Imperial Spain

Imperial Spain

Of all the European states that developed intelligence networks in the early modern period, Spain deserves special mention for two reasons: firstly, because Spanish diplomacy was deeply entangled with Italian affairs, hatching botched plans to advance Habsburg control over the Pope’s terrain in central Italy and Saint Mark’s territories in the north; and secondly, because, especially during the reign of Philip II, Charles V’s successor, Spain developed a centrally administered intelligence apparatus, which, ostensibly, resembled that of the Venetians.

A brief examination of its structure, however, will reveal the fundamental differences between Spain, Rome, and Venice, the three major ‘information states’ of the early modern period.¹⁰¹ Both Charles and Philip tussled to establish their hegemony over Italian territories, a prerequisite for the preservation of the Spanish empire.

The treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) between Valois France and Habsburg Spain, paved the way for the Habsburgs’ expansionist designs eastwards, as the French Crown formally renounced all dynastic claims over Italy. 

So great was the Spanish triumph that Fernard Braudel, ‘the great chronicler of the age of Philip II’, termed the century and a half that followed the treaty a period of ‘pax hispanica’ in the Italian peninsula.

 Consequently, several scholars subscribed to the contention that a prolonged and unchallenged Spanish sovereignty over large parts of Italy ensued from the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. Yet, as the systematic study of the diplomatic correspondence between Spanish ambassadors in Italian city states and the Spanish Crown reveals, Spanish sovereignty was anything but taken as a given in the Italian peninsula. Instead, the rather bumptious self-perceived superiority of Habsburg Spain, in essence, operated as a facade that masked the inability of the Habsburgs to consolidate Spanish imperialism in Italy, primarily due to their failure to control Venice and Rome.

 It was, therefore, through their extended diplomatic service that the Spanish tried to maintain a certain degree of control over Italian affairs. The foundations for the expansion of the Spanish diplomatic service were laid by King Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516). In his effort to secure the diplomatic encirclement of France during the last two decades of the fifteenth century, Ferdinand founded the first Spanish resident embassies in Rome, Venice, London, Brussels, and the court of the Holy Roman Emperor.

These diplomatic stations played a pivotal role in Spain’s ensuing foreign policy. Ferdinand’s successor, Charles V, expanded his predecessor’s ambassadorial network by adding Genoa and the duchy of Savoy to the string of Spanish embassies in the Italian peninsula.

Philip II

By the time Philip II assumed the reins of power in the mid-sixteenth century, imperial Spain’s embassies in Italy, alongside the Spanish strongholds of Naples and Milan, played a pivotal role in the preservation of the Spanish empire. Of particular significance were the embassies of Venice and Rome, as the Crown looked to them for backing in its predatory quest for Spanish control over and beyond Italy.

Spanish sovereign interests, however, which clashed with France’s encroaching proclivities, were something of a spent force, as Venice and papal Rome protected their independence with fervent zeal. Venice, in particular, while figuring prominently in Spain’s imperial ambitions, never succumbed to Spanish hegemony and only partnered with Spain when it was deemed necessary by the Venetian authorities.

This geopolitical landscape, in combination with the immensity of the Spanish state, created the need for centrally administered intelligence operations. An instrumental role in the centralization of Spain’s intelligence pursuits was played by Philip II, whose vast empire on the European continent spanned parts of Italy, the Iberian peninsula, the imperial states of the Habsburg Netherlands, and even England and Ireland, during his brief marriage to Queen Mary I, between 1554–8. 

Consequently, Philip ventured the creation of a centrally administered intelligence service that focused, primarily, on the king as the head and monomaniacal controller of Spain’s intelligence pursuits. 

Philip’s secret service was administered by him and the Consejo de Estado (the Council of State), a governmental office responsible for foreign policy, including matters of secret diplomacy and intelligence.

 The council was made up of the Secretary of the Consejo and a circle of trusted officials. Philip, who insisted on presiding over meetings, exerted an allconsuming influence over decisions relating to issues of intelligence and espionage.

The council was also supported by the Secretaría de Estado, which was made up of a large number of state functionaries who set in motion Spain’s state bureaucracy. These included the secretario de la cifra, the state expert cryptanalyst.

According to Venetian envoys in Spain, the odd characteristic of the Spanish secretaría, and the one that rendered it so inefficient compared to its Venetian equivalent, was the working culture, as Spanish secretaries were not stationed in the palace, but worked in their own homes. This led to work

disorganization, the occasional—if not frequent—loss of important documents, and, more often than not, corruption.

The key figurehead of the Secretaría de Estado was the Secretary of State, the monarch’s most important minister. The Secretary of State played a pivotal role in the Spanish intelligence network. Under the king’s supervision, he was responsible for organizing covert operations and the analysis of intelligence that emanated from them, playing the role of the intermediary between the monarch and his military commanders.

