[246] The crown of Castile had conceived of itself as imperial since the eleventh century, and the crown of Aragón had created a Mediterranean empire on land and sea. During the later Middle Ages a whole series of institutions had been built to cope with imperial expansion. The Catalans had dealt with the problem of controlling far-flung territories by creating the office of "vice-roy" (sub-king) for direct representation of the crown. This office was used also in administering peninsular principalities of the Aragonese crown. Commerce was regulated by the Consulat of Barcelona, which chartered and administered maritime activity. In Castile, border governors (adelantados) had been appointed since the thirteenth century to govern and defend the frontier territories. The outfitting of individual expeditions against the infidels (or others) in imperial enterprise or reconquest had been common since the early Middle Ages, though the most extraordinary example until the sixteenth century had been the conquest of Athens by the Catalan Grand Company of Almogávars. Subjects of all the major Hispanic states had participated in the repartimiento, or division, of conquered territories and the tutelage of alien ethnic groups. The Castilian crown for four centuries had been accustomed to intermittently augmenting its income, somewhat artificially, by bullion shipments in tribute from the remaining Muslim territory. In all three major kingdoms the reconquest had encouraged a massive flow of [247] colonizing emigrants outward (southward). Local social and urban structures had been developed or redeveloped, with varying representation or self-government.
 
Even more important than any particular aspect of historical experience was the continuing psychic mold which patterned the thinking of the people of Castile in particular. The crusade psychology rose to its height in the late fifteenth century. The paradoxical consequences of this orientation have frequently been pointed out, for the guerra divinal for God and the crown had the added appeal of making some of its practitioners rich. It was the opportunity for renewed military aggrandizement that had enabled Hispanic society to remain socially mobile over a period of eight hundred years. Thus at the end of the fifteenth century no societies were better prepared for imperial expansion than those of the Hispanic kingdoms.
 
The completion of the reconquest, absorbing the entire emirate of Granada after the ten-year struggle of 1482-1492, was a galvanizing deed that gripped the imagination of nearly all Castile and much of Aragón as well. It extended royal power and satisfied popular aspirations at the same time. Once completed, however, the straits hardly served as a stopping point. The Maghreb and the Hispanic peninsula had formed a geographic unit in African expansion throughout the Middle Ages, and were perceived in the same terms when the tide began to flow in the opposite direction. The Spanish crown received the blessing of the papacy and special tax rights over church and laity for expansion into North Africa. Portugal had begun its offensive in Morocco in 1415, and the Castilian phase began with the capture of the northeast Moroccan port of Melilla in 1497. Several minor ports and fortresses were seized during the next few years. In her will of 1504, Isabel commended to her subjects the continuation of the offensive against the Muslim world as their main international objective, and a major expedition in 1509 seized the key Algerian port of Oran.
 
Yet the grand Hispanic counteroffensive into northwest Africa did not fully materialize, for almost from the beginning it was shoved into the background by other considerations. The united crown had inherited not one but two imperial traditions: the crusading drive of the Castilians against the Muslim world to Africa and beyond, and the Mediterranean thrust of the Catalan-Aragonese monarchy. Even during Isabel's lifetime foreign affairs were mostly the prerogative of the more experienced, sophisticated Fernando, who had every intention of restoring, and if possible extending, the Aragonese sphere of influence in the west Mediterranean, though that would bring the Spanish crown into conflict with other Christian states.
 
The rise of the united monarchy in Spain coincided with the last great burst of vigor of medieval Europe. The French monarchy, [248] always potentially the most powerful force in western Europe, had greatly consolidated its position during the second half of the fifteenth century. This was done partly at the expense of its traditional enemy, Aragón, as the French crown incorporated Catalan border territory and pressed its imperial ambitions in Italy. By the treaty of Barcelona of 1493, Fernando skillfully avoided immediate conflict with the French in the Italian peninsula, winning in return, as a bloodless concession from Charles VIII of France (1483-1498), restoration of the former Catalan dominions of Cerdanya and Rosselló.
 
At no time during the Middle Ages or after could even a united Castile-Aragón equal the economic and organizational potential or manpower reserves of a unified kingdom of France. France was the most densely populated major power in Europe, and if not always ahead economically, was never too far behind, enjoying the medieval and early modern equivalent of the largest gross national product in Europe. France's population was at least 50 percent greater than that of Castile-Aragón; its domestic economic superiority was potentially even greater.
 
