The Ottoman and the Spanish empires, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Front matter

THE OTTOMAN

THE SPANISH EMPIRES,

IN THE

Introduction

PAGE

Foundations of the Ottoman Power 5

Digression respecting the modern Greeks in the Sixteenth Century 9

On the decay of the Ottoman Power 11

The Sultans 12

1. Charles V.

2. Philip IT...

1. The Court and State of Charles V 37

2. The first Ministry of Philip II 39

3. Digression respecting Don John of Austria 43

I. Castile 56

The Nohles ib.

The Towns 57

Digression respecting the range of action of the later

Cortes 58

New Constitution 61

The Inquisition ib.

II. Aragon 63

Old Constitution ib.

Revolution 64

III. Sicily 65

IV. Naples 67

The Nobles and the Towns 68

1. Under Charles V 84

Income from America .. 88

2. The Finances under Philip II 90

1. Castile 98

2. Catalonia 104

3. Sicily, Milan, Naples 105

Sicily ib.

PAGE

Viziers 15

Military Forces 19

Posture of the Empire under Amurath IV 24

Conclusion 26

35 36

4. The second Ministry of Philip II 47

5. Philip III. and Lerma 51

New Constitution 70

Relation to the Pope ib.

Functionaries, the Army, Revenues 71

V. Milan 72

The Senate 73

The Archbishop 74

The Communes 76

VI. The Netherlands 78

Monarchical Authority ib.

Provincial Rights 79

Balance of the Constitution 80

Misunderstandings under Philip ib.

The Troubles 81

Administration of Castile 92

3. Finances under Philip III 97

Milan 106

Naples 107

4. The Netherlands 109

THE SPANISH EMPIRE.

INTRODUCTION.

Author's Preface

There was a time when the power, and, in a great measure, the civilization of Europe, seemed to have their chief seat in the South ; a time when the Ottoman empire and the Spanish monarchy had grown up, face to face, to an overtopping greatness, dangerous to neighbouring and remote nations, and when i no literature in the world could compare with that of Italy.

Another followed, in which the Spanish monarchy, far from asserting its force over friends or foes, j was rent and sub-divided by foreign politics, in which Italy, as well as Spain, was pervaded by a J civilization of no native growth ; and in which the Ottomans ceased to be feared, and began themselves i to fear. These changes, we know, constitute, in no small degree, the distinctive features that mark, j respectively, two periods in modern history.

What then produced these changes ? How did they arise ? Was it through the loss of decisive I battles, or the invasion of foreign nations, or the stroke of inevitable disasters ? They were mainly the result of internal developments ; and these are what the present work proposes to investigate. As it contemplates the period filled by the vigour and seeming bloom of the two nations in question, from 1540 to 1620, or thereabouts, it traces in the germ what succeeding times brought forth.

It will, I think, be admitted, that even the more authentic and pains-taking works on the history of late ages, engrossed, as they are, with the events of political or religious strife, which occurred from day to-day, afford us but little information respecting the gradual revolution in the inward organization and economy of nations. Had I relied on these works only, I should never have accomplished my own, I imperfect as it is ; nay, I should never have undertaken it. But fortunately I found other aids, which afforded a more complete body of information ; aids, frequently, of extraordinary value, and yet still [ unknown, which it is a main object of this work to bring within the circle of general knowledge. I purpose going through them upon another occasion, singly and in detail ; still I think it necessary to give a general description of them in this place.

If, after the numerous labours of able men, posterity still feels how short-coming are the historical works belonging to the period in question, this feeling must have been much more strongly experienced by contemporaries ; above all, by those who were called on to take an active part in public affairs. These men soon turned from printed works, in which comprehensiveness of range and fluency of expression were the chief things aimed at, to manuscript documents of more veracity. We have essays recommending the formation and study of collections of this kind ; we have such collections themselves j in our possession. Among their contents the Venetian Relationi hold by far the most conspicuous place.

