Habsburg Spain, also known as the Catholic Monarchy, was the period of Spanish history and Spanish Empire from 1516 to 1700 when it was ruled by kings from the House of Habsburg. In this period the Spanish Empire was at the zenith of its power and influence. During this period, Spain held many territories, including Pan-American continental holdings and the West Indies; European territories like the Low Countries, Italian territories, Portugal and parts of France; and the Philippines and other possessions in Southeast Asia. The period of Spanish history has also been referred to as the "Age of Expansion".
The Habsburg name was not always used by the family members, who often emphasized their more prestigious princely titles. The dynasty was long known as the "House of Austria". Calling this era "Habsburg", is, to some extent, a convenience for historians.
The marriage of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1469 united the two main crowns, Castile and Aragon, which eventually led to the de facto unification of Spain after the culmination of the Reconquista with the conquest of Granada in 1492 and of Navarre from 1512 to 1529. Isabella and Ferdinand were given the title of "Catholic Monarchs of Spain" by Pope Alexander VI in 1494. With the Habsburgs, the term Monarchia Catholica (Catholic Monarchy, Modern Spanish: Monarquía Católica) remained in use. Spain remained one of the greatest political and military powers in Europe and the world for much of the 16th and 17th centuries. The Habsburg period ushered in the Spanish Golden Age of arts and literature, producing some of the world's most influential writers, painters, and intellectuals, including Teresa of Ávila, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Miguel de Cervantes, Francisco de Quevedo, Diego Velázquez, El Greco, Domingo de Soto, Francisco Suárez and Francisco de Vitoria. The death of Charles II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, in 1700, led to the War of the Spanish Succession and the ascension of Philip V of the Bourbon dynasty.
History
Beginnings of the empire (1504–1521)
In 1504, Queen Isabella I of Castile died. Though her widower, King Ferdinand II of Aragon, tried to maintain rule over Castile, the crown passed to his and Isabella's daughter Joanna. Her husband, Philip, was the Habsburg son of Emperor Maximilian I and Duchess Mary of Burgundy. Shortly thereafter Joanna began to lapse into insanity, although the extent of her mental illness remains the topic of some debate. In 1506, Philip I was declared jure uxoris king, but he died later that year under mysterious circumstances, possibly poisoned by his father-in-law, Ferdinand II. Since their oldest son, Charles, was only six, the Cortes Generales reluctantly allowed Ferdinand to rule the country as regent in Joanna's name.
As undisputed ruler in most of the Peninsula, Ferdinand adopted a more aggressive policy than he had as Isabella's husband, escalating his longstanding designs on Navarre into a full-blown invasion, initially led by a Castilian military expedition and later supported by Aragonese troops (1512).
He also attempted to enlarge Spain's sphere of influence in Italy to strengthen it against France. As ruler of Aragon, Ferdinand had fought France and Venice for control of Italy. These conflicts became the center of Ferdinand's foreign policy as king. In the War of the League of Cambrai against Venice, Spanish soldiers distinguished themselves on the field alongside their French allies at the Battle of Agnadello (1509). A year later, Ferdinand joined the Holy League against France, seeing a chance at taking both Naples and Navarre, which he claimed by blood and marriage respectively. The war was less successful than the one against Venice, and a truce in 1516 gave Milan to France and recognized Spanish hegemony in northern Navarre.
Ferdinand's death later that year led to the ascension of young Charles to both Spanish thrones, further solidifying the monarchy of Spain. His inheritance included all the Spanish possessions in the New World and around the Mediterranean. Upon the death of his Habsburg father in 1506, Charles had inherited the Habsburg Netherlands and Franche-Comté, growing up in Flanders. In 1519, with the death of his paternal grandfather, Emperor Maximilian, Charles inherited the Habsburg territories in Germany, and was duly elected as Holy Roman emperor that year. Joanna remained queen of Castile until her death in 1555, but due to her mental health and worries of her being proposed as an alternative monarch by opposition (as happened in the Revolt of the Comuneros), Charles kept her imprisoned.
At that point, Emperor and King Charles was the most powerful man in Christendom. The accumulation of so much power by one man and one dynasty greatly concerned King Francis I of France, now surrounded by Habsburg territories. In 1521 Francis invaded the Spanish possessions in Italy and Navarre, inaugurating a second round of Franco-Spanish conflict. The war was a disaster for France, which suffered defeats at Biccoca (1522), Pavia (1525, at which Francis was captured), and Landriano (1529) before Francis ceded Milan to Spain once more.
Spain's overseas possessions in the New World were based in the Caribbean and the Spanish Main. They consisted of a rapidly decreasing indigenous population, few resources of value to the crown, and a sparse Spanish settler population. The situation changed dramatically with the expedition of Hernán Cortés, who conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521 by allying with indigenous rivals of the Aztecs alongside thousands of native warriors. Following the pattern established during the Reconquista and in the Caribbean, the first European settlements in the Americas, were created by conquerors who divided up the indigenous population into private holdings, encomiendas, and exploited their labor. With America's colonization, Spain gained vast new indigenous populations to convert to Christianity and rule as vassals of the crown. Charles established the Council of the Indies in 1524 to oversee all of Castile's overseas possessions. Charles appointed a viceroy in Mexico in 1535, capping the royal governance of the high court, Real Audiencia, and treasury officials with the highest royal official. Officials were under the jurisdiction of the Council of the Indies. Charles promulgated the New Laws of 1542 to limit the power of the Conquistadors to form a hereditary aristocracy that might challenge the power of the crown.
