Philip of Spain

by Henry Kamen

  Lack of information sometimes made it extremely difficult to plan policy. When in 1566 he was asked to make a decision on a voyage of the conqueror Miguel López de Legazpi to the Philippines, he was unsure what to do since he could find no maps of the area. ‘I think I have some,’ he wrote to his secretary, ‘and I tried to find them when I was in Madrid the other day. When I go back there I shall look again.’172

  His constant interest in maps was not the curiosity of an amateur: he collected few of them. They were, rather, essential instruments of state. Preparations for the Armada against England involved extensive poring over maps. In 1591, when his troops marched into Aragon, he used maps to plan their movement personally. It is a comment on the general backwardness of cartography in Spain that the king's interest did not stimulate the science among Spaniards.

  There were not even any reliable maps of the Iberian peninsula. The best map-makers of the time were foreigners, mostly Italians, and they devoted more care to Spain's coastline (for shipping) than to its interior. Philip was therefore highly satisfied with the publication at Antwerp in 1570 of Abraham Ortelius's Theatrum, a work dedicated to him. Other Netherlanders also made a crucial contribution to knowledge of the peninsula. Shortly after his return, Philip invited Anton van den Wyngaerde to come to Spain and make a survey of its cities.173

  From 1575 the councils began preparing the most ambitious of all the survey schemes. In May 1576 Philip issued a detailed list of forty-nine questions which were to be answered by all officials in America. The questionnaire covered every conceivable topic from botany and geography to economy and religion. The answers, the famous ‘geographic relations’, began to come in from 1577 and trickled through for ten years more.174

  In Castile a pilot questionnaire was distributed in December 1574 to villages in the area of Coria. On the basis of this, a broad survey was commissioned in October 1575. A list of fifty-seven questions was sent to the villages and towns of Castile, and a subsequent questionnaire was issued three years later. From the document it is clear that the king intended the information to be used also as the basis for a general history of Spain. The ‘Survey of Towns’, as it was called, foundered on the sluggishness of local officials, who could not be bothered to carry out the task. Only Toledo and surrounding areas took the trouble to send in details.175

  Behind all these projects, which occupy the 1560s and 1570s, it is possible to see clearly the king's desire to produce a large and encyclopaedic corpus of information on his realms. In detail, some of the individual schemes were the brainchild of officials, but the overall concept came from the king alone. Philip has often been criticised for smallness of mind and correcting grammatical faults in letters, yet in these schemes we have clear proof of his capacity to rise above the detail and envisage wide-ranging and universal schemes. His own incessant curiosity and interest were the driving forces. No other monarch of that time sponsored, as Philip did, a general history, a general geography, a general topographical survey and a general map of his domains. As in all his projects, he wanted research to be based on the methodical use of original data. His purpose was not to impress, but to learn and to achieve. He never became, like some other rulers, a great scholar. But he was without any doubt the most creative sponsor of schemes among the monarchs of Europe.

  Philip encouraged the collection of state papers into a central deposit in the old castle of Simancas, near Valladolid. The deposit had been begun by Cobos, but Philip as regent in 1545 took the first steps to store papers officially. In 1578 he approved the construction of a building designed by Juan de Herrera,176 and bit by bit, administrative papers were sent there for storage. In 1581 he realised that most of the papers on the provincial Church councils of 1565 had been in the keeping of Gonzalo Pérez and were now in the custody of the disgraced Antonio Pérez. They should immediately be retrieved from Antonio, he ordered, and taken to Simancas.177 The papers of the crown of Aragon were also carefully conserved. They must be kept in the archive in Barcelona,’ he ordered in 1552, ‘where they are usually taken and preserved.’178

  Information was also collected for the king through espionage, a policy followed by many governments of the time. In the case of Spain, the espionage network was normally coordinated by the Spanish ambassador in the relevant country. Francés de Álava, when ambassador in France in the 1560s, ran a small team of spies which operated mainly in the south of the country.179 The ambassador in England ran a similar operation. Lack of finance was the principal barrier to a more efficient espionage system. By 1589 ministers were complaining to Philip that more spies were needed in order to get the information required to run foreign policy.180

