Charles VIII, portrait by an unknown artist; in the Uffizi, FlorenceAlinari/Art Resource, New York
The French invasion of Italy marked the beginning of a new phase of European politics, during which the Valois kings of France and the Habsburgs of Germany fought each other, with the Italian states as their reluctant pawns. For the next 60 years the dream of Italian conquest was pursued by every French king, none of them having learned anything from Charles VIII’s misadventure except that the road southward was open and paved with easy victories. For even longer Italy would be the keystone of the arch that the Habsburgs tried to erect across Europe from the Danube to the Strait of Gibraltar in order to link the Spanish and German inheritance of the emperor Charles V. In destroying the autonomy of Italian politics, the invasions also ended the Italian state system, which was absorbed into the larger European system that now took shape. Its members adopted the balance-of-power diplomacy first evolved by the Italians as well as the Italian practice of using resident ambassadors who combined diplomacy with the gathering of intelligence by fair means or foul. In the art of war, also, the Italians were innovators in the use of mercenary troops, cannonry, bastioned fortresses, and field fortification. French artillery was already the best in Europe by 1494, whereas the Spaniards developed the tercio, an infantry unit that combined the most effective field fortifications and weaponry of the Italians and Swiss.
Thus, old and new ways were fused in the bloody crucible of the Italian Wars. Rulers who lived by medieval codes of chivalry adopted Renaissance techniques of diplomacy and warfare to satisfy their lust for glory and dynastic power. Even the lure of Italy was an old obsession; but the size and vigour of the 16th-century expeditions were new. Rulers were now able to command vast quantities of men and resources because they were becoming masters of their own domains. The nature and degree of this mastery varied according to local circumstances; but throughout Europe the New Monarchs, as they are called, were reasserting kingship as the dominant form of political leadership after a long period of floundering and uncertainty.
By the end of the 15th century, the Valois kings of France had expelled the English from all their soil except the port of Calais, concluding the Hundred Years’ War (1453); had incorporated the fertile lands of the duchy of Burgundy to the east and of Brittany to the north; and had extended the French kingdom from the Atlantic and the English Channel to the Pyrenees and the Rhine. To rule this vast territory, they created a professional machinery of state, converting wartime taxing privileges into permanent prerogative, freeing their royal council from supervision by the Estates-General, appointing a host of officials who crisscrossed the kingdom in the service of the crown, and establishing their right to appoint and tax the French clergy. They did not achieve anything like complete centralization, but in 1576 Jean Bodin was able to write, in his Six Books of the Commonweal, that the king of France had absolute sovereignty because he alone in the kingdom had the power to give law unto all of his subjects in general and to every one of them in particular.
Battle of Poitiers, oil on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, 1830.Art Media/Heritage-Images
Bodin might also have made his case by citing the example of another impressive autocrat of his time, Philip II of Spain. Though descended from warrior kings, Philip spent his days at his writing desk poring over dispatches from his governors in the Low Countries, Sicily, Naples, Milan, Peru, Mexico, and the Philippines and drafting his orders to them in letters signed “I the King.” The founding of this mighty empire went back more than a century to 1469, when Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile brought two great Hispanic kingdoms together under a single dynasty. Castile, an arid land of sheepherders, great landowning churchmen, and crusading knights, and Aragon, with its Catalan miners and its strong ties to Mediterranean Europe, made uneasy partners; but a series of rapid and energetic actions forced the process of national consolidation and catapulted the new nation into a position of world prominence for which it was poorly prepared. Within the last decade of the 15th century, the Spaniards took the kingdom of Navarre in the north; stormed the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, the kingdom of Granada; and launched a campaign of religious unification by pressing tens of thousands of Muslims and Jews to choose between baptism and expulsion, at the same time establishing a new Inquisition under royal control. They also sent Columbus on voyages of discovery to the Western Hemisphere, thereby opening a new frontier just as the domestic frontier of reconquest was closing. Finally, the crown linked its destinies with the Habsburgs by a double marriage, thus projecting Spain into the heart of European politics. In the following decades, Castilian hidalgos (lower nobles), whose fathers had crusaded against the Moors in Spain, streamed across the Atlantic to make their fortunes out of the land and sweat of the Native Americans, while others marched in the armies and sailed in the ships of their king, Charles I, who, as Charles V, was elected Holy Roman emperor in 1519 at the age of 19. In this youth, the vast dual inheritance of the Spanish and Habsburg empires came together. The grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella on his mother’s side and of the emperor Maximilian I on his father’s, Charles was duke of Burgundy, head of five Austrian dukedoms (which he ceded to his brother), king of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and claimant to the duchy of Milan as well as king of Aragon and Castile and German king and emperor. To administer this enormous legacy, he presided over an ever-increasing bureaucracy of viceroys, governors, judges, military captains, and an army of clerks. The New World lands were governed by a separate Council of the Indies after 1524, which, like Charles’ other royal councils, combined judicial, legislative, military, and fiscal functions.
Columbus, ChristopherChristopher Columbus requesting support from Isabella I and Ferdinand II of Spain, chromolithograph after a painting by Václav Brožík, c. 1884.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-pga-03133)
The yield in American treasure was enormous, especially after the opening of the silver mines of Mexico and what is now Bolivia halfway through the 16th century. The crown skimmed off a lion’s share—usually a fifth—which it paid out immediately to its creditors because everything Charles could raise by taxing or borrowing was sucked up by his wars against the French in Italy and Burgundy, the Protestant princes in Germany, the Turks on the Austrian border, and the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean. By 1555 both Charles and his credit were exhausted, and he began to relinquish his titles—Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip, Germany and the imperial title to his brother Ferdinand I. American silver did little for Spain except to pay the wages of soldiers and sailors; the goods and services that kept the Spanish armies in the field and the ships afloat were largely supplied by foreigners, who reaped the profits. Yet, for the rest of the century, Spain continued to dazzle the world, and few could see the chinks in the armour; this was an age of kings, in which bold deeds, not balance sheets, made history.