Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  The acquisition of Navarre was a source of enormous satisfaction to Ferdinand on sentimental grounds, but he can hardly have been unaware of the other advantages of its possession, which were listed by the Florentine Guicciardini, then on an embassy to Spain. According to Guicciardini, Navarre was a fine state, not so much for its revenues, which were relatively small, but for the ‘conformity’ which it had with Ferdinand's other kingdoms. It was valuable, too, because it closed the passage into Spain, while allowing the Spaniards entry into France.2 Here were the defensible frontiers and the relative uniformity of customs and language, which were increasingly being regarded as desirable features for a prince who was bent on extending his dominions. Politically, however, the uniformity was no greater than that which existed between Castile and the Crown of Aragon. The kingdom of Navarre possessed, and was allowed to retain, its own customs, coinage, and institutions, including a Cortes and a Diputació. As might have been expected from Navarre's past association with the Aragonese dynasty, it was joined on its annexation to the Crown of Aragon; but three years later Ferdinand changed his mind, fearing perhaps, as the chronicler Zurita suggests, that union with the Crown of Aragon would encourage the Navarrese to extend their liberties and exemptions. Perhaps also because he wished to commit Castile to the protection of Navarre, he arranged in 1515 for its definitive incorporation into the Crown of Castile, although its semi-autonomous government continued to remain untouched.

  If Ferdinand hoped to placate his enemies in Castile by the gift of Navarre he was to be disappointed. His government, dominated by Aragonese officials, was becoming increasingly unpopular, and Castilian nationalist sentiment – briefly disillusioned by the behaviour of the Archduke Philip – was again turning to the Burgundians for help. The Great Captain, the Marquis of Priego, and other leading nobles were all planning in 1515 to leave Spain and take service with their new hope, Charles of Ghent. But this proved to be unnecessary. Ferdinand was ailing, and he died at the village of Madrigalejo in Estremadura on 23 January 1516. The man who had achieved so much – the Union of the Crowns, the annexation of Navarre, the ordering of Spain and its promotion to the ranks of the great European powers – died embittered and resentful, cheated not by his opponents, all of whom he had outwitted, but by a malignant fate which had placed his masterwork in the hands of alien descendants.

  On his death-bed Ferdinand had been reluctantly persuaded to rescind a previous will in favour of his younger grandson Ferdinand, and to name Charles of Ghent as his heir. He also arranged that, until Charles should come to Spain to take up his inheritance, his bastard son Alonso de Aragón should act as regent of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, while the government of Castile should be entrusted to Cardinal Cisneros. The Cardinal ruled Castile with all the authoritarianism of the humble cleric elevated to a high secular command, but nothing less could have saved the country from anarchy. Even if death opportunely removed the Great Captain and the Duke of Nájera, there were still many dangerous nobles whose feuds and ambitions were a constant threat to public order. Not only were there fierce faction struggles, like those between the Duke of Infantado and the Count of La Coruña, but the grandees were determined to discredit Cisneros in the eyes of Charles's advisers in Brussels. Failing this, they planned to proclaim the Infante Ferdinand king. A group of nobles, including the Duke of Alburquerque, the Count of Benavente, and Don Pedro Girón, met at the Duke of Infantado's palace in Guadalajara to plot the overthrow of the Cardinal, but Cisneros was too quick for them. The Infante was separated from his closest adherents, and, in order to forestall an aristocratic attempt to seize control of the government, a volunteer militia was raised in Castile, known as the gente de la ordenanza and inspired by the old Hermandad.

  This militia of some 30,000 well-equipped men was a kind of standing army, and offered a foretaste of arbitrary power that was by no means to the liking of nobles or towns. Cisneros was too inflexible, his hand too heavy; and the mounting complaints against his government found answering echoes in Brussels. But the death of Ferdinand had to some extent modified the relationship between the leaders of Castilian discontent and Charles's Flemish advisers. As long as Ferdinand lived, the more intransigent Castilian nationalists, exasperated by the Aragonese characteristics of his régime, could turn to the Flemings for sympathy and support. But Ferdinand's death made Charles the ruler of Aragon as well as of Castile – a fact that Ferdinand's former servants were quick to appreciate. As soon as their old master was dead, they flocked to Brussels - men like Lope Conchillos, Ferdinand's principal secretary; the Aragonese secretaries, Pedro de Quintana and Ugo de Urries; Antonio Agustín, vice-chancellor of the Council of Aragon; and a non-Aragonese official, Francisco de los Cobos, chief assistant of Lope Conchillos. On arriving in Brussels, most of these men were confirmed in their offices, to the deep distress of Cisneros, who sent constant warnings to Flanders against the employment of Ferdinand's former servants, many of them notoriously corrupt.

