Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  4. THE REVOLT OF ARAGON (159I–2)

  When he recommended the removal of the Government from Madrid to Lisbon, Cardinal Granvelle may not have been exclusively influenced by strategic considerations. His experiences in Madrid had merely confirmed a long-standing uneasiness about the role of the Castilians in the management of the Monarchy. ‘I recall having written to His Majesty more than once from Italy,’ he wrote to Margaret of Parma in 1581, ‘that the Castilians want everything, and I suspect they will end by losing everything.’9 Unworthy heirs of the great imperial tradition, the Castilians, by their clumsiness and arrogance, were all too capable of shattering the fragile vessel which the Emperor had entrusted to his special care. Might not this danger perhaps be averted if the capital of the Monarchy were transferred from Castile to Portugal before it was too late?

  Granvelle's distrust of the Castilians was widely shared throughout the Monarchy, although usually for other, less sophisticated, reasons. It was shared, for instance, by the upper classes of Aragon; and the Aragon of the 1580s and early 1590s was indeed to exemplify the fundamental problem of the Spanish Monarchy – the problem of the relationship between an increasingly Castilianized absentee monarch and subjects who clung to their traditional liberties with all the fervour of those who feared they were shortly to lose them.

  By the 1580s, the kingdom of Aragon had become one of the most ungovernable of Philip II's possessions. Acutely suspicious of Castilian intentions, its governing class had barricaded itself behind the kingdom's many fueros, which seemed to offer the best guarantee of immunity from royal and Castilian interference. Yet the very condition of Aragon in the later sixteenth century demanded royal intervention if a conflagration were to be avoided, for social tensions in the kingdom were becoming acute. Aragon, unlike Catalonia, had escaped civil war during the fifteenth century; but equally it had escaped a satisfactory agrarian settlement on the model of the Sentencia de Guadalupe. During the course of the sixteenth century the relations between lords and their vassals appear to have deteriorated. Some of the friction was caused by the presence of a Morisco population some 50,000 to 60,000 strong, a considerable proportion of which was employed on the estates of lay and ecclesiastical landowners. At a time of general population increase, the Old Christian population resented the favoured position enjoyed by the Moriscos both in the labour market and in the cultivation of the most fertile land, and there was a running war between the Moriscos who worked the rich lands along the banks of the Ebro and the Mon-tañeses or Old Christians who came down with their flocks each winter from the Pyrenees. Seigneurial protection of Morisco labourers was thus an added irritant to a rural population which felt itself grievously burdened by feudal rights and exactions. Aragonese nobles were free to treat their vassals as they liked without fear of royal interference, and the Cortes of Monzón of 1585 actually increased their already very considerable powers by making any vassal who took up arms against his lord automatically liable to sentence of death.

  While vassals could band together in self-defence against their lords, their only hope of permanent relief appeared to lie in recourse to the King. Consequently, they made great efforts during the course of the century to incorporate themselves into the royal domain. Some of these efforts met with success. At Monzón in 1585, for instance, Philip put an end to a ninety-five-year feud by agreeing to incorporate the vassals of the Barony of Monclús, and compensated the Baron with an annual pension of 800 escudos in perpetuity. But the really serious problem was presented by the county of Ribagorza, the largest barony in Aragon, which included seventeen towns and 216 villages, and extended from Monzón to the Pyrenees. From the strategic point of view its incorporation into the royal domain was extremely desirable; and the owner of the barony, the Duke of Villahermosa, was so exasperated by the rebelliousness of his vassals, that nothing would have pleased him better than a deal with the Crown. But unfortunately the incorporation of Ribagorza into the royal domain was endlessly delayed. The King was unwilling to pay a large sum by way of compensation, and a settlement was deliberately postponed by the machinations of the Treasurer-General of the Council of Aragon, the Count of Chinchón.

