The growth of the Turkish threat to the western Mediterranean was, in fact, to have a decisive impact on the character and development of sixteenth-century Spain. The Europe of Charles V found itself confronted by a powerful State specifically organized for war – a State possessing resources of money and manpower on an imperial scale. The threat to Spain was open and obvious. Its coasts were exposed to pirate attacks; its grain supplies from Sicily could easily be cut; and it had, in its large Morisco population, a potentially subversive element, well placed to aid and abet any Ottoman attack on Spanish soil. Spain therefore found itself in the front line of the battle, a natural bastion of Europe against a Turkish assault. It was at this point that Charles's imperialism came into its own. An empire was wanted to meet the attack of an empire. The States of the Crown of Aragon by themselves would have been too weak to prevent and throw back a Turkish attack, while Castile also required a line of defence beyond its own borders. Charles's imperialism provided exactly this. He could draw on the financial and military resources of his widespread dominions, on the naval power of his Genoese allies, and on the loans of his German bankers, to defend Italy and Sicily, and hence Spain itself, against the onslaught of Ottoman imperialism. However weak the links between his various territories, they none the less formed a sufficiently solid mass to impede the further advance of the Turk, and to provide between them the resources for a successful defence such as they could never have mustered on their own.
There were, however, counterbalancing disadvantages for Spain in Charles's domination of half the Continent. In particular, he was too absorbed in the German problem and in his wars with France to be able to pursue a consistently offensive policy against Ottoman power. The capture of Tunis in 1535 thus remained an isolated incident, and, in the end, Charles's Mediterranean policy came to be limited to a mere holding operation. In this respect especially, Charles's Castilian and Aragonese subjects found their ruler's possession of the Imperial title a constant liability, requiring frequent diversions from a strictly Mediterranean policy, and demanding of them large and continuing sacrifices for causes that appeared to them unnecessary and remote. It was true that Spain enjoyed under Charles V and his successor the inestimable blessing of peace on its own soil, at a time when large regions of Europe were the scene of constant warfare; but while it escaped the ravages of war, Castile in particular was almost permanently on a war footing, fighting battles sometimes for itself, but no less frequently for others. Charles always insisted that these battles ultimately redounded to the benefit of his Spanish subjects, and he succeeded in making many Castilians identify themselves and their country with his crusade against the Turk and the heretic. In perpetuating Castile's crusading tradition, and giving it a new sense of purpose and direction, he undoubtedly met a psychological need. But there was a high price to be paid, for the perpetuation of a crusade entailed the perpetuation of the archaic social organization of a crusading society. It also meant that the institutions and economy of sixteenth-century Spain and its empire were formed, and deformed, against the sombre background of incessant war.
2. THE ORGANIZATION OF EMPIRE
If warfare was a dominant theme in the history of Spain under Charles V and Philip II, bureaucratization was another. In order to govern Spain and its overseas possessions, and to mobilize their resources for war, a large number of officials were required. Charles was, and remained, an old-style ruler who liked to lead his armies in battle and to govern his subjects personally, and there remained to the end of his life an element of the improvising amateur about his manner of government. But all the time the sheer physical problems involved in ruling large territories spread over vast distances were imposing new bureaucratic methods and administrative procedures, which came gradually to replace government by the spoken word with government by the written word – government by paper. Already by the reign of Philip II it seemed unbelievable that Charles V should once have called for pen and ink only to find that there was none in the palace (or so at least the story went). The replacement of the warrior-king Charles V by a sedentary Philip II, who spent his working day at his desk surrounded by piles of documents, fittingly symbolized the transformation of the Spanish Empire as it passed out of the age of the conquistador into the age of the Civil Servant.
The character and timing of the transformation were determined by the constitutional characteristics of the Spanish kingdoms, by the conquest of an American empire, and also by the demands of war. As early as 1522 it had become clear that the existing system of government was inadequate for the new demands that were being imposed upon it, and the Grand Chancellor Gattinara set about rationalizing and improving Spain's administrative machinery. Between 1522 and 1524 he reformed the Council of Castile, founded a Council of Finance, reorganized the government of Navarre, and established a Council for the Indies. With these reforms of the early 1520s, the pattern was set for the government of the Spanish Monarchy throughout the sixteenth century. It was elaborated in 1555 by the removal of Italian affairs from the province of the Council of Aragon and the creation of a special Council of Italy to handle them, but the basic system remained untouched.
The system was essentially conciliar in character, along the lines already established during the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella. (See Table 3.) Such a system was well suited to the particular needs of an empire as geographically dispersed and constitutionally diversified as that of Spain. Any effective system of government for the Spanish Monarchy clearly had to take into account both the prolonged absences of the Emperor from his various dominions, and the insistence of those dominions on the scrupulous observation of their laws and customs. At the same time it had to provide at least some central direction for the co-ordination of policies. The organization of the Councils adequately met these various needs.
