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The European Background: Kings and Soldiers

The document discusses the political structure of Europe during the period of overseas expansion. There was a struggle for power between kings who wanted centralized authority and nobles who sought a decentralized system with checks on royal power. Military developments had empowered the nobility, especially knights, giving them influence. The church also allied with nobles against centralized royal power. This political environment shaped how European powers engaged in overseas expansion and colonization.

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The European Background: Kings and Soldiers

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2

The European Background

The involvement of European governments in overseas expansion was rendered

urgent by a long-standing struggle over power and authority at home, one
that the speciic character of European expansion helped meet. This European
political structure would determine how the Atlantic world developed politi-
cally as it was created by European exploration and commerce. The power
struggle in question was particularly between the kings of emerging states and
the nobility in those same areas, complicated by the role of a powerful and
wealthy ecclesiastical establishment with local power and signiicant interna-
tional connections.
The crucial element of European political structure that shaped its poli-
tics was the struggle between the kings, or other oficials who wished to hold
supreme sovereign executive authority (titled princes, dukes, or other noble
titles, or alternatively emperors), and the nobility. Monarchs wished to cen-
tralize power, income, and decision making in their own hands or in the hands
of oficials who they controlled exclusively; nobles contested this and sought
a more decentralized decision-making process, involving one or another sort
of deliberative body that could check or instruct the monarch. Control of mili-
tary power was essential to this balance, and the period of European expansion
corresponded to major shifts in the nature of war and, more importantly, of
armies.

kings and soldiers

Military developments dating back to before 1000 had shaped the power of
the nobility, especially the initiation of cavalry warfare employing heavily
armored knights that became the essential art of war in the medieval period.
Their impact can be seen quite clearly in the literature of the times: detailed
descriptions of knights’ armor and deeds were an important part of the verbal
art that was sung by troubadours and subsequently recorded in literature and
chronicles. Arthurian romances spent considerable time describing combats,

and even historical chronicles dwelled at great length on wars and even on
single combats within wars.1
The origins of the armored knight went back to the Frankish heartland in the
Germanic- and French-speaking lands lying along the Lower Rhine valley and
northern France, and a long period of development that allowed a relatively
small but highly restricted class of warriors to dominate politics. Developments
in armoring and horse training and breeding placed the armored knight, who
reached crucial development by the late eleventh century, in a position to dom-
inate European battleields.
To become a knight required long training, commencing almost in child-
hood, and considerable capital, because ownership of horse, armor, and the
service necessary to keep a knight in the ield was expensive. While in many
parts of the world, rulers managed to keep highly trained cavalry forces under
state control, in Western Europe, the older nobility became knights, creating a
remarkable military nobility that would be one of its hallmarks. But no polit-
ical authority could be without them, and in effect they charged a high price.
The price was not simply payable in money, for the continuation of knight’s
services required that they have lifetime – and heritable – income, grounded in
land. Thus, knights had been paid by giving them long-term, effectively perpet-
ual grants of land, in exchange for promises to serve whoever, king or other
noble, supplied the land. Nobles who were also knights and often had other
knights in their service also demanded and received more: they also wanted
the right to effective sovereignty over the lands they owned, and often over
those of the neighboring peasants. In the earlier feudal period, knights gradu-
ally forced the tax-paying peasantry (whose income thus went to the king) to
surrender their lands to them, and in countries like France and Germany espe-
cially, they created small, state-like jurisdictions around their lands.
Another set of developments also placed the church in league with the nobles
and against any attempt to centralize royal power. The rule of celibacy in the
medieval church ensured that priests could not be a self-perpetuating class,
and their ranks were illed by younger sons or weaker members of the knightly
class. The heads of these noble families then claimed the right to patronage –
that is, to place members of their families in the clergy and by extension also
into the ecclesiastical hierarchy in decision-making positions, such as heads
of monasteries (abbots), religious orders, parish vicars, and bishops. Thus the
great noble families not only owned their own lands and often also controlled
local governments, but their collateral branches controlled the church, at least
at the local level.
Because senior clerics were related to the nobility, they often joined with
nobles to oppose any growth of royal power. Their position was complicated
by the fact that the papacy had sought, since the eleventh century, to control

1
For what follows, I am inspired by Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe. Conquest,
Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, 1993), pp. 60–83.

the church and its incomes and thus often had grounds to interfere in the local
politics where those interests were involved. The great struggle over control of
the church between the rulers of Italy and Germany and the Popes had ended
inconclusively; although the Popes claimed the right to appoint bishops, they
often had to yield for practical reasons to powerful noble families that aided
the Popes in their struggle, and in the process extended their power and protec-
tion against kings. In other parts of Europe, however, kings usually managed
to win control over the senior and decision-making parts of their church estab-
lishment, albeit not without stubborn and sometimes effective rearguard action
on the part of the local authorities and their noble allies.
A inal element in the larger struggle was the various chartered and exempted
corporations that were eventually called the Third Estate in France but were
present everywhere. Many towns and cities, and even some rural areas, had
been granted charters, sometimes by the king, sometimes by lesser authorities.
These charters often included ixed taxes, or exemptions from various services
and other duties (such as military service). Although most of the privileged cor-
porations of the Third Estate were not completely tax exempt, the crown had
to seek their permission to raise taxes beyond certain limits. There were many
classes of people within the Third Estate, such as manufacturing workers orga-
nized in guilds, but as most merchants lived under the jurisdiction of towns,
and many towns included both privileges and exemptions relevant to trade and
commerce, the Third Estate was especially dominated by the merchant class.
In Spain and Portugal in particular, the chartered towns and municipalities
were also expected to raise soldiers, both infantry and mounted knights. These
corporate bodies were originally created to bolster royal power and give kings
access to more military power outside the reach of the noble knights, but soon
they were demanding rights of their own, often in exchange for support for
this or that contender for the throne, or as a reward for the ongoing struggle
against Muslim powers that were only driven from Iberia at the end of the if-
teenth century.
In Portugal, kings always maintained a certain set of overarching rights,
however much they were compromised in practice. In France, and even more
so in the former Kingdom of Germany, this power was all but lost in the Early
Middle Ages. To ensure their dominance, and to protect themselves in the
endemic local and private warfare that marked the feudal period, knights –
at least the most successful and wealthy ones – built castles on their lands.
The castles, which were invulnerable to cavalry assault and very dificult to
take with infantry, provided a base from which one noble, usually one hold-
ing extensive lands as well as a political title, could support and host a group
of other knights who would then be attached to him for service. Castles could
rarely be taken by direct assault, and were most often captured by surprise,
betrayal, or through lengthy sieges in which the defenders were worn down by
starvation. Knights or nobles who held castles could keep kings or their ofi-
cials at bay, and became close to effectively self-governing territories, with the
military element being the last of a series of economic and political elements.
Because of the signiicance of castles, many of the medieval military campaigns

were in fact a series of sieges. This was abundantly clear in the Hundred Years’
War, which lasted intermittently from 1337 until 1453, where siege warfare
was the dominant factor everywhere.
Rulers of states were themselves descendants of this military equestrian
class, and often intermarried with them. Indeed, a survey of chronicles of the
period quickly reveals how important the marriages of these nobles and the
kings were considered, for most of them dedicated considerable space to these
developments. Nobles were anxious about the marriages of kings and the con-
sequences these might bring. The chronicler Hernando de Pulgar noted that
when Joana, the wife of Enrique IV, the allegedly impotent king of Castille,
gave birth in 1462, it was grounds for a signiicant division among the nobles
and indeed a civil war after he declared this daughter, also named Joana, his
heir.2 Likewise, when his sister Isabella decided to marry Fernando of Aragon,
her decision upset the king, who for geostrategic considerations wanted the
marriage to be with a Portuguese or French noble.3 Indeed, had Henrique had
his way in his sister’s marriage, Castille and Portugal might have united, leav-
ing Aragon in the position of the “other” Iberian kingdom. Royal marriages
had resulted in rival claims of England and France that led to the Hundred
Years’ War; similar arrangements led to the near development of a Rhine Valley
kingdom in Burgundy; and of course the House of Hapsburg eventually won
claims to the lower Rhine Valley, Austria, and Spain (among other places)
through similar conjunctions of marriage and inheritance in the early sixteenth
century.
Thus, just as royal ofices might be inherited and substantial empires sud-
denly appear through the vagaries of inheritance, the ultimate capacity of these
unions to become effective and permanent relied on more local arrangements
with families and other powerful forces in each area. When Castile and Aragon
were joined by the marriage of Fernando and Isabella, the two kingdoms had
very different governments when the two began ruling them as a single unit
in 1479. Castille had a strong monarch, and the nobles, while locally power-
ful, had relatively little role in decision making; Aragon, on the other hand,
found both nobles and the towns exercising substantial power, and even within
Aragon there were separate and iercely independent representative councils in
Catalonia and Valencia.4
One of the impacts of the development of noble property and jurisdiction
is the creation of a wild, patchwork geography for most of Western Europe by
1500. A look at maps of fourteenth- to seventeenth-century Europe is reveal-
ing, as such maps tend to show large blocks of territory as “kingdoms.” The
Catalan Atlas, drawn in 1375 by Abraham Cresques, a Mallorcan cartographer,
has no borders, just kingdom names written in the middle of their territory.5

