had risen to throw off the ‘evil customs’ and seize deserted lands in the remença rebellions of the 15th century. Finally, a civil war between the monarchy and nobility, pulling other social groups into its maelstrom, had further weakened the Catalan economy. Its overseas bases in Italy, however, remained intact. Valencia, the third province of the realm, was socially intermediate between Aragon and Catalonia. The nobility exploited morisco labour; a merchant community expanded during the 15th century, as financial dominance passed down the coast from Barcelona. The growth of Valencia, however, did not adequately compensate for the decline of Catalonia. The economic disparity between the two Realms of the Union created by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella can be seen from the fact that the population of the three provinces of Aragon together perhaps totalled only some 1 million inhabitants – compared with Castile’s 5–7 million. The political contrast between the two Kingdoms, on the other hand, was no less striking. For in the Realm of Aragon, there was to be found perhaps the most sophisticated and entrenched Estates structure anywhere in Europe. All three provinces of Catalonia, Valencia and Aragon had their own separate Cortes. Each had, in addition, special watchdog institutions of permanent judicial control and economic administration derived from the Cortes. The Catalan Diputadó – a standing committee of the Cortes – was the most effective exemplar of these. Each Cortes, moreover, had statutorily to be summoned at regular intervals, and was technically subject to a rule of unanimity – a device unique in Western Europe. The Aragonese Cortes itself had the further refinement of a four-curia system of magnates, gentry, clergy and burghers.5 In toto, this complex of mediaeval ‘liberties’ presented a singularly intractable prospect for the construction of a centralized Absolutism. The asymmetry of institutional orders in Castile and Aragon was, in fact, to shape the whole career of the Spanish monarchy henceforward.
For Ferdinand and Isabella, understandably, took the obvious course of concentrating on the establishment of an unshakeable royal power in Castile, where the conditions for it were most immediately propitious. Aragon presented far more formidable political obstacles to the construction of a centralized State, and much less profitable prospects for economic fiscalization. Castile had five or six times the population, and its greater wealth was not protected by any comparable constitutional barriers. A methodical programme for its administrative reorganization was thus set in train by the two monarchs. The military orders were decapitated and their vast lands and incomes annexed. Baronial castles were demolished, marcher lords ousted, and private wars banned. The municipal autonomy of the towns was broken by the planting of official corregidores to administer them; royal justice was reinforced and extended. Control of ecclesiastical benefices was captured for the State, detaching the local Church apparatus from the reach of the Papacy. The Cortes was progressively domesticated by the effective omission of the nobility and clergy from its assemblies after 1480; since the main purpose of summoning it was to raise taxes for military expenditure (on the Granadan and Italian wars, above all), from which the First and Second Estate were exempted, the latter had little reason to resist this restriction. Fiscal yields rose impressively: Castilian revenues increased from some 900,000 reales in 1474 to 26,000,000 in 1504.6 The Royal Council was reformed and grandee influence excluded from it; the new body was staffed by lawyer-bureaucrats or letrados, recruited from the smaller gentry. Professional secretaries worked directly under the sovereigns, dispatching ongoing business. The Castilian State machine, in other words, was rationalized and modernized. But the new monarchy never counterposed it to the aristocratic class as a whole. Top military and diplomatic positions were always reserved for magnates, who kept their great viceroyalties and governorships, while lesser nobles filled the ranks of the corregidores. Royal domains usurped since 1454 were recovered by the monarchy, but those appropriated earlier – the majority – were left in the hands of the nobility; new estates in Granada were added to its possessions, and the immobilization of rural property by the device of the mayorazgo was confirmed. Moreover, wide privileges were deliberately granted to the pastoral interests of the Mesta wool cartel in the countryside, dominated by Southern latifundists; while discriminatory measures against cereal farming eventually fixed retail prices for grain crops. In the towns, a constricting guild system was foisted on nascent urban industry, and religious persecution of the conversos led to an exodus of Jewish capital. All these policies were pursued with great energy and resolution in Castile.
In Aragon, on the other hand, no political programme of comparable scope was ever attempted. There, on the contrary, the most that Ferdinand could achieve was a social pacification, and restoration of the late mediaeval constitution. The remença peasants were finally granted remission of their dues with the Sentence of Guadelupe in 1486, and rural unrest subsided. Access to the Catalan Diputació was broadened by the introduction of a sortition system. Otherwise, Ferdinand’s rule unambiguously confirmed the separate identity of the Eastern realm: Catalan liberties were expressly acknowledged in their entirety by the Observança of 1481, and new safeguards against royal infractions of them actually added to the existing arsenal of local weapons against any form of monarchical centralization. Rarely resident within his native country, Ferdinand installed viceroys in all three provinces to exercise a delegated authority for him, and created a Council of Aragon, mostly based in Castile, to liaise with them. Aragon, in effect, was thus virtually left to its own devices; even the great wool interests – all-powerful beyond the Ebro – were unable to secure sanction for their sheep-runs across its agricultural land. Once Ferdinand had been obliged solemnly to reconfirm all its thorny contractual privileges, there was no question whatever of an administrative merger at any level between Aragon and Castile. Far from creating a unified kingdom, their Catholic Majesties failed even to establish a single currency,7 let alone a common tax or legal system within their realms. The Inquisition – a unique creation in Europe at the time – should be seen in this context: it was the one unitary ‘Spanish’ institution in the peninsula, an overwrought ideological apparatus compensating for the actual administrative division and dispersal of the State.
The accession of Charles V was to complicate, but not substantially alter, this pattern; if anything, it ultimately accentuated it. The most immediate result of the advent of a Habsburg sovereign was a new and heavily expatriate court, dominated by Flemings, Burgundians and Italians. The financial extortions of the new regime soon provoked a wave of intense popular xenophobia in Castile. The departure of the monarch himself for Northern Europe was thus the signal for a widespread urban rebellion against what was felt to be foreign fleecing of Castilian resources and positions. The comunero revolt of 1520–1 won the initial support of many city nobles, and appealed to a traditional set of constitutional demands. But its driving force was the popular artisan masses in the towns, and its dominating leadership was the urban bourgeoisie of northern and central Castile, whose trading and manufacturing centres had enjoyed an economic boom in the preceding period.8 It found little or no echo in the countryside, either among the peasantry or rural aristocracy; the movement never seriously affected those regions where towns were few or weak – Galicia, Andalusia, Estremadura or Guadalajara. The ‘federative’ and ‘proto-national’ programme of the revolutionary Junta which the Castilian communes created during their insurrection clearly marked it as basically a revolt of the Third Estate.9 Its defeat by royal armies, behind which the bulk of the aristocracy had rallied once the potential radicalism of the upheaval became evident, was thus a critical step in the consolidation of Spanish Absolutism. The crushing of the comunero rebellion effectively eliminated the last vestiges of a contractual constitution in Castile, and doomed the Cortes – for which the comuneros had demanded regular tri-annual sessions – to nullity henceforward. More significant, however, was the fact that the Spanish monarchy’s most fundamental victory over corporate resistance to royal absolutism in Castile – indeed its only actual armed contest with any opposition in that realm – was the military defeat of the towns, rather than nobles. Nowhere else in Western Europe was this true of nascent absolutism: the primary pattern was the suppression of aristocratic rather than burgher revolts, even where the two were closely mingled. Its triumph over the Castilian communes, at the outset of its career, was to separate the course of the Spanish monarchy from its Western counterparts thereafter.
The most spectacular development of Charles V’s reign was, of course, its vast enlargement of the Habsburg international orbit. In Europe, the Netherlands, the Franche-Comté