Early Modern Spain

A Social History

James Casey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134623808
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Early Modern Spain: A social History explores the solidarities which held the Spanish nation together at this time of conflict and change. The book studies the pattern of fellowship and patronage at the local level which contributed to the notable absence of popular revolts characteristic of other European countries at this time. It also analyses the Counter-Reformation, which transformed religious attitudes, and which had a huge impact on family life, social control and popular culture.
Focusing on the main themes of the development of capitalism, the growth of the state and religious upheaval, this comprehensive social history sheds light on changes throughout Europe in the critical early modern period.

1
AN INHOSPITABLE LAND

A country of which ‘we had little experience or knowledge in the days of our forefathers’: such was the impression which the Venetian Michele Suriano carried home with him at the end of his embassy to the Spanish court in 1559. At the western extremity of the ancient and medieval worlds, cut off from Europe by the Pyrenees (a more impenetrable, if less lofty, barrier than the Alps), Spain had been locked for more than seven centuries in those civil wars known as the Reconquest, which ended with the fall of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492, and which determined that the country would belong to Christendom rather than to Islam. Stretched out ‘like an ox-hide’, in the words of the famous classical geographer Strabo, writing in the first century BC, Iberia appeared at the time as a poor, mountainous land, ‘whose soil is thin—and even that not uniformly well watered’. With few cities, and few good harbours between Tarragona and the Pillars of Hercules (the western limits of the ancient world), the peninsula nevertheless possessed one navigable river, which fertilised its banks and stimulated trade—the Baetis, or Guadalquivir (‘Great River’), as the Moors were to rebaptise it. From these lands of Seville and Cordoba came the grain, wine and olive oil which were exported in quantity to Rome, and here was to be the heart of Muslim power for centuries after the fall of Rome.

Though Spain made a distinctive contribution to classical civilisation, the general impression of later writers, not least Spaniards themselves, was that the country had been somewhat on the margin. In his introduction to one of the early geographies of the peninsula, that of Méndez Silva in 1645, the historiographer Pellicer commented that few classical writers, either Greek or Roman, had left adequate accounts ‘of matters affecting us’. Things had got worse as a result of the political chaos caused by the Arab invasions, and he thought that it was only now that a proper inventory of the country, its people, resources and history, could be made.

Pellicer was neglectful, as most of his contemporaries were, of the work of the Arab geographers. The Arab invasion of 711 might be regarded as a continuation of those links with Africa which since prehistoric times and with the Carthaginians had led to the transfer of manpower and culture across the Straits of Gibraltar. But the Spain that we know took shape through a long guerrilla war against Islam, led by Christian chiefs who had taken refuge in the impenetrable Cantabrian and Pyrenean mountain chains. One of these, the king of León, began to reassert old notions of Hispanic unity, under himself as Emperor (Alfonso VI 1065–1109). His control of the increasingly important pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela— famed throughout Christendom, along with Rome and Jerusalem—no doubt explains his pre-eminence. The emergence of a more tangible unity among the different Christian kingdoms was a slower process: by the thirteenth century León and Castile had been definitively united, and the Crown was beginning to be looked upon as an inalienable trust rather than a private patrimony which could be divided among several sons. The subsequent dynastic unions of Castile with the Crown of Aragon (marriage of Isabel of Castile with Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469), and then with Portugal (sucession of Philip II to the Portuguese throne in 1580) completed the restoration, as men believed, of that old Roman Iberia, promising a new Augustan age of peace and prosperity.

To say, as did the Venetian ambassador in 1559, that other Europeans had had ‘little experience’ of the Spaniards before his own day, is somewhat misleading. The Mediterranean coastline had been in continual contact with the south of France since the early Middle Ages. James I of Aragon (1213–76), the famous conqueror of the Balearic Islands and Valencia from the Moors, was the son of the countess of Montpellier, and the culture and language of his new conquests were to be largely that variety of Occitan which obtained in Catalonia. But James’s father, Peter II, had been killed in 1213 at the decisive battle of Muret, which gave control of the Languedoc to the king of France, in the name of a crusade against the Albigensian heresy, and ended effectively any Spanish pretensions north of the Pyrenees. However, the expansion of the Crown of Aragon along the Mediterranean coast of Iberia in the following generation opened up new possibilities of trade and naval power. Thanks to the resources of those great emporia, the cities of Barcelona and Valencia, an Aragonese maritime empire began to take shape, with the conquest of the islands of Sicily (1282) and Sardinia (1323–4), and mainland Naples (1435). Castile, high up on the central tableland and turned away from the Mediterranean, was developing significant naval and commercial links through Biscay with the cities of north-west Europe in the later Middle Ages. Its conquest of Granada gave it control of navigation through the Straits of Gibraltar. In the same year (1492), it patronised the voyage of Columbus, which opened up the Atlantic world to commercial activity of a kind which would soon outstrip that of the old inland sea of Europe and North Africa.

