In addition to these outgrowths from the primitive council of the king, new councils were created from time to time, analogous in powers, but holding oversight over special spheres of national interest. Some of these were temporary, others permanent. Among them were the Council of the Hermandad, which lasted only for the twenty-two years of the existence of that institution; the Council of the Suprema, or of the Inquisition; the Council of the Military Orders, the Council of the Indies, and the Council of Aragon. [Footnote: Antequera, Hist. de la Legislation Espanola, 347, 348.] These great administrative boards were a characteristic part of the Spanish system of government, a natural outgrowth of its wide-spread fields of action.
The Council of the Indies was constituted in 1511, under the presidency of Juan de Fonseca, archdeacon of Seville, and was exactly analogous to the other councils. It accompanied the king, and had under him all ultimate control in policy, in jurisdiction, and in legislation over the Spanish possessions in America and in the East. Its members were habitually drawn from those men who had had experience as public servants in the West Indies or in the Philippines. The more direct oversight of individual voyages to the Indies, the regulation of details of colonial affairs, and a large sphere of general activity were possessed by the powerful Casa le Contractacion at Seville. A Bureau of Pilots also existed, whose office it was to collect nautical information, provide charts, and give assistance to Spanish navigators. But both of these offices were under the control of the Council of the Indies. [Footnote: J. de Veitia Linage, The Spanish Rule of Trade to the West Indies, trans. by Captain J. Stevens, book I., chap. iii.]
All these councils were stronger in discussion than the execution; their archives came to include a vast mass of records and special reports on subjects falling within their respective fields, and their procedure favored penetrating investigation and full debate. But decision was hard to come at, and the consciousness that final decision after all rested with the king paralyzed effectiveness. The custom of submitting all questions of policy to investigation by the appropriate council became invariable in later Spanish history, and it resulted in cumbrous ineffectiveness. Interminable inquiry and discussion ended frequently only in suspension of judgment or a divided report. Points of policy of imminent importance had to await a dilatory investigation and equivocal conclusions. This impotence of the central organs of government did not come in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and their immediate successors, and the growing inefficiency of the councils was long overcome by the resolution of the monarchs. Nevertheless the system was part of the price paid for centralized government, acting independently of local initiative or independence.
The preponderance of power that was being obtained by the sovereigns in the affairs of central government by means of the royal councils was gained in the local affairs of provinces, towns, and communes, by the appointment of corregidores. Such officials were appointed from time to time by earlier sovereigns to represent them in various towns, but the system had never been extended widely. In 1480 the king and queen sent one or more corregidores into every self-governing town and city in Castile where such officials did not exist already. [Footnote: Pulgar, Cronita de los Reyes, II., chap. xcv.] They were to act alongside of the older local regidores and alcaldes as special representatives of the crown, defending its rights and claims, and fulfilling its duties of general oversight and protection. As a matter of fact, the great work they accomplished was the enforcement of royal supremacy over local privileges. Little by little they extended their powers and encroached upon the local self-government, bringing to bear all the weight of the central government upon local conditions. [Footnote: Mariejol, L'Espagne sous Ferdinand et Isabelle, 172-174.] The steady pressure of the corregidores was supplemented by the periodical visits of the pesquidores, veidores, or inspectors, whose duty it from time to time to visit the various localities, examining into the conduct of the corregidores and other officials, listening to complaints against them, reporting on the revenues, condition of the roads, and other local conditions and needs.
Councils, corregidores, inspectors, and various other instruments of royal power fast sapped the strength of older institutions and gave authority and efficiency to the royal government; but they were expensive and the crown was poor. Moreover, these institutions were only the permanent elements in a policy which had a thousand temporary occasions of expense. Not even Ferdinand and Isabella could carry out so vigorous a regime unless provided with larger revenues. They determined, therefore, to emancipate the crown from its poverty. A few years after their accession they felt themselves strong enough, supported by the representatives of the towns, in the Cortes of Toledo, to convoke the great nobles and churchmen of the kingdom and demand from them an investigation into the conditions under which the ancient domains of the crown had been alienated. [Footnote: Pulgar, Cronica de los Reyes, II, chap. xcv.; Calmeiro, Introduction to Cortes de los Antiguos Reinos, II., 63, 64.] The Cardinal Pedro de Mendoza and the queen's confessor, Ferdinand de Talavera, were appointed to judge of the propriety of the gifts of former sovereigns. They did their work so adequately that pension after pension, estate after estate, endowment after endowment, were resumed by the crown. These resumptions were principally to the loss of the great noble families which had enriched themselves at the expense of the crown. None, it is true, were impoverished thereby, but a more normal relation of comparative income between sovereign and subject was established in the process. [Footnote: Mariejol, L'Espagne sous Ferdinand et Isabelle, vi., 24.] Another and more permanent addition to the royal income was made by the absorption into the crown of the grand masterships of the three military orders which existed in Castile, the Knights of Santiago, of Calatrava, and of Alcantara. In the course of three centuries of conquest from the Moslems these orders had added estate to estate, territory to territory, town to town, benefice to benefice, till their possessions extended widely through Spain, their income perhaps equalled that of the king, and their rule as landlords extended over almost a million people, or one-third the population of Castile. [Footnote: Vicente de la Fuente, Hist Generale de Espana, V., 79.] At the head of each of these orders was a grand master, whose rich income, military following, and prestige made him one of the greatest nobles in Europe. There was reason in the claim that these grand masterships were antagonistic to royalty. Those who held them were the most turbulent nobles of Spain, and in earlier times had been the leaders in many a revolt against the crown. Their military system was co-ordinate with, and sometimes in conflict with, that of the king; their estates surrounded royal fortresses and sometimes excluded royal forces from frontier districts.
