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As Morgan prowled the jungles of Jamaica, forty-five hundred miles away in Madrid, a dark mood prevailed. Not since Rome was in its twilight had there been such odd scenes in a court that ruled the known world. The atmosphere was embodied in the somber person of King Philip IV.
At fifty, Philip had the long Hapsburg face; he was tall, with wounded eyes caught indelibly by the master painter Velázquez in his portraits of the king. An ex-sportsman and libertine who had spent his youth cavorting in the fleshpots of Madrid, he now required that all the grandees at court who wished to address him wear black from head to toe. He was stone-faced; famously, he’d smiled only three times in public. He was not naturally this way; in other circumstances Philip might have turned out very differently. The sadness that seemed to emanate from his royal person was less personal than historical. A tremendous weight was pressing down on Philip: The empire he’d inherited was tearing apart before his very eyes, and he felt powerless to save it. In fact, he believed—and here one runs up against the incredible narcissism of the Spaniard during the nation’s golden age—that his personal infidelities had caused every one of Spain’s recent disasters. It was as if his body were a map of the empire, and every eruption and desire that twitched through it caused upheavals and defeats from one end of the kingdom to the other.
On the hot days of that spring and summer, as the news of Jamaica’s fall made its way to his court, Philip could be found at the Escorial, the palace built by his grandfather on the slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama outside of Madrid. Constructed in gratitude for the victory over the French at Saint-Quentin in 1557, it contained art galleries, a library, a college, and a monastery. But Philip was not studying the masterpieces that were hung on the gallery walls, though they were magnificent and featured the faces he knew so well, those of his own family of Hapsburg kings; instead he could be found in the mausoleum, where he’d recently had the bodies of his ancestors brought together and placed in the marble pantheon. Courtiers gossiped about the long hours Philip spent there; he emerged, they reported, with his eyes red from weeping. But for Philip the hours spent alone in the dark, cool tomb were his new pleasure. “I saw the corpse of the Emperor, whose body, although he has been dead ninety-six years, is still perfect,” he wrote to a friend, “and by this it may be seen how richly the Lord has repaid him for his efforts in favour of his faith whilst he lived.” Still, the bodies of his illustrious dead comforted him less than one empty space; he spent hour after solitary hour kneeling on the stone floors, staring into the slot where his own body would lie. “It helped me much,” he admitted. How he envied the dead, who could not be humiliated by events and whose bodies had ceased to rebel against them. How, in his quiet moments, he wished to join them.
Philip held in his hands reins of power that with a single twitch could unsettle the lives of men and women across the globe; it was an empire nearly two hundred years in the making, which now held in thrall millions of people of many different cultures. Sir Walter Raleigh ticked off the things Philip’s forefathers had overcome: “tempests and shipwrecks, famine, overthrows, mutinies, heat and cold, pestilence and all manner of diseases, both old and new, together with extreme poverty and want of all things needful.” The Spanish had conquered them all and saw themselves as the new Israelites, chosen by God to drive the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula and then to reclaim the world for Christ. A Catalan author in the sixteenth century wrote that the Spanish Castilians believed “that they alone are descended from heaven and the rest of mankind are mud,” but in some ways they could hardly be blamed. How could a thinly populated backwater like Spain become the first global superpower since the Romans if God didn’t have a hand in their victories? What were the spurting riches of the New World but God’s reward to His faithful? How could Cortés have conquered the Aztecs with 550 men? It was absurd! And hadn’t a visionary told King Ferdinand, the co-founder of the nation, that he wouldn’t die until he entered Jerusalem in glory, a prediction Ferdinand fervently believed? A skeptic looking at the remarkable series of conquests would have to say there was something at work that could not be explained by armaments, management style, or weak opponents. The variable x, to the Spanish, was God’s will. Machiavelli marveled at how Ferdinand had transformed himself from a “small, weak king” into the “greatest monarch in Christendom.”
And Spain had extended that monarchy to the New World. When Spain’s explorers—native or not—discovered a new territory, they did what all such men did: clambered to the shore, jabbed a pole with a fluttering banner atop it into the ground, and declared the land the property of their monarch. But in the Spanish case, the statement was literal: Mexico, Peru, the islands of the Caribbean, and all of Central America belonged personally to the current king or queen of Spain. They were not annexed but taken as legal birthright; the long-absentee landlord had arrived to claim his ancestral home. When some locals were found, they’d be read (in Spanish, a language the natives could not understand) a long proclamation called the Requerimiento, which began with the creation of the world and showed how the pope had granted rights to all the piece of land the conquistadors were now standing on. The Requirimiento was in effect a property deed with a history going back to the beginning of time, and it had to be read before the property passed into the hands of the Crown and before the conquistadors could launch the inevitable attacks on their listeners. “This monarchy of Spain,” wrote Thomas Companella in 1607, “which embraces all nations and encircles the world, is that of the messiah, and thus shows itself to be the heir of the universe.”
