查理五世：战争的掌控者Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War

Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War Campaign Strategy, International Finance, and Domestic Politics JAMES D. TRACY University of Minnesota published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011-4211, usa 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarco´n 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org C© James D. Tracy 2002 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2002 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeface Bembo 11/12 pt. System LATEX 2ε [tb] A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Tracy, James D. Emperor Charles V, impresario of war : campaign strategy, international finance, and domestic politics / James D. Tracy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-521-81431-6 1. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 1500–1558. 2. Europe – Economic conditions – 16th century. 3. Holy Roman Empire – Kings and rulers – Biography. 4. Holy Roman Empire – History – Charles V, 1505–1555. 5. Europe – History, Military – 1492–1648. 6. Finance, Public – Holy Roman Empire – History – 16th century. i. Title. d180.5 .t73 2002 943′ .03′092 – dc21 [b] 2002023395 isbn 0 521 81431 6 hardback Contents List of Illustrations page ix List of Tables xi Acknowledgments xiii List of Abbreviations xv Introduction 1 Part 1 Strategy and Finance 17 1 The Grand Strategy of Charles V 20 2 The Habsburg-Valois Struggle: Italy, 1515–1528 39 3 The Search for Revenue, I: The Hard Roads of Fiscal Reform 50 4 The Search for Revenue, II: Parliamentary Subsidies 67 5 The Search for Credit: Charles and His Bankers 91 Part 2 Impresario of War: Charles’s Campaigns, 1529–1552 109 6 Finding Uses for an Army: Charles in Italy, 1529–1530 114 7 Crusades in Austria and the Mediterranean, 1532–1535 133 8 Failures in Provence and at Prevesa and Algiers, 1536–1541 158 9 Charles’s Grand Plan, 1543–1544 183 10 The First Schmalkaldic War, 1546–1547 204 11 The Second Schmalkaldic War and the Assault on Metz, 1552 229 Part 3 War Taxation: Parliaments of the Core Provinces of the Low Countries, Naples, and Castile 249 12 Fiscal Devolution and War Taxation in the Low Countries 254 13 Baronial Politics and War Finance in the Kingdom of Naples 274 vii viii Contents 14 Town Autonomy, Noble Magistrates, and War Taxation in Castile 289 Conclusions 305 Bibliography 317 Index 329 Illustrations maps Int.1. Habsburg dominions in Europe, 1555 (based on Brandi, Kaiser Karl V ) page 3 3.1. The core provinces: Flanders, Brabant, and Holland 52 3.2. The Kingdom of Naples 55 3.3. The Kingdom of Castile 64 6.1. Northern Italy, with Alpine passes, 1530 118 7.1. The Danube campaign of 1532 140 7.2. Habsburg and Ottoman Empires at war in the Mediterranean 142 8.1. The Provence campaign of 1536 162 9.1. The Rhineland campaign of 1543 189 9.2. Charles’s invasion of northern France, 1544 193 10.1. The First Schmalkaldic War, 1546–1547 211 11.1. Charles’s retreat to Villach 236 figures 5.1. Jan Ossaert, Francisco de los Cobos, Getty Museum, Los Angeles 93 6.1. Titian, La Emperatriz Don˜a Isabella, Prado, Madrid 115 7.1. Anonymous, Andrea Doria with a Cat, Palazzo Doria, Genoa 136 7.2. Siege of Goletta, in the 1555 Antwerp edition of Historiarum sui Temporis by Paolo Giovio, University of Minnesota Library 148 7.3. Tunis Captured, in the 1555 edition of Kurze Verzeichnis wie Keyser Carolus der V in Africa . . ., Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbu¨ttel 150 ix x Illustrations 8.1. Siege of Algiers, in the 1555 Antwerp edition of Historiarum sui Temporis by Paolo Giovio, University of Minnesota Library 175 10.1. The Ingolstadt Cannonade, in the 1550 Antwerp edition of Commentariorum de Bello Germanico by Luis de A´vila, University of Minnesota Library 212 10.2. Spaniards Wading the Elbe at Mu¨hlberg, in the 1550 Antwerp edition of Commentariorum de Bello Germanico by Luis de A´vila, University of Minnesota Library 216 10.3. Titian, Charles V as the Victor at Mu¨hlberg, Prado, Madrid 218 Tables 5.1. Lenders to be repaid by the treasury of Castile, 1521–1555 page 101 5.2. Revenue structure of Charles V’s lands 102 ii.1. Warfare and loans against the treasury of Castile during Charles’s reign 110 8.1. Sources of funds for Charles’s campaigns, 1529–1541 182 9.1. Castile’s revenues, 1543–1548, and cambios for Charles remitted 1543–1544 203 11.1. Loans charged against the treasury of Castile in 1552 245 11.2. Sources of funds for Charles’s campaigns, 1543–1552 247 iii.1. Average annual subsidies of the core provinces, Naples, and Castile, 1519–1553 250 iii.2. Largest parliamentary grants during Charles’s reign 251 12.1. Charges against the ordinary subsidies of the Low Countries in 1531 263 12.2. Sources of funds raised by the three core provinces, 1543–1544 266 xi Chapter 1 The Grand Strategy