Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  Improvements of posts and routes did something to bring closer together the different regions of the Spanish peninsula, but on the whole no more was done by the Catholic Kings to break down the economic barriers between their kingdoms than to break down the political barriers. The customs system continued untouched, so that all goods continued to pay heavy duties as they passed from one region to another. Nor was anything done to bring the different kingdoms into closer economic association. Instead, two separate economic systems continued to exist side by side: the Atlantic system of Castile, and the Mediterranean system of the Crown of Aragon. As a result of the expansion of the wool trade and the discovery of America, the first of these was flourishing. The Crown of Aragon's Mediterranean system, on the other hand, had been gravely impaired by the collapse of Catalonia, although there was some compensation for Catalonia's losses in the increased economic activity of late fifteenth-century Valencia. Ferdinand's pacification and reorganization of Catalonia, however, enabled the Principality at the end of the century to recover a little of its lost ground. Catalan fleets began to sail again to Egypt; Catalan merchants appeared once more in North Africa; and, most important of all, a preferential position was obtained for Catalan cloths in the markets of Sicily, Sardinia, and Naples. But it is significant that this recovery represented a return to old markets, rather than the opening up of new ones. The Catalans were excluded from direct commerce with America by the Sevillian monopoly, and they failed, for reasons that are not entirely clear, to break into the Castilian market on a large scale. They may have shown a lack of enterprise, but they also seem to have suffered from discrimination, for as late as 1565 they were arguing that the Union of the Crowns of 1479 made it unreasonable that Catalan merchants should still be treated as aliens in Castilian towns. As a result of this kind of treatment, it is scarcely surprising that Catalonia and the Crown of Aragon as a whole should have continued to look eastwards to the Mediterranean, instead of turning their attention towards the Castilian hinterland and the broad spaces of the Atlantic.

  Castile and the Crown of Aragon, nominally united, thus continued to remain apart – in their political systems, their economic systems, and even in their coinage. The inhabitants of the Crown of Aragon reckoned, and continued to reckon, in pounds, shillings, and pence (libras, sueldos, and dineros). The Castilians reckoned in a money of account – the maravedí. At the time of the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella the monetary system in Castile was particularly chaotic. The stabilizing of the coinage proved to be a difficult operation, but it was finally achieved by the pragmatic of 1497, which formed the basis of the Castilian coinage in the following centuries. This pragmatic established the following system:

  Gold Excelente menor (or ducat) 12 375 maravedís

  Silver Real 34 maravedís

  Vellón (silver and copper) Blanca ½ maravedí

  Meanwhile there had also been certain monetary innovations in the Crown of Aragon. In 1481 Ferdinand had introduced into Valencia a gold coin modelled on the Venetian ducat – the excel·lent – and an equivalent coin, the principat, was introduced into Catalonia in 1493. The Castilian reforms of 1497 meant, therefore, that for the first time the three principal coins of Spain – the Valencian excel lent, the Catalan principat, and the Castilian ducat – were worth exactly the same. This represented the only measure of economic unification for their kingdoms which the Catholic Kings ever undertook. As such, it bore an odd resemblance to their achievements in the field of political unification. Just as the Crowns of Castile and Aragon were politically united only in the persons of their kings, so their monetary systems were similarly united only at the top, by a common coin of high value. Sole symbols of unity in a continuing diversity, the gold coins of early sixteenth-century Spain are at once a testimonial to the restored economies of the Spanish kingdoms and a mocking reminder that the policies of the Catholic Kings were no more than a faint beginning. Economically as much as politically, Spain still existed only in embryo.

  5. THE OPEN SOCIETY

  The reign of Ferdinand and Isabella was called by Prescott ‘the most glorious epoch in the annals’ of Spain. Generations of Spaniards, contrasting their own times with those of the Catholic Kings, would look back upon them as the golden age of Castile. The conquest of Granada, the discovery of America, and the triumphant emergence of Spain on to the European political stage lent unparalleled lustre to the new State created by the Union of the Crowns, and set the seal of success on the political, religious, and economic reforms of the royal couple.

  Against the conventional picture of a glorious spring-time under Ferdinand and Isabella, too soon to be turned to winter by the folly of their successors, there must, however, be set some of the less happy features of their reign. They had united two Crowns, but had not even tentatively embarked on the much more arduous task of uniting two peoples. They had destroyed the political power of the great nobility, but left its economic and social influence untouched. They had reorganized the Castilian economy, but at the price of reinforcing the system of latifundios and the predominance of grazing over tillage. They had introduced into Castile certain Aragonese economic institutions, monopolistic in spirit, while failing to bring the Castilian and Aragonese economies any closer together. They had restored order in Castile, but in the process had overthrown the fragile barriers that stood in the way of absolutism. They had reformed the Church, but set up the Inquisition. And they had expelled one of the most dynamic and resourceful sections of the community – the Jews. All this must darken a picture that is often painted excessively bright.

