Charles obtained an order from the pope to raise taxes on church goods. Among other concessions made to him by Rome was the Cruzada bull (authorising consumption of bacon and eggs on fast days). Commerce and industry were terribly crippled. In 1526, Charles had recourse to his wife’s portion to defray war expenses; in 1527, his army not having received its pay, set out to ask the pope for that which the emperor did not give. In 1529, Charles, not being able to go to Italy for want of funds, ceded to Portugal for a large sum the Castilian rights in the Moluccas. He sold the fortresses of Florence and Leghorn for 150,000 ducats to Cosmo de’ Medici. In a little more he would have sold the pope the states of Milan and Siena. When all these resources were exhausted he had recourse to foreign loans. The uncertainty of public credit, the urgency of present needs obliged him to pay interest of ten, twenty, and fifty per cent. Is not this like the Spain of to-day—swallowing up the state revenues in advance?
By 1550, Charles had mortgaged the whole of his revenues—those of Castile for 800,000 ducats on the 920,000 they yielded; those of Naples and Sicily for 700,000 on the 800,000 which formed the revenue. Those of Milan, amounting to 400,000 ducats, were entirely mortgaged, also a large part of the Flemish revenues. All this without counting the sums coming from America, the amount of which has been so disputed that it is difficult to fix the value, but which must have been very considerable.
These usurious transactions ruined the country; their insufficiency compelled the emperor to make fresh demands for money, but no one would take his bond. Then foreigners, the only ones who would do so, acquired privileges which killed native commerce and industry. Thus the lenders had permission to export articles that Spaniards were forbidden to send abroad. They held also a monopoly for importations. Nearly all the home and Indian commerce came by these means into the hands of foreigners. All appeals were useless, the growing necessities of the prince made him deaf to the just complaints of his people. Thus there was no interior organisation, no real government under the military despotism of the first prince of the house of Habsburg. Charles V destroyed public liberty, corrupted the nobility, tyrannised, oppressed the people, destroyed industry and commerce, and lived only by expedients and usurious contracts. A strong, intelligent administration would have augmented the state revenue, by promoting general prosperity. Charles V abandoned Spain to all the vice, all the excess of avaricious despotism which dried up the sources of national prosperity.[n]
FOOTNOTES
[77] [The ducat may be taken as valuing approximately at 9s. 6d. or $2.30; it being remembered that gold purchased then much more than now—the usual theory being that it had seven times its present purchasing power.]
[78] [The name germaneros was given to the rebels of Valencia who were organised into a “brotherhood” or germania, a word closely allied in sound and meaning to the Castilian hermandad or “brotherhood.” The name comuneros is simply the Castilian for “commoners.”]
[79] In the defence of Pamplona the celebrated Ignatius de Loyola received a wound in his leg. During his illness he resolved, if his life were spared, to found the order of Jesuits, both for the destruction of Lutheranism, and for the propagation of the Catholic religion among distant nations. See in an earlier volume the chapter on Monasticism.
[80] The warlike bishop of Zamora was confined to the prison of Simancas; there he committed a murder, and was hanged for it—a fit ending for so stormy and unprincipled a life.
[81] See Stirling,[h] Bakhuyzen van den Brink,[i] the works of Mignet[j] and Pichot,[k] and particularly the publication of M. Gachard,[l] in which last work the subject may be considered to have been fairly exhausted, and in which the text of Siguenza[g] and of the anonymous manuscript discovered by M. Bakhuyzen, in the greffe of the court of appeals at Brussels, are placed in full before the reader, so far as they bear on the vexed question as to the celebration by the emperor of his own obsequies.