2
Hernando del Pulgar, Crónica de los señores reyes católicos Don Fernando y Doña Isabel de
Castilla y de Aragon (mod ed. Valencia, 1780) (BVCervantes), Prologue, Cap 1–2.
3
Pulgar, Crónica, Prologue cap 8, Part 1, cap.1–2.
4
John Lynch, Spain Under the Hapsburgs (2nd ed., 2 vols., New York, 1984), pp. 8–11.
5
Published on the Web at http://expositions.bnf.fr/ciel/catalan/index.htm.

Erhard Etzlaup’s late-ifteenth-century map intended to show the routes to

Rome, has large colored blocks indicating kingdoms – Germany, for example
is a single color, France another, a convention that is maintained in Abraham
Ortelius’ celebrated Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of 1612 (although he places
broad provincial names without borders in France).6 It was only in the eigh-
teenth century that lines consistently began to represent borders and that
subdistricts were delineated.7 In the nineteenth century, historical cartogra-
phers sought to recreate a political geography of earlier periods; as a result,
their maps were incredibly complex, far more than the contemporary ones.
Such maps, of course, tend to make us think of modern states, which the
polities represented on these unicolored map igures emphatically were not.
In a modern state, there is a single government with more or less uniform
authority over all its lands. Local and regional governments may create local
statutes and taxes, but the whole is still harmonized under a uniform structure.
Higher levels, in any case, can override or modify whatever happens at the
lower levels. This did not happen in any of the European polities shown on the
maps of the day.
Instead, these territories were a patchwork of fractured partial sovereign-
ties and jurisdictions. Royal oficials could not even enter lands belonging to
some noble families and towns. Many districts had their own inviolable laws
that could not be contradicted by legislation at higher levels. The area of royal
authority might include parts of the whole country designated as France or
Spain, but it was constantly interrupted by other discordant and powerful
counterjurisdictions. Royal oficers might be able to travel, in France for exam-
ple, to many places and exercise authority over the people there, but their jour-
neys would also take them past various noble territories, exempt ecclesiastical
lands, chartered towns, and other districts where the royal writ was limited or
nonexistent, where no taxes could be collected, and even where no royal oficer
was permitted to step. No king could simply raise an army by issuing com-
mands; rather, a wide range of nobles, commanding various groups of men at
arms (armored horsemen of lower rank, even non-noble), who they supported
with grants of land, and peasants or archers from their estates might answer
the call. Furthermore, they did not come without making some demands, so
that power and jurisdiction that might be increased in a war were whittled
away almost immediately afterward.
The noble knight and his descendants won the right to maintain substan-
tial governmental activity as private property. They could offer or withhold
money, allow or disallow royal oficials to visit them, agree or refuse to perform

6
“Der Romweg” (1497) at http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00033752–7; Ortelius,
Theatrvm Orbis Terrarus at http://www.deventerboekenstad.nl/?sid=sab:lib_rep&pid=ppn:0662
06014&zoom=65&x=0.08&y=-0.05&page=29&zoomin=true
7
For example, Robert de Vaugondie, whose maps of the mid-eighteenth century are found at http://
www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/view/search?sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_
Date&q=+Pub_List_No%3D%273353.000%27%22+LIMIT%3ARUMSEY~8~1&pgs=50&
res=1

military service. If kings wanted their service, they had to ask and be granted
permission. Growing out of this relationship was the right that the nobility
claimed to advise the king, especially on matters pertaining to war. This right
gave nobles, church oficials, and the heads of chartered towns increasingly
strong participation in basic decision making. Nobles claimed exemption from
taxation and immunity from royal law, instead demanding that only bodies of
their peers could condemn them. The representative assemblies, courts, par-
liaments, and the like that were created in the Middle Ages were designed to
protect their rights from royal harassment and ensure that their incomes and
interests were secure from their would-be patrons. Such assemblies existed in
multiple layers – kingdoms had them, but so to did smaller polities that were
formally subunits of kingdoms, provinces in France, duchies, and other such
units in the German lands.
European monarchs began adding representation by chartered towns and
associations to their royal councils, among the earliest being those in Iberia.
Leon’s in 1188 was perhaps the earliest, although by the mid-thirteenth cen-
tury, most Iberian countries had established this tradition: Castille in 1250,
Portugal in 1254. In France, such meetings began at the provincial level at
the same time, and in the fourteenth century, during the crisis of the Hundred
Years’ War, the kings often summoned the “Estates General” to which all the
various exempt groups responded, both to raise funds and decide issues of sov-
ereignty; the irst such assembly took place in 1301.
In England, the growth of these representative assemblies can be said to
have started in 1215 when rebellious noble knights, or barons, forced John
(1166–1216) to sign the Magna Carta, guaranteeing wide-ranging liberties
to the nobility.8 It was reissued several times in the following period, often
with revisions as king and nobles asserted and reasserted themselves. A noble
rebel, Simon de Montfort summoned a gathering of nobles, church leaders,
and urban elites to a Parliament to present an organized front to the king in
1265, and set forth a stronger document placing power in the hands of a par-
liament representing baronial and ecclesiastical interests.9 Although this did
not produce long-ranging results, King Edward I, in fact, summoned what is
largely regarded as the irst Parliament in England in 1295 for the purposes
of obtaining funds for his wars by arranging for them to raise special taxes
for his efforts.10 However, as elsewhere, the nobles and urban elites demanded
the right to present grievances to the king and thus the exchange of taxation
for redress was established.11 In England, Parliament consolidated much of its

8
Carl Stevenson and Frederick Geogre Marchum, eds., Sources of English Constitutional History
(New York, 1937), pp. 115–126.
9
The rebellion is described in Mathew of Westminister, The Flowers of History (trans. C. D.
Yonge II, London, 1853[GB]), pp. 414–417 and 436–438. The documents of this period are in
Stephenson and Marchum, eds, Sources, pp. 142–153.
10
Documents in Stephenson and Marchum, eds., Sources, pp. 159–161.
11
See the Parliamentary Bill of 1301 (in Stephenson and Marchum, eds, Sources, pp. 165–166) for
the nature of grievances.

control of revenue and certain other matters pertaining to the royal house by
1399, and consolidated the idea of the three estates meeting together.12

royal assertion
The ultimate power of the nobility rested irmly in their ability to dominate
battleields with armored cavalry and territory with castles. Knightly armies
were relatively small, a few thousand at most, and were not particularly well
disciplined even in battle. Indeed, the problems of European heavy cavalry
were sharply revealed when they proved completely incapable of handling the
Mongol cavalry, organized along different principals in eastern Europe during
the brief Mongol incursion in 1241. The same social programs that had given
them political power reduced their overall effectiveness, but in the end it only
meant that no one knightly power could dominate the others. It would be
changes in the art of war that would ultimately change the balance of power
between monarchs and nobles.
The military developments that would shift the balance started in the four-
teenth century, but began reaching their fulillment in the ifteenth – just as
European ships were reaching into the Atlantic – and the Atlantic possibilities
would contribute to the victory of the kings. Military historians often point to
the Hundred Years’ War period of the fourteenth and ifteenth centuries as a
turning point, when small, compact formations of infantry, equipped with long
pikes and effective armor-piercing missile weapons (powerful English-style
longbows or crossbows at irst and then gunpowder weapons later on), were
able to defeat cavalry forces, and would eventually lead to a time when armor
was abandoned altogether. In addition, the development of effective artillery
using gunpowder, which could batter down castle walls and cramp the military
independence of the nobility, took place at about the same time. These develop-
ments favored those who could afford gunpowder weapons, and, combined,
helped place more power in the hands of commoners and to expand the size
of some states.13
These infantry forces were recruited at irst from peasants, often from mar-
ginal areas like Switzerland, Scotland and Wales, or the Pyrenees, sometimes
from densely populated regions like Flanders. Sometimes they were raised by
levy, but often they were recruited by military entrepreneurs who formed them
into military companies. Such mercenary units were not necessarily cheaper to
raise and maintain than cavalry were in the short run, but they were unable to
make long-term inancial or political demands. As mercenaries they could be
employed for the duration of a war and then dismissed, without land grants,
concessions of jurisdiction, or rights over peasants.

