We know now, as was recognized by some observers even then, that Spain was a hollow shell. After the reign of Charles V. population stood stationary, or declined, and wealth decreased. Philip II. enforced orthodoxy, excluded all non-Catholic literature, and summoned home all Spanish students in foreign universities, thus dooming Spain to intellectual stagnation. She exhausted her resources in unwise or hopeless foreign struggles, like the war of conquest of Italy and the effort to reconquer the Netherlands; she wasted her peculiar opportunities by driving from her borders the enterprising Jews and industrious Moriscos, and by allowing commerce and finance to fall into the hands of foreigners. But most of these errors were, at the death of Ferdinand, in 1516, still in the future; and the Spanish monarchy and nation had much of the reality as well as the appearance of greatness.
CHAPTER VI
POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS OF CENTRAL EUROPE (1400-1650)
America's political and social institutions are unquestionably founded upon those of England, and these will be described in their proper place in this volume. But the institutions of three other European nations were for considerable periods dominant in certain parts of the New World, and have left an impress that is even yet far from being effaced. They are those of Spain, France, and Holland.
Since the Indies were, in theory, an outlying part of the kingdom of Castile, they naturally reflected the recently achieved absolutism of the Spanish monarchy. This absolutism in Castile extended over all fields—legislation, judicial action, and administrative control. Although the most formal and permanent statutes were drawn up by the king with the consent of the cortes, or even at its request, yet the custom of issuing pragmatica, or ordinances enacted by royal authority, grew until their provisions filled a large sphere. They were promulgated on all sorts of subjects, and became, immediately on their issue, authoritative rules of action. The whole subsequent legislation for the American colonies, springing as it did from the mere will of the sovereign, was an outcome of this custom.
The king was the fountain of justice, in whose name or by whose grant all temporal jurisdiction was exercised. In no country of Europe was this principle more clearly acknowledged than in Spain. Immediately attending upon him was an audiencia, or group of judicial officers whose duty it was to carry out these functions in the most immediate cases. The audiencia was a high court of law and equity, deciding both civil and criminal cases; and, as is always the case in early stages of government, exercising much administrative and financial control through the forms of judicial action. The insufficiency for these ends of a peripatetic body bound to follow the king in all his movements was early recognized, and the royal audiencia was made stationary at Valladolid. Later a second such court was established, first at Ciudad Real, then, after the conquest, at Granada. Ultimately others were organized in Galicia, Seville, Madrid, Burgos, and several additional centres. The system was early transported and extensively developed in the American possessions, where twelve independent audience existed. There, as at home, this court system gradually superseded the more individual and military rule of the adelantado, which had been characteristic of the early conquest period. [Footnote: Moses, Spanish Rule in America, 66, etc] The adelantado was the representative of the administrative powers of the crown. Five such officials in the fifteenth century governed respectively the provinces of Castile, Leon, Galicia, Andalusia, and Murcia; another was appointed over Granada when it was conquered; and still another administered the temporal affairs of the vast estates of the archbishopric of Toledo. Their duties were partly military, partly civil, and under them were subordinate royal officers with a great variety of titles such as sarjento mayor, alferez real, alcalde. The title of adelantado was naturally given to Columbus, Pizarro, and several of the other early conquistadores as the nearest equivalent to their position as civil and military governors of the wide-spreading, newly conquered lands of America. [Footnote: Moses, Spanish Rule in America, 68, 69, 113.] The supremacy of the crown extended to the church as well as to the state. Spain, in the Middle Ages and far into modern times, presented the anomaly of a nation and government most ardently devoted to orthodox Christianity and to the church, and yet jealous and impatient of the powers of the Pope. In 1482 Isabella protested against the use of a papal provision for the appointment of a foreign cardinal to a Castilian bishopric, and claimed a right to be consulted in all ecclesiastical appointments. A serious contest ensued, the ultimate result of which was that the queen obtained a clear right of appointment, which, in the reign of Charles V., was formally recognized as such by the pope. [Footnote: Vicente de la Fuente, Hist Generate de Espana, V, 150, quoted in Mariejol, L'Espagne sous Ferdinand et Isabelle, 28.]
This position of the monarchs at home made easy and natural the adoption of their position of supreme patrons of the church in Spanish America. In the colonies conquered, settled, and Christianized under their influence they had a completeness of control, not only over appointments, but over the establishment of new church centres and the disposition of the titles to ecclesiastical property generally, which was quite unknown anywhere in Europe.
The supremacy of the crown in Spain is evidenced in no way more markedly than by its entire freedom from dependence on the military and landed classes of the country. Yet the nobility were numerous, rich, and distinguished. In the sixteenth century there were twelve dukes, thirteen marquises, and thirty-six counts in Castile, some of whom had princely estates and power. The heads of such families as that of Mendoza or Gruzman or Lara or Haro or Medina Celi were among the greatest men in Europe. Yet the highest of these nobles was still an immeasurable distance below the king. The option of royal estates, the seizure of the grand masterships, the enforcement and extension of all latent powers of the monarchy had freed the Spanish kings from all danger of control by the great nobility.
The chief characteristic of the Castilian nobility, however, was not its wealth, but its numbers. Next in rank to the great nobles, or ricos hombres, were the caballeros, the knights, and below them was a vast number of hidalgos, mere gentlemen. In Castile all were accounted gentlemen who were sons of gentlemen, legitimate or illegitimate; all those who took up their residence in a city newly conquered from the Moors, providing themselves with horse and arms without engaging in trade; those who lived without trade in certain provinces and cities which had that privilege. Whether rich or poor, those who belonged to the noble class had many privileges: they paid none of the general taxes; they were free from imprisonment for debt; they had the preference in appointments to office in state and church; they had precedence on all public occasions; and, except in case of treason or heresy, they had the privilege in case of execution of being decapitated instead of hanged. [Footnote: Mariejol, L'Espagne sous Ferdinand et Isabelle, 278-284.]
These hidalgos and caballeros, many of them poor, living on inadequate estates, in service to other nobles or in irregular ways in the towns, furnished promising material for volunteer forces in war, for distant conquest, and for an expanding government service; but they were weak elements of economic progress. The conquistadores of Spanish America, the soldiers in Italy and the Netherlands, and the drones of Spain were all to be found among the teeming lower Spanish nobility and gentry. They made admirable soldiers. With all their pride and all their indolence, Spanish gentlemen were not too proud to fight, even in the ranks and afoot; or too lazy to endure effort and privation when they were for a military end. The Spaniards as a race were then, as now, abstemious, and could make long marches on a slender commissariat. Many of them were used to the extremes of heat and cold of the mountainous regions of their native country, and were fitted for the most trying of long campaigns, All the material was ready to the hand of the king for use in his European campaigns, or to be let loose for adventure in America. With this acknowledged position of legislative, judicial, administrative, and ecclesiastical supremacy at home; with the headship of a numerous, loyal, and warlike nobility; with the possession of a numerous trained official class, it was easy for the Spanish monarchs to impose a centralized and homogeneous system of despotic government upon the distant and widespread colonies of America.