In the Iberian Peninsula the impetus of the counteroffensive against the Moors carried the Portuguese to probe the West African coastline and the Spanish to attempt the expulsion of Islam from the western Mediterranean. In the last years of the 15th century, Portuguese navigators established the sea route to India and within a decade had secured control of the trade routes in the Indian Ocean and its approaches. Mercantile interests, crusading and missionary zeal, and scientific curiosity were intermingled as the motives for this epic achievement. Similar hopes inspired Spanish exploitation of the discovery by Christopher Columbus of the Caribbean outposts of the American continent in 1492. The Treaties of Tordesillas and Saragossa in 1494 and 1529 defined the limits of westward Spanish exploration and the eastern ventures of Portugal. The two states acting as the vanguard of the expansion of Europe had thus divided the newly discovered sea lanes of the world between them.
By the time of the Treaty of Saragossa, when Portugal secured the exclusion of Spain from the East Indies, Spain had begun the conquest of Central and South America. In 1519, the year in which Ferdinand Magellan embarked on the westward circumnavigation of the globe, Hernán Cortés launched his expedition against Mexico. The seizure of Peru by Francisco Pizarro and the enforcement of Portuguese claims to Brazil completed the major steps in the Iberian occupation of the continent. By the middle of the century, the age of the conquistadores was replaced by an era of colonization, based both on the procurement of precious metal by Indian labor and on pastoral and plantation economies using imported African slaves. The influx of bullion into Europe became significant in the late 1520s, and from about 1550 it began to produce a profound effect upon the economy of the Old World.
Nation-states and dynastic rivalries
The organization of expansion overseas reflected in economic terms the political nationalism of the European states. This political development took place through processes of internal unification and the abolition of local privileges by the centralizing force of dynastic monarchies. In Spain the union of Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia under John II of Aragon was extended to association with Castile through the marriage of his son Ferdinand with the Castilian heiress Isabella. The alliance grew toward union after the accession of the two sovereigns to their thrones in 1479 and 1474, respectively, and with joint action against the Moors of Granada, the French in Italy, and the independent kingdom of Navarre. Yet, at the same time, provincial institutions long survived the dynastic union, and the representative assembly (Cortes) of Aragon continued to cling to its privileges when its Castilian counterpart had ceased to play any effective part. Castilian interest in the New World and Aragonese ties in Italy, moreover, resulted in the ambivalent nature of Spanish 16th-century policy, with its uneasy alternation between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The monarchy increased the central power by the absorption of military orders and the adaptation of the Hermandad, or police organization, and the Inquisition for political purposes. During the reign of Charles I (the emperor Charles V) centralization was quickened by the importation of Burgundian conciliar methods of government, and in the reign of his son Philip II Spain was in practice an autocracy.
Other European monarchies imitated the system devised by Roman-law jurists and administrators in the Burgundian dominions along the eastern borders of France. In England and France the Hundred Years’ War (conventionally 1337–1453) had reduced the strength of the aristocracies, the principal opponents of monarchical authority. The pursuit of strong, efficient government by the Tudors in England, following the example of their Yorkist predecessors, found a parallel in France under Louis XI and Francis I. In both countries revision of the administrative and judicial system proceeded through conciliar institutions, although in neither case did it result in the unification of different systems of law. A rising class of professional administrators came to fulfill the role of the king’s executive. The creation of a central treasury under Francis I brought an order into French finances already achieved in England through Henry VII’s adaptation of the machinery of the royal household. Henry VIII’s minister, Thomas Cromwell, introduced an aspect of modernity into English fiscal administration by the creation of courts of revenue on bureaucratic lines. In both countries, the monarchy extended its influence over the government of the church. The unrestricted ability to make law was established by the English crown in partnership with Parliament. In France the representative Estates-General lost its authority, and sovereignty reposed in the king in council. Supreme courts (parlements) possessing the right to register royal edicts imposed a slight and ineffective limitation on the absolutism of the Valois kings. The most able exponent of the reform of the judicial machinery of the French monarch was Charles IX’s chancellor, Michel de L’Hôpital, but his reforms in the 1560s were frustrated by the anarchy of the religious wars. In France the middle class aspired to ennoblement in the royal administration and mortgaged their future to the monarchy by investment in office and the royal finances. In England, on the other hand, a greater flexibility in social relations was preserved, and the middle class engaged in bolder commercial and industrial ventures.
Territorial unity under the French crown was attained through the recovery of feudal appanages (alienated to cadet branches of the royal dynasty) and, as in Spain, through marriage alliances. Brittany was regained in this way, although the first of the three Valois marriages with Breton heiresses also set in train the dynastic rivalry of Valois and Habsburg. When Charles VIII of France married Anne of Brittany, he stole the bride of the Austrian archduke and future emperor Maximilian I and also broke his own engagement to Margaret of Austria, Maximilian’s daughter by Mary of Burgundy. Margaret’s brother Philip, however, married Joan, heiress of Castile and Aragon, so that their son eventually inherited not only Habsburg Germany and the Burgundian Netherlands but also Spain, Spanish Italy, and America. The dominions of Charles V thus encircled France and incorporated the wealth of Spain overseas. Even after the division of this vast inheritance between his son, Philip II of Spain, and his brother, the emperor Ferdinand I, the conflict between the Habsburgs and the French crown dominated the diplomacy of Europe for more than a century.
The principal dynastic conflict of the age was less unequal than it seemed, for the greater resources of Charles V were offset by their cumbrous disunity and by local independence. In the Low Countries he was able to complete the Seventeen Provinces by new acquisitions, but, although the coordinating machinery of the Burgundian dukes remained in formal existence, Charles’s regents were obliged to respect local privileges and to act through constitutional forms. In Germany, where his grandfather Maximilian I had unsuccessfully tried to reform the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V could do little to overcome the independence of the lay and ecclesiastical princes, the imperial knights, and the free cities. The revolts of the knights (1522) and the peasantry (1525), together with the political disaggregation imposed by the Reformation, rendered the empire a source of weakness. Even in Spain, where the rebellion of the comuneros took place in 1520–21, his authority was sometimes flouted. His allies, England and the papacy, at times supported France to procure their own profit. France, for its part, possessed the advantages of internal lines of communication and a relatively compact territory, while its alliance with the Ottoman Empire maintained pressure on the Habsburg defenses in southeast Europe and the Mediterranean. Francis I, however, like his predecessors Charles VIII and Louis XII, made the strategic error of wasting his strength in Italy, where the major campaigns were fought in the first half of the century. Only under Henry II was it appreciated that the most suitable area for French expansion lay toward the Rhine.