In contrast, medieval Aragón had built its position in the west Mediterranean by exceptional military, naval, and commercial skill, at times abetted by clever diplomacy and the intermittent breakdown of French political unity. Fernando made more effective use of diplomacy than perhaps any other king in Hispanic history. He was assisted by the first regular cadre of diplomats, agents, and spies used by an Hispanic government, and it may not be too much to say that he developed the first regular royal diplomatic service in late medieval Europe.
 
The union of Castile with the Aragonese Mediterranean empire meant that the Spanish monarchy almost inevitably inherited an anti-French orientation. After Charles VIII established French hegemony in the Italian peninsula in one swift campaign (1494), the balance of power was so greatly changed that the Spanish crown had no alternative to direct action unless it was ready to relinquish the entire sphere of traditional Aragonese activity. Fernando labored to restore the broad international anti-French alliance first fashioned by his father, Juan II of Aragón. There followed the campaigns of 1495-1497 and 1501-1504, in which the Spanish forces, aided by Italian allies, drove the French from the peninsula, regaining Sicily and Naples for the Spanish crown.
 
These contests were triumphs of skill and leadership over superior French manpower and were the training ground for what would become the royal Spanish army. Though the medieval Castilian forces had more often than not been paid soldiers, and the crown maintained a few small mercenary units, there was no more a standing royal army in Spain than elsewhere. The Spanish army did not develop [249] fully until after the reign of Fernando, but prolonged confrontation with the leading military power in western Europe hastened its organization.
 
The early Italian campaigns made famous the name of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdova, the Andalusian grande called by Italians "the great captain." One of the most chivalrous spirits of his time, Fernández de Córdova led Spanish forces in Italy and began the tactical transformation that created the classic military operations of the imperial age. The Catalans had been used to employing professional infantrymen in their Mediterranean operations, and foot soldiers had been used to great advantage in the siege warfare of the Granada region. By the fifteenth century, the dominance of armored cavalry was nearly ended. The new military elite of Europe were sturdy infantry pikemen, usually Swiss or German mercenaries, who wielded compact rows of long, heavy lances. Such a well-disciplined foot formation had broken many a cavalry charge, though it was not itself very mobile. Fernández de Córdova's achievement was to build a diversified force, incorporating firearms, that could deal with both cavalry and infantry.
 
The standard Spanish unit developed in the Italian campaigns was at first made up of some 6,000 men. These large sections were later broken into tercios (thirds) or brigades of approximately 2,000. Until the l530s, pikebearers, infantry armed with short swords, and arquebusiers firing a sort of matchlock were combined in proportions of 32-1. The pikemen guaranteed the defense, the swordsmen carried the offensive against the enemy infantry once the latter had been engaged, and the arquebusiers provided what was perhaps the first portable long-range missile force in modern history, able to strike at a distance before the enemy was ready to engage. Small light-cavalry companies also accompanied the tercios. The soldiers were almost entirely volunteers, but they normally served for long terms of ten years or more and were paid by the royal treasury. Discipline and organization became strict, for only careful coordination could ensure success in increasingly complex battles.

Beside these titanic struggles on the European continent and in the Mediterranean, the great transatlantic empire developed as a marginal activity. It has sometimes been observed that the Spanish conquest and partial colonization of so much of America--and of a large swathe of the western Pacific as well--was a matter of private initiative. There is considerable truth to this, yet it must be remembered that all the principal expeditions of exploration and conquest were conducted under royal license, though not usually at royal initiative or expense, and that the crown was always careful to reserve for itself all political sovereignty in new areas brought under Spanish domination. Properties and a few positions were granted on an hereditary basis, and toward the end of the sixteenth century it became increasingly possible to purchase local administrative offices in Spanish America, whether or not on an hereditary basis, but all this merely followed Castilian precedent. Every town established in the overseas [255] empire had to be chartered by the crown, and the entire administrative structure was organized from Castile. Thus the overseas empire was not at first a fully Spanish empire but an empire of the Spanish crown and more precisely of the crown of Castile. For several generations, subjects of the Aragonese principalities were nominally prohibited from participating, though in one guise or another a small number had been involved from the very beginning.
 
The government of the Spanish crown was organized on the basis of a series of separate councils for various regions and branches of governmental activity, expanded over a period of one hundred years. In 1494, a general royal Council of Aragón to deal with the affairs of all the Aragonese principalities was established parallel to but separate from the royal Council of Castile, which dealt with the internal affairs of Castile. This, in turn, required formation of a new Council of State, to help formulate the foreign policy of the royal government as a whole. The conquest of Mexico made it necessary to set up a new organ, the Council of the Indies, to supervise the American possessions. This body was officially constituted in 1524 and retained its authority until most of Spanish America had gained its independence. The council was not officially dissolved until 1834.
 
