The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Why did the Habsburgs fail?

(#litres_trial_promo) This issue is so large and the process was so lengthy that there seems little point in looking for personal reasons like the madness of the Emperor Rudolf II, or the incompetence of Philip III of Spain. It is also difficult to argue that the Habsburg dynasty and its higher officers were especially deficient when one considers the failings of many a contemporary French and English monarch, and the venality or idiocy of some of the German princes. The puzzle appears the greater when one recalls the vast accumulation of material power available to the Habsburgs:

Charles V’s inheritance of the crowns of four major dynasties, Castile, Aragon, Burgundy, and Austria, the later acquisitions by his house of the crowns of Bohemia, Hungary, Portugal, and, for a short time, even of England, and the coincidence of these dynastic events with the Spanish conquest and exploitation of the New World – these provided the house of Habsburg with a wealth of resources that no other European power could match.

(#litres_trial_promo)

(#ulink_1301956f-43f9-53a3-9400-bef1b4cbd597)

Given the many gaps and inaccuracies in available statistics, one should not place too much reliance upon the population figures of this time; but it would be fair to assume that about one-quarter of the peoples of early-modern Europe were living in Habsburg-ruled territory. However, such crude totals* (#litres_trial_promo) were less important than the wealth of the regions in question, and here the dynastic inheritance seemed to have been blessed with riches.

There were five chief sources of Habsburg finance, and several smaller ones. By far the most important was the Spanish inheritance of Castile, since it was directly ruled and regular taxes of various sorts (the sales tax, the ‘crusade’ tax on religious property) had been conceded to the crown by the Cortes and the church. In addition, there were the two richest trading areas of Europe – the Italian states and the Low Countries – which could provide comparatively large funds from their mercantile wealth and mobile capital. The fourth source, increasingly important as time went on, was the revenue from the American empire. The ‘royal fifth’ of the silver and gold mined there, together with the sales tax, custom duties, and church levies in the New World, provided a vast bonus to the kings of Spain, not only directly but also indirectly, for the American treasures which went into private hands, whether Spanish or Flemish or Italian, helped those individuals and concerns to pay the increasing state taxes levied upon them, and in times of emergency, the monarch could always borrow heavily from the bankers in the expectation of paying off his debts when the silver fleet arrived. The fact that the Habsburg territories contained the leading financial and mercantile houses – those of southern Germany, of certain of the Italian cities, and of Antwerp – must be counted as an additional advantage, and as the fifth major source of income.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was certainly more readily accessible than, say, revenues from Germany, where the princes and free cities represented in the Reichstag voted money to the emperor only if the Turks were at the door.

(#litres_trial_promo)

In the postfeudal age, when knights were no longer expected to perform individual military service (at least in most countries) nor coastal towns to provide a ship, the availability of ready cash and the possession of good credit were absolutely essential to any state engaged in war. Only by direct payment (or promise of payment) could the necessary ships and naval stores and armaments and foodstuffs be mobilized within the market economy to furnish a fleet ready for combat; only by the supply of provisions and wages on a reasonably frequent basis could one’s own troops be steered away from mutiny and their energies directed toward the foe. Moreover, although this is commonly regarded as the age when the ‘nation-state’ came into its own in western Europe, all governments relied heavily upon foreign mercenaries to augment their armies. Here the Habsburgs were again blessed, in that they could easily recruit in Italy and the Low Countries as well as in Spain and Germany; the famous Army of Flanders, for example, was composed of six main nationalities, reasonably loyal to the Catholic cause but still requiring regular pay. In naval terms, the Habsburg inheritance could produce an imposing conglomeration of fighting vessels: in Philip II’s later years, for example, Mediterranean galleys, great carracks from Genoa and Naples, and the extensive Portuguese fleet could reinforce the armadas of Castile and Aragon.

