Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  Already in the later years of Philip II attempts had been made to assist an ailing King in his administrative duties by the creation of the small Junta de Noche which acted as a clearing-house for the consultas of the various Councils. This Junta was abolished on the accession of Philip III, but Lerma soon had recourse to a similar device. No doubt this was partly because the death of the old King had led to an immediate weakening of royal power, and the magnates, so resolutely excluded from the Councils by Charles V and Philip II, were now pressing irresistibly for admission. Two capa y espada members were appointed to the Council of the Indies in 1604; and the Council of State, which came to consist of fifteen members, gradually fell into the hands of the grandees. The increasing aristocratic predominance in certain of the Councils made the recourse to a small Junta of his own confidants all the more desirable for the Duke of Lerma, if he were to retain power in his own hands. At the same time, certain aspects of government, like the state of the Crown's finances, required a detailed and expert study, such as they could not be given in full council, and this naturally led to the creation of special Juntas to deal with particular problems.

  The trend in seventeenth-century Spanish government was therefore towards the creation of small committees of ministers, operating independently of the Councils. The régime of the Duke of Lerma saw only a tentative beginning in this direction, and the real establishment of government by Junta belonged to the 1620s and 1630s. But at last Lerma seems to have appreciated, as did his successor, the Conde Duque de Olivaries, that the Councils were now so routine-ridden, and so consumed with concern for their own prestige and precedence, that they were becoming increasingly inadequate organs for the government of the Monarchy. The use of Juntas to by-pass the Councils was an obvious way of escape from the dilemma, but their effectiveness would clearly depend on the calibre of the men appointed to sit in them. There were great opportunities to infuse fresh ideas into the government by selecting men from outside the usual cursus honorum that led to a seat at the council table. But whether the right men were chosen depended upon the Favourite.

  Lerma's choice of confidants was uniformly disastrous. Easily deceived by plausible rogues, he elevated to positions of great importance the most unsavoury characters. In particular, his choice fell upon two adventurers who succeeded in insinuating themselves into his confidence – Don Pedro Franqueza and Don Rodrigo Calderón. Franqueza, the younger son of a Catalan gentry family, enjoyed a meteoric rise to power under Lerma's benign patronage. Entrusted with the task of reforming the royal finances, he managed to obtain the title of Count of Villalonga and an enormous fortune before his sins were found out. He fell from power in 1607 as dramatically as he had risen – arrested for malversation of funds, put on trial, and forced to disgorge some 1,500,000 ducats (about a fifth of the Crown's average annual expenditure). The career of his colleague, Calderón, was remarkably similar, although less abruptly terminated. Enjoying complete ascendancy over the Favourite, he succeeded in retaining his power as long as his master, and lost his position – and eventually his life – only with the coming of a new régime.

  A Government which consisted of Lerma, Franqueza, and Calderón, hardly offered very hopeful prospects for that great campaign of reform and renovation for which arbitristas and country were clamouring, and it soon showed itself adept at shirking measures likely to antagonize the influential and the articulate. This was particularly obvious in its fiscal policies. One of the most important tasks facing the Government of Spain at this moment was to begin the delicate work of attempting to equalize the fiscal contributions of the different provinces of the Monarchy, in the hope of reducing the tax burden on Castile. It was true that Lerma managed to extract subsidies of 1,100,000 ducats from the Cortes of Catalonia in 1599, and of 400,000 ducats from those of Valencia in 1604, but so much of this sum was expended on bribes and mercedes in the two provinces that the Crown obtained virtually no benefit from the grants. The Government also attempted in 1601 to extend the payment of the millones to Vizcaya, but quickly abandoned the attempt in face of strong Vizcayan protests. The redistribution of the tax burden within the peninsula and the Monarchy was thus allowed to go by default at a moment when the improved international situation might have allowed a more resolute Government to embark on a more effective and equitable exploitation of its subjects' resources.

