2. The Habsburg Dynasty

The Habsburg Dynasty

Juan Antonio López Luque

• Born in Flanders

• Inherited all Spain’s and Holy Roman Empire (HRE) territories

• When he first arrived in Spain,he hardly spoke the Spanish language

• He put many foreign nobles in the most important government positions

• He spent lots of Castilian money in wars and in his candidacy for election as HRE

Carlos I of Spain and V of the HRE


Carlos´inheritanceJuan Antonio López Luque

European territoriesJuan Antonio López Luque

Carlos V Empire


• Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire

• King of Spain

• King of Naples

• King of Sicily

• Archduke of Austria

• Lord of the Low Countries

Carlos V


• The government of such a big empire was not easy:many different territories, with their own laws and institutions demanded a big effort to maintain

• Carlos V did not have absolute power

• He governed using councils like the Catholic monarchs before him

• His revenues came from taxes from Castilla and precious metals from America

• BUT he spent a lot of money on expensive wars to preserve territories and influence

Carlos V


The council system of government

Carlos did not have absolute powerHe needed the approval from the Parliaments of each state.There was no one capital city – the court moved around


Problems at home -Revolt of the Comuneros (1520 – 1521)

• The comunidades were the representative local communities during the early Middle Ages

• Carlos angered both Castilian urban aristocracy (taxes) and some Castilian nobles (important positions in government)

• The revolt started in Toledo and spread to other cities, with the support of the nobles in the beginning.

• They were fighting for the right of the towns and local districts to control their own affairs and choose their own Cortes representatives


Problems at home -Revolt of the Comuneros (1520 – 1521)

• As the middle and lower classes became more prominent the revolt became a fight for economic and social reforms

• The urban upper classes and by rural hidalgos deserted

• An agreement with the nobles allowed Carlos to defeat the revolt in 1521

• Changes in the government were introduced afterwards


Problems at home -Germanías

• The "Germania" was a militia brotherhood of lower-class volunteers to help protect the Valencian coast against Muslim pirates

• After an outbreak of the plague interpreted as punishment for impiety, they started a bloody riot against Muslim peasants

• When officials tried to intercede, the Germania took over the whole city

• Finally an army led by the nobles had to fight and crush the rebels


A general pattern of troubles

• This revolts in Castile and Valencia are just a part of the general pattern of social, political, and economic unrest among the middle and lower classes in Europe during the transition from the middle Ages into the sixteenth century.

irmandade rising in Galicia

Cataluña and Mallorca revolts

revolts of Bohemia

social risings in the Low

Countries

upheavals in Switzerland


• Carlos fought against foreign powers to defend his authority & the Catholic religion

• He defeated the French, his main rival in 1525

• He fought the Turks (1529-1541) who were invading from the east

• He confronted the German princes who supported Luther & Protestantism

• He continued his fight against the Moors of North Africa & defended his territory in Italy

Problems abroad

see next slidesee next slide


Battle of Pavía (1525)

• Charles finally abdicated from his Spanish Empire in January 1556 and gave it to his son Philip.

• He retired to the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura where he died on 21 September 1558.

• “I speak Latin with God, Italian with the musicians, Spanish with the troops, German with the servants, French with the ladies and English with my horse”

Abdication


Felipe II

• To foreign and Protestant writers he was the arch-fiend of Counter-Reformation iniquity, the brutal instigator of the Inquisition.

• To Spaniards, the great ruler who guided the empire at the height of its power, the sword arm of Catholicism, defender of the faith and unity of Europe. El prudente ("the wise")


Felipe II (1556-1598) and the organization of the empire

• Carlos’ empire was divided

• Felipe inherited territories from Spanish and Portuguese crowns

• Spain as the centre of his monarchy

• Madrid becomes capital

• It’s the complete hispanization of the dynasty and the kingdom


Felipe II

• Whereas Carlos V had been a military and cavalier king, devoted to battle, Felipe was a bureaucratic ruler.

• He did not personally lead his armies

• He refused to delegate central authority and served as the first clerk of the imperial bureaucracy


Felipe II Cateau-Cambresis

• After the major Spanish victory at St. Quentin in France in 1557, the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis was sigend (1559)

• The end to the Hispano-French wars

• It was a "Catholic" peace, between the two major Catholic powers and enable them to concentrate their energies on internal and religious unity

Protestants


Felipe II the Turkish

• For 15 years the center of attention for Felipe was not Western Europe but the Turkish menace 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.


The battle of Lepanto

• The largest engagement in the history of naval warfare to that time.

• Carlos V's bastard D.Juan de Austria, won a smashing victory. More than one-third of the Turkish fleet was destroyed


Problems and more problems

• The English and rebel Dutch navies in the North Atlantic were a menace to the sea route to Flanders and communications with the Indies

• French military activity on the Catalan border

• Fear of rebellion and heresy in Catalonia

• Death of Felipe's apparently schizophrenic heir, D. Carlos

• The great Morisco rebellion in the Alpujarra mountains around Granada


The Low Countries

• After the Protestant revolt in the Low Countries in 1566 Felipe decided that he could no longer trust the affairs of that area to semi-autonomous local administration

• He dispatched a Hispano-Italian army of occupation under his leading military commander, the duke of Alba

• During six years, the "Council of Troubles" (also called the Council of Blood) in Brussels executed more than 1000 rebels and heretics, exceeding the peninsular Inquisition in its harshness.


Felipe II king of Portugal

• In 1578 young king Sebastian of Portugal died without descendants.

• His uncle, the elderly Cardinal Henry, succeeded him as King, but Henry also had no descendants.

• Felipe marched then into Portugal and defeated the other candidate

• Philip II of Spain was crowned king of Portugal in 1581


The Empire of Philip II


Spain and England

• In 1554 Felipe had married Mary queen of England. • The marriage treaty excludes Philip from the throne if

Mary dies childless.• In 1558 Mary dies, without producing the desired

Catholic heir Mary

Elizabeth

• After Elizabeth's appropriation of Spanish gold on its way to the Netherlands in 1568, relations between Spain and England are formally severed for five years.

• By 1585 Elizabeth is actively supporting the Dutch rebels in the Netherlands

• English incursions into the rich Spanish territories of America have been escalating since the pioneering efforts of John Hawkins. The main English voyages of plunder have been carried out by Francis Drake


Spain and England

• Drake's departure from Plymouth for the Caribbean in 1585, with a fleet of about thirty ships. He and his men spend several months plundering Spanish settlements, burning houses, sinking ships, and destroying whatever they cannot profitably remove.

• When Elizabeth dispatches her troops to the Netherlands in the same year, this provocation finally persuades Philip that he must invade England.

• While Philip assembles his fleet in Cadiz in 1587, Drake sails into the crowded harbor and burns or sinks some thirty ships


The Armada

• Despite the English attacks the fleet safely reaches Calais, where the plan is to pick up an army from the Netherlands and to ferry it across the Channel against England. But the army has not arrived.

• During the night of August 7 the English send fire ships in among the anchored fleet, causing the Spanish to cut their cables in disarray.

• The Armada escapes into the North Sea.

The Armada

• Ships founder or are wrecked on Scottish and Irish coasts but the fleet was broken up by a storm.

• Of the 130 vessels which sailed from Corunna in June, only 67 limp back to Spain.

• The English, with a very much easier return voyage to their home ports, lose not a single ship.

• Perhaps the greatest effect of the Armada was its psychological impact on the Spanish people.

• Philip II: “I sent my ships against the English, not against the elements”


Felipe II

• 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 disillusioned ruler who realized that dominance of Western Europe and the repression of heresy abroad had escaped him.

• His last major act was to conclude peace with France before dying in 1598 at the age of 71.

The Black Legend

• The term Black Legend refers to a centuries-old view of Spain and its people as particularly cruel, prejudiced, and greedy.

• 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 in fact 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.

The Black Legend

• The earliest roots of Black Legend lay in the anti-Aragonese feeling generated in the Italian peninsula during the 14 and 15 centuries.

• Denunciations of Aragonese expansion were sometimes coupled with racial sneers

referring to race-mixing in the Hispanic peninsula (Italians preferred to consider themselves comparatively "pure" descendants of ancient Romans).

• By the middle of the 15 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 all kinds of things about the Spaniards.

• Even more influential in building the image of brutal, violent, intolerant Spaniards were the long war with Holland and the struggle with Elizabethan England, particularly during the bloody epoch of the duke of Alba in the Low Countries.

• 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.

• first published in 1552, was written in lurid, occasionally exaggerated tones, and later republished in foreign editions by Spain's detractors.

The Black Legend

• 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.

The Black Legend

• The Black Legend would accompany Spain and the Spaniards until the XIXth century through the writings of North European and British (=American) authors.

The Black Legend

The Life, Travels and Adventures of Ferdinand de Soto, de Lambert A.

Wilmer, 1858.

The Life, Travels and Adventures of Ferdinand de Soto, de Lambert A.

Wilmer, 1858.

• The Spanish-American war of 1898 saw a new rising of the image of Spaniards as greedy, cruel and fanatics..

War is Hell, but Peace in Cuba under Spanish Rule is Worse than Hell, 1898.War is Hell, but Peace in Cuba under

Spanish Rule is Worse than Hell, 1898.

The Black Legend

• Morisco is a derogatory Spanish term, deriving from moro - meaning Moorish and used originally of Muslims from Morocco.

• The Catholic Monarchs first declared the expulsion or conversion of the Muslims of Granada in 1502.

• Charles V extended the norm in 1525 to the rest of the kingdom.

• In 1567 Philip II introduces a law banning their customs and their clothes. The result is a violent uprising in 1568 by the Moriscos of Granada, brutality suppressed in 1570.

Moriscos, the «final solution»


• During the 16th century Morisco becomes applied to Muslim families who have remained in Spain by converting to Christianity.

• Many Muslims families keep faith with the old religion, carrying out the rituals of Islam in private.

• Morisco communities, as often with minorities, tend to be hard-working and prosperous, provoking jealousy.

• In the coastal areas of Granada and Valencia they are also suspected of assisting the Muslim pirates who regularly raid from North Africa.





• In 1609 Philip III passes a decree ordering the expulsion from Spain of all Moriscos.

• It takes five years for the process to be carried out; most of the families are transported in galleys across the Mediterranean to the coast of North Africa.

• It is calculated that 300,000 people are deported.

• The property which they leave behind seems at first like a welcome bonus.

but…



• These are people skilled in crafts and agriculture, paying onerous taxation .

• Their departure does great damage to Spain's economy, just as their arrival eventually benefits North Africa.

• The final solution of the Morisco problem came not so much as a protective measure but as a gesture that Spain still had the strength to resolve a domestic problem and complete the unity of Spanish Counter-Reformation society.

• Ironically most of the Moriscos descend from Christian families converted during the long centuries of Islam in Spain.



• He lacked the industry and driving sense of responsibility of his father.

• Reluctant to continue the aggressive policies of Felipe II he mends Spain's fences with England in the treaty of London (1604) and achieves a spell of calm in the northern Netherlands: the Twelve Years' Truce.

• The reign of Felipe III was a static period in most aspects of imperial affairs, but the loss of naval leadership was grave.

• From the beginning left government to a personal favorite (valido), the duke of Lerma.

Felipe III


• Was above all interested in prestige and fortune.

• Established his control over the aristocracy and became the wealthiest man in Spain.

• The counciliar system of state administration was maintained, but there was a growing tendency to appoint subcommittees to deal with special problems.

• This resulted in further division in administrative organization. The government system tended more and more to get out of control.

Felipe III: the Duke of Lerma


As the government bankrupted itself, every possible device for raising money was tried: •Sale of offices in state affairs •In the Indies the practice was extended from fee-earning positions to more important salaried posts as well. •Seats on the Council of Indies were sold.

The treasury system itself was a rat's nest. Nearly all tax collection was indirect and after so many local notables, tax farmers, and agents had siphoned off funds for themselves, little more than 20 % of the sum originally collected reached the crown.

Financial stress, favoritism, and maladministrationled to protest even among the upper classes

In 1618 Felipe III dismissed his valido

Felipe III: Bankrupcy


• Felipe IV succeeded his father in 1621 when only sixteen years old.

• He was more frivolous and little disposed to devote himself to public affairs

• He was young, inexperienced, and not well educated

• A new valido: the Count-Duke of Olivares

Felipe IV


• Unlike the Duke of Lerma (Felipe III’s valido) Olivares was well trained and used to responsibility, a man of great vigor and energy.

• He was not after personal gain, however, but sought the vindication of the Spanish empire. He wanted to strengthen the Spanish empire and lead it to victory over its many foes.


The Count-Duke of Olivares

• The size and potential wealth of the overseas empire made it an almost irresistible target for European rivals;

• The extent of the empire's European territories placed it in a dominant position that was eventually intolerable to a revitalized France determined to cut Spain down to size;

• The geographic pattern of the European empire was awkward, for the Low Countries and the France Comte were isolated from the southern base and were difficult to defend;

• The government refused to recognize the independence of the only dissident part of the empire, Holland, which had long since broken away and made its own place in the world.

The Empire: difficulties


• The Thirty Years' War was a series of wars in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648. It was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history, and one of the longest.

• Initially a war between Protestant and Catholic states in the fragmenting Holy Roman Empire, it gradually developed into a more general conflict involving most of the great powers of Europe

The Thirty Years' War


1) Continued increase in the size of entailed domains held by the aristocracy and the church, which had the effect of withdrawing land from use and of lowering production;

2) Increasing social disruption and vagrancy;

3) An overabundance of clerics;

4) The status orientation of society;

5) The negative, charity-oriented religious attitudes toward poverty that precluded serious thought of reform and new enterprise; and

6) Government policy, which maintained prohibitive taxes in Castile, produced capricious waves of alternating inflation and deflation that led to monetary chaos, over-regulated some aspects of the economy, and was incompetent in planning and execution.

XVII century decline: Economy


• The crown was unable to sustain its huge military expenses and was forced to another declaration of bankruptcy* in 1627.

• The entire annual treasure fleet from New Spain was captured by a Dutch squadron along the Cuban coast in 1628. The struggle continued against both Holland and England, while income to finance it dropped, and Spain's Catholic allies in central Europe showed no inclination to assist in fighting the Dutch.

*Bankruptcy during the Habsburgs: • Carlos I & Felipe II: 1557, 1576, 1596; • Felipe III: 1607; • Felipe IV: 1627, 1647, 1652, 1662; • Carlos II: 1666

XVII century decline: Economy


• The reigns of Philip III and IV, spanning the first seven decades of the 17th century, constitute a peak in Spanish literature and art.

• Cervantes produces the western world's first great novel, Don Quijote.

• Lope de Vega and then Calderón establish the Spanish theatre.

XVII century culture: El Siglo de Oro


• Velazquez, painter to the Spanish court, transforms his unglamorous masters into masterpieces. He’s the greatest Spanish painter of all times.

• Also El Greco, Zurbaran, Murillo , Ribera, etc...


XVII century culture: El Siglo de Oro

• The Spanish monarchs create a problem for their royal line by constantly marrying within the Habsburg dynasty.

• Three successive generations of Spanish kings (Philip III, Philip IV and Charles II) have Habsburgs as both parents.

• All the immediate ancestors of Charles II (1665-1700) are descendants of the emperor Maximilian.

• The famous Habsburg jaw, prominent in Velazquez's portraits of Philip IV, is so extreme in Charles II that it amounts to a disability - one of many, for he is sickly from birth.

Carlos II: the end of the dynasty


• Charles II marries twice but has no children and is assumed to be impotent.

• In his thirties he is so often ill that his early death is widely expected.

• With no immediate heir, but powerful claimants to his great empire, the coming crisis obsesses Europe in the 1690s.

• The issue will be fought out in the War of the Spanish Succession.

Carlos II: the end of the dynasty


Education

2. The Habsburg Dynasty