420 teofilo f. ruiz
Spain and FranceThe rise of Spain and France as dominant western European powers in the late fif-
teenth and early sixteenth centuries had a considerable impact on Italy. Italian urban
centers, Florence, Venice, Genoa, Naples, and others, had either been dominant cul-
tural or economic centers. In the case of Florence, Venice, and Naples, they had been
both. By 1494, Italy became a battlefield for France and Spain until the battle of Pavia
(1525) gave Charles V (1516–1556), Holy Roman emperor and king of the diverse
Spanish kingdoms, the upper hand. Most of Italy came to be directly ruled either by
Spain or under its heavy-handed protectorate. By the mid-1550s, the independence
of many Italian communities had come to an end under the weight of Spanish occupa-
tion or political interference. The Renaissance had also lost its vigor and waned mark-
edly. Culture and trade, while not completely vanishing, found better homes elsewhere.
If Italian bankers and merchants profited from the Atlantic trade they did so either as
parts of the far-flung Spanish administration or as faithful allies, as was the case of the
Genoese whose fortunes rose and fell with those of Spain.
Whether or not it was cowed by Spanish presence, a great deal of the dynamism
shown by Italian bankers and merchants in the late Middle Ages and on the eve of the
opening of the Atlantic waned. Italy ceased to play a significant role in European
affairs. Cultural centers moved elsewhere—to France, Spain, the Low Countries,
England—as did financial ones, with some notable exceptions. The Spaniards were
not easy masters. The sack of Rome by Charles V’s German and Spanish troops in
1527 was a reminder that opposition to Spain and alliance with Spain’s enemies, as
the papacy had done, had frightful consequences. France, the great rival of Spain in
the sixteenth century, had no significant ports on the Mediterranean besides Marseilles,
or notable naval presence there. It could not compete in the Atlantic either, but it
sponsored corsair and piratical activities in both seas. Cervantes, in one of his stories
within stories, tells us of a Spanish captive and his friends, fleeing the slave prison in
Algiers (the banhos or prison in Argel). As they sailed toward Majorca from the North
African coast, they ran into a French pirate who took all their possessions but spared
their lives. They eventually made it to the southern coast of Spain, near Malaga, alive
and free, but without a penny (see Kinoshita, this volume).
ReligionIn addition to the armed conflicts affecting the western Mediterranean because of the
rivalry between the Sublime Porte and western naval powers led by Spain, the Protestant
Reformation, beginning with Luther’s challenges to Catholic orthodoxy in 1517, also
severed, in many respects, the Mediterranean world, mostly Catholic, from a Protestant
north. The horrific religious wars that followed, and that remained fairly unresolved
until the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, wrecked most of central Europe and eventually
turned Spain into a third-rate power. The energy and funds that were to be deployed
in the great plans of Ferdinand and Isabella and, later, their grandson, Charles V, to
conquer all of North Africa and turn the western Mediterranean into a Spanish lake
were wasted in useless sectarian struggles in central Europe. And the economic con-
sequences were long felt as well, redirecting European commercial ventures into
Atlantic, African, and Asian markets.