The immediate purpose of a Council was to advise the monarch. This meant that the Councils must be attendant upon the person of the King, or, if he were out of the country, of the regent. The fact that the Court was frequently on the move and that there was no fixed capital until Philip II's selection of Madrid in 1561, made it difficult to accomplish this without loss of efficiency, and Valladolid seems increasingly to have become the administrative capital of the realm in these years. At the same time Cobos took steps to combat the lack of continuity in the administrative system by planning the establishment of an archive of official documents. Hitherto, some State papers had been kept in Segovia Castle, others at Medina del Campo, and still others in the chancellery at Valladolid. The increasing number of official documents made it essential to set up some central repository, and Charles V and Cobos finally selected as the most suitable site the fortress of Simancas, which was conveniently close to Valladolid. Between 1543 and 1545 orders were issued for the transference to Simancas of all State papers and for the turning over by officials of all documents in their possession to the newly appointed keepers of the archive. Simancas was to suffer many vicissitudes, and government officials (especially in the seventeenth century) would frequently ignore, or obtain exemptions from, the orders to hand over their papers on leaving office, but at least Spain now possessed a central archive worthy of the new bureaucratic State.
The Councils themselves can be divided broadly into two classes: those that concerned themselves with advising the monarch on general or departmental questions relating to the Monarchy as a whole, and those responsible for the government of the individual territories within it. Of the more generalized advisory Councils, the
Table 3 THE CONCILIAR SYSTEM
best known in the later years of Habsburg rule, but the most indeterminate in composition and functions under Charles V, was the Consejo de Estado – the Council of State. This was in theory a Council to advise the monarch on matters of general policy ‘concerning the government of Spain and Germany’, and consisted in 1526 of the Archbishop of Toledo, the Dukes of Alba and Béjar, the royal confessor, and the Bishop of Jaén, together with Gattinara and Count H
enry of Nassau. But there was jealousy among those who were excluded, and Charles chose to avoid trouble by dispensing with the Council's advice and largely confining its functions to those of an official nature. More active was another Council closely associated with the Council of State and sharing some of its councillors: the Council of War, which was responsible for the military organization of the Monarchy. The first reference to this body as an independent Council dates from 1517, but it was remodelled in 1522 to make it a more effective instrument in the new circumstances created by Charles's succession to the Imperial title.
The most important of Gattinara's reforms, however, was the creation of a Council of Finance – the Consejo de Hacienda. The need for a financial organization better than that provided by the two contadurías mayores of Castile was borne in upon Gattinara as he surveyed the grim picture of royal penury that greeted him on his arrival in Spain. There was a convenient model to hand in the Consęil des Finances of Flanders, of which the nominal head, Count Henry of Nassau, had accompanied Charles to the peninsula. Orders were therefore given in February 1523 for the establishment of a Council of Finance, including Nassau among its members. Cobos was the secretary of the new Council, and although it was Gattinara who. had originally proposed the Council, it was the protégés of Cobos who were favoured in the appointments.
The Council had originally been designed to deal with the Castilian finances, but inevitably it came to be concerned with the Crown's finances in general. Meeting daily to examine estimates of income and expenditure, it largely superseded the old contaduría de hacienda. The other contaduría, however – that of accounts – acquired a fresh lease of life as a dependent organ of the Council, responsible for dealing with the Crown's growing expenditure and with the vital task of organizing the large-scale credit operations essential to keep it solvent.
While Castile's financial system required, and obtained, a radical overhaul, the rest of the country's administrative machinery continued to function very much as it had in the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Council of Castile, reduced in size by Gattinara's reforms, remained the principal organ of government, but, by decrees of 1518 and 1523, there developed out of it a small cabinet council known as the Consejo de la Cámara de Castilla, which only attained proper conciliar rank in 1588. This cabinet council was simply a body of three or four councillors of the Council of Castile, who were entrusted with the special task of advising the King on all matters arising out of the royal Patronato of the Spanish Church, and on judicial and administrative appointments.
Outside the realm of the royal finances, the greatest administrative challenge to Gattinara lay not in Spain itself, but in Spain's new overseas possessions. In the first years after the discoveries, all business connected with the Indies passed through the hands of a legally-minded cleric, Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, the Queen's chaplain and later Bishop of Burgos. Although commercial affairs were to become the particular province of the Casa de Contratación which had been established at Seville in 1503, Fonseca remained in supreme charge of all colonial matters, with occasional assistance from members of the Council of Castile. By the time of Charles's arrival in Spain it was already becoming clear that a more formal organization would be necessary, and this took shape in 1524, the year of Fonseca's death, when a special Council of the Indies was created.