One further political event must be considered before we can situate Spain within the early modern world. The succession of the Habsburg Charles V, grandson of the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabel, to the Spanish Crown in 1516 brought these southern realms right into the heart of European politics at a particularly sensitive time, that of the Reformation and the beginning of the wars of religion. With Charles V, Spain found her destinies yoked to some of the most wealthy, but most fought-over areas of Europe—Flanders, Franche-Comté, eventually Milan (1535–40), not to mention Austria and the German empire, which, after his retirement, was assigned to Charles’s brother and not to his son, the Spanish king Philip II (1556–98). Charles V, a Fleming by birth and French by tongue, had no fixed headquarters and spent much of his time outside Spain, though returning there to prepare for death. In the reports of the Venetian ambassadors at this time, Spain tends to figure merely as one part of a federal empire. Antonio Tiepolo (1567) may be the first to signal a new reality. He would pay more attention to Spain than to the other states of the monarchy, he told the senate, because it was ‘the most important of all the realms of this most serene king’.

In the history books the period between the treaties of Cateau Cambrésis (1559) and Westphalia (1648) is conventionally known as that of the hegemony of Spain, arbiter of the destinies of Europe. Thereafter a much weakened Spain, stripped of her European possessions in a series of treaties culminating with Utrecht (1713), tends to fade from the textbooks. Yet this state maintained through much of the eighteenth century the third most important fleet in Europe, after that of Britain and France, and, as mistress of much of America, continued to play a significant role in the Atlantic world. It is only with the defeat of the Spanish navy at Trafalgar (1805), and the subsequent loss of control in America, confirmed by the independence of most of the former colonies by 1825, that Spain passed definitively to the second rank of European powers.

In its heyday the empire conferred on this rather poor, once marginal European country, a unique attractiveness. Perhaps the most gifted and certainly the most eloquent of the Venetian ambassadors, Leonardo Donà (1570–3), conveys all the excitement which men of the time felt at the reports of the conquests of Mexico and Peru, and marvelled at a court masque to celebrate the birth of a son to Philip I I, in which the portrayal of the submission of two Indian princes ‘gave us foreign observers an idea of how great is the power of Castile’. And later ambassadors, like Girolamo Soranzo (1608–11), were dazzled by the silver and gold landed at Seville, the pearls and diamonds at Lisbon. Even the financially exhausted and militarily crippled Spain of 1664–6 could still impress Lady Ann Fanshawe, wife of the British ambassador with the ‘curiositys brought from Italy and the Indies’, the silver and chocolate (still a novelty) from America, the lacquered or ivory cabinets from India or Japan. The sense of cosmopolitanism, at least in Seville and at court, and of being at the heart of the world was captured in the saying, reported by the French traveller Jouvin in 1672, ‘that mass is said at every hour of the day in some part of their empire, that the sun shines there all the time, for when it has set in Spain it is casting its rays in America’.¹

This imperial radiance was associated with a golden age of Spanish art, literature and learning. Spanish treatises on government, on warfare, on the exploration of the New World became particularly popular in the sixteenth century, followed by an admiration for poetry, plays and novels. Sir Richard Fanshawe, husband of Lady Ann mentioned above, was a gifted translator of Spanish and Portuguese poetry. Inevitably the far-flung nature of the Spanish dominion led to a study of its language and culture, even by its enemies. Queen Elizabeth may have been the last British monarch to read and speak Spanish, an example imitated by her chief secretary Burghley. The Puritan party at court— men like Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser—were under the spell of Spanish romances of chivalry. One of Secretary Walsingham’s correspondents wrote in 1582 that he was learning the Spanish language, ‘which I plainly see that he who would go about in the world ought to know’.²

Most people nowadays will think of El Greco, Velázquez, Murillo—and, of course, also of Cervantes—when they evoke the Spanish Golden Age. But Spanish painting— and even more the rich tradition of polychrome sculpture—was less appreciated abroad initially than Spanish books. Some interest was shown by foreign merchants in Murillo, during and soon after his own lifetime; but Spanish art remained to be discovered by the Romantics—like the country itself, which began to attract gentlemen of leisure (as distinct from merchants and ambassadors) during the later eighteenth century. In 1779 Secretary of State Floridablanca deplored the fact that ‘some foreigners are buying up in Seville all the canvases that they can acquire of Bartolomé Murillo and other famous painters, and sending them abroad’, and he introduced new restrictions.³ Joseph Townsend’s sensitivity to the beauties of the Alhambra palace in Granada in the course of his visit of 1787 is an early symptom of the Romantic appreciation of the exotic, which would heighten sympathy for things Spanish in nineteenth-century Europe.