Placed repeatedly in the midst between two parties, having relations not only of politics, but still more of trade and commerce with half the world, not strong enough to rest wholly on her own strength, and yet not so weak as to be obliged inactively to wait what should be done by others, Venice had occasion enough to turn her eyes in every direction, and to form connexions in every quarter. She frequently sent her most experienced and able citizens to foreign courts. Not content with the despatches on current affairs regularly sent home every fourteen days, she further required of her ambassadors, when they returned, after an absence of two or three years, that they should give a circumstantial account of the court and the country they had been visiting. This was delivered in the council of the Pregadi, before men who had grown old in the service of the state, and who had, perhaps, themselves discharged the self-same embassies, or might soon be called on to do so. The reporter laboured to pourtray the person and character of the sovereign to whom he had been accredited, his court and his ministers, the state of his finances, his military force, his whole administration, the temper and feeling of his subjects, and, lastly, his relations with other states in general, and with Venice in particular. He then laid at the feet of his Siguoria the present made him by the foreign potentate. Sometimes these reports were very minute, and occupied several evenings in the delivery : we can see how the reporter breaks off, when arrived at the end of some division of his subject, to take breath. Sometimes, at least in earlier times, they were delivered from memory : they are all interspersed with direct addresses to the Doge and the assembly : their style and matter every where shows the freshness of personal observation ; every man strove to do his utmost ; he had an audience worthy of a statesman. The Venetians are not unfrequent in their praises of this institution. " In this way we learn, respecting foreign states, what it is alike serviceable to know in peace, and when discord has broken out ; we can draw also from their measures I lessons for our own administration ; and the inexperienced are thus forearmed and prepared for public '

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

business. Whilst a scholar knows only the past, and a reconnoitrer can only communicate what is present, an ambassador, deriving credit from the importance of his country, and from his own, will easily make himself familiar with both, and be enabled to furnish satisfactory information." Others, on the contrary, not unfrequently found fault with the republic for this anatomy, as they called it, of foreign courts and states. They thought the Venetian ambassadors over-eager in prying into likings and dislikings, favour and disfavour, resources and designs of sovereigns, and far too liberal when the question was, how to discover secrets. Men who have taken an active part in business, and who have been personally privy to details, always possess a knowledge of existing things, and of the immediate past, of decisive positions and of ruling interests, which is hidden from the crowd, and which dies with themselves. The ambassadors of Venice gathered up no small stock of such knowledge in almost all the courts of Europe, for the behoof of their Signory. Their reports were inserted in the archives of the state.

How rich must these archives have been ! A law, passed as early as 1268, enjoins the ambassadors to note down and communicate whatever they could observe, that might be interesting to the government. The word " Relatione" came into use after 1465. Giovanni Casa, speaking of a report made by Oaspar Contarini, in 1526, says, that it was delivered after the usage of their predecessors. The republic continued this practice to the last days of her existence, and there is still extant a report of the Venetian embassy touching the commencement of the French revolution, which is full of striking and impartial revelations. But these performances obtained most note at the period the regular embassies came in vogue, and when Venice was strong and respectable in the eyes of other powers, namely, in the sixteenth century : between 1530 and 1620, we find them sometimes made use of, frequently alluded to, and continually copied and communicated. They constituted the chief part of the politico-historical collections we have spoken of.

But these contained many other important pieces besides. Similar reports were likewise called for. at times, by the Pope, the King of Spain, and the Dukes of Ferrara and Florence. Ex-ambassadors drew up instructions, full of detailed information for their successors. High functionaries and governors of provinces were inducted into their offices by their predecessors, or by others possessed of the necessary knowledge. There was a multitude of letters in circulation. All things of this kind were stored up in the above-mentioned collections, to afford materials for a conception of the then existing world. For us that world is long gone by : we can easily see how a consecutive series of such reports would necessarily become for us direct history, and that, too, such a one as we are now looking for ; one that deals not so much with individual occurrences as with the general aspect and condition of things, and with the development of inherent principles. But doubly valuable must these collections have been for contemporaries themselves : only the question presents itself, how could they have come into existence ? If, as we are assured, it was no very difficult matter to get hold of those same MSS., provided one spared neither money nor trouble, still, it may be asked, how did so singular a traffic in private state papers arise, and how did it become general ?