  The ambassadors and other high officials who served the king on an international plane were among the most distinguished in all European history. Curiously, their story has never been told.181 Philip, evidently, could act only within certain limits when choosing them. The unwritten rules demanded that he appoint from among the grandees of Castile, but he broke the rules often enough, in his preference for Portuguese (Ruy Gómez, Moura) and Catalan (the Requesens family) advisers, and his appointment of Granvelle. Since his was a multinational monarchy, he drew whenever possible on the support of all. It is a comment on his own impartiality that he only asked for loyalty. Beyond that, he allowed his advisers considerable freedom of thought and action. A typical example of this liberal policy was his employment of Jean Baptiste de Tassis in the 1580s and 1590s in several sensitive posts. Tassis was a Netherlander, fluent in six languages, of outstanding diplomatic and military talents. He also supported toleration in the Netherlands, and openly admired Henry of Navarre as ‘a great soldier’.182 None of this disqualified him from the royal service.

  Reliable administrative officials, the second of Philip's prerequisites for efficiency, were almost impossible to secure. There was no imperial bureaucracy, and the king had to fend for himself in each country. He attempted to secure nomination of as many senior officials as possible. Appointment to these posts was usually made from among the local elite, a practice which brought stability and bound these elites to the crown. But Philip also insisted that Spaniards must occupy posts. In 1568 he ordered the viceroy of Naples: ‘in future, when posts fall vacant, inform us if there are any Spaniards who might be appointed’.183 Posts involving military security were almost invariably reserved for Spaniards.184 Non-Spanish elites quickly came to resent this preference. From the 1560s, when cash problems became serious, Philip resorted with frequency to selling offices to local elites. In the American colonies, it was the local elites rather than peninsular Spaniards who came to control the administration.

  Trying to get the states of the monarchy to contribute to expenses was the most difficult task of all. No European state of this time, Spain included, had a central treasury or a uniform tax system. Nor were taxes normally raised directly by the parliament or government. Most taxpayers, even in Spain, paid their taxes to a number of different local entities, rather than to the crown. One golden rule, clung to everywhere, was that tax revenue must not be spent out of the country. In these circumstances the king found it extraordinarily difficult to raise revenue for general enterprises, or to persuade each state to contribute to imperial costs. His view was clearly expressed in 1589, when he was asked to reduce his demands for taxes from Sicily. ‘Except in pressing cases,’ he conceded, ‘the burdens of one kingdom are not usually loaded on to another.’ However, ‘since God has entrusted me with so many, and all are in my charge, and the defence of some preserves the others, it is fair that all should help’. At the same time, he wanted each realm to keep its finances distinct: ‘it is better not to mix up the debts and payments of different kingdoms’.185 Philip was helped by the collaboration of the nobles in each state. He also benefited from the services of the international financiers, who advanced him cash which he repaid out of taxes.

  The desire for efficiency was frustrated, above all, by the immense distances in the monarchy. In order to keep c
ontact with every corner of the world-wide empire, ‘Spain waged an unremitting struggle against the obstacle of distance’.186 Philip's ability to issue commands and control events was determined by the days, weeks and even months that it took for correspondence to reach its destination. Letters to Madrid took just under two weeks from Brussels, over three months from Mexico. Other factors might extend these intervals. In the last week of September 1569 Alba wrote from Brussels to Philip, but the king did not reply until late in November. Alba received the response only in December, a delay of nearly three months which left him fuming.187 Slowness was not, for all that, the exclusive fault of the king. It was an inevitable defect of the age. Commenting on the delays in letters, Granvelle in 1562 complained that in Brussels they had less contact with Madrid than Americans did.188 Later, when viceroy of Naples, he quoted a previous viceroy as saying that ‘if one had to wait for death he would like it to come from Spain, for then it would never come’.189

