The Iberian World

1450–1820

Fernando Bouza, Pedro Cardim, Antonio Feros, Fernando Bouza, Pedro Cardim, Antonio Feros

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000537055
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The Iberian World: 1450–1820 brings together, for the first time in English, the latest research in Iberian studies, providing in-depth analysis of fifteenth- to early nineteenth-century Portugal and Spain, their European possessions, and the African, Asian, and American peoples that were under their rule.

Featuring innovative work from leading historians of the Iberian world, the book adopts a strong transnational and comparative approach, and offers the reader an interdisciplinary lens through which to view the interactions, entanglements, and conflicts between the many peoples that were part of it. The volume also analyses the relationships and mutual influences between the wide range of actors, polities, and centres of power within the Iberian monarchies, and draws on recent advances in the field to examine key aspects such as Iberian expansion, imperial ideologies, and the constitution of colonial societies.

Divided into four parts and combining a chronological approach with a set of in-depth thematic studies, The Iberian World brings together previously disparate scholarly traditions surrounding the history of European empires and raises awareness of the global dimensions of Iberian history. It is essential reading for students and academics of early modern Spain and Portugal.

Part 1

The Iberian peninsula (fifteenth‒seventeenth century)

CHAPTER ONE

The shaping of the Iberian polities in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries¹

Xavier Gil

Introduction

Over the last third of the fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth, the kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula experienced major internal transformations, while at the same time emerging to take on a central role on the international stage and as pioneering powers in the age of discovery. Assertive and determined rulers entered into dynastic marriages that resulted in new, composite monarchies; royal authority was consolidated, bringing domestic peace in the wake of major noble uprisings, civil wars, and wars between the kingdoms; territorial consolidation in the peninsula and overseas expansion, which extended the limits of Iberian, Christian, and European presence as far as the Indian Ocean and the subcontinent, the Caribbean, and Brazil; active engagement in regions hitherto outside the sphere of interest of Iberian diplomacy, such as the Holy Roman Empire and Flanders; socioeconomic dynamism and the more visible preoccupation with social and cultural issues related to ethnic and religious minorities, both familiar (Jews and judeoconversos) and new (Moriscos and enslaved blacks). Some of these developments were not unique to Iberia, and were a feature common to Renaissance monarchies, while others were owing to particular circumstances and contexts, such as the completion of the so-called Reconquest with the capture of Granada, the last remaining Islamic kingdom in the southeast of the peninsula. In sum, there is no doubting the significance of the contribution made by the Iberian world to the opening of a new phase in world history.

As elsewhere, dynastic politics was a favoured instrument of the different peninsular kingdoms: Portugal, Castile, the Crown of Aragon (including Aragon proper, Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca, Sardinia, Sicily, and, for a time, Naples) and Navarre (straddling both sides of the Pyrenees). With meticulous planning of marital alliances frequently disrupted by untimely deaths of spouses and heirs, dynastic politics necessitated the making and remaking of agreements with neighbouring and distant princes, alliances that significantly altered the geopolitical map of the region.

Thus, in 1468 Joan II of Aragon (the Catalan form of his name is used in this chapter to help differentiate him from Juan of Castile and João of Portugal) proclaimed Fernando, his son and heir, king of Sicily in view of his projected marriage to Princess Isabel of Castile, due to take place the following year. With this in mind, Joan Margarit Pau, bishop of Girona, humanist, and ambassador, dedicated his Corona regum to the young prince, a lengthy “mirror of princes” (speculum principis) in which, the author noted, Fernando would find “many examples of virtue” (Margarit 2007–2008, I, 119). Nearly half a century later, in 1513, Francesco Guicciardini remarked that Fernando had succeeded in joining virtue to good fortune. He did so in a written report addressed to the Florentine authorities following his diplomatic mission to the king the previous year. In his report, Guicciardini explained that Spain was divided into three parts: Aragon, in which he included Catalonia and Valencia, and where Fernando was king; Castile, ruled by Doña Juana, daughter of Fernando and the late Isabel; and Portugal, ruled by king Dom Manuel, “a small country known for the great concourse of merchants in Lisbon, and for the trade route to Calicut and other newly discovered lands, more than anything else.” He also mentioned the kingdom of Navarre, but emphasised that Aragon and Castile were “the principal parts” (Guicciardini 2017, 123–124, 142).

On the surface, little had changed between 1468 and 1513 in the disposition of the Iberian kingdoms, save that Granada and Navarre had been incorporated into the domains of the Spanish monarchs in 1491–1492: the peninsula was divided, as it had been almost half a century earlier, between three large polities, each one ruled by its own king. Yet, notwithstanding a war between Portugal and Castile (1474–1479), and boosted by a union of the Crowns of Aragon and Castile under Fernando and Isabel between 1479 and 1504 (the year of the queen’s death), their fortunes were now much more closely intertwined—not to mention the fact that Castile had in the meantime established its own foothold in the Caribbean. And yet the dynastic and political crises that had marked the beginning of this period appeared to have resurfaced at its end: in 1474, following the death of her father Enrique IV, Isabel had herself proclaimed queen of Castile in Segovia, at the expense of her half-sister, Juana; in 1516, on Fernando’s death, Charles of Ghent proclaimed himself king of Castile and Aragon in Ghent, in rivalry with his mother, also Juana. Both Juanas were subsequently removed from public life: the first entered a Coimbra monastery, whence she emerged from time to time to make an appearance at the court in Lisbon, while the second, afflicted by a mental disorder, was secluded in a convent in Tordesillas, and both lived out the rest of their considerable days until their deaths in 1530 and 1555 respectively.