12
See the Parliament of 1399 in Stephenson and Marchum, eds. Sources, pp. 250–257.
13
Clifford J. Rogers, “The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years’ War,” Journal of Military
History 57 (1993): 241–278.

Figure 2. “Armborst” from Nordisk Famijlebok, 1904 edition.

The political beneits of employing mercenary companies of infantry had

another cost, however, and that was that they needed to be paid in cash – that
is, in monetary substance like silver or gold. It was precisely the use of the cash
payment system that made it possible for the political impact of military forces
to be reduced and placed once again in the hands of centralizing authorities.
Without cash payments, military units would refuse to ight, or might decided
to change sides, or even to riot and rebel, looting the countryside. Indeed, many
thinkers of the period recognized that the cheapness of mercenaries had a seri-
ous disadvantage in that their loyalty could not be counted on. No less an
authority than Niccolò Machiavelli, in his book, The Art of War, argued that
princes were ill advised to rely on mercenaries because of their changeable and
negotiable loyalty.

The expense of raising soldiers and the fragmented authority of kings created
very complex problems in organizing armies. The contemporary writer Luis de
Ávila y Zúñiga described the way in which Charles V raised troops to ight in
the German war of 1546–1547. First he sent four colonels to raise German
infantry companies of 4,000 men each, which were then grouped “following
custom” in two regiments, which were then subdivided in 25 smaller units,
each with its own lag. Then Álvaro de Sande of Hungary arrived with a tercio
(an infantry company) of 2,800 Spaniards, and Arce came with 3,000 infantry
from Lombardy. The marquis Albrecht of Brandenburg “immediately sent the
horsemen he was obliged to provide, who were 2,500” when called. Juan, the
brother of the Marquis of Brandenburg, reported with 600 horse, the master
of Prussia with 1,000, Duke Heinrich of Braunschwig with 400, and the prince
of Hungary, Archduke of Austria, a further 1,500 cavalry. This complex force
including commoners in infantry units and noble horsemen was scattered all
over Charles’s vast holdings in Spain and central Europe and could not actually
assemble in time to ight in all the engagements.14
French kings emerging from the Hundred Years’ War, which ended in 1453,
found that the unemployed bands of mercenaries could prove to be very trou-
blesome, and came to adopt a military policy that every other major power
would eventually adopt – they bought out the private companies and guar-
anteed employment for some 100 companies of soldiers. They then used this
permanent army to round up and crush the other companies and to ensure the
powers of the king. Such a policy, however, required large outlays of cash.
Early European monarchs were not rich in cash. They received a good deal
of the revenue from their own lands in kind – products of the ield or herd, and
these might not always be convertible to cash. Then too, they often had limited
power to tax; thanks to noble concessions, the exemption of church income,
and the tax-limiting privileges of the Third Estate, they could only obtain the
right to tap these incomes with the consent of the taxpayers, typically by calling
them to an assembly and asking for money. While the assemblies would grant
taxes and even pay them in money, they demanded a price. That price was to
continue or deepen their power. They demanded more from the kings for their
taxes, the right to permanent representation in parliamentary bodies, the right to
choose kings, even limited rights to depose them, along with a plethora of lesser
demands (often including further exemptions from taxation in the future).
In response, kings turned to indirect taxes; rather than asking the assemblies
to pay them taxes and accept their counterdemands, they sought to raise cash
by taxing trade and production. Salt taxes, tolls, transaction taxes – all became
the tools of revenue raising in the emerging monarchies of the ifteenth century.
These taxes fell heavily on the merchants, especially because the nature of their
occupations caused them to have supplies of cash, and they were not able to

14
Luis de Ávila y Zúñiga, “Commentario de la Guerra de Alemania hecha por Carlos V, máximo
emperador romano, rey de España, en el año de 1546 y 1547” (Venice, 1548) (digital version
www.cervantesvirtual.com/historia/CarlosV/7_2_avila.shtml).

protect it. Although merchants were often citizens of chartered towns or had
won various privileges, they were the least capable of all the estates to resist
taxation, and they became the source of royal revenues in cash, which in turn
went to fund the new infantry armies and their equipment.
Cash revenues were not only useful for paying the new armies; they also could
purchase the services of oficials. By paying oficials, drawn from the impecunious
ranks of the lower nobility or the merchants, in cash, the crown ensured that
they would be dependent on these payments, and thus unable to negotiate their
services for permanent wealth. With these dependent oficials, the kings could be
assured of loyal and consistent service that they could control, much better than
the services in government that nobles rendered earlier for free, but with their
own agenda in mind. If these oficials could not be paid in cash, kings would have
to rely on self-suficient nobles, or wealthier but less dependent people, to carry
out these tasks, and to accept a lesser degree of ultimate control over them.
The degree to which an early modern monarch could centralize authority
was thus highly dependent on his or her ability to raise cash, or to obtain the
critical services by barter that did not involve cash services. The more suc-
cessful one, such as the Castilian monarchs in the late ifteenth century or the
Portuguese crown after 1500, managed to persuade the nobility to serve as
salaried oficials (although they actually paid little salary) so that they would
not be excluded from military or political service altogether. But in serving in
this way, with or without pay, these nobles gave up their political privileges in
decision making and served as dependent oficers of the king, subject to dis-
missal at will. In creating the means to centralize authority and participate in
the new, infantry-based armies, European rulers developed what modern histo-
rians have termed the iscal-military state – that is, a state whose primary goals
are to raise revenue by whatever means possible in order to wage war.15
The concern for inance and its connection to war is well illustrated by the
reports sent back home by Venetian ambassadors, dispatched since the early
sixteenth century to all the countries with which the Italian city-state had rela-
tions. Such reports regularly feature detailed breakdowns of the revenues avail-
able to rulers and the problems they might have in collecting these funds, as
well as assessments of their military strength. Indeed, for many of their reports,
this is the single most important topic dealt with. Even though the numbers
were clearly only estimates, and modern historians can correct them sometimes
by recourse to archival data, the emphasis they received in these reports under-
lines the importance of these matters in the health of the states in question.16
Vincenzo Quirini wrote his report in 1506 from Burgundy (root of modern
Belgium and Holland), the core of Charles V’s empire that included Spain as

15
There is a substantial literature on the concept of “iscal-military” states; for a recent overview
and contribution, see Jan Glete, War and Society in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch
Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London and New York, 2002).
16
For a detailed study and bibliography, as well as many datasets, see Richard Bonney, director and
editor, “European State Finance Database,” http://www.le.ac.uk/hi/bon/ESFDB/frameset.html