  Chinchón's behaviour was motivated by a family feud which had arisen in the most extraordinary and terrible circumstances. In 1571 the Count of Ribagorza, the 27-year-old son of the Duke of Villahermosa, had formally sentenced his own wife to death on a charge of adultery, and the sentence was duly carried out. The victim of this judicial murder happened to be Chinchón's niece. The Count of Ribagorza, who fled to Italy, was caught and executed on the King's orders in the public square of Torrejón de Velasco, near Madrid, in 1573; but Chinchón was henceforth an implacable enemy of the house of Villahermosa. He pursued his vendetta both at Court and on Villahermosa's estates, where the Duke and his vassals were engaged in a regular war – the vassals, who enjoyed the assistance of a company of Catalan bandits, being covertly encouraged by Chinchón, while the Duke sought French help from Béarn.

  A situation in which the King's principal minister for Aragonese affairs was personally involved in a feud on so large a scale with the most powerful noble in Aragon, was clearly fraught with the most explosive possibilities. But when the King at last decided to take remedial action, he only precipitated the disaster he had hoped to avoid. It seemed to him that the only way to bring Aragon under control was to fly in the face of tradition and appoint an ‘impartial’ viceroy who was not Aragonese by origin; and with his customary concern for legal niceties, he sent to Aragon in 1588 the Marquis of Almenara (who happened in fact to be a cousin of Chinchón) to secure a judgment on the legality of this procedure from the court of the Justicia of Aragon – the high official whose task it was to protect the kingdom's liberties. While the Justicia's judgment was favourable, the Aragonese ruling class as a whole was deeply perturbed at what appeared to be yet one more Castilian attempt to whittle away the Aragonese fueros. Anti-Castilian feeling among nobles, clergy, and the inhabitants of Zaragoza, was thus already reaching fever-pitch when the news arrived in the spring of 1590 that Almenara would be returning to Aragon with increased powers, which suggested that the viceroyalty would shortly be conferred upon him.

  It was at precisely this moment, a few days before the arrival of Almenara, that a more unexpected figure suddenly turned up in Aragon – the King's ex-secretary, Antonio Pérez. For the last eleven years, Pérez had been kept in strict confinement under increasingly rigorous conditions. Finally, in February 1590, he was subjected to torture in an effort to make him produce vital information about the murder of Escobedo. Pérez still had his friends, and on the night of 19 April 1590 he managed to break out of his jail in Madrid, and, riding hard through the night, to reach safety across the border in Aragon. Here he availed himself of the traditional Aragonese privilege of manifestación, by which a man threatened by royal officials had the right to protection by the Justicia of Aragon, who would keep him in his own prison of the manifestados until sentence was pronounced.

  The flight of Antonio Pérez came as a terrible blow to Philip. That Pérez, the repository of so many state secrets, should again be at liberty, was itself serious enough. But it was even worse that he should have fled to a kingdom in which the King's powers were so restricted, and most of all at a moment when discontent and unrest were rife. Pérez, whose family was Aragonese by origin, was perfectly informed of all the possibilities open to him under Aragonese law, and was well acquainted with the most influential figures of Zaragoza. When Philip (concerned, as always, to abide by the legal conventions) pressed his suit against his former secretary in the court of the Justicia, Pérez was able to publicize the King's complicity in Escobedo's murder with the evidence of documents he had secreted about his person. Realizing that he was hurting himself far more than he was hurting Pérez, the King halted the case and turned in desperation to his last hope – the tribunal of the Inquisition. This was the one tribunal in Aragon where the fueros lacked the force of law, and if Pér
ez once fell into the hands of the Inquisitors he was lost. But he managed to warn friends of his imminent transfer. On 24 May 1591, as he was being furtively moved to the prison of the Inquisition, the Zaragoza mob turned out with cries of ‘Liberty’ and ‘Contra fuero’, rescued Pérez from the hands of his jailers, stormed the palace of the Marquis of Almenara, and beat up the unfortunate Marquis so severely that he died a fortnight later.

