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Cervantes and his world
B.W. Ife

Document Contents

III

I

At a critical point in his short story La española inglesa, Cervantes has to repatriate the heroine Isabela from London to Seville. Writers of romance conventionally handled journeys of this kind by supernatural means or by an authorial stroke of the pen. But Isabela would be taking with her a dowry of 10,000 escudos, and England and Spain were at war: how was she going to get home with the fortune intact? Interested readers can consult the text to see exactly how it was done, but the solution is a masterpiece of early modern capitalism involving a network of French merchant-bankers acting on commission: one in London to take care of the cash and arrange the transfer; another to issue the documents in Paris to throw the authorities off the scent; and another to cash the cheque once Isabel arrives back in Seville.

This mixture of high romance and precise documentary detail is a trademark of Cervantes, and one of the reasons why it is important to try and understand, four centuries later, the relationship between his work and the world in which he lived. Although it is impossible to overstate the dangers of extrapolating biography from fiction, it is safe to say that few writers of the early modern period travelled as extensively as Cervantes did, or turned their hands to so many occupations, or knew as much as he did about their contemporary world; and he put more of that knowledge into his work than most.

Born in 1547 in Alcalá de Henares to a poor professional family, Cervantes was largely self-taught; he studied for a while in Seville and Madrid, but most of his learning came from wide and -by his own admission- indiscriminate reading. In 1569, he left Madrid for Italy, and entered the service of Giulio Acquaviva before enlisting in the Spanish army. He fought under Don John of Austria in the great Christian victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, and lost his left hand, an injury of which he was inordinately proud, 'since it was collected in the greatest and most memorable event that past centuries have ever seen'. Other military operations followed, in Corfu, Navarino and Tunis, and during his return journey to Spain in 1575, he was captured at sea by Turkish corsairs and taken to Algiers. There he spent five years in captivity before being redeemed by the payment of a ransom in 1580. Cervantes's experiences of military life in Italy, and more especially of prison life in north Africa, colour a great deal of his writing, and, in particular, several of the Novelas ejemplares.

Back in Spain, Cervantes found the life of an ex-serviceman frustrating and disappointing, and his attempts to build a literary career met with little success in the early years. An unhappy marriage to a much younger girl and continued financial difficulties forced him to take a series of poorly-paid public posts, including tax-collecting and provisioning for the Armada (1588). In 1590 he made the first of two unsuccessful applications for a post in America. During these years Cervantes travelled widely and gained a considerable knowledge of rural Spain, knowledge displayed most obviously in Don Quijote, but he was accused of fraudulent accounting and spent at least two periods of time in prison in Seville. There he learned a great deal about organised crime and the Seville underworld, including germanía, the language of criminals featured in Rinconete y Cortadillo.

In 1605 Cervantes, now settled in Valladolid, published Part I of Don Quijote. Although the work brought few financial rewards, it was well received in some circles and earned him a place on the fringes of the literary establishment there, and later in Madrid. The last four years of his life saw the culmination of his literary career: the Novelas ejemplares (1613) were followed by a long allegorical poem, the Viaje del Parnaso (1614); the following year brought Part II of Don Quijote and the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses. His great epic novel Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda was published posthumously in 1617.

Cervantes's career -from soldier to tax-gatherer, from unpromising writer to literary celebrity-makes a historicist approach to his work particularly appropriate. Reputation has transformed the historical Cervantes into a universal genius, independent of time or place; yet the very work which made his name, Don Quijote, is not only profoundly steeped in the social and economic reality of Habsburg Spain, but has anachronism as its central theme. So we have two leaps of the historical imagination to make if we want to place Cervantes in context: back to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to the reigns of Philip II and Philip III; and then beyond that to the late medieval world of knight errantry which Don Quixote was so keen to revive. Don Quijote telescopes together nearly 150 years of Spanish history, and unless we adjust our sights accordingly, we are likely to misread the complex relationships between past and present which are a central theme of Cervantes's fiction.

When Don Quixote first rode out onto the plains of La Mancha, the rural landscape he encountered would have seemed reassuringly familiar. The windmills, the flocks of sheep and the fulling mills testified to the long-standing importance of agriculture in general and the wool industry in particular in the Spanish economy and way of life. The country roads and wayside inns which populate the novel, and the drovers and the goatherds that frequent them, would hardly have struck the contemporary reader as worthy of comment. Yet this was a world which was experiencing profound social, political and economic change; change to which Don Quixote was largely oblivious, but from which he could not remain unscathed.

La Mancha lay at the heart of one of greatest empires the world has ever seen. In a little over 100 years Spain had undergone an astonishing transformation from a collection of intermittently warring kingdoms to become an emerging nation state, and had then rapidly gone on to acquire a world-wide empire. It is vital to understand the outlines of this process because the long-term consequences for Spaniards at all levels of society were both profound and far-reaching, and because it is important to dispel some myths about Spain and Empire, particularly those which detect in, or read back into, the events of the long sixteenth century a conscious strategy for world domination by a unified political machine. Throughout the early modern period, what we think of as (and for convenience will continue to call) 'Spain' had very little constitutional basis: both as 'nation' and 'empire', Spain was never more than a composite monarchy, an association of autonomous realms united only by what they had in common: a single monarch. At its most extensive, this global monarquía had as many as seventeen constituent parts, and like all federal or quasi-federal structures (such as the United States of America, the European Union, or Spain since Franco) it was as diverse as it was homogeneous. Time and again in the development of Spain and empire we see the laws of serendipity and unintended outcomes prevailing over those of historical inevitability.

