Felipe’s great monastery-palace of El Escorial is often taken as the symbol (rightly and wrongly) for both his court and his religiosity. Felipe made Madrid his capital in 1561, then purposefully placed his palace outside the city as a way of distancing the monarch from the typical political intrigues of the capital. In keeping with the somber style of the monastery-palace and the Burgundian tradition, Felipe’s court was solemn, but it was not unrelentingly grave. Thanks to his well-rounded education in history and the arts, his cultural patronage was dazzling. He assembled the Habsburgs’ first great collection of art, stocking it with portraits of his family and many religious paintings. Felipe loved Titian’s work, met the painter several times, and commissioned paintings from him. The king’s sharp eye for quality was also captured by Hieronymus Bosch. El Greco moved to Spain during Felipe’s reign, and though the king was not a particular fan of the Greek painter, Greco’s painting “The Dream of Felipe II” became one of the most striking political and religious allegories of Felipe’s kingship. Research in math and science bloomed in Spain at this time. Charles V and Felipe both employed the renowned Andreas Vesalius as their court physician. El Escorial itself was conceived as a Christian Olympus, a temple to the arts and sciences, embodied above all in its stupendous library. While there were attempts to close off Spain from some potentially heretical external cultural influences, that did not impede the blooming of the illustrious Golden Age of cultural production. Felipe III’s reign continued the tremendous vitality in this area, as Cervantes and Lope de Vega reached their peak in literature and Tomás Luis de Victoria in music.
Contrary to the Black Legend’s slander, Felipe never simply holed up in El Escorial; he left it often to spend time in Madrid and in his other palaces. Nonetheless, that palace and the Burgundian court style did deeply stamp Felipe’s image as a ruler. They made him (and subsequent Spanish kings) remote, exalted figures who were rarely glimpsed by the public. Because Felipe’s personality was not that of a charismatic battlefield leader (as even his father had been), his majesty depended in large part on this rarified aura. He was El Rey Prudente, the prudent king, untouchable, incorruptible, consummately conscientious—an image maintained despite the many rash gambles he took, including three armadas to invade England. It was true, however, that he spent less time hunting, feasting, dancing, jousting, judging, battling—the iconic displays of kingship—and much more time writing. Felipe II was the king as clerk; he claimed once to have signed 400 different papers in a single day. The minions of his government were secretaries, not the traditional, feudal vassals. He was the master of the first great bureaucracy of any modern monarchy. Though his function as sovereign became more workaday, certainly his rule was still personal. The circles of counselors and bureaucrats of which he was the center served to carry out his will. Felipe alone had ultimate authority and responsibility, which he believed were entrusted to him by God.
The evolution of the monarch into chief bureaucrat was fitful, of course. Felipe III’s disengagement from governing meant that he reverted to many of the more traditional roles of the monarch in courtly display. The emergence of the valido, however, was part of other changes taking place in the dynastic state. On the traditional side, the valido was still justified by ideas of divine right. A Spanish priest tried to legitimize this system by declaring that “God chooses the favorite as he does the king.”8 On the innovatory side, the valido was associated with the movement away from personal monarchy and toward the monarch representing the apex of an increasingly impersonal bureaucratic apparatus. It also points to the changing status of the nobility vis-à-vis the monarch, since through high offices such as the valimiento the aristocracy was incorporated into state administrative structures more directly than before. This change shows that the nobility was not merely subjugated to or conflicting with the crown, but was often actively cooperative in governance.
That cooperation was essential for this reason: the existence of such an entity as “Spain” was quite weak at this time. The monarchy remained a loose collection of realms sharing the same king. Given the great distances between these territories and the primitive state of communications, it made sense to let them govern themselves to a large extent. The system of regional councils (Castile, Aragon, Italy, etc.) that Felipe II had inherited from his father was the principal central structure of governance. They were typically composed of high nobles from the relevant territory who helped represent the interests of that territory in Felipe’s court. A professional cadre of administrative secretaries grew up to liaise between the king and these councils. Because the councils could be riven by factional rivalries among their members, Felipe came to depend on a new circle of experienced advisors, many of whom had backgrounds in the lower nobility. Though key decisions were taken at the top, Felipe otherwise pursued very little centralization. His attempt to constrict some local privileges in the Netherlands helped spark the rebellion there, but elsewhere he negotiated more conciliatorily. His power was never absolute. It usually depended on consultation with other elites. He also professed to respect laws, and royal governance was in fact too weak for him ever to impose his will on his realms unconditionally. Only with the Spanish Church did he have thorough control over such things as ecclesiastical appointments and finances.
