Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  There seems no reason to doubt that the measures of 1558–9 administered a drastic shock to Spanish intellectual life. By cutting off the supply of foreign books, and imposing further restrictions on theological and devotional writings, they inevitably undermined the confidence of Spanish men of letters, and added one more set of barriers to the many barriers now being raised all over Europe to impede the free circulation of ideas. It is, however, difficult to determine how permanent were the consequences, especially as the replacement of Valdés as Inquisitor General by Cardinal Espinosa in 1566 led to some modification of the earlier severity. It is equally difficult to determine the extent to which Spain's relations with the European intellectual community were affected. The prohibition on Spaniards studying abroad obviously restricted one fruitful source of contact with foreign ideas; but it seems that the prohibition was never total, and distinguished Spaniards were still to be found in the second half of the sixteenth century in the universities of Italy and Flanders, and even those of France. Intellectual contact with Flanders naturally remained close. The great scholar Arias Montano, for instance, went to Flanders on Philip II's instructions in 1568 to organize the preparation at Antwerp of a revised and improved edition of the Polyglot Bible of Cardinal Cisneros. Above all, there was no break in the close cultural relationship between Spain and Italy. From the fifteenth century onwards, Italy had been a constant source of intellectual and artistic inspiration to Spain, which in turn transmitted its own and Italian ideas to France and northern Europe. This northward flow of South European culture by way of Spain remained unaffected by the European religious crisis of the 1550s; and indeed Spanish influence on the cultural life of the north continued to grow, reinforced as it was by all the prestige of Spanish power and by the extraordinary quality and variety of Spain's literary and artistic achievements in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

  Yet the decrees of the 1550s inevitably meant a partial closure of Spain to ideas from outside. Religiously it remained part of the international community of Counter-Reformation Europe, but this was a community that embraced only half a continent. Europe was now divided within itself, each half barricading itself against the religious beliefs of the other. In this international conflict of the later sixteenth century, Spain's pre-eminent position and potential vulnerability made it acutely sensitive to the dangers of religious subversion, and it responded by becoming exceptionally selective in its approach to the products of foreign cultures, subjecting them to the minutest scrutiny before it allowed them entry.

  While Spain was sealing itself off against the indiscriminate entry of foreign ideas, it was also in process of determining its relationship with the supreme head of Counter-Reformation Europe – a relationship which was bound to exercise an important influence on the outcome of the battle against international Protestantism. In the reign of Charles V, relations had been singularly unhappy between the Popes and an Emperor with important territorial interests in Italy; and during the pontificate of the fanatically anti-Spanish Paul IV (1555–9) Spain and the Papacy actually went to war. On the death of Paul IV in 1559 Philip used his influence in the conclave to secure the election of a more amenable Pope, but the successful candidate, Pius IV, himself became involved in a controversy with Spain, which once again clouded the relations between Rome and its most powerful secular ally.

  The dispute arose over a matter which is best seen as representing a further, and perhaps final, stage in the struggle of the conservatives to secure absolute control over Spain's religious and intellectual life. This was the affair of Cardinal Carranza. Bartolomé de Carranza was the son of poor, but hidalgo, parents. Born in Navarre in 1503, he was educated at Alcalá, and then joined the Dominican Order. After studying at the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid, where he became professor of theology, he was sent in 1545 as a delegate to the Council of Trent. Having gained a great theological reputation at Trent, he accompanied Philip to England in 1554 and became Mary Tudor's religious adviser and a ruthless suppressor of English Protestantism. In 1559 he returned to Flanders, where he investigated the clandestine trade in heretical literature with Spain. This early career would have seemed an ideal preparation for the post to which Philip now appointed him – that of Archbishop of Toledo in succession to Cardinal Siliceo; but in August 1559, after enjoying his archbishopric for less than a year, he was suddenly arrested by officers of the Inquisition. For seventeen years, first in Spain and then in Rome, he remained a prisoner, only emerging from prison in April 1576, a broken old man of seventy-three, to die a few days later.

