The Revolt of the Comuneros: A Revisionist Perspective

0:00The Revolt of the Communeros is described and often dismissed as an uprising of citizens in Castile against the rule of Charles V in Spain between 1520 and 1521. I don't actually remember what brought me to this kind of small or seemingly small event in history, but I think it was I was doing some research or reading about the Great Plague and this is a peripheral or a tangential sort of event and there's really not much written on it. Books, most of which are out of print, as well as documents that are in archives in Spain, obviously in Spanish, and they're 500 years old. So it's not easy to find information on this event. But the plan is basically I'll discuss what occurred in the event, what precipitated the events. Second, I'll talk about the official views, those that I was able to find, explaining the revolution itself. And then finally, I'll present my perspective, which as you probably So the guest is in stark contrast to what the official views are.

0:57And that's it. So starting here. Okay, so there's a map of Spain and you see that since most of the action here, almost all of it takes place in Castile, it's the central region of Spain, just a map so you can orient yourself. Okay, so there's two really, initially there are two really high level trends that led to, that sort of precipitated the events. The first was explosive economic growth in Castile. Essentially what had occurred in the late 15th and early 16th century is the combination of the Black Death, the social effects of the Great Schism, the Hundred Years' War and the protectionism which arose as a result of all these events led to Spain and in particular the Castilian region being in and sort of the same position that America was in on the eve after World War II.

1:51Essentially, they had no competitors, so there was a huge economic boom in Castile. Plus the monarchy under Isabella and Philip was, this isn't saying much, but it was initially relatively non-interventionist in nature. And so a significantly less competition came a growth, a boom in business in Castile. And what this led to was improvements in technology, specifically the hydraulic press, which allowed producers of, and I have a list here so I don't have to memorize, wool, ceramic, soap, leather, wine, books and paper, sugar dyes, jewelry, silver, gold, etc. to produce more products more quickly. So with improvements in hydraulic mills, they were able to produce more products more quickly.

2:37And of course with more stuff to ship, that means there had to be improvements in roads and bridges. A lot of that was actually done privately. One of the things about those lands that didn't go through feudal land or over feudal manners was that were done privately like merchants. They could facilitate the transfer of their goods. And with the growth and the improvement of the roadways and bridges came more fairs. And fairs played a really important role in Castile in that they brought merchants together. They permitted for differentiation and specialization and for price competition. and in that way they had that effect of weeding out the worst and the less efficient competitors in the given business and allowing the more efficient and the better run to rise up. Shortly thereafter of course with briskness of trade comes money markets and then primitive capital and commodity markets, all of which in turn help the entrepreneurs because they allow for pricing and liquidity and all that sort of thing and all positive developments

3:34as it would seem. With this growth came the ascendance of a merchant class which was displacing nobles and localities and it caused a lot of tensions in Castilian society. At the same time there was political instability where first, and I'll just go over this quickly, there was Ferdinand and Isabella. They ruled in the last quarter of the 15th century. They were succeeded by Philip and Joanna. Joanna was committed to an insane asylum. Philip died and their small son was elevated to the throne. He was educated in Flanders and he spent most of his time there so he didn't speak Spanish. When he finally rose to the throne in his teens, he didn't speak Spanish and he brought with him a coterie of Flemish and Dutch advisors which rankled a lot of nerves in Spain at the time because he didn't speak Spanish and he really wasn't familiar with Spanish customs.

4:26Two years after he took the crown, he was named Holy Roman Emperor and he left, and he left Spain essentially in the hands of a Dutch Cardinal, which also really, you know, Spaniards weren't very amused by that. So now we'll go to the, those are the two, the political instability and the economic boom were the two major factors at this time and now I'd like to point to the, or outline Those events which led to the actual revolt, the tensions. First, taxes, and that's probably not surprising. These, by the way, these various tensions started under Philip and Isabel and they were accelerated under Charles. So in the course of about 30 years, these things ramped up. There was a lot of military interventionism at this time. Spain had troops in the Navarre and also in North Africa. So there was a need, as well as considering the opulent lifestyles of the Monarchy, there was a need to increase revenue.

5:24And so between 1479 and 1504, taxes increased almost 350%. On top of that, as taxes rose, again, no surprise, they were increasingly evaded. And so this led to the deputization or the mercenarizing of tax farmers. Basically they went out to people, almost like bounty hunters, and they said, if you can get this person to pay their taxes, you'll get a cut. And that of course led to violations of property and such, which was property had a new position in society as merchants began to rise, it was a lot more important at that time. Corruption of course is shortly thereafter. Most controversial here, there was a mysterious little edict that let low-level nobles exile certain subjects under certain conditions without judicial process.

6:12And more than a few of these newly successful merchants found themselves essentially ejected Next was the forming of the Irman Adad, which was extremely Ericsson to many Castilians. It's essentially, it suggests a military brotherhood, but it's kind of, I would liken it to like a state police kind of thing. And it was created with the explicit goal, and I quote here, of giving the crown a striking force with which to consolidate, to defeat local enemies and consolidate power. And it doesn't seem to me like a coincidence that this was formed as the tax deputizers had a hard time collecting these astronomical levels of uncollected taxes.

7:04In addition, the Council of the Inquisition formed during this time period a loose but important coalition with the Crown, whereby they acted as a sort of a, like the Crown's Gestapo in a way, and they expanded their power far beyond the policing of purity and religious doctrine. And essentially what the Crown did was they made a deal with the Inquisition whereby they set a minimum price for indulgences and then they would take a cut. where formerly it was at the discretion of the official of the Inquisition. Now there is a minimum price and the crown got cut. So that was another thing that offended people. When I was reading this, I never realized that people despise the Inquisition so much that Inquisition officials had to travel bodyguards because they're caught alone.

