Revolt of the Comuneros

6 Key excerpts on "Revolt of the Comuneros"

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  Shaping History

  Ordinary People in European Politics, 1500-1700

  • Wayne te Brake(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  As the events in Segovia suggest, however, the Comuneros’ opposition to the royal government involved as well a political realignment within the local community as officials appointed by and oriented to the royal administration were replaced by others who were more responsive to local demands and who were selected by, among others, the representatives of popular parish assemblies. And once they joined the Sacred League, the leaders of the rebellious communes of Castile deepened their political orientation toward ordinary political actors within the urban community by building the league’s defenses on the basis of urban militias mobilized and recruited locally. There is certainly more than a little historical irony in the fact that the Comunero Revolution adopted the defensive form of a sacred league because less than fifty years earlier, in 1476, Queen Isabella had encouraged the chartered cities in her Castilian domain to act as a sacred league—the Sancta Hermandad—and to raise urban militias to maintain public order and support her in her efforts to tame the powerful Castilian nobility. Though the league of cities had been disbanded in 1498, when the Crown once again shifted its dynastic policy toward dependence on the rural nobility, the lessons of this earlier political process had clearly not been lost on the municipalities involved. To deploy the civic militia in opposition to the new king, however, was to create a new kind of internal political dynamic that also entailed the creation of independent municipal councils, or “communes” (hence the name “Comunero”). For the duration of the revolt, at least, the local rulers of the rebellious cities were to be fundamentally dependent on the approval and support of their subjects (see fig. 2a).

  In the late summer of 1520, the political situation in Castile became even more volatile and threatening to the established political order when political disturbances in the countryside began to threaten noble landlords as well as the king. In the village of Dueñas, not far from the

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  Unraveling Abolition

  Legal Culture and Slave Emancipation in Colombia

  • Edgardo Pérez Morales(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  1 Raynal in the New Kingdom? The Comunero Revolution in 1781 was the most serious uprising against Spanish authorities in the New Kingdom of Granada prior to the crisis that ended with independence from Spain (1810–1821). In the populous east of the viceroyalty, around 20,000 people in arms took over several districts and came close to marching on the viceregal capital, Santa Fe (present-day Bogotá). The protesters revolted against recent fiscal and political measures. Common men and women opposed new taxes and restrictions on tobacco and alcohol production and sale. Even some elite criollos (vassals of Spanish stock, born in the New World) carefully mobilized against their replacement in adminis- trative posts with peninsulares (people born in Spain). Indian commu- nities protested a continuing assault on their landholdings. Fearing for their lives, high officials made some concessions, though they later recanted and ordered the execution of the leaders. Besides the protest near the capital, smaller groups of people revolted in other districts, even deposing and killing local magistrates. 1 Although the new policies seemed terribly burdensome, it was the abrasive way they were introduced that most deeply concerned many of the protesters. Traditionally, taxes and policies were implemented after consultation with locals, who had the privilege to petition the king and negotiate over the scope of change. Some bureaucrats warned that a different, unilateral approach might meet with stiff resistance, but Madrid paid little attention, since ministers were by then engaged 12 in efforts to transform government by compromise into absolute rule. They planned to extract as much revenue as possible from Spain’s overseas domains, utilizing those lands as true “colonies” – a concept they borrowed from the vocabulary of French and English policymakers. 2 Many of the protesters in 1781 relied on Castilian political concepts and practices.

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  Colombia before Independence

  Economy, Society, and Politics under Bourbon Rule

  • Anthony McFarlane(Author)
  • 1993(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The meaning of the Comunero rebellion Despite the Comunero rebellions rapid dissolution when rebel terms were accepted by the authorities, some historians have regarded it as a protona- tionalist movement in which leading Creoles aspired for the first time to independence from Spain. 56 In fact, this view is unsupported by convinc- ing evidence. Although it is true that the rebels mounted a great chal- lenge to the Spanish government, their slogan was "Long live the King and down with bad government" and at no stage in the rebellion do we find either mention or sign of any determination to separate from Spain. The idea that leading New Granadan Creoles sought British military and political support for independence in the years immediately after the rebellion is also without foundation. Reports of approaches to the British government emerge from an opaque world of international espionage and are not to be trusted. At most, the reports refer to the activities of a Venezuelan sympathizer of the Comuneros rather than to the Creole patri- ciate of New Granada. 57 If such rumors were taken seriously by the Spanish government, this owed more to Madrid's fears of British inten- tions in the aftermath of the American War of Independence than to any imminent threat of colonial revolution. However, if the Comunero rebel- lion was not an independence movement, it nevertheless caused a very severe political crisis, for it had shown that the crown could not depend on the unconditional obedience of its subjects in New Granada and had revealed the vulnerability of colonial government to a concerted chal- lenge. What, then, was the character of this crisis, and why did a cluster 54. Phelan, The People and the King, pp. 200-29. 55. Cardenas Acosta, El Movimiento Comunal, p.