  The mystery surrounding the arrest of a man who might have appeared the ideal primate for Spain in the new age of open religious warfare, has never been fully dispelled; but Carranza, for reasons both good and bad, was a man with many influential enemies. He was perhaps unlucky in that he was appointed to his see at a time when the King was still abroad and had therefore been unable to consult either his usual advisers or the Council of the Inquisition. It was also unfortunate that Carranza, like his predecessor Siliceo, was a man of relatively humble origins. Twice running, prelates of a more aristocratic background had been disappointed of the rich see of Toledo. Among those who had hoped for promotion were two sons of the Count of Lemos – Don Pedro de Castro, Bishop of Cuenca, and his brother, Don Rodrigo; and the Castro brothers found a powerful supporter in Valdés, the Inquisitor General, himself another disappointed candidate. Nor could Carranza expect much help from other Spanish prelates, since he had been rash enough to publish a book containing the most severe strictures on episcopal absenteeism. Even worse, he had long ago incurred the enmity of a fellow-Dominican, who was now Philip II's most trusted religious adviser. This was the theologian Melchor Cano. Cano had been a rival of Carranza at the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid, where the students had been divided into the rival factions of canistas and carranzistas, and his dislike of Carranza can only have been increased by Carranza's success at the Council of Trent.

  Aristocratic and personal hatreds therefore played an important part in the conspiracy against Carranza, but it also seems likely that the Archbishop was a further casualty in the campaign of the Spanish traditionalists against allegedly ‘liberal’ theologians with foreign affiliations. For all his record as a persecutor of heretics, Carranza, having travelled round Europe with the Emperor, could himself easily be classed with the ‘heretical’ Dr Cazalla as a man contaminated by too frequent contact with the Erasmian Christianity of the north. While Siliceo, who had enemies enough, was so orthodox as to be untouchable, Carranza had published an enormous tome of Commentaries on the Catechism which left him dangerously exposed to the attacks of determined enemies. Cano and the Inquisitors now set to work; seeds of doubt were planted in Philip's mind; and the primate of Spain found himself arrested on suspicion of heresy.

  Already a pawn in the feud between aristocrat and plebeian, between nationalist and cosmopolitan, the unhappy, if unsympathetic, Carranza now became also a pawn in the feud between the Spanish Crown and the Papacy. The King saw that he had in the Inquisition an admirable instrument both for extending his control over his dominions and for preserving them from heresy. He therefore proceeded to identify his own power with that of the Inquisition as Charles V had never done, and allowed himself to be pushed by the inquisitors into making the unprecedented claim that it was for the Inquisition and not for Rome to try prelates of the Church. The Pope contested the claim, but it was not until 1566 that he managed to secure the transference of the prisoner to Rome; and even then, Spanish delaying tactics postponed for ten years a decision that was by no means so favourable to Carranza as many had expected.

  The struggle between Philip II and the Papacy, exacerbated by the Carranza affair, served only to weaken the forces of the Counter-Reformation at a time when strength was imperative. Neither could afford an open break, for Rome needed Spanish military assistance, while Philip needed ecclesiastical revenues and the prestige that only the Pope could
confer on his struggle against heresy. But there existed between the two a kind of undeclared war, in which Philip did everything possible to extend his control over the Spanish Church and to exploit its financial and political resources. The Inquisition was duly reduced to little more than a department of state; the enormous revenues of the see of Toledo were appropriated by the Crown during the seventeen years of Carranza's trial; the Tridentine decrees were finally published in 1565, but only with a proviso which guaranteed the Crown's continuing influence in ecclesiastical jurisdiction and episcopal appointments; and in 1572 papal briefs citing Spaniards to appear before foreign courts in ecclesiastical cases were declared null and void, and the King insisted on his right to scrutinize papal bulls, and if necessary to forbid their publication in his dominions.

