Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  The proposición real read at the opening session by Ruiz de la Mota, Bishop of Palencia, elaborated on the imperial theme on which he had already expatiated, as Bishop of Badajoz, in the Cortes of 1518. He had explained on the earlier occasion how the Empire had turned to Spain for its Emperor. While still insisting on the universalism of the Empire and the absolute necessity for Charles's departure from Spain, he and the Emperor were now especially careful to emphasize that Spain itself was the foundation of the Empire and that Charles would be back in three years at the most. Even the idea of a Spanish-based Empire, however, did nothing to placate the Cortes. The procuradores refused to believe that Charles would ever return, and the majority were not prepared to vote a subsidy until their grievances had been considered. On 10 April, hoping to gain time which could be used to put pressure on individual procuradores, Gattinara transferred the Cortes from Santiago to Corunna. The interval was obviously used to some effect, for a majority eventually approved the subsidy, although six towns still stubbornly resisted. Having obtained what he wanted (although the subsidy was, in fact, never collected), Charles nominated Adrian of Utrecht as regent, and set sail on 20 May to take up his inheritance. But he left behind him a nation in revolt.

  The revolt of the Comuneros, which began in the last week of May 1520 and continued until the defeat of the Comuneros at the battle of Villalar on 23 April 1521 was a confused affair, lacking in cohesion and a sense of positive purpose, but at the same time expressing, however inarticulately, deep-seated grievances and a burning sense of national indignation. Essentially it was a movement against, rather than for, any particular object: in so far as the Comuneros were animated by any constructive ideals, these consisted in the preservation of the old Castile – a Castile untouched by the dangerous winds that were beginning to blow so strongly from abroad. In spite of the determination of nineteenth-century historians to depict the revolt as liberal and democratic, it was in its origins fundamentally traditional, as the demands of the Comuneros themselves suggested.5 The revolt had been sparked off by the attack on the independence of the Cortes; and the desire of the rebels to preserve that independence gave it, at least in part, the character of a constitutional movement. But there was little that was radical in their constitutional demands, other than the request that the towns should have the right to assemble Cortes on their own initiative every three years. No attempt was made to secure for the Cortes the right of legislation, nor was any attempt made to strengthen it by the inclusion of new towns. The prime concern of the Cortes was to preserve intact its traditional rights, and it therefore concentrated on demanding that the procuradores should be paid by the cities rather than the Crown, and that they should not be told to come with full powers.

  There was, then, no attempt to set up the Castilian Cortes as a partner of the Crown in the work of government, let alone to promote the idea of the Cortes as a possible alternative government. However radical may have been the action of the rebels in forming a revolutionary Junta, they remained conservative in intention. Theirs was constitutionally a movement on the defensive – a movement of angry reaction to a long period in which royal government, whether exercised by the Catholic Kings or by Cardinal Cisneros, had eroded away many of the traditional powers and prerogatives of the Castilian towns. It was significant that one of the demands sent to the Emperor by the revolutionary Junta of Tordesillas on 20 October 1520 was that no corregidor should in future be appointed, except at the specific request of the town concerned. However sudden and complete the collapse of royal authority in 1520, it was clear that the hand of government had lain heavy on the towns in the none too distant past.

  The essentially moderate character of the rebels' constitutional demands hardly suggested the depth of feeling behind the revolt, nor the violent form that it was shortly to assume. For all the importance of the constitutional grievances of the municipalities, these were heavily outweighed among the mass of the Castilian populace by other complaints of more general appeal. It was well known that the King had asked for money, not once but twice in the space of three years. It was universally assumed that the country was being stripped bare by foreigners, who were sending shiploads of its wealth abroad. The behaviour of the King's Flemish suite had made an indelible impression on the minds of those who had seen it – which meant, in practice, the towns of north and central Castile. A sermon preached by a Dominican at Valladolid in the summer of 1520 forcefully expressed their feelings: ‘It is of these realms that Your Majesty is true sovereign and proprietor, and you have bought with money the Empire, which ought not to pass nor be transmitted to your heirs; and Your Majesty has reduced the realm to the poverty in which it stands, and your followers have enriched themselves excessively.’6 The real spur to revolution was thus a burning hatred of the foreigners and of a foreign rule which was stripping the country of its wealth; and this nationalistic indignation was reflected in the demands of the Junta of Tordesillas that the King should live in Castile, that he should bring no ‘Flemings, Frenchmen, nor natives of any other country’ to fill the posts in his household, and that in everything he should conform to the customs of the ‘Catholic Sovereigns Don Fernando and Doña Isabel, his grandparents’.

