City 1530 1594
Valladolid 38,100 33,750
Córdoba 33,060 31,285
Medina del Campo 20,680 13,800
Alcázar de San Juan 19,995 10,285
Medina de Ríoseco 11,310 10,030
Santiago (1557) 5,380 4,720
Orense (1557) 5,290 3,500
Vigo (1557) 5,025 4,225
Túy (1557) 3,805 2,480
Corunna 3,005 2,255
Betanzos 2,850 2,750
It is noticeable that nine of these eleven towns with a declining population are in the northern half of Spain – the region likely to be most affected by the war with the Netherlands and by the spread of piracy in the Bay of Biscay. What contemporaries assumed to be a general depopulation may therefore have been a depopulation of the north – the most prosperous part of Castile in the earlier years of the century. The southwards migration of the inhabitants of this region could easily suggest a demographic disaster at a time when the population increase of the early sixteenth century may perhaps not yet have spent itself.
Apart from a shift of population from north to south, which was not necessarily inimical to economic advance, there was, however, another shift of population, the implications of which were very disturbing. This was the drift from the countryside to the towns. There are many indications that the position of the Castilian peasant and agricultural labourer was deteriorating in the second half of the sixteenth century. In the region of Valladolid, for example, there were increasing complaints after 1550 about peasant indebtedness and the dispossession of peasantry from their lands by creditors from the towns. It was all too easy for a small peasant to run into debt as the result of a succession of poor harvests. Even in good times his profits were limited by the tasa del trigo; and at all times he was liable to be subjected to the attentions of the tax collector, the billeting officer, and the recruiting sergeant.
The ordinary Castilian villager had few defences against these merciless agents of a higher power. There was, for instance, little protection to be had against the depredations committed by a licentious soldiery, and Calderón's El Alcalde de Zalamea, written around 1642, describes the kind of incident that was all too common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain. The soldiers despised the peasants in whose houses they were billeted, and treated them with mingled brutality and disdain. Military discipline, precarious at the best of times, seems to have declined sharply over the course of the years: captains tended to take the side of their soldiers in any incident that occurred between them and the civil population, and to see in the complaints of the civil authorities a threatened infraction of their jealously guarded fuero militar. As a result there were endless conflicts between civil and military jurisdiction, in which the municipal authorities were generally worsted, since military tribunals winked at the offences of their men, and the highest tribunal of all, the Council of War, could be relied upon to take the part of its captains and maestres de campo.
Calderón's rich peasant, Pedro Crespo, who took the law into his own hands and had the offending captain hanged, is at once the idealized symbol of a peasantry which had little effective legal protection against the provocations of the soldiery, and the expression of a spirit of resistance which, at least in Castile, was infrequent, partly because it had so little hope of success. Faced with a company of soldiers to be billeted in his village, and already crushed by the weight of royal taxes and seigneurial and ecclesiastical dues, the unfortunate peasant was liable to take the line of least resistance and to abandon his village, seeking shelter and safety with his family in the anonymous world of the town.
The exodus to the towns gradually transformed Castile into a land of deserted villages, with tragic consequences for the country's agrarian development. All over the Mediterranean region, the second half of the sixteenth century was a period in which local food production was proving increasingly inadequate for a still growing population. Castile, with its rural labour force dwindling, was no exception to this; and from about 1570 it began to be heavily dependent on grain supplies from northern and eastern Europe. After 1570, therefore, Castilian grain prices were rising; the fields were deserted; and the country was tied still more closely to a northern Europe from which it was already importing the manufactures that its own industries could no longer supply at competitive rates. While the Cortes of Castile constantly lamented the decay of agriculture, little was done to prevent it. The radical reforms that were really needed could be achieved only through a collective effort and a revaluation of national priorities so drastic as to appear inconceivable.
The physical and geographical obstacles to economic growth in Castile were admittedly exceptionally intractable. The soil was poor, the climate unfavourable, and internal communications hopelessly difficult. This meant that improvements – such as irrigation schemes or engineering projects – demanded a co-operative endeavour and the investment of considerable funds. The city of Toledo, for instance, with its thriving silk industry, had remained prosperous in spite of Philip II's transfer of the Court to Madrid in 1561; but continued economic expansion depended on its ability to improve its communications with the outside world. This could best be achieved by making the River Tagus navigable from Toledo to Lisbon – a difficult and expensive, but by no means impossible, enterprise. The work was begun with royal encouragement in the 1580s, and was completed, in accordance with the plans of an Italian engineer, in 1587. But the engineer died the following year; the engineering works proved insufficient on certain reaches of the river; and the navigation of the Tagus was eventually abandoned in the last years of the century.
