United Spain under the Catholic Monarchs

Aragon and Catalonia

Ferdinand and Isabella ruled jointly in both kingdoms and were known as the Catholic Monarchs (Reyes Católicos). It was, however, a union of crowns and not of kingdoms. In size, institutions, traditions, and, partly, even language, the two kingdoms differed greatly. Within the kingdom of Aragon, Aragon and Valencia each had about 270,000 inhabitants, of whom some 20 percent and more than 30 percent, respectively, were Muslims and Moriscos (Muslims officially converted to Christianity). Catalonia had about 300,000 inhabitants. In each of these kingdoms the powers of the crown were severely limited. The barons ruled their estates like kings, dispensing arbitrary justice over their peasants. In Catalonia they had the right to wage private war. In Aragon anyone arrested by order of the king could put himself under the jurisdiction of a justicia who held his office for life and was therefore independent of the king’s pleasure. It was this highest judge who crowned the kneeling king and made him swear to observe the fueros, the laws and privileges, of the kingdom. Although it is now known that the formula

We who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than we, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you accept all our liberties and laws; but if not, not

is a forgery, most probably of the mid-16th century, the quotation does summarize succinctly the relations between the kings of Aragon and the Aragonese nobility.

Ferdinand made no attempt to change this position; nor did he do so in Catalonia, where the crown had just emerged successfully from a long and confused civil war. The nobility and the urban aristocracy of Barcelona had been faced with violent social movements of the peasants and the lower classes of the cities and were themselves riven by family and factional strife. The crown intervened, mainly on the side of the lower classes but, inevitably, in alliance with some of the noble factions and against the French who had taken the opportunity to occupy Cerdagne and Roussillon. In 1486 Ferdinand settled the Catalan problem by a compromise, the Sentencia de Guadalupe, which effectively abolished serfdom and the more-oppressive feudal obligations of the peasants in return for monetary payments to the lords. Otherwise, the political and legal privileges of the rural nobility and the urban aristocracy were left intact. Effectively, therefore, Ferdinand made no attempt to strengthen the powers of the crown and to give the principality a more efficient system of government. But Ferdinand had given Catalonia peace and the opportunity to make good the ravages of the civil wars and the losses of commercial markets to Italian competitors. This opportunity was only partially taken by the Catalans. They failed completely to prevent the Genoese from establishing a dominant position in the economy of Castile and, more especially, in the vital and rapidly expanding Atlantic trade of Sevilla. The union of the Crowns of Aragon and Castile therefore led to neither a political and institutional union nor to an economic integration of the Iberian Peninsula.

Castile

Castile, too, was a poor country. Much of its soil was arid, and its agriculture was undeveloped. The armed shepherds of the powerful sheep-owners’ guild, the Mesta, drove their flocks over hundreds of miles, from summer to winter pastures and back again, spoiling much cultivated land. Despite the violent hostility of the landowners, the government upheld the Mesta privileges, since the guild paid generously for them and was supported by the merchants who exported the raw wool to the cloth industry of Flanders. The activities of the Mesta were undoubtedly harmful to the peasant economy of large parts of Castile and, by impoverishing the peasants, limited the markets for urban industries and thus the growth of some Castilian towns. A change, however, occurred in the 16th century. Just as in the rest of Europe, the population of Spain grew, rising in Castile from about 4.25 million in 1528 to about 6.5 million after 1580. To meet the increasing demands for agricultural products, the peasants expanded the cultivation of grain and other foodstuffs, and the Mesta and its migratory flocks gradually lost their dominant position in the Castilian economy. Their contributions to government finances declined as a proportion of total government revenue. The growing market also stimulated urban industries. Segovia, Toledo, Córdoba, and other towns expanded their manufactures of textile and metal. The apex of this expansion was reached in the third quarter of the 16th century, but it never matched that of Flemish and northern Italian cities. Overall, Spain remained a country that exported raw materials and imported manufactures.

In the northern provinces of Castile there lived a large class of minor nobles, the hidalgos. The inhabitants of Guipúzcoa (by the westernmost French border) even claimed that they were all of noble birth. But the south, New Castile (southeast of Madrid), Extremadura (southwest of Madrid), and especially Andalusia—that is, those provinces most recently reconquered from the Muslims—were the domain of the great nobility. There the Enríquez, the Mendoza, and the Guzmán families and others owned vast estates, sometimes covering almost half a province. They had grown rich as a result of the boom in wool exports to Flanders during the 15th-century, when there were more than 2.5 million sheep in Castile, and it was they, with their hordes of vassals and retainers, who had attempted to dominate a constitutionally almost absolute, but politically weak, monarchy.

It was in this kingdom that the Catholic Monarchs determined to restore the power of the crown. Once this was achieved, or so it seemed, the liberties of the smaller kingdoms would become relatively minor problems. Like their contemporary Henry VII of England, they had the advantage of their subjects’ yearning for strong and effective government after many years of civil war. Thus, they could count on the support of the cities in restoring law and order. During the civil wars the cities of northern Castile had formed leagues for self-defense against the aggressive magnates. A nationwide league, the hermandad (“brotherhood”), performed a wide range of police, financial, and other administrative functions. Isabella supported the hermandad but kept some control over it by the appointment of royal officials, the corregidores, to the town councils. At the same time, both municipal efficiency and civic pride were enhanced by the obligation imposed on all towns to build a town hall (ayuntamiento).

With the great nobles it was necessary to move more cautiously. The Catholic Monarchs revoked usurpations of land and revenues by the nobility if these had occurred since 1464, but most of the great noble estates had been built up before that date and were effectively left intact. From a contemporary chronicler, Hernán Pérez del Pulgar, historians know how they proceeded piecemeal but systematically against the magnates, sometimes using a nobleman’s defiance of the law, sometimes a breach of the peace or of a pledge, to take over or destroy his castles and thus his independent military power. Even more effective in dealing with the nobility was the enormous increase in royal patronage. Isabella was stage manager to Ferdinand’s election as grand master of one after another of the three great orders of knighthood: Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara. This position allowed the king to distribute several hundred commanderships with their attached income from the huge estates of the orders. Equally important was royal control over all important ecclesiastical appointments, which the Catholic Monarchs insisted upon with ruthless disregard of all papal claims to the contrary. In the Spanish dependencies in Italy, Ferdinand claimed the right of exequatur, according to which all papal bulls and breves (authorizing letters) could be published only with his permission. A letter from Ferdinand to his viceroy in Naples, written in 1510, upbraids the viceroy for permitting the pope to publish a brief in Naples, threatens that he will renounce his own and his kingdoms’ allegiance to the Holy See, and orders the viceroy to arrest the papal messenger, force him to declare he never published the brief, and then hang him. In Spain the Catholic Monarchs had no formal right of exequatur, but they and their Habsburg successors behaved very much as if they did. From that time onward the Spanish clergy had to look to the crown and not to Rome for advancement, and so did the great nobles who traditionally claimed the richest ecclesiastical benefices for their younger sons.

Perhaps most effective of all in reducing the political power of the high nobility was their virtual exclusion from the royal administration. The old royal council, a council of great nobles advising the king, was transformed into a bureaucratic body for the execution of royal policy, staffed by a prelate, three nobles, and eight or nine lawyers. These lawyers, mostly drawn from the poor hidalgo class, were entirely dependent on the royal will and became willing instruments of a more efficient and powerful central government. The Catholic Monarchs established the Council of Finance (1480, but not fully developed until much later), the Council of the Hermandad (1476–98), the Council of the Inquisition (1483), and the Council of the Orders of Knighthood (for the administration of the property and patronage of the orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcántara), and they reorganized the Council of Aragon. Charles I (Holy Roman emperor as Charles V) and Philip II were later to continue this work and to add further councils, notably those of the Indies (1524) and of Italy (1558).

After Isabella’s death in 1504, the nobles appeared to be tamed and politically innocuous. In fact, their social position and its economic basis, their estates, had not been touched. The Laws of Toro (1505), which extended the right to entail family estates on the eldest child, further safeguarded the stability of noble property. In 1520 Charles I agreed to the nobles’ demand for a fixed hierarchy of rank, from the 25 grandees of Spain through the rest of the titled nobility, down to some 60,000 hidalgos, or caballeros, and a similar number of urban nobility, all of them distinguished from the rest of the population, the pecheros, by far-reaching legal privileges and exemption from direct taxation. Thus, the Catholic Monarchs’ antinoble policy was far from consistent. Having won the civil war, they needed the nobility for their campaigns against the kingdom of Granada and, later, the kingdoms in North Africa and Italy. They now favoured the nobles against the towns, allowing them to encroach on the territory around the cities and discouraging the corregidores and the royal courts from protecting the cities’ interests. Thus, the seeds were sown for the development of the comunero movement of 1520.