  Although Philip II's zeal for the preservation and extension of royal prerogatives was natural enough, his behaviour also suggests that in his heart he considered religion too serious a matter to be left to the Pope. Terrified of heresy, he would trust none but himself and his own chosen agents to eradicate it from his dominions. He would turn the Spanish Monarchy into an impregnable fortress, against whose walls the heresies that were sweeping Europe would batter in vain. While no fortress would be impregnable as long as there were traitors inside, it might at first sight seem difficult to justify the severity of the measures taken against those who were considered suspect in the faith. The rather pathetic handful of Alumbrados who found themselves in the cells of the Inquisition would hardly seem to have necessitated the mounting of so formidable a machine. But if, in retrospect, Philip and his agents would seem to have displayed an excessive alarm at the supposed dangers in their midst, their sense of insecurity is at least explicable in terms of both the domestic and the international situation at the time of the King's accession. By the 1560s it was becoming increasingly clear that the King was faced with war on two fronts, and the last thing he wanted was to be faced with a third front at home. The apparently panic measures of the first ten years of the reign were thus prompted by a genuine fear of imminent disaster, which, in the light of the events of the 1560s, seems by no means entirely misplaced.

  4. THE CRISIS OF THE 1560s

  The peace of Cateau-Cambrésis of 1559, ending the war between France and Spain, had come none too soon. Apart from the fact that the bankruptcy of 1557 made the continuation of the war virtually impossible, Philip, like the French King Henry II, could not fail to be concerned at the spread of the Protestant heresy in France. Besides this, there was the Turkish danger, now perhaps slightly abated, but none the less pressing. Rumours of a growing Ottoman weakness suggested that the moment might be propitious for an attempt to recover the initiative in the Mediterranean – something which had been impossible as long as the war with France continued. Philip therefore chose to rescind earlier orders for the opening of negotiations with the Turks for a ten- or twelve-year truce, and to conduct the war in the Mediterranean with all the resources at his disposal.

  In the light of Spain's financial position, the decision was unwise. During the 1550s depression had hung over Seville's trade with the New World, keeping money tight and confidence low. The yield of taxes was totally inadequate for the Monarchy's heavy military commitments, and already in 1558 a heavy duty had been imposed on the export of Castilian wool. This was followed by the levying of customs along the Portuguese frontier, by increases in the almojarifazgo and the customs dues in the ports of Vizcaya, by the enforcement of the royal monopoly on playing cards, and the incorporation of the salt-mines into the royal domain. These measures greatly enlarged the yield of extra-parliamentary taxation, and the Crown's revenues were further increased in 1561, when the King induced the Cortes of Castile to agree to a large rise in the en-cabezamiento by promising to impose no new taxes without their consent (a promise that it was not difficult to evade).

  The tax increases were very necessary if Spain was to mount a serious campaign in the Mediterranean. This had been clearly shown by the overwhelming defeat in May 1560 of a joint Spanish-Italian expedition to the isle of Djerba, which was intended as a base for the recovery of Tripoli. The Christian reverse – the most considerable since the failure of Charles V at Algiers in 1541 – encouraged the Turks to step up their pressure in the central and western Mediterranean, and even to approach the coast of Majorca in the spring of 1561. Spain urgently needed more ships, and the rise in royal revenues made it possible to launch a galley-building programme which might at least fill the gaps made by the losses of the previous years. But even now the Spanish fleet remained dangerously small. Although Don Garcia de Toledo commanded a fleet of a hundred ships for his successful attack on the North African fortress of Peñón de Vélez in September 1564, many of these had been supplied by Spain's allies; and when, in the following year, a naval expedition was sent to relieve the beleaguered island of Malta, the entire southern coast of Spain was left undefended, and a party of corsairs from Tetuan landed at Motril and ravaged the coast.

  While Spain in the early 1560s was slowly and painfully building up its strength in the Mediterranean, it was receiving a number of increasingly sharp reminders that Islam was not its only enemy, nor its eastern and southern coastlines the only frontiers open to attack. The spread of Calvinism and the outbreak of the French wars of religion in 1562 raised for the first time the spectre of a Protestant power on Spain's northern border. This itself was serious enough, but worse was to follow. Discontent was spreading in the Spanish Netherlands. Pressure from the Dutch nobility had induced Philip to remove Cardinal Granvelle from the government of the Netherlands in 1564; heresy was spreading among the inhabitants; and in August 1566 Calvinist mobs ran wild and sacked the churches. Philip, in fact, was faced with both heresy and rebellion in one of the most prized portions of his father's inheritance.