The abandonment of the Tagus navigation scheme offers a striking local example of a national failure. It is true that the unexpected extent of natural obstacles in the river made the undertaking much more difficult than had originally been expected; but ultimately this was a human, rather than an engineering failure. The project was opposed by mill-owners along the river bank, and hampered by the imposition of tolls and dues on the traffic. But it seems that the decisive reason for the failure of the scheme was the constant opposition of the city of Seville, which saw in a navigable Tagus a serious threat to its own trade both with Toledo and with Lisbon. This was sadly typical of the reaction to any important project for the country's improvement. In Catalonia, for instance, plans for irrigating the plain of Urgel were sabotaged by merchants who were dependent for their livelihood on the continuation of grain imports from Sicily. Seville itself never built the bridge it so badly needed over the Guadalquivir, and it failed to tackle the increasingly serious problem of the silting up of the river, which was finally to destroy its commercial prosperity. The reasons were similar to those which had wrecked the Tagus navigation scheme: a reluctance to invest money in public works; personal and municipal rivalries; and, ultimately, a deadening inertia, which crippled both the capacity and the desire to act.
Although individual Spaniards showed both interest and proficiency in certain fields of scientific inquiry, and Galileo was invited to the Spain of Philip III, foreign travellers found the country as a whole backward, and uninterested in matters of scientific and technological concern. Already by the end of the sixteenth century many Spaniards seem to have been gripped by that sense of fatalism which would prompt the famous pronouncement of a Junta of theologians in the reign of Philip IV. Summoned to consider a project for the construction of a canal linking the Manzanares and the Tagus, it flatly declared that if God had intended the rivers to be navigable, He would have made them so. In the first instance, therefore, it seems to have been an attitude of mind, rather than any technical difficulty, which stood in the way of economic advance; and even if the attitude were not yet universal, real power in the country lay in such few hands, that one or two individuals could effectively prevent the implementation of schemes that could have been of benefit to many. This was particularly true in the realm of agrarian development. Much of the soil of Castile belonged either to magnates, who had accum
ulated large estates through the workings of the entail system, or to the Church, which had accumulated them through mortmain. Outside Andalusia, where the demands of the American market still offered some incentive to improve, these large landowners apparently showed no interest in irrigation projects, or in a more effective exploitation of the soil; and bourgeois landowners, who had acquired property from peasants, were either equally uninterested, or else lacked the resources to undertake improvements on their own. As a result, agriculture languished and the economy stagnated.
The return of peace towards the end of the century might perhaps have offered opportunities for economic recovery, on the assumption that the military budget could be cut. But given the will to reform – and this remained problematical – the prospects of success were drastically reduced by a sudden catastrophe. In the last years of the century, the harvest failed. The price of a fanega (1.6 bushels) of Andalusian corn rose from 430 maravedís in 1595 to 1,041 in 1598, and on the heels of dearth came plague. The epidemic made its first appearance in northern Spain in 1596, and moved steadily southwards, ravaging in its passage the densely crowded cities of Castile. The great plague of 1599–1600 wiped out at a single blow much of the population increase of the sixteenth century, and opened a new era in Castilian demographic history: an era of stagnation, and perhaps of demographic decline.
The economic consequences of the plague were to be seen in the labour crisis with which the new century opened, and can be traced in the 30 per cent increase in salaries in the three years that followed it. González de Cellorigo, an official in the chancellery of Valladolid who published in 1600, under the shadow of the plague, a brilliant treatise on the problems of the Spanish economy, accurately prophesied its effects: ‘Henceforth we can only expect that everything requiring human industry and labour will be very expensive… because of the shortage of people for tillage and for all the types of manufactures that the kingdom needs.’ The acute labour shortage, and the consequent upswing of salaries, were, as González de Cellorigo appreciated, irreparable disasters for the Castilian economy, since they destroyed the possibility that the years of peace might be used to build up Castilian industry to a point at which it would again be able to compete with foreign industries in the home and overseas markets.
But the most serious long-term consequences of the plague may have been psychological rather than economic. Already, before it was struck by the plague, Castile was weary and depressed. The failures in France and the Netherlands, the sack of Cadiz by the English, and the King's request for a national donativo in 1596 as bankruptcy struck, completed the disillusionment that had begun with the defeat of the Invincible Armada. Then, to crown it all, came the plague. The unbroken succession of disasters threw Castile off balance. The ideals which had buoyed it up during the long years of struggle were shattered beyond repair. The country felt itself betrayed – betrayed perhaps by a God who had inexplicably withdrawn His favour from His chosen people. Desolate and plague-stricken, the Castile of 1600 was a country that had suddenly lost its sense of national purpose.
Castilians reacted to the moment of disillusionment in different ways. Optimism had gone, to be replaced by bitterness and cynicism, or else by the resignation of defeat. The new mood of fatalism and disillusionment naturally tended to reinforce certain latent tendencies that had already been encouraged by the unusual circumstances of the sixteenth century. During that century, events had conspired to disparage in the national estimation the more prosaic virtues of hard work and consistent effort. The mines of Potosí brought to the country untold wealth; if money was short today, it would be abundant again tomorrow when the treasure fleet reached Seville. Why plan, why save, why work? Around the corner would be the miracle – or perhaps the disaster. Prices might rise, savings be lost, the crops fail. There seemed little point in demeaning oneself with manual labour, when, as so often happened, the idle prospered and the toilers were left without reward. The events of the turn of the century could only increase this sense of insecurity and strengthen an already widespread fatalism. It was fatalism that characterized the outlook of the pícaro, and the seventeenth century was essentially the age of the pícaro, living on his wits – hungry today, well fed tomorrow, and never soiling his hands with honest work. ‘Quere-mos comer sin trabajar’: we want to eat without working. 3 The words could be applied to Castilians in many walks of life, from the townsman living comfortably on his annuities to the vagabond without a blanca in his purse.
