A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

The Rise of Spain 173

Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors were known as the Catholic
monarchs because of their devotion to the Church. But like other mon­

archs, they brought the Church, its privileges, and some of its income from
tithes and the sale of indulgences under royal control. While the Reforma­
tion shook the foundations of the Church in much of Europe, it barely
challenged Spanish religious orthodoxy. The Spanish Inquisition, whose
original purpose had been to enforce the conversion of Islamic Moors and
Jews in the late fifteenth century, served the Catholic Reformation in the
late sixteenth century. The tribunal of the Inquisition interrogated and
punished those accused of questioning Church doctrine. Housed in Castile,
the Inquisition became a respected agent of royal as well as Church author­
ity in some parts of Spain. Elsewhere—in Sicily and the Dutch Nether­
lands, above all—local people resisted the Inquisition, seeing it as another
aspect of Spanish domination.
In Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella centralized the system of justice and
made towns more subservient to the royal will. They stripped the Castilian
nobles of some of their privileges while dispensing titles and positions. In
Catalonia and Valencia, on the other hand, nobles resisted, maintaining
most of their noble prerogatives. Nonetheless, because they feared a revolt
of the lower classes, the Catalan and Valencian nobles became willing allies
with the crown in maintaining social hierarchy and order.
Parliamentary traditions in the Spanish principalities to some extent lim­
ited the reach of the Castilian monarchy. The rulers of Spain were not able
to tamper with Catalonia’s traditionally less centralized constitutional tradi­
tions, which dated from the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when
Catalonia itself had been a Mediterranean power. Thus, the territories of
Catalonia and Valencia maintained their political institutions, principally
their Cortes (assembly), which continued to limit the authority of the
monarchy and which had to be consulted in order to achieve compliance
with royal edicts. The Spanish monarchy therefore was less a “new
monarchy”—at least outside of Castile—than that of France, because partic­
ularly strong institutional limits on its effective authority remained.
In Castile, disagreements between the monarchy and the Cortes there
were frequent during the middle decades of the sixteenth century. The
Cortes excluded nobles and included only representatives from the eighteen
most important cities and towns of Castile. The Castilian Cortes, which
maintained the right to approve special taxes, refused taxes to subsidize the
monarchy for thirty-five years (1541-1575), obviously hampering the royal
fiscal apparatus. The long reign of Philip II began (1556) and ended (1598)
with a declaration of royal bankruptcy.

The Spanish Economy

Although income from its colonies never accounted for more than about 10

percent of the crown’s total income, Spain’s colonial empire in the Americas