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Figure 3. “The Battle of Breitenfeld on 17 September 1631” from ‘Theatrum Europaeum’ volume II, engraved by Matthaus Merian the Elder
(1631). Image courtesy of the Deutsch Historisches Museum.
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The European Background 45

well as holdings in the Rhine valley. After carefully noting the cash salaries of
the Duke’s principal court oficers, drawn from his closest family, and includ-
ing the courts of his queen and children, his armed retainers and secretarial
staff and their food and that of their horses – some 360,000 ducats – he also
noted that Charles paid a “pension to all the lords of the lands subjected to
him” amounting to a further 50,000 ducats. He also had to spend between
15,000 and 20,000 ducats for all the paid oficials he had posted throughout
the country, by “districts [terre], castles and fortresses.”17 This survey of royal
income and expense was followed by a notice of noble revenues ranging from
the Count of Nassau’s 15,000 ducats per year, to the lesser nobles who gained
only 2,000 or 3,000: “[A]ll subjected to the duke, but not obliged to give him
anything from their income,” even though the duke gave them each a pension
from his income. They were obliged, however, to give him ighting men at their
expense.18 After estimating the income from the markets of the largest towns,
“around a million in gold,” Quirini went on to note that even though they had
to make account of their public expenses to the Duke, they did not have to pay
him anything from it. They did however, give various sums to the Duke to aid
in wars, and these had become sources of income, amounting to some 350,000
ducats, although he had to visit each place at least once in four years to receive
it. In emergency, too, as in the war between Burgundy and Gelderland, addi-
tional extraordinary sums could still be raised.19
The tyranny of cash revenues shaped policy. Crowns wished to protect and
extend the range and effectiveness of their merchants because their prosperity
would ensure that they could pay heavier cash payments, as indeed Quirini’s
estimates of market incomes in Burgundy reveals. They tried to ensure that
trading relationships would maximize cash return payments whenever pos-
sible, and they tried their best to accumulate supplies of cash, both for their
payments and for emergencies, especially wars, which demanded large and
immediate outlays of the precious specie. Many of the royal policies that came
to be deined as mercantilism – the interest in the concentration of bullion, the
zero-sum trade policies, the privileged monopoly companies – all originated in
the need for the monarchs to maximize cash lows. The foolishness of some of
these policies in terms of the overall economic health of the nation, as the early
economists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would demonstrate,
were irrelevant. Kings were not interested in the overall economic health of the
nation as much as they were in maintaining the supplies of cash that were the
lifeblood of centralized authority.
Atlantic expansion played a critical role in creating the cash low neces-
sary to centralizing authority, as is well demonstrated in the case of Portugal,

17
“Relazione di Borgogna con aggunti di alcuni particulari da Vincenzo Quirini l’anno 1506,” in
Eugenio Albèri, ed., Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato (15 vols., Florence, 1839–63
[GB]) ser 1, vol. 1: 7–10.
18
Quirini, “Relazione,” 1: 12.
19
Quirini, “Relazione,” 1: 16–18.

the country that beneited quickly from the Atlantic and developed policies to
maximize the crown’s gains from it. Portugal’s early gains are revealed by the
report, submitted in 1505 by Venice’s ambassador to Lisbon, Lunardo da Ca’
Masser, which surveyed the incomes of the nobility and the crown. According
to his report, the total income of the Portuguese nobility represented some
350,000 Venetian ducats, an income the kings could tap only by summon-
ing the Cortes, the noble-controlled parliamentary body that represented their
interests (and the church’s) to the king. In contrast, the king also controlled
some 350,000 ducats in revenue from Portugal, including income from lands
that the crown owned, or was able to tax, “which is a little thing, especially as
he has made many grants.” Thus, although he was much richer than any single
noble – the Dukes of Braganza and Coimbra, the richest among their peers,
only accounted for 16,000 and 17,000 ducats of income, respectively – with-
out the extra that they could pay him, the king could not do much more than
meet normal administrative costs.20
Because of this inancial situation, the history of ifteenth-century Portugal
clearly reveals that the crown was never able to ight a war – and they fought
many in the ifteenth century – without summoning the Cortes. Between 1385,
when the ruling House of Aviz had come to power with the support of the
Third Estate, until 1495, when King Manuel I took the throne, the Cortes had
met roughly every other year, although some kings, like Afonso V (1475–81)
met with the Cortes every year. Even so, the principal reason for the Cortes
meeting less than annually had as much to do with the mechanics of organiz-
ing the assembly as any royal control over its meeting. In addition to votes for
money to pay for dowries and for wars, the kings heard complaints against
his oficials and accepted the control that the Cortes insisted it had over royal
marriages that might affect the sovereignty of the state.21
But the situation was changing thanks to Portuguese expansion. Ca’ Masser
also noted that the crown had a very large new source of income from overseas
revenues. In 1505, these amounted to another 500,000 ducats, drawn from
revenues of the trade of Madeira and the Azores, the gold trade of the Gold
Coast, and the incipient slave trade.22 This considerable revenue would soon
be joined by the income from the Indian Ocean trade, just then being reached,
and Brazil, irst visited just ive years earlier. These revenues would have their
effect: the Cortes met in 1502, and then not again until 1525, 1535, 1544, and
inally in 1562. Furthermore, these Cortes were unable to make as thorough-
going demands for power as the ifteenth-century Cortes had done.23 Overseas

20
G. Scopoli, ed., “Relazioni di Leonardo da Ca’ Masser alla serenissima Repubblica di Venezia…”
Archivio Storico Italiana 2, appendix 10 (1845 [GB]): 37–43.
21
A good overview of the Cortes in Portugal is found in Serrão, História 2: 211–216, 221–223;
225–233. There is no continuous record of their proceedings, and what is known has been
assembled piecemeal from many sources.
22
Ca’ Masser, “Relazione,” pp. 44–45.
23
Serrão, História 3: 16, 42–44; 60–62. King Sebastião, who called the last of these Cortes, only
called one; subsequently, the Portuguese crown passed to Spain (in 1580), and Portugal’s history
was disrupted until the reestablishment of independence in 1640.

revenues ensured that the Portuguese nobility would be cowed, and Portugal,
though small, would be the most centralized state in Western Europe in the
early sixteenth century.
Spain also beneited from overseas cash lows. This was already appar-
ent when Bernardo Navagero submitted his report on Spain to Venice in July
1546. After carefully noting the complex revenues of the Spanish crown in
Iberia, Naples, and “Lower Germany,” the ambassador turned to the “Indies,”
about which “people say great things,” and noted that it was yielding “at a min-
imum 500,000 ducats per year,” or almost as much as the Iberian kingdoms
of Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia combined (at 600,000 ducats). He noted
that there was a wildly different set of opinions, and that there were those who
held the American revenues were already “the fourth part of all the income of
the emperor.”24 In 1595, after the production of revenue from the silver mines
of Mexico and Peru were in full swing, the Venetian ambassador, Francesco
Venarmino, noted that while in Charles V’s time, the Indies yielded about
500,000 scudi (a Venetian coin) on average, at century’s end, it was “of the great-
est utility [grossima utilità] to the king,” and in three years had rendered “ten
million in gold,” while the revenues from Iberia and Italy amounted to about 10
million annually.25 In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the Spanish
Cortes was curtailed. The revenue not only spurred centralization within Iberia;
it encouraged Phillip II to pursue a centralizing policy in lands that were not
fully integrated into Spain, such as the Low Countries, Italy, and Sicily, using the
military means that the revenue low assured him he could use. To complicate
Spain’s inancial problems even more, throughout the sixteenth century, Spain
waged a costly sea (and sometimes land) war against the Ottoman Empire.
Indeed the low of overseas revenue would embolden monarchs to expand
their powers, as the Portuguese kings did by hiring many oficials on salaries
of one kind or another, or the Spanish kings did by seeking to impose a more
uniform order on the far-lung territories that had come under nominal Spanish
control when Charles V united all the lands owned by the Hapsburg family.
These included not just southern Italy, but also the whole of modern Belgium and
the Netherlands and huge German possessions in Austria and the Holy Roman
Empire. Both monarchies used overseas revenue lows to assist in their plans for
more power, but both also overstepped their capacities, borrowing heavily from
various merchant groups (using tax revenues and overseas income as collateral)
and then, when income still fell short of the higher expenses, restructuring loans
and even declaring bankruptcy, as the Spanish crown did several times in the late
sixteenth century. Thus overseas revenue did not guarantee stable inances, but it
did encourage and promote vigorous moves to break the feudal impasse and cre-
ate a very expensive state and army.