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  Seventeenth-Century Europe

  State, Conflict and Social Order in Europe 1598-1700

  • Thomas Munck(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  When the province accepted renewed submission to the Habsburgs in 1652 its traditional notoriously autonomous constitutions were confirmed, but the economic and social damage took much longer to repair. The Catalan revolt, whose origins in terms of Spanish government policy and local sensibilities have been so brilliantly analysed by J. H. Elliott, does not appear to have realised much of its social revolution-ary potential. The two main driving forces behind the movement – the lower orders with long-standing social grievances, and the ruling elite – had aims which were ultimately incompatible once the Spanish yoke had been thrown off. As elsewhere in Europe, no effective challenge to noble–seigneurial domination could be maintained, least of all in a period of economic instability. Significantly, the loyalty of the already crippled Castile, the heart of Philip IV’s dominions, was not shaken by Portuguese or Catalan protests, and there were consequently no major changes in the Spanish system of government. The revolts in Palermo and Naples in 1647 merely confirmed amongst other things that the fiscal, administrative and military resources of a major 226 Seventeenth-Century Europe warring power were dangerously inadequate. In fact, a state bank-ruptcy was declared shortly afterwards, ruining many Portuguese and Genoese asiento -holders, and driving up the cost of future loans even further. But the Spanish giant wobbled on, pursuing the war against France to a stalemate in 1659 and surviving the unexpected attack of Cromwell in 1655. While accepting that there was a real revolutionary ‘crisis’ in Catalonia itself, we may therefore agree with R. A. Stradling that the Spanish system as a whole experienced no such sudden jolt. Instead, it underwent piecemeal loss of possessions, colonial resources and military reputation through a series of costly and futile conflicts, starting with the Dutch war of independence in the later sixteenth century and not ending until 1715.

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  Gunpowder and Incense

  The Catholic Church and the Spanish Civil War

  • Hilari Raguer, Gerald Howson(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  17

  Anti-communism?

  Anti-communism occupies the second place in the list of reasons offered by the rebels for the uprising. Most of the proclamations of the pronunciamiento mention the imminent danger of the ‘sovietization’ or ‘bolshevikization’ that was, according to them, threatening Spain. Yet in reality, when the war broke out the Communist Party of Spain could count on very few effective members. In the Cortes Constituyentes of 1931 there was not a single Communist deputy, in those of 1933 there was only one and in 1936, despite the triumph of the Popular Front, of the 473 deputies, only seventeen were Communist. Later, Francoist propaganda published, as one of the key items of the so-called ‘Legal Report on the Validity of the Uprising’, some documents which were supposed to prove that the Communists had been preparing a revolution for the spring of 1936. It detailed the horrible crimes that were being planned, which left the military no choice but to anticipate the revolution by a coup of their own. Today, however, all historians recognize the falsity of those papers. Southworth, simply by analysing the internal content of the documents themselves and by examining the inconsistencies found in successively published versions, demonstrated with irrefutable methodological rigour that they were an imposture.18 Even an author as Francoist as Ricardo de la Cierva, when he published Los documentos de la primavera trágica in 1967, thought it unacceptable to include those relating to the alleged conspiracy, and in a later work he even went so far as to ridicule the ‘foolish acceptance of these documents by numerous propagandists and even by some distinguished historians’.19 One of the secondary effects of this was precisely the empowerment of a Communism which, until then, had been almost non-existent. Four months into the conflict, the American ambassador wrote in one of his despatches, ‘This war is making communists’.20

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  The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union, and Communism

  • Stanley G. Payne(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  the military rebellion that began the Spanish Civil War was a pre-emptive strike by approximately half of the army, led by a diverse cadre of oªcers, primarily of middle and junior rank. It initially sought a new, more conservative and authoritarian republic that would put an end to the growing anarchy, the pervasive misgovernment or lack of government by the left Repub-licans, and the mounting threat from a profoundly disunified but ever-expanding and violent revolutionary left. Later, after the rebellion had begun, the insurgents would release forged documentation in an e¤ort to show that the Comintern planned to take over the government no later than August. 1 Though some in-dividual Communists may have engaged in loose talk of that sort, the evidence is clear that the Comintern intended to continue the Popular Front formula indefinitely and had no such immediate plan or timetable in mind. Nor is it even likely that most of the rebel leaders believed it did, for they well knew that the great bulk of the prerevolutionary agitation and activity stemmed from Socialists and anarchosyndicalists. At the same time, it should be kept in mind that “communism” had come to serve the right as a catchall term for the entire revolutionary left, just as the left called all the right “fascist.” The greatly increased presence, propaganda, and activism of the PCE in Madrid during the spring and early summer of 1936 only heightened this tendency. The more moderate sectors of the Popular Front had called time and again for patience, moderation, and discipline, failing to grasp that the prerevolutionary violence was less a tactic than a fundamental attitude on the worker left that chapter six Communism and the Spanish Revolution July–August 1936 109 could not readily be restrained—not that the government ever took any serious measures to restrain it.

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