  Having failed to spread more evenly the burden of taxation within the Monarchy, Lerma's Government also failed to redistribute the tax burden more equitably within Castile. Any fiscal measures which might help to reduce the gross inequalities between the exempt rich and the penalized poor was scrupulously avoided, and Lerma fell back instead on more comfortable expedients, such as the sale of offices and jurisdictions, the extraction of subsidies from the Portuguese Jews, and the manipulation of the Castilian coinage. A vellón coinage of pure copper was authorized in 1599, and was returned to the mints in 1603 to be stamped at double its face value. Although the Cortes of 1607 made their subsidy conditional on the suspension of vellón production, the temptation to make money out of money proved too strong for the perennially bankrupt Government, and minting was resumed in 1617, to be ended only in 1626 – by which time Castile was flooded with valueless coins.

  Perpetually living on expedients, and anxious only for a smooth passage, the passive and negative régime of the Duke of Lerma was more remarkable for what it left undone than for what it actually did. Lerma himself was by nature indolent, and given to a resigned melancholy which kept him away from business for days on end. Hunting, the theatre, and lavish Court fiestas occupied the days of the King and his ministers, so that diplomatic representatives would constantly complain of the difficulty of obtaining audiences and transacting their affairs. Urgent problems, like the fiscal question in Castile, or the spread of banditry in Catalonia, were quietly shelved in the vain hope that they might in the course of time satisfactorily solve themselves; and the one positive action of the régime of real merit was the signing in 1609 of the Twelve Years' Truce with the Dutch – a settlement which Lerma steered through with some skill in the face of considerable opposition, but which was ultimately forced on him by the bankruptcy of the treasury. Otherwise the actions of his Government were ill advised and unfortunate, like the removal of the capital to Valladolid in 1601, which proved so unsatisfactory that it had to return again to Madrid in 1606.4

  One action, however, the Government was to push through with a most uncharacteristic resolution: the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain. There was a deliberate significance in the choice of the date on which the decree of expulsion was formally approved by the King – 9 April 1609, the day which also saw the signing of the Twelve Years' Truce. By the use of skilful timing, the humiliation of peace with the Dutch would be overshadowed by the glory of removing the last trace of Moorish dominance from Spain, and 1609 would be ever memorable as a year not of defeat but of victory.

  The expulsion of the Moriscos, carefully prepared, and carefully executed between 1608 and 1614, was to some extent the act of a weak Government anxious for easy popularity at a time of widespread national discontent. But although the Government acted in response to pressures from beneath, there was a complexity about the whole Morisco problem which conferred a certain plausibility on the assumption that expulsion was the only remaining solution. Fundamentally, the Morisco question was that of an unassimilated – and possibly unassimilable – racial minority which had given endless trouble ever since the conquest of Granada. The dispersion of the Moriscos through Castile after the suppression of the second rebellion of the Alpujarras in 1570 had only complicated the problem by extending it to areas which had previously been free of Morisco inhabitants. From 1570 the Morisco problem was Castilian, as well as Valencian and Aragonese, although it varied in character from one region to another.

  It was in Valencia that the problem appeared most serious. There were some 135,000 Moriscos in Valencia in 1609 – perhaps a third of the total population of th
e kingdom; and the proportion was increasing, since there had been a 70 per cent increase in the Morisco population between 1563 and 1609, against only a 45 per cent increase among the Old Christians. These Moriscos formed a closely knit community, significantly known as ‘la nación de los cristianos nuevos de moros del reino de Valencia’. The very extent of their organization aroused widespread fears at a time when the danger of a Turkish attack on the Levantine coast still appeared very real. Nor did the discovery of links between the Aragonese Moriscos and the French Governor of Béarn do anything to diminish them. A Turkish-Protestant-Morisco conspiracy looked plausible enough to such a man as Archbishop Ribera of Valencia; and it could certainly be made to appear plausible to all those who were anxious to see the last of the Moriscos. These included Valencian lords whose vassals were Old Christians, and who envied the lords of Morisco vassals their greater prosperity; and it included, too, the lower class of the Old Christian population, hungry for the land which the Moriscos occupied. But the Valencian Moriscos had powerful protectors in the majority of the nobles, who were dependent on Morisco labour for their income. Equally, the townsmen who had lent money to aristocrats on the security of their estates were opposed to any sudden change that might reduce the rate of interest on their censos.

