The Business of War in Europe, 1000–1600 103
Even parsimonious governments like those of Manuel of Portugal
(1495–1521) and Elizabeth of England (1558–1603), found reason to
encourage this kind of voyaging. Both of these monarchs personally
invested in overseas ventures, thereby lending the weight of royal
authority to such enterprises, yet without committing the government
to meeting their costs. The Portuguese king was the more ambitious,
seeking to monopolize for his personal account all of the profits of the
spice trade. But to do so he had to enter into partnership with
Genoese bankers, who were the only people able to supply the neces
sary amount of ready cash for equipping the king’s ships. Interest on
his debts on the one hand, and peculation by his agents on the other,
cut into Manuel’s profit very heavily. Consequently, the Portuguese
king found it hard to cash in personally, although others around him
were notably successful in doing so.
Elizabeth of England was more modest. She never aspired to
monopolize the overseas enterprise of her kingdom and chose which
voyages to invest in from a mix of pecuniary and political consider
ations. She was shrewd on both counts, and profited handsomely
from her investments.^33
The Dutch case was different, inasmuch as public authority in Hol
land and Zeeland after about 1570 came to be wielded by merchant
oligarchs among whom private and public business calculations were
more intimately mingled and less tinged by considerations of prestige
and prowess than was the case in countries where a royal court existed.
The Spanish regime stood at an opposite extreme, for in King Philip’s
realms state enterprise played an ever larger role in mercantile as well
as in military undertakings. This was because English, Dutch, and
French privateers captured so much Spanish and Portuguese shipping
between 1568 and 1603 that they almost drove Iberian private mer
chantmen from the seas. State-owned galleons only partially filled the
gap.^34 Yet the Spanish state was only able to outfit its ships and sol
diers by virtue of loans made by bankers and private speculators, many
of them foreigners.
Thus, despite differences of degree, in every instance European
ventures on the oceans were sustained by a combination of public,
quasi-public, and relentlessly private enterprise. The resulting mix
- An Admiralty Court judge in 1590 wrote: “Her Majesty hath gotten and saved by
these reprisals since they began [five years previously in 1585] above 200,000 pounds.”
Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, 1585–1603 (Cambridge, 1964), p. 22.
Since Elizabeth’s annual income amounted to about £300,000, this was no trivial incre
ment.
- Other factors, especially tax rates and timber costs, also worked against private
Iberian maritime enterprise. Cf. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering.