Though Felipe II’s bureaucracy was the best of its day, it was still woefully inadequate for optimal management of the monarchy’s affairs. His financial administration epitomizes the strengths and weaknesses of his institutions. He was able to raise greater revenues than any other contemporary sovereign, yet Felipe himself acknowledged that his finances were handled poorly. Revenues roughly quadrupled over the course of his reign. In addition to the old alcabala sales tax, other taxes became a heavy burden in Castile. The Cortes approved some of these, but regressively levied them on the lower classes. The contribution from the colonies amounted to a modest income, some 20 percent of total revenues in 1598, less than what Castile paid in taxes. Military expenditures, however, proved the sinkhole of Felipe’s finances. Castile spent less than 2 million ducats on the military in 1566 but about 10 million in 1598. Felipe did increase royal control of the military, taking it away from the high nobility. For example, he made manufacture of gunpowder a royal monopoly. But where every government of the time accrued debt, Felipe’s was spectacular for its size. He inherited a debt of 20 million ducats from his father, and left Felipe III a debt of 100 million. By 1598 debt repayment amounted to eight times annual revenues. As guarantees for loans, the government often granted its Italian or German bankers the right to administer tax collection, mines, or other revenue sources. This meant that the state did not control revenues, nor did it construct much of an apparatus to oversee their collection; the apparatus belonged instead to the banks. Despite their flaws, the governance structures elaborated in Felipe II’s time remained fundamental to the dynastic state’s functioning for the remaining century of Habsburg rule in Spain.
Felipe II was one of the most serious, committed, and simultaneously controversial monarchs in Habsburg history. That he was dedicated to his dynasty and left it an illustrious legacy cannot be questioned. His frustrated attempts to produce an heir, his work to maintain solidarity among the Austrian and Spanish branches, his attachment to Catholicism as a source of legitimacy, and his cultural patronage were all undertaken to serve his family and its posterity as much as to serve himself. His governance also became a model. For all its many problems of inefficiency and financial mismanagement, it was nonetheless superior to most of his contemporaries’ and many of his successors’. Likewise, though the Armada, the Dutch revolt and multiple bankruptcies stand out as fiascos, in many other ways Felipe’s reign has to be counted as among the most impressive in the dynasty’s history. When Portugal was added to his other domains, his monarchy not only loomed over Europe but bestrode the world. Besides the incomparable cultural efflorescence, this was also a time of significant economic vitality in much of Iberia. Seville, for exam
ple, was the boomtown of the sixteenth century, growing to possibly 150,000 people in the later 1580s, which made it the third largest city in Europe after Paris and Naples. Certainly by the end of his reign the monarchy’s problems were mounting. Without minimizing them, however, an honest evaluation of Felipe II would judge him as about the best that could be expected from sixteenth-century dynastic monarchy. That much worse was possible, even habitual, is shown by Felipe III.
CHAPTER FIVE
Division in faith and family (1564–1619)
Maximilian II insisted, “I am neither a Catholic nor a Protestant—I am a Christian.”1 As a ruler, he hoped to foster in his realms the religious harmony that was in his own mind. Yet bridging the divide between the Christian sects proved impossible, and no politician of this time could have achieved it. In truth, Maximilian’s own judicious but ambiguous position provided no real solution. As so often in history, the person who tries to steer a course down the middle is attacked by those at the extremes. Thus he was heavily criticized by both conservative Catholics and the most extreme Lutherans, who were unanimous at least in rejecting compromise. These confessional fissures in the Danubian domains bedeviled Habsburg rule for decades, debilitating the best efforts of even an intelligent, conscientious sovereign such as Maximilian. His sons Rudolf II and Matthias confronted the same splits but then only succeeded in creating new ones. Rudolf is one of the most fascinating yet unstable members of his dynasty, the Habsburg Prospero, neglecting affairs of state in favor of his artistic and occult obsessions. And like Shakespeare’s magician in The Tempest, Rudolf’s titles were usurped by his brother. All three men achieved relatively little in the dynastic perspective, leaving a legacy of festering religious conflicts, empowered provincial estates, costly wars against the Turks, and hapless feuds within the family. Maximilian and Rudolf were interesting as individuals but ineffectual as rulers; Matthias was nothing but a bungler.
Maximilian II (1527–76)
The ambiguity in Maximilian’s religious beliefs was evident to and troubling for many members of his family. Ferdinand I, in a codicil to his will of August 1555, felt compelled to admonish his son very explicitly to remain a Catholic. Ferdinand wrote, “I’ve seen a number of things that make me greatly suspicious that you, Maximilian, would fall from our religion and go over to the new sects. [. . .] God grant that this is not so, and that I have falsely suspected you.”2 He had good reason to worry. In the 1550s Maximilian’s actions definitely seemed to indicate Protestant sympathies, or at least an antipathy to the pope’s Catholicism. Maximilian argued against the Jesuits, defended a heterodox (though not at that time acknowledged Protestant) preacher in his court, and allowed the Lower Austrian estates to accept communion in both kinds, which was associated with Protestant practice at the time. Ferdinand was so disturbed by what seemed his son’s wavering Catholicism that he pressed Maximilian’s Spanish wife to intervene and make sure he remained a Catholic. He even threatened to disinherit Maximilian if he left the Church.
