ing simultaneously with the unification of the Iberian kingdoms, the conquest
of the Americas, and dynastic marriages and alliances which brought it the
Netherlands, Austria, and a string of territories up the eastern border of France.
Not least was its expansion into Italy, building on its possessions in Sicily; this
was driven by rivalry with the French, the other great consolidating post-feudal
state. Spanish and French armies marched back and forth from Milan to
Naples from the 1490s to 1530, liberating and sacking Rome on the way. The
pope was reduced to maneuvering for allies, perhaps the main reason why
central religious authority was broken at last during these years by the Lu-
theran Reformation. From 1530 down to 1700, large parts of Italy were
directly annexed to Spain, and the rest, including the Papal States along with
Tuscany and Venice, were uneasy regions of mixed resistance and acquiescence.
Here was a major cleavage within the Catholic power, and one reason why
Naples suddenly became a center of intellectual action—Telesio, Bruno, Cam-
panella, della Porta—embroiled in movements against the Spanish occupation
with intermittent support from the pope.
France and Spain remained locked together in the north by their geopolitical
conflict. The Spanish Habsburgs hemmed in France on every border. The Low
Countries, “the cockpit of Europe,” became the equivalent of a buffer zone of
shifting political fragments, and this made it more vulnerable to religious
decentralization in its most extreme, Calvinist form. This is ironic only if we
think that a military power ought to be able to impose its religious orthodoxy;
in fact the huge resources of the French and Spanish states allowed each to
check the other, including their efforts to dictate religious policy. As Spain
eventually became the standard-bearer of the Counterreformation, France was
driven into the surreptitious policy of supporting Protestants. Geopolitics refers
not merely to dominance by the strongest state but to the pattern of relations
between rivals’ resources. As Spain became the Catholic authoritarian state,
France became the center of Catholic liberalism. And the Netherlands, for all
its tendencies toward Calvinist authoritarianism, by the 1600s had become the
center of religious war-weariness and the home of cosmopolitan movements
transcending religious factions.
The Spanish Intellectual Efflorescence
Although Spain eventually settled into a hard-line effort to enforce Catholic
traditionalism, this did not happen before several generations of internal strug-
gles, which brought intellectual creativity as a result. Spain was not automat-
ically anti-Reformation, especially since it had its own military and political
problems with the pope over its Italian policy. Robert Wuthnow (1989: 26–35,
102–113) has shown that the landed aristocracy derived its strongest legitima-
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