  It does not seem to have occurred to the rebels that there might be a certain incompatibility between their anxiety to return to the days of Ferdinand and Isabella and their desire to loosen the tight grasp of the Crown. The Catholic Kings were already passing into history – symbols of a golden age to which Castile would for ever aspire to return. The rebels remembered Isabella's piety and wisdom, not her zealous concern to extend her royal powers. They remembered the ‘secure liberty’ she had given them, and forgot its authoritarian overtones. Measuring the present against an idealized past, when a Castile ruled by a truly Castilian sovereign had wrought great things, they raised the banner of revolt in a gallant but hopeless attempt to prove to themselves that, although everything was different, it could still be the same.

  Since they championed at the outset a cause with wide general appeal, the rebels secured a great body of support that appeared at first to ignore the sharp social divisions within Castile. Although agricultural labourers fought in the Comunero army, the revolt was essentialy an urban revolt, confined at first to the towns of north Castile, which had first-hand experience of Charles's Flemish following. But within the towns the movement seems, at the beginning, to have been general. The clergy, monks, and friars, were violent partisans of the revolt, partly perhaps out of mistrust for the new ideas entering Spain from Flanders and the north. Many urban nobles and gentry, like the Maldonados of Salamanca, also showed themselves sympathetic to the rebels. The grandees on the whole behaved with extreme caution. While they sympathized with many of the aspirations of the rebels, they chose to play a waiting game, like the Duke of Infantado, hoping to see which way the battle would go before taking sides.

  The movement began in the towns with popular risings against royal officials: corregidores were forced to flee for their lives. The populace would then turn for leadership to some members of a distinguished local family, as in Toledo, where the royal administration was replaced by a commune headed by Pedro Laso de la Vega and Juan de Padilla. During the summer of 1520 other towns followed Toledo's example and set up communes of their own. It was essential to co-ordinate the activities of these communes, but the traditional rivalry of the towns of Castile made the task a difficult one, and when the Toledo leaders summoned a congress of Comunero representatives at Ávila in July, only delegates from Segovia, Salamanca, and Toro appeared. But at the moment when enthusiasm seemed to be flagging Adrian of Utrecht and his regency council played into the hands of Padilla and his friends by ordering an attack on Segovia. Unable to press home its assault, the royalist force moved to the great arsenal town of Medina del Campo in search of siege artillery, only to be met with fierce resistance by the townspeople. In the street fighting that followed a number of houses were fired, the flames took hold and a la
rge part of the city was burnt to the ground.

  The burning of Medina del Campo on 21 August 1520 transformed the situation in Castile. The destruction of the greatest financial and commercial centre in the country provoked a wave of indignation which for the first time stirred the cities of the south, brought Jaén into the Comunero movement, and induced the defaulting towns of the north to send their representatives to the Junta at Áila. But it was ominous that the new-found unity of the Comuneros was the product only of a fresh upsurge of indignation. The fundamental problem of finding a common programme of action remained unsolved, and it was in an attempt to resolve this problem that the leaders of the Junta turned to the one source of authority in Castile potentially higher than that of Adrian of Utrecht the mad Queen Juana. If they could once secure her written recognition of the legality of their cause, their triumph would be complete. At Tordesillas in September Padilla managed to elicit from the Queen expressions of sympathy for his aims, but Juana stubbornly refused to sign any documents. Although Adrian and his council were chased out of Valladolid shortly afterwards, and the Junta prepared to assume the government of Castile, Padilla, in fact, had shot his final bolt.