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II

The emergence of Spain as a world power in the sixteenth century can be understood in terms of two major cycles of growth and development characterised by a small number of recurring issues: how to balance political unity with cultural diversity; assert crown authority while working constructively with powerful elites; maintain and defend the growing number of territories within the monarchy; discharge responsibilities for defending the Catholic faith; and meet the growing costs of operating on an international stage.

The first of these two cycles begins with the so-called 'union of the crowns', initiated by the marriage of Isabel, step-sister of Henry IV of Castile, to Ferdinand, son of John II of Aragon, in 1469. Although this marriage created the potential to unite two of the major powers in the Iberian peninsula, the potential was not realised without several years of struggle, in which Isabel's determination and Ferdinand's strategic and diplomatic skills were forged into an outstanding partnership. On the Castilian side, Isabel's claim to succeed her half-brother Henry would not normally have taken precedence over that of his daughter, Joanna. But it was widely rumoured that Henry was impotent and Joanna was illegitimate. Henry's sudden death in 1474 precipitated a succession crisis and civil war which was resolved in Isabel's favour in 1479. It was during the struggles of the 1470s that Isabel laid the unassailable foundations of the power base on which she and her successors would build. On the Aragonese side, the political landscape was dominated by a long-term dispute with France and civil war in Catalonia. Ferdinand's marriage to a Castilian had therefore been seen as an effective alliance against the French.

The first ten years of their marriage were a testing time for both Ferdinand and Isabel, but when Ferdinand succeeded his father in 1479, two of the four major power blocks of the Iberian peninsula had begun to forge a stable alliance bordering on union. But this 'union' was both provisional and conditional. The two crowns were united only by virtue of the marriage and only for its duration: the terms of the marriage contract preserved the independence of both parties and their respective territories.¹ Furthermore, Castile and Aragon were unequal partners: Castile was much the larger territory in geographical terms, and enjoyed numerically superior human and economic resources. The constituent kingdoms had been moulded into a much more unitary state than Aragon, and a more absolutist style of monarchy had been developed. Aragon was physically and economically less powerful, but had possessions in the Mediterranean (Majorca, Minorca, Ibiza, Sardinia, Sicily and, from 1504, Naples), and was still a federation of distinct kingdoms or principalities (Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia) under a single monarch who governed by consent rather than by absolute right. The kingdoms in the Aragonese federation were all fiercely loyal to different systems of local government and different sets of rights and privileges, all of which the monarch was required to respect as a condition of allegiance.

Once the foundations of the union had been laid, the second phase of the reign, to the early 1490s, was concerned with consolidation and development. One of the most frequently debated questions about the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel concerns unification: did they set out to unify the peninsula, and in either case, did they succeed? There is no evidence that they pursued a conscious policy of unification, but it might be argued that, if they had, their principal policies would have been the same. The territories over which they had only recently consolidated control were diverse in every conceivable way, and Ferdinand and Isabel had none of the structures and resources -army, exchequer, administration- which would normally be considered necessary for unitary rule; the Council of the Inquisition was the only body with a unified responsibility for an aspect of the affairs of both kingdoms.

It is hardly surprising that the monarchs made no effort to harmonise the many systems of local government, taxation, currency, or internal trade conventions, which made such a varied patchwork across the peninsula.² They appear instead to have concentrated on a few major, interrelated themes: enforcing law and order; restructuring relations between the crown and the local elites; reinforcing the power of the church; securing the territorial integrity of the peninsula; and developing the structures and systems needed to deliver these. It was an ambitious agenda designed to assert the authority of the crown, secure popularity with the people, promote a common ideology and harness the military power of the nobility by giving them something useful to do.

The re-establishment of law and order was long overdue. The peninsula had been dominated by military conflict for several centuries, the frontier culture was a violent one, and internal security had rarely been strong. Powerful local elites were able to capitalise on the general feeling of insecurity both in the towns and the countryside. The civil wars of the 1470s had not helped this situation. It was therefore essential that Ferdinand and Isabel act quickly to restore the confidence of the common people in a system of security and justice which clearly had support at the very top. By reorganising the local militias or hermandades into larger units responsible to the crown, by increasing the number of crown officials (corregidores) charged with maintaining a watching brief over local government, and by reforming the administration of justice, Isabel was able to gain popular support and curb the power of the municipalities and the nobles.³

The nobles were a particular problem. The feudal model of allegiance had never been strong in Spain, and the military and political power of the aristocracy was considerable. The image of the medieval baron living in a fortified castle on a huge estate, running a private army and living off tributes and taxes extorted from terrified peasants may be a caricature, but it is one which came close to reality in parts of late fifteenth-century Spain. Although Isabel had found the nobles useful while they were supporting her claim to the throne, once she had secured it, their habit of fighting amongst themselves, and their potential to act as focal points for sedition and rebellion, had to be addressed. The solution to this and to many other problems was one favoured by governments throughout the ages: war. Governments find wars useful because they distract the populace from more immediate problems, encourage people to sink their differences in the face of a common enemy, and if they end in victory, wars invariably make governments popular.

