The the story of the Spanish habsburbgys Religious war.

  The the story of the Spanish habsburbgys Religious war.  The story for  the Spanish habsburbgys Religious war. Not long after the voyages of Christopher Columbus, convoys of ships were bringing treasure from the New World into Spain.

 The newly installed Habsburg Spanish dynasty, and in particular Philip II, used that wealth to bring Spain into a golden age of building and arts. 

That part of the story is wonderful, for it has left breathtaking beauty for us to enjoy today. But this is not the full story of the spending of the unprecedented wealth acquired from the Americas. 

Philip II - ruling Spain from 1556 to 1598 - also spent a fortune on wars. This was his duty, after all.

 For you see, the job of making sure that the correct, Catholic faith was spread and maintained fell upon the Spanish Habsburg - at least that is what they believed.

This is the story of Philip II’s wars - against both Muslims and Protestants. 

Many were glorious victories for Catholics and Christendom, some were humiliating defeats. 

Regardless of the outcomes, bankruptcy and the fall of the interbred Spanish Habsburg dynasty was the ultimate result.

Emperor Charles V - ruling in Spain from 1516 to 1556 - had struggled to keep the Muslim Turks from taking over his lands in the Holy Roman Empire. 

The Turks had swept through the Balkans in several waves and by 1532 were at the gates of Vienna - the heart of Charles’s vast empire.

 Charles V managed to raise a huge army in the east and stopped the Turks at the walls of Vienna.

 Western Europe was saved for Christendom, but the Muslim presence in the Balkans set up conflicts that would last up until the late 20th century, as long-time neighboring Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania fought with Eastern Orthodox Christians in Serbia and Roman Catholics in Croatia.

By 1555, exhausted after decades of ruling the largest empire in the world, Charles V gave his German lands to his brother Ferdinand, splitting up the Habsburg Empire, and the next year abdicated his Spanish lands to his son Philip II.

 Ferdinand had the responsibility to guard the eastern borders of Europe against any encroachment from the Muslims, while Philip II had to guard against threats on the water. The sea is precisely where the next conflict would arise.

The Turks had been pushing into the eastern Mediterranean as part of their expansion program. They were so effective that Charles V had moved the crusader knights of Saint John to the island of Malta in 1530, leaving the Turks in control of the eastern sea. 

The Turks also sponsored pirates in North Africa to raid Christian ships throughout the Mediterranean. 

These Muslim pirates - known as Barbary pirates or Barbary corsairs - were based on the coast of North Africa. Towns like Algiers, Tunis, and others were havens for them. These pirates not only threatened shipping, but they repeatedly raided coastal towns. Islands like Corsica (off Italy) and Mallorca (off Spain) were devastated by the raids. 

Estimates are that from 800,000 to 1.25 million Christians were captured by these Barbary raiders and sold into slavery. 

Muslim pirates were a serious threat in the western Mediterranean, and Philip II had to take action.

The first serious crisis came in 1565, when corsairs of the sultan launched a huge amphibious operation to force the knights of Saint John from their island stronghold on Malta. 

The knights were the last Christian bastion in the western Mediterranean, and if the Turks took Malta, Christian shipping would have come to a halt.

 Besieged by over 38,000 men, the 600 knights and a few thousand civilians held out.

 The battle raged for months as the small number of knights retreated from a few of their strongholds as the violence escalated.

 Eventually, they held only one last fortification on the island. It seemed only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed.

Historians have called this one of the world’s bloodiest battles. Muslims floated the decapitated corpses of Christian captives towards the trapped men, and to respond in-kind, Christians fired Muslim skulls instead of cannonballs at the besieging Turks.

Somehow, the handful of knights held on. Philip II was eventually able to send reinforcements from Spanish Sicily. 

These mounted knights landed and drove the Turks from the island. Only about 10,000 were able to escape and return to Istanbul. 

The capital of Malta is Valletta, named for the victorious commander of the siege, Jean de Valette.

The astonishing survival of Malta was much praised throughout Christendom. 

Even Voltaire, writing some two centuries later, wrote, “Nothing is better known than the Siege of Malta.” This was a great battle, but the war wasn’t over.