24
Bernardo Navigero, “Relazione di Bernardo Navigero ritornato ambasciatore da Carlo V…” (July
1546) in Albèri, ed., Relazioni series 1, 1: 297; Paolo Tiepolo, writing in 1563, and perhaps with
more certain igures, given the detail he provides for other elements of Spanish revenue, put the
income of the Indies (in silver alone) between 1553 and 1561 at 3.2 million ducats, or 500,000
ducats per annum; “Relazione di Paolo Tiepolo, 1563,” in Albèri, Relazioni series 1, 5: 37.
25
“Relazione de Francesco Vendramino, 1595” in Albèri, ed., Relazioni series 1, 5: 450–454.

finance and expansion

To ensure that the revenue low would come, these European monarchs were
careful to manage the politics of expansion in the most cost-effective way. From
the very beginning, the rulers tried to avoid granting privileges and exemptions
from taxes to those representing them overseas, or to limit these as much as
possible. At the same time, the risks were great enough that the state regularly
sought to entice private citizens with money who were willing to take risks
if the potential rewards were great enough. Thus, Spain and Portugal both
encouraged private citizens to undertake public projects in exchange for privi-
leges. Merchants, for example, might use their own ships to be a sort of navy
if they were given the right to a share of spoils captured from prizes taken in
the war. They might be willing to take risks if the crown could promise them
monopolies or agree to protect their business. In this way, a monarch could
persuade them to take risks, and then, only when merchants had demonstrated
the risk could pay off, the crown would step in and charge revenue.
Charters that were given to early explorers in both Spain and Portugal
serve as a good example. Portuguese charters usually required the grantee to
supply some or all of the start-up capital; for example, he would supply the
ships, or perhaps pay the personnel, recruit settlers, provide for their trans-
portation, or supply munitions from his own capital. In exchange, the crown
agreed to allow the grantee to operate tax-free for a period of years, and then
to pay taxes, often at a reduced rate, for more years. Such charters might
include the rights to exercise law over areas that might be conquered, to gov-
ern the affairs of settlers, and to rule territories almost as if they were sover-
eign lords. Sometimes the charters allowed the powers to be hereditary and
transmitted on to heirs. In general, however, the powers granted in charters
were limited, and in the long run, European states were successful in avoiding
making permanent concessions of income or jurisdiction to those to whom
they granted charters.
If the charter holders were successful, then most often, the crown sought
to resume its rights to the newly lucrative trading area or conquest as soon as
possible and by any means, just as the success of Prince Henrique’s navigations
in Guinea led the crown to take direct control of the trade in 1460. Similarly,
Fernão Gomes’s exploration and trade contract was allowed to lapse when the
wealth of the Gold Coast was revealed. Crown lawyers often found defects in
the charters, or at times the charter holders were unable to fulill all the terms
of the charter. In such a case, the crown could step in and supply its own ofi-
cials as governors, and the chartered territory became a colony. Charters were
often generous, as it was only by promising big beneits that the crown could
persuade private citizens to take up the risks. The same generosity, however,
ultimately would defeat the purpose of the crown to obtain better and higher
revenues. Therefore, the crown pursued its interest in the more successful col-
onies vigorously, while often not bothering much about it in the less successful
areas.

The Portuguese crown’s grant of captaincies to various worthy people along

the coast of Brazil between 1534 and 1536 called on them to develop resources
and defend the regions and gave their captains wide powers, but the most suc-
cessful of them were resumed by the crown in 1549; likewise, the charter made
to Paulo Dias de Novais for the conquest of Angola in 1571 was revoked, for
technical reasons, upon his death in 1589, as the conquest had begun yielding
substantial proits.26
Columbus’s generous charter, given to him prior to his voyage to America in
1492, became the basis for his attempts to develop its commerce, and from the
time when the settlement in Hispaniola began to pay off, the crown moved in
to revoke the charter. His son Diego fought the crown tooth and nail over the
charter’s privileges, inally losing in 1525. On a smaller scale, the encomienda
grants that the crown gave to Spanish subjects who took over areas in America,
which were never seen as permanent grants of land, people, or income, were
soon under attack, often for allegations that the tax-paying Native American
subjects were being abused. Attempts to revoke encomiendas and renegoti-
ate their privileges began as early as 1502, and were pressed hardest with the
establishment of the New Laws in 1542, ostensibly a move to create justice for
Native Americans, but just as much a reassertion of crown authority over ever-
more lucrative land held in private contract. On the whole, the Spanish crown
was successful in returning these charters to its authority, at least in areas that
produced signiicant amounts of revenue.
The idea of having private citizens do public service in exchange for privi-
leges was not limited to explorers. It might also apply to fundamental parts of
defense, and it was through the farming out of military and especially naval
activities that the northern European countries like France, the Netherlands,
and England – and later Sweden, Denmark, Courland (now Latvia), and
Prussia – also joined in colonization or developed commerce. All these powers
initially granted rights to deal in the Atlantic for purposes of defense much
more than for exploration. There were English, Dutch, and French traders in
the early Atlantic, to be sure, but most of them were private traders working
markets explored by Spanish and Portuguese merchants and explorers, often
paying the crowns of those countries for access to their markets. As merchants,
they had little or no interest in exploration or even in high-seas navigation.
More often then not, these northern Europeans simply bought the newly arriv-
ing African and American products in Seville or Lisbon, thus avoiding the risks
of sailing the Atlantic Ocean or engaging in long-distance commerce.
A series of wars would change that, however, the origins of which ultimately
lay in Spanish ambitions, especially as they were fueled by income from their
conquests. With the output of American mines beginning in 1540 and becoming
larger and more regular every year after that, Spanish silver not only allowed

26
For a worthwhile comparative study of the charter in Brazil and Angola, see Ilidio do Amaral,
O Consulado de Paulo Dias de Novais. Angola no último quartel do século XVI e primeiro do
século XVII (Lisbon, 2000), pp. 49–72.

the Spanish crown to dispense meeting with the Cortes to decide policy or
declare taxes. It also allowed Hapsburgs, the Austrian royal family that took
over the Spanish throne, to follow up on its potential claims to control in other
parts of Europe, using the military power that access to large quantities of sil-
ver could allow. A series of military and dynastic adventures, often connected
with Spanish claims to champion the Catholic Church against Protestants,
were fueled by Spanish silver.
As its ships made their irst tentative discoveries in America, Spain was at
odds with France over power in Italy, kicked off by a French invasion of the
north in 1494 and Spanish attacks on the French in Naples in 1502. In 1519,
Charles V, of the Austrian house of Hapsburg, became king of Spain and Holy
Roman Emperor at the same time, thus challenging France both in northern
Europe – his possessions in Burgundy bordered France on the northeast – and
in Italy. Wars between the two in the Low Countries (modern Belgium and the
Netherlands) and in Italy continued until they were resolved in Spain’s favor
by the treaty of Cateau Cambrisis in 1559. Thereafter, following the death of
King Henri II, France was thrown into chaos for the rest of the century. Henri
left a minor heir, François II, and when François died the next year, ten-year-old
Charles IX succeeded him, leading to various factions contending to control
his regency. At the same time that factional rivalry was disturbing the country,
religious rivalry that matched Calvinists against Catholics overlay the existing
blocs. Spain supported some Catholic factions and did some limited interven-
tion in the later phases of the civil war, but mostly it used the opportunity
presented by French disunity to operate in the Low Countries more freely than
it might have had there been a strong France.
Spanish policy in the Low Countries was designed as much to hem in
France as to expand its own power, but the combination of French weak-
ness and Spanish perceptions of strength as they garnered ever more Atlantic
resources allowed the Spanish crown to tighten its power in the territory at the
mouth of the Rhine River that had fallen to its dynasty through the Duchy of
Burgundy. Spain sought to limit and even eliminate privileges of taxation and
self-government exercised by the towns of the region, and coupled that with
a rigorous campaign against Lutherans and Calvinists. A revolt of common-
ers, led by preachers who called on a destruction of images in churches in the
name of Calvinist reform, began in 1566 and was followed by a civil rebellion.
Draconian suppression of the rebellion by the Spanish Duke of Alba led to fur-
ther unrest, and refugees eventually established a rebel province in the northern
part of the region – the future Netherlands – in 1572. War between this entity
and Spanish forces, with various interventions on both sides from France and
England and further revolts in the south, was only ended by an uneasy truce
in 1609.
The Spanish were able to maintain substantial forces – upward of 60,000
men – in the Low Countries for such a length of time because of the arrival of
Spanish silver from mines in Mexico and Peru. Phillip’s revenue in silver from
America rose from 12.5 million ducats in the period between 1560 and 1580