The war against Granada, which was successfully concluded in January 1492, fulfilled all of these objectives, and more. The capture of the last remaining Muslim territory in the peninsula brought to an end a long period of invasion and reconquest which began in 711. Muslim domination once extended almost as far north as the Pyrenees, but from the early thirteenth century the Christian territories had begun to fight back. A relatively peaceful coexistence (convivencia) had been achieved between the Christian kingdoms and the Emirate, and had lasted for over two centuries. Political coexistence, however, had not always been matched by religious and racial tolerance. Whereas the advancing Muslims had been generally tolerant of Christianity, and had encouraged Jews to settle and practice their religion in the peninsula, the reconquering Christians pressed for conversion of the Jews and the Muslims living under Christian rule, or their expulsion. Only in Valencia and Aragon were the civil and religious customs of Muslims respected to any great extent. The capture of Granada gave Isabel the excuse she needed to impose a single religion in Castile. In 1492 all Jews were required to be baptised or be expelled, and within ten years the same requirement was made of the Muslims.

Had this happened today, NATO planes would undoubtedly have been in action over southern Spain; but ethnic cleansing of the kind which has taken place in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s was not to become policy in Spain until 1609, when Philip III decreed the expulsion of all descendants of former Muslims (moriscos).⁴ What Isabel was trying to achieve in Granada was the logical consequence of a series of measures which she and Ferdinand had already taken to strengthen the power of the Church. Isabel had been concerned that, not only were there obvious signs of laxity in several areas of public life, such as public security, the administration of justice and the collection of taxes, but the Church itself was clearly corrupt and in need of reform. Many years before these issues surfaced in northern Europe at the time of the Reformation, Isabel perceived widespread ignorance, venality, absenteeism and peculation among all levels of clergy; and superstitious, unorthodox and near heretical beliefs among the lay people. She and Ferdinand set about reforming the secular clergy and the religious orders, gained control of ecclesiastical appointments, and introduced the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Castile (1478) and Aragon (1487).

But the war had to be paid for, and Ferdinand and Isabel could not meet the costs themselves. They relied on a tax granted by the Pope (the cruzada or 'crusade') and on troops and supplies from the nobles. Isabel and Ferdinand thereby created a powerful alliance of religious and aristocratic interests around a crusading ideal which helped them to achieve several military, religious and political objectives. First, they significantly extended their territories by annexing the third great power block of the peninsula (the fourth, Portugal, would have to wait until 1580). Secondly, by giving the nobles a bigger stake in the crown's own success, Ferdinand and Isabel began to build a stronger alliance with them. They rewarded service, not by payment in cash, but by various kinds of patronage, including grants of land in the conquered territories, and exemption from direct taxation, one of the most important traditional privileges granted in exchange for personal service.⁵ The disadvantage to the crown was the opportunity cost involved: no money changed hands, but the crown 'bought' the services it could not afford to pay for by foregoing future income from the land, and from direct taxation. The arrangement also transferred large stretches of land into private ownership, and the prosperity which resulted for a number of noble families began to change the long-term relationship between the nobles and the crown.

Thirdly, and most significantly, the completion of the reconquest enabled Isabel to implement a policy of forced conversion or expulsion. The ending of religious pluralism strengthened the position of the Church and imposed a militant, white, Christian ideology to which every local political and cultural interest in the peninsula was subordinate.⁶ This ideology was increasingly underwritten by the growing supremacy of Castilian as the preferred language for government and education, recognised by the publication of the first grammar of Spanish, and of any European vernacular language, by the humanist Antonio de Nebrija in 1492. Ferdinand and Isabel gave a high priority to education at all levels, and this enabled them to develop an administrative cadre of letrados, selected and trained on a meritocratic basis, to support the crown in managing the complexities of early modern statecraft.

Many of the achievements outlined above were to have very significant, and unforeseen, long-term disadvantages: the imposition of a single religion entailed the loss of a significant body of creative and entrepreneurial talent among the religious minorities who chose exile, and created two disaffected and marginalised ethnic minorities from among the moriscos and conversos who remained; and the concentration of land ownership in a small number of powerful families brought about long-term structural inequalities in the distribution of wealth. But there were also many benefits, including the priority given to education: some twenty universities were created in the peninsula by the end of the sixteenth century, and Spain became one of the most cultured and literate societies in early modern Europe. Without that readership, the work of Cervantes and his contemporaries would have been inconceivable.

Within months of the conclusion of the reconquest of Granada, Isabel and Ferdinand's reign entered its third phase prompted by an event which could not have been planned, but which was also the logical consequence of the policies outlined above: the 'discovery' by Christopher Columbus of islands in the Atlantic at approximately the longitude at which China and Japan were thought to be located. Isabel had agreed to permit, and partly to fund, a speculative voyage to investigate the feasibility of a westerly, transatlantic route to the Far East. As Columbus made clear in the prologue to the account he presented to the monarchs in 1493, there were four principal objectives to the voyage: scientific, economic, diplomatic and religious. As far as Columbus was concerned, the 1492 voyage was designed to strengthen Christian alliances against Islam, facilitate the recapture of Jerusalem and generate sufficient income for the enterprise to pay its own way.