  The news of the Zaragoza riot brought Philip face to face with the problem he had long attempted to evade – whether to send an army into Aragon. The dilemma that confronted him was a serious one. Quite apart from his heavy commitments against the English and the Dutch, he was faced at this time with many domestic troubles. Not only was Aragon seething with rebellion, but the spirit of sedition was being fanned in Portugal by the irrepressible Prior of Crato; and even in Castile pasquinades were circulating about the tyranny of the King. At such a time there were obvious risks attached to sending an army into Aragon, especially since there was always the danger that the Catalans and Valencians might come to the help of the Aragonese.

  The special Junta set up in Madrid to advise the King on the Aragonese question was sharply divided: the three members of the Council of Aragon who sat on the Junta all favoured leniency, as did the Prior of San Juan (Alba's natural son), while the rest of the Junta advocated repression. In spite of the disappearance of the Alba and Eboli factions, therefore, there was still a cleavage among the King's councillors on a problem relating to provincial liberties – a problem which bore an unpleasant resemblance to that of the Netherlands. This time, however, Philip had the disastrous failure of Alba's attempts at repression in the Low Countries to guide his decision. While arranging for troops to concentrate near the Aragonese frontier, he hoped to avoid the necessity of ordering them to cross it, and announced that his intention was only to ‘preserve their fueros and not allow them to be abused by those who, under the guise of protecting them, are in reality the worst offenders against them’.

  In practice, however, it proved impossible to avoid the use of force. Pérez had used all his arts to incite the Zaragoza populace, warning it that Philip planned to send an army to strip Aragon of its liberties. When a further attempt was made on 24 September 1591 to move him to the prison of the Inquisition, the crowd again came to his rescue, and this time Pérez broke free and fled from Zaragoza, intending to make for France. But he then changed his mind and returned in disguise to Zaragoza, planning now to lead a revolution which perhaps was intended to turn Aragon into a Venetian-style republic under French protection.

  The events of 24 September finally convinced Philip that force would be necessary, and an army of some 12,000 men under the command of Alonso de Vargas crossed into Aragon at the beginning of October. In spite of the proclamation issued by the young Justicia, Juan de Lanuza, urging the country to rally to the defence of its liberties, the majority of the Aragonese showed no inclination to resist a royal army which many of the peasants may well have looked upon as an army of liberation from aristocratic oppression; nor did the Catalans show any inclination to come to the help of their brethren. Seeing that everything was lost, Pérez fled to France on the night of 11 November, and the following day the Castilian army made its entry into Zaragoza. Lanuza and his adherents, who had fled to Épila, were lured back to the capital; and in accordance with a secret order, which arrived on 18 December, Lanuza was seized and beheaded. A month later the King issued a general pardon. The pardon, however, excluded the Duke of Villahermosa and the Count of Aranda. Both these nobles were carried off to Castile where they died mysteriously in prison.

  The revolt of Aragon was over, and Spanish unity preserved. The revolt had shown at once the weakness and the strength of the King of Spain. His weakness was revealed in the lack of any effective royal control over a kingdom enjoying as many liberties as Aragon; his strength in the social divisions within the country, which turned the revolt into little more than a movement by the city of Zaragoza and the Aragonese aristocracy to preserve laws and liberties which were too easily exploited by the few to the prejudice of the many. But there survived throughout the Crown of Aragon a sense of liberty which it would at this moment have been impolitic to flout. Moreover, as Philip has already shown in Portugal, he was deeply sensible of inherited obligation and of the bonds of legality. The revolt could easily have served as a pretext for acting as Alba had proposed thirty years before, and destroying the fueros of Aragon. But Philip chose instead to respect the laws. The Cortes of Aragon were summoned to meet at Tarazona in June 1592, so that any changes in the fueros would be legally procured. But such changes as were introduced were, in fact, remarkably moderate. The traditional requirement of unanimity in the votes of the four Estates of the Aragonese Cortes was altered to the requirement of a mere majority vote, although unanimity would still be needed for the voting of new taxes; the King was given the right to appoint non-Aragonese viceroys, at least until the next session of the Cortes; certain reforms were introduced into the management of the Aragonese Diputación; and, while the post of Justicia was allowed to survive, the official who held it was henceforth removable by the King.