to 52 million ducats in the period between 1580 and 1605.27 By this time,
nearly 40 percent of the incoming revenue was spent on the war in the Low
Countries.28 In 1580, Philip inherited the crown of Portugal and with the union
of the two was able to combine two mighty streams of overseas revenue, even
though Portuguese tried hard to keep their resources out of Spanish adven-
tures. Spanish dynastic aims in England and the threat of a irmly Spanish
Netherlands soon brought England into the war. In 1588, the Spanish sought
to invade England, launching a mighty leet, the Spanish Armada (much of it
Portuguese), to ferry an equally powerful army to England, but fortunately for
the English, their seamanship and bad weather thwarted the Spanish attack
and sank most of the leet.
Considering the signiicance of revenue to the war, increasing, protecting, or
stopping income lows became of vital strategic importance, much as with the
oil supplies were in World War II. The Spanish silver leet, bringing the wealth
of the New World back to aid its wars, could not help but be a target. French
privateers and their leaders were already considering how to take the leet in
the 1560s when Spain and France were at war.29
The war in the Netherlands became a lynchpin for Europe, matching Spain
against the Dutch and English. The French watched helplessly as they waged
their own civil war, but once Henry IV reestablished order in France before his
death in 1610, France became a powerful check on the combatants in the Low
Countries. Although the war was cooled by a partition of the country into the
Spanish-held Spanish Netherlands (eventually Belgium) and the Dutch Republic
by the truce of 1609, Spanish plans for a renewed attack played a part in the
politics of Germany. In Germany, the Hapsburg family claimed the power of
the Holy Roman Emperor and hoped to use it to increase imperial authority at
the expense of the German towns and states, while pushing Catholic interests.
A struggle over the succession of Bohemia, which brought Rhine Valley politics
to central Europe, kicked off the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). During this
war, ambitious northern European powers like Sweden and Denmark inter-
vened to support both the Protestant and anti-Spanish causes and their own
ambitions to take over the southern shores of the Baltic Sea.
Throughout this key period in European history, the wars had an Atlantic
dimension as well as a European one. While the ighting in the Atlantic was
relatively limited compared to the devastating wars in Europe, these naval wars
led directly to the colonization of the Americas by France and the northern
European countries, as well as their increased participation in the trade of
Africa. From the very start of the Hapsburg-Valois wars, the Calvinist parties

27
Basic data on the low of “Spanish silver” was accumulated in the 1920s by Earl J. Hamilton,
and is still the basis for understanding the dynamics of its low and impact on revenue; American
Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650 (Cambridge, MA, 1934).
28
See graph in Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of
Philip II (trans. Sîan Reynolds, 2 vols, New York, 1972 [1966]), 1: 476–482 and chart p. 477.
29
K. R. Andrews, The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630 (New Haven, 1978), pp.
84–87; 128–130; 134–150.

in France, which were situated in commercial areas and port cities, waged a
relentless, albeit limited, naval war against Spain, which also involved Portugal.
An important part of the overall Protestant strategy in the war was to seek to
boost their own incomes and to hurt Spanish efforts by attacking Spanish ship-
ping on the high seas.
The French partisans lacked funds to inance a navy for this naval war,
and so the crown issued special licenses to merchantmen, called “letters of
marque,” allegedly permitting them to seek violent compensation for losses by
opposing leets, which allowed them to seize Spanish shipping and take its car-
goes, in exchange for the right to keep the cargoes after paying certain taxes.30
The considerable costs of itting out ships intended for war and the risks of
taking on the Spanish shipping were borne by the private merchant, thus spar-
ing the state the expense, while at the same time the state beneited from rights
to tax the merchants who might otherwise simply be hung as pirates for what
they did. To separate these activities from those of pirates in the old-fashioned
criminal sense, the French established special courts that had to hear testimony
to ensure that the rules established by the system of letter of marque were kept,
and to determine the values and distributions of proits from prize ships (ships
taken by the raiders). French privateers, as such citizen-raiders were called,
became famous and were soon doing signiicant damage to Spanish shipping.
They fanned out well into the Atlantic, attacking Portuguese shipping in the
Atlantic as far as Brazil and continuing such attacks until 1536.31 Renewed
attacks on Portuguese shipping began in 1544; some 220 Portuguese vessels
were seized in 1549–1550 alone.32
As the French civil wars began, the Protestant Admiral Coligny, who was
appointed Admiral of France, sponsored voyages, not only to raid Spanish ships
and harbors, but also to establish colonies to serve as bases for these attacks.
Coligny was particularly interested in areas that had no strong Spanish pres-
ence, such as the coast of North America north of Florida, or the regions along
the southern coast of Brazil. In 1555, the French established a colony at what
is today Rio de Janeiro under Coligny’s direction, which they called “Antarctic
France,” encroaching on space that the Portuguese regarded as their own.33
A Portuguese attack on the colony in 1560 ended its brief existence, but the
French were back and settled another colony in what is today South Carolina
in 1562. This outpost was also quickly destroyed by Spanish counterattacks.
French privateering continued to be active throughout, even without other

30
Letters of marque went back to the Hundred Years War epoch at least; see Charles de la
Roncière, Histoire de la Marine Français (5 vols, Paris, 1899–1920) 2: 159–162.
31
Documents on these early privateering attacks in Brazil are found in Mário Brandão, O Processo
na Inquisição de Mestre João da Costa (Coimbra, 1944), pp. 301–3028.
32
Serrão, História 3: 47–49.
33
For a irsthand account of the colony, see Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of
Brazil (ed. and trans. Janet Whatley, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990, the original French was
published Lyons, 1578); see also André Thevet, Les Singularités de la France Antarctique (1557)
mod. ed. Frank Lestringant (Paris, 1997).

colonial enterprises, until Henri IV agreed to limited toleration of Protestant

political power in the edict of Nantes in 1598. But many of the old privateers
never really gave up their activities, and for a time even turned to outright
piracy. Dunkirk, on the border of what is today France and Belgium, was the
most famous pirate hideout in Europe, terrorizing shipping of all nationalities
well into the seventeenth century.
The French pioneers at this endeavor were joined in the 1580s by Dutch and
then English privateers as the territory held by the Spanish crown at the mouth
of the Rhine River revolted. Like France before it, the government of the Dutch
Republic looked to its commercial classes to build a privately funded navy to
carry on war against Spain. At irst, these were the “Sea Beggars,” a group of
raiders who tried to harass Spanish shipping in the mouth of the Rhine, but
increasingly they began taking the war to the Atlantic. Already in the 1570s
they were raiding as far away as the Caribbean,34 and in the 1590s were work-
ing off the coast of Africa.
As England was drawn into the Dutch war, it too turned to private navies and
issued letters of marque to wage a sea war. Soon English privateers were prowl-
ing the lands of the Spanish, taking prizes and even seizing coastal towns for
brief periods. The great English “Sea Dogs” like Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh,
or Thomas Cavendish were able to mount leets and attack Spanish shipping.
They forced the Spanish to divert naval forces to protect their American pos-
sessions and thus to weaken their war effort in the Low Countries or against
England.35
English raiders in the Caribbean found rich pickings, but the distance made
it dificult to sustain their operations without land bases on the American side.
Even more than the French bases in Brazil and South Carolina, the English
looked for bases in the Americas. Walter Raleigh, one of the early pioneers,
sought to build a base at Roanoke, now in North Carolina, in 1585, with the
express purpose of helping supply leets from England bound to the West Indies.
The colony only sporadically fulilled its mission, but did serve this important
function when Raleigh left the Caribbean in 1590, taking the remaining colo-
nists with him.
Raleigh tried again after 1590, this time in the southern Caribbean. He built
a base in Trinidad for a few years after 1595 and explored, with the aim of
colonizing, the coast north of Brazil around the mouth of the Amazon and
Orinoco Rivers. These colonies also failed to be permanent settlements, and the
Spanish proved to be capable of enlisting allies among the Native Americans
living in the areas to defend their interests.

34
Museu Naval, Coleccion de MSS Navarete, MS 480, vol 25, fol. 114, “Aviso de la poderosa
armada compuesta de 70 o 80 navios que preparan en la Rochella y otros,” 1571.
35
For this and what follows, see the various publication of Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan
Privateering:English Privateering during the Spanish War, 1588–1603 (Cambridge, 1964);
Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of
the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge, 1984).