  There was, then, constant friction between the government of Cisneros and the growing circle of Spanish officials around Charles. But the Castilian aristocracy, which loathed the government of Cisneros, was equally finding Charles's circle of Spanish advisers increasingly unpalatable. Many of them came from the Crown of Aragon, ‘and it would be better for the kingdom that its affairs were entrusted to the purest-bred Frenchman than to an Aragonese’.3 Even worse, most of them were conversos. A future Government of Flemings, Aragonese, and Jews was the last thing the Castilians had envisaged when they originally placed their hopes in Charles of Ghent.

  Yet such a government was becoming increasingly possible, for the moment of Charles's long-awaited visit to Spain was at last approaching. On 4 July 1517 Charles and his suite arrived at Middleburg, where the fleet awaited them, but it was held up for two months by contrary winds, and was unable to leave until the second week of September. Even then, instead of landing at Santander according to plan, Charles was forced by bad weather to disembark on a wild stretch of the Asturian coast. The days that followed his landing had a curious dreamlike quality, and must have seemed to Charles a strange introduction to his new dominions. With his suite of 200 ladies and gentlemen, inadequately supplied with horses, mules, and ox-carts that had been hastily gathered together to meet the emergency, he was led along the winding mountain routes of north Spain, through a barbarous countryside totally unprepared to receive him. To make matters worse, he fell ill on the journey, and his physicians insisted that the party move inland, away from the dangerous sea air. Through fog and drenching rain it moved slowly southwards. At last on 4 November it arrived at Tordesillas, where Charles and his sister had a brief meeting with a mother whom they could scarcely remember. The real purpose of this meeting was to secure from Juana the necessary authorization for Charles to assume royal power; once this was given, Charles could act as King of Castile.

  The first move of Charles's principal adviser, Chièvres, was to send a letter to Cisneros instructing him to meet the King, and advising him that in future his services would no longer be required. Cisneros was now gravely ill, and on the very day the letter arrived – 8 November 1517 – he died at Roa near Valladolid. The old tradition that the arrival of the letter hastened the Cardinal's death is unlikely to be true, but there could be no doubt of the significance of Chièvres's letter. For the past two years Cisneros and the Castilians had been struggling to wrest Charles from the hands of his Burgundian advisers, and had planned to secure control of his government as soon as he arrived in Spain. Cisneros's letter of dismissal showed that this plan had failed. The Castilians had been worsted by Chièvres and his Flemings, and had seen all their forebodings confirmed. The alien Habsburg had assumed the government of Spain – and assumed it with alien ministers.

  3. NATIONALISM AND REVOLT

  The new King, a gawky, unprepossessing youth with an absurdly pronounced jaw, did not make a favourable impression on his first appearance in Spain. Apart from looking like an idiot, h
e suffered from the unforgivable defect of knowing no Castilian. In addition, he was totally ignorant of Spanish affairs, and was surrounded by an entourage of rapacious Flemings. It was natural to contrast him un-favourably with his brother Ferdinand, who enjoyed the supreme advantage of a Castilian upbringing – a background that seemed to Charles's advisers to be so fraught with danger for the future that they shipped Ferdinand off to Flanders a few months after his brother's arrival in Spain. His departure, which (as was intended) deprived the grandees of a potential figurehead and the populace of a symbol, merely increased the discontents of a disaffected nation.