  Away in the Netherlands the Emperor's advisers, already distracted by the problem of Luther, decided after much discussion that certain concessions should be made. They agreed to suspend the collection of the servicio and to appoint no more foreigners to offices in Castile, and they also decided to associate the two most important grandees, the Admiral and the Constable of Castile, with the regency government of Adrian of Utrecht. Their bid to win back the great nobility to active loyalty to Charles proved to be well timed. Since the interviews with Juana in the autumn of 1520, the Comunero movement had been running into trouble. The Flemings were now far away, Adrian was at the worst but a pallid replica of Chièvres, and time and distance were beginning to blunt the indignation that had given impetus to revolt. In the towns the rising was rapidly degenerating into civil war between traditional enemies, and in the Junta of the Comuneros itself, where opinions were divided on the next step to be taken, power was falling into the hands of the more extreme. Voices were now beginning to be raised against the power of the nobles and the rich. A movement which had begun as a national rising against a foreign régime was assuming some of the aspects of a social revolution.

  This could not but affect the attitude of the nobles, whose tacit approval, if not active encouragement, was essential if the revolt were to win lasting success. The dangers to the aristocracy inherent in any general revolution were already at this very moment being vividly illustrated by events in Valencia. Here, curiously divorced from events in Castile, another revolutionary drama had been unfolding on its own. Discontent had begun to flare up in Valencia as early as the summer of 1519, while Charles was in Barcelona. This time it had nothing to do with the behaviour of the Flemings, of which the Valencians had seen nothing: indeed, if there was any cause for political discontent it lay in the absence, not the presence, of the King and his Court. The prime motive for unrest, however, was not political but social. Orders had been given for the arming of the guilds against possible raids on the Valencian coast by Turkish galleys. At this moment, in the summer of 1519, the city of Valencia was struck by plague, which a preacher in Valencia Cathedral pronounced to be a divine chastisement for the prevailing immorality. If this was so, it seemed particularly unjust that the most immoral of all – the nobles and the rich – should escape its consequences by fleeing the city. Feelings were running high, all those in authority had fled, and the armed artisans in the guilds banded together in a Germanía or brotherhood, which took over control of the city and then began to extend its power into the countryside. This was an urban movement – a movement of middling burgesses, of weavers, spinners, artisans – and it was led in its first months by a Catalan weaver resident in Valencia, Juan Llorenç, who hoped to turn Valencia into a republic like Venice. But extremists like Vicenç Peris wrested control of the movement from the hands of Llorenç (who died shortly afterwards); and they turned it against the nobles and their Morisco vassals, whom they forcibly baptized.

  While the Comuneros were rising in Castile, therefore, the rebel Germania of Valencia had become a violently radical social movement. Although its aims had been curiously vague since the death of Llorenç, it clearly constituted a grave threat to aristocratic power and to the whole hierarchical order. It is difficult to determine what repercussions this had on the nobility in other parts of Spain. It is perhaps significant that the Aragonese nobility, unpleasantly close to the movement in Valencia, showed no sympathy for the Comunero cause. There are also signs that the Valencian troubles had an impact farther afield. In Murcia, for instance, Don Pedro Fajardo, first Marquis of los Vélez – whose former tutor, the great humanist Pietro Martire, had written him scathing descriptions of the behaviour of the Flemings – had at first supported the Comuneros. But when the revolt of the communes in Murcia came to be infected by the more extreme spirit of the Germanías, los Vélez prudently changed sides and raised his own army against the Valencian rebels.

  As the Castilian nobility, affected either by events in Valencia or by the growing radicalism of the movement nearer home, gradually retreated from their earlier sympathetic attitude into strict neutrality or outright hostility, the Comuneros in turn became increasingly anti-aristocratic in their pronouncements and actions. During the winter of 1520 and the early spring of 1521 the revolt of the Comuneros began to turn into a social struggle against the nobility, as the extremist faction in the Junta, led by Gonzalo de Guzmán of León, defeated Laso de la Vega and his moderates. Towns under seigneurial jurisdiction, like Nájera and Dueñas, renounced obedience to their lords; and anti-aristocratic sentiments reached their climax in the Junta's announcement of 10 April 1521 that war would in future be waged with ‘fire, sack, and blood’ against the estates and properties of ‘grandees, caballeros, and other enemies of the realm’. The revolt of the Comuneros had been transformed into a social revolution.