In 1487 when the grand mastership of the order of Calatrava became vacant, Ferdinand presented himself in the chapter of the commanders of the order, exhibited a papal bull giving him the administration of the order, and forced the assembly to elect him grand master. In 1494, with less formality, the grand master of Alcantara was induced to resign to the king his office, receiving, in recompense, the dignity of archbishop of Seville. Two years later, when the grand master of the order of Santiago died, Ferdinand had himself elected without difficulty. [Footnote: Maurenbrecher, Studien und Skizzen, 54.] Some time after this Isabella issued a pragmatic decree, declaring that the grand masterships of the orders should always be annexed to crown. These dignities were of great value; not only did they bring in a princely income, but they practically extended the estates and patronage of the crown by all the broad lands, cities, and villages, the offices, honors, and benefices with which the piety and chivalry of three centuries had endowed the orders.
When once such foundations had been laid, the crown extended rapidly its aggressions upon the old powers, privileges, and customs of classes and local bodies. To the nobility were interdicted the possession of fortified castles, the practice of private warfare, the use of artillery, the duel, [Footnote: Mariejol, L'Espagne sous Ferdinand et Isabelle, 35.] the use of quasi-royal formulas in their documents, [Footnote: Cortes de los Antiguos Reinos, IV., 191, 192.] and other proud old feudal customs. No slight influence was exercised upon the nobility by the increasing ceremony, size, and expenditure of the court, to which they came to be attached in positions of nominal service and honorable dependence, a position altogether favorable to the supremacy of the monarchs and unfavorable to the independence of the nobility.
Side by side with the consolidation of royal power went the creation of the territorial unity of the Spanish peninsula. The greatest step was the conquest of Granada. Rich, warlike, and proud, this ancient Moorish state resisted the persistent attacks of the Catholic sovereigns for eleven years, from 1481 to 1492. [Footnote: Prescott, Ferdinand and Isabella, chap. ix.] At least once Ferdinand wearied of the struggle and the expense, and longed to turn the efforts of the united Castilian and Aragonese arms eastward, where the natural ambitions of his own kingdom drew him towards France, Italy, and the islands of the Mediterranean. [Footnote: Mariejol, L'Espagne sous Ferdinand et Isabelle, 63.] Isabella's determination, however, never wavered, and in 1492 Granada opened her gates to her conquerors, the Moorish dynasty disappeared from Spain, and their mountains and plains were added to the kingdom of Castile.
In the very next year Ferdinand reunited to his dominions, by amicable treaty with the king of France, the two northern provinces of Catalonia, Cerdagne and Roussillon—which had been detached for thirty years. There remained Portugal and Navarre. The first of these independent kingdoms had already attained a degree of national independence, power, and wealth which prevented its absorption, though it was in the days of Spain's greatest power to be dragged for eighty years in her train. Navarre, balanced on the Pyrenees, had long been drawn alternately to France and to Aragon. In the closing years of the fifteenth and the opening years of the sixteenth century, neutrality became impossible; and in 1512 a powerful Spanish army under the duke of Alva marched into Navarre; its castles and towns capitulated, the latter under a promise of the maintenance of their privileges; the king retreated to the trans-Pyrenean part of his kingdom, and Ferdinand added to his other titles that of king of Navarre. [Footnote: Boissonade, Reunion de la Navarre a la Castille.] By the time of the death of Ferdinand, the unity of the peninsula, except for Portugal, was complete. The immediate successors of the Catholic sovereigns wore the crowns of all the countries that ever have made part of Spain.
Just as Spain became territorially one, she was made homogeneous in race and religion so as ultimately to become a land of one race and one faith. The Jew and the Moor were both destined to disappear; every element alien in blood and every element unorthodox in religion to be driven out of the land. This complete purity of blood and unity of belief were only attained long afterwards, in a period when Spain had little else than her orthodoxy to pride herself upon, but they were well begun in the time of the Catholic sovereigns.