of Charles V Military historians working on periods as far apart as the Roman Empire and the twentieth century have adopted the term “grand strategy” to denote the highest level of thinking about the interests of the state. To quote a recent definition, Strategy is the art of controlling and utilizing the resources of a nation – or a coalition of nations – including its armed forces, to the end that its vital interests shall be effectively promoted and secured against enemies, actual, potential, or merely presumed. The highest type of strategy – sometimes called grand strategy – is that which so integrates the policies and armaments of the nation that the resort to war is either rendered unnecessary or is undertaken with the maximum chance of victory.1 If one applies this definition strictly, especially the implication that the wealth of a nation is a “resource” to be enhanced by government policy, Charles V cannot be said to have had a grand strategy. His sister, Mary of Hungary, regent of the Low Countries (1531–1555), clearly grasped the importance of strengthening the commercial relations of the Netherlands; for example, she tried to discourage Charles from going to war to put his niece on the throne of Denmark, a scheme that had little chance of success, and threatened to disrupt altogether Holland’s vital Baltic trade.2 Similarly, 1 A quotation from Edward Mead Earle, The Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, 1943), viii, in Paul Kennedy, “Grand Strategy in War and Peace: Toward a Broader Definition,” in his Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 2. 2 Daniel Doyle, “The Heart and Stomach of a Man but the Body of a Woman: Mary of Hungary and The Exercise of Political Power in Early Modern Europe,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1996, chap. 6. Charles’s sister Isabella had married King Christian II who was driven from his throne in 1523. During the so-called Counts’ War of 1533–1536, Charles ordered the mobilization of Low Countries shipping to carry to Denmark an army enrolled under the banner of Frederick of Wittelsbach, brother of the Count Palatine of the Rhine, and husband of Dorothea, daughter of Isabella and Christian II. 20 The Grand Strategy of Charles V 21 Francis I had ambitious plans for enriching the Mediterranean trade of his kingdom by making French-held Savona a rival to the busy port of Genoa.3 But there is, to my knowledge, nothing in Charles’s correspondence to suggest an awareness that the trade or agriculture of his realms was an asset to be nurtured and protected, for the future profit of the crown. He seems not to have seen beyond the fact that wealth of subjects could be called upon to support the great deeds of princes, as in a speech to the Council of Castile in 1529, explaining his decision to embark on a military campaign in Italy: “It is very pusillanimous for a prince to forgo undertaking a heroic course of action merely because money is wanting, for in matters of honor a prince must not only risk his own person but also pledge the revenues of his treasury.”4 Geoffrey Parker has applied a more limited concept of the term to Charles’s son Philip. As against critics of the idea of a “grand strategy” for Philip’s reign, Parker acknowledges that neither Philip nor his councillors had a “comprehensive master-plan.” But one can discern “a global strate- gic vision” in the initiatives of the king’s government, as when he ordered simultaneous visitas or inspection tours of Spain’s three Italian provinces, Milan, Naples, and Sicily (1559). Through his councils Philip had a sys- tematic procedure for sifting and evaluating incoming reports about threats to Spain’s interests in various parts of Europe and overseas. There was also a systematic collection of information that could be useful in the gover- nance of his realms, as in the twenty sectional maps the king had made of Iberia,5 which were “by far the largest European maps of their day to be based on a detailed ground survey.” Unlike “more successful warlords,” such as his great rival, King Henry IV of France (1589–1610), or his own father, Charles V, Philip did not appreciate the strategic importance of “seeing the situation in a theater [of war] for oneself,” or of “building bonds of confidence and trust with theater commanders through regular personal meetings.” But Philip did inherit from his father what Parker calls a “blueprint for empire” to guide his thinking and that of his minis- ters. This was the so-called political testament of 1548, written for Philip’s instruction, “a highly perceptive survey of the prevailing international situ- ation, and of the Grand Strategy best suited to preserve Philip’s inheritance intact.” Because Philip’s possessions were physically separated from one an- other, and the object of widespread jealousy, he must take care to maintain friends and informants in all areas, so as to understand the actions of other states and anticipate danger.6 3 See Chapter 6. 