But perhaps the greatest military advantage possessed by the Habsburgs during these 140 years was the Spanish-trained infantry. The social structure and the climate of ideas made Castile an ideal recruiting ground; there, notes Lynch, ‘soldiering had become a fashionable and profitable occupation not only for the gentry but for the whole population’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In addition, Gonzalo de Córdoba, the ‘Great Captain’, had introduced changes in the organization of infantry early in the sixteenth century, and from then until the middle of the Thirty Years War the Spanish tercio was the most effective unit on the battlefields of Europe. With these integrated regiments of up to 3,000 pikemen, swordsmen, and arquebusiers, trained to give mutual support, the Spanish army swept aside innumerable foes and greatly reduced the reputation – and effectiveness – of French cavalry and Swiss pike phalanxes. As late as the battle of Nördlingen (1634), the Cardenal-Infante’s infantry resisted fifteen charges by the formidable Swedish army and then, like Wellington’s troops at Waterloo, grimly moved forward to crush their enemy. At Rocroi (1643), although surrounded by the French, the Spaniards fought to the death. Here, indeed, was one of the strongest pillars in the Habsburg edifice; and it is significant that Spanish power visibly cracked only in the mid-seventeenth century, when its army consisted chiefly of German, Italian, and Irish mercenaries with far fewer warriors from Castile.

Yet, for all these advantages, the Spanish-Austrian dynastic alliance could never prevail. Enormous though its financial and military resources appeared to contemporaries, there was never sufficient to meet requirements. This critical deficiency was itself due to three factors which interacted with each other over the entire period – and which, by extension, provide major lessons for the study of armed conflict.

The first of these factors, mentioned briefly above, was the ‘military revolution’ of early-modern Europe: that is to say, the massive increase in the scale, costs and organization of war which occurred in the 150 years roughly following the 1520s.

(#litres_trial_promo) This change was itself the result of various intertwined elements, tactical, political, and demographic. The blows dealt to the battlefield dominance of cavalry – first by the Swiss pikemen and then by mixed formations of men bearing pikes, swords, crossbows, and aquebuses – meant that the largest and most important part of an army was now its infantry. This conclusion was reinforced by the development of the tracé italien, that sophisticated system of city fortifications and bastions mentioned in the previous chapter. To man such defensive systems, or to besiege them, required a very large number of troops. Of course, in a major campaign a well-organized commander would be successfully employing considerable numbers of cavalry and artillery as well, but those two arms were much less ubiquitous than regiments of foot soldiers. It was not the case, then, that nations scrapped their cavalry forces, but that the infantry proportion in their armies rose markedly; being cheaper to equip and feed, foot soldiers could be recruited in large numbers, especially since Europe’s population was rising. Naturally, all this placed immense organizational strains upon governments, but not so great that they would necessarily overwhelm the bureaucracies of the ‘new monarchies’ of the West – just as the vast increase in the size of the armies would not inevitably make a general’s task impossible, provided that his forces had a good command structure and were well drilled.

The Spanish Empire’s army probably provides the best example of the ‘military revolution’ in action. As its historian notes, ‘there is no evidence that any one state fielded more than 30,000 effectives’ in the Franco-Spanish struggle for Italy before 1529; but:

In 1536–7 the Emperor Charles V mobilized 60,000 men in Lombardy alone for the defence of his recent conquest, Milan, and for the invasion of French Provence. In 1552, assailed on all fronts at once – in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean – Charles V raised 109,000 men in Germany and the Netherlands, 24,000 more in Lombardy and yet more in Sicily, Naples and Spain. The emperor must have had at his command, and therefore at his cost, about 150,000 men. The upward trend continued. In 1574 the Spanish Army of Flanders alone numbered 86,000 men, while only half a century later Philip IV could proudly proclaim that the armed forces at his command in 1625 amounted to no less than 300,000 men. In all these armies the real increase in numbers took place among the infantry, especially among the pikemen.

(#litres_trial_promo)

What was happening on land was to a large extent paralleled at sea. The expansion in maritime (especially transoceanic) commerce, the rivalries among the contending fleets in the Channel, the Indian Ocean, or off the Spanish Main, the threats posed by the Barbary corsairs and the Ottoman galley fleets, all interacted with the new technology of shipbuilding to make vessels bigger and much better armed. In those days there was no strict division between a warship and a merchantman; virtually all fair-sized trading vessels would carry guns, in order to beat off pirates and other predators. But there was a trend toward the creation of royal navies, so that the monarch would at least possess a number of regular warships to form the core around which a great fleet of armed merchantmen, galleasses, and pinnaces could gather in time of war. Henry VIII of England gave considerable support to this scheme, whereas Charles V tended to commandeer the privately owned galleons and galleys of his Spanish and Italian possessions rather than to build his own navy. Philip II, under far heavier pressure in the Mediterranean and then in the Atlantic, could not enjoy that luxury. He had to organize, and pay for, a massive programme of galley construction, in Barcelona, Naples, and Sicily; by 1574 he was supporting a total of 146 galleys, nearly three times the number a dozen years before.

