While reflecting in 1531 on the difficulties which Miguel da Paz had in convincing the Valencian Corts to contribute materially to the war effort against the Turks, Garcilaso de la Vega, a Castilian poet, stated that Castile’s role - and therefore the role of Miguel and his successors - in the Iberian Union was not unlike a man trying to keep two baying hounds leashed while they pulled willfully in every which direction. This was an apt comparison, as the years following Miguel’s accession to the Castilian, Aragonese, and Portuguese thrones in that order were plagued by recurring disagreements and misgivings over the individual directions and idiosyncrasies of the three kingdoms. Although Fernando II of Aragon had taken the reigns of Castile after Queen Isabel’s death and although the newly formed house of Avís-Trastámaras had thus far been primarily influenced by its Portuguese side, Castile was fated by demographics and geography to become the Spanish monarchy’s center of gravity, and preserving the Iberian Union was therefore a matter of reconciling Portuguese and Aragonese interests to a national program decided primarily by Castile.
Compared to some of his descendants, Miguel da Paz had to deal with relatively little agitation for autonomy during his reign, deciding on most occasions to leave well enough alone when it came to further enmeshing his three crowns. Nonetheless there were still incidents that allowed Miguel to centralize royal authority across national lines, with one such incident being the Revolt of the “Germanies” - guild “brotherhoods” representing the different artisanal industries of the city of Valencia. Beginning in 1520, tensions between the middle-class germanies and the nobility of the kingdom of Valencia began to boil over. As Valencia’s large population of unconverted Muslims - mudéjares - formed the backbone of the cheap labor used by the nobility on their farm estates, they also made for an easy scapegoat for the Christian Valencians when plague struck in 1519. Matters were made worse when Oruç Reis and his Turkish corsairs began the most intense phase of their piracy along the Catalan Coast in 1520, leading the Valencians to take issue with the nobility’s protection of their Muslim tenants and accusing them of belonging to a Mohammedan conspiracy to turn over the city and its environs to the Turks.
Superstitious suspicion led to massive riots targeting Muslims and other perceived ne'er-do-wells alongside the nobles within the city, forcing most of the nobility as well as the royal administration to flee into the countryside, following which the germanies stepped in to govern the city with a “Council of Thirteen” (comprised of a representative from each germania) under the leadership of the relatively moderate Joan Llorenç. Things continued in this state for a few short weeks before the elderly Llorenç died in late 1520, with the more extreme Vincent Peris taking his place and beginning a campaign of further retribution against the nobility and land redistribution. King Miguel, at the moment preoccupied with taking up the Portuguese throne and planning a massive invasion of North Africa, was beside himself with anger at the disobedience and discord of his Valencian subjects, and set out to attend to the problem personally. When Miguel finally arrived in June of 1521, the royal presence was enough to convince most on both sides to lay down their arms, while the more committed rebels were dispersed violently or captured and executed. This was only a quick solution, however, as Miguel departed the city within two weeks, leaving behind a garrison that would be withdrawn after a year.
The conflict initiated in 1520, therefore, had not been meaningfully resolved, and as was to be expected it was reignited later on in 1525 with the re-installment of the unpopular viceroy Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. Another revolt was staged with the germanies again gaining control of the city, but a joint force of royal troops and the Valencian nobility put it down very quickly, this time making sure to inflict lasting punishment. Apart from the far more numerous public executions, crushing fines would also be levelled against Valencia’s germanies, virtually eradicating them as a political or economic force in the kingdom. The nobility’s preeminence and the safety of most of Valencia’s mudéjares had been ensured, but at great cost to both parties. The Valencian nobility saw their lands and homes ravaged, and only avoided complete destitution with assistance from the Crown, to which they now owed complete subservience. Amongst the mudéjares a great number were killed or endured forced baptisms - the religious obligations of the latter being expected of them by the Inquisition in spite of the event’s patent insincerity - and many left their homes in Valencia to settle in North Africa. The only real victor in the Revolt of the Germanies was the Crown, which could now easily twist the arm of any opposition amongst the Valencian nobility to its prerogative and found the whole of the kingdom of Valencia laid open for reorganization. The city of Valencia in particular prospered from this, becoming the focus of many Crown projects and transforming into Spain’s most prominent naval arsenal and Mediterranean center of trade.
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Beyond Valencia there were few other instances of serious unrest, and no significant instances of resistance to the imposition of the Iberian Union. The constituent kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon and their respective Corts had had time to accept the inevitability of a union with Castile since as early as the marriage of the Catholic Monarchs in 1469, and were mostly content with the arrangement so long as they kept the nigh impenetrable rights and liberties which kept them almost completely sovereign from their monarch. However, there were still some minor throes of patriotic sentiment in Portugal when it became apparent that Miguel would in fact survive his sickly childhood and succeed his ageing father, and would bring with him a living heir of his own as assurance of the continuation of the personal union.
Manuel I had been largely successful in selling the impending Iberian Union as a diplomatic victory for Portugal, ensuring the members of the Portuguese Cortes that Miguel would be an attentive and benign ruler unbound by his more imperialistic Castilian subjects. Yet an opposition concerned with maintaining both de jure and de facto separateness from their larger neighbor nevertheless began to gather around Jaime, the Duke of Bragança and Guimarães and head of the most powerful noble house in Portugal. The Braganças had already set themselves at odds with the Isabelline Trastámaras during the War of the Castilian Succession - Jaime’s father, Fernando II, having been personally responsible for the safekeeping of the pretender Juana la Beltraneja - and had developed a troublesome relationship with the Portuguese monarchy - the same Fernando II having been executed by Manuel’s predecessor João II for high treason. Jaime was also a perfect symbolic counterweight to the monarchies of Manuel and João II and their attendant pro-Castilian faction at court: not only was Jaime the head of the one great noble family not absorbed or lowered in standing by João II’s ruthless campaign against the Portuguese nobility, he was also a male-line descendant of the late king’s namesake, João I, who was remembered for having repulsed a Castilian invasion intended to seat Juan I, king of Castile, on the Portuguese throne.