  The balance of forces in Valencia suggests that, if the kingdom had been left to itself the Moriscos would have remained. But the presence of Moriscos in Castile had set up a whole new series of pressures which did much to strengthen the hand of those in favour of their total expulsion from the peninsula. The Castilian Moriscos, unlike their Valencian brethren, were rootless and scattered; and where the Valencian Moriscos were largely agricultural labourers, those of Castile had drifted to the towns and taken up a wide variety of fairly menial occupations, as carriers, muleteers, and small craftsmen. Since they were so widely dispersed, they hardly represented a very serious danger, but they were disliked by many Old Christians for spending too little, working too hard, and breeding too fast. In such a climate it was not difficult to whip up popular feeling by rhetorical arguments to the effect that Spain's recent misfortunes could be attributed to the continuing presence of unbelievers in a country that called itself Catholic.

  Once the populace was aroused, the supporters of the Moriscos no longer dared raise their voices in protest, and the case against expulsion went by default. The vast bureaucratic machine was duly set in motion; the Moriscos were shepherded towards the frontiers and the ports, and the majority eventually found their way to North Africa, where many died of hunger and exhaustion, or were massacred by their unfriendly brethren. The total number leaving Spain is now reckoned at some 275,000 out of a probable Morisco population of rather over 300,000. The regional distribution of the emigrants was as follows:

  Valencia 117,000

  Catalonia 4,000

  Aragon 61,000

  Castile, La Mancha, Estremadura 45,000

  Murcia 14,000

  Andalusia 30,000

  Granada 2,000

  The economic consequences of the disappearance of the Moriscos from Spain are still by no means clear. A satisfactory evaluation would have to be undertaken on a regional basis, since the economic importance of the Moriscos varied from one area to another. Although industrious, they were neither wealthy nor economically enterprising members of the community, and to assume that their expulsion had economic effects comparable to those of the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 is absurd. But in some areas their departure left gaps which it proved difficult or impossible to fill. In the city of Seville for instance, there were some 7,000 Moriscos, occupied in humble but indispensable jobs as porters and carriers and dockyard hands, and the sudden removal of these men added to the many troubles of the port in the years around 1610.

  In Castile the Moriscos had been too thinly scattered for their disappearance to have any drastic effect, but in Aragon and Valencia the story was very different. In Aragon, the fertile strip on the south of the Ebro was ruined. In Valencia, the consequences varied from one area to another, and in some places were modified by repopulation schemes which brought Old Christians to settle in abandoned areas; but the general effects on the Valencian economy were disastrous. Those who stood to lose most were the nobles who had employed Morisco labour on their estates, and depended for their income on the dues paid them by their Morisco vassals. Their losses were heavy, but to some extent they were mitigated by the policy of Lerma's government of shifting them on to the bourgeoisie. This was done by a pragmatic of 1614 which lowered the rate of interest on censales to 5 per cent, the losses being borne by the creditors – members of the Valencian bourgeoisie, and religious and charitable institutions – who had originally lent money to nobles on the security of their estates. Once again, therefore, the Lerma régime conformed to its usual practice of favouring the privileged at the expense of the less privileged, who lacked the influence to press their suit at Court.