(#litres_trial_promo) The explosion of warfare in the Atlantic during the following decade necessitated an even greater effort there: oceangoing warships were needed to protect the routes to the West Indies and (after Portugal was absorbed in 1580) to the East, to defend the Spanish coastline from English raids, and, ultimately, to convey an invading army to the British Isles. After the Anglo-Spanish peace of 1604, a large fleet was still required by Spain to ward off Dutch attacks on the high seas and to maintain communications with Flanders. And, decade by decade, such warships became heavier-armed and much more expensive.

It was these spiralling costs of war which exposed the real weakness of the Habsburg system. The general inflation, which saw food prices rise fivefold and industrial prices threefold between 1500 and 1630, was a heavy enough blow to government finances; but this was compounded by the doubling and redoubling in the size of armies and navies. In consequence, the Habsburgs were involved in an almost continual struggle for solvency. Following his various campaigns in the 1540s against Algiers, the French, and the German Protestants, Charles V found that his ordinary and extraordinary income could in no way match expenditures, and his revenues were pledged to the bankers for years ahead. Only by the desperate measure of confiscating the treasure from the Indies and seizing all specie in Spain could the monies be found to support the war against the Protestant princes. His 1552 campaign at Metz cost 2.5 million ducats alone – about ten times the emperor’s normal income from the Americas at that time. Not surprisingly, he was driven repeatedly to raise fresh loans, but always on worse terms: as the crown’s credit tumbled, the interest rates charged by the bankers spiralled upward, so that much of the ordinary revenue had to be used simply to pay the interest on past debts.

(#litres_trial_promo) When Charles abdicated, he bequeathed to Philip II an official Spanish debt of some 20 million ducats.

Philip also inherited a state of war with France, but one which was so expensive that in 1557 the Spanish crown had to declare itself bankrupt. At this, great banking houses like the Fuggers were also brought to their knees. It was a poor consolation that France had been forced to admit its own bankruptcy in the same year – the major reason for each side agreeing to negotiate at Cateau-Cambresis in 1559 – for Philip had then immediately to meet the powerful Turkish foe. The twenty-year Mediterranean war, the campaign against the Moriscos of Granada, and then the interconnected military effort in the Netherlands, northern France, and the English Channel drove the crown to search for all possible sources of income. Charles V’s revenues had tripled during his reign, but Philip II’s ‘doubled in the period 1556–73 alone, and more than redoubled by the end of the reign’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

His outgoings, however, were far larger. In the Lepanto campaign (1571), it was reckoned that the maintenance of the Christian fleets and soldiers would cost over 4 million ducats annually, although a fair part of this burden was shared by Venice and the papacy.

(#litres_trial_promo) The payments to the Army of Flanders were already enormous by the 1570s, and nearly always overdue: this in turn provoking the revolts of the troops, particularly after Philip’s 1575 suspension of payments of interest to his Genoese bankers.

(#litres_trial_promo) The much larger flow of income from American mines – around 2 million ducats a year by the 1580s compared with one-tenth of that four decades earlier – rescued the crown’s finances, and credit, temporarily; but the armada of 1588 cost 10 million ducats and its sad fate represented a financial as well as naval disaster. By 1596, after floating loans at an epic rate, Philip again defaulted. At his death two years later his debts totalled the enormous sum of 100 million ducats, and interest payments on this sum equalled about two-thirds of all revenues.

(#litres_trial_promo) Although peace with France and England soon followed, the war against the Dutch ground away until the truce of 1609, which itself had been precipitated by Spanish army mutinies and a further bankruptcy in 1607.

During the few years of peace which followed, there was no substantial reduction in Spanish governmental expenditures. Quite apart from the massive interest payments, there was still tension in the Mediterranean (necessitating a grandiose scheme for constructing coastal fortifications), and the far-flung Spanish Empire was still subject to the depredations of privateers (necessitating considerable defence outlays in the Philippines and the Caribbean as well as on the high seas fleet).