From the moment that Columbus claimed the first small island in the Bahamas, Castile began to acquire extensive transatlantic possessions and Spain graduated almost overnight from embryonic nation state to emergent world empire.The crown and its advisors quickly assessed the true significance of Columbus's discoveries and staked an early territorial claim against the rival Portuguese. The resulting treaty of Tordesillas (1494) paved the way for future Spanish domination of the Caribbean, Mexico and the greater part of the South American continent, and by 1503 the Casa de Contratación had been established in Seville to regulate trade with the New World, which was soon being run as a fully-fledged offshore company. Seville would grow rapidly throughout the sixteenth century, fuelled by the trading opportunities offered by the New World. There were rich pickings to be had, and one fifth of all income went to the crown.

The discovery of large native populations who appeared to have no religion of their own gave plenty of scope for the salvation of souls. Spain had been granted sovereignty over the new territories by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, but this 'donation' was not without conditions. Ferdinand and Isabel were expected to use their sovereignty to advance the cause of Christianity, and in 1496, Alexander gave them the title 'Reyes Católicos' (Catholic Monarchs) in recognition of their support for the Church in Granada and the New World. When Isabel died in 1504 she could look back on a productive reign with a clear conscience that she had fulfilled the duties of a Christian monarch. But the burdens of empire were to become much greater with the passage of time, and the acquisition of an overseas empire was to prove a mixed blessing.

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III

The reign of the Catholic Monarchs began with a succession crisis and ended with one. On Isabel's death, Ferdinand remained king of Aragon, but not of Castile, to which the succession was problematic. Isabel and Ferdinand had arranged marriages for each of their four children to strengthen alliances with Portugal, England and Burgundy. But their efforts to secure the future of the union were frustrated when their only son John died in 1497, his sister Isabella died the following year, and the nominated successor Joanna ('Juana la Loca') was judged mentally unstable and unfit to rule. When Joanna's husband, Philip of Burgundy, also died unexpectedly in 1506, Ferdinand became regent of Castile on behalf of Joanna and her infant son Charles of Ghent (born in 1500). When Ferdinand died in 1516, Charles acquired a three-fold inheritance: in his person the two crowns of Castile and Aragon were finally united, together with the reconquered territories in the peninsula, the Atlantic, the New World, the Mediterranean (including Naples, recaptured by Ferdinand from the French in 1504), and North Africa; and to these territories he also added the Burgundian inheritance of the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Franche Comté. When he was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, the same year in which the first Spaniards reached Mexico, a fourth group of territories were added to the monarchy: the Habsburg lands in Germany, Poland, Austria and Hungary. Within a three-year period, King Charles I of Spain -the Emperor Charles V- became the most powerful man the world had ever seen.

Charles's accession established the Habsburg dynasty in Spain and ushered in the second great cycle of development for Spain and the empire. In many ways, this second cycle replays on a grander scale the central themes of the first. Like the Catholic Monarchs, the Habsburg kings of Spain had to grapple with problems of imposing and maintaining their authority on a politically diverse and geographically widespread collection of territories; they had to defend the territorial integrity of the empire; they took very seriously their responsibilities as defenders of the Christian faith; and they needed to raise large sums of money to do so. Charles adopted many of the solutions devised by the Catholic Monarchs -he became a skilful diplomat, travelled a great deal, led from the front and imposed his authority through the power of his personality while keeping the powerful elites on his side. But initially he had a number of disadvantages: he was a foreigner, a French-speaking Fleming, and he got off to a bad start by sidelining native Spaniards and appointing Burgundians to senior positions, while giving the impression that he intended to strip the assets of Castile and Aragon to fund his imperial ambitions.

The early years of Charles's reign were marked by suspicion and resentment which boiled over in a series of revolts by the comuneros and the germanía (1520-1521). In Castile, a number of towns experienced serious disturbances fuelled by resentment at the conspicuous presence of Burgundians in influential positions, the King's hasty departure from Spain on imperial business, and various long-standing complaints about the privileges of the aristocracy. In Valencia, the grievances were against the Muslims as well as the nobles. Both revolts had the effect of rallying the nobles in support of the royal cause, and were quickly suppressed. The rebels had made their point, nevertheless, and Charles spent most of the 1520s making amends for his high-handedness and for having taken the Spaniards and the regional parliaments (Cortes) for granted. 1522-1529 was the longest continuous period he ever spent in Spain; he made sure he learned the language and understood the local customs, and in 1526 he contracted a popular marriage with Isabella of Portugal, who gave him an heir, the future Philip II, the following year. Charles had put down roots in Spain and won the hearts of Spaniards, and more important, their political and financial support in defending the faith and the territories outside the peninsula.

Charles was at pains to make clear that he had no intention of extending the empire in Europe by conquest. But, equally, he would not contemplate surrendering territory on any front. There were three main troublespots: in the south and the east there was the old enmity with Islam, and the need to maintain naval power across the long and difficult frontier in the Mediterranean and North Africa, and along the Danube. Across the centre of the empire, and effectively dividing it in two, lay France. In the north, the greatest threat of all came from the rise of Protestantism. What began as a religious movement quickly took a political turn as secular leaders throughout northern Europe turned the mood of rebellion to their own advantage. Charles accepted that there was corruption and abuse among the clergy and the religious orders which needed to be dealt with, and encouraged a Catholic Counter-Reformation in response. But as the secular guardian of the church, the Emperor became increasingly alarmed at the political threat of the German princes, and the way in which perfectly justified calls for moral reform were causing widespread civil unrest and rebellion against the authority of the Pope. It was Charles's confrontation with Luther in 1521 which led him to pledge his 'kingdoms, dominions and friends, body and blood, soul and life' in defence of Christendom. With that pledge he committed Spain and the Spaniards to more than a century of conflict throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, and with it vast amounts of resource, both human and financial.