But for most of the early modern period Spain was trying to live down its Moorish past. The indefatigable traveller and art critic Antonio Ponz, whose journeys across his native land in the 1770s and 1780s are such a mine of information for the social historian, was typical of the classical temper which marked the culmination and waning of early modern civilisation. For him, the Spanish cities, with their narrow, crooked streets and intimate, rambling buildings had to be explained away as an unfortunate legacy of the Islamic period. The Venetian ambassadors shared a similar impression. Federico Badoero in 1557 found most Spanish towns ‘neither beautiful nor clean’; and his successor Francesco Soranzo in 1602 commented that, compared with their European counterparts, ‘they are remarkable neither for the splendour of their buildings, nor for the beauty of their streets, nor for the grandeur of their public squares’. The qualities which later generations would come to admire, the intimacy of the little squares and labyrinthine neighbourhoods, held little attraction for the classical mind.

The Venetians, and more generally the Italians, were not only the arbiters of good taste in the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth centuries, but also the supreme exponents of political philosophy. They first drew attention to the paradox of Spain: a great empire which seemed very insecurely balanced on the shoulders of a poor and backward people. Giovanni Botero (1544–1617), one of the pioneers of political economy, helped shape contemporary views of Spain as a giant with feet of clay through his influential writings. He had no first-hand knowledge of the country until a visit he made there in 1603–6, well after he had published his criticism. But from Strabo and from travellers’ tales he could find out enough to make some telling points. ‘Generally mountainous and lacking in water’, Spain had few rivers, therefore few opportunities to build markets and towns, or expand her population. The Spanish temperament, as described in the classical authors and as appeared to be confirmed by the persecutions and wars of Botero’s own day, was more attuned to war than to the arts of peace. ‘No country is more lacking in crafts and industry,’ he thought.

The peninsula lay, in some senses, with its back to Europe. The Pyrenees had few accessible passes. The fertile Mediterranean coastline, the natural gateway to Europe, had few good harbours, and backed on to the high, bare continental plateau of Castile, the meseta. The best harbours, and the easiest communications with the interior, by mule if not by river, faced west, out into the long uncharted waters of the Atlantic. The central tableland had an average altitude of 660 metres (just under 2,200 feet), making the country the most elevated in Europe after Switzerland. A high, squat landmass, Iberia generates a kind of continental climate of its own, with extremes of heat and cold.

Three main features determine the climate of the peninsula. First there is its southerly latitude—considerably to the south of most of Italy, for example. Then one has to take into account the altitude of much of the landmass, which can lead to cold and snow in Old Castile and León, that is those areas to the north of Madrid and the Guadarrama mountains, which bisect the meseta in two. Here the average altitude rises to 1,000 metres above sea level, where, according to a saying related by the Venetian envoy in 1525, there are ten months of invierno (winter) and two of infierno (hellfire).⁴ The third factor shaping the climate of Spain is the westward thrust of the peninsula out into the Atlantic, exposed, therefore, to the cloud, winds and rain from the great ocean. The north-western seaboard, including Galicia and its great pilgrimage centre of Santiago de Compostela, tends to get a lot of rain. Even the south-west, including the fertile valley of the Guadalquivir, is swept generously by the rainclouds in autumn and spring. But the altitudes there are generally low (200 metres on average), and the southerly latitudes lead to rapid evaporation, creating problems of aridity particularly in the summer months. One of the great conditioning influences on the peninsula has been, as Botero put it, the ‘lack of water’. In general, as one gets further back from the Atlantic shoreline, rising gradually to altitudes of 800–1,000 metres in the eastern and northern mesetas, the rainclouds peter out. About half of the landmass gets under 500 millimetres (about 20 inches) of rain a year, creating what is known as a semi-arid climate.