(#litres_trial_promo) The state of armed truce in Europe which existed after 1610 hardly suggested to Spain’s proud leaders that they could reduce arms expenditures. All that the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618 did, therefore, was to convert a cold war into a hot one, and to produce an increased flow of Spanish troops and money into Flanders and Germany. It is interesting to note that the run of early Habsburg victories in Europe and the successful defence of the Americas in this period largely coincided with – and was aided by – significant increases in bullion deliveries from the New World. But by the same token, the reduction in treasure receipts after 1626, the bankruptcy declaration of the following year, and the stupendous Dutch success in seizing the silver fleet in 1628 (costing Spain and its inhabitants as much as 10 million ducats) caused the war effort to peter out for a while. And despite the alliance with the emperor, there was no way (except under Wallenstein’s brief period of control) that German revenues could make up for this Spanish deficiency.

This, then, was to be the Spanish pattern for the next thirty years of war. By scraping together fresh loans, imposing new taxes, and utilizing any windfall from the Americas, a major military effort like, say, the Cardenal-Infante’s intervention in Germany in 1634–5 could be supported; but the grinding costs of war always eventually eroded these short-term gains, and within a few more years the financial position was worse than ever. By the 1640s, in the aftermath of the Catalan and Portuguese revolts, and with the American treasure flow much reduced, a long, slow decline was inevitable.

(#litres_trial_promo) What other fate was due to a nation which, although providing formidable fighters, was directed by governments which consistently spent two or three times more than the ordinary revenues provided?

The second chief cause of the Spanish and Austrian failure must be evident from the narrative account given above: the Habsburgs simply had too much to do, too many empires to fight, too many fronts to defend. The stalwartness of the Spanish troops in battle could not compensate for the fact that these forces had to be dispersed, in homeland garrisons, in North Africa, in Sicily and Italy, and in the New World, as well as in the Netherlands. Like the British Empire three centuries later, the Habsburg bloc was a conglomeration of widely scattered territories, a political-dynastic tour de force which required enormous sustained resources of material and ingenuity to keep going. As such, it provides one of the greatest examples of strategical overstretch in history; for the price of possessing so many territories was the existence of numerous foes, a burden also carried by the contemporaneous Ottoman Empire.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Related to this is the very significant issue of the chronology of the Habsburg wars. European conflicts in this period were frequent, to be sure, and their costs were a terrible burden upon all societies. But all the other states – France, England, Sweden, even the Ottoman Empire – enjoyed certain periods of peace and recovery. It was the Habsburgs’, and more especially Spain’s, fate to have to turn immediately from a struggle against one enemy to a new conflict against another; peace with France was succeeded by war with the Turks; a truce in the Mediterranean was followed by extended conflict in the Atlantic, and that by the struggle for northwestern Europe. During some awful periods, imperial Spain was fighting on three fronts simultaneously, and with her enemies consciously aiding each other, diplomatically and commercially if not militarily.

(#litres_trial_promo) In contemporary terms, Spain resembled a large bear in the pit: more powerful than any of the dogs attacking it, but never able to deal with all of its opponents and growing gradually exhausted in the process.

Yet how could the Habsburgs escape from this vicious circle? Historians have pointed to the chronic dispersion of energies, and suggested that Charles V and his successors should have formulated a clear set of defence priorities.

(#litres_trial_promo) The implication of this is that some areas were expendable; but which ones?

In retrospect, one can argue that the Austrian Habsburgs, and Ferdinand II in particular, would have been wiser to have refrained from pushing forward with the Counter-Reformation in northern Germany, for that brought heavy losses and few gains. Yet the emperor would still have needed to keep a considerable army in Germany to check princely particularism, French intrigues, and Swedish ambition; and there could also be no reduction in this Habsburg armed strength so long as the Turks stood athwart Hungary, only 150 miles from Vienna. The Spanish government, for its part, could allow the demise of their Austrian cousins neither at the hands of the French and Lutherans nor at the hands of the Turks, because of what it might imply for Spain’s own position in Europe. This calculation, however, did not seem to have applied in reverse. After Charles V’s retirement in 1556 the empire did not usually feel bound to aid Madrid in the latter’s wars in western Europe and overseas; but Spain, conscious of the higher stakes, would commit itself to the empire.