  It would hardly seem that the constitutional changes pushed through the Cortes of Tarazona under the shadow of the royal army were very far-reaching. In spite of the opportunity that had arisen for bringing the laws of Aragon into conformity with those of Castile, Philip decided instead to preserve the semi-autonomous political system of Aragon virtually unchanged. Both his handling of the annexation of Portugal and his response to the revolt of Aragon showed, therefore, that he remained dutifully loyal to his own sense of obligation and to his father's concept of a Monarchy of individual states each bound to their sovereign by their traditional legal ties, and continuing to lead independent lives according to their own historical systems of government. So far as Aragon was concerned, Philip's decision was to justify itself: the Aragonese never revolted again under the government of the House of Austria. But the fact remains that, under Philip II, the grievances of the non-Castilian States of the Monarchy were allowed to fester, and the fundamental constitutional problem of the Monarchy's organization was left unsolved. Portuguese and Aragonese continued to complain of neglect by a King who rarely visited them, who failed to grant offices and mercedes to their aristocracies, and who was so surrounded by Castilians that they could not but think of him as a Castilian King. With one of those compromises – so frequent with Philip II – which tended to make the worst of every world, the Aragonese federalist structure of the Monarchy was preserved, as the Prince of Eboli would have wished, but nothing was done to promote that spirit of mutual interchange which alone could make a federal system work. Instead, the Monarchy remained a Castilian-dominated Monarchy with an Aragonese political organization. Such a solution satisfied nobody. The Castilians resented having to bear the responsibility – and especially the fiscal responsibility – of empire without being able to enforce their will on provinces which sheltered behind ‘archaic’ laws and privileges; the non-Castilian provinces resented the Castilian monopoly of offices in the Monarchy and the Castilian domination of a King who had ceased to be their own. As a result, the unity which Hernando de Acuña had prophesied for the dominions of the King of Spain continued to elude them. Superficially there was, in the reign of Philip II, ‘one monarch, one empire, and one sword’. But by the end of the reign it was apparent that one monarch remained too few; that the one empire was a divided empire; and that the sword was fatally blunted.

  Splendour and Misery

  1. THE CRISIS OF THE 1590s

  DURING the 1590s there were numerous signs that the Castilian economy was beginning to crack under the relentless strain of Philip II's imperial adventures. The apparently inexhaustible stream of silver from the Indies had tempted the King to embark on vast enterprises which swallowed up his revenues and added to his mountain of debts: the Invincible Armada alone is said to have cost him 10,000,000 ducats, and in the mid-1590s he w
as probably spending over 12,000,000 ducats a year. How long he could continue to spend on this scale would ultimately be determined by the revenue-yielding capacity of his dominions both at home and overseas, and there is good reason to believe that by the 1590s this capacity was reaching its limits.

  Less than a quarter of the King's annual revenues came from remittances of American silver; the rest was borrowed, or was paid for by taxes raised primarily by Castile. By 1590 it had become clear that, in spite of the large increase of 1575 in the figure for the en-cabezamiento, Castile's traditional sources of revenue were inadequate for the Crown's needs. Neither the alcabala nor the ordinary and extraordinary servicios were any longer sufficient, and it was found necessary to supplement them from 1590 by a new tax which was to bulk large in the fiscal history of seventeenth-century Castile. This new tax, which was voted by the Cortes, was in effect the excise which Charles V had vainly attempted to introduce in 1538. Called the millones, because it was reckoned in millions of ducats rather than in the traditional maravedís, it was first fixed at 8,000,000 ducats spread over a period of six years, the method of raising the money being left to the towns. On its prolongation in 1596, however, it was increased by a further 1,300,000 ducats a year to be collected in sisas on essential foodstuffs; and in 1600 the original and the supplementary levies were lumped together into a subsidy of 18,000,000 ducats payable over six years. This consolidated tax was levied on essential articles of consumption – notably meat, wine, oil, and vinegar – and its grant was made conditional by the Cortes on its being applied to certain specific purposes: the payment of the royal guard and royal officials, and the upkeep of frontier garrisons and the royal households, with any surplus being devoted to the reduction of royal debts by the redemption of juros.