The Birth of a Composite Monarchy: Medieval Foundations and Institutional Framework

The most obvious driver of the formation of the Hispanic monarchy in the sixteenth century was the dynamic expansion of the peninsula's Christian kingdoms, whose frontiers were pushed both north and south.

The struggle in the south was characterized by a continuous southward push of the frontier separating the Christian kingdoms from those territories ruled by the Caliphate. The 1212 Battle of the Navas de Tolosa—between the armies of Alfonso

III of Castile, Peter II of Aragon, and Sancho VII of Navarre, with the significant intervention of the archiepiscopal authority of Toledo—signaled a point of no re­turn between two worlds that had been in close contact for centuries.

It was in this context that the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon formed their dynastic alliance. The 1469 marriage between Ferdinand II and Isabella I, the so-called Catholic monarchs, and their ascension to the throne 10 years later, represented the fusion of two different visions of rule: that of the Aragonese king—Mediterranean, Neapolitan, and Italian—and that of the queen from the Castilian plateau—a warring land whose only access to the sea came through Basque seamen, along with the conquest of Murcia and western Andalusia. That dynastic alliance also represented the basis of the Catholic monarchy with its European, African, Atlantic, and American projec­tion, one of the greatest conglomerations of territorial power of its time. In the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Pope Alexander II arbitrated between the “reyes Catolicos” of Castile and Aragon and John II of Portugal, drawing a north-south line in the Atlantic that granted the Spanish any new territories discovered west of the Antilles, and the Portuguese any territories to its east, up to the Cape of Good Hope.

Along with their domains, Charles also inherited his parents' enemies, in par­ticular the French kings, with whom he had several border conflicts (for instance, over the Navarre lands north of the Pyrenees cited earlier, as well as northern Italy). He inherited, as well, the enmity of the Ottoman Turks, religious rivals whom his

ancestors had fought for nearly a century over control of the Mediterranean. These conflicts eroded Castile's capacity for war at the same time that Charles' position as Carolingian heir imposed on him the task of asserting authority over the rest of the continental powers. And as if this was not enough, the Protestant Reformation undermined the papacy's role as a diplomatic and military arbiter, something that the Holy Roman emperor was supposed to represent. In the Atlantic, the Dutch Provinces (1568-1581) and England since the 1580s no longer accepted the au­thority of the papal concessions to the Spanish Catholic king.

Charles and his successor Philip, through sustained imperial efforts, consolidated the three Iberian monarchies—that is, the crowns of Castile, the Aragon, and Portugal (however unevenly)—through a mixed strategy of inheritance and con­quest, on and off the peninsula. Meanwhile, several factors conspired to shrink the empire in Europe: wars with France; the failure of the Spanish Armada off Great Britain; continued reform in Germany and Northern Europe; and finally, the shifting of imperial priority toward the New World, Africa, and Asia.

If such continental entanglements were not enough, Castile's significance increased greatly when it incorporated American territories (in what was called an “accessory union” by the seventeenth-century jurist Juan de Solorzano Pereira). And with Philip II's accession to the Portuguese throne in 1580, this complex lat­ticework was augmented further by the peninsular domains of the Avis dynasty and their important network offeitorias, or trading posts, across coastal Africa, South Asia, and even Japan.

This tradition of governance through separate Councils continued despite conflicts, either within the Councils themselves, or between them and the Crown. At the heart of each was the ongoing struggle between the Royal Treasury and the aristocracy, both of whom were seeking new sources of income, usually at the ex­pense of other sectors, such as prosperous farmers or the indebted urban elite. In the fifteenth century, for instance, conflicts over peasants' compulsory labor (remenga) resulted in a long and bloody civil war in Catalonia (1462-1472). A similar issue lay behind the Irmandino Wars (1467-1470) in Galicia. In the first decades of the six­teenth century, conflict erupted in the prosperous city of Valencia and its agrarian hinterland, which was very similar to the troubles that afflicted the kingdom of Mallorca. These were urban revolts against the excessive demands of both the Crown and the local aristocracy, which spread to the countryside and transformed into rebellions against feudal demands. Those years also witnessed the two Palermo revolts, which the king—fearing French intervention in the island—r epressed heavily. Most politically significant, however, was the early sixteenth-century up­rising of the Castilian cities against the interference of Emperor Charles and his foreign court in Castilian affairs.