We have some information on this point too. In the year 1557, Paul IV. bestowed the cardinal's hat on Vitellozzo, of the house of Vitelli, a house that, for a considerable while, had been mixed up in all Italian movements. Vitellozzo himself had long in his hands all the papers of the Caraffeschi, who thought to revolutionize all Italy. He collected from Italian, French, and Spanish archives, invaluable memorials for the history of modern Rome. The popes esteemed him the best versed, of all men, in their affairs ; he was called the Interpreter of the Curia ; he always proved himself full of talent, apt, and docile. This cardinal was held to be the founder of the study of political MSS. " I will not omit to mention," says the author of an essay entitled, Memoranda for the Roman See, " that the endeavour to gain information from MSS, was principally introduced by Cardinal Vitellozzo, of glorious memory. If he was not the first to set up the practice, at least he gave it new animation. His excellency was exceedingly eager on this point; he took the utmost pains to get together written pieces from various places, and spent a great deal of money for them. To such an extent did he push his exertions, that his archives were surpassingly rich, and commanded universal wonder." The practice came very speedily into vogue. Cardinals and papal nephews established archives of their own, for similar collections ; and we find instances of such-a-one being recommended to another as a man who had a quiet, noiseless way of going to work, and bringing together many fine things.

Pallavicini found such collections in the possession of Cardinal Spada, in the Borghese Palace, and he employed them in the composition of his History of the Council of Trent. Cardinal Francesco Barberini deposited another, in a long series of volumes, in the library that still bears his family name. Another was kept in the library Delia Vallicella, founded at the same period by San Filippo Neri. Collections similarly composed are to be found ha the Vatican, and in the mansions of the Chigi and Altieri families. But why attempt to enumerate them ? Rome was full of them ; Rome (says one reporter), where every thing is known, and nothing kept silent ; Rome (says another), a registry of all state transactions. It will not be supposed that every collector went back to the first fountain-heads. One copy produced twenty others ; and Vitellozzo's collection will probably have been the mother of the rest. A lively movement was continually kept up in this range of pursuit by the addition of new pieces. How should it have been difficult for a reigning nephew, the ambassador of a powerful sovereign, or an influential cardinal, to get possession of state papers, which, after all, did not always contain the very secrets of current negotiations, but were merely drawn up for the advice and guidance of the rulers ? At any rate, the Venetian Relationi, to which the state historiographers unambiguously allude, and collections of which in foreign libraries Foscarini mentions without suspicion, bear the full stamp of genuine authenticity. Collectors seem to have assisted each other by mutual exchanges. When we consider the ample stock that is extant of these writings, the wide range, and the abundance of their contents, it almost seems as though, even after the

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

art of printing was in practice, there existed for the knowledge of modern history a literature apart, but only in manuscript ; a literature declared secret, and yet so diffused that works newly circulated excited public attention, and called forth replies ; a literature almost wholly unused, as regarded general knowledge, and yet rich, in manifold, instructive, well-written works.

These collections did not remain confined to Rome. The archduke Cosmo of Tuscany appointed a man expressly to bring together and obtain copies of everything that had appeared there for a long while. In Venice, Agostino Nani had a stock of similar manuscripts. The library of Paris has so ample a store of Venetian Relazioni, that it seems almost in a condition to supply the place of the Venetian archives. They have also found their way to Germany.

