While Charles was in Barcelona, he learned that his paternal grandfather, Maximilian of Austria, the Holy Roman Emperor and scion of the Hapsburg family, had died in January 1519. Charles immediatelysent emissaries to Aachen, Germany, to secure his place as his grandfather's successor. Over the next six months, he borrowed enormous quantities of cash from his German bankers to bribe the electors and hoped to pay them back with revenues from the Castilian city-states.
Even more in need of Castile's contributions from taxes on the wool trade and on money from the American colonies, Charles again called the Cortes to a meeting in March 1520. The delegates, including Juan de Padilla, a member of the lower aristocracy of Toledo, were appalled. They viewed Charles's demands as far exceeding what they were authorized to offer.4 Under de Padilla's leadership Toledo became a bastion of opposition to taxation without sufficient representation. De Padilla wrote a letter to each of the cities eligible to send representatives to the Cortes inviting them to meet jointly to petition Charles to remain in Spain, stop asking for their support for foreign ventures, and appoint Spaniards to govern them. Although other cities decided to attend the Cortes, Toledo's fear of being forced to pay Charles's bills led them to boycott the meeting.
Other delegates reluctantly voted to grant Charles his revenues and he escaped to Flanders and Germany in May 1520. He left his former tutor the Dutch Adrian of Utrecht, dean of the University of Louvain, and later Pope Adrian VI, to govern Castile, without agreeing to the Cortes's rights to have their grievances heard. The delegates considered Charles's quick exit as proof of his lack of interest in their kingdom and its problems. But, in fact, an uprising defending the rights of the cities
Juan de Padilla, who appears in this illustration as half armored knight, half urban representative with a feather in his cap, was one of the leaders of the sixteenth century comunero movement that attempted to gain rights for Castilians to initiate legislation, have King Charles V hold regular meetings of the Cortes or parliament, and establish a more just system of taxation. Although defeated and executed in 1521, de Padilla and the comunero movement exemplified early efforts to democratize Spain. Biblioteca Nacional de Espana IH/GRUPO/62to allocate funds in exchange for legislating policy prevented the king from ever collecting the funds he thought he had secured in 1518 and 1520.
Exasperated city delegates met in Avila in July 1520 and organized themselves into a federation of city councils or comunidades, and named Juan de Padilla their leader. The ideas developed in Avila— the rights to initiate legislation, hold regular meetings of the Cortes, and establish a more regular taxing system—formed the equivalent of Spain's first constitution, and clearly expressed the democratic ideas of some of the new social groups of lower aristocracy as well as physicians, lawyers, and the commercial groups who dominated the city governments. Members of the lower aristocracy, such as de Padilla and his wife Maria Pacheco, also upheld the interest of the cities against the imperial interests of the king.
Maria Pacheco, from one of the most powerful aristocratic Christian families of Granada, grew up in the palace of the Alhambra that had been seized from the Muslim King in 1492. She received a classical education, complete with the study of ancient politics. Nevertheless, at fifteen she was forced against her wishes to marry Juan de Padilla, whose family wielded a lot of power in Toledo's city council although they were only members of the lower aristocracy. By law, de Padilla became the sole executor of the considerable fortune Pacheco brought into the marriage. Unlike aristocratic women in Barcelona and elsewhere in Catalonia, Pacheco and other Castilian women lacked control over their own dowries and thus had to depend on the generosity of their husbands for any resources and freedom of movement they themselves enjoyed. By chance, Pacheco's autonomy was considerable.
Juan de Padilla was a gentleman or hidalgo, one of those new men and women who fought for equal rights, at least for the lower aristocracy, in early modern Europe. His aged father had defended Toledo's interests against Isabella's encroachments, and the son became a celebrity in his own right as the leader of the urban military forces against Charles V. De Padilla's fame, which seems to have spread by word of mouth, helped him gain a personal following based on his defense of local interests against the barons, who kept trying to confiscate land that belonged to the cities. As in ancient Greece and Rome, the urban poor used common land to feed cattle, hunt, and get firewood, and since the Spanish aristocracy paid no taxes, municipal officials wanted to exclude them from city government. De Padilla was the kind of leader cities like Toledo depended on to protect their interests. A sixteenth-century observer gushed that the people in all the towns opposed to the monarchy loved Juan de Padilla. In fact, he claimed that "Clerics would quit their churches to follow him, women and girls go from village to village to see him, peasants would go with their carts and mules to serve him without pay, soldiers and squires would fight without any wage under his banner, villages where he passed supplied food to him and his troops liberally; when he went through the streets everybody stationed themselves at doors and windows showering on him a thousand blessings, while young boys hailed him with song, calling him 'liberator'."5
De Padilla's prominence, lofty as it was, actually derived its power from the vitality of cities such as Avila, Toledo, Segovia, and Valladolid that were centers of the Spanish wool industry and hotbeds of social change. Santa Teresa of Avila, who was born in 1515, was only a young child when the comuneros, the defenders of the comunidades met. Yet her life exemplifies some of the innovations the comuneros created. She was a local nun from a family that may have converted from Judaism to Catholicism. Like de Padilla and Pacheco, Santa Teresa represented those eager to democratize society at least to include a high degree of local control over daily life free from the interference of the barons and the crown. Arguing that God was among the pots and pans, she organized a new order of nuns, "the barefoot Carmelites," who honored their vows of chastity and poverty and worked in the world outside the convents. People like Santa Teresa depended on the city councils to protect them and poorer groups from the landed nobility and the vagaries of the monarchy.