 Every summer, from 1565 on, when sailing season began, Philip’s navy fought fleets launched by the Turks near North Africa. Philip II needed to take more decisive action, and he did.

In 1571, Philip II put together a coalition called the Holy League to assemble a great fleet to attack the Ottoman navy. He persuaded the papacy to contribute money, and the Venetians to bring their impressive fleet to the war. Hundreds of warships assembled, and Philip II gave command to his half-brother Don Juan of Austria. The fleet assembled in Sicily, then sailed east. They found the Turkish forces at Lepanto, near Corinth in Greece.

The Turkish forces had a message from the Sultan in Istanbul to attack, and Don Juan was a bold young man who would not retreat. In spite of bad weather, the forces lined up for one of the greatest sea battles of the Mediterranean. Hundreds of ships assembled in two lines in the bay. Each side brought tens of thousands of men on the ships. The Holy League, Don Juan’s forces, were better armed with newer weapons - they had over 1,800 cannons to the Turks 750. Paintings of this famous battle show the tall Spanish ships shooting at the low Turkish galleys rowed mostly by slaves. It was a decisive victory for the Christians.

The Turks lost over 200 ships and the Christians no more than 20. There were about 7,500 Christian soldiers killed, but they had freed about that many Christian slaves who had been forced to row the Turkish galleys. The Turks, on the other hand, lost about 15,000 men. The Christians had also captured the famous Turkish admiral Ali Pasha and cut off his head, displaying it from their ship. The remnants of the Muslim fleet limped back to Istanbul.

This battle proved that the Turks could be beaten at sea. Many in the West, including the victorious commander Don Juan, wanted to continue the war and attack the Ottoman Empire itself and take the eastern lands back from the Muslims. However, Philip II decided there were dangers closer to home. He turned his attention to Protestants in the Netherlands, giving the Ottomans time to rebuild their fleet, which they did in great haste.

When Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand conquered the peninsula for Christendom in 1492, they expelled Jews and Muslims, making sure their kingdom was religiously homogeneous. Then the Inquisition in Spain ensured that the Iberian Peninsula had almost no Protestants, or any religious diversity whatsoever. But Philip II didn’t just rule Spain; he ruled the Netherlands, too, and the situation there was very different.

France had been split by religious warfare from 1562 to 1598, when kings tried to eliminate growing numbers of Protestants, called Huguenots. In time, a Protestant king - Henry IV - came to the throne, converting to Catholicism in order to rule, claiming, “Paris is worth a mass.” This ended the French Wars of Religions. However, during these wars, many of these Protestants had spread into the Netherlands, where they would confront Philip II’s desire to rule over a religiously homogeneous land. Philip II had inherited these lands from his father Charles, and he wanted to bring these northern provinces more closely into his rule - especially in light of the fast spread of Protestantism. Today, these provinces are the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

In response to Philip II’s autocratic rule, riots broke out in 1566. Dutch Protestants, though still a tiny minority, rebelled against their Spanish Catholic overlords. In a spasm of violence, they destroyed Catholic Church property, smashing images of saints and desecrating the host. Philip II was enraged. Vowing to silence the rebels, he sent the largest land army ever assembled into the Netherlands to crush the Protestants and bring the province back under his Catholic rule. In 1572, organized revolt broke out and war officially began.

Philip II’s crackdown ignited a savage 40-year war of religion that became part of the Eighty Years’ War of Dutch Independence. Philip II sent his trusted advisor and best general, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the duke of Alba. He, like Philip II, believed that religious beliefs could be changed with autocratic firmness, and he instituted a brutal regime. He presided over a slaughter of thousands of Protestants in what he called a Council of Troubles. Calvinist preachers retaliated by urging their congregations to kill the invaders. To protect themselves, the towns of the Netherlands opened their dikes to flood their country rather than give in to Philip II’s armies. In response, Philip II recalled his enforcer and sent a more compromising negotiator, but nothing worked.

Philip II never succeeded in subduing the Protestants in the Netherlands. The conflict dragged on past his death. In 1609, his heir, Philip III, negotiated a settlement. The northern provinces became the Protestant Dutch Republic, free from Spanish rule. The southern provinces became the Spanish Netherlands - which would later become Belgium - and remained Catholic.