This Council, consisting of a president and eight councillors, was the equivalent for America of the Council of Castile. It was entrusted with supreme control of all administrative, judicial and ecclesiastical matters relating to the Indies, and was the agency through which the Crown established its authority over its American possessions and developed a colonial administration. The organs of this administration were modelled on those of the peninsula, and gradually took over from the makeshift administrative system established by the conquistadores. Royal authority, instead of being temporarily exercised by individual conquistadores and by the cabildos (town councils), was now permanently vested in the twin institutions of audiencias and viceroyalties, both of which suffered a sea change as they crossed the Atlantic. The audiencias, of which six had been established by 1550, differed from those of the peninsula in acquiring political and administrative as well as judicial functions. The viceroys, on the other hand, were in some respects more restricted in the scope of their powers than their Aragonese equivalents. Where a viceroy in the Crown of Aragon was the alter ego of the King, entrusted with administrative and judicial powers, his equivalents in New Spain and Peru were primarily governors, enjoying enormous influence by virtue of their remoteness from the metropolis, but for this very reason carefully shorn of certain powers they would have expected to enjoy at home. The task of administering justice belonged not to them but to the audiencias, for although the divisions were often blurred in practice, it was the Crown's policy in the New World to separate government and jurisdiction wherever possible, so that the agencies responsible for them could each keep a constant check on the other. The Spanish Crown was quick to appreciate, here as elsewhere, that a system of checks and balances carefully distributed between a number of different institutions and social groups was the best, and possibly the only, hope of preserving its own authority in its dependent territories.
With the creation of the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, the number of viceroyalties in the Spanish Monarchy rose to nine Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Navarre, Sardinia, Sicily, Naples, and the two American viceroyalties – and the Monarchy's administrative system was now established in the form in which it was to continue for the best part of two centuries. This system was in effect that of the medieval Catalan-Aragonese Mediterranean empire adapted and extended to meet the needs of a world empire. The vast distances in the empire – the eight months or more that were necessary to transmit messages from Castile to Peru – constituted a challenge to the Spanish Crown that was without precedent in European history. Inevitably the administrative system developed by Spain during the course of the sixteenth century had numerous defects, but its success in meeting the challenge was nevertheless remarkable.
The secret of this success lay in the skilful combination of effective regional government with the maximum degree of centralization possible in an empire of remote and scattered territories, some of which had never seen their King. The viceroys – the majority of them great Castilian nobles, like Antonio de Mendoza in New Spain, or Francisco de Toledo in Peru – enjoyed enormous powers, but yet at the same time found themselves closely tied to the central government in Spain. Each viceroy had to work in harness with the relevant Council at Court. The dispatches of the viceroy of Peru would be received and handled by the Council of the Indies; those of the viceroy of Catalonia by the Council of Aragon. A Council could be expected to keep a sharp look-out for any abuse of his powers on the part of the viceroy, since its own interests were at stake. Not only did any extension of viceregal power entail a proportional diminution of conciliar power, but a Council like the Council of Aragon consisted (apart from the Treasurer General) of natives of the territories concerned, who would be quick to react to any threat to the rights of their native land; for the Councils were much more than mere administrative organs in that they also fulfilled some of the essential functions of representative bodies. The original purpose behind them was to preserve a fiction central to the whole structure of the Spanish Monarchy – the fiction that the King was personally present in each of his territories.3 A body of representative native councillors attendant on the person of the King could at least help to restrict the deleterious consequences of royal absenteeism, both by acting as the mouthpiece of provincial interests, and by seeing that the King's viceroy acted in conformity with a royal intention of which it considered itself the guardian.
The machinery for achieving this lay in the system of the consulta. A Council, meeting regularly – usually every working day by the later part of the century – would discuss the viceroy's latest dispatches and all matters of general significance in the territory und
er its jurisdiction. The results of its discussions would be embodied in documents known as consultas, which would summarize the views of the various members of the Council on a particular topic, so that the King would be sufficiently informed to make his decision. He might simply accept the majority recommendation; or, if the matter was a difficult one, he might pass the consulta to the Council of State, or to a special body of ministers, for further discussion. Their recommendations, also in the form of a consulta, would be referred back to him in due course for a final decision, which he would communicate by means of a written statement, often in his own hand, on the original consulta. Once the royal reply had been received by the Council, the secretary to the Council would draft the appropriate letters, to be signed by the King and dispatched to the viceroy for action.
Imperial Spain 1469-1716 Page 20