4 Santa Cruz, Cro´nica del Emperador Carlos V, II, 456. 5 From 1580, Philip was also king of Portugal. 6 Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 2–6, 9–10, 21–25, 40, 59–63, 77–79. For the text of Charles’s testament of 18 January 1548, Corpus Documental, Letter 22 Part One. Strategy and Finance It makes sense to apply this qualified idea of a grand strategy to Charles’s reign also, but only if a further adjustment is made. Although Philip’s dominions were indeed scattered, the policy of the monarchy was governed by Spanish interests. This was not yet so in Charles’s time, primarily because the crown he wore as Holy Roman Emperor was more prestigious than the crowns of Castile and Arago´n, and implied responsibilities lying well beyond the zone of Spanish concerns. Hence one cannot say of Charles that his thinking about war and peace was undergirded by a sense of “national” interest. Moreover, although panegyrists compared him with the Caesars of Rome, his empire, unlike theirs, never made up a contiguous territory with common interests and common enemies. The lands Charles ruled at least in name7 were a motley collection mak- ing up nearly half of Europe.8 In Spain he was (from 1516) king of Castile and Arago´n by right of his maternal grandparents, the Catholic kings, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Arago´n. In the Low Countries, he ruled a fistful of provinces inherited from his paternal grandmother, Mary, the duchess of Burgundy, including Flanders, Brabant, and Holland. Across the French border, he claimed to be the rightful duke of Burgundy, even though the duchy was reincorporated into France in 1477. In Italy, he was king of Naples (including Sicily), thanks to the conquest of that realm by his Aragonese great-grandfather, King Alfonso V (d. 1458). Meanwhile, and with minimal attention on Charles’s part,9 his subjects added the great Aztec and Inca realms to Castile’s overseas possessions. Finally, in the vast and ramshackle Holy Roman Empire, where each prince and city-state ruled more or less without interference from the emperor, Charles and his younger brother Ferdinand were heirs to Habsburg Austria, yet another collection of separate provinces. Upon the death of their grandfather, Emperor Maximilian I (1519), Charles was able to succeed him by vote of the empire’s seven prince-electors, but only thanks to indecently large bribes advanced by Augsburg’s great banking houses. How does one understand the interests of a prince ruling so many lands, whose discernible interests were often in direct conflict with one another? CCCLXXIX, II, 569–592; and for the place of this document in a series of such testaments, Karl Brandi, “Die politische Testamente Karls V,” II (1930), 258–293, in “Berichte und Studien zur Geschiche Karls V,” nos. I–XIX, Nachrichten von der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Go¨ttingen, Philologisch-Historische Klasse, 1930–1941, hereafter abbreviated as “Berichte.” 7 The order in which his titles were listed varied slightly with the secretary’s home base; for a Spanish version, Rodriguez-Salgado, The Changing Face of Empire, 33. 8 Wim Blockmans, “The Emperor’s Subjects,” in Soly,Charles V, 234: in a western and central Europe estimated to have had 70 million people in 1550, those who could be called subjects of Charles numbered about 28 million. 9 For Charles’s legislation on the Indies, Ciriaco Pe´rez Bustamente, “Actividad legislativa de Carlos V, en orden a las Indias,” in Charles-Quint et son temps (Paris, 1959), 113–121. The Grand Strategy of Charles V 23 Or what were Charles’s interests as holder of an imperial crown to which no lands or revenues were attached, only a vague prestige that evoked the jealousy of other crowned heads? There were no precedents to fall back on, because no prince in living memory – indeed, no one since Alexander the Great, or Charlemagne10 – had ever ruled such a large and heterogenous complex of territories. Nonetheless, Charles groped his way toward a settled understanding of his interests, and those of the “House of Austria,” including a grasp of European affairs that in his mature years was indeed highly perceptive. To be sure, this was not a wisdom gained in a single campaign, or a single season of hearing ambassadors’ reports read in council. The first time Charles wrote down his thoughts about the choices facing him (February–March 1525), he gave no evidence of ideas more complex than the traditional chivalric sense of honor that required him, as he thought, to undertake an expedition to Italy.11 The young emperor had to learn from his councillors, especially Mercurino Gattinara, grand chancellor of the empire. It will thus be useful to look first at the advisers who