  The principal complaint of the Castilians was directed against the Flemings, who were alleged to be plundering the country so fortuitously inherited by their duke. Castilian allegations of Flemish rapacity have sometimes been treated with scepticism, on the grounds that the information about the iniquities of the Flemings comes overwhelmingly from humanist writers like Pietro Martire, who hated the aristocratic world of Chièvres and his friends, or from royal officials like Galíndez de Carvajal, disappointed in their hopes of the new regime. But there is sufficient evidence to suggest that, even if the Castilians exaggerated the failings of foreigners whom they neither liked nor understood, the alleged rapacity of the Flemings is firmly rooted in fact. Charles was a pawn in the hands of his Grand Chamberlain Chièvres, and offices and honours went to Chièvres's friends. Charles's tutor, Adrian of Utrecht, who had been in Spain since 1515 as his special agent, received the bishopric of Tortosa. Chièvres himself was given the lucrative post of contador mayor of Castile, which he sold to the Duke of Béjar for 30,000 ducats, while his sixteen-year-old nephew, Guillaume de Croy, was appointed to the Archbishopric of Toledo itself. Chièvres's wife, and the wife of Charles's chief equerry, Charles de Lannoy, were each given passports to take out of Spain three hundred horses and eighty pack-mules laden with clothes, bullion, and jewellery. The Governor of Bresse, Laurent Gorrevod, was granted the first licence to ship negroes to the Indies – a privilege calculated to be worth 25,000 ducats when he sold it to the Genoese. No doubt the stories about the ‘plundering’ of Castile by the Flemings were magnified in the telling, and were deliberately distorted for purposes of propaganda, but at least enough was taken to give point to the little rhyme composed by the Castilians in honour of the occasional ducat that had not yet gone to Flanders:

  Doblón de a dos, norabuena estedes

  Pues con vos no topó Xevres.4

  When the Cortes were held at Valladolid in January 1518 to swear allegiance to the new King and vote him a servicio, the procuradores seized the opportunity to protest against the exploitation of Castile by foreigners; and they found some outlet for their indignation in addressing Charles only as ‘su Alteza’, reserving the title of ‘Magestad’ exclusively for his mother, Juana.

  After the conclusion of the Castilian Cortes, Charles left for the Crown of Aragon, arriving at Zaragoza on 9 May. During the seven months spent by the Court at Zaragoza, where the Cortes showed themselves a good deal more obdurate than those of Valladolid, the highly unpopular Grand Chancellor, Jean Sauvage, died, and was replaced by a much more cosmopolitan character, Mercurino Gattinara. The change of officers fittingly preceded by a few months a total change in Charles's affairs. News reached Charles as he was on the road to Barcelona at the end of January 1519 of the death of his grandfather Maximilian; five months later, after long intrigues and the expenditure of vast sums of money, he was elected Emperor in his grandfather's place. Gattinara, a man whose broad imperial vision was inspired by a cosmopolitan background, an acquaintance with the political writings of Dante, and, most of all, by the humanist's longings for a respublica christiana, showed himself fully prepared for the change. Charles was no longer to be styled ‘su Alteza’, but ‘S.C.C.R. Magestad’ (Sacra, Cesárea, Católica, Real Magestad). The Duke of Burgundy, King of Castile and León, King of Aragon and Count of Barcelona, had now added to his imposing list of titles the most impressive of all: Emperor-elect of the Holy Roman Empire.

  Charles's election as Emperor inevitably altered his relationship to his Spanish subjects. It did much to increase his prestige, opening up new and unexpected horizons, of which the Catalans – as a result of his residence among them at this moment – were probably the first to become aware. Charles himself was changing, and beginning at last to acquire a personality of his own; he seems to have established an easier relationship with his Catalan subjects than with the tightly suspicious Castilians; and Barcelona for a glorious six months revelled in its position as the capital of the Empire. If a foreign ruler had obvious disadvantages, there might none the less be compensations, as yet barely glimpsed.

  It was the disadvantages, however, which most impressed the Castilians as Charles hurried back across Castile in January 1520 to embark for England and Germany. If the King of Castile were also to be Holy Roman Emperor, this was likely to lead to two serious consequences for Castile. It would involve long periods of royal absenteeism, and it would also involve a higher rate of taxation in order to finance the King's increased expenditure. Already, at the news of Charles's election, voices were raised in protest against his impending departure. The protests originated in the city of Toledo, which was to play the leading part in the troubles of the next two years, for reasons that are not yet fully clear. The city seems somehow to have exemplified, in heightened form, all the tensions and conflicts within Castile, offering an illuminating example of the constant interaction of local and national affairs.