As the English were seeking colonies to support their operations, so were the
Dutch, who made signiicant attempts to colonize the coast along the Atlantic
coast of South America in the early seventeenth century, more or less in the
same regions where the English tried building their own colonies.36
The military aspects of these early colonies were muted in the early seven-
teenth century, when England and the Netherlands signed truce agreements
with Spain, and privateering stopped legally after 1609. But while the priva-
teers had pillaged Spanish and Portuguese shipping, private merchants had also
come to the Americas to trade.
We have noted before that English, French, and Dutch merchants had visited
the Americas in the early sixteenth century, often with oficial permission from
Spain or Portugal, but during the war period, such oficial visiting stopped.
Indeed, the Spanish crown began the policy of “arresting” shipping in Spanish
ports in the 1580s as a war measure and as retaliation for privateering attacks.
Thus, merchants who wanted to deal in New World commodities were forced
to develop their own commercial links in Africa and America, which they did,
sometime in the wake of the privateers, sometimes on their own.
In the process, English, French, and Dutch consumers became used to
American commodities like tobacco and sugar, or found, as the Dutch did, abun-
dant supplies of vital commodities like salt, which previously had been pur-
chased from Portuguese suppliers but was now being supplied from salt pans
on the islands off the coast of South America. These commercial enterprises
continued after the truce, but with considerable resistance. The Spanish crown
never fully accepted the foreign merchants and refused to allow them to trade.
When the merchants came to trade anyway, Spanish oficials seized their ships
and accused them of piracy. Many merchants were hung by Spanish oficials for
nothing more than trading in salt from Aruba or tobacco and hides off Cuba.
Often, in the climate of the early seventeenth century, merchants formed
companies with the aim of protecting their interests, convoying ships to defend
against piracy or against the Spanish who still regarded trading in their domains
(and this included even West Africa in their eyes) as piracy. The Dutch and
English both formed East India Companies at the turn of the century to protect
their trade in Indian Ocean markets. Dutch traders on the Gold Coast formed
companies to protect themselves against Portuguese attack.
During the truce, these merchants also decided to follow up on coloniza-
tion. No longer looking for naval bases, the merchants still thought they could
build commercial centers in areas that were out of range of Spanish leets,
which might supply the American commodities direct from American produc-
ers, either Native Americans or farming colonists who would grow tobacco or
other products.37

36
Cornelis Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1589–1680 (Goricum,
1971).
37
Linda Heywood and John Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles and the Foundation of
the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 5–48.

English commercial colonies were tried in the area of modern-day Maine in

1602 and successfully in Jamestown in 1607. The English were less successful
in Grenada in 1609, while French merchants worked on the irst colonies in
what would become Canada in 1609. Dutch merchants penetrated the Hudson
River and founded Fort Orange (now Albany) in 1614. Similar Dutch and
English colonies began to sprout in the mouth of the Amazon and along the
coast north of that river and the Orinoco River in the future Guianas.
When war broke out again in Europe, irst in the Bohemian phase of the
Thirty Years War in 1618 and then as the truce ended in 1619, privateers
swarmed out once again into the Caribbean and the Americas. The commer-
cial bases could be converted into naval bases easily, and these bases, with an
economy grounded on commercial enterprises, could be self-sustaining and
not require the sort of inancial investments that earlier naval-oriented colo-
nial bases had. The most successful of these colonies were founded on growing
tobacco in some areas, in trading with Native American producers of tobacco
in other areas (especially in the Amazon and the Guianas), or in tapping the
vast potential of the Native Americans in North America to deliver furs to the
European market.
English privateers were soon using Bermuda, founded as an offshoot of
the early Virginia colony in 1609, as a base, and ships under the enterprising
Earl of Warwick, England’s most active privateering family, were raiding the
Caribbean. Robert Rich, the earl in these years, and his associates founded a
private company to promote simultaneously privateering and colonization in
1631, and then used it to build two bases at Providence Island (off the coast of
Nicaragua) and Ascenion Island (now Tortuga) in 1633. The Spanish managed
to overwhelm both bases in 1641–1645, but their existence demonstrated the
way in which privateering base and tobacco producing economy could work.
The Riches and their privateering interests were instrumental in establishing
colonies in the southern Caribbean. They had interests in the Amazon, and one
of their allies established an English colony in St. Christopher (modern day
St. Kitts) in 1624, and then two years later another colony in Barbados. These
colonies had less to do with privateering than with growing crops, focusing
on tobacco in their earliest years. The Spanish knew their dangers, and on one
occasion, in 1629, they managed to capture and depopulate St. Christopher
(although the colonists soon reoccupied it).
If the English used this combination of privateering and producing in tan-
dem in small companies like the Rich’s Providence Island Company, the Dutch
went much bigger. In 1621, a group of powerful Dutch merchants and pri-
vateers formed the Dutch West India Company with the express purpose of
carrying the war into the Spanish Caribbean. The West India Company sent
out large and powerful leets to harass the Spanish, soon capturing hundreds
of prizes and thousands of tons of goods. In 1628, one of their most notable
admirals, Piet Heyn, managed to capture the entire Spanish silver leet off the
coast of Cuba. It was the highlight of the Dutch campaign, and produced a
dividend greater than the entire revenue of the Dutch Republic.

The West India Company was not as much interested in building colonies
from scratch as the English were. Instead, they hoped to use their military
strength to take over whole, fully developed colonies. In 1624, a Dutch leet
temporarily occupied Bahia, a rich, sugar-exporting part of Portuguese Brazil.
Although they were driven out, they continued their campaign, and in 1630
managed to conquer key parts of another rich province, Pernambuco, which lay
north of Bahia. Soon the wealth of Brazilian sugar harvests was being shipped
in Dutch holds as they had taken over working colonies. To secure the supply
of slaves to Brazil, they crossed over the Atlantic, taking Angola in 1641, and
then took a second Portuguese sugar colony at São Tomé the same year. It was
only after the Portuguese drove the Dutch from Pernambuco in 1654 that they
built their own colonies producing sugar in the Guianas.38
The Dutch West India Company became a model for other countries. Some
of the people associated with the company found that its monopoly policies
discouraged them and cost them income. Thus Willem Usselinx, one of the
founders of the company, feeling that he did not get his just rewards from it,
offered his services to Sweden in 1623. Initially the company was directed
more to trading, as a charter granted by the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus
for a General Trading company in 1626 was, but it included a proviso for the
taking of prizes and the disposal of such proits, though limited to action only
when attacked.39 However, as Sweden became more deeply involved in the
Thirty Years War in which Spain was the principal enemy, the idea of a trading/
naval warfare company that might pay for its operations (without state input)
through privateering or commerce was applied to the Swedish navy in 1629,
which was built and purchased through the promises of trading ventures and
privateering aimed at Spanish shipping.40 Another former Dutch West India
Company oficer, Samuel Bloomaert, proposed a more focused company in
1635, whose principal goal would be to trade German copper and Swedish
iron to West Africa, where some believed that copper was sold for its weight
in gold.41
The various West India Companies that Bloomaert formed gradually
expanded the operations to include trade with the Spanish colonies in the
Caribbean, also seen as consumers of copper, and then the development of

38
C. R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (Oxford, 1957); Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Olinda
Restaurada: Guerra e açúcar no Nordeste, 1630–1654 (Rio de Janeiro, 1975).
39
An English translation of the charter is published in Documents on the Colonial History of New
York 14: 1–7.
40
A convenient summary is Amandus Johnson, The Swedish Settlements on the Delaware,
1638–64 (2 vols, Philadelphia, 1911, reprinted Baltimore: Genealogical Society, 1969 [GB]), pp.
69–73.
41
His suggestions are laid out in a series of letters to Axel Oxenstierna, the Swedish minister from
1635 to 1641; the basic plan and its background is in Samuel Bloomaert to Axel Oxenstierna,
June 3, 1635, in G. W. Kernkamp, “Zweedsche Archivalia,” Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van
het Historish Genootschap te Utrecht 29 (1908), pp. 67–75. The copper-for-gold concept is
found in Konrad van Falkenburg to Axel Oxenstierna, October 28, 1628, in Rikskanslern Axel
Oxenstiernas skrifter och brevväxling (Stockholm, 1905) 2/11, p. 560.