It was in this atmosphere of desengaño, of national disillusionment, that Cervantes wrote his Don Quixote, of which the first part appeared in 1605 and the second in 1614. Here, among many other parables, was the parable of a nation which had set out on its crusade only to learn that it was tilting at windmills. In the end was the desengaño, for ultimately the reality would always break in on the illusion. The events of the 1590s had suddenly brought home to more thoughtful Castilians the harsh truth about their native land – its poverty in the midst of riches, its power that had shown itself impotent. Brought face to face with the terrible paradoxes of the Castile of Philip III, a host of public-spirited figures – such men as González de Cellorigo and Sancho de Moncada – set themselves to analyse the ills of an ailing society. It is these men, known as arbitristas (projectors), who give the Castilian crisis of the turn of the century its special character. For this was not only a time of crisis, but a time also of the awareness of crisis – of a bitter realization that things had gone wrong. It was under the influence of the arbitristas that early seventeenth-century Castile surrendered itself to an orgy of national introspection, desperately attempting to discover at what point reality had been exchanged for illusion. But the arbitristas – as their name suggested – were by no means content merely to analyse. They must also find the answer. That an answer existed they had no doubt; for just as Sancho Panza had in him something of Don Quixote, so also even the most pessimistic arbitrista was still something of an optimist at heart. As a result, the Government of Philip III found itself bombarded with advice – with innumerable projects, both sensible and fantastic, for the restoration of Castile.
2. THE FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP
Absurd as were many of the arbitrios solemnly proposed to the ministers of Philip III, there were enough sane ideas among them to provide the basis of an intelligent programme of reform. The arbitristas proposed that Government expenditure should be slashed; that the tax-system in Castile should be overhauled, and the other kingdoms of the Monarchy be called upon to contribute more to the royal exchequer; that immigrants should be encouraged to repopulate Castile; that fields should be irrigated, rivers be made navigable, and agriculture and industry be protected and fostered. In itself there was nothing impossible about such a programme. The return of peace provided an admirable opportunity to embark upon it, and all that was needed was the will.
Much therefore depended on the character of the new régime. Philip III, twenty years old at the time of his accession, was a pallid, anonymous creature, whose only virtue appeared to reside in a total absence of vice. Philip II knew his son well enough to fear the worst: ‘Alas, Don Cristóbal,’ he said to Don Cristóbal de Moura, ‘I am afraid they will govern him.’ Philip's fears were to be fully realized. Well before his father's death, the future Philip III had fallen under the influence of a smooth Valencian aristocrat, Don Francisco de Sandoval y Rojas, Marquis of Denia. As soon as the old King died, Denia moved in to place his own friends and relations in the highest posts in the State. Don Cristóbal de Moura, the first minister during the last years of Philip II's régime, was moved out of harm's way to Lisbon as viceroy of Portugal; Rodrigo Vázquez de Arce was replaced as president of the Council of Castile by Denia's son-in-law, the Count of Miranda; and a convenient vacancy in 1599 enabled Denia to make his uncle Archbishop of Toledo.
It very quickly became clear that the régime of the Marquis of Denia was not likely to introduce the reforms that were so urgently required. Denia himself was a
n affable, easy-going man, whose prime concern was to enrich his family and to remain in power. He was singularly successful in both of these ambitions. A relatively poor man at the time he captured the King's favour, he soon became very rich indeed. Created Duke of Lerma in 1599, he accumulated offices and mercedes in rapid succession; the office of Comendador de Castilla, worth 16,000 ducats a year; a royal gift of 50,000 ducats in silver from the treasure fleet; another royal gift, this time diamonds to the tune of 5,000 ducats, to cheer him up when his health and spirits were low; and a profusion of baronies and lordships which helped to raise his annual income to 200,000 ducats by 1602, and enabled him in the same year to buy for 120,000 ducats the town of Valdemoro from the Marquis of Auñón.
Lerma had, in fact, succeeded in acquiring for himself a position in the State to which there had been no parallel since the time of Álvaro de Luna, the favourite of John II. More than a first minister, he was officially the Privado or Valido – the favourite of the King, and the first of a line of favourites which was to govern Spain during the course of the seventeenth century. It was difficult at first for Spaniards accustomed to the habits of Philip II to adapt themselves to a system in which the King merely reigned while the favourite ruled. In time, however, the Privado became an accepted feature of national life. Where the sixteenth century had produced innumerable ‘mirrors’ for princes, the seventeenth century devoted its attention to ‘mirrors’ for favourites, on the assumption that, since they could not be abolished, they might at least be improved. This rise of the favourite to an established position in government was partly the result of the personal characteristics of the descendants of Philip II – men who lacked both the ability and the diligence to govern by themselves. But it also reflected the growing complexity of government, which made it increasingly necessary to have an omni-competent minister, capable of extracting some decision from the mountain of consultas which piled up on the royal desk.
Imperial Spain 1469-1716 Page 35