The war against Protestants in the Netherlands did not remain contained. Instead, the Protestant queen of England, Elizabeth I, supported the Protestants in the Netherlands. This brought Philip II into conflict with England, which led to more violence, culminating in an ill-advised attempt by Philip II to invade England by sea. His Spanish Armada was a fleet of 130 ships and nearly 30,000 men. This was an incredibly expensive undertaking, and it was impossible to keep something this large hidden. By the time the armada left from Lisbon in late May of 1588, the English were prepared.

This time, Philip II’s fleet did not have the same luck they had had at Lepanto. The battle took place over several days in July. The British ships were well armed and defended the coast vigorously. The armada was driven from the English Channel and dropped anchor off Calais, but they weren’t safe there from English ingenuity. The English sent burning ships at the Spanish, forcing them to withdraw. A strong southwest wind forced them north to Scotland, while the English ships chased and harassed them. Finally, the Spanish commander ordered a return to Spain. However, a sudden onslaught of violent storms from the North Sea all but destroyed the Spanish Armada. About half the ships were wrecked, and the loss of life was staggering. Philip II emptied his treasury again and rebuilt the country’s navy within a few years, but he never again tried to launch a direct attack on England.

The Austrian branch of the Habsburgs fared no better than Philip II in its desire to impose religious unity on their lands. Under Ferdinand, the temporary Peace of Augsburg broke down and the German lands were devastated by what’s been called the Thirty Years War that raged from 1618 through 1648. This bloody war involved most of Europe, with French and Scandinavian forces fighting on German lands. The war, that began about religion, turned into a bloody political struggle to weaken the power of the Habsburgs. For example, the Catholic French king was willing to join Protestants, and Scandinavian countries - who were all Protestant - often fought on opposing sides.

Spain couldn’t stay out of this mess. In support of their Habsburg relatives, Spanish kings sent soldiers into the battle. Ships sailed from Barcelona carrying Spanish troops. They landed in Genoa and marched through Switzerland into the heartland of the Holy Roman Empire, that was composed of German principalities in the center of Europe. Spanish forces occupied lands east of the Netherlands in hopes of containing Protestants there. To fund this war, the Spanish Habsburgs went further into debt.

By the 1640s, the war had reached a stalemate. The kings and princes who had started the hostilities had all died, and their successors and all the civilians were exhausted. This war had raged with violence that astonished contemporary witnesses as armies on both sides had swept through villages and towns, destroying everything in their paths. Germany’s population had plummeted. Some historians suggest a population loss as high as 30%.

A series of agreements that ended the Thirty Years War are collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia. In this treaty, Spain finally recognized the independence of the northern Netherlands in return for the Dutch recognition of Spain’s right to its overseas empire, which the Dutch had coveted. This peace agreement set the political geography of Europe for the next century and established a precedent for diplomacy that would last hundreds of years. However, it was still assumed that kings and lords should pick the religion of their subjects. It would be another 100 years before the Enlightenment moved religion to individuals, establishing a separation of church and state.

All the wealth from the New World could not pay Philip II’s massive bills over the years. The endless wars he fought were expensive, bringing no returns to the Spanish economy. Between 1559 and 1598, Philip increased the taxes within Spain by 430% in an attempt to pay some of the debt. These taxes hurt only the peasantry because the nobility paid no taxes at all. But the bills simply couldn’t be paid, and Philip II declared state bankruptcy four times: in 1557, 1560, 1575, and 1596. He depended on credit from Genoese and German bankers to keep the state functioning.

When Philip II started the religious wars in the Netherlands, money flowed from his coffers in other ways, as well. For example, the wars severely hit Spain’s wool industry because the Dutch were the main importers of Spanish wool. During the war, wool piled up in warehouses, and Spanish herders went broke. To be fair, modern debt restructuring techniques were not understood back then. But Spanish advisors knew they were spending more money than they had, and this was devastating to the Spanish people. When Philip died, Spain’s debt was 85.5 million ducats, and its annual income was only 9.7 million ducats. And this was all before Spain entered into the Thirty Years’ War in Germany. Spain would not recover from this spending binge. The golden age was coming to an end.