Since the Spanish Habsburg empire in Europe was governed on the Aragonese pluralistic principle, further councils were added to supervise its affairs. A Council of Italy was organized between 1555 and 1558, a Council of Portugal in 1580, a Council of Flanders in 1588, and finally, a separate Council of Finance in 1593, to try to bring order to the crown's highly complex and overburdened financial system. Smaller royal councils administered royal justice in Castile and the affairs of the Inquisition. The pluralistic conciliar system guaranteed considerable autonomy in the affairs of various regions of the empire and certain branches of government, but it also discouraged cooperation and coordination in the whole. It resulted in the duplication and overlapping of functions and the entrenchment of vested interests that became increasingly pernicious during the seventeenth century.
 
There was a basic difference between the structure of the Council of the Indies and those which governed the crown's European principalities. The latter were composed for the most part of influential inhabitants of the regions with which they dealt and were guided and limited by the local constitutions or laws and usages of the area. The Council of the Indies was staffed exclusively by peninsular Spaniards, mostly Castilian, and was not bound by any colonial charter, tradition, or constitution. For three hundred years its power was nearly absolute. It must be said, however, that the council's members were more often than not able and hardworking, and even during the [256] seventeenth century tended to escape the pervasive corruption that was by that time weighing down most branches of Spanish government. Their legislative and judicial activity was prodigious, for they constantly felt called upon to regulate life in the most minute detail. By 1635, over 400,000 edicts were nominally in force; an abridgment of 1681 reduced this number to a more digestible 6,400.
 
Under the Spanish Habsburg empire, the executive powers of the crown were vested in regional viceroys, more or less on the Aragonese pattern. Viceroys represented the crown in Zaragoza, Barcelona, Valencia, Palermo, and Naples, and after the incorporation of Hispanic Navarre (1512), in Pamplona as well. Overseas, powers of viceroy were delegated to Columbus in the first charter of 1492 and subsequently divided between two viceroys in Mexico and Peru. All commerce and navigation with Spanish America was controlled and administered by the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade), an agency of the Council of the Indies established in Seville and modeled, to some extent at least, on the medieval Catalan consulate, though its powers were more extensive and arbitrary. The colonial judicial system, by comparison, was a direct extension of the Castilian. Regional audiencias were formed in America from 1511 onward, expanding the audiencia system slowly elaborated in Castile since the thirteenth century and reformed by the Catholic Kings.
 
The empire was administered by the largest bureaucratic apparatus in the western world. This vast mechanism, which sometimes worked with surprising effectiveness, was eventually overwhelmed by its own size, by distance, and by the volume of its work. By the end of the sixteenth century it was becoming ossified, but even during the seventeenth-century decline it continued to serve its main purpose of holding the empire together administratively.
 
The overseas empire, of distinctly secondary importance during the first third of the sixteenth century, became more significant after the increase in shipments of precious metals in the 1530s. By the reign of Felipe II, American resources were a vital mainstay of the crown, even though the overseas territories still received much less attention than did the European principalities.

Felipe II (1556-1598) has been the most controversial ruler in Spanish history. Foreign and Protestant writers gave him a long and enduring reputation as the arch-fiend of Counter-Reformation iniquity, blackening his fame outside of Spain for three centuries. To Spaniards, he has been the great ruler who guided the empire at the [257] height of its power, the sword arm of Catholicism, defender of the faith and unity of Europe. He has also been called el prudente-"the wise" or "prudent."
 
Felipe II was a Spanish king in a way that Carlos V could never become. Born and bred in Castile, he was thoroughly imbued with Castilian values and knew no other language well. After the retirement of Carlos, the central European Habsburg ("Austrian") domains were split off from the Spanish crown. They remained the patrimony of Ferdinand, younger brother of Carlos V, who decades earlier, as the Castilian-bred Infante D. Fernando, had been much the more Spanish of the two sons of Juana and Philip the Fair. Ferdinand also succeeded his brother as Holy Roman Emperor. This title henceforth would remain exclusively among the Austrian Habsburgs.
 
Freed of the central European imperial title and obligations, the empire of Felipe II was much more a Spanish empire than that of his father had been. Its base was the kingdom of Castile, whence came the bulk of its manpower, the largest share of its income, the tenor of its religious policy, and even to some extent the spirit of its politics. Felipe II was most similar to his father in his sense of duty. Yet whereas Carlos V had been a military and cavalier king, devoted to battle, the hunt, and the pleasures of the table, Felipe was a bureaucratic ruler. He did not personally lead his armies and was averse to hunting, but he himself attended to the vast paperwork and correspondence that held together the huge diplomatic and administrative network of the empire. He served as the first clerk of the imperial bureaucracy. The amount of detail to which Felipe applied himself was truly prodigious, but even his tireless application was inadequate to the task. Refusing to delegate central authority, he fell farther behind each year, and the backlog of imperial paper work became even greater.
 