  Control from Spain blurred the important difference between being a colony and being a sovereign territory. ‘The other parts of the empire’, it has been observed, ‘slipped imperceptibly into the role of satellites and Castile into that of the metropolitan power. Hatred of the Spaniard began to smoulder everywhere.’190 Officials were perfectly aware of the discontent. Since the fifteenth century the Spaniards had been the most hated nation in Italy. Italy's political leaders wanted nothing more than to see the back of Spain. ‘I don't know what there is in the nation and empire of Spain,’ an official in Milan lamented in 1570, ‘that none of the peoples in the world subject to it bears it any affection. And this is much more so in Italy than any other part of the world.’ An annotation by the same writer goes some way towards showing what Italians had to put up with from Spaniards. ‘These Italians’, the writer notes, ‘although they are not Indians have to be treated as such.’191 No less memorable is the observation made by the governor of Milan at this time, Luis de Requesens. ‘We cannot,’ he stated, ‘trust Italy to the Italians.’192

  Hatred of Spain was not provoked only by Spanish misdeeds. A particularly efficient propaganda campaign was launched at the time by Protestant religious leaders and by Protestant states. From about 1580 the campaign assumed greater virulence as a result of Spanish involvement in the politics of every western European state. Calumnies focused above all on the person of the king of Spain. Legends were born which succeeded in distorting his image down to today.

  Curiously, Philip did not believe in the need for propaganda. He believed that the truth – his truth – would triumph over the lies of his enemies. When it was suggested to him in 1593, during his military intervention in France, that he should publish a paper justifying his position to the French people, he refused. ‘As for the paper’ he said, ‘there's no need to discuss it, because for good people it is our works that count, and for the others we don't need to give them the opportunity for debate.’193 It was one of the most serious of all his mistakes. By refusing to engage in the propaganda battle, he left the field wide open to the English and Dutch. Their brilliant journalism produced an image of Spain which has since been called‘the Black Legend’.194 The image succeeded in influencing the way in which even Spaniards viewed their king.

  9

  War in the West 1580–1586

  Strange people, these Portuguese.1

  Philip was, in 1580, at the height of his power. The first monarch in history to rule over a united peninsula, he could now truly title himself king of ‘Spain’. In medieval times, the term ‘Spain’ (or ‘the Spams’) had been applied loosely to the sum of states within the whole peninsula, including Catalonia and Portugal. Philip had frequently termed himself ‘king of Spain’ in documents, but only as a way of abbreviating his titles.2 From 1580 the loose concept was a political reality. To issue a decree in Lisbon for ‘these realms of Spain’3 was something no ruler of Spain had ever done before. For some, even in Portugal, there was a hope that unity would bring stability and prosperity. When the king entered Lisbon in 1581 one of the triumphal arches erected for him carried the verse: ‘Now will be fulfilled the prophecies of the wise, that you will be sole king and sole shepherd on earth.’4

  The universal monarchy had indeed arrived. A Spanish poet expressed the hope of seeing a world with ‘one sole shepherd and monarchy’.5 These were the years when the veteran soldier Alonso de Ercilla, who had accompanied Philip on both his European journeys and had then served in Peru, composed his epic poem on Spain's imperial triumphs, the Araucana. There was reason for the imperial pride. Peace in the Mediterranean was assured. Philip had moved the defence frontier out towards the Atlantic. The one-year truce signed with the Turks was extended in January 1581 into a three-year truce. In the north the richest and most populous provinces of the Netherlands had made their peace. In the New World the Philippines were firmly conquered, viceroy Toledo had put an end to Inca resistance in Peru, expeditions were moving up from Mexico into what is now the southern United States, and in the south Atlantic the city of Buenos Aires was founded. With the absorption of Portugal, Philip's authority now reached also into India, Indonesia and China. The empire, so extensive as to stagger the imagination, was the biggest ever known in history. It was, a Spaniard wrote with pride, ‘over twenty times greater than the Roman’.6 A wave of imperialist pride swept over Spaniards everywhere. Zealous missionaries believed that a universal monarchy would help to conquer the known world for Christ.7