Philip II died in 1598. He was a hard working, diligent king who took his responsibilities seriously. His heirs were neither so responsible or hard working. In fact, it’s a wonder that the Spanish Habsburg dynasty lasted as long as it did.

Philip III was the child of his father’s fourth marriage. Although he was barely 21 years old when he came to the throne in 1598, he proved a relatively stable and wise monarch. Philip III married his Habsburg cousin Margaret of Austria in the next year. Instead of opening new wars, Philip III negotiated peace agreements with England and the Netherlands. This did not mean that Philip III was any more accommodating of religious diversity; he deeply resented the Dutch Protestants, but he was realistic enough to see that he could not change religious ideas through warfare. Philip III also improved relations with France, even arranging a marriage between his daughter, Anne of Austria, and King Louis XIII. This brought France more closely into its cultural sphere, which would have lasting effects.

Philip III became ill and died suddenly in 1621. His son, Philip IV, was 16 years old when he inherited the throne. Philip IV married a French princess, Elisabeth, a diplomatic union that tied Spain even more closely to France. Historians often praise the cultural brilliance of the court of Philip IV, and when they do, it is to downplay the political and economic disasters of his reign. The Thirty Years’ War had already broken out, and the conflict would stretch Spanish resources, both human and material, to the breaking point. Spain suffered from severe economic distress, a population decline, and loss of international trade. Meanwhile, Philip IV spent most of his time drinking with friends and in bed with mistresses. But despite all this devastation, after the Thirty Years War, Spain had stopped its disastrous wars and was still bringing in tons of wealth from its overseas empire. It was certainly possible for the Spanish Habsburgs to overcome the financial challenges of its reign. However, one thing they couldn’t fix were the disastrous effects of centuries of inbreeding.

When Philip IV died in 1665, his heir was the four-year-old Charles II. Charles II was the child of Philip IV’s marriage to his Habsburg niece Mariana, and five generations of inbreeding had finally taken its toll. When Charles II officially took over his rule in 1675, he was a sickly 14-year-old. His mother Mariana of Austria continued to serve as regent until her death in 1696. Charles continued to rule until his death in 1700, but he simply withdrew from society, playing games and ignoring the stresses of rule. The king suffered from debilitating epileptic seizures. He married twice to cousins, but produced no heirs. Rulers and diplomats all over Europe knew that the Spanish Habsburgs would die out with the unfortunate Charles II. The only question was how Spain’s rivals would divide up the remains of the Spanish empire.

The powerful French king Louis XIV took advantage of his sickly counterpart, launching the so-called War of Devolution in 1667 and another war in 1672-1678. Through these wars France gained lands in the Netherlands at Spain’s expense. In a secret treaty that ended the wars in 1698, Louis XIV made a pact with other European powers to divide the Spanish empire after Charles II’s death, which seemed increasingly imminent.

In 1700, the king made a surprising deathbed decision that saved the integrity of Spain, if not of the Habsburg line. Persuaded by his Catholic confessor that France was the only power capable of preventing the disintegration of the Spanish empire, Charles II named as his heir the grandson of Louis XIV, Philip. Louis XIV gave his blessing, and when Charles II died, Philip became Philip V, the first in the House of Bourbon to rule Spain.

The rest of Europe would not sit idly by as the French empire acquired that of Spain, and a war would soon sweep the continent once again. But that is a story for another day, because the age of the Spanish Habsburgs was over.

The Spanish Habsburgs were the self-appointed protecters of Catholicism for centuries, but that proved a thankless job. Some of the wars they waged were justified and were glorious victories, others were shameful and resulted in terrible bloodshed. The cost of these conflicts ruined them in the long-run. Meanwhile, their relatives to the east would limp along to rule the Holy Roman Empire, then the Austrian Empire, and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire up until after the First World War. However, this was no longer a global empire or a world power.

With the death of Charles II in 1700, the once glorious Spanish Habsburgs exited the stage, not with a bang, but with a whimper.