In effect, the Secretary of State was the ‘nominal head’ of the Spanish secret service, but always under the granite shadow of Philip II, who, ultimately, proposed and granted approval of espionage missions, accepted or rejected the recruitment of spies, authorized payments, controlled the distribution of secret expenses, dictated the rules of the use and change of official ciphers, coordinated the information flow between state officials, and regulated the security measures of intelligence activities.

In imperial Spain, intelligence was supplied by a variety of informers, including ambassadors and other formal representatives of the Crown who comprised viceroys, governors, and military leaders executing missions in the Mediterranean.

Spanish ambassadors, in particular, were ‘the point men in the Crown’s campaign to establish hegemony in Italy’. 

For this reason, they acted ‘as political analysts or outright spies’, and Philip persistently reminded them of their obligation to obtain any information crucial to Spanish affairs.¹²¹ ‘You must be cautious in order to know and obtain news from all routes, and in all manners and forms’, he once instructed Diego Guzmán de Silva, his ambassador to Venice between 1571 and 1576.

 Indeed, due to its geographical position, the Spanish embassy in Venice was ‘a command center for espionage in the Mediterranean’, with particular interests in the French and Ottoman affairs.

Spanish ambassadors, viceroys, and governors maintained their own network of spies, which was, to be sure, overseen by Philip. In practice, when a spy proffered his services to a Spanish dignitary, the latter had to solicit Philip’s permission for recruitment and authorization for the spy’s reimbursement.

 Aspiring spies were offered employment either on account of their extensive network of connections—on this occasion, even without an impending formal mission—or on an ad hoc basis, recruited when imminent need for intelligence arose. 

In such cases, individuals in positions of power were ordered to supervise and protect the novice spy.

 Undeniably, Philip’s network of spies comprised numerous amateur informers who were routinely used to obtain information from a variety of sources. Francesco Vendramin, for instance, the Venetian ambassador to Spain, once reported back to Venice that court jesters acted as the king’s spies, as and when needed.

If spies did not perform according to royal expectations, the king had no qualms in withholding their pay.

For Philip, secrecy was a vital constituent of effective government. Consequently, he developed an obsession with managing all secret information personally, extending his autocratic grip over Spain’s boundless bureaucracy. 

Making a fetish of both secrecy and obsessive control, he voraciously hoarded, read, and replied to astonishing volumes of documents, a large quantity of which is currently stored in Spain’s imperial archives in the castle of Simancas.

So omnivorous was his appetite for the consumption, production, and stringent protection of state records that he once lamented the existence of over 100,000 documents awaiting to be processed on his desk. It is not accidental, then, that posterity assigned him the sobriquet el rey papelero, or, as Fernand Braudel put it, ‘the bureaucratic king’.

Due to his penchant for secrecy, the reign of Philip II has been rhapsodized as the ‘Golden Age’ of Spanish cryptography. This is because Philip obsessed over the need to conceal and protect sensitive information that had to be shared between the monarch, his Secretary of State, ambassadors, governors, viceroys, and other agents. 

A seasoned cryptographer himself, he headed the Spanish cryptographic service, ordering the creation of Spanish ciphers and the change of their keys. Amongst them, the cifra general was used for correspondence between Spanish ambassadors and state ministers, while the cifra particular was reserved for direct communication with the monarch. 

Due to its significance, the cifra general changed, on average, every four to five years.  While a small army of state secretaries enciphered and deciphered important documents for Spanish grandees, governmental elites, such as the Secretary of State, were expected to be well-versed in both cryptography and cryptanalysis. 

Overall, however, Spanish dignitaries relied both on the secretarios de la cifra and on other white-collar functionaries for the encryption and decryption of significant information. On the whole, Philip II was notorious amongst his coevals as the best-informed monarch of his time, allegedly deriving unabashed pleasure from showing off his unmatched knowledge of current affairs to foreign envoys frequenting his court, just to get a glimpse of their astonished reaction.

As the ‘director de los servicios secretos’, Philip oversaw the operations of his intelligence machinery with absolutist zeal, maniacally controlling every minute detail of Spain’s intelligence operations, from the recruitment and reimbursement of spies to the formulation of intelligence strategy.

 This was a remarkable feat and, simultaneously, a herculean challenge for a monarch ruling over an empire that lacked spatial, social, cultural and religious cohesion, and even spanned different continents. 

His aversion to delegation and, by extension, his inability to fully entrust his ministers with exercising initiative and control over the Spanish intelligence operations within their jurisdiction are amongst the reasons why, unlike Venice, sixteenth-century Spain failed to create a systematized intelligence organization premised upon managerial structures that determined and controlled the ways in which people worked and interacted with each other. 

Without a doubt, Philip’s intelligence service was extremely well organized. Ultimately, however, it was a composite spy network, operating, like his government, as a ‘ “panopticon”, in which only a person at the centre can see everything’. It was, thus, hermetically controlled by a monarch whose ministers played only a supporting role in his absolutist running of Spain’s intelligence pursuits. 

A similar case, albeit on a significantly smaller scale, was that of Tudor England’s web of spies.