colonization. The word conquista to the Castilian implied essentially the establishing of the Spanish ‘presence’ – the securing of strongpoints, the staking out of claims, the acquisition of dominion over a defeated population. This style of warfare, tried and proven in medieval Spain, was naturally adopted in North Africa, in spite of local conditions which threatened

  to limit its effectiveness from the start. Since the country was hard and the booty disappointing, Africa, unlike Andalusia, offered few attractions to the individual warrior, more concerned to obtain material rewards for his hardships than the spiritual recompense promised by Cisneros. Consequently, enthusiasm for service in Africa quickly flagged, with entirely predictable military consequences. North Africa remained throughout the sixteenth century the Cinderella of Spain's overseas possessions – a land unsuited to the particular characteristics of the conquistador. The inadequacies of the crusading style of warfare of medieval Castile were here exposed; but failure in North Africa was almost immediately eclipsed by the startling success of the traditional style of warfare in an incomparably more spectacular enterprise – the conquest of an empire in America.

  3. MEDIEVAL ANTECEDENTS

  Medieval Castile had built up a military, crusading tradition which was to win for it in the sixteenth century an overseas empire. But it had also developed another tradition too easily overlooked – a tradition of maritime experience which was the essential prelude to its acquisition of overseas territories. The discovery and conquest of the New World was, in reality, very far from being a lucky accident for Spain. In many respects the Iberian peninsula was the region of Europe best equipped for overseas expansion at the end of the fifteenth century. Although the opening up and settlement of the New World was to be a predominantly Castilian undertaking
, the enterprise had a common Iberian foundation. Different parts of the peninsula each contributed their own skills to a common store on which the Castilians drew with such spectacular results. The medieval Catalans and Aragonese had acquired a long experience of commercial and colonial adventure in North Africa and the Levant. The Majorcans had established an important school of cartography, which had devised techniques of map-making invaluable for the charting of hitherto unknown lands. The Basques, with the experience of Atlantic deep-sea fishing behind them, were skilled pilots and ship-builders. The Portuguese had played a predominant part in the perfecting of the caravel, the stout, square-rigged vessel which was to be the essential instrument of European overseas expansion in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

  But the Castilians also had acquired their own commercial and maritime experience, especially during the past two centuries. The growth of the Mesta and the expansion of the wool trade with northern Europe stimulated the development of the ports of north Spain – San Sebastian, Laredo, Santander, Corunna – which as early as 1296 banded together in a brotherhood, the so-called Hermandad de las Marismas, aimed at protecting their domestic and foreign commerical interests in the manner of the Hanseatic League. Similarly, the advance of the Reconquista in the late thirteenth century to Tarifa, on the straits of Gibraltar, had given Castile a second Atlantic seaboard, with its capital at Seville – itself recaptured by Ferdinand III in 1248. A vigorous commercial community established itself in Seville, including within its ranks influential members of the Andalusian aristocracy who were attracted by the new prospects of mercantile wealth. By the fifteenth century the city had become an intensely active commercial centre with thriving dockyards – a place where merchants from Spain and the Mediterranean lands would congregate to discuss new projects, form new associations and organize new ventures. It was Europe's observation post from which to survey North Africa and the broad expanses of the Atlantic Ocean.