48 CHAPTER 2 THE HISPANIC BACKGROUND
holdings in central Italy were threatened by his
expansionist plans. Actually, only one of these
wars vitally concerned the kingdom’s interests: the
struggle with the Turkish Empire, whose growing
naval power endangered Aragón’s possessions in
Italy and Sicily and even threatened the kingdom’s
coasts with attack. Yet Charles, absorbed in the
Protestant problem and his rivalry with France,
pursued this struggle against the infi dels less con-
sistently than the others; in the end, it declined into
a mere holding operation.
The impressive victories of Castilian arms on
land and sea had few tangible results, for Charles,
embroiled in too many quarters, was unable to take
full advantage of his successes. In 1556 Charles
renounced the throne in favor of his son, Philip.
Charles had failed in all his major objectives. The
Protestant heresy still fl ourished in the north. The
Turks remained solidly entrenched in North Af-
rica, and their piratical fl eets prowled the Mediter-
ranean. Charles’s project of placing Philip on the
imperial throne had broken on the opposition of
German princes, Protestant and Catholic, and of
Charles’s own brother Ferdinand, who wished to
make the title of Holy Roman Emperor hereditary
in his own line. Charles’s other dream of bring-
ing England into the empire by marrying Philip to
Mary Tudor collapsed when Mary died in 1558.
Meanwhile, commoners in the growing em-
pire groaned under a crushing burden of debts
and taxes, with Castile bearing the main part of
the load. German and Italian merchant-princes
and bankers, to whom an ever-increasing part of
the royal revenue was pledged for loans, took over
important segments of the Castilian economy. The
Fuggers assumed the administration of the estates
of the military orders and the exploitation of the
mercury mines of Almadén. Their rivals, the Wels-
ers, took over the Galician mines and received the
American province of Venezuela as a fi ef whose
inhabitants they barbarously exploited. To fi nd
money for his fantastically expensive foreign enter-
prises, Charles resorted to extraordinary measures:
he extracted ever-larger grants from the Cortes of
Castile and Aragón; he multiplied royal taxes; and
he appropriated remittances of American treasure
to private individuals, compensating the victims
withjuros(bonds). When his son Philip came to
the throne in 1556, the kingdom was bankrupt.THE REIGN OF PHILIP II AND
THE REMAINING HAPSBURGS
The reign of Philip (1556–1598) continued in all
essential respects the policies of his father, with the
same general results. Spain won brilliant military
victories, which Philip failed to follow up from lack
of funds or because some new crisis diverted his at-
tention to another quarter. His hopes of dominat-
ing France by playing on the divisions between
Huguenots and Catholics were frustrated when the
Protestant Henry of Navarre entered the Catholic
Church, a move that united France behind Henry
and forced Philip to sign the Peace of Vervins with
him. The war against the Turks produced the
great sea victory of Lepanto (1571), which broke
the Turkish naval power, but when Philip’s reign
ended, the Turks remained in control of most of
North Africa. In the prosperous Netherlands, the
richest jewel in his imperial crown, Philip’s policies
of religious repression and absolutism provoked a
great revolt that continued throughout his reign
and imposed a terrible drain on the Spanish treas-
ury. War with England fl owed from the accession
of the Protestant Elizabeth to the throne, from her
unoffi cial support to the Dutch rebels, and from the
encroachments of English corsairs and smugglers
in American waters.
The crushing defeat of the Invincible Armada
in 1588 dealt a heavy blow to the empire’s self-
confi dence and virtually sealed the doom of Phil-
ip’s crusade against the heretical north. Philip
succeeded in another enterprise, the annexation
of the kingdom of Portugal (1580), which gave
Spain considerably more naval strength and a long
Atlantic seaboard to use in a struggle against the
Protestant north. But Philip failed to exploit these
strategic opportunities, and Portugal, whose colo-
nies and ships now became fair game for Dutch
and English seafarers, grew increasingly discon-
tent with a union whose disadvantages exceeded
its gains.
At his death in 1598, Philip II left an empire
in which the forces of disintegration were at work