to secure sanction for their sheep-runs across its agricultural land. Once Ferdinand had been obliged solemnly to reconfirm all its thorny contractual privileges, there was no question whatever of an administrative merger at any level between Aragon and Castile. Far from creating a unified kingdom, their Catholic Majesties failed even to establish a single currency,7 let alone a common tax or legal system within their realms. The Inquisition – a unique creation in Europe at the time – should be seen in this context: it was the one unitary ‘Spanish’ institution in the peninsula, an overwrought ideological apparatus compensating for the actual administrative division and dispersal of the State.
The accession of Charles V was to complicate, but not substantially alter, this pattern; if anything, it ultimately accentuated it. The most immediate result of the advent of a Habsburg sovereign was a new and heavily expatriate court, dominated by Flemings, Burgundians and Italians. The financial extortions of the new regime soon provoked a wave of intense popular xenophobia in Castile. The departure of the monarch himself for Northern Europe was thus the signal for a widespread urban rebellion against what was felt to be foreign fleecing of Castilian resources and positions. The comunero revolt of 1520–1 won the initial support of many city nobles, and appealed to a traditional set of constitutional demands. But its driving force was the popular artisan masses in the towns, and its dominating leadership was the urban bourgeoisie of northern and central Castile, whose trading and manufacturing centres had enjoyed an economic boom in the preceding period.8 It found little or no echo in the countryside, either among the peasantry or rural aristocracy; the movement never seriously affected those regions where towns were few or weak – Galicia, Andalusia, Estremadura or Guadalajara. The ‘federative’ and ‘proto-national’ programme of the revolutionary Junta which the Castilian communes created during their insurrection clearly marked it as basically a revolt of the Third Estate.9 Its defeat by royal armies, behind which the bulk of the aristocracy had rallied once the potential radicalism of the upheaval became evident, was thus a critical step in the consolidation of Spanish Absolutism. The crushing of the comunero rebellion effectively eliminated the last vestiges of a contractual constitution in Castile, and doomed the Cortes – for which the comuneros had demanded regular tri-annual sessions – to nullity henceforward. More significant, however, was the fact that the Spanish monarchy’s most fundamental victory over corporate resistance to royal absolutism in Castile – indeed its only actual armed contest with any opposition in that realm – was the military defeat of the towns, rather than nobles. Nowhere else in Western Europe was this true of nascent absolutism: the primary pattern was the suppression of aristocratic rather than burgher revolts, even where the two were closely mingled. Its triumph over the Castilian communes, at the outset of its career, was to separate the course of the Spanish monarchy from its Western counterparts thereafter.
The most spectacular development of Charles V’s reign was, of course, its vast enlargement of the Habsburg international orbit. In Europe, the Netherlands, the Franche-Comté and Milan were now added to the personal patrimony of the rulers of Spain, while Mexico and Peru were conquered in the Americas. During the life-time of the Emperor himself, the whole of Germany was a major theatre of operations over and above these hereditary possessions. This sudden territorial expansion inevitably reinforced the prior tendency of the emergent Absolutist State in Spain towards devolution via separate Councils and Viceroys for the different dynastic possessions. Charles V’s Piedmontese Chancellor, Mercurio Gattinara, inspired by universalist Erasmian ideals, strove to confer a more compact and effective executive on the unwieldy bulk of the Habsburg Empire, by creating certain unitary institutions for it of a departmental type – notably a Council of Finances, a Council of War and a Council of State (the latter theoretically becoming the summit of the whole imperial edifice), with overall responsibilities of a trans-regional character. These were backed by a growing permanent secretariat of civil servants at the disposal of the monarch. But at the same time, a new series of territorial Councils was progressively formed, Gattinara himself establishing the first of these for the government of the Indies. By the end of the century, there were eventually to be no less than six such regional Councils, for Aragon, Castile, the Indies, Italy, Portugal and Flanders. Outside Castile itself, none of these had any adequate body of local officials on the ground, where actual administration was entrusted to viceroys, who were subject to often fumbling control and direction from a distance by the Councils.10 The powers of the viceroys themselves were usually very limited in their turn. Only in the Americas did they command the services of their own bureaucracy, but there they were flanked by audiencias which deprived them of the judicial authority they enjoyed elsewhere; while in Europe, they had to come to terms with resident aristocracies – Sicilian, Valencian or Neapolitan – who normally claimed by right a virtual monopoly of public offices. The result was to block any real unification either of the international imperium as a whole, or of the Iberian homelands themselves. The Americas were juridically attached to the kingdom of Castile, Southern Italy to the realm of Aragon. The Atlantic and Mediterranean economies represented by each never met within a single commercial system. The division between the two original realms of the Union within Spain was, in practice, if anything, reinforced by the overseas possessions now subjoined to them. For juridical purposes, Catalonia could simply be assimilated in statute to Sicily or the Netherlands. Indeed, by the 17th century, Madrid’s power in Naples or Milan was actually greater than in Barcelona or Zaragoza. The very sprawl of the Habsburg Empire thus overextended its capacity for integration, and helped to arrest the process of administrative centralization within Spain itself.11
At the same time, Charles V’s reign also inaugurated the fateful sequence of European wars which was to be the price of Spanish power in the continent. In the Southern theatre of his innumerable campaigns, Charles achieved overwhelming success: it was during this period that Italy fell definitively under Hispanic ascendancy, as France was driven from the peninsula, the Papacy intimidated, and the Turkish threat held off. The most advanced urban society in Europe henceforward became an elongated military platform for Spanish Absolutism. In the Northern theatre of his wars, by contrast, the Emperor was forced into a costly stalemate: the Reformation remained unvanquished in Germany, despite his repeated attempts to crush or conciliate it, and hereditary Valois enmity survived every defeat in France. The financial burden of constant war in the North, moreover, had gravely strained the traditional loyalty of the Netherlands by the end of the reign, preparing for the disasters which were to overtake Philip II in the Low Countries. For the size and expense of Habsburg armies had escalated steeply and regularly throughout Charles V’s rule. Before 1529, Spanish troops in Italy had never numbered more than 30,000; in 1536–7, 60,000 soldiers were mobilized for war with France; by 1552, there were perhaps 150,000 men under the Emperor’s command in Europe.12 Financial borrowing and fiscal pressures increased commensurately: Charles V’s revenues had tripled by the time of his abdication in 1556,13 yet royal debts were so great that a State bankruptcy had to be formally declared a year later by his heir. The Spanish Empire in the Old World inherited by Philip II, always administratively divided, was becoming economically untenable at mid-century: it was the New World which was to refurbish its treasury and prolong its disunity.
For from the 1560’s onwards, the multiple effects of its American Empire on Spanish Absolutism became increasingly determinant for its future, although it is necessary not to confuse the different levels at which these worked themselves out. The discovery of the Potosi mines now enormously increased the flow of colonial bullion to Seville. The supply of huge quantities of silver from the Americas henceforward became a decisive ‘facility’ of the Spanish State, in both senses of the word. For it provided Hispanic Absolutism with a plentiful and permanent extraordinary income that was wholly outside the conventional ambit of State revenues in Europe. This meant that Absolutism in Spain could for a long time continue to dispense with the slow fiscal and administrative unification which was a precondition of Absolutism elsewhere: the stubborn recalcitrance of Aragon was compensated by the limitless compliance of Peru. The colonies, in other words, could act as a structural substitute for provinces, in a total polity where orthodox provinces were substituted by autarchic patrimonies. Nothing is more striking in this respect than the utter lack of any proportionate contribution to the Spanish war effort in Europe during the later 16th and 17th centuries from Aragon or even Italy.