  The grave news from Brussels confronted a congenitally indecisive monarch with the need to make a series of crucial decisions. Should he return to Flanders to re-impose his authority in person? Should he adopt a policy of moderation, as Cardinal Espinosa and the Prince of Eboli recommended in the Council of State, or should he order military action against the rebels, as urged by the Duke of Alba and the Count of Chinchón? Military action required money, but fortunately the Crown's financial position had recently begun to improve. During 1562 and 1563 the depression hanging over Seville's trade with the New World had gradually lifted, and the silver remittances for the Crown had started to rise. As fresh streams of silver were pumped into the system, Spanish power began to revive. With a new confidence born of new resources, the King decided in favour of repression. The Duke of Alba was ordered to the Netherlands with an army to suppress the revolt; and in spite of the success of the Governess of the Netherlands, Charles V's daughter Margaret of Parma, in restoring order among her rebellious subjects, the Duke was instructed to continue his march.

  Before the departure of Alba there had been some uncertainty whether he was ostensibly going to the Netherlands to destroy heresy or to crush revolt. It was finally decided that the war in the Netherlands was best treated as a war against rebellious vassals; but in practice both Philip and his soldiers looked upon it as a religious crusade undertaken by a ‘Catholic army’ against a people whom Philip himself persistently described as ‘rebels and heretics’. For Philip, heresy and rebellion were synonymous – and not without reason. Everywhere he looked, the Calvinists were subverting the established order. Calvinist preachers were stirring up the populace; Calvinist literature was poisoning men's minds. In the Netherlands, in France, the forces of international Protestantism were on the march. That it was an international conspiracy, Philip had no doubt, for each passing year showed more conclusively that the Dutch rebels were not alone. Behind them were the Huguenots, and the Breton seamen who were now waging war on Spanish shipping in the gulf of Gascony, and who were to cut Spain's maritime communications with Flanders in the winter of 1568–9. Behind them, too, were English privateers like Sir John Hawkins, whose
raid into the Spanish Caribbean in 1568 brought Spain and England a step nearer to open war.

  Already by 1568 it was clear that the struggle was spreading – spreading in particular to the sea, where the Protestants were at their strongest and where Spain was still weak. The war between Spain and international Protestantism was essentially a naval war, fought in the Bay of Biscay, the English Channel, and even, increasingly, in the hitherto exclusive preserve of the Spanish Atlantic. Spain's American possessions could no longer be regarded as safe. But for that matter it was questionable whether any part of the King's dominions was now immune from attack. Indeed, Spain itself was threatened, both by pirate attacks on its coasts, and by armed incursions across its frontier with France.

  The acute sensitivity of Philip to the dangers from heresy is suggested by his behaviour in the Principality of Catalonia. The Principality was undoubtedly one of the weaker sections of the Spanish bastions, both because of its exposed position on the French frontier, and because the extent of its privileges made it little amenable to royal control. It was well known that there were Huguenots among the bandit gangs that were constantly passing to and fro across the border, and there was every reason to suspect that heresy had found converts among that steady stream of Frenchmen which had for some years been crossing the Pyrenees into Catalonia in search of work. If heresy were to take root in Catalonia, the position would be extremely grave, since the Principality had all the makings of a second Netherlands: a strong tradition of independence, its own laws and privileges, and a hatred of Castile that was aćcentuated by linguistic and cultural differences. Consequently, as the pressure mounted against the Catalan frontier, the King's fears grew. The viceroys were instructed to show the greatest vigilance in guarding the frontier, and in 1568 the situation appeared so alarming that severe new measures were decreed: a fresh prohibition on natives of the Crown of Aragon studying abroad; a harsher censorship in Catalonia; and a ban on all teaching by Frenchmen in Catalan schools. Then, in 1569, the Catalans refused to pay the new tax known as the excusado, which had just been authorized by Pius V. Convinced by their refusal that they were on the verge of going over to Protestantism, Philip ordered the Inquisition and the Viceroy to take action, and had the Diputats and a number of nobles arrested.