  Within the range of his war budgets, Philip's most substantial expenditure had been on building up the Mediterranean fleet. In Lisbon, his perspective altered. He now definitively changed his focus from the inland sea out towards the Atlantic.8 His future strategy, his military efforts, his concern for security, shifted westwards. The choice was not his alone. The growing maritime activity of both the Dutch rebels and the English gave him very little alternative. A programme of shipbuilding was directed from Lisbon and by 1587 Philip was maintaining over one hundred ships in the Atlantic.9

  He had not been out of Spain for over twenty years. Despite the urgent issues pressing for attention at home, he now took the bold decision to reside away from his capital, his palaces, and his family, in a realm he did not know. His immediate motive was political. In the summer of 1579 he had been advised to give the Portuguese the impression that, once accepted as their king, he would make Lisbon his regular home.10 It was advice he came to accept. Besides, he was assured, ‘the climate of Lisbon is ideal for Your Majesty's health’. Nor was the environment alien: he was half-Portuguese by origin, and could understand the spoken language. He came eventually to spend an impressive two years and four months away from his own nation.

  In Lisbon he adapted his living conditions.11 With some 100,000 inhabitants, the city was the second largest in the peninsula (after Seville) and a fitting capital for a king. The existing waterfront palace of the Paço da Ribera was modified. Its great windows looked directly over the ships in the harbour and gave a panoramic view of the ocean. A new four-storey domed tower, the Torreão,12 was constructed by Juan de Herrera and Filippo Terzi. It dominated the harbour like a lighthouse,13 and contained a library as well as a ceremonial throne room and royal lodgings. The Torreão was lavishly furnished, but Philip made no attempt to convert his buildings into expressions of an imperial triumph.14

  Philip was well aware of popular hostility to Spain among ordinary Portuguese. He was kept informed of ‘the stubbornness of the populace in not wanting a foreign king’,15 but made efforts to win them over. He ordered the bodies of two popular saints to be brought back from Spain.16 He attended an auto de fe in Lisbon on 1 April 1582, to show his disapproval of heretics (Portugal had its own Inquisition, dating from 1547). He tried to intervene as little as possible in Portuguese politics, and left nearly all business in the hands of Cristóbal de Moura, who was less likely to offend. Decisions of every sort were put off until ‘Don Cristóbal’ could be consulted. ‘You do well to keep Don Cristóbal informed of these matters
(which I can't handle),’ he wrote on one memoir; ‘inform Don Cristóbal of the details’ on another; and ‘this can be dealt with in a committee, or by Don Cristóbal’ on yet another.17 The process is expressed neatly in the following order: ‘you should draw up a summary that I can give to Don Cristóbal, and on which I can state that he should look into and deal with those matters’.18

  However, Philip's role in Lisbon was far from passive. For the first time, he came into direct contact with the rich overseas trade of Spain and Portugal. He had the satisfaction of watching from his window as the great galleons came in from the ocean. The Spanish fleets bound for America could now use Lisbon as a departure point. On one occasion, in April 1582, the king actually ‘accompanied the fleet out of the harbour’ on its first stage to the New World. ‘He breakfasted on board his royal galley, and passed the whole day at the mouth of the port.’19 He took special interest in plans to form a company to organise the trade in pepper from Asia. He was proclaimed king in Goa in 1581. To his other titles, at the end of his reign, he was proud to add that of ‘king of Ceylon’.20 Excited by the new dimensions opening up for Christianity, in 1582 he appointed an Indian from Malabar as one of his chaplains.21 In practice, it was the possibility of finding new sources of income, through Portugal, that absorbed most of his time. He did not have to tax the Portuguese themselves, since overseas commerce brought in good returns. Half of all Portuguese government revenue came from the lucrative trade to Asia, and a third from trade to Europe and America.22 The Atlantic trade was booming, thanks to the development of Brazil.