Charles was in a better position than Ferdinand and Isabel had been to afford a religious war on such a scale, but the cost to Castile in particular was high. Imperial armies depended on Spanish manpower and military expertise, but they had to be paid and the Emperor had increasing recourse to the cruzada, to general taxation, and to international sources of capital. The nobles were exempt from direct taxation, and constant recourse to grants and taxes to meet imperial commitments made the tax system more and more regressive as the burden fell increasingly on those least able to pay. Charles's greatest asset, however, was the ability to raise loans. By the early 1530s, when imports of silver bullion began to flow in large quantities, it was becoming clear that the economic potential of America was enormous. But the impact on Spain proved much less favourable than it might have been, and on balance was sharply negative.

Charles could raise large loans from German and Italian bankers to fight his wars in Europe because he could use imported silver from Peru as collateral. As a result, income was mortgaged for years in advance, and when the loans could not be paid, the crown was regularly bankrupt. Far from being a benefit to Spain, America proved a triumph for international venture capitalism: for the Genoese who underwrote much of the cost of the discoveries and then cashed in on the trading opportunities, and for the Italian and German bankers who saw Charles, and later Philip, struggling to hold back an unstoppable tide of social change by throwing huge sums of money at it, and were happy to feed their habit because their credit was good. Vast quantities of money flowed into the royal exchequer from America, but none of it stuck, and the Spaniards became net contributors to the cost of sustaining the empire.

The struggle to maintain control over such a large and turbulent empire eventually began to take its toll. Quite apart from the effort of securing the empire on several fronts in Europe, Charles also had to contend with a range of other important issues. The bad press which Spain was receiving about the conquests in South America and the abuse of the native populations by the conquerors and settlers, led to a high-profile enquiry into the legitimacy of conquest and brought about changes in the law governing the rights of Indians and the responsibilities of settlers. The growing pressure for reform of the church from within the Catholic sector, coupled with the increasing incidence of heretical belief was met by higher levels of activity from the Inquisition, tougher censorship, and the final suppression of Islam in Aragon in 1526. And the need to ensure that adequate systems of government were in place in Spain during his frequent absences abroad brought about an extension of the system of councils -early examples of modern government departments- and placed more power in the hands of the civil servants. By the 1550s Charles had concluded that his vast multinational conglomerate was too large to be manageable and he planned a phased abdication and demerger: he split the empire into two parts, handed on the original Holy Roman Empire inherited from the Austrian Habsburgs to his brother Ferdinand, and left the Castilian, Aragonese and Burgundian inheritances to his son Philip. Charles himself retired to a monastery at Yuste, in Extremadura.

The accession of Philip II in 1556 brought about a change of style but not of substance. Philip had been groomed to be king from an early age, and he regarded being king as a job to be taken seriously. He learned the lessons of his father's reign and was determined that he would not spend his life travelling from pillar to post. He established a capital in Madrid, built a headquarters at the Escorial and ran the empire from a tiny office with the help of a small group of trusted advisors. Where his father had been a general, he preferred the role of chief executive. On the domestic front, Philip remained unswervingly loyal to the Catholic cause, and cracked down even more strictly on the merest suspicion of unorthodoxy, using a range of repressive measures -the Inquisition and the auto de fe, the index of prohibited books and a ban on Spaniards studying abroad- to reinforce the prevailing orthodoxy. In the 1560s he decided that he needed to intensify the assimilation of the moriscos and reduce the security threat posed by a substantial ethnic minority in the east and south of the peninsula. In the face of a series of prohibitions against speaking Arabic, reading Arabic literature, and wearing traditional dress, the moriscos rebelled in 1568 and after a savage two-year conflict, the rebellion was crushed and the moriscos were forcibly dispersed throughout the peninsula.

Philip's regime was more centralist, more absolutist and more repressive than his father's, but the major foreign policy issues remained unchanged, and there was no let-up in the associated cost. Charles's division of the empire no doubt made good sense, but it left Philip two principal hot- spots to deal with: the on-going Islamic threat in the Mediterranean and the political and religious conflict in the Netherlands. Fighting on both these fronts continued to be ruinously expensive, and proved impossible to direct from an office in central Castile. Even a defensive policy in the Mediterranean needed a large, well-equipped navy. The Spanish fleet scored a number of successes in the 1560s in defence of Oran and Malta, and in the 1570s as part of the Holy League with Italy in defence of Cyprus. In 1571, at Lepanto, off the coast of Greece, the combined Christian fleet under the command of Philip's half-brother, Don John of Austria, inflicted a decisive defeat on the Turkish fleet, the battle in which Cervantes took part and in which he took such pride. But Philip's efforts to defend Spanish possessions in North Africa and in the Mediterranean were compromised by the need to deal simultaneously with a serious revolt in the Netherlands.

Unrest in the Netherlands was brought about by a cocktail of interrelated factors: resentment that the political centre of gravity of the empire had shifted to Spain; the virulence of the local brand of protestant religious thought (Calvinism); separatist movements in the northern provinces led by William of Orange; and Spanish heavy-handedness, including a conspicuous military presence and unsubtle attempts to gain control of local affairs. Had Philip spent more time in the area he might have been able to respond more sensitively to the changing mood. But after Calvinists rioted and desecrated Catholic churches in 1566, Philip sent the Duke of Alba to investigate. Alba sentenced more than a thousand people to death and imposed a draconian tax to pay for the army. By the early 1570s, virtually the whole of the Netherlands was in revolt, supported by protestant allies in Germany, France and England.