  As such, it was doomed. It forfeited the assistance of the aristocracy, which was indispensable for any permanent success, and it alienated the more moderate rebels, who ceased to attend the Junta. Adrian of Utrecht and his advisers had managed to win back Burgos into the royalist camp during the course of the winter, and, as fear of social upheaval spread, one after another of the towns of Castile and Andalusia followed Burgos's lead. The Comuneros, however, found some compensation for these losses in the adherence of a disgruntled noble, Don Pedro Girón, and in the vigorous support of Antonio de Acuña, Bishop of Zamora, who came to their help with a private army over two thousand strong. Acuña was the last of the warrior-prelates of Castile, and the most formidable of them all. A member of the family of Acuña, one of the great houses of central Castile, he had found favour with Ferdinand and Isabella, who made him their diplomatic agent in Rome. On Isabella's death he deserted Ferdinand for Philip the Fair, and continued in Rome until 1507, when he persuaded Julius II to appoint him Bishop of Zamora by promising that he would do everything possible to further the Papacy's interests in Castile. When the Council of Castile objected to his appointment, he seized his bishopric by force, and successfully held it against the attempts of the alcalde of Zamora, Rodrigo Ronquillo, to evict him. Although he managed to work his way back into the good graces of Ferdinand, and to obtain royal confirmation of his appointment, he was never entirely secure in his hold over his diocese. Zamora was the scene of unending faction struggles, and these merged into the struggle of the Comuneros as Acuña, expelled from the city by his enemies, put himself at the head of the rebels of Zamora, while the alcalde Ronquillo, his implacable enemy, became one of the leading royalist commanders. Now, in the early months of 1521, Acuña led his troops across northern Castile, joined the council of war of the Comuneros at Valladolid, conducted a few spirited forays into the surrounding countryside, and then took it into his head to march on Toledo, where he induced the populace to proclaim
him Archbishop, in place of the recently deceased Guillaume de Croy.

  The revival of Comunero fortunes under the fiery leadership of the Bishop of Zamora proved, however, to be no more than a passing phenomenon. The Comunero army, composed of local militia, rural labourers, and a handful of gentry, was unlikely to be a match for the royalist army marching southwards under the Constable of Castile. On 23 April 1521 the two armies met in the fields of Villalar, outside Toro. The Comunero infantry offered little effective resistance, most of the army scattered in confusion, and Padilla and the Segovian Comunero leader Juan Bravo were captured, and executed the following day.

  The revolt of the Comuneros was now virtually at an end. Toledo, the first Castilian city to rise, was the last to yield, thanks to the heroism and determination of Padilla's widow, Maria Pacheco. The Bishop of Zamora fled in disguise to join the French troops who were at this moment invading Navarre, but he was caught on the way, and imprisoned in the castle of Simancas. Here, five years later, his career came to a suitably stormy close. In attempting to escape, the Bishop was rash enough to kill his jailer, and Charles V sent his old enemy, the alcalde Ronquillo, to investigate. Ronquillo, ignoring a clerical immunity which seemed in this instance peculiarly inappropriate, sentenced Acuña to be tortured and garrotted. The Bishop's body was strung up from one of the turrets of Simancas – a gruesome warning that had lost its point, for open defiance of the King and his ministers was already a thing of the past. After the defeat at Villalar, the rebels had melted away, and the nobles and gentry most implicated in the troubles found in the French invasion of Navarre a convenient opportunity for an ostentatious parade of their loyalty to the Crown. In Valencia, too, the rebellion was crushed. Peris was defeated outside the city of Valencia in October, and was finally captured and executed in March 1522. When Charles landed at Santander on 16 July 1522, he returned to a Spain once more at peace. By October he felt strong enough to issue a general pardon for the Comuneros, although nearly three hundred of the rebels were specifically excluded from its provisions. The authority of the Crown had prevailed, and the king had returned as absolute master to a cowed and subdued Castile. But this time he had taken the precaution of coming with 4,000 German soldiers at his side: