The Manila galleon, as it was known, became the iconic image of the Spanish Empire during its 17th-century heyday, when it encompassed lands from California to Patagonia, the Philippines to North Africa. Court chroniclers sang of Spain’s glory: “Never has a king or people ventured so far or conquered so much… as our people have done, nor have any others achieved… what we have done in feats of arms, in navigations, in the preaching of the holy gospel,” wrote Lopez de Gomara in 1552. Modern historians followed suit, painting a dramatic picture of Spain’s rise to world dominion that started in 1516, when the country was incorporated into the European empire ruled by Charles V.
But according to Kamen’s book, the true story is quite different. When Spain became part of Charles V’s empire, it was immediately sidelined–not least because it was significantly poorer than some of the emperor’s other territories, including what are now Austria, Hungary, most of Italy and the Netherlands. Charles rarely visited. Only when precious metals from the New World–courtesy of Christopher Columbus–began to flood Spanish coffers under Charles V’s son, Philip II, did Spain win a prominent place in the empire. In fact, writes Kamen, the Spanish expansion abroad was driven as much by individuals from other countries as by Spaniards: Columbus, for one, was an Italian based in Lisbon, and later explorers were Italian, Portuguese and German.
Kamen also questions Spain’s sway over its foreign dominions, doubting that they were ever fully under Spanish control. His meticulous research shows that Spanish imperialism was based less on military conquest than on uneasy alliances and trades. Italians and Germans financed Spain’s expeditions. The country’s ability to trade in the Philippines depended on Chinese help and acquiescence. Even the fall of the Aztec Empire in Mexico and that of the Incas, which extended from the south of modern Colombia into central Chile, was achieved only by marshalling the manpower of those empires’ own enemies. Spain’s title to the Americas was acquired through a letter from the pope (though indigenous tribes took no notice when it was read aloud to them).
In fact, Kamen writes, Spain didn’t even exist as a unified nation during this period. Though the feuding kingdoms of Aragon and Castile had achieved peace by the beginning of the 16th century, the provinces still had separate governments, laws and taxes. They didn’t begin to develop into a nation until 200 years later. And until that happened, argues Kamen, Spain couldn’t possibly have had the necessary manpower, credit, ships or weapons to pursue global conquest alone. Indeed, the Spaniards’ limited resources allowed them to assert their authority over only a tiny proportion of the lands they claimed to have conquered, in what are now Mexico and the Philippines.
Kamen is braced for a critical outcry when the book hits stores in Spain next month (it is already out elsewhere in Europe). But he is hardly the first to take such a stance; Spanish historian Bartolome Leonardo de Argensola voiced similar qualms about Spain’s empire back in the 17th century: “We wish to be seen as champions of what is good, but at the very most we are ghosts and apparitions,” he wrote. Says Kamen: “The Spanish are conscious of their empire still, and what they may have lost. But they have a very unrealistic view of what their empire was.” His pugnacious book will certainly do its bit to change that.