In 1585, England signed a treaty agreeing to aid the rebels, and Philip decided that, unless he could stop English involvement, he would never recapture the United Provinces. The result was the attempted attack on London by the 'Invincible Armada' in 1588. The invasion was doomed to failure by lack of surprise, poor communication between the navy in the English Channel and the army in Flanders, bad weather and the fact that the commander-in-chief was directing operations from Madrid. The failure of the Armada cost hundreds of lives, was a massive waste of money, and caused a serious loss of confidence among Spaniards. Philip's reputation never fully recovered. The debacle was widely interpreted as a punishment for over-weaning pride. In fact it was a classic case of over-commitment on too many fronts, but there is no evidence that the lessons were learned in Philip's lifetime. He went on taxing and borrowing, and when he died in 1598, the crown was in debt for eight times its annual revenue.

The Netherlands were an insoluble problem, but Philip's decisive annexation of Portugal in 1580 finally brought the whole peninsula within a single monarchy, and added another overseas empire (Brazil, parts of Africa, India and the far east) to the growing extent of Spain's possessions in the New World. Philip III succeeded his father in 1598, and the turn of the century brought mixed fortunes; Spanish influence on the world stage had never been greater, but the mood at home was more sombre. A serious outbreak of plague weakened an already overstretched populace and a bout of national introspection gave rise to a wide-ranging review of international strategy. The new regime moved quickly to address the balance of payments crisis by concluding treaties and cease-fire agreements with England and the United Provinces, and by trying to control the import of manufactured luxury goods such as textiles.

Philip III has often been perceived as a weak king, largely because he delegated much of his executive authority to a 'favourite' or first minister, the Duke of Lerma, and dedicated himself to more regal pursuits such as hunting and collecting works of art. Lerma was undoubtedly the wrong choice in the long term: his most serious error of judgment came with the expulsion of the moriscos in 1609, and over time he allowed power to corrupt him absolutely. But Philip's decision to share the burdens of office with a first minister was sensible, and Lerma's initial assessment of the problem was undoubtedly correct: Spain was over-committed and under-resourced for the role it was attempting to play, and a period of retrenchment was essential if the structural weaknesses in the Spanish economy were ever to be corrected.

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IV

All forms of historical narrative are misleading, and in the case of Spain and the empire the risks are particularly great. A narrative of growth, overreach and exhaustion can easily become, as it did for the Spaniards of Cervantes's time, a providentialist account in which pride goes before a fall. Yet the process by which the empire, particularly the empire in Europe, grew by leaps and bounds with each successive generation, was as much the result of accident as design. The union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon was only one of a number of possible outcomes from the turbulence of the 1470s, and Charles's succession in 1516 was an endgame which few could have foreseen when Isabel died over a decade earlier. Even Charles's attempt to downsize the unruly empire in the 1550s was thwarted by Philip's decisive assertion of his claim to the throne of Portugal in 1580. And all the while, the astonishing extent of the discoveries in the New World regularly added thousands upon thousands of square kilometres to the sum of Spanish possessions -and of Spanish responsibilities- overseas. But it would be foolish to ignore the recurring themes which dominate the successive cycles of growth and development, and which help to explain the social complexity of Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century: the gradual but inexorable emergence of an absolutist monarchy and a normative culture; the changing dynamic between the crown and the other power bases within society, particularly the nobility, the church and the urban elites; the importance of religion as an ideological driver; and the role of America in sustaining imperial ambitions abroad and widening the wealth gap at home.

Although in many ways Spain at the end of the sixteenth century was more cohesive, both in concept and reality, than it had been a century earlier, the Spaniards then, as now, defined themselves in terms of a range of distinctions: differences of region, class, wealth, ethnicity, religion, culture, language and sex. Distinctions of these kinds are inherent in all societies, but what makes them particularly important in early modern Spain was the shifting nature of certain established correlations, especially changes in the distribution of wealth, the relationship between wealth and rank, and the balance of religion, ethnicity and culture.

Wealth is the key to understanding these changes and divisions. Taken as a whole, Spain was an extremely prosperous country in the early modern period, but the gap between the rich and the poor grew steadily wider throughout the sixteenth century. At the same time, the traditional correlation between social class and economic circumstances came under significant strain. New routes to wealth were open to all classes and ethnic groups, and no class was immune from poverty. The result was to reverse the polarity between wealth and status: where once membership of the ruling class would almost inevitably bring prosperity, in the changing circumstances, wealth was increasingly used to buy rank. There were three major factors driving these changes: demographic stability and growth, major shifts in land use and tenure, and the new commercial opportunities offered by the New World.