  In the national mood of euphoria created by the expulsion, its practical consequences were easily overlooked. It was only later, when Olivares and his colleagues attempted to mobilize the wealth, real or imagined, of the peripheral regions of the peninsula, that the real seriousness of the expulsion was brought home to the Government. In 1633 the royal confessor wrote: ‘It is a very short time ago since the Moriscos were expelled – an action which did such harm to these kingdoms that it would be a good idea to have them back again, if they could be persuaded to accept our Holy Faith.’ 5 But what was done could never be undone. The régime of the Duke of Lerma was never one to give much thought to the morrow, and the expulsion of the Moriscos aptly symbolized its general outlook in its total disregard for economic realities, its determination to adopt the easiest solution when confronted by admittedly intractable problems, and its tendency to give way before popular and sectional pressures. Here was a régime which, at a time when Castile stood most in need of government, was content merely to follow where others led; a government which preferred panaceas to policies, and which had nothing but high-sounding phrases and empty gestures to offer a society that desperately needed a cure for its many ills.

  3. THE PATTERN OF SOCIETY

  While it was relatively easy to expel the Moriscos from Spain, it was infinitely more difficult to expunge the traces of Moorish civilization from the soil of the peninsula. Moorish ways had profoundly influenced the life of Spanish society, and inevitably the processes involved in Spain's turning its back on Africa were painful and slow. It was something of a revolution when the new houses built in Seville during the course of the sixteenth century began to face outwards on to the street, instead of facing inwards as in Arab days. It was still more of a revolution when women started to appear at the windows, for it was in family life, and especially in the role of women in Spanish society, that Moorish habits were most deeply engrained. The Spanish upper classes had inherited the Moorish custom of keeping their womenfolk secluded, and the women themselves still retained many of their Moorish ways. They crouched on cushions instead of using chairs; in all Spain, except for the north and northwest, they remained semi-veiled, in spite of frequent royal prohibitions; and they had an extraordinary habit, which may perhaps have originated in Africa, of nibbling pieces of glazed pottery – a choice of diet which may account for their notoriously poor complexions. But the strongest reminder of the Moorish past was to be found in the extreme inequality between the sexes, which was much greater than in contemporary northern Europe, and which found its counterpart in extreme male gallantry towards the inferior sex.

  Under the combined influence of Europe and America, habits slowly began to alter. The appearance in Seville of wealthy and dissolute creole women from the New World led to a gradual relaxation of manners and morals, and the veil was often retained as a convenient means of concealment instead of as a token of modesty. But, in spite of these changes, the position of the upper class Spanish woman seems to have altered far less between the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century than that of her f
oreign counterparts. Installed at the centre of the family unit, she remained the repository of traditional ideals and customs, many of which had been acquired from the Moors during the time when they were still the masters of Spain.

  The survival of Moorish customs in seventeenth-century Spain vividly illustrates the enormous problems of adaptation which this society was called upon to make, and suggests something of the tensions to which it was subjected. If it tended to veer between two extremes – if, for instance, the extreme doctrine of limpieza appeared a natural solution to the problem of alien survivals – this was partly because the problems which faced it were themselves of such an extreme character. Castilian society, as the arbitristas never tired of pointing out, was a society based on paradox and contrast. The contrasts were everywhere: Moorish and Christian; devoutness and hypocrisy; fervent professions of faith and exceptional laxity of manners; vast wealth and abject poverty. There was no moderation here, no sense of proportion. The Memorial de la Política Necesaria y Útil Restauración a la República de España of González de Cellorigo is in practice one long text on the extremes of Spanish life and the paradoxes of its social and economic organization. For González, the greatness and perfection of a state were determined not by the extent of its possessions, but by a ‘constant and harmonious’ proportion between the different classes of its citizens. By this criterion Spain had reached the apex of its perfection in 1492. After the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella it ‘began to decline to our own days’, when it seemed to be appro7:53 PM 12/12/2008aching its nadir. All proportion was now gone, and ‘our republic has come to be an extreme contrast of rich and poor, and there is no means of adjusting them one to another. Our condition is one in which we have rich who loll at ease, or poor who beg, and we lack people of the middling sort, whom neither wealth nor poverty prevent from pursuing the rightful kind of business enjoined by natural law.’