Great intrafamilial feuds, succession crises and profound uncertainty about the future marked the beginning and the end. However, while the Castilian-Portuguese war of 1474 became at once a Castilian civil war, both coming in the wake of the Catalan civil war (1462–1472), Charles’ succession in 1516 did not trigger new wars or open conflicts. The upheavals of the mid-fifteenth century certainly gave no inkling of the great achievements to come.

Image 1.1Family tree showing the Avis dynasty to the Spanish Succession

Source: Andrew C. Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978

Image 1.2Family tree showing the house of Castile from the reign of Henry II of Trastámara to the Habsburg Succession

Source: Andrew C. Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978

Images 1.3a & b Family trees showing the Aragonese Succession from Jaume II to Fernando II (a), and the Castilian Succession from Juan I to Charles I (b)

Source: J. N. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250–1516, Volume 2, 1410–1516, Castilian Hegemony, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1978

Image 1.4Family tree showing the Houses of Trastámara and Antequera

Source: Alan Ryder, The Wreck of Catalonia. Civil War in the Fifteenth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007

Image 1.5Genealogical table showing the rulers of the Iberian kingdoms

Source: Christopher Allmand (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Vol. VII, ca. 1415–1500, 1998

Civil strife and settlement, 1385–1481

Their borders settled since the thirteenth century, relations between Aragon, Castile, and Portugal remained rather ambivalent throughout the fifteenth century. They supported one another in campaigns of the Reconquista—an endeavour that had long since become bogged down—and occasionally closed ranks in the face of foreign incursions related to the Hundred Years War. Yet they also fought amongst themselves when the occasion arose. As elsewhere, these wars did not stand in the way of the respective royal houses marrying into one another, a practice that eventually led to or foreshadowed future unions between the Iberian kingdoms. Thus in 1109 Castile and Aragon were united for the first time through the marriage of Doña Urraca and Alfonso the Battler, though the ensuing difficulties rendered this a brief association. The first of these tendencies—the spirit of cooperation between the kingdoms—is captured in the commentary of the great Catalan chronicler Ramon Muntaner, referring to a 1284 episode involving the rulers of Aragon, Castile, Portugal, and Navarre: “If these four kings […] of Spain, who are one flesh and blood, could stay united, they would never lack resolve, and would look down on any other power in the world” (Muntaner 1971, 757).

The primary objective of these wars was not to wrest away territory from neighbouring kingdoms, but rather to gain a measure of peninsular hegemony by configuring an advantageous union, making the most of family ties between royal houses and the support of sympathetic factions. In this manner, Fernando I of Portugal tried unsuccessfully to incorporate Castile into his realms in 1369–1373, while Juan I of Castile likewise failed to seize Portugal in 1381–1385, despite the ongoing dynastic crisis in the neighbouring kingdom. Indeed, the decisive victory over the Castilians at Aljubarrota in 1385 paved the way to the consolidation of both the kingdom of Portugal and the new Avis dynasty. Not long after, in 1410, on the death of the heirless Martin I, the last in the line of kings of the Royal House of Aragon that had ruled the Crown of Aragon since 1137, another important dynastic change took place on the other side of the peninsula. The delegates appointed by the Cortes of Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia resolved through the Compromise of Caspe (1412) that of the four main candidates vying for the vacant throne, the one with the strongest claim was the Castilian infante Fernando. A nephew of the late king, uncle to Juan II of Castile (during whose minority he had acted as regent) and the lord of one of the largest estates in the peninsula, Fernando had acquired the nickname “of Antequera” following his taking of that city in 1410, which had given new impetus to the Reconquest. His accession to the throne as Fernando I of Aragon meant that the same Trastámara dynasty now ruled in both Castile and the Crown of Aragon, in the latter case through its junior branch.

During the fifteenth century, each one of the Christian Iberian kingdoms pursued its own course in domestic affairs, while at the same time maintaining close relations with the others through dynastic, economic, and cultural exchanges. Meanwhile, the Nasrid kingdom of Granada remained a vassal state and tributary of Castile, as it had been since 1246 (Elliott 1963, chs 1 and 2; Disney 2009, I, ch. 7; Hillgarth 1978, II; Ladero Quesada 1999; Ruiz 2007, ch. 5).