The royal library of Berlin contains a collection like those formerly made in Rome, and comprised in forty-eight vols, folio, of which forty-six are entitled Informationi Politiche. It is made up of writings of the same kind, reports, particularly of Venetian ambassadors, instructions, and memoranda for high functionaries entering on office, narratives of conclaves, letters, speeches, reflections, and notices. Each volume contains no small number of these, but not arranged in any order. The heads under which they might he ranged, such as the times and the places to which they relate, the languages in which they are composed (for though far the majority are written in Italian, some are in Spanish and some in Latin), have not been made the basis of any classification ; no other order of succession is observed than that in which the copies came to hand ; the same work recurs two or three times. The bulk however of what we find in this collection belongs to a definite and not very extensive circle. Some of the documents relate to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ; but these are not many, and are already known : perhaps only two amongst them may be deserving of reconsideration. It is not till we come to the sixteenth century that we find ourselves presented with a more varied store year by year. Instructions, reports, and letters fall most thickly between 1550 and 1580. After this, single points of time of pre-eminent importance for the general politics of Europe, 1593, 1606, 1610, 1618, present us with extraordinary abundance of materials. As we proceed, we find them continually decrease in frequency. The last manuscript is of the year 1650. Most of them are fairly written, revised by a corrector, and pleasanter to read than many a printed work. They are of very various worth : it is unnecessary to state that there are many excellent pieces among them.

Twenty years ago Johann Miiller had thoughts of publishing extracts and notices of the Berlin collection. He devoted himself with great animation to its study, particularly in September 1807, and an essay is extant in which he describes the general impression made on him by the first volume. But he left Berlin in the October of the same year. It was no more permitted him to carry out this design than others of greater magnitude with which his noble soul was filled.

The ducal library, too, at Gotha contains volumes of kindred matter. There are three large ones, and one smaller, in folio : they are the more important for us, as their contents are confined to Venetian Relationi. When Frederick- William, a sovereign who participated vividly in the general movements of his times, kept his court as administrator of electoral Saxony between 1502 and 1601 on the Hartenfels at Torgau, George Koppen presented him with at least two out of those three volumes, which are marked as his property. Possibly he collected them when travelling in Italy.

I can never sufficiently extol the kindness with which I was allowed the use of these manuscripts. Along with a volume of just the same kind which fell into my own possession, I had before me fifty-three folio volumes full of the greatest variety of papers, comprising perhaps upwards of a thousand larger and smaller treatises, from which I was at liberty to select whatever seemed particularly suitable to my purposes. For these it was my good fortune to find them copious in materials.

In truth, these manuscripts relate to almost all Europe. The pope sends his nuncios now to Switzerland, now to Poland, and here we have their reports. The connexions of Venice stretch afar : we possess reports on Persia and Moscow, above all on England : they meet us however but sparingly, and one by one. It strikes me as singular, that neither in our own, nor as it seems in other collections, is there to be found a single report on Portugal by a Venetian ambassador *. As Rome and Venice constitute the centres of the politics here disclosed, so the manuscripts chiefly throw light on that southern Europe about the Mediterranean, with which those powers were most directly connected. Repeatedly do we accompany the bailo of the Venetians along the well known coasts to the capital of that Ottoman empire which was for them so formidable a neighbour, to the divan of the vizier, and to the audience hall of the sultan. Not unfrequently we accompany the ambassadors of the republic to the court of Spanish kings, whether they stood in the midst of an agitated world, in Flanders or in England, or kept their state in the quiet of Madrid. Piedmont, Tuscany, Urbino, and sometimes even Naples, are visited by special envoys ; but these are most constantly to be encountered in the Vatican and the Belvedere at Rome, in confidential discourse with the pope, in close relation with the pope's nephews and with many a cardinal, always engaged in the most weighty affairs, which keep their attention alive to every turn of things in that changeful court. Here we can take our place. Here we have native works instructing us as to a host of individual circumstances. The nuncios return to Rome after defending the rights of papal camera in Naples or in Spain, or consulting perhaps with the Catholic king on enterprises of great moment. Here Venice in her turn is made the subject of report, and so closes this circle.