(#litres_trial_promo) The long-term consequences of this disparity of feeling and commitment are interesting. The failure of Habsburg Spain’s European aims by the mid-seventeenth century was clearly related to its internal problems and relative economic decline; having overstrained itself in all directions, it was now weak at heart. In Habsburg Austria’s case, on the other hand, although it failed to defeat Protestantism in Germany, it did achieve a consolidation of powers in the dynastic lands (Austria, Bohemia, and so on) – so much so that on this large territorial base and with the later creation of a professional standing army,

(#litres_trial_promo) the Habsburg Empire would be able to re-emerge as a European Great Power in the later decades of the seventeenth century, just as Spain was entering a period of even steeper decline.

(#litres_trial_promo) By that stage, however, Austria’s recuperation can hardly have been much of a consolation to the statesmen in Madrid, who felt they had to look elsewhere for allies.

It is easy to see why the possessions in the New World were an area of vital importance to Spain. For well over a century, they provided that regular addition to Spain’s wealth, and thus to its military power, without which the Habsburg effort could not have been so extensively maintained. Even when the English and Dutch attacks upon the Hispano-Portuguese colonial empire necessitated an ever-increasing expenditure on fleets and fortifications overseas, the direct and indirect gains to the Spanish crown from those territories remained considerable. To abandon such assets was unthinkable.

This left for consideration the Habsburg possessions in Italy and those in Flanders. Of the two, a withdrawal from Italy had less to recommend itself. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the French would have filled the Great Power vacuum there, and used the wealth of Italy for their own purposes – and to Habsburg detriment. In the second half of that century Italy was, quite literally, the outer bulwark of Spain’s own security in the face of Ottoman expansion westward. Quite apart from the blow to Spanish prestige and to the Christian religion which would have accompanied a Turkish assault upon Sicily, Naples, and Rome, the loss of this bulwark would have been a grave strategical setback. Spain would then have had to pour more and more money into coastal fortifications and galley fleets, which in any case were consuming the greater part of the arms budget in the early decades of Philip II’s reign. So it made good military sense to commit these existing forces to the active defence of the central Mediterranean, for that kept the Turkish enemy at a distance; and it had the further advantage that the costs of such campaigning were shared by the Habsburg possessions in Italy, by the papacy, and, on occasions, by Venice. Withdrawal from this front brought no advantages and many potential dangers.

By elimination, then, the Netherlands was the only area in which Habsburg losses might be cut; and, after all, the costs of the Army of Flanders in the ‘Eighty Years War’ against the Dutch were, thanks to the difficulties of the terrain and the advances in fortifications,

(#litres_trial_promo) quite stupendous and greatly exceeded those on any other front. Even at the height of the Thirty Years War, five or six times as much money was allocated to the Flanders garrison as to forces in Germany. ‘The war in the Netherlands’, observed one Spanish councillor, ‘has been the total ruin of this monarchy.’ In fact, between 1566 and 1654 Spain sent at least 218 million ducats to the Military Treasury in the Netherlands, considerably more than the sum total (121 million ducats) of the crown’s receipts from the Indies.

(#litres_trial_promo) Strategically, too, Flanders was much more difficult to defend: the sea route was often at the mercy of the French, the English, and the Dutch – as was most plainly shown when the Dutch admiral Tromp smashed a Spanish fleet carrying troop reinforcements in 1639 – but the ‘Spanish Road’ from Lombardy via the Swiss valleys or Savoy and Franche-Comté up the eastern frontiers of France to the lower Rhine also contained a number of very vulnerable choke points.

(#litres_trial_promo) Was it really worthwhile to keep attempting to control a couple of million recalcitrant Netherlanders at the far end of an extensive line of communications, and at such horrendous cost? Why not, as the representatives of the overtaxed Cortes of Castile slyly put it, let the rebels rot in their heresy? Divine punishment was assured them, and Spain would not have to carry the burden any longer.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The reasons given against an imperial retreat from that theatre would not have convinced those complaining of the waste of resources, but they have a certain plausibility. In the first place, if Spain no longer possessed Flanders, it would fall either to France or to the United Provinces, thereby enhancing the power and prestige of one of those inveterate Habsburg enemies; the very idea was repellent to the directors of Spanish policy, to whom ‘reputation’ mattered more than anything else. Secondly, there was the argument advanced by Philip IV and his advisers that a confrontation in that region at least took hostile forces away from more sensitive places: ‘Although the war which we have fought in the Netherlands has exhausted our treasury and forced us into the debts that we have incurred, it has also diverted our enemies in those parts so that, had we not done so, it is certain that we would have had war in Spain or somewhere nearer.’