In Portugal, the long reign of the first Avis king João I (1385–1433) was one of changeable fortunes. Able to count on English support thanks to his marriage to Philippa of Lancaster, João renewed hostilities with Castile, at least until a truce in 1402 and a peace concluded in 1411 finally put an end to these wars for another half century. On the domestic front, he gradually managed to impose royal authority over the clergy, the nobility, and the cities. In a period when throughout Western Europe relations between the crown and the social elites were fraying, the Portuguese rulers managed to secure a considerable degree of control over the clergy, thanks to the concordata of 1427, and over noble estates through the Lei mental of 1434. That said, land disputes between the crown and the nobility continued, especially in the case of the houses of Braganza and Viseu-Beja. At the same time, João took the first step in the overseas expansion of the kingdom with the 1415 conquest of Ceuta, an important junction on the trans-Saharan trade routes. Although his son and successor Duarte subsequently failed to capture Tangier in 1437, the numerous offspring of the dynasty’s founder and his spouse embodied a felicitous moment in the rise of Portugal: “illustrious generation, high royal princes,” as they were eulogised by Luís de Camões in The Lusiads (IV, 50).

Although the possession of Ceuta did not bring great riches, Afonso V (ruled 1438–1481) continued the expansion in the Maghreb. Before that, however, he had to face a challenge from his uncle and regent, Dom Pedro, who at the end of the young king’s minority in 1446 raised an army against him, only to lose his life on the field of battle. Some years later, following Pope Nicholas V’s call for a crusade in defence of Constantinople, Afonso prepared an expeditionary force, and, when the crusade failed to materialise, directed his forces southward, this time with greater success: between 1458 and 1471 he conquered the coastal outposts of Alcácer Ceguer, Arzila, and finally Tangier itself. Meanwhile, through individual initiatives under royal patronage, Fernão Gomes and other navigators continued to make headway along the African shore, reaching the equator in 1471. With the help of scientific and technical advances sponsored by Prince Henry the Navigator, these forward movements led to the growth of the traffic in slaves from the Gulf of Benin and West and Central Africa to Lisbon and, to a lesser extent, other parts of the peninsula. To celebrate these extraordinary feats of exploration and conquest, Afonso titled himself “king of Portugal and of the Algarves, of these shores and beyond the sea in Africa (de aquém é além mar)”, earning the byname of “the African”. Yet thereafter he shifted his focus to the peninsula, and Castile, which in the final years of the reign of Enrique IV (1454–1474) was on the threshold of civil war.

Of weak character, Enrique had given away a substantial portion of the royal domain to the Castilian magnates through the famous “mercedes enriqueñas”. As a result, the crown lost not only economic resources but also quite manifestly its political authority, a situation that was only made worse by a dynastic struggle. Enrique’s only daughter, Juana, was proclaimed heiress by the Cortes on her birth in 1462. It was suspected however that she was in fact the daughter of the royal favourite, Beltrán de la Cueva, which earned her the sobriquet of “la Beltraneja” from the noble faction opposed to Enrique. Led by the Archbishop of Toledo and the marquis of Villena, this faction forced the king to revert the succession in favour of his half-brother Alfonso. This was followed shortly after by the so-called “farce of Avila” (1465), in which an effigy of Enrique was stripped of the royal insignia and thrown to the ground. The conspirators proclaimed the 12-year-old Alfonso as king, but as he was most likely their pawn, he was unable to attract wider support. His death in 1468 paved the way for a more far-reaching solution: by the accords of Guisando (Avila) Enrique was accepted as king by his noble rivals, who in return secured the succession of his half-sister Isabel (sister of the late Alfonso), though she would forego the customary title of princess of Asturias. With Alfonso dead and Juana supplanted, the prospect arose of a marital union between the two heirs, who were also second cousins: Isabel (born in Castile in 1451 to a Castilian father and Portuguese mother) and Fernando (born in 1452 in Aragon, to Castilian parents and grandparents).

More than one possible match had been mooted for Isabel: the widowed Afonso V, an option favoured by Enrique IV; the Duke of Guyenne, Louis XI of France’s brother; Fernando himself; and the Duke of York. Through a combination of genuine feeling and calculation, Isabel resolutely opted for Fernando, a choice that the groom’s father, Joan (king of Navarre since 1425 through his first wife Blanca, and of Aragon since 1458 having succeeded his older brother Alfonso V the Magnanimous) had been working towards with the aid of the Castilian faction that favoured the Aragonese solution. The figure of Joan II of Aragon, tireless and tenacious, and ably supported by his second wife Juana Enríquez (Fernando’s mother), a member of the powerful Castilian lineage of the same name, cast a shadow over this entire period. Indeed, in terms of gravity and duration, the difficulties faced by Afonso of Portugal and the Castilian king Enrique were of small account next to those faced by Joan.

In contrast to his brother Alfonso, who had left behind his peninsular dominions in 1432 and settled in Naples after conquering that city and kingdom in 1443, Joan’s focus was always on the peninsula, and above all on Navarre and Catalonia. In Navarre, he clashed with his first wife’s son, Carlos de Viana, whose family ties with the House of Anjou did not escape the attention of the French ruling dynasty,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Iberian peninsula (fifteenth‒seventeenth century)
• Part 2 Expansion and empires (fifteenth‒seventeenth century)
• Part 3 The eighteenth-century Iberian world
• Part 4 The Iberian world in the age of revolutions
• Index