The voyages of Columbus were the expression of an ambitious and forward-thinking monarchy, the conquistadors embodied a warrior spirit that reveled in adventure and accepted hardship as a test, but the empire was the result of gold and silver. Without the ore that poured forth from the mines of Mexico and Peru, Spain would have remained a modest European power and not the world-altering behemoth it became. The discovery of the Americas’ wealth transformed the world economy and Spain’s place in it. The amounts are staggering: between 1500 and 1650, approximately 180 tons of gold flowed through the official port of Seville, so much that the entranceway that connected it to the royal palace where Philip IV impatiently awaited the arrival of his treasure was known as “the Golden Doorway.” Gold animated the dreams of the explorers, conquistadors, merchants, and pirates, but it was the 16,000 tons of silver (worth at least $3.7 billion in current dollars) that Spain extracted from American mines that allowed for uniform coins to be made and distributed throughout the world, revolutionizing (in fact, one might say, creating) the global economy. In 1535, Spain decreed that a mint be established in Mexico City, and a year later the production of rough silver cobs began, using crude dies and a sledgehammer and then, in 1732, a minting machine. During its useful life, the mint produced 2.68 billion silver coins; merchants and common people were soon using them for buying everything from a bushel of corn to a shipload of Chinese ceramics. Even in the American colonies, the Spanish piece of eight was more popular and plentiful than were English notes; the currency issued by the Continental Congress were denominated in “Spanish Milled Dollars.” Fueled by a universal currency, worldwide trade exploded, and the gold and silver streaks arced across the oceans like sparks from a Roman candle. Ships from the Atlantic seaboard to Shanghai and everywhere in between traded on the new commercial sea routes, exchanging pieces of eight or silver ingots for Colombian emeralds, French muskets, and indigo from the ancient woods of the Caribbean. “The king of China could build a palace with the silver bars from Peru which have been carried to his country,” wrote an official in the Philippines. The value of the treasure taken from the Americas during the Spanish reign ranges from $4 to $6 billion in unadjusted dollars; its present-day worth would be many times that.
By the time that Penn and Venables sailed, however, the Spanish dream of universal monarchy was growing confused and dark. Fernand Brandel called the empire of Philip II “un total de faiblesses,”—“a total of weaknesses”—and by the mid-1600s they were everywhere to be seen. The reasons were many and complicated, but in the end Spain was radically overextended: Every mile of territory that was conquered had to be pacified, guarded, supplied, administered, and, once any treasure was carted off, made self-sustaining. As the decades passed, it seemed that everyone was benefiting except the Spanish: The Crown was forced to borrow huge amounts from the Genoese financiers who underwrote the galleon fleets; when the ships returned from the New World, brimming with escudos and pearls, the majority would be parceled out to lenders across Europe, leaving only a small percentage for the Crown’s actual operating costs. “Everything comes down to one thing,” sighed Philip II. “Money and more money.” The king’s 1584 income was estimated at 6 million pesos; his debts totaled nearly 74 million. By the time of Philip IV, the kingdom was in even worse shape. Foreign affairs absorbed a staggering 93 percent of the budget. The kingdom was dependent on the treasure of the West Indies to support its empire, and Philip’s European armies waited for the galleons’ arrival to march. On October 4, 1643, the king wrote a correspondent that the silver fleet had arrived and the money had instantly been used “to dispose my forces.” Other times he tied the galleons even more closely to the fate of Spain. “We are expecting hourly, by God’s help, the arrival of the galleons,” he wrote, “and you may imagine what depends on it for us. I hope that, in His mercy, He will bring them safely…. It is true, I do not deserve it, but rather great punishment; but I have full confidence that He will not permit the total loss of this monarchy….” Any disturbance in the flow of gold could threaten the very existence of the empire.
The treasure of the New World had acted like a steroid on the empire, expanding it beyond its natural dimensions. And the king depended on it like a drug. Jealous of the source, he wouldn’t let non-Spaniards set foot in the Americas or trade with their inhabitants. The empire ballooned, but the Spanish mind closed in on itself. Religious fervor hardened into ceremony; the vast bureaucracy stifled ambition; a rigidly hierarchical society replicated itself in all its colonies. To take only the humblest example of the iron bureaucracy that ruled men’s lives in the empire: In Panama or Havana, poor men needed state-approved licenses simply to beg on the streets. No human activity escaped the hand of tradition and state control. The empire had shut itself off to the idea of flexibility and change.
As their fortunes slowly darkened, the Spanish increasingly felt that God was rebuking them, just as the Bible told them He had the Israelites when they failed to take the promised land of Canaan. The glory days had been an engaño, a trick; the Spanish believed they’d gone from being God’s darling to his bewitched plaything. No one felt the curse more than Philip IV. When news reached Madrid that Jamaica had been lost, Philip was convinced he’d doomed the nation. “The news fell upon Philip like an avalanche,” wrote one historian. “Panic spread through Seville and Cadiz, and curses loud and deep of the falsity of heretics rang through Liars Walk and the Calle Mayor.” England had successfully been kept out of direct conflict with Spain for decades, but now they’d obviously cast their fortunes against their ancient enemy. And the fact that they’d done so in the West Indies, the source of the bright stream of gold and silver that helped sustain the empire, signaled a new opening in the struggle. England had placed itself perfectly “to obstruct the commerce of all the islands to the windward with the coasts of the mainland and of New Spain,” an officer of the court acknowledged. “The fleets and galleons will run great risk in passing Jamaica.”
Philip tried to maintain his stoic façade in court, but when he wrote to one correspondent, his true emotions came pouring out. His deepest fear, the complete collapse of the empire, would be a distinct possibility if England really entered the fray and seized the American treasure:
If this should happen it would be the final ruin of this realm; and no human power would be able to stop it: the Almighty hand of God alone could do it; and so I beseech you most earnestly to supplicate Him to take pity upon us, and not to allow the infidels to destroy realms so pure in the faith…. Blessed be his holy name!