Nonetheless, despite his reservations about the Catholic Church, Maximilian never became an avowed Protestant. He did have a special dispensation from the pope to take communion in both kinds. And while he sympathized somewhat closely with the Lutherans, he actually disapproved of some Protestant sects such as the Calvinists and the Bohemian Brethren. He more dutifully towed the Catholic line once he was emperor, but he never gave up criticizing Rome’s hostile treatment of Protestantism. His reaction to the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France—in which thousands of Huguenots were killed in 1572—expresses one of his fundamental tenets. “The affairs of religion,” he said, “cannot be adjudicated and dealt with by the sword.”3
Maximilian’s ambivalent religious stance also complicated relations between the Austrian and Spanish branches of the family. Maximilian was married to his cousin María, Felipe II’s sister, in 1548 as part of Charles V’s tactic to ensure dynastic solidarity between the two branches. For several years beginning in the late 1540s he acted as regent in Spain, but he never liked it there. He found Spanish Catholicism too dogmatic. He was also angered by Charles’s idea to alternate the Holy Roman Empire’s crown between the two branches of the family. He schemed quite actively to frustrate Felipe’s candidacy for the imperial title. Once Maximilian returned to central Europe in 1551, he started making alliances with Protestant princes, in part to expand his own influence and room to maneuver. He was positioning himself as a defender of German interests, and trying to create a balance of power against the Spanish branch. He also came out in strong support of the Augsburg agreement, which was part of his political and religious strategy to appeal to Protestants without abandoning his family’s Catholicism. His antagonism toward Felipe and Spain was sufficiently strong that at one point he floated the ridiculous idea to Ferdinand that the German princes should ally with France against Spain—ridiculous because Ferdinand was very dutiful about maintaining dynastic solidarity. This antagonism was mutual, since Felipe complained about Maximilian’s unreliable support of Catholicism. His politicking in Germany ensured that Maximilian did receive the imperial crown in 1564 following Ferdinand’s death. Maximilian’s attitudes toward Spain mellowed enough in later years that he agreed to his two oldest sons being sent to Felipe’s court to be educated.
In some ways, the tensions in Maximilian’s own religiosity mirrored the complex confessional situation in his realms. Religious pluralism was a fact of life in the Danubian lands that Maximilian, Rudolf, and Matthias all had to deal with. Apart from Tyrol, Catholic observance was in steep decline everywhere, in cities, towns, and the countryside. In Bohemia and Hungary, too, the numbers of Catholic clergy dwindled, and monasteries emptied. In many places, this left a power vacuum that local nobles filled by taking over church lands. This pluralistic situation set the tone for a generally tolerant society, with significant confessional liberty. Catholicism hung on because the dynasty protected it and none of the Protestant sects was dominant enough to uproot it completely. In Inner Austria particularly, Ferdinand I’s son Karl was determined to hold the line for Catholicism, even though the estates in his territories were majority Protestant. It was from Karl’s line that the aggressive Counter-Reformation would come in the next century. Despite his compromising inclinations, Maximilian’s tolerance had its limits. In 1566 at a Reichstag he tried to have Calvinism banned. His motivation was that this sect was not included in the 1555 Augsburg agreement, and hence seemed a destabilizing force.
Like most contemporary rulers, Maximilian viewed religious pluralism as dangerous, and he dreamed of reuniting the various splinters of Christendom. This aspiration always ran against the hard realities of politics. The estates used his compromising inclinations to their advantage. In return for agreeing to financial outlays, they demanded official acknowledgment of religious freedom. Over several years starting in 1568 Maximilian was forced successively to grant freedom of worship to lords and their subjects in many of his Austrian lands, as well as in Bohemia. He made concessions to Catholics, too, such as promising the archbishop of Olomouc that he could persecute Protestants in Moravia. By the 1570s, Maximilian had begun to see that his hope of compromise between the sects was in vain. Instead of trying to mend the splits, his scaled-back goal became keeping the peace in religiously splintered central Europe.
Given this goal, Maximilian was alarmed by Felipe II’s actions in the Netherlands. He was deeply opposed to Felipe’s military response to the Dutch revolt. His fears were plausible, namely that the armed response against Dutch Calvinists would stir up anger among Calvinists in Germany. He was also worried that Spanish armies straying into German territory could provoke armed resistance, and that as a result of Spanish military recruiting in Germany, Germans could end up fighting other Germans in the Low Countries. This was an extremely difficult situation for Maximilian. He felt the pressures of his own conscience to maintain family solidarity while, at the same time, he was being pressured by the German princes to counterac
t Felipe’s policies. In the late 1560s he repeatedly pleaded with Felipe and the Duke of Alba to moderate their response, but Felipe rebuffed him with the disingenuous insistence that religion was not an issue in the Netherlands. Maximilian’s own attitude toward the revolt began changing by 1571 because of his concern about the precedent the Dutch were setting by revolting against monarchy. Now Maximilian approved Spanish recruitment in Germany (which had been going on with impunity anyway). But this movement toward Felipe’s position frayed his relations with the Protestant German princes. There were accusations that Maximilian had become a partner in Felipe’s aggression. Characteristically, Maximilian tried to find a middle way, counseling moderation to Felipe while hosting the rebel leader Egmont’s son in Vienna after his father had been executed. Also characteristically, this policy did not work. Protestant princes such as the Elector of the Palatinate bucked the emperor’s policy when they started aiding Willem of Orange by 1573.
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