How did Renaissance Spain rule Italy?
The King of France complained that I had deceived him twice. He lied, fool; I had cheated on him more than ten times.
Catholic Ferdinand
They eventually ruled the peninsula and became the most powerful militarily, politically intelligent, and economically wealthiest.
The biggest bar in the block.
At the end of the so-called Italian War before 1559, Spain remained the only foreign power on the peninsula, directly ruling two important lands, namely the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, as well as a number of other small lands, and essentially kept the rest of Italy under indirect control, since no one was capable of resisting Spanish power.
The details about how they do it are long, and I'll try to summarize them briefly instead of writing a book.
Spain already owned Sicily, which had been ruled by members of the Aragonese family since the end of the 13th century. By the mid-15th century, a cadet branch of the Aragonese kings also began to rule the Kingdom of Naples.
But The Terrastamara of Naples was not supported by the nobles of the entire kingdom, and their rule was not very stable, so when the King of France proclaimed the throne of Naples in 1494, he succeeded in conquering it in less than 6 months. He was driven away only when essentially all the northern Italian countries plus the alliance of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire intervened.
Spain launched a military expedition, and with the help of Terrastamara of Naples, defeated the French garrison and reconquered Naples. But once the chosen king ruled Naples, Fernandino, nephew of King Ferdinand of Aragon and Castile, died of malaria and another relative Federico took the throne, the King of Spain decided that it would be better to take direct control of Naples, and in a spectacular example of realpoli turned to his cousin and ally the King of Naples.
In 1499, the new King louis XII of France invaded and conquered Milan. Fearing a strong military presence in which France was allied with many Italian countries, the King of Spain decided to limit the damage by signing the Treaty of Grenada with France, which granted the title of King of Naples to the French king but also split southern Italy in two. Partly controlled by the French and partly under the direct control of the Aragonese royal family. The current king of Naples would be deposed and exiled in 1501.
Of course, the two parts never reconciled and did not really understand how the kingdom's economy worked, so in 1502 a war began between France and Spain, which was also a civil war between the pro-French and pro-Spanish factions. Kingdom of Naples.
After some initial struggle, Spain decisively won the war, and by 1504 the French had left Naples, where they could no longer conquer the Southern Kingdom (not because of a lack of attempts).
Northern Italy will now be the main battleground between the two countries. The prizes were the property of the Duchy of Milan and were still held by the French.
The importance of the Spanish Royal Family's acquisition of the Kingdom of Naples is self-evident. Naples, in pre-industrialized Europe in the 16th century, was an economic powerhouse with Naples, Europe's second largest city after Paris, which would remain the largest city in the kingdom. The crowns of Castile and Aragon increased their subject numbers by more than 2 million, increasing tax revenues almost overnight, when the United States was just an unknown region that had not yet been developed by the royal family.
In the decades that followed, the revenue financed Spain's rise as a world power.
Next up are nearly 20 young men in war, fighting, siege, political betrayal, real betrayal, assassination, betrayal and more. Compared to what happened between the beginning of the Cambrai Alliance War in 1508 and the Battle of Pavia in 1525, Game of Thrones is YA literature.
The war spread to Italy, involving England, Scotland, and almost all other countries in Central, Western, and Southern Europe.
With the death of Ferdinand of Aragon and the ascension of Charles V of the Austrian Grand Duke Habsburg to the Spanish throne and soon becoming Holy Roman Emperor, the war also became the Valuis and Bourbon dynasties later with the Habsburgs, more or less lasting throughout the entire period of early modern history.
In Pavia, an imperial and Spanish army, together with their Italian allies, defeated a very large French army, of which the Swiss army of course had its share of the Italian allies, and even succeeded in capturing King Francis of France. The victory gave the Habsburgs complete control of Milan. First indirect, and then after the death of the last Duke of Sforza, there was no heir.
Over the next 30 years, France attempted to wrest control of Italy from Charles V and his successors and defeated the Habsburgs. They even allied themselves with the Ottomans, but after many battles on land and sea, sieges, sacks, changing fronts, etc. were unsuccessful.
In 1559, the Treaty of Cato-Cambreces ended hostilities and Spanish rule in Italy began uncontroversial until the 18th century. It ended the Italian Renaissance.
After 60 years of fierce war, leaving many scars on its land, with the rise of the Protestant faith and the introduction of counter-reformation, the discovery of the New World destroyed the Italian state's primacy in banking and trade, and Italy in 1599 was less efficient in its administration of most of the peninsula than in 1499.