Were it but continuous and unbroken ! But in the midst of wealth we are sensible of our poverty.

* (Note to the second edition.) There have since indeed been found a couple of Relationi on Portugal, besides many others, with the aid of which the present work might have been considerably enlarged. But having engaged in studies that carry me far from this range of subject, T must make up my mind to leave the work unchanged in essentials. I beg the reader too to regard it for the future as a work of the year 1827. In the new edition, which I publish only to meet the demands of the public, I have merely sought to improve the style here and there.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

As a whole there is much ; but when we look to particulars, great wants are apparent. Printed works, no doubt, by learned men, afford us welcome aid and manifold information : but still we remain in the dark on many points ; many questions arise and are not solved. We feel like a traveller who has roamed over even the less known heights and valleys of a country, and who then not only investigates individual points with more minuteness, but believes himself too to have acquired novel and true views of the whole, yet still feels the wants under which he labours even more sensibly it may be than the acquisitions he has made, and has now no more earnest wish than to return and make his inspection complete. Meanwhile he is allowed to communicate even his imperfect observations. The like permission I ask for myself and my attempts.

Let the reader then accompany me, in the times of which our manuscripts chiefly treat, to those southern nations and states which then maintained a pre-eminent position in Europe.

The diversity of the European nations was far more striking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than at present ; it was fully discernible in their systems of warfare. If the nations of Germanic and Roman origin every where furnished their territories with fortresses, and cultivated the use of artillery for the attack or defence of such strongholds ; if they took the field with no very numerous forces, and placed their chief reliance on their infantry ; the other nations on the contrary encountered each other on horseback in open and unfortified plains, and if a castle was any where to be seen, it served only to guard the treasures of the sovereign. Poland possessed so numerous a cavalry that it has been expressly computed that Germany, France, and Spain together would have been incapable of bringing a similar one into the field. The grand prince of Moscow could lead 150,000 mounted men to war ; the Szekler in Hungary alone were estimated at 60,000, the forces of the woiwodes of Transylvania, Moldavia, and I Wallachia, at 50,000 horsemen ; to these were to be added the Tatar nations, whose lives were passed on horseback. It will at once be perceived that this difference must have inferred a thorough diversity upon all other points.

The supremacy among the second of these two classes of nations belonged to the Ottomans ; Hungary bore their yoke ; the principalities obeyed them ; and the Tatars yielded them military service. They belonged indeed essentially to the latter, but they had the advantage over them of the institution of their Porte. Among the first class the Spaniards were predominant. Not only were they rulers over a good I portion of Italy, but Charles V. carried them also into Germany ; they maintained themselves in at least half the Netherlands ; Philip II. was once king of England ; another time he had his armies at once in Provence and Bretagne, in Picardy and Burgundy, and his garrison in Paris. To match with him, the Italians asserted not physical force indeed, but the only supremacy left them, that of talent and address. This was evinced, not merely on occasions such as when cardinal Pole, during his administration in England, consulted with none but the Italians who had accompanied him thither, or when the two Medicean queens filled France with their own countrymen, though this too had its significance ; but above all through their literature, the first of modern times which combined a deliberate cultivation and perfecting of form with scientific comprehension. To this were added accomplishments in various arts. We find that the only engineer in Poland, about the year 1560, was a Venetian ; that Tedali, a Floi-entine, offered to make the Dniester navigable for the dwellers on its banks, and that the grand prince of Moscow had the castle in his capital built by an Italian. We shall see that their commerce still embraced half the world.

Whilst these three nations made themselves formidable or conspicuous among the rest, they encountered each other directly in the Mediterranean ; they filled all its coasts and waters with life and motion, and formed there a peculiar circle of their own.

