An Absent King and an Imperial Burden
Whether the rise of Charles I of Spain (1516–1556) to Emperor Charles V (1519–1558) benefited or harmed the people of Spain is a question worth thought. Charles, born and brought up in Flanders and used to its ways, did not come to know the temper of the Spanish people until the last years of his life. His responsibility as king was small beside his duties as emperor, which the Protestant revolt and struggles with the pope, Suleiman the Magnificent, Khair ad-Din Barbarossa and Francis I kept him busy with. The Spaniards complained to see the lives and wealth of their country wasted in wars far from their interests. How could the emperor respect Spain's town institutions, which before Ferdinand the Catholic's mastery of the land had given Spain a kind of half-formed democracy, and whose return the Spaniards were always waiting for?
On his first trip to Spain Charles failed to win any popularity. Twenty months after being named ruler of Spain he still did not know Spanish. By boldly removing Cardinal Ximénez from the regency he offended the Spanish, who had given their hearts to the cardinal for his valuable religious and political service. Charles was brought up among Flemings, who thought Spain a wild country in need of their guidance, and at seventeen, when he became Spain's absolute ruler, he put these parasites in the highest offices of the land.
Some provincial Cortes, in which lesser nobles held sway, did not hide their reluctance at the appointment of a foreigner as ruler of Spain. The Cortes of Castile refused at first to give him the title of king, and then, reluctantly, accepted him as king of Spain on condition that he rule together with his mad mother, Joanna. These oppositions taught Charles that he must learn Spanish, live in Spain and stop giving other Spanish offices to foreigners. The other Cortes of Spain, one after another, opposed his rule. The Spanish had not yet stopped feeling slighted when Charles heard that he had been elected emperor and that the Germans were calling him to their country to be crowned. When he asked the Cortes of Valladolid (then Spain's capital) for travel expenses, his request was refused and such an uproar broke out among the people that the king's life was nearly in danger. In the end Charles obtained his travel money from the Cortes of La Coruña and hurried to Flanders.
By installing judicial officers in the towns to protect his own interests, and by naming his former tutor, Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht, regent of Spain, he trebled the danger that came from his absence.
The Holy Junta
The comunidades of Spain rose in revolt one after another. The rebellious townspeople drove out the judicial officers and killed some of the deputies who had voted the king's travel expenses. They gathered in a league called the "Holy Commune" and pledged to oversee the king's acts. Nobles, church leaders and townsmen joined the rebels and at Ávila formed a central government, the "Holy Junta" (August 1520). They declared that the royal council had no right to choose a regent without agreement of the Cortes, that nobody might declare war without the Cortes' approval, and that towns should be governed by their own elected mayors instead of royal officers. Antonio de Acuña, Bishop of Zamora, openly took up a republican tune. He formed revolutionary fighters from the clergy under him and gave his diocese's revenue to the rebels. Juan de Padilla, a Toledo nobleman, was chosen commander of the rebels. Under him they took Tordesillas, seized the mad Joanna as a hostage, and asked her to sign a declaration deposing Charles and making her sole ruler of Spain. But for all her madness she refused to sign.
Adrian, who had little force to put down the revolt, asked Charles to return to Spain at once, and blamed the rising on arbitrary rule and his absence from the country. Charles did not return, but in the end he and his counselors managed to scatter the opposition and so prepare the ground for his return to the throne. They warned the nobles that a rebel victory would endanger the existence of the wealthy class, like the crown.
Class War
The danger was already lying in wait for the wealthy, because workers, worn down over years by fixed wages, forced labor and denial of the right to join labor unions, had seized power in several towns. In Valencia and its neighboring districts workers organized as the "Brotherhood of the Guilds" and set up workers' committees. This dictatorship of the proletariat, unlike the usual kind, was a devout one: it warned thousands of Moors who still lived there to choose between baptism and death, and hundreds who would not be baptized were killed (I give this only briefly). In Majorca, workers whose employers had enslaved them took up arms, overthrew the king's governor and killed the nobles who could not escape. Many Spanish towns drove out their feudal lords and refused to pay rent. In Madrid, Sigüenza and Guadalajara, new town governments removed aristocrats and nobles from public office; here and there aristocrats were killed by the people, and the "Holy Junta" taxed the estates of nobles, who were exempt from tax. Everywhere the comunidades turned to plunder and burned nobles' palaces, and the nobles in turn set about slaughtering the rebellious townspeople. Class war spread across all of Spain.
Defeat and Conciliation
By widening their aims beyond their power to reach, the rebels prepared their own defeat and ruin. The nobles raised a force and fought the rebels alongside the king's soldiers, took Valencia and, after some days of killing and bloodshed, overthrew its workers' government (1521). In the heat of the crisis the rebel army split into two hostile camps, under Padilla and Don Pedro Girón, and discord came into the "Holy Junta" too. The rebels of each province fought on independently, without cooperating with the others. Girón joined the royal army, which took Tordesillas and Joanna out of the rebels' hands, and Padilla's weakened army was scattered at Villalar and its commander killed. When Charles returned to Spain with 4,000 German soldiers (July 1522), the nobles had conquered the country for him. In the civil war the nobles and the common people had so weakened one another that Charles easily brought the towns and guilds to obedience, put the Cortes in their place and ruled Spain at his own will.
The defeat of the Comuneros' democratic movement so cowed Spain that until the nineteenth century the Spanish put up with their loss in silence. Charles, by a prudent course, made his arbitrary rule bearable for the Spanish, gathered the grandees of Spain around himself, and, to speak Spanish fluently and eloquently, set himself to learn the people's language. He is said to have remarked that Italian is a language fit for women, German for talking to enemies, French for conversation with friends and Spanish for conversing with the Creator, a saying that pleased and won over the Spanish.