  Like Córdoba, Seville, and any other large town in Castile and Andalusia, Toledo was torn by the feuds of great noble houses, whose rivalries reached back far into the past. Inevitably, rival families had ranged themselves on different sides during the civil wars of the fifteenth century, and the pattern was repeated in the succession struggles that followed the death of Isabella. Toledo itself was divided into two principal factions: the Ayalas, led by the Count of Fuen-salida, and the Riberas, headed by Don Juan de Ribera. The Riberas had supported Ferdinand in 1504, while the Ayalas, and their friends the Ávalos, had thrown in their lot with the Archduke Philip. They duly reaped their reward after Philip's arrival in Castile with the appointment of Hernando de Ávalos as corregidor of Jérez de la Frontera, but Ávalos was relieved of his post on Philip's unexpected death. Until 1516 the Riberas were in the ascendant, but, with the death of Ferdinand, the fortunes of the rival families were once again reversed, and Cisneros restored Ávalos to office. The triumph of the Ayala faction, however, was short-lived, for it fell victim to the new political feuds generated during the Cisneros régime of 1516–17. As former supporters of the Archduke Philip, the Ayalas might reasonably have expected to continue in favour after the arrival of his son Charles in Spain; but so bad were the relations between the Cisneros group and Charles's Flemish advisers, that Chièvres removed many of the Cardinal's supporters, including the unfortunate Hernando de Ávalos, from office.

  By 1519, therefore, there had been a strange reversal of roles. The Ribera faction, the old supporters of Ferdinand against a Habsburg succession, now found themselves favoured by the Chièvres régime,

  Map 4

  and became loyal supporters of the dynasty they had formerly mistrusted. The Ayalas, on the other hand, disillusioned by the treatment they had received at the hands of a dynasty they had originally supported, now openly identified themselves with the anti-Flemish, Castilian nationalist sentiments of which their patron Cardinal Cisneros had been the symbol.

  Family feuds, while crucially important, cannot, however, explain in every instance the alignment of two opposing factions – for and against the Emperor – that was now taking place in Castile. Hernando de Ávalos, the real leader of the Ayalas, found an influential ally in another caballero of Toledo, Juan de Padilla, who by origin was a member of the rival faction of the Riberas, and had married a Mendoza – a family loyal to Charles. Padilla was a disgruntled and embittered man, who felt himself to have been slighted
in the distribution of favours; and if he was hardly the man to turn spontaneously from indignation to action, his ambitious wife Maria Pacheco suffered from no such inhibitions. Padilla and his friends now took it upon themselves to voice the discontents of Castile. In November 1519 they wrote to the leading cities, pointing out that Charles had spent much longer in Aragon than in Castile, and proposing a meeting of municipal representatives. These were to make certain demands: that Charles should not leave the country; that no more money should be allowed to go abroad; and that foreigners should not be appointed to offices in Spain.

  In an atmosphere of impending crisis, Chièvres and Gattinara pressed ahead with their plans for Charles's departure. These plans included another session of the Castilian Cortes to vote a further servicio. The subsidy of 600,000 ducats voted at Valladolid in 1518 was intended to cover a period of three years; but money was needed at once for the Emperor's journey, since the sums granted by the Cortes of the Crown of Aragon had proved insufficient. Charles's advisers, however failed to prepare Castilian public opinion or to mollify bruised feelings by tactful concessions. They hoped to weaken the opposition by disregarding precedent and summoning the Cortes to Santiago, a remote town convenient only for Charles, who was to embark at the nearby port of Corunna. They also insisted that the procuradores to the Cortes should come armed with full powers. This itself was not a novel demand, for the Crown had insisted on full powers being given both in 1499 and 1506. Since then, however, its authority had been undermined by the succession struggles, and both the demand for full powers and the choice of Santiago as the site of the Cortes merely added to the anger of the towns. When the Cortes opened at Santiago on 1 April 1520 it was found that Salamanca had flatly defied the royal order, and that other towns had prepared secret instructions for their procuradores. In fact, only Burgos, Granada, and Seville, whose town councils were dominated by Charles's adherents, had given their representatives the full powers requested by the Crown.