Linked to the question of aridity is the lack of tree-cover, commented upon by travellers in the early modern period. A narrow belt—perhaps one-tenth of the surface area—along the Pyrenees, Cantabrian Mountains and Galicia can boast a good natural cover of chestnut, beech and grass. But south of the Cantabrians the landscape is and was steppe-like, on the high Castilian plateau. Antonio Ponz commented on the consequences: the erosion of the soil, the evaporation of what moisture there was, the shortage of firewood and the lack of building materials.⁵ The chestnut, needing the rains of north and west Spain, ventured timidly down as far as the Tagus (or beyond, in the west). But the characteristic tree of the Castilian steppe was the stubby, drought-resistant evergreen oak. A kind of climatic frontier was crossed south of the Guadarrama mountains and south of the Tagus River, as one entered New Castile. Here the olive, dreading frosts and happy with little water, came into its own. Further south still, beyond the Sierra Morena, one came to the old Arab heartland of Andalusia, which linked up, via the mountainous kingdom of Granada, with the other Moorish stronghold of south-eastern Spain, Valencia. These areas were famed for their warmth and fertility. The Andalusian Pedro de Medina, in one of the early geographies of Spain (1548), praised Valencia’s river banks ‘lined with roses and flowers’, with ‘poplars, pines and other trees’. And that other pioneering geographer, Rodrigo Méndez Silva (1645), found it full of ‘gardens, orchards, groves’.

Overall, Méndez Silva’s impression of Spain was flattering: a land of ‘abundance’, blessed with ‘the most agreeable, temperate climate in all Europe’, half-way between the cold of France and the heat of North Africa. But the future Philip II is found writing to his father in 1545 that the country could never match the subsidies paid by France to its monarch: ‘The infertility of these realms is well known to Your Majesty, and one bad year can throw our people into poverty.’ And the Jesuit historian Mariana lamented towards the end of the century that lack of rainfall often meant that ‘the harvest will not repay the cost of farming’.⁶

The great problem facing most of the peninsula was the thinness of the soil (aggravated by deforestation) and the irregular distribution of water. Much of the northern tableland receives less than 500 millimetres (about 20 inches) of rain a year, much of southern Castile under 400, the higher figure generally being taken as the lower limit for comfortable farming. In the fertile basin of the Guadalquivir, where the Atlantic breezes bring in up to 700 millimetres a year, the supply is concentrated in torrential spring downpours; here the problem is to prevent evaporation during the intense heat of summer.

One of the features of the Iberian landscape which is still marked is the great contrast between regions. Not only is the central plateau difficult of access from the Mediterranean, but it is itself traversed by mountain barriers. We may start with the Cantabrian Mountains to the north, shielding Castile from the Bay of Biscay. Here the Christian armies had taken refuge in the eighth century from the Moorish invaders, and from here had launched the campaigns of Reconquest. The Iberian sierras, sweeping south from there towards the Mediterranean coast, helped foster the separate political identity of the Crown of Aragon, a medieval frontier only partially overcome with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1469. Then the Central System, with its centrepiece the Guadarrama mountains to the north of Madrid, separates Old from New Castile. The Christians had built up their towns and settlements behind the Guadarrama, in the land of chestnut, snow and Romanesque churches, before launching the hardest-fought part of the Reconquest, the struggle of the twelfth century for control of New Castile. After New Castile, the Muslims were entrenched behind the Sierra Morena in Andalusia, and beyond and below the Iberian mountains in Valencia. They lost control of these in the thirteenth century. The Sub-Baetic mountains and the desert country of the south-east guaranteed the survival of the last Moorish kingdom, that of Granada, until 1492.

Though the mountains of Spain help to explain some of the human and political development of the peninsula, they were not in themselves great impediments to communication, if the will was there. The Pyrenees and Cantabrians certainly posed formidable problems, with only a limited number of crossings which man or beast could use. The other mountain ranges were more easily passable, at least in the good season. The altitude of the central tableland itself meant, though, that in winter many of the sierras received 20–40 inches of snow, sufficient to block the higher passes for two to three months of the year.⁷ The papal nuncio Camillo Borghese was held up on the road from Aragon to Castile by snow in January 1594, as had been the king himself shortly before, travelling in the opposite direction from Castile to Aragon to hold a parliament there at the beginning of February 1585. The Cortes (parliament) of Castile urged in 1588 that ‘it would be most useful to erect high stone plinths on the mountain passes to mark out the road, for it happens day after day when the snows fall…that travellers lose their way and fall into the ravines’.⁸

In pre-industrial Europe traffic tended to follow the rivers, and here Spain was at a clear disadvantage. As the Venetian ambassador noted in 1602, ‘there are few rivers, and none of them can be called really navigable’. Of the five great...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: AN INHOSPITABLE LAND
• 2: THE FEWNESS OF PEOPLE
• 3: THE LIMITS OF A PEASANT ECONOMY
• 4: TREASURE AND THE COST OF EMPIRE
• 5: FEUDAL LORDS AND VILLAGE POTENTATES
• 6: PATRICIANS AND PAUPERS: THE URBAN COMMONWEALTH
• 7: THE CONSOLIDATION OF AN ARISTOCRACY
• 8: OBEDIENCE TO THE LAW
• 9: THE POLICING OF THE FAMILY
• 10: THE COMMUNITY OF THE FAITHFUL
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY