Gold
Prologue
In 1519, the Little Santa Maria was the first ship ever to reach Europe from the newly settled shores of Mexico. A large gold disc was an extraordinary treasure that had been sent by Cortes and his men as a present to the newly crowned King of Spain, Charles of Gent.
The Age of Chivalry: Charles V
Realms of Gold
Until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the Habsburg lands engaged with their neighbors in a constantly fluctuating but never-ending round of conflict and diplomacy.
Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas has been one of the earliest colonists of Santo Domingo, founded by Columbus on the island of Hispaniola.
By defeating Francis I of France in the election for the imperial crown, Charles had deeply wounded the pride of a dangerous and powerful rival. Charles was afraid France will forge the alliance with England (Henrik VIII). Henrik was married to Charles aunt, Catherine of Aragon.
Peter Martyr was the official court historian and an Italian humanist who first gave currency to the idea of a ‘New World’.
Habsburgs borrow to pay for their political and military ambitions in the rest of Europe and the debt was secured against Castilian tax revenue. It is a cycle that continued until 1648 and beyond.
Holy Roman Emperor
On 20 May 1520 Charles V sailed to England and he was sighted off Dover on 26 May.
The alliance was forged between Spain and England, Charles promised to marry Mary Tudor. But he only fulfilled that promise in 1554, when he married his son Philip II with Mary.
There were turbulent times, the main battle in Europe was between Protestant Reform and Catholic orthodoxy.
In Spain they had the Communero Revolt that was broken down in 1521. But Francis I took advantage of that situation and marched into the small frontier kingdom of Navarre. Among the defenders was also Ignatius Loyola. During hard times he read The Life of Christ by Rudolph the Carthusian. He later founded the Society of Jesus and became one of the most religious driven person of his age.
Isabella of Portugal
Charles returned to Spain with a massive debts, an immensely egotistical sense of his responsibility as a Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor. He married the Castilians’ preferred choice of queen, Isabella of Portugal, in 1526.
Charles keep on fighting with France, this time in Italy. One of the soldiers was also sixteen-year old Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, the future third Duke of Alba. They won on the Emperor’s birthday, 24. February 1525. He was a quarter of the century old.
Isabela was portraited by Titian’s in 1548. The portrait was commissioned by Charles in 1543. She was a lady very interested in fashion and jewelry. The dress she wore in Seville was almost certainly made in Granada, then the heart of the Spanish silk industry, home to the best Musli craftsmen and seamstresses.
As the scene of Ferdinand and Isabella’s decisive victory over the Moors, Granada held a bewitching symbolism for Charles, for it spoke to his dynastic destiny: as Holy Roman Emperor, he must now lead Christendom against the formidable, perhaps insurmountable threat posed by the Ottoman Turks.
Across the centuries, Almoravids, Almohads, and the Nasrid sultans built the Alhambra to stand sentinel over the town and market gardens of the fertile vega. Charles spent 1526 summer there. And he was thinking of Alhambra as his tomb.
Arms and Letters: Garcilaso and Alba
21 May 1527 Philip was born.
Charles was still fighting France in Italy. Two crucial changes in fortune saved Naples and buried Francis’s ambitions in Italy for ever. First, the wily and silver-tongued Marquis of Vasto managed to persuade Adrea Doria to change sides. Second, a virulent epidemic described by contemporaries as plague struck Naples and forced Francis to lift the siege.
The French Queen Mother, Louise of Savoy, and Margaret of Austria, Charles’s Regent of the Netherlands and Isabela met at Cambrai and agree on the Ladies’ Peace that resolved Charles and Francis’s constant feuding.
Charles had spent the summer of 1530 searching for some sort of reconciliation between the Protestant and the Catholic Church.
Charles was also preparing a big armada for Ottomans. In 1532 he was launching campaign at Ratisbon. His goal was Tunis. He returned triumphant from Tunis as ‘Carolus Africanus’ first to Sicily and then Naples.
ON 19 February 1536, the news arrived that Francise I had again invaded Milan. But he was again beaten and he had hide in Avignon.
Garcilaso also died and his death heralded the end of the Age of Chivalry.
Rule of Law
After the Comunero Revolt , fundamental social and economic change was taking place at a disorientating pace as money poured in from the Americas.
Castilians began to place their trust in the newly empowered Crown and instead of going into battle they went to law.
The dispute between Columbus’ descendants and the Crown over their title to lands in the New World, first field in 1504, famously dragged on into the eighteenth century.
In November 1542, a special committee of the Council of the Indies led by Las Casas, had drafted new legislation and Charles put his signature to these New Laws of Burgos. No Indian could be enslaved under any pretext. But colonists reacted with fury.
Isabela died in 1539, after her newborn boy died.
Charles seriously turned to the complicated business of succession. He hoped to keep his dominions concentrated in Philip’s hands, but his brother Ferdinand wanted the Empire and the Netherlands for himself and his son Maximilian.
Death of the Emperor
The sixteen-year-old Prince Philip had really become a man in 1543, the year in which he assumed the regency of Spain in his own right and in which he also married his cousin Maria Manuela of Portugal.
He went on a trip around his kingdom. At Milan he met Titian. He also went to Trent, Augsburg and then the Prince and the Emperor were finally reunited in Brussels on 1 April 1549.
Charles and Ferdinand began to negotiate the imperial succession, with Mary of Hungary attempting to mediate.
In 1552, Maurice of Saxony abandoned the Emperor and joined the Protestant cause. Charles was a broken man, racked by disease, submerged by debt and short of money to spend.
He secured English alliance by negotiating a marriage between Philip and the thirty-six-year-old Mary Tudor, Queen of England. The wedding took place at Winchester on 25 July 1554.
In 1554, Queen Juana la Loca finally died in Tordesillas. Philip was the new ruler of the Netherlands. On 16 January the following year, Charles then transferred his Spanish crowns to his son. In September he settled the religious question at Augsburg. The princes of the region should decide the religion of the subjects. He did not formally abdicate the imperial crown until 1558, when it went to Ferdinand and in due course it would pass to Maximilian. The Habsburg inheritance would soon be divided for ever.
Philip signed a treaty with France on 3 April 1559.
The Age of Bureaucracy: Philip II
El Escorial and El Greco
The Escorial is Philip II’s very personal, awe inspiring essay on the greatness of God, the grandeur of the Habsburg, the wonders of Empire and the centrality of Castile. He chose as his architect a Spaniard called Juan Bautista de Toledo. But stress killed him in 1567. Juan de Herrera was the new chief architect.
Philip ruled ‘an Empire on which the sun never set’ from a monk’s cell, relying entirely on written instructions based on other men’s reported experience of the reality of his realms.
Philip was obsessed with Hieronymus Bosch. He also liked Titian.
Since Philip’s return to Spain in 1558, he had been considering compiling a comprehensive atlas of his lands in Castile and the Spanish Indies.
Philip understood that he needed strong centralized bureaucracy. He was interested in the work of Majorcan philosopher Ramon Lull. And he was also briefly seduced by alchemy.
In 1573 Philip ordered the remains of his deceased family to be brought to the Escorial. Elizabeth of Valois, Don Carlos, Charles V.
Philip brought artists from Italy to Escorial. El Greco was the greatest genius to make that journey. He arrived in Toledo in 1577.
A century ago, it was obvious to crudite Spaniards that El Greco had been crucially by the greatest Spanish artist of the early sixteenth century the sculptor Alonso de Berruguete.
St. Teresa, Mystic Poets and the Inquisition
In the wake of violent rioting across Spain against Jews in the 1390s, many converted to Christianity and during the following century more and more converted out of fear or convenience or for genuine reason of faith.
A marrano was a neophyte who failed to embrace Christianity properly.
The Inquisition was established in 1480 to deal with the persistence of Jewish cultural traits and the perceived problem of willful Judaizing.
Queen Isabel personally ordered the arrest of a group of Jews in Toledo.
During the 1492, amid the victory over Islam at Granada, the catholic monarchs issued an edict requiring all Jews to leave Spain or convert to Christianity.
Old and New Christians were divided by limpieza de sangre or purity of blood according to the Inquisition.
Within two generations largely Judaism in Spain was largely suppressed. Until 1558 the Inquisition became largely directionless, but then two new Protestant cells were discovered in Valladoid and Seville. And the institution was largely revitalized in 1561.
The Netherlands: The Great Bog of Europe
Foreigners always marveled at the wealth of the hard-working easy-trading Dutch.
The Netherlands were vital to the Spanish economy: over three-quarters of Castilian wood, Spain’s only major export, was sold there.
In 1549, Charles V had joined Flanders and Artois to the Dutch- and German-speaking provinces that had formerly been part of the Empire and assumed for himself the title of Lord of Netherlands.
When Philip returned to Spain in 1559, leaving his illegitimate half-sister Margaret of Parma as Regent in Brussels, the Dutch were incensed.
Don Carlos had gone from being a headache of the future to a very current political liability.
Philip was determined to send a formidable army of mainly Spanish veterans from Italy to restore Catholic order in the Netherlands. Duke of Alba agreed to serve as Governor of the Netherlands and Margaret resigned the next year.
Philip’s heir Don Carlos had descended into hopeless lunacy. He died on 24 July 1568.
But in Netherlands Alba was true to his reputation of cruelty that he already gain in Italy. A terrifying piece settled across the Low Countries, but thousands of Netherlanders were fleeing abroad. William of Orange retreated to his ancestral lands in Germany, others went to France. Alba was recalled by Philip and brought home in 1572.
Philip had understood that he could not afford to borrow enough money to defeat the Dutch, Alba’s war had bankrupted him.
The gold and silver from Americas helped the bankers to gain their power. International merchant banking was born. The Fugger family from Augsburg were the heavy-weights of the early sixteenth century. When they refused to borrow to Spain, the old nobility of Genoa stepped in to fill the gap.
The juros – government bonds was one source of money. Interests were usually linked to Castille taxes (sales taxes on salt, wine …).
The other source was asientos, some short term borrowings with very high interest rates.
Juros were also backed by revenues from Americas. But in 1570 the revenue from Americas fell significantly, and on 1 September 1575 Philip effectively declared himself bankrupt, the first sovereign default in history.
Portugal and the Duke of Alba
While Cervantes was in Italy, in 1570, the Ottoman navy captured Cyprus, terrifying Spaniards, the Italian Princes, the Venetians and the Papacy.
In 1571 all that led to the Battle of Lepanto. Spaniards won. Cervantes was part of that battle. He wintered on Sicily to recover from his wound.
In 1578, Sebastian I of Portugal had died childless campaigning in North Africa. He was the last of great house of Avis to rule the Portuguese people. In the battle for succession, Philip engaged Alba for one last time. They won. In 1581, Philip was crowned King of Portugal.
Cervantes was in Portugal for the coronation. He saw the wealth coming from colonies, but Lisbon lacked monumental buildings. Juan de Herrea led an ambitious programme of construction.
Lope de Vega lived as colorful a life as lover, poet and playwright as Cervantes did as a soldier and novelist.
Pirates, Criminals and Tax Collecting
When Cervantes left Algiers for Spain and Portugal in 1580s, he returned to the heart of Empire that with hindsight we know now had reached its zenith.
In Americas they were fighting the Protestant pirates from Englan. Francis Drake was the main one. in 1587 he led an attack in Cadiz.
Philip assembled the Great Armada.
Charles V and Philip II had established a lasting peace in Castile following defeat of the Comuneros. A pax hispanica at home lasted until the Spanish War of Succession at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Cervantes was at that time going to Seville. Seville in sixteenth and seventeenth century was a country where murder and robbery was part of daily life. He also was traveling around Andalusia. He developed his literary characters from the life in ordinary Spain.
Cervantes was in Ecija when he learnt that the Marquis of Santa Cruz had died on 9 February 1587, Medina Sidona replace him as the leader of the Great Armada.
The Great Armada, 1588
On 29 July 1588, the Armada sighted the Lizard, the most southern part of England. They were defeated more due to the wind then English navy.
By June 1589, Cervantes had completed his commission and was in Seville, apparently rolling in money.
‘El Inca’ Garcilaso was born Gomez Suarez de Figueroa, in 1539, at Cuzco, the Inca capital high up in the remote heart of the Andes, five years after Francisco Pizarro completed his conquest of Peru.
The Florida is ostensibly a history of Hernando de Soto’s disastrous attempt to settle the American south-east between 1538 and 1540. Soto was an enormously symbolic figure for Garcilaso because he had been Pizzaro’s right-hand man during the conquest of Peru. He had returned to Spain fabulously wealthy and was made Governor General of ‘La Florida’.
Cervantes agreed with the Crown as an experienced tax collector to collect unpaid taxes in the Kingdom of Granada. But he was involved in some troubled situations and even thrown to jail in Seville.
When Philip II died on 13 September 1598, Castile still felt itself to be powerful, but voices of dissent and doubt were beginning to be raised in the taverns and the salons.
Glitter
Prologue
In 1610, Gaspar Perez de Villagra published his epic poem The History of New Mexico, which tells the story of his participation in the settlement of the Upper Rio Grande. The expedition under the command of Juan de Onate in 1598.
Villagra like Juan de Onate was child of Mexico. He was criollos or creoles.
The colonial economy depended on Indian labour and agriculture, which it had co-opted through the system of encomiendas by which indigenous American social and political groups were reorganized to pay tribute to Spanish masters.
The European population in the New World increased five-fold, from about 120.000 in 1570 to 650.000 in 1650. Over the same period the combined population of Africans and mixed-race castas or castes grew similarly from 230.000 to 1.3 million. The number of indigenous Americans collapsed by 93 percent in the first century or two after the arrival of Columbus.
Philip II realized that the Habsburg Empire had become unmanageably large. He settled on a double marriage alliance that would unite Philip III to Margaret of Austria, granddaughter of his uncle Ferdinand, and his beloved daughter the Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia to the Archduke Albert, son of the Emperor Maximilian II. Philip would rule in Spain, while Isabel would inherit the sovereignty of the Spanish Netherlands.
Albert proved a singularly incompetent regent.
In 1604, peace was secured with England by the Treaty of London, and in 1607 an armistice was concluded with the United Provinces that would be ratified in 1609 as the Treaty of Antwerp, brining about the Twelve Years’ Truce.
The Duke of Lerma and Philip III led what might best be described as a cultural assault on the traditional institutions of monarchy, aristocracy and government, replacing rule and leadership with a strange new authority based on art and display.
The Age of Peace: Philip III and the Duke of Lerma
The First Modern Novel, Don Quixote
The first edition of Don Quixote dated in 1605.
Cervantes’s Book Two (of Part One and not to be confused with Part Two, published in 1615) talked about second author.
It is usually thought that Cervantes was claiming that the original manuscript of Don Quixote was written in Arabic.
Moriscos and Catalans
The Explusion of the Moriscos has long been seen as emblematic of the evil stupidity of Philip III’s government under the leadership of Duke of Lerma.
In 1502, there had been some attempt to force Muslims either to convert to Christianity or to leave Spain.
Alpujarra uprising in 1568 and 1570 led to the forced dispersal of the still mostly Muslim Moriscos of Granada.
At the time, expelling around 5 per cent would be madness, devastating local economies, upsetting regional economic balances and ultimately further destabilizing an already precarious Castilian economy.
On 9 April, the very same day that he signed the Treaty of Antwerp, the King also put his name to the Edict of Expulsion of the Moriscos of Valencia. The idea was that the first countries would be Aragon and Valencia and later Catalonia and Castile. In 1610 the Edicts of Expulsion from Murcia and Andalusia were issued, followed by those of Aragon and then Castile.
In 1627, Philip IV announced a competition to paint a major work depicting the Expulsion of the Moriscos. It was won by Diego Velazquez.
The Ricote Valley was once a separate kingdom in the uplands of Region of Murcia and the heart of Morisco country. Ricote was clearly a name that for Cervantes symbolized the inefficiency of the expulsion.
The further away from Madrid, the more difficult it was to enforce the dictats. Se obedece per no se cumple. One obeys, but one does not comply.
The Catalan banditry was one the hot political topics of the day. The worst robbers were Roca Guinards.
On 23 April 1616 Cervantes died. Two years before on 31 March 1614 El Greco died. Two of the most unlikely celebrities of the Spanish Golden Age were dead.
Holly Week: Art and Illusion
In 1615 in Seville, the religious Brotherhood of Christ’s Passion (The Hermandad de Pasion) commissioned an image of Christ carrying the Cross from the sculptor Juan Martinez Montanes. While Montanes had sculpted the image, Francisco Pacheco, had painted it. He was the teacher of Velazquez.
Seville and Valladoid are two cities famous for their religious processions. In Seville there is the Holly Week.
The popularity of Holly Week grew just as the creole colonial culture in the Americas was developing its sense of identity. The Spaniards were greatly impressed by the Aztecs’ love of public spectacle.
Velazquez and Zurbaran
Velazquez was born in Seville in 1599.
Francisco de Zurbaran was often known as the ‘painter of monks’. He was born in 1598 in the harsh provinces of Extremadura, where Cortes was also born.
Two Velazquez’s best know works are The Waterseller of Seville and An Old Woman Cooking Eggs.
For centuries, Sevillian architecture had been rooted in Islam’s love of very private, inward-looking living spaces, homes arranged around secret courtyards filled with plants and fountains.
In Spain the Immaculate Conception became especially popular and was enthusiastically supported by the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. Juana the Mad established a convent in Mallorca under the patronage of La Immaculada, while Charles V had an image of the subject displayed on his armour.
Politics and Poetry: Gongora and Quevedo
Luis de Gongora y Argote was perhaps the most brilliant poet of the Spanish Baroque, certainly the most controversial. He was born in 1561.
During his visits to court he met Lope de Vega and Francisco Quevedo. Quevedo was Castilian nobility and was attacking Gongora’s poetry.
Gongora’s main work was Soledades or Solitudes. The Soledades require the reader to indulge in a process of inquiry and reasoning that leads to this epic moments of truth, a moment of revelation about the depressing reality of contemporary Castile.
In 1617, Gongora’s life changed completely when he was appointed Chaplain of Honour to Philip III.
Don Gaspar de Guzman, third Count of Olivares was the future favourite of Philip IV. He was born in 1587 in Rome. In 1615 Lerma called Olivares to court.
In 1618 the Defenestration of Prague dragged all the European powers into Thirty Years’ War. Lerma tried to avoid embroiling Spain in the Bohemian problems, while Zuniga argued for intervention. Olivares and Zuniga positioned themselves perfectly during Lerma’s fall from grace in the summer of 1618. In May 1619, Spain sent 17.000 troops from the Netherlands and Italy to support the Emperor Ferdinand.
The Age of Decline: Philip IV and the Count-duke of Olivares
Drama: Olivares and Don Juan
Philip IV wrote: “I had been too young for the King to have introduced me to the business of monarchy.” As Philip III died, Olivares said that now everything is his. Olivares persuaded young King Philip III to appoint Zuniga as his First Minister.
Olivares and Zuniga had predicated the public image of Philip’s new government on a moralizing break with the political corruption and bad reputation of his father’s court and administration. In 1621, they had established a powerful Council of Reform.
They executed Lerma’s right-hand man Rodrigo Calderon. The old regime also lost Villamediana.
Don Juan Tenorio, the Trickster of Seville, was the most iconic secular figure in western culture. Theaters started to grow around Spain. The first of this playhouses opened its doors in Seville in 1574.
The Prince of Wales in Madrid
On 7 March 1621, the later Duke of Buckingham together with Charles, Prince of Wales, rode to Madrid. Charles had come to woo the Infanta Maria, sister of Philip IV. Charles left Madrid at the end of August, still promising to marry Infanta by proxy, but never attempting to do it.
Olivares reform were based on three basic and sensible objectives: to stimulate trade and economic growth, to rationalize taxation and to push through a massive austerity drive to direct investment away from luxury. The entire programme of reform led him into a head-on-collision with the towns and so the Cortes.
In 1624 Olivares and Philip went south (Seville) in an attempt to secure and revive Crown revenues from the Indies trade. They learned that government in Madrid was powerless to enforce the law.
Triumph and Disaster
Olivares had sired a single daughter Maria. In 1625 he married Maria to the Marquis of Toral, from the line of Medina Sidonia. But Maria died in 1626.
In 1628 Spain was losing Dutch countries , not being able to pay the soldiers. In Italy Louis XIII send troops across the Alps and defeated the Spanish army.
Olivares’s foreign policy of bellicose intervention had been a failure, the economy at home was in deep depression. The King would continue to rely on Olivares for another dozen years. The obvious question is why?
Death and Defeat
Towards the end of 1625, Olivares had begun seriously to contemplate pitching his policy of a Union of Arms to the kingdoms of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia.
In 1635, the United Dutch finally convinced France to declare war on Spain. This pitted Olivares against his able French counterpart Cardinal Richelieu, favourite of Louis XIII. In the summer of 1638, a French army invaded north-west Spain and laid siege to the border fortress at Fuenterrabia. In summer of 1639, a strong French force invaded Catalonia.
On 1 December 1640, the Duke of Braganza was proclaimed King Joao IV of Portugal. The Portuguese nobility had finally decided to break with Castile.
In the south, the ninth Duke of Medina Sidonia was plotting a rebellion that would lead to him being proclaimed King of Andalusia.
Olivares died two year later. Philip IV wanted to become statesman himself. Luis de Haro became his favourite.
In 1646, Madrid began to capitulate, agreeing to the absolute independent sovereignty of the United Provinces. The Peace of Munster was formally signed on 30 January 1648.
In 1649 plague and flooding hit Seville. It never recovered.
In 1659, peace was finally agreed between France and Spain, to be secured by the marriage of the Infanta Margarita to Louis XIV, which took place in the summer of 1660.
Epilogue
Philip IV died on 17 September 1665. His son Carlos II, was known in history as Carlos the Bewitched. Mariana of Austria, Queen Mother, was installed as regent.
Carlos would produce no heir and the Spanish branch of the House of Habsburg would soon be eclipsed forever.
On 25 May 1681, the last great literary celebrity of the Spanish Golden Age, the virtuoso court playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca, died in Madrid aged eighty-one. A year later Bartolome Esteban Murillo was also dead, the last great artist of the Spanish Golden Age was dead.
