The Spanish kingdoms

The difference between England and France has some parallel in the Iberian peninsula, where Aragon-Catalonia resembled England and Castile resembled France. Aragon-Catalonia had a strong assembly and limited monarchy.⁵⁷ Here burghers, notably those of Barcelona, played an important part together with the nobility, which led to the development of a reasonably effective constitutional government.

During the period of expansion in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a large part of the population of Castile had been militarily active and received corre­sponding political influence, notably through the governments of the towns. The country did have a medieval assembly of some importance, although the king was stronger here than in Aragon. After the great conquests in the first half of the thirteenth century, Castile was by far the largest kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula. It thus had similar problems as France. Moreover, it consisted of parts that had earlier been independent kingdoms and it was thinly populated, notably in the centre, the Castilian Plain, which consists of dry and barren highland, mostly used for sheep farming. This became even more dominant with the reduction of the population resulting from the expulsion of the Moors. The prolonged wars against them had necessitated a certain unity under the king’s leadership, whereas the period after the death of the great conquering King Ferdinand III (1252) was marked by a series of inner struggles. Their cause was the increasing power and wealth of the nobles who appropriated most of the lands conquered from the Moors in the thirteenth century, combined with the absence of further foreign expansion. The troubled period continued until the reign of the two ‘Catholic kings’, Ferdinand of Aragon (1479—1516) and Isabella of Castile (1474—1504), who united the two countries in a personal union and whose reigns have traditionally been regarded as the most glorious in Spanish history.

Aragon was somewhat more peaceful in the Middle Ages, possibly because of a more expansive foreign policy, directed towards conquests in the Mediterranean area, Sicily, Sardinia, eventually also Southern Italy and the Byzantine Empire during its period of decline in the fourteenth century. Despite its internal troubles, however, Castile was the more successful of the two in the later Middle Ages. Aragon’s expansion in the Mediterranean came to an end, partly as the result of the rise of the Ottoman Empire, whereas Castilian merchants profited from the trade with England and Flanders. In addition, Castile, together with Portugal, which had enjoyed internal peace under a strong monarchy during most of the period, began the expansion towards the west and south that eventually led to the Great Dis­coveries. The difference between the two countries survived the personal union between them in 1479 and continued until the defeat of Aragon during the War of the Spanish Succession (1702—14), when the country became integrated into the larger Spanish kingdom. Thus, when Aragon did not develop in the same way in the early modern period as England and the Dutch Republic, the explanation must largely be sought in the union with Castile, in which it was clearly the weaker partner, combined with the general weakening of the Mediterranean powers during this period. Nor did the country profit from the trade with America and was therefore probably too weak economically to develop in the same way as England and the Dutch Republic.

Constitutionally, the foundation of royal absolutism in Castile was laid during the troubled period of the fifteenth century. Both John II (1406—54) and Henry IV (1454—74), neither of whom was a particularly strong king, solemnly proclaimed royal absolutism and resisted any claims from the nobles or the cartes to share the power of the ruler.⁵⁸ Their successors, Ferdinand and Isabella and later the Habsburgs, made the claim a reality. As was the case in contemporary France, the inner struggles had demonstrated that only a strong monarchy was able to create stability in the country.

A curious feature of royal absolutism in Spain is the abolition of royal corona­tion. The last coronation in Castile was that of John I in 1379 and the last in Aragon that of Ferdinand I in 1414. The king also lacked the normal regalia, sceptre, crown and throne. A possible explanation for this is the Muslim influence; for Muslim rulers, such distinctions were blasphemy. Nevertheless, the king was clearly different from other humans, as expressed in the development towards absolute monarchy and in the strong emphasis on the Spanish king as the defender of the Christian faith.⁵⁹

The revival of Spain in the following period seems to have been the result, partly of the political skill of Ferdinand and Isabella and partly of the new oppor­tunities for the nobility resulting from the Great Discoveries and the ambitious foreign policy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, when the Castilian cartes dwindled into insignificance in the sixteenth century whereas the English Parliament prospered, the reason was not that the king of Spain had plenty of gold and silver from America while the poor English monarch depended on taxes.⁶⁰ The Spanish king lived from hand to mouth and went bankrupt eight times in the period 1557—1680, because of costly wars and bad financial manage­ment, including the tax exemption of the nobles. In 1647—48, the estimated annual expenses amounted to four times the income.⁶¹ Although the English king at the time was far from rich, he managed better financially than his Spanish counterpart, partly because he was less involved in war and partly because he could tax the nobility with consent from Parliament. Like France, Spain thus serves as an exam­ple of war weakening rather than strengthening the state.

In several respects, however, Spain faced greater problems than France. The Habsburgs, who inherited the Spanish throne in 1516, used Spain and its colonies as a base for an ambitious foreign policy that involved the country in an almost continuous war throughout the sixteenth century. Apart from the colonies, which were exploited in a way that gave the country significantly less surplus than its competitors, Spain was not a rich country, with relatively poor agricultural land and less than half the population of France. Spain was also more composite than France. In addition to the fact that the three main kingdoms on the Iberian peninsula, Castile, Aragon and Valencia, were largely independent units, only joined in a personal union, the king of Spain also governed various other largely separate units, like the Kingdom of Naples and other Italian units, the Low Countries and Franche Comte. The strict religious policy, including the persecu­tion and eventual expulsion of Moors and Jews, weakened the country econom­ically as well as intellectually. Finally, a series of weak kings after the death of Philip II (1598), notably Charles II (1665—1700), contributed further to the decline of the country. The new dynasty from 1700, the Bourbons, resulted in some improve­ment but the country never regained its position as a great power.⁶²