7:53The people would usually just beat them up or kill them. They're absolutely hated by the people of Spain. Two other things, many of these resentful displaced nobles began to strike at the merchants by levying tolls on their land, which was their right, but nonetheless it caused tensions between the two groups. And finally, no doubt arising, to some extent arising from the inability of the crown to collect their taxes, there was a general inflation that arose in the land about this time, probably because of fiat currency printing and those sorts of Practices. So finally we reach the point of no return. In the last few years before the revolt began in 1520, when the amount of debt that military striking force was founded, there were very few volunteers, mostly because people who were so inclined to fight were already in the military and the rest of them were merchants. And so they started a conscription effort. And to add insult to injury, you had to buy all of your own equipment.

8:55That stinks. And at the same time, Charles left to assume his position as Holy Roman Empire in Germany. There were rumors that the coterie of advisors and people who were led to rule in Zapsans were siphoning funds, the few funds that they could collect and sending them off to Flanders and to the Netherlands. So that wrangled nerves as well. And finally, The exasperation between tax collectors and taxpayers reached a crescendo when there was occurrence of a number of business whereby when traveling abroad, a number of merchants had their properties sold without their knowledge. They came back to find out that their possessions had been sold off for disputed tax liens. And so with that, this is when people start In April 15, 1520, organized mobs ran royal representatives, tax collectors and other officials out of cities in Castile. You see here, there's a circle. I have around a number of the purple cities there. Those are the cities that were part of this rebellion. There

10:07are 13 cities that got together and they formed a junta. The junta was essentially a loose In the first union of cities, each individual city was run by a board called a communero which were mostly these merchants at the time who had risen up in the social structure and also some low-level nobles as well. And they expressed a desire to band together and they finally sent a letter to the king, to Charles, or actually to Adrian who was ruling in place of Charles, saying that they wanted to essentially secede from the monarchy and form a series of independent city-states which would be loosely bound by a defense pact and other than that they would trade freely among each other and they would have their own sort of ruling class. They would pay some lip service to a king. In fact, I think to sort of assuage the fears of the populace they were going to appoint a figurehead queen which was the insane Queen Joanna, Charles's

10:59mother. And so that's where the revolt begins. Now the description of the military operations, The tactical and strategic undertakings is beyond the scope of this talk. It's not very important. But suffice it to say that in the very beginning, the junta, the joined-up communera, scored a number of surprising military victories. But by the fall of 1520, a shift in support among the people, poor financing or lack of financing and rain conspired to bring the Revolt to a Decisive Halt at the Battle of Villier in April of 1521, just almost exactly a year after the revolt began. It's also worthy of note that most of the people leading this revolution were merchants and lower nobles. They weren't actually professional soldiers.

11:51So the day after the revolution began, the three leaders were taken out and beheaded and Toledo held out for a while, but they were all, all the revolting cities were brought So, here are some of the official reviews in the revolt. In 1854, Karl Marx described a loose union of artisans, workers and farmers combining with intellectuals to combat aristocrats and merchants. Danvila, writing in 1897, characterized the commoner's goal as one of sorted fiscal Gregorio Maranone, in the Roaring Twenties, described the revolt as one where invested economic interests were rebelling against a progressive monarchy.

12:43And finally, Jose Penan, who was a court historian of Francisco Franco, wrote in the 50s, dismissed the event as petty regionalism. So those are the official views. This is my thesis. I'll give you a second to read it. Essentially, like I said, I disagree markedly with the preponderantly status interpretations of the revolt. And I went to both, to Conceived in Liberty and For New Liberty, both by Murray Rothbard. And I tried to ferret out what I basically summarized as hallmarks of a libertarian rebellion, or essentially of a liberty-focused uprising, and they include these five points, and in the interest of time, I'll describe two of them.

13:29The first of which, philosophical upheaval, what I mean by that is, there's generally a, there's a re-examination of the relationship between the citizen and the state at these times. And in the time of the communist revolt, political theory was dominated by Don Francisco de Toledo, And his perspective, his ideological viewpoint was that no matter how bad a king is, the subject must never rise against him. Unsurprisingly, this was the view espoused by the monarchy. With the meeting of the junta and the discussions that followed, they discovered or renewed a vigor to the writings of Diego de Valera, Enrique de Valenya, and Rodrigo Sanchez de Aravello, who together expressed that it was right and salutary to overthrow a ruler if If he disrespects the laws he laid in the land and seizes private property without cause.

14:22In addition, point five, I'll speak out here, and that is that Rothbard points out in particular in Toward a New Liberty that in this type of political upheaval, it's important to strenuously avoid contradiction, not to do things that undermine us. And this is one of the places where the communeros failed greatly because in the spring of 50, In 1521, as they were losing more and more battles, the common air forces turned to looting and robbery, including murder in some cases, and in the most horrendous reversal of all, they established an emergency tax on their own city-states in order to finance a continuing rebellion. And as a result of all that, they lost a lot of support, and that was one reason why they had trouble getting recruits and getting funding, and one thing leads to another, and they were ultimately defeated.

15:10In the aftermath of the revolt, the ultimate loser still appears to have been the monarchy because while they stayed in power, they were forced to enact a large number of radical legal and fiscal reform measures as well as hugely lowering tax rates. In addition, in a sign of how widespread the support for the Junta and its constituent communeros was, a large portion of the regulators were within two years released without any penalty. Lastly, and one of the most ironic points is that the marauding and the pillaging that some of the common air forces did at the end led to the establishment of more thorough rights to bear arms among the civilians.

15:58It's just very strange to think that it worked out that way. But in summary, my view is that this was an arguably libertarian uprising. are all really liberty-focused, at any rate, poorly served by status interpretations, and that the communist revolt requires, you know, reconsideration by all of us. That's it.