Thecomunero movement

On June 28, 1519, Charles was electedHoly Roman emperor as Charles V and prepared to go to Germany. His chancellor, Mercurino Gattinara, summoned the Castilian Cortes to Santiago in northwestern Spain (April 1520) to demand more money, even though the former grant had not yet expired. The towns immediately made their displeasure apparent. The Toledans refused to appear; the others demanded the discussion of grievances before they would supply the funds. By a mixture of bribery andconcessions, the government finally induced a majority of the delegates (who had transferred from Santiago toA Coruña [Spanish: La Coruña] on the northwest coast of Spain) to vote the new grant. Many of the delegates were immediately disowned in their hometowns, and one fromSegovia was murdered by an enraged mob. As Charles set sail (May 20, 1520), the Castilian revolution had already begun.

The towns, led byToledo, formed a league and set up a revolutionary government. They claimed—more boldly even than theThird Estate during theFrench Revolution in 1789—that they were the kingdom and that the Cortes had the right to assemble without a royalsummons and to discuss all matters relating to the welfare of the realm. There was talk of dethroning Charles in favour of his mother,Joan the Mad. Thecomunero leader,Juan de Padilla, actually captured the castle of Tordesillas (100 miles northwest of Madrid), where Joan was kept as prisoner, but the queen, whether out of madness or calculation of the interests of themonarchy, would not commit herself to Padilla’s proposals. Thecomunero movement spread rapidly through Castile, and the nobles did nothing to check it. They had not forgiven Charles for his quest toattain the imperial title (which they thought inferior to that of king of Castile) nor for his foreign councilors and courtiers. They resented above all his bestowal of the archbishopric of Toledo on a young Burgundian, Guillaume de Croy, and the appointment of his former tutor, Adrian of Utrecht (later PopeAdrian VI), as regent of Castile. Even the appointment of the admiral Fadrique Enríquez and the constable of Castile, Iñigo de Velasco, asAdrian’s coregents did little to mollify the offended grandees. Only when the more radical and popular elements in the cities were gaining control of thecomunero movement and beginning to spread it to the nobles’ estates did the nobles combine to raise an army and defeat thecomunero forces atVillalar (April 23, 1521).

The power of monarchy was thus restored in Castile, never to be seriously shaken again under the Habsburg kings. But in practice it was far from absolute. The towns kept much of theirautonomy, and thecorregidores were often unable to exert effective royal control over determined town councils. The 18 “royal towns” that were summoned to the Cortes never again challenged the ultimate authority of the crown. However, they continued to quarrel with the king about their claim that they were entitled to delay granting taxes until after their grievances had been dealt with, and they frequently managed to sabotage the government’s demand that their deputies be given full powers to vote on government proposals. Moreover, when the crown found it convenient to convert thealcabala (amedieval sales tax) into theencabezamiento (global sums agreed by the Cortes and raised by the individual towns as they wished), the towns achieved a great measure of control over the administration of parliamentary taxation. Nor did the estate of the nobles in the Cortes prove easier to handle. In 1538, when Charles proposed a tax from which the nobles should not be exempt, there were immediate rumblings of revolt. The king had to give way, but he never summoned the nobility again to the meetings of the Cortes. The monarchy had thus won its political victory in Castile only at the cost of letting the nobility contract out of the financialobligations to the state and the empire. The rising burden of taxes fell therefore on those least able to bear them and on the only classes whose activities and investments could have developed the Castilian economy.

The nobility

The traditions of thegrandees andhidalgos, formed in the centuries of struggle against the Muslims, made them even more averse to economic activities than the rest of the European nobility. Many engaged in wholesale trade inwool and grain, and some profited from the American trade inSevilla. But the majority invested their money in land—without, however, improving agriculture—and preferred careers in the army, the church, and thecivil service to the ignoble occupations ofcommerce. In the long run, the economic weakness of Spain, aggravated by its social traditions and its system of taxation, proved a serious handicap in Spain’s struggle with its western European rivals.

After Villalar, however, the Spanish nobility had come to accept Charles I. His championing of Roman CatholicChristianity against the Muslim Turks and German heretics appealed to their own traditions of Christian warfare against the Muslims in theIberian Peninsula andNorth Africa. While Charles kept the grandees out of the central government of Spain itself, he had many prizes to offer in military commands, provincial governorships, and even viceroyalties inItaly and SpanishAmerica. The hidalgos, trained as lawyers atSalamanca or as theologians atAlcalá de Henares (just east of Madrid), could look forward todazzling careers in the king’s councils and in the Spanish church. Even though Charles spent only 16 of the 40 years of his reign in Spain, the Spanish upper classes were beginning to accept and enjoy their monarch’s position as the greatest ruler inEurope.

Charles I’s foreign policy

Because of Charles’s role asHoly Roman emperor, Spain became involved in interminable wars. The necessity of defending southern Italy against the Turks brought Charles’s empire into collision with theOttoman Empire, with the central Mediterranean as the chief battleground. Ferdinand’s failure to complete the conquest of North Africa now brought a bitter revenge. The corsair leader Khayr al-Dīn, known asBarbarossa, had made himself master of Algiers (1529) and acknowledged the suzerainty of the sultan ofConstantinople. Thus, the purely local problem of the Muslim raids on the Spanish south coast became merged into the much moreformidable struggle with the Ottoman Empire. In 1535 Charles capturedTunis. In perhaps his most satisfying triumph, Charles appeared in his chosen role of, as he said himself, “God’s standard-bearer.” He now seriously considered carrying the war into the eastern Mediterranean, even conquering Constantinople itself. But in 1538 Barbarossa, with a Turkish fleet, defeated Charles’s Genoese admiral,Andrea Doria, at Préveza (western Greece), and in 1541 the emperor himself failed against Algiers. At the end of the reign, the balance of the two great naval powers in the Mediterranean, the Spanish and the Turkish, was still even.

Rival claims to Naples by the Aragonese and the Angevins (cousins of the ruling French house) also brought conflict with the French kings, against whom Charles fought four wars. His armies conqueredMilan (northern Italy) and reduced most of the still-independent Italian states to Spanish satellites. An increasing part of the burden of these wars fell on Spain and especially on Castile. The Spanishtercios (infantry regiments) were not only the emperor’s best troops, but it was in Castile that he could raise the largest part of his imperial revenues—moreover, without having to account for the way he spent them, as he had to do with the taxes voted by theStates General of the Netherlands. It is therefore not surprising that the empire in Europe withCharles V as head became gradually transformed into a Spanish—or, rather, Castilian—empire of Charles I. In the latter part of his reign, Spaniards and Hispanicized Italians monopolized all high positions in the empire south of the Alps and began to appear in Germany and theNetherlands. More and more they came to interpret the international and Roman Catholic ideals of the emperor in terms of the political predominance of Spain in Europe and overseas.