surrounded Charles, before examining the elements of a grand strategy that he drew from their counsel and, in time, reformulated in his own terms. Charles's Advisers From an early age Charles took governing seriously. France’s King Francis I (d. 1547) is said to have been happiest when “riding to the hounds, tilting in a joust or performing in a masque.”12 Charles, though not adverse to taking his pleasures, maintained throughout his life a daily routine that included meeting with one or another of his councils, hearing reports from abroad read aloud, dictating letters or dispatches, and, in special cases, writing out long missives. Even when afflicted with gout, he used his distinctive hand as a means of underlining his instructions; recipients knew at once they had been favored with such a letter and were meant to be impressed.13 10 The example of Charlemagne’s conquest and subjugation of the stubbornly pagan Saxons was evoked as a precedent for what Charles might have to do to stubborn Lutherans, concentrated in roughly the same part of Germany: Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggi to Charles, end of June 1530, Staatspapiere, Document 8, 41–50; cf. Ferdinand to Charles, 1 February 1531, Familienkorrespondenz, Letter 451, III, 17: “Y. . . la tierra de Saxonia ha sido en tiempos passados rreduzida dos vezes a la fe.” 11 For text and commentary, Karl Brandi, “Eigenha¨ndige Aufzeichnungen Karls V aus dem Anfang des Jahres 1525,” in “Berichte,” IX, 1933, 220–260; see also Federico Chabod, Lo stato e la vita religiosa a Milano nell’ epoca di Carlo V = Opere (5 vols., Turin, 1964–1985), III, 133–135. 12 R. J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge, 1994), 107. 13 See, eg., the gratitude of Charles de Lannoy, viceroy of Naples (1522–1527), to have letters in the emperor’s own hand: to Charles, 20 April 1525, Lanz, Letter 67, I, 160, and 25 May 1526, 24 Part One. Strategy and Finance His earliest mentors were men who had received their political and mili- tary education at the Habsburg-Burgundian court in Brussels. Gattinara, a Piedmontese, came to the Low Countries with Charles’s aunt, Margaret of Austria, widowed duchess of Savoy, for her first term as regent (1506–1514). Upon Gattinara’s death in 1530, Nicholas Perrenot, lord of Granvelle in Franche-Compte´ (d. 1550), succeeded him as the emperor’s chief adviser for the affairs of France and the empire, though not as chancellor of the empire (this position was not filled again in Charles’s reign). Other key advisers had been chamberlains to Charles in his boyhood, hunting with him in the Zonie¨nbos outside Brussels: Guillaume de Croy, lord of Chie`vres in Hainaut, the grand chamberlain (d. 1521); Philibert of Chaˆlons, prince of Orange (d. 1530); Orange’s son-in-law and heir, Count Henry of Nassau (d. 1538), lord of the Low Countries lands of the German princely house from which he came; Charles de Lannoy, lord of Molembaix (d. 1527); Lodewijk van Vlaanderen, lord of Praet (d. 1551), representing an illegiti- mate branch of the old comital house of Flanders; Adrien de Croy, lord of Roeulx, the brother of Chie`vres; Jean Hannart, lord of Likerke; and Charles de Poupet, lord of La Chaulx.14 Only slowly did these “Burgundians” give way in the inner circle to Castilians. There were first of all the ecclesiastics, who traditionally occu- pied high positions at the court in Valladolid, notably Alonso de Fonseca (d. 1534), archbishop of Toledo and president of the Consejo de Estado or Council of Castile. Juan Pardo de Tavera (d. 1545), archbishop of Santiago, was especially effective at building a clientele among servants of the crown at various levels.15 He succeeded Fonseca both as primate of Spain (arch- bishop of Toledo) and president of the council. Though men from grandee families – the highest rank of the nobility – were excluded from the coun- cils of state in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, there were a few for whom Charles made exceptions, including three men from the House of Alba: Fadrique Alva´rez de Toledo (d. 1531), the second duke of Alba; his younger son, Pedro Alva´rez de Toledo (d. 1553), marquess of Villafranca; and Villafranca’s nephew, Fernando Alva´rez de Toledo (d. 1581), the third Lanz, Letter 89, I, 210–211. Ferdinand’s suggestion that Charles need not trouble writing in his own hand is taken by Wolfram as a hint that Ferdinand, following his election (1530) as King of the Romans and thus as designated successor in the empire, now had less need of direction from Charles: Ferdinand to Charles, Familienkorrespondenz, Letter 669, IV, 639. 14 For biographical sketches, Michel Baelde, De Collaterale Raden onder Karel V en Filips II, 1531–1578, Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Akademie van Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schoone Kunsten van Belgie¨, Klass