The Spaniards and the Italians were very closely knit together by the ties of church and state. By the former, because after the general departure from its communion, the dwellers alone beyond the Pyrenees and the Alps remained wholly faithful to the Roman see. By the latter, because Naples and Milan were Spanish. Often was Madrid the abode of young Italian princes, of the Roveri, the Medici, the Farnese, and Rome the residence of young Spaniards desirous of cultivating their minds. The Castilian poets adopted the forms of the Tuscan masters ; all the martial fame of the Italians was won in Spanish campaigns.

The Ottomans set themselves in violent contrast to both. The Spaniards they encountered victoriously on the African, the Italians on the Greek coasts. They threatened Oran ; they attacked Malta with their whole force; they conquered Cyprus, and swarming round all the coasts they carried danger even into the haunts of peace. They were opposed therefore not alone by the old maritime powers of the two peninsulas ; in Tuscany and Piedmont new knightly orders were founded for this strife ; the pope himself yearly despatched his galleys in May from Civita Vecchia to cruise against them ; the whole force of the two nations took part in this contest. Those fair coasts and many named seas that beheld in their antique grandeur the rise, the rivalry, and the extinction of the Shemitic, and the Greco-Roman sea dominions, that saw the mastery won successively by Arabs and by German Christians, were witnesses to a third struggle, when Ottomans came forth instead of Arabs, when Spaniards and Italians (for no other people stood by them in this cause, and the French were often leagued with the foe) had need to put forth all their strength to uphold the Christian name on the Mediterranean. Hereby was formed for the most immediate and vivid exertion of all the powers of these nations, a circle in which they are most at home, and which is often the horizon involuntarily bounding the thoughts and the fancy of their authors. The strife gave their genius free and vigorous play. It contributed to work out in them that singular mixture their minds then exhibited ; a mixture of pride and cunning, of illusion and eagerness to discover the mystery of things, of romantic chivalry and insidious policy, of faith in the stars, and implicit devotion to religion.

Let us now enter into this circle, among these nations.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE.

I

INTRODUCTION.

Hoible indeed is the description the Ottomans give of their own origin. They relate that Othman, the founder of their empire and name, himself followed the plough with his servants, and that when he wished to break off from work at noon he used to stick up a banner as a signal to call them home. These servants and none besides were his first followers in war, and they were marshalled beneath | the same signal. But even he, they add, had in his day a forecasting of his house's future greatness, ! j and in a dream he beheld a tree grow up out of his I navel that overshadowed the whole earth *.

The new power that arose in Asia Minor having J now established itself on its northern coasts, it chanced one day, as the story continues, that Soliman, the grandson of Othman, rode along the shores j of the Hellespont, passing on through the ruins of ancient cities, and fell into a silent reverie. "What is my khan thinking of !" said one of his escort. K I am thinking,*' was the reply, "about our crossing over to Europe f" These followers of Soliman were the first who did cross over to Europe : they I were successful; and Soliman's brother, Amu- j rath I., was he who conquered Adrianople.

Thenceforth the Ottoman power spread on the further side of the Hellespont, east and west from Brusa, and from Adrianople on this side northwards and southwards. Bajazeth L, the great-grandson of Othnian, was master here of Wedclin and Wallachia, yonder of Caramania and CEesarea.

Europe and Asia, both threatened by Bajazeth, rose up to resist him. Europe however fell prostrate at Nicopolis; and though Asia, for which j Timur stood forth as champion, was victorious, still it did not destroy the dominion of Bajazeth. It was but fifty years after this defeat that Mahomet II. took Constantinople, the imperial city whose sway | had once extended far over both quarters. The victor was not content with seeing the cities on the coasts of the Black Sea and the Adriatic own his supremacy; to bring the sea itself under subjection he built a fleet; he began to conquer the islands of the iEgean one after the other ; and his troops showed themselves in Apulia.

There seemed to be no bounds to the career of victory. Though Bajazeth II. did not equal his