The peninsula has been one of its pulsating and most important elements since Roman times, after which the peninsula began to decline as a sleeping agrarian society on the borders of Europe. It was a process known as re-feudalization, which, though not caused, was ultimately accelerated by excessive rigidity in society and a lack of economic mobility driven by counter-reform and Spanish rule.
The King of Spain and his ministers administered their members of the direct territories in Italy (South, Sicily, Sardinia, Milan and Prescidi in Tuscany) through the Italian and Spanish Supreme Council of Madrid, composed of Italians and Spaniards.
Power was exercised by the three viceroys living in Naples, Palermo and Cagliari, as well as by a viceroy in Milan; in addition to the viceroy, there was a parliament representing the clergy, nobles and citizens, with judicial, administrative and financial functions, and in Milan a senate composed of nobles was initially obliged to approve every law, but eventually became increasingly marginalized. More over the decades.
Italian territory was of strategic importance to the Spanish monarchy: the southern regions and islands fought the Turks in the eastern Mediterranean, lombardy controlled the Alpine passes, and italian territory made a rich contribution to the Spanish crown in terms of soldiers, commanders, financial resources and supplies. Fun fact: most of the Spanish ships that took part in the Battle of Lepanto were built in Italy, and even Spanish-built ships were transported to Barcelona via Naples with masts and oars made of Calabrian timber.
Many times, the intentions of the Spanish administrators were the best, but they soon learned how difficult it was to manage their unruly subjects.
Among the Milanese, relations between the new Spanish rulers and the Milanese ruling class were strained. The Milanese resisted almost any attempt to restructure the tax collection. Thus it established a secret committee composed of the Governor-General, the Grand Chancellor, the President of the Senate, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Commander-in-Chief of the Milan Garrison, as well as other high-ranking bureaucrats and judges, effectively ending its rule over the territory.
The economy of the 17th century experienced a recession as the closure of Nordic markets lost much of the region's manufacturing capacity. For example, the number of cloth manufacturers fell from 80 in 1600 to 8 in 1660. This decline has facilitated take-off and the transfer of capital to agriculture, with the construction of new irrigation canals, the widespread introduction of rice cultivation, orchards and the development of sericulture.
In Sicily and Sardinia, the period of Spanish rule witnessed the strengthening of feudal aristocracy and large estates, which made it impossible to modernize the agricultural structure, which was the true wealth of the medieval kingdom. Especially in Sicily, where the royal family found that the best way to get money from the local nobles was to sell them titles, Sicily became the "land of princes" and was inhabited by more than 400 princes at the same time.
The rural population lived in a state of misery and close to slavery: in order to escape these conditions, there was a wave of emigration to the capital, Naples, where people wanted to serve the lords, live there, or work for the most important manufacturers of the state concentrated in the region. Tensions reached a tipping point between 1647 and 1648, when Spain's tax burden due to the financial needs of the Thirty Years' War became unsustainable.
In Naples, a civilian uprising led by Tommaso Aniello, known as Marciano, was against the Spanish government and supported by the upper class. The armies of Spanish soldiers and nobles defeated the rebels and restored Spanish rule.
Parts of Italy, which are not under Spain's direct control, remain largely in line with Spain's foreign and religious policies. The King and Pope of Spain were seen as the core and main driving force of the reforms.
Genoa has been closely associated with Spain since 1528, when Andrea Doria died in the service of Charles V. The São Jorge family acted as bankers for the Madrid monarchy, providing Spain with advance payments for gold and silver goods shipped from the Americas to Spain, exchanging American silver for gold coins to spend in Europe and processing the transfer of money to the desired destination.
The Genoese nobility was able to find internal compactness, overcome competition between old and new nobles, and try to make its rule over the rest of Liguria coherent and solid.
Rome, as the seat of the Pope, maintained its international prominence until the mid-17th century, taking advantage of the impetus of the church's deployed counter-reformers and missionaries. Rome, the capital of the Papal States, stretched all the way to Persia, as the capital of Catholicism, is now a world religion. However, the papal domain did not avoid economic recession in the rest of the peninsula.
Papal efforts to make Rome the capital of the counter-Reformation 'victorious church' led to an increase in the tax burden to the detriment of the provinces. The allure of Rome and the career opportunities opened up in Curia attracted great aristocratic families to the city, distracting them from more economically lucrative investments; banditry spread among those who had lost their land. The administration of the state was in the hands of the clergy, and secular non-aristocratic societies had limited possibilities of seeing their interests protected. By the 19th century, Rome, especially its countryside, was probably the less developed part of Italy.