  Yet nothing can alter the fact that Ferdinand and Isabella created Spain; that in their reign it acquired both an international existence and – under the impulse given by the creative exuberance of the Castilians and the organizing capacity of the Aragonese – the beginnings of a corporate identity. Out of their long experience, the Aragonese could provide the administrative methods which would give the new monarchy an institutional form. The Castilians, for their part, were to provide the dynamism which would impel the new State forward; and it was this dynamism which gave the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella its distinguishing character. The Spain of the Catholic Kings is essentially Castile: a Castile, overflowing with creative energy, which seemed suddenly to have discovered itself.

  This self-discovery is nowhere more apparent than in the cultural achievements of the reign. After centuries of relative isolation, Castile had been subjected in the fifteenth century to strong and contradictory European cultural influences, out of which it would eventually fashion for itself a national art. Commercial contacts with Flanders brought northern influences in their train – Flemish realism in painting, the flamboyant Gothic style in architecture, and Flemish religion in the widely read manuals of popular devotion. At the same time, the traditional ties between the Crown of Aragon and Italy brought to the Spanish Court the new Italian humanism, and, belatedly, the new Italian architecture.

  These foreign stylistic currents had somehow to be fused with the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions of medieval Castile. The result was often an amalgam of warring influences; but in certain arts, particularly architecture, a genuine style emerged which came to be recognized as characteristically Spanish. This was the ‘plateresque’ – that strange blend of Moorish and northern, indiscriminately combining Gothic and Renaissance motifs to form fantastically ornamented surfaces. Equally remote from the purity of medieval Gothic and from the Renaissance ideal that detail should be subordinated to unity, the plateresque was a style which vividly suggested the exuberant and distinctive vitality of Isabella's Castile.

  Like the other achievements of contemporary Castile, however, the creation of plateresque was dependent as much on the direction and impulse given by the rulers as on the creative vitality of the ruled. Plateresque was a rich and extravagant style requiring rich and extravagant patrons. Enrique de Egas built the hospital of Santa Cruz at Toledo for Cardinal Mendoza; Pedro de Gumiel was comm
issioned by Cardinal Cisneros to build the university of Alcalá. The Castilian grandees rivalled the great ecclesiastics as patrons, building themselves sumptuous palaces like that of the Duke of Infantado at Guadalajara, with its superbly elaborate ornamentation. But it is symptomatic of the newly acquired supremacy of the monarchy in Spain that many of the most lavish and impressive buildings were royal foundations – the Hospital de los Reyes at Santiago, the charter-house of Miraflores, the royal chapel at Granada. Ferdinand and Isabella built and restored on an enormous scale, and they left on all their creations, by means of emblems and medallions, anagrams and devices, the imprint of their royal authority.

  The Court was the natural centre of Castile's cultural life; and since Spain still had no fixed capital it was a Court on the move, bringing new ideas and influences from one town to another as it travelled round the country. Since Isabella enjoyed a European reputation for her patronage of learning, she was able to attract to the Court distinguished foreign scholars like the Milanese Pietro Martire, the director of the palace school. Frequented by foreign scholars and by Spaniards who had returned from studying in Italy, the Court thus became an outpost of the new humanism, which was now beginning to establish itself in Spain.

  One of the devotees of the new learning was Elio Antonio de Nebrija (1444–1522), who returned home from Italy in 1473 – the year in which printing was introduced into Spain. Nebrija, who held the post of historiographer royal, was a grammarian and lexicographer, and an editor of classical texts in the best humanist tradition. But his interests, like those of many humanists, extended also to the vernacular, and he published in 1492 a Castilian grammar – the first grammar to be compiled of a modern European language. ‘What is it for?’ asked Isabella when it was presented to her. ‘Your Majesty,’ replied the Bishop of Avila on Nebrija's behalf, ‘language is the perfect instrument of empire.’13

  The Bishop's reply was prophetic. One of the secrets of Castilian domination of the Spanish Monarchy in the sixteenth century was to be found in the triumph of its language and culture over that of other parts of the peninsula and empire. The cultural and linguistic success of the Castilians was no doubt facilitated by the decline of Catalan culture in the sixteenth century, as it was also facilitated by the advantageous position of Castilian as the language of Court and bureaucracy. But, in the last analysis, Castile's cultural predominance derived from the innate vitality of its literature and language at the end of the fifteenth century. The language of the greatest work produced in the Castile of the Catholic Kings, the Celestina of the converso Fernando de Rojas, is at once vigorous, flexible, and authoritative: a language that was indeed ‘the perfect instrument of empire’.

  A vigorous language was the product of a vigorous society, whose intellectual leaders shared the inquiring spirit common to so much of late fifteenth-century Europe. Humanism, patronized by the Court and popularized by the printing of classical texts, found enthusiastic adherents among the conversos and gradually gained acceptance in the universities of Castile. With the foundation of the university of Alcalá and the publication of the Polyglot Bible, Spanish humanism came of age. Royal patronage had helped to make the new learning respectable, and the new learning proved in turn to be a useful key to royal favour. The Castilian aristocracy, like the aristocracy of other European states, was not slow to learn the lesson. Among the seven thousand students to be found at any one time in sixteenth-century Salamanca, there were always representatives of the leading Spanish houses, and some nobles themselves became distinguished exponents of the new learning, like Don Alonso Manrique, professor of Greek at Alcalá.