The imperial affairs of the reign of Felipe II fall into five general periods: 1) the peaceful Spanish hegemony of 1559-1565, inaugurated by the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559; 2) the imperial crisis of 1566-1570; 3) the Spanish response of 1571-1572; 4) the relatively static period of 1573-1580; and 5) the concluding era of the crown's great struggle for the unity and hegemony of western Europe, 1581-1598.
 
The last round of the Franco-Spanish wars of Carlos V had begun in 1552, and was climaxed by the major Spanish victory at St. Quentin in northeastern France in 1557. The peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) putting an end to these Hispano-French wars, proved the longest peace agreement of the century between the two crowns, lasting for thirty-seven years until 1596. Felipe II was eager to have [258] the costly struggle over, while the French crown found its kingdom weakened by internal division. Cateau-Cambrésis was a "Catholic" peace, designed to promote harmony between the two major Catholic powers and enable them to concentrate their energies on internal and religious unity. It coincided with the first measures of Felipe II to seal off Spain from foreign books, and with major persecution of Castilian crypto-Protestants by the Inquisition. It also recognized, in effect, the hegemony of the Spanish crown, for France renounced its ambitions in Italy and evacuated the duchy of Savoy, which it had occupied for more than two decades. Felipe II thus began his reign in a stronger position in western Europe than his father had ever enjoyed.
 
Four years later the Council of Trent completed its work, providing reformed Catholicism with a strong doctrinal base from which to launch a counteroffensive on wavering borderlands. The political difficulties of Felipe II with the papacy have been discussed in chapter 11. In his own dominions, the Spanish king took an even more ruthless and uncompromising stand against heresy than some church theologians felt was necessary. Toward other powers, however, he followed a more prudent line, ignoring all pressures from the papacy to pursue a hostile policy toward Elizabeth of England so long as Elizabeth avoided an outright declaration of Protestantism.
 
For nearly fifteen years the center of attention for Felipe was not western Europe but the Turkish menace in the Mediterranean, which had been a major factor in his desire for peace with France. During the 1550s the Mediterranean had become almost a Muslim lake. The first offensive expedition of Felipe's reign, against Tripoli in 1560, was badly led and ended in disaster with the loss of twenty galleys and more than six thousand men. It prompted a major naval construction campaign in Spain and Italy during the next four years, however, and Spanish forces conquered the Peñón de Yélez on the north Moroccan coast in 1564, then defeated a major Turkish attempt to seize Malta in the central Mediterranean the following year.
 
Felipe II had to face a series of new challenges between 1566 and 1568, starting with the Protestant revolt in the Low Countries in 1566. Though this was completely crushed in less than a year, Felipe decided in 1567 that he could no longer trust the affairs of that area to semi-autonomous local administration supervised by a viceroy, as in his father's reign. In 1567, he dispatched an Hispano-Italian army of occupation under his leading military commander, the duke of Alba. This marked a turning away from the ecumenical, federal policy of his father toward a more centralized and authoritarian Spanish Counter-Reformation policy. The decision to adopt an intransigent line against heresy in the Low Countries, involving the execution even of recanters, was primarily that of the king himself. His theological advisers did not themselves agree on such draconian measures. During [259] the next six years, the "Council of Troubles" (also called the Council of Blood) in Brussels executed more than one thousand rebels and heretics, exceeding the peninsular Inquisition in its harshness.
 
The great crisis year of Felipe's reign was 1568. Muslims were still a major threat in the Mediterranean, where Spanish forces had not yet made good the losses of the 1540s and l550s. The English and rebel Dutch navies in the North Atlantic were an incipient menace to the sea route to Flanders and communications with the Indies. Then there occurred simultaneously the beginning of French Huguenot military activity on the Catalan border and the momentary fear of rebellion and heresy in Catalonia (see chapter 9), a royal domestic tragedy resulting from the attempted flight and death of Felipe's apparently schizophrenic heir, D. Carlos, and, most perilous of all, the great Morisco rebellion in the Alpujarra mountains around Granada, involving nearly all the Muslims of southeastern Castile. The royal forces were unprepared--most of the trained units had been dispatched to the Low Countries--and the bloody struggle went on for nearly two years. What made the situation particularly dangerous was the Morisco appeal to Turkey and the threat of Turkish intervention which, however, never materialized. The Morisco revolt was finally crushed (see chapter 14).
 
As soon as this grave question of internal security was solved, the crown had to face a renewed Turkish threat in the Mediterranean. In 1570, the Turks launched a major expedition of conquest against the Venetian-held island of Cyprus. The papacy helped organize a Holy League bringing together the navies of the Spanish crown, Genoa, and Venice. Cyprus fell in 1571, but a few months later the Christian forces engaged the main Turkish fleet at the great battle of Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth, the largest engagement in the history of naval warfare to that time. Thanks to superior naval technology, strong leadership, and tenacious combat, the Christian armada, under Carlos V's bastard D. Juan de Austria, won a smashing victory. More than one-third of the Turkish fleet was destroyed, with great loss of life, and the triumph inspired Christian confidence throughout the Mediterranean. Though the Christian forces did not follow up their triumph with any lasting conquests, the Turks were stopped. The Ottoman regime became increasingly preoccupied with affairs on its eastern border and drew away from Europe. A truce was signed with the Spanish crown in 1578 and renewed periodically for the rest of the century.
 
Yet achieving this balance in the Mediterranean did not completely restore the initiative to the crown, for the revolt in the Netherlands grew broader and more costly. In 1572, the Dutch "Sea Beggars" seized the port of Brill, giving them a permanent naval base in the [260] Low Countries. The Spanish forces were threatened by French invasion from the south, as well, an initiative that was choked off by the great massacre of French Protestant leaders by their Catholic rivals in Paris on St. Bartholomew's Day in August 1572. This French slaughter killed about as many people within twenty-four hours as did the Spanish Inquisition in three hundred years. Though Spain had no hand in the mass murder, it greatly benefitted the Spanish position by eliminating French support for the Flemish and Dutch rebels. The duke of Alba began a major counteroffensive in Flanders in 1572-1573, marked by some of the worst planned atrocities of sixteenth-century west European wars. By official policy whole populations of towns were slaughtered, and thousands of civilians perished. The growing savagery and ruthlessness of the reign of Felipe II reflected the intransigent religious position of the Spanish leaders and contrasted sharply with the temperate military policies of an earlier period in Spanish history. Yet it should be kept in mind that the Spanish outrages were no greater than those committed in certain other parts of continental Europe.
 
The duke of Alba's terror was also counterproductive, for it probably did even more than foreign political control and increased taxation to solidify opinion in the Low Countries, of both Catholic and Protestant, against Spanish rule. In 1573, the soldier Alba was replaced by the diplomat Luis de Requesens as viceroy in Brussels, but by that time the revolt was out of hand. Spanish resources were no longer sufficient to meet gigantic and prolonged military strains, and the result was a declaration of bankruptcy in 1575. Lack of pay eventually led to a mutiny by the main Spanish force at Antwerp-- the so-called Spanish fury (though most of the troops were non-Spanish mercenaries) in which the city was sacked and at least seven thousand people slaughtered. Don Juan of Austria, the hero of Lepanto, who had been sent as the new viceroy, was forced to agree to withdraw the Spanish tercios. A decade after it began, the revolt in the Low Countries was settling into a draw, with little prospect of Spanish victory.
 
The king's outlook was made gloomier by the discovery that his chief personal secretary, Antonio Pérez, had been playing a double game in his relation to the crown and high officials and had maintained secret contacts with the rebels. Pérez was removed and arrested in 1579, and the elderly Cardinal Granvelle, who had served Felipe II at the beginning of his reign, was installed as imperial chancellor.
 
The years 1573-1579 were relatively static because of the crown's multiple burdens, financial shortages, and erratic policy in the Low Countries, but new opportunities presented themselves in 1580. Incorporation [261] of the Portuguese monarchy increased the naval resources of the empire, ⁽¹⁾ and by that time the flow of bullion from Spanish America had begun to increase markedly. By 1582, the Spanish forces in the Low Countries had been expanded once more to nearly sixty thousand, including the return of the tercios, ⁽²⁾ and Alessandro Farnese, viceroy since 1578, was able to launch a general offensive. Farnese was undoubtedly the most able lieutenant to serve the Spanish crown during the later sixteenth century, combining outstanding qualities of military and diplomatic leadership. From about 1579 he was assisted by a growing reaction among the Catholic aristocracy of Flanders and Brabant against radical urban middle- and lower-class Calvinists. Spanish strength had always been centered in the southern Low Countries, and after a social and ideological split developed in the rebel camp, Farnese was able to solidify much of the population of Flanders and Brabant behind the restoration of a Catholic regime which, though part of the Spanish empire, would be respectful of local rights. By 1585, he had conquered Antwerp. The entire southern half of the Low Countries--the predecessor of modern Belgium--lay under Spanish control and was being restored to Catholicism.
 
This threatened to return full Spanish domination to the Low Countries, which in turn would menace the political and religious independence of England. Elizabeth and her advisors could not afford to see the Dutch cause go under completely, while to the Spanish crown England stood as its principal maritime rival, after Holland, and the only encouragement for continued Dutch resistance. Hence the key to complete victory in the Low Countries and secure hegemony for the empire in western Europe seemed to be the subjection of England. The execution of Mary Queen of Scots by the English crown in 1587 finally removed the danger of a French succession to the English throne if Elizabeth were overthrown and thus left Felipe II free to act.
 
The Armada of 1588 was a much more complex enterprise than the expedition to Lepanto seventeen years earlier had been. It was the most massive high seas fleet that Europe had ever seen, but it was also part of an amphibious operation that planned to ferry much of the Spanish forces in the Low Countries to a land invasion of England. There were some one hundred thirty ships in the Armada. The English mustered a larger fleet, though their tonnage was considerably smaller. Spanish naval strategy relied on heavy short-range artillery to [262] close with the enemy vessels, wreck their rigging, and hold them still in the water to be boarded. The English relied on long-range artillery. Their ships were sufficiently maneuverable to frustrate Spanish strategy, but their long-range artillery was too weak to do great damage. The worst Spanish problem was lack of a deep-water port in which to pick up Farnese's troops, making the junction of forces almost impossible. After English fireships forced the Armada from Calais harbor in disarray, heavy winds cut it off from contact with Farnese. A storm blew the remnants of the Armada all the way around the British Isles. Only one-third of the vessels were completely wrecked, and most of these were merchantmen, but damage was heavy and there was great loss of life among skilled Spanish seamen.
 
Perhaps the greatest effect of the Armada was its psychological impact on the Spanish people. The struggles and triumphs of the century had built up a complex of Counter-Reformation messianism and imperialism among many Spaniards. The empire was associated with a sense of divine mission, and the Armada had been preached from many village pulpits. Its defeat for the first time began to raise doubts as to whether God would bless further imperial enterprise, whether the great physical burdens of taxation and military recruitment were really worthwhile for Castile.
 
Yet the losses of the Armada were made good within a year or two. Taxes could still be raised and bullion imports from America remained high. The Spanish fleet was still the strongest in the Atlantic, and in some respects Felipe II stood at the height of his power in 1590-1592. The crown was determined to combat the conquest of the French throne by the Protestant Henri IV, and in this connection Felipe II pressed the claim of his daughter, Isabel Clara Eugenia, whose mother had been a French princess. During 1590-1591, the Spanish invaded France from the northeast, northwest, and southwest. The Spanish crown also pressed the Austrian Habsburgs to pursue a more militant Counter-Reformation policy, provided Vienna with a subsidy in the struggle against the Turks, and even contemplated sending a Spanish force to campaign in the Balkans.
 
The new struggle in France distracted Spanish strength from the Low Countries, however, where the Dutch won important victories. It also encouraged a Franco-English-Dutch alliance against Spain in 1596. The English naval raid of that year against Cádiz was a smashing success. Two new Spanish efforts to send major expeditions to Ireland were blown back by storms in 1596 and 1597. In 1595, the crown was forced to declare bankruptcy for the third time in less than four decades. By the last year of his life, Felipe II was a chastened and disillusioned ruler who realized that dominance of western Europe and the repression of heresy abroad had escaped him. His last [263] major act was to conclude peace with France before dying in 1598 at the age of 71.
 
The wisdom and prudence of Felipe II are open to doubt. He was stubborn and persevering in strategy, but his tactics were sometimes erratic. He occasionally followed long periods of caution by overreaching himself in grandiose enterprises, such as the Armada, which had the odds against it from the start. His drastic policy in the Low Countries proved partially counterproductive.
 
There is no questioning his devotion to duty and his sense of personal responsibility; he was the hardest working ruler of his time. Though he distinguished between Spanish political and Catholic religious interests in general European affairs (at one point in 1584 he was willing to subsidize French Protestantism to weaken the French crown), his religious ardor was genuine and complete, and he did far more than reason of state required to combat heresy. Thus the supreme moment of his reign was indeed 1588, when imperial interest and religious zeal were ideally combined in the great Armada. It is possible that he made his reign unnecessarily difficult by taking so much responsibility upon himself. At any rate, he had a great distrust of strong personalities and powerful advisers, and was even preparing to replace the brilliant Farnese at the moment of the latter's death in 1592.
 
With the passing of Felipe II, the Spanish politico-military hegemony did not by any means come to an end but would last half a century more. The Spanish sense of providential mission, however, of being the sword arm of Catholic Christendom, of expanding a divinely guided empire, was indeed beginning to wane. Multiple strains--economic, spiritual and psychological--compounded by the frustrations of the unrewarding final decade of 1588-1598, were leaving their effect.

Felipe III was a prince of pleasant, negative personality, with few vices and few virtues. He lacked the industry and driving sense of responsibility of his father and from the beginning left government to a personal favorite, the duke of Lerma. This set the style of Spanish government for most of the seventeenth century. Lerma had no long-range policy, but dealt with the vast problems confronting the empire on the basis of makeshift and procrastination.
 
There was clear reluctance to continue the aggressive policies of Felipe II. Peace had already been made with France (1598); it was followed by peace with England in 1604 and after another state [264] bankruptcy in 1607 by a ten-year truce with Holland in 1609. The struggle to recover all of the Low Countries had turned into a hopeless drain of men and money. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the seven northern provinces that made up rebel Holland were on their way to becoming economically and technologically the most dynamic part of western Europe, combining the maritime enterprise and daring of the Portuguese of an earlier period with the economic acumen of the Germans and north Italians. Holland presented an increasing contrast to Spain itself, which had developed an almost closed society during the sixteenth century and under the burden of war, taxes, and its own social values was no longer able to expand economically. Holland was becoming the freest, most open country in Europe, and for the next two generations the most socially and economically creative. The truce of 1609 recognized the apparent inability of Spain to reconquer it.
 
For most of the reign of Felipe III, the Spanish fleet remained the strongest in the western world, but its margin of superiority was dwindling. Sources of naval supplies in the peninsula were being exhausted and much had to be imported from the north. Spanish wages rose more rapidly than general prices in the early part of the seventeenth century, and costs of naval construction, outfitting. and maintenance were much higher--possibly two or three times higher-- than in Holland, England, or even France. Moreover, the half century 1570-1620 was the heyday of west European piracy, and Spanish shipping was the main target. When the conflict with Holland began once more after expiration of the ten-year truce in 1619, the Dutch inflicted a crushing defeat upon the Spanish fleet and made it clear that the naval hegemony had passed from Spain.
 
The reign of Felipe III was a static period in most aspects of imperial affairs, but the loss of naval leadership was grave, for control of communications was vital to the integrity of the empire. Thus the apprehension and disillusion noticeable in the last years of the reign of Felipe II slowly increased during the period of his successor.

The era of Spanish domination almost inevitably brought the enmity of most of western Europe against the Spanish crown and its subjects. This hostility was tinged with deference, as witnessed by the vogue of dark-hued Spanish clothing and the domination of Castilian literature and of Castilian as a literary language in western Europe. But among the chief foes of Spain and its royal policies there took shape a vague but sweeping denunciation, not merely of Spanish power but of [265] almost all things Spanish. The conceptualization of this enmity defined as uniquely Spanish the vices of overweening pride, violence, intolerance, ethnocentrism, and obscurantism. By the beginning of the seventeenth century it was taking the form in which it would subsequently be known to Spaniards as the Black Legend.
 
The earliest roots of Black Legend theorizing lay in the anti-Aragonese feeling generated in the Italian peninsula during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Denunciations of Aragonese expansion in the late Middle Ages were sometimes coupled with racial sneers referring to race-mixing in the Hispanic peninsula. By contrast, Italians preferred to consider themselves comparatively "pure" descendants of ancient Romans. In the 1490s, the Aragonese pope Alexander VI was called a marrano (Spanish Jew) by Italian enemies. Anti-Aragonese sentiment in Italy changed to general anti-Spanish and anti-Castilian feeling during the sixteenth century. By the middle of that century, with the tension between Carlos V and German Protestants and the first major Spanish campaigns in central Europe, German sources also began to launch general denunciations of things Spanish. Even more influential in building the image of brutal, violent, intolerant Spaniards were the long war with Holland and the struggle with Elizabethan England. The most important objective factor was the Spanish atrocities, particularly during the bloody epoch of the duke of Alba in the Low Countries, for this went beyond anything experienced in northwestern Europe in the sixteenth century. The French seem to have contributed rather less to the early formulation of the Black Legend, possibly because they usually equalled or surpassed the Spanish in their own atrocities, as in the case of the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.
 
Paradoxically, the most important single document in establishing the Black Legend was written by a Spanish monk, Bartolomé de las Casas, in his effort to defend American Indians from the further depredations of Spanish colonists. His account of the destruction of the Indians of the West Indies, first published in 1552, was written in lurid, occasionally exaggerated tones, and later republished in foreign editions by Spain's detractors. ⁽³⁾
 
It should be kept in mind, however, [266] that Las Casas' campaign on behalf of the American Indians had been possible precisely because moral and political protest, as distinct from heterodox religious protest, had always been possible in Spain. For example, the Spanish crown of the Counter-Reformation period never committed an arbitrary act in domestic politics equivalent to the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh by the English crown.
 
The first full-blown statement of the Black Legend was the Apology of the Dutch leader William the Silent, prepared in 1580 and circulated throughout western Europe. It emphasized the fanaticism and cruelty of Spaniards, the horrors of the Inquisition, the suppression of Moriscos, destruction of "twenty million" Indians, the supposed tyranny of Spanish political institutions, and varied imagined iniquities of the personal life and reign of Felipe II. Some of this was invented and most of it was greatly exaggerated, yet it contained a certain kernel of truth, particularly for Dutchmen and Englishmen trying to preserve local freedoms, religious choice, and a more open society than that of militant, Counter-Reformation Castile.
 

[346] The best Spanish study of foreign affairs in the sixteenth century is Manuel Fernández Alvarez, Política mundial de Carlos V y Felipe II (Madrid, 1966). Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen a l'époque de [347] Philippe II, rev. ed. (Paris, 1966), is classic synthesis of comparative history. Aside from the work of Fernández Alvarez, the best biographies of Carlos V are Karl Brandi, Charles V, Eng. tr. (London, 1965), and Royall Tyler, The Emperor Charles V (London, 1956). On Felipe II, see C. Bratli, Felipe II (Madrid, 1940); Fernández Alvarez's Felipe II (Madrid, 1956); Rafael Altamira's Ensayo sobre Felipe II (Mexico City, 1950); and Henri Lapeyre's "Autour de Philippe II," Bulletin Hispanique 59 (1957): 152-75.
 
On Spanish policy in North Africa there is Giancarlo Sorgia, La politica nord-africana di Carlo V (Padua, 1963). Bohdan Chudoba, Spain and the Empire, 1519-1643 (Chicago, 1952), is useful on relations with the Austrian Habsburgs. Lucien Febvre, Philippe II et la Franche Comté (Paris, 1921), deals with the Spanish Habsburgs' French province. On the crown's Portuguese policy, see Alfonso Danvila, Felipe II y la sucesión de Portugal (Madrid, 1956), and J. M. Rubio, Felipe II de España, rey de Portugal (Madrid, 1939). Hans Koenigsberger, The Government of Sicily under Philip II of Spain (London, 1951), presents an interesting case study. Two biographies of key imperial figures are M. Van Durme, El Cardenal Gran vela (Barcelona, 1957), and L. Van der Essen, Alexandre Farnése, 5 vols. (Brussels, 1933-37). The finest narrative of any event in sixteenth-century Spanish history is Garrett Mattingly's The Armada (Boston, 1959).

Two works by J. A. Maravall are important on political theory: Carlos V y el pensamiento político del Renacimiento (Madrid, 1960), and La teoría española del Estado en el siglo XVII (Madrid, 1944). Spanish attitudes toward the imperial policies of Carlos V are treated in J. Sánchez Montes, Franceses, protestantes, turcos: Los españoles ante la política internacional de Carlos V (Madrid, 1951), and in J. M. Jover, Carlos V y los españoles (Madrid, 1960).

Genesis of the Black Legend has been studied by Sverker Arnoldsson, La leyenda negra (Goteborg, 1960). On its elaboration in England and later in the United States, see William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England (Durham, N.C., 1971), and Philip W. Powell, Tree of Hate (New York, 1971).

1. According to the best available estimate, after 1581 the combined Spanish and Portuguese fleets totaled 250,000-300,000 tons, that of Holland about 230,000, those of the German states 110,000, France 80,000, and England 42,000.

2. Of the Spanish forces in the Low Countries after 1577, only 10 to 20 percent were actually soldiers from Spain itself.

3. The forged title page of the 1689 London edition of Las Casas' Very Brief Recital of the Destruction of the Indies, published as anti-Spanish propaganda, read, "Popery truly Displayed in its Bloody Colours: Or a Faithful Narrative of the Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manner of Cruelties, that Hell and Malice could invent, committed by the Popish Spanish Party on the Inhabitants of West-India...Composed first in Spanish by Bartholomew de las Casas, a Bishop there, and an Eye-Witness of most of these Barbarous Cruelties; afterwards translated by him into Latin, then by other hands into High-Dutch, Low-Dutch, French, and now Taught to speak modern English."