During the following decades, moreover, internal conflict in the American territories increased greatly. The first generation of conquistadors tried to main­tain control over the American territories (along with the labor of the indigenous population). The Crown, in turn, issued new legislation to curb their feudalizing ambitions. The so-called encomendero revolts, alongside the related civil wars be­tween the Spaniards, threatened to slow the consolidation of the first European communities in the New World. In New Spain, pressure from the encomenderos led to the temporary suspension of the new legislation, so that the direct relations be­tween the Indians and the encomenderos that the Crown had wished to suppress con­tinued unchecked. Nevertheless, the encomenderos, although they had the support of the highest civil and religious authorities in Mexico, could not prevent the Crown from changing the encomienda itself— that is, the existing system of enforced native labor—into so-called repartimientos (community shared work). The encomiendas were thus transformed into institutions with limited heredity. In Tawantinsuyu, the former Inca Empire, open war between the followers of the Pizarro brothers and Diego de Almagro raged on and off from the 1530s through the mid-1550s (indeed, this long conflict set the scene for the encomendero revolt of 1544). It was only in 1554 that Viceregal authority finally prevailed. The American territories could only be said to have been stabilized with the liquidation of the encomenderos, along with the organizational reform of religious and secular institutions.

In Europe, however—especially in the 1530s and 1540s, regardless of the con­solidation of the imperial frontier or the accommodation of its many territorial elites—political and religious fault lines continued to shape the features of the em­pire. It gave the empire a sense of being a threatened citadel. For an imperial polity whose essence lay in the conqueror society of Castile, rivalries with the Turks in the western Mediterranean were no minor matter. They were linked, after all, with the defense of the western peninsular coast, the Balearic Islands, and the Crown's Italian domains. Spain's failed takeover of Algiers in 1519 initiated this stage of the conflict, and remained active until 1571 and the Battle of Lepanto, which settled the various Mediterranean spheres of influence. The struggle to impose religious unity across the kingdom (often through suppression of minorities) led to the parallel persecution of so-called Judaizers (baptized Jews of doubtful conviction) as well as the remaining Andalusian populace. This culminated in the two expulsions of the “Moorish” (morisco) population: the first came after the Granada War in 1568, and the second in 1609, when the pre-conquest inhabitants of the Kingdom of Aragon were “asked” to leave. From that time forward, the tribunals of the Holy Office were charged with guaranteeing Catholic homogeneity vis-à-vis non-Catholics (which included alumbrados—the Spanish word for Protestants). In the context of such in­ternecine struggle, a belief that heresy was a hereditary characteristic (a notion that magnified the perceived danger that non-Catholics posed) led to the development of a concept of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre, or blood cleansing). This sin­ister instrument of Catholic unity would, in turn, be exported to America, where it would have unexpected consequences, creating a colonial society based upon an ambiguous but central taxonomy that was rooted in genealogy, or “caste.”^[1953]

But the deepest blow to the Spanish Crown's aspiration to universality came in the form of the Protestant Reformation, especially in its German territories. Since the Inter Caetera papal bull of 1493 (and the subsequent Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494), which had defined the Spanish and Portuguese division of the New World, Spanish kings had acted upon a very precise theory of world sovereignty. In prac­tice, that placed a heavy responsibility on the back of the monarchy. Adding to this burden, the Council of Trent—which attempted to reform Catholicism—failed to stop the expansion of Protestantism in Central Europe and the North Atlantic. Two branches—Calvinist and Lutheran—developed, in addition to the Church of England, which formed a separate and nationalistic denomination under the auspices of the king of England in 1534. The major Atlantic empires would reproduce this religious divide in the New World.^[1954] The Spanish Empire's loss of the German states, as well as the Low Countries' rebellion of 1568-1581—both largely attributable to the Protestant Reformation—had catastrophic consequences for the monarchy in terms of its geopolitical position, finances, and legitimacy. The most tangible aspect of this crisis was the construction of the so-called Spanish Road, a military supply route winding through Crown and neutral territories that was used to send troops from northern Italy to the Low Countries. The Spanish Road re­quired immense military effort and effectively ruined the Crown's finances.^[1955] Finally, the defeat of the Invincible Armada off the coast of Britain in 1588 would seal off the possibility of a military solution to the religious and political rebellions of the emer­gent North Atlantic powers.