  No doubt some of the manifestations of Spanish humanism were crude and jejeune, but even these were to some extent redeemed by the enthusiasm which characterized the cultural life of Castile under the Catholic Kings. There was a sense of intellectual excitement in the country, and a thirst for cultural contacts with the outside world. It is this, above all, which distinguishes the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella from that of Philip II. The Spain of the Catholic Kings was an open society, eager for, and receptive to, contemporary foreign ideas. The establishment of the Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews were steps in an opposite direction, but they proved at the time insufficient to deflect Spain from its voyage of discovery beyond its own frontiers. Under the government of the Catholic Kings, Castile – its most pressing domestic problems momentarily solved – was ready to throw itself into new experiences, cultural or political, with all the energy of a nation released from a long confinement. Ferdinand and Isabella, in giving Castile a new sense of purpose and direction, had released the springs of action. It was Castile, rather than Spain, which burst into life in the late fifteenth century – a Castile which had suddenly become aware of its own potentialities. Already, to the Castilians, Castile was Spain; and already it was being beckoned towards a still greater future, as circumstances both at home and overseas inexorably cast it for an imperial role.

  The Imperial Destiny

  1. THE FOREIGN POLICY OF FERDINAND

  ISABELLA died on 26 November 1504. Her grandson, the Emperor Charles V, was to be firmly established on the Spanish throne only in 1522. The intervening eighteen years, complex and confused, were decisive in shaping the entire future of the Spanish Monarchy. Against very considerable odds, the Union of the Crowns was somehow preserved during these years, royal authority over the nobles and towns of Castile was confirmed, and Spain launched out on its imperial course under the leadership of the Habsburgs. There was as much of accident as of design in the final conclusion, but in so far as it can be attributed to any particular policies, they were those of Ferdinand and of Cardinal Cisneros.

  The diplomatic involvement of Castile in the affairs of western Europe, which was to culminate so unexpectedly in the placing of a foreign dynasty on the Castilian throne, was the work of Ferdinand, inspired in the first instance by the interests of Aragon. Louis XI's intervention in the domestic troubles of Catalonia during the reign of John II, and his seizure of the Catalan counties of Rosselló and Cerdanya in 1463, had exacerbated the traditional rivalry between the Crown of Aragon and France. It was only natural that Ferdinand, as the heir to this rivalry, should seek to induce his wife to abandon Castile's traditional policy of alliance with France. Between 1475 and 1477 envoys were sent to Germany, Italy, England, and the Netherlands, offering them, as natural enemies of France, a Castilian alliance. Here were the first steps towards the European involvement of Castile, and towards that diplomatic isolation of France – later to be reinforced by a series of dynastic marriages – which was to be the permanent theme of Ferdinand's foreign policy.

  During the following fifteen years, which were largely taken up with the completion of the Reconquista, Ferdinand devoted himself in particular to a tightening of the bonds between Spain and Portugal, in the hope of preparing the way for the ultimate unification of the peninsula. A marriage arranged between Isabella, the eldest daughter of the Catholic Kings, and Prince Alfonso of Portugal, eventually took place in 1490, but ended a few months later with the death of Alfonso. Isabella was remarried in 1497 to the new King Emmanuel of Portugal, but died the following year giving birth to the Infante Miguel, who himself was to die within two years. Distressed but undaunted, Ferdinand and Isabella married their fourth child, Maria, to Emmanuel in 1500. No opportunity could be neglected for ensuring the succession of a single ruler to the joint thrones of Spain and Portugal.

  The fall of Granada in 1492 for the first time allowed Ferdinand to direct all his energies outwards in pursuit of a more active foreign policy. Two areas received his special attention: the Catalan-French border, and Italy. No true king of Aragon could resign himself permanently to the loss of the Catalan counties of Rosselló and Cerdanya. As the original homeland of the Catalans, they were considered as integral a part of the dominions of the kings of Spain as the kingdom of Granada, and their recovery was a prime object of Ferdinand's policy. His alliance with England at the Tr
eaty of Medina del Campo in 1489 was intended to facilitate a Spanish invasion of France to recover the counties, by obtaining the assistance of an English diversion in the north. This particular project was unsuccessful, but a new opportunity shortly arose to acquire the counties, and this time without bloodshed. Charles VIII of France had conceived his idea of an Italian expedition, and in order to secure the quiescence of Spain while he was away on campaign, he agreed by the Treaty of Barcelona of January 1493 to restore Rosselló and Cerdanya to Ferdinand. For the next century and a half therefore, until the Treaty of the Pyrenees, the counties became once more a part of Catalonia, and Spain's frontier with France lay again to the north of the Pyrenees.