Charles, an emperor and a king (1521–1558)
Charles's victory at the Battle of Pavia (1525) surprised many Italians and Germans and elicited concerns that Charles would endeavor to gain even greater power. Pope Clement VII switched sides and now joined forces with France and prominent Italian states against the Habsburg Emperor, in the War of the League of Cognac. In 1527, due to Charles' inability to pay them sufficiently, his armies in Northern Italy mutinied and sacked Rome itself for loot, forcing Clement, and succeeding popes, to be considerably more prudent in their dealings with secular authorities. In 1533, Clement's refusal to annul Henry VIII of England's marriage to Catherine of Aragon (Charles' aunt) was a direct consequence of his unwillingness to offend the Emperor and perhaps have his capital sacked a second time. The Peace of Barcelona, signed between Charles and the pope in 1529, established a more cordial relationship between the two leaders that effectively made Charles the protector of the Catholic cause and recognized Charles as King of Italy in return for Imperial-Spanish intervention in overthrowing the rebellious Republic of Florence.
The Protestant Reformation had begun in Germany in 1517. Charles, through his position as Holy Roman Emperor, his important holdings along Germany's frontiers, and his close relationship with his Habsburg relatives in Austria, had a vested interest in maintaining the stability of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Peasants' War broke out in Germany in 1524 and ravaged the country until it was brutally put down in 1526. Charles, even as far away from Germany as he was, was committed to keeping order. After the Peasants' War the Protestants organized themselves into a defensive league to protect themselves from Emperor Charles. Under the protection of the Schmalkaldic League, the Protestant states committed a number of outrages in the eyes of the Catholic Church (the confiscation of some ecclesiastical territories, among other things) and defied the authority of the Emperor.
In 1543, Francis I, King of France, announced his unprecedented alliance with the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, by occupying the Spanish-controlled city of Nice in cooperation with Turkish forces. Henry VIII of England, who bore a greater grudge against France than he held against the Emperor for standing in the way of his divorce, joined Charles in his invasion of France. Although the Spanish army was soundly defeated at the Battle of Ceresole, in Savoy Henry fared better, and France was forced to accept terms. The Austrians, led by Charles's younger brother Ferdinand, continued to fight the Ottomans in the east. With France defeated, Charles went to take care of an older problem: the Schmalkaldic League.
Perhaps more important to the strategy of the Spanish king, the League had allied itself with the French, and efforts in Germany to undermine the League had been rebuffed. Francis's defeat in 1544 led to the annulment of the alliance with the Protestants, and Charles took advantage of the opportunity. He first tried the path of negotiation at the Council of Trent in 1545, but the Protestant leadership, feeling betrayed by the stance taken by the Catholics at the council, went to war, led by the Elector of Saxony Maurice. In response, Charles invaded Germany at the head of a mixed Dutch-Spanish army, hoping to restore the Imperial authority. The Emperor personally inflicted a decisive defeat on the Protestants at the historic Battle of Mühlberg in 1547. In 1555, Charles signed the Peace of Augsburg with the Protestant states and restored stability in Germany on his principle of cuius regio, eius religio ("whose realm, his religion"). Charles's involvement in Germany would establish a role for Spain as protector of the Catholic Habsburg cause in the Holy Roman Empire.
In 1526, Charles married Infanta Isabella, the sister of John III of Portugal. In 1556 he abdicated from his positions, giving his Spanish empire to his only surviving son, Philip II of Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire to his brother, Ferdinand. Charles retired to the monastery of Yuste (Extremadura, Spain), and died in 1558.
Philip II (1558–1598)
Spain was not yet at peace, as the aggressive Henry II of France came to the throne in 1547 and renewed the conflict between the two countries four years later. Charles' successor, Philip II, aggressively conducted the war against France, crushing a French army at the Battle of St. Quentin in Picardy in 1557 and defeating Henry again at the Battle of Gravelines the following year. The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, signed in 1559, permanently recognized Spanish claims in Italy. In the celebrations that followed the treaty, Henry was killed by a stray splinter from a lance. France was stricken for the next forty years by civil war and unrest and was unable to effectively compete with Spain and the Habsburgs in the European power struggle. Freed from any serious French opposition, Spain saw the height of its might and territorial reach in the period 1559–1643.
The Spanish Empire had grown substantially since the days of Ferdinand and Isabella. The Aztec and Inca empires were conquered during Charles' reign, from 1519 to 1521 and 1540 to 1558, respectively. Spanish settlements were established in the New World: Mexico City, the most important colonial city established in 1524 to be the primary center of administration in the New World; Florida, colonized in the 1560s; Buenos Aires, established in 1536; and New Granada (modern Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Venezuela), colonized in the 1530s. The Spanish Empire abroad became the source of Spanish wealth and power in Europe. But as precious metal shipments rapidly expanded late in the century it contributed to the general inflation that was affecting the whole of Europe. Instead of fueling the Spanish economy, American silver made the country increasingly dependent on foreign sources of raw materials and manufactured goods. In 1557, Spain was forced, for the first of many times, to declare a sovereign default, requiring it to partially repudiate its debt through consolidation and conversion.