With very few exceptions (the revolts of the comuneros and the germanía in the early 1520s, and the rebellion of the moriscos in the 1560s) Spaniards enjoyed over a century of peace and stability within the peninsula itself. By exporting military conflict to America and other parts of Europe, the conditions were created for sustained net growth of the population until well into the 1580s. This growth was not uniform, however, and some significant changes took place in its shape and distribution. Emigration caused by forced expulsions, the demands of conquest and colonisation in America, and wars in Europe was balanced by the immigration of Catholic refugees from the religious wars and merchants attracted by the investment potential of New World trade. The outflow of able-bodied men opened the way for women of all classes to take a more active role in society, a significant social change which is reflected in the prominence given to women in Cervantes's fiction and on the contemporary stage. At the same time, there was a pronounced shift in the economic centre of gravity of the peninsula from north to south, and from the countryside to the towns. Both trends account for the emergence of Seville as a major commercial and cultural centre during the sixteenth century, a role reflected in several of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares.⁷

The Spanish economy depended on agriculture, and the political stability and population growth of the sixteenth century favoured both livestock and farming. Sheep farming was particularly successful. The mountainous terrain of much of the country made sheep and goats the only viable industry, the fine wool of the merino sheep fetched good prices among weavers in northern Europe, keeping sheep was not labour- or capital-intensive, and it was compatible with the long-standing aversion of the upper classes to manual labour. Sheep farming was also extremely well organised by a powerful guild, the Mesta, which enjoyed political support from the crown. Despite growing competition from silk and cotton, wool continued to be a major industry throughout the sixteenth century, and would undoubtedly have made a greater contribution to the economy had the domestic textile industry been developed in parallel. As it was, the export of wool did not cover the cost of importing finished cloth, of which Spain was a net importer.

Farming also flourished in response to stability and growth, and large amounts of additional land were brought into cultivation. The reluctance of emigrants to the New World to adjust to local conditions and diet created a strong export market for foodstuffs, wine and olive oil, as well as manufacted goods, and Spain remained a net importer of food. With favourable political and economic conditions and wealth of natural resources, Spain could have done a good deal better had more American silver been used for investment and less for conspicuous consumption. Nevertheless, it was possible to make a good living from farming and many people did. We have only to look beyond the surface rural poverty of Don Quijote to see how many prosperous gentlemen farmers there are in the subtext. Note, for example, the precision with which Cervantes fills in the family background of Grisóstomo and Marcela, the two protagonists of the pastoral episode in Book I, chapters 11-14, both of whom have inherited wealth from parents who worked hard and did well from farming.⁸

But the real beneficiaries of a strong agricultural economy were the large landowners.⁹ Land is a finite resource, and a primary source and repository of wealth. We have already seen how the Catholic Monarchs bought political and military service from the nobles by making grants of land and associated income in conquered territories, and this process continued in different forms under the Habsburg kings, with large areas of crown lands being granted to a rapidly growing aristocracy, or sold into private ownership to raise capital for military expenditure. Many of these disposals were of baldíos, crown lands in common use, and the privatisation of ownership often brought severe hardship to common people whose traditional rights of access and use were denied. As more land was granted or purchased, large estates were accumulated by families who took legal steps to ensure that they could not be alienated and would be transferred intact to subsequent generations.¹⁰ The 'land grab' by the Spanish nobility in the sixteenth century undoubtedly helps to explain the growing obsession with lineage, the association of identity with place, and the importance given to legitimate, patrilineal, succession and the sexual integrity of women: rich, powerful men do not want their carefully accumulated assets accidentally transferred to another man's son.

The benefits of land ownership were also open to members of other classes, including those on both sides of the Atlantic who got rich from trade.¹¹ There was no monopoly of class or ethnic group, and the aristocracy, the urban middle classes and the conversos were all represented among the successful merchant class. Large fortunes were made from American bullion: for every 20% that went to the crown, 80% went into private pockets and ultimately had to be banked, invested or traded for another asset. Many of the 'new rich' preferred to invest in status rather than trade or industry. A crown which was desperate for cash was more than willing to sell patents of nobility, with the associated tax-exempt status, in exchange for large, up-front contributions to the imperial revenue account. The emergence of a 'new rich' concentrated in the southern half of the peninsula and including descendants of religious minorities caused considerable concern among the nobility and gentry of Old Castile, many of whom had missed out on the prosperity brought by reconquest at home and conquest abroad. In the face of influential new money, the old Christian ruling classes closed ranks and hit back with the one thing money cannot buy: blood.¹²

Long-standing discrimination against conversos became institutionalised in Toledo during the 1540s, and took the form of statutes of limpieza de sangre, which restricted access to a wide range of ecclestiastical and secular posts and privileges to those who could demonstrate that their blood was of pure Christian origin. Philip II ratified this practice in 1556 and it came into common use. Purity of blood was a social and economic issue as much as a religious one. In practice, and over time, the importance attached to purity of blood also reinforced the claims of low-born old Christians to enhanced social status: a humble, 'blue-blooded' peasant might have a greater claim to be considered honourable than a social superior of less immaculate racial origin. The blood factor added a further dimension of confusion to a social order which had already been rendered fluid by money. No-one could be certain which was the true indicator of status: inherited wealth, new money or Christian blood.¹³

But the wealth of the few was gained at the expense of the majority. For every farmer or merchant who made good there were many more who barely lived above subsistence level. Over and above the daily vicissitudes of early modern rural life -low life expectancy, malnourishment, disease, infant and early male mortality- the Spanish peasantry had to contend with two devastating consequences of imperial ambition: inflation caused by American bullion and the resulting excess liquidity in the European economy, and high taxation needed to meet the costs of religious wars abroad. Ground down by these two millstones, many agricultural workers deserted the countryside, flocked to the towns and joined the ranks of the urban poor. The lucky ones were able to scrape a hand-to-mouth existence from casual labour in manufacturing or service; many had recourse to begging, prostitution or organised crime. The urban underclass which grew up in the shadow of the conspicuous prosperity of early modern Spain is featured in Cervantes's short fiction, in the picaresque novels of the early seventeenth century, and in the visual art of painters like Velázquez and Murillo.