colonies in American regions that might be beyond Spain’s naval reach, which
in this case meant North America. Bloomaert’s company went on to found
New Sweden on the banks of the Delaware River, in what is now Delaware and
Pennsylvania, in 1638.42 But if New Sweden was to be a settlement, the prospect
of it as a naval base was never lost, for throughout his letters, Bloomaert focused
often on the successes the Dutch company had in privateering. When questions
of proitability of the American settlement came up, Bloomaert proposed that
these could be met by privateering against the Spanish.43 The ship bearing the
irst colonists to New Sweden followed their disembarking by continuing on a
successful privateering run against Spanish shipping in the Caribbean, making
the proits that the settlers could not yet muster.44 Another plan of 1644 pointed
out that New Sweden was an ideal location for raiding the Caribbean – better,
the planners argued, than the Dutch West India Company’s holdings in New
Netherlands (New York) to which they had learned that, on two occasions,
Dutch ships had brought four Spanish prizes.45 The colony managed to develop
a mildly proitable enterprise growing tobacco and exporting Native American
products and furs, but the Dutch Company attacked and took it over in 1655.
Meanwhile, the plans for a more purely commercial company aimed at the
gold trade off the Gold Coast were more successful. The irst trading ventures
were organized by the Dutch merchant (and now Sweden-based industrial-
ist) Louis de Geer in 1645–1648, which was subsequently incorporated into
the Swedish West Africa Company, which established some posts on the Gold
Coast and managed to trade from there until the Dutch forced it out of busi-
ness by raiding its shipping in 1663.46
Like the Swedish kings, Duke Jakob of Kurland (modern-day Latvia) saw
in the Dutch model a possible way of enhancing naval power through self-
supporting companies, although his company was much more oriented to trade
than privateering. The Dutch merchant Firck became the founder of the duke’s
navy in 1640, and focused his attention initially on trade with the East Indies.
In 1650, however, the company turned to trade on the African coast, especially
the Gambia region, where there was perceived to be a valuable gold trade. Its
irst trading voyage in 1645 had failed, but the renewed efforts were more suc-
cessful, and the company founded a colony there to engage in trading for gold
and other African products. The Kurland African Company quickly turned to
American possessions, like the Swedish Company. Unlike the Swedes, however,
the Kurlanders went to the Caribbean. In 1654, the Kurlanders founded a col-
ony on the island of Tobago, the site of a Dutch colony from about 1629 to

42
Johnson, Swedish Settlements, 1: 92–139.
43
Bloomaert to Oxenstierna, August 22, 1637 in Kernkamp, “Zweedsche Archivalia,” p. 129.
44
Blommaert to Oxenstierna, September 4, 1638, January 28, 1640, Kernkamp, “Zweedsche
Archivalia,” pp. 157–158, 174–176.
45
Rigsarchivet, Stockholm, Eric Oxenstierna Sammlungen, Instructions to Printz, June 11, 1644.
46
For details of the company’s trade and its organization, see György Nováky, Handelskompanier
och kompanihandel. Svenska Afrikakompaniet 1649–63. En studie i feodal handel (Uppsala,
1990).

1635. The Kurland colony remained for a few years before it met the same fate
as the Dutch had: wiped out by the Caribs.47
With the ending of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the compelling military
reasons for Dutch West India Company style naval war/trading compa-
nies diminished. But the earlier efforts of Dutch and English privateers and
merchants had created a new commercial situation, and more commercially
oriented companies were founded to exploit it. For example, Danish, Dutch,
and German merchants working from the port of Glückstadt formed a com-
mercial company to work the Gold Coast trade in 1658. The purposes of the
company were to protect the valuable cargo and to built forts and trading
points on the coast.48 Heinrich Carloff, who had formerly served on the Dutch
West India Company, had subsequently transferred his loyalty to the Swedish
company and founded a number of trading posts. He subsequently turned them
over to the new Danish company and managed them for the Danes. Eventually
the Danish crown participated in forming a royal company in 1674 from the
Glückstadt posts.49 The new Danish company then moved from the gold trade
in Africa to see what could be done in the Caribbean, and quickly acquired a
small chain of islands – the modern-day Virgin Islands – and developed them
as sugar plantations.
Brandenburg (subsequently Prussia) also chartered a commercial company
to engage in the gold trade. Like the earlier companies, the Brandenburg com-
pany emerged out of naval necessity, not for war against the Spanish, but in
the Baltic wars. The Elector of Brandenburg, Friedrich Wilhelm (1640–1688)
appointed a Dutch merchant named Benjamin Raule to form a navy for the
principality in 1672. To inance this enterprise, Raule immediately proposed
forming a trading company, although it was not until 1680 that the idea of a
commercial relationship with the African coast was entertained. After a irst
experimental voyage, the company was formed in 1682. They founded a num-
ber of posts on the Gold Coast, as well as on the island of Arguin off the coast
of Senegal, where they hoped to deal in desert products like gum Arabic, which
was used as a dyestuff. But it was dificult to trade on the Gold Coast, espe-
cially to maintain forts. The company’s ships were frequently seized by other
European powers, and the Brandenburgers became involved in African wars,
which sapped their resources. Although the Brandenburg crown maintained
little interest in the unproitable company, it was not inally wound up (by
being sold to the Dutch company) until 1721.50
47
For a study of the company and its relationships, as well as the texts of many crucial docu-
ments, see Otto Heinz Mattiesen, Die Kolonial- und Überseepolitik Herzog Jakobs von Kurland,
1640–1660 (Stuttgart, 1939).
48
Heinrich Sieveking, “Die Glückstädter Guineafahrt im 17. Jahrhundert. Ein Stück deutscher
Kolonialgeschichte,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 30 (1937): 19–71.
49
Georg Norregaard, Danish Settlements in West Africa (Boston, 1966).
50
Richard Schück, Brandenburg-Preussens Kolonial-Politik unter dem Grossen Kurfüsten und
seinen Nachfolgern (1647–1721) (2 vols., Leipzig, 1889). Many of the documents of the com-
pany have been published with English translation in Adam Jones, ed. and trans. Brandenburg
Sources for West African History (Wiesbaden, 1985).

There is no compelling reason why Europeans had to colonize in the

Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. They might have had very
proitable enterprises simply with merchants’ contacts, as they did in most of
Africa. The speciic way in which conquest took place, however, was dictated
by European concerns of state and of warfare. European governments looked
to commercial ventures to increase state revenue, and saw that this could be
increased for their purposes by sponsoring colonization. Then again, private
commercial ventures could be enlisted in the struggle to increase the reach of
the state by making special proit-sharing and cost-distributing arrangements.
These arrangements led to the speciic nature of colonization.
Initially the Spanish and Portuguese beneited from the overseas revenues,
and the interventions of northern Europeans were driven by defensive war and
the hope that they could disrupt the revenue low. The need to involve mer-
chants in this enterprise eventually led to the founding of commercial colonies.
Before 1650, these colonies, while sometimes prosperous, did not contribute
much to revenue, and were primarily seen not as sources of revenue, but rather
as strategic outposts.
However, beginning in the 1650s, as the English and French began cultivat-
ing sugarcane in Barbados and the Lesser Antillies, the proitability of these
Caribbean colonies increased. By the early eighteenth century, they had become
signiicant sources of cash revenues to all the northern countries, but espe-
cially to England and France. By the mid-eighteenth century, revenue from the
Caribbean was a vital element of royal incomes and signiicant in programs of
national defense, much as they had been earlier in Spain and Portugal.
Europe’s military transformation and its effect on social and political struc-
tures was therefore crucial in determining what the nature of overseas expan-
sion would be. While merchants may well have been willing to deal with distant
markets in the Atlantic, the potential for revenue, and the various European’s
government’s interest in enhancing revenue to expand its military resources,
led to a different sort of expansion. Private capital led the way and took the
risks, but the rulers of the state took over once the proitability had been guar-
anteed. Although Spain and Portugal were the irst to realize the importance of
overseas income for state centralization, their very success ultimately dragged
their rivals and enemies from northern Europe into the Atlantic as well. At irst
the northerners entered aggressively, to cut vital routes of silver to embattled
Europe in the war over the Rhine Valley, and later, as a means to fund these
outposts, as merchants. Ultimately their commercial success would underwrite
a new expansion in military power in Europe.
The eighteenth century would show the development of newer and ever
more expensive means of ighting war for Europeans, and to that end, their
rulers turned again to the Atlantic colonies for iscal relief. As we shall see in
the inal chapters of this book, this new grasping for overseas resources would
backire and lead many of their colonies to obtain independence.

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The European Background: Kings and Soldiers

Uploaded by

The European Background: Kings and Soldiers

Uploaded by

2

The European Background

The involvement of European governments in overseas expansion was rendered

kings and soldiers

Erhard Etzlaup’s late-ifteenth-century map intended to show the routes to

Figure 2. “Armborst” from Nordisk Famijlebok, 1904 edition.

The political beneits of employing mercenary companies of infantry had

finance and expansion

The Portuguese crown’s grant of captaincies to various worthy people along

colonial enterprises, until Henri IV agreed to limited toleration of Protestant

English commercial colonies were tried in the area of modern-day Maine in

There is no compelling reason why Europeans had to colonize in the

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