Spain: A Unique History (20 page)

There were a multiplicity of legal or constitutional systems to be dealt with and a wide variety of identities and sensibilities that needed to be respected, even within the peninsula. This raised the question not merely of pluralistic internal policy, accommodated through the various administrative councils ("Council of Castile," etc.), but also the question of the power of the crown itself. Political theory throughout western Europe held that authority or sovereignty was derived from the general community, but that the monarchy held "preeminent" power (including the right to make new law) and was answerable ultimately to God, although it was expected to abide by the established laws of each principality. On various occasions the Castilian Cortes of the fifteenth century had emphasized that God "made kings his vicars on earth," consistent with the medieval doctrine of the sacralization of monarchy and its functions.
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Moreover, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there had developed the concept of the crown's "poderío absoluto" (absolute authority), giving rise to the early modern doctrine of "absolute monarchy," for long exaggerated by historians. The united monarchy of Spain rarely claimed absolute power, especially during the sixteenth century, and the doctrine referred not to absolute despotic power but to the hierarchical superiority and independence or indivisibility of royal authority, which also had the power to make new laws. Even in Castile, the Cortes and the cities continued in various ways to contest legally the powers and policies of the crown.
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Outside the peninsula, the variety of principalities and legal systems was bewildering, but in the Habsburg Italian states, the largest part of the dynastic empire outside Spain and the Low Countries, a considerable sense of loyalty and legitimacy was maintained, and even at the low point under Carlos II there was little susceptibility to French political blandishments.

The word
patria
was employed as flexibly and on as many different levels as the word "nation."
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In his
Tesoro de la lengua castellana
of 1611, Sebastián de Covarrubias defined the term as "Patria: the land where one was born. It is a Latin term, patria. Compatriot, someone from the same place." In the expansive
Siete Partidas
, Alfonso X had been the first European writer to employ the term in the vernacular, without giving it any precise application. As distinct from the traditional use of nation, the word "patria" did not connote simply a fact of origin (however uncertain in application) but also a mutual relationship of duty and responsibility. The term was most commonly used for individual principalities, and even more for local regions and districts, for what would become known in colloquial Castilian as the "patria chica" (little fatherland).

The writing of history advanced rapidly during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and on all levels.
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It culminated in the first great history of Spain, Juan de Mariana's
Historia general de España
(Latin, 1592; Castilian, 1601), which would remain the standard work for two and a half centuries. This was followed during the first half of the seventeenth century by a series of works by Castilian authors affirming Spain in the form of the policies of the monarchy and to some extent of the institutions of Castile. Fray Juan de Salazar, in his
Política española
(1619), hailed common government of the peninsula for the Spanish as a "chosen people," a not uncommon attitude at court and among part of the Castilian elite.

Integrationism culminated in the program of the Conde-Duque de Olivares for Felipe IV to govern as "king of Spain," though even this continued to respect the distinct politico-legal systems. The result was dismaying to the Conde-Duque, who continued to identify nation and national in the traditional sense as concepts limited to the separate principalities, and variously lamented "Cursed be nations, and a curse on national men!" and "I am not national, which is something for children," off-cited complaints.
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Although Castile was the main base of the state and also contained more advocates of a more integrated system, Castile itself remained a specific nation in this traditional sense and a patria in the common usage, and a strong sense of distinct Castilian identity remained, with its own interests.
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By the early seventeenth century, the term "nation" was being used in the peninsula in at least three different ways. The most common usage referred to individual kingdoms or principalities. Beyond that for a small minority stood the "nation of Spain," though, contradictorily, it in turn was held to be made up of lesser nations. A very few even referred to a sort of "monarchist nation" that embraced all nations or principalities of the entire western Habsburg dynasty, but that was too complex and tenuous a usage to have much currency.

Historical works devoted to principalities and smaller areas proved yet more common, however, with the popularity of the genre known as "corografía," devoted to local histories. The affirmation of an integrated all-Spanish policy, which never went very far before Olivares, was met in turn by vigorous new affirmation of the identities and laws and constitutional systems of the several principalities, particularly in the Basque provinces and in Catalonia but also in some other regions. Catalan writers and historians developed their own myth of an absolutely separate and autonomous ethnogenesis during the ninth and tenth centuries.
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If Mariana had set a new standard for Spanish historical writing, the new regionalist histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth often went in a diametrically opposite direction, led particularly by the Vizcayans, as they elaborated fantasies, which in some cases they knew had no basis in fact.

The Habsburg dynasty has been almost universally, and accurately, criticized for the stubbornness and destructiveness of its foreign and fiscal policies. Its domestic policy, however, was modest in the extreme, compared with the domestic policies of the French and English monarchies, which slowly but steadily worked to build broader and more united polities. The Spanish Habsburgs accepted a highly legalist interpretation of the domestic status quo, which they rarely tried to change. The kingdom of Castile had been made increasingly responsive to the crown, its Cortes after 1538 the only European parliament composed exclusively of the third estate. It had relatively effective fiscal and judicial institutions, as well as an aristocracy generally trained to cooperate with the crown. This contrasted sharply with the elaborate but ossified constitutional structures of the Aragonese principalities, intensely elitist and oppressive, unwilling to pay any new taxes or even contribute to the common defense. Felipe IV was a more astute ruler than he has usually been given credit for; he understood the desirability of achieving equal rights and responsibilities in all the Spanish principalities — even though at no time was so sweeping a reform proposed, even by Olivares.
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The separatist conflicts developed by Portugal and Catalonia in 1640 were in neither case united patriotic struggles, since each also involved an internal civil war, though the supporters of the separatist policy were stronger in both instances. By the second half of the seventeenth century traditionalist particularism was once more dominant, though the independence of Portugal and the reconquest of Catalonia began for the first time to draw the modern dividing line of Spain and Spanish, stopping at the Portuguese frontier but including all the rest of the peninsula. Such a definition was finally accepted by the Portuguese after the early eighteenth century.

The Asturian-Castilian crown had intermittently aspired to "empire" since the end of the ninth century, an empire that was to extend over the entire peninsula and then, in a further projection of the Reconquest, into North Africa, as well. The crown of Aragon had created a genuine Mediterranean empire that included a degree of indirect hegemony over small portions of North Africa, though it never pretended to be more than an extended "composed monarchy." The conquest of Granada revived classic Castilian aspirations that began to be realized through the subjugation of several sites on the African coast, before the attention of the crown was diverted. Interest in crusading had revived in various parts of Europe after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, but nowhere else was this so strong as in the Iberian Peninsula, for the obvious combination of historical, political, geographical, and cultural reasons.

Carlos V realized the old ambition of Alfonso el Sabio to be elected head of the central European Holy Roman Empire, being in as strong a position to do so as that of the Rey Sabio had been weak. The Holy Roman Empire — which because of its loose, secular, and essentially Germanic structure has been described as "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire" — was the classic historic European "empire" supposedly deriving its origins and legitimacy from Charlemagne and from Rome itself. As a central European entity, however, it represented something quite different from the historic ambitions of the crown of Castile.

Carlos V assumed the imperial title during the first phase of the Protestant Reformation and sought to restore religious unity and achieve harmony in Europe, tasks totally beyond his reach. Early in his imperial reign, his advisors posited the goal of achieving "universal empire," not in the sense that Don Carlos would achieve direct sovereignty over all European states, but that he would achieve a position of hegemonic leadership that would guarantee peace and harmony. This was not to be, but instead inaugurated the beginning of the modern era of what would much later be known as the "balance of power," as other European states allied in opposition to any one dominant force. By the middle of the century both Spanish and imperial foreign policy had become essentially defensive, but the dynastic possessions of the crown, even after the imperial title and the central European domains had been relinquished, remained so extensive that attempting to hold the status quo meant endless warfare in Italy, France, the Low Countries, central Europe, and at times against England. Further charges of seeking "universal monarchy" were hurled against the Spanish crown, after which the target for nearly two centuries would be France. Moreover, for most of the sixteenth century, the responsibility of defending the Islamic frontier cost as much as the wars in Europe and even more in loss of lives. This stood as a basic Spanish obligation, not shared to the same extent by any other state, a burden that eased only after 1585. It was a task that the representatives of Castilian taxpayers were willing to bear, while they frequently urged the crown to seek peace and reduce military obligations in Europe.

Henry Kamen has emphasized the international nature of the leadership, administration, financing, and military resources of the far-flung domains of the Spanish monarchy.
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This is to a considerable degree correct, for the crown followed not a "Spanish" but a dynastic policy that relied considerably on non-Spanish personnel. The absence of Hispanocentrism in this policy sometimes elicited strong protests from Castilians, but Castile remained its financial and military base and, even though most of the crown's soldiers were not Spanish, the Spanish Tercios (infantry battalions) remained the hard core of its armed forces.
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The American empire, which eventually expanded into the first true world empire that included possessions in the Pacific, raised different problems. Dominion was nominally derived from papal authorization, which, however, pertained only to general sovereignty, not to the ownership of land or the domination and exploitation of the native population. This produced modern Europe's first moral confrontation with the issues of colonialism and imperialism. Religious and intellectual figures in Spain and Spanish America addressed the resulting dilemmas with honesty, compassion, and intellectual originality, resulting in new development of natural law and innovations in international law as well, but the humane and pathbreaking definitions by part of the religious and intellectual elite were never really implemented, and the new empire mostly became domination pure and simple.
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Ancient Rome served as a kind of conceptual model, though not as a practical model, while the conquest of exotic peoples also awakened a new consciousness in reflective Spaniards, who by the sixteenth century did not find the origins of Spain in the Visigoths but to an increasing degree in the native population of the peninsula who had resisted the Romans, just as Indians resisted Spaniards.
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Similarly, from the very beginning in the 1580s North American Indians reminded some Englishmen of the original Britons and Picts of their own home island.

The overseas empire was never termed such by the monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was technically just the patrimony of the crown of Castile, though contemporary Europeans considered all this simply the "Spanish empire." There was no historical precedent for this kind of empire, and its territories were never called "colonies" prior to the eighteenth century. Rather, they were to some extent considered overseas equivalents of the lands won in the peninsular reconquest, and were made new "reinos" (lit., kingdoms) of the crown of Castile.

The American empire received little attention and not that much emigration during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the crown's main concern being reception of the gold and silver (primarily the latter) that became crucial to its finances. The estimates are that no more than 300,000 Spaniards went to America during the entire colonial period, while not all the survivors of the journey remained there permanently. These were just enough to establish the beginning of a new hybrid creole and mestizo society, which, largely left to its own devices, proved impressively loyal and resilient amid the trials of the seventeenth century.

A surprisingly small number of colonizers thus achieved complete success in laying down the roots of a unique new society, but in later times its development would become increasingly problematic, the very opposite of the success story of North America. The differences in many ways were the differences between early modern Spain and seventeenth-century England. Indeed, England was rapidly overtaking Holland as the most modern and innovative country in Europe, while Spain during the imperial era largely failed in the modernization struggle.
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The Spanish empire constituted a totally unique historical precedent to which the English paid considerable attention, but the newer "commercial empires" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries pursued different policies and priorities. The empire was not used as a factor of integration or nation-building within the peninsula, because such a goal simply did not exist prior to the eighteenth century, leaving the empire primarily the preserve of Castilians and Basques. Similarly, the priorities of rigid state regulation of commerce (even though the economy was based on private enterprise) and emphasis on bullion extraction were narrowly conceived and precluded use of the empire to achieve economic development at home. When the priorities changed in the second half of the eighteenth century, the era of the empire was nearly over.
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