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V

Cervantes was a shrewd observer of the world around him, but the literary realism which is such a feature of his fiction is not primarily documentary in nature. The world he depicts is clearly recognisable as his own, but he does not write simply to record the fact. Cervantes's world was complex and full of conflict, and writers of fiction need conflict to generate plot and character. His genius consists in allowing the circumstantial evidence of his own society to act as testimony to a much wider range of issues. This may be why readers and critics of Cervantes have found it difficult to detect what he really thinks about his material. Very occasionally, as in the Ricote episode of Don Quijote where he is outspoken about the expulsion of the moriscos, we can detect genuine anguish in the writing. More often, he comes across as a wryly detached, non-committal ironist who can see both sides of the question. Does he really think that Quixote is a fool, or does he secretly admire his misplaced idealism?

Cervantes is much more an analyst and observer than a policy-maker, but he clearly had strong views about many of the political and social issues which preoccupied his age. He took a close interest in the complexities of class, wealth and status and developed many permutations of these themes in his work. His religious views appear to be orthodox, notwithstanding the occasional touch of anticlerical satire; divine providence is a frequent driving force behind the construction of plots in which vicissitudes turn out for the best and hidden truths must be revealed; and the overtly Catholic agenda of his prose romance Persiles y Sigismunda is only conceivably open to question on the grounds that it protests too much. Cervantes is often discreetly critical of divisiveness and intolerance in his own society by indirect reference to societies outside Spain: La española inglesa and El amante liberal are both set in worlds -one protestant, the other Islamic- where religious and cultural diversity is shown to be rather more tolerantly managed than it was within the peninsula. He was a brilliant observer of regional and linguistic diversity, urban life and manners, and he clearly had strong views about the sexual basis of the honour code.

Spanish society in Cervantes's time was a complex weave of many potentially contradictory strands. Traditional structures were under strain: the ruling class was becoming increasingly segmented; the grandees were growing in number and wealth but had been effectively emasculated by prosperity; many of the gentry had fallen on hard times, while the 'new rich' were rising up to take their place. Alonso Quijano was clearly dysfunctional in this context. While all around him the land-owning classes were enlarging their estates and begetting heirs, he was allowing his estate to decline, selling off land to buy books which encapsulated an outworn ideology, living with his niece and housekeeper, unmarried and childless. And when he reinvents himself as Don Quixote in a desperate attempt to put the clock back to the frontier society of the fifteenth century, he rides out into a world in which rich farmers put their sons through university and Dukes and Duchesses have transformed their castles into chateaux where they pass the time playing effete masquerades. The old ethos of service has disappeared, along with the respect due to the chivalric ideal; everyone now wants to be paid -innkeepers, his squire Sancho, even his lady-love Dulcinea tries to touch him for the loan of six reales.

Although Spain remained largely free of political and military conflict for most of Cervantes's lifetime, the internal boundaries between regions, languages, classes and castes, were all too apparent. The towns and cities, Seville above all, were a potent melting pot in which rich and poor, criminals and polite society, Old Christians and new, lived side by side. Rinconete and Cortadillo both experience the permeability of these boundaries and the way in which large parts of Spanish society moved to the margins. The world of organised crime centred on Monipodio's headquarters mimicks the self-deluding order of conventional respectability, but Cervantes does not treat the criminal underworld and polite society as worlds apart. Cervantes's characters are continually crossing geographical, political, cultural and religious boundaries, negotiating and testing the sometimes artificial distinctions between the different spheres. Preciosa (La gitanilla), Isabel (La española inglesa), Costanza (La ilustre fregona) are all exiled into other worlds, to be redeemed by the power of integrity, truth and love. It is difficult not to look for the origins of this recurrent narrative structure in Cervantes's own experience of captivity and redemption in Algiers during the late 1570s.

Each of these three female characters is rescued from some form of internal or external exile back into their rightful place within the ruling class, but Cervantes is not foolish enough to believe that virtue and nobility are linked: he is merely using conventional measures of distinction associated with literary romance -youth, beauty, ability, breeding, blonde hair and a pretty dress- to indicate other more significant forms of distinctiveness and value. But there is one manifestation of exile which Cervantes treats more literally: the untouchable status of the violated woman. Cervantes clearly had no problem with female sexuality: his works are full of feisty women who are prepared to make the first move as well as those who allow themselves to be seduced and live to regret it. But rape is another matter, and La fuerza de la sangre plays out the vivid drama of violent sex and retributive marriage which dominated the Spanish stage for over fifty years. Amid all the fluidity of Spanish society, Cervantes seems to argue, there are some things that never change. The violated woman has no value in the sexual economy of the time, and she can only be redeemed by marriage to the rapist, however implausibly this is brought about. Once her virginity is lost, or her faithfulness compromised, she cannot provide that essential guarantee that a man's children are his own, or that his property will pass to his heir. In a society obsessed with lineage and with an abhorrence of miscegenation, honour and status are reduced to a simple biological fact: blood is the most powerful delineator of all.

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Cervantes and his worldB.W. Ife

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Further Reading

Cervantes and his world
B.W. Ife