Lineages of the Absolutist State. Perry Anderson
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personal patrimony of the rulers of Spain, while Mexico and Peru were conquered in the Americas. During the life-time of the Emperor himself, the whole of Germany was a major theatre of operations over and above these hereditary possessions. This sudden territorial expansion inevitably reinforced the prior tendency of the emergent Absolutist State in Spain towards devolution via separate Councils and Viceroys for the different dynastic possessions. Charles V’s Piedmontese Chancellor, Mercurio Gattinara, inspired by universalist Erasmian ideals, strove to confer a more compact and effective executive on the unwieldy bulk of the Habsburg Empire, by creating certain unitary institutions for it of a departmental type – notably a Council of Finances, a Council of War and a Council of State (the latter theoretically becoming the summit of the whole imperial edifice), with overall responsibilities of a trans-regional character. These were backed by a growing permanent secretariat of civil servants at the disposal of the monarch. But at the same time, a new series of territorial Councils was progressively formed, Gattinara himself establishing the first of these for the government of the Indies. By the end of the century, there were eventually to be no less than six such regional Councils, for Aragon, Castile, the Indies, Italy, Portugal and Flanders. Outside Castile itself, none of these had any adequate body of local officials on the ground, where actual administration was entrusted to viceroys, who were subject to often fumbling control and direction from a distance by the Councils.10 The powers of the viceroys themselves were usually very limited in their turn. Only in the Americas did they command the services of their own bureaucracy, but there they were flanked by audiencias which deprived them of the judicial authority they enjoyed elsewhere; while in Europe, they had to come to terms with resident aristocracies – Sicilian, Valencian or Neapolitan – who normally claimed by right a virtual monopoly of public offices. The result was to block any real unification either of the international imperium as a whole, or of the Iberian homelands themselves. The Americas were juridically attached to the kingdom of Castile, Southern Italy to the realm of Aragon. The Atlantic and Mediterranean economies represented by each never met within a single commercial system. The division between the two original realms of the Union within Spain was, in practice, if anything, reinforced by the overseas possessions now subjoined to them. For juridical purposes, Catalonia could simply be assimilated in statute to Sicily or the Netherlands. Indeed, by the 17th century, Madrid’s power in Naples or Milan was actually greater than in Barcelona or Zaragoza. The very sprawl of the Habsburg Empire thus overextended its capacity for integration, and helped to arrest the process of administrative centralization within Spain itself.11
At the same time, Charles V’s reign also inaugurated the fateful sequence of European wars which was to be the price of Spanish power in the continent. In the Southern theatre of his innumerable campaigns, Charles achieved overwhelming success: it was during this period that Italy fell definitively under Hispanic ascendancy, as France was driven from the peninsula, the Papacy intimidated, and the Turkish threat held off. The most advanced urban society in Europe henceforward became an elongated military platform for Spanish Absolutism. In the Northern theatre of his wars, by contrast, the Emperor was forced into a costly stalemate: the Reformation remained unvanquished in Germany, despite his repeated attempts to crush or conciliate it, and hereditary Valois enmity survived every defeat in France. The financial burden of constant war in the North, moreover, had gravely strained the traditional loyalty of the Netherlands by the end of the reign, preparing for the disasters which were to overtake Philip II in the Low Countries. For the size and expense of Habsburg armies had escalated steeply and regularly throughout Charles V’s rule. Before 1529, Spanish troops in Italy had never numbered more than 30,000; in 1536–7, 60,000 soldiers were mobilized for war with France; by 1552, there were perhaps 150,000 men under the Emperor’s command in Europe.12 Financial borrowing and fiscal pressures increased commensurately: Charles V’s revenues had tripled by the time of his abdication in 1556,13 yet royal debts were so great that a State bankruptcy had to be formally declared a year later by his heir. The Spanish Empire in the Old World inherited by Philip II, always administratively divided, was becoming economically untenable at mid-century: it was the New World which was to refurbish its treasury and prolong its disunity.
For from the 1560’s onwards, the multiple effects of its American Empire on Spanish Absolutism became increasingly determinant for its future, although it is necessary not to confuse the different levels at which these worked themselves out. The discovery of the Potosi mines now enormously increased the flow of colonial bullion to Seville. The supply of huge quantities of silver from the Americas henceforward became a decisive ‘facility’ of the Spanish State, in both senses of the word. For it provided Hispanic Absolutism with a plentiful and permanent extraordinary income that was wholly outside the conventional ambit of State revenues in Europe. This meant that Absolutism in Spain could for a long time continue to dispense with the slow fiscal and administrative unification which was a precondition of Absolutism elsewhere: the stubborn recalcitrance of Aragon was compensated by the limitless compliance of Peru. The colonies, in other words, could act as a structural substitute for provinces, in a total polity where orthodox provinces were substituted by autarchic patrimonies. Nothing is more striking in this respect than the utter lack of any proportionate contribution to the Spanish war effort in Europe during the later 16th and 17th centuries from Aragon or even Italy. Castile was to bear the tax burden of interminable military campaigns abroad virtually alone: behind it, precisely, lay the mines of the Indies. The total incidence of American tribute in the Spanish imperial budgets was, of course, much less than was often popularly supposed at the time: at the height of the treasure-fleets, colonial bullion directly accounted for only 20–25 per cent of its revenues.14 The bulk of the rest of Philip II’s income was furnished by domestic Castilian charges: the traditional sales tax or alcabala, the special servicios levied on the poor, the cruzada collected with the sanction of the church from clergy and laity, and the public bonds or juros sold to the propertied. American metals, however, played their part in sustaining the metropolitan tax-base of the Habsburg State: the extremely high fiscal levels of successive reigns were indirectly supported by the private transfers of bullion to Castile, whose volume averaged well over twice that of public inflows;15 the notable success of the juros as a funding device – the first widespread use of such bonds by an Absolute monarchy in Europe – is, no doubt, partly explicable by its capacity to tap this new monetary wealth. Furthermore, the colonial increment to royal revenues was in its own right quite decisive for the conduct of Spanish foreign policy, and for the nature of the Spanish State. For it arrived in the form of liquid specie which could be used to finance troop movements or diplomatic manoeuvres directly, all across Europe; and it afforded exceptional credit opportunities to the Habsburg monarchs, who could raise sums in the international money market to which no other princes could aspire.16 The huge military and naval operations of Philip II, from the Channel to the Aegean, and Tunis to Antwerp, were possible only because of the extraordinary financial flexibility provided by the American surplus.
At the same time, however, the impact of American metals on the Spanish economy, as distinct from the Castilian State, was no less critical, if in another way. For the first half of the 16th century, the moderate level of shipments (with a higher gold component) provided a stimulus to Castilian exports, which quickly responded to the price inflation that followed the advent of colonial treasure. Since the 60–70 per cent of this bullion which did not go straight into the royal coffers had to be bought as a commodity like any other from the local entrepreneurs in the Americas, a thriving trade with the colonies developed, mainly in textiles, oil and wine. Monopoly control of this captive market initially benefited Castilian producers, who could sell at inflationary prices in it, although domestic consumers were soon complaining bitterly of the cost of living at home.17 However, there were two fatal twists in this process for the Castilian economy as a whole. Firstly, increased colonial demand led to further conversion of land away from cereal production, to wine and olives. This reinforced the already disastrous trend encouraged by the monarchy towards a contraction of wheat output at the expense of wool: for the Spanish wool industry, unlike the English, was not sedentary but transhumant. and therefore extremely destructive of arable farming. The combined result of these pressures was to make Spain a major grain-importing country for the first time by the 1570’s. The structure of Castilian rural society was now already unlike anything else in Western Europe.
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