The birth of Manuel’s second son, Fernando, in 1504 eased some of the conspirators’ apprehension, but following the death of Manuel’s wife Isabel of Aragon in 1511, there were vocal petitions made in the Portuguese Cortes for Manuel to marry again - this time to someone outside the Trastámara family. In order to quiet the opposition, Manuel took another wife under court pressure, choosing the yet-unmarried Germaine de Foix in 1514. To many, this choice gave the impression that Manuel was undermining his own son’s inheritance. It also angered Fernando of Aragon, who had desired to marry Germaine himself in order to gain a stronger claim on Iberian Navarra. This exacerbated the growing competition between Manuel and the “Old Catalan,” which had already been heightened by the tug-of-war being waged over guardianship of the adolescent infante Miguel in the absence of Isabel of Castile. By the end of 1514 it seemed as though the kings of Portugal and Aragon were ready to cut all ties, but the hostility subsided for Miguel’s sake, and for the sake of the grand project of uniting all Spain in peace.
When the infante Miguel was crowned king of Castile in late 1515, plans for an insurrection against King Manuel began to materialize, with the Duke of Bragança procuring horses in the region of Alentejo and arms in the city of Guimarães and its environs. Manuel, however, was not above safeguarding his rule through whatever means necessary, and was made privy to this plan after bribing one of the members of the Duke of Bragança’s inner circle. Before the rebels could assemble, Manuel had confiscated their horses - citing a planned royal pilgrimage to Coimbra and Santiago - while their arms cache had not so mysteriously burnt to the ground and the Duke of Bragança’s younger brother Dinis, the Count of Lemos, had been poisoned. Most of the conspirators were convinced to put the whole affair behind them through a combination of bribes and threats, and the Duke of Bragança must have gotten the point, as he almost immediately withdrew to his family estate at Vila Viçosa, only leaving on a few short occasions until Miguel’s 1520 reception in Lisbon. Fortunately for Miguel, Germaine de Foix had only borne his father a single child; a daughter named Luísa.
There was a brief renewal of the Portuguese anti-unionist plot after Miguel was crowned, this time putting forward the candidacy of Miguel’s younger brother Fernando as a means of severing the bond with Castile. Fernando was a lanky, quiet, sensitive youth who, unlike his shorter, louder brother (secretly nicknamed “Miguel da Estridência” by soe of his peers), was not required to split his adolescent years between the three Iberian kingdoms and was raised almost exclusively in Portugal. When Miguel was made aware of the possibility of this rebellion and his brother’s potential place in it by the loyalist elements at court, he hastily bestowed the dignity of viceroy on the 16 year old Fernando and shipped him off to Naples to take up his office, remaining as far away from Portugal as was necessary. As long as the infante Fernando lived he remained the chosen pretender of a number of Portuguese independence movements, something that even Miguel’s heir Juan Pelayo was conscious of, leading him to cement Fernando’s bloodline in Southern Italy with hereditary titles such as those of the Duchy of Calabria and the County of Montescaglioso. After 1520, Miguel had few issues with his Portuguese subjects, keeping the budgets and military hierarchies of Portugal and Castile separate and respecting the further stipulations of the treaties of Alcáçovas and Montehermoso.
While Miguel had never officially formed a permanent governing or even advisory body that was meant to transcend the divisions of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon, he had twice assembled a special council comprised of financial advisors, lead knights of the Órdenes Militantes, and bureaucrats from all three of his realms to address matters in North Africa and the Mediterranean, and had succeeded in holding a joint meeting of the Portuguese and Castilian Cortes in 1522. Although said meeting was split between Elvas in Portugal and Badajoz in Castile (it was expected for the two cortes not to meet in a kingdom foreign to their own, much less under the same roof), it was still a landmark precedent and proved that cooperation between the kingdoms was not only necessary in some cases, but even beneficial.
Before Juan Pelayo united the law codes of the kingdoms of Spain, one of the most effective means of tightening the bonds of the Iberian Union lay in population transfers. Movement between Portugal, Castile, and Aragon was fairly free, but permanent settlement was another issue entirely. The inhabitants of the three kingdoms - especially the representatives of the different cortes - still treated one another with distrust, and viewed the percolation of settlers across their borders as a subversion of their legal separateness, which the Spanish monarchy was supposedly bound to uphold by the Treaty of Montehermoso. While migration from kingdom to kingdom was discouraged by law, the Crown was able to circumvent this by authorizing the implantation of varying numbers of people in a neighboring kingdom as an exercise of its royal prerogative.
For example, the poorer region of Alentejo in Portugal supplied an inordinate percentage of the Portuguese who had moved to the colonies, and it consequently dealt with frequent labor shortages. On three occasions - one under Miguel da Paz in 1528, and two under Juan Pelayo in 1539 and 1553 - the Crown reached an agreement with the Portuguese Cortes and the senhores of Alentejo to settle hundreds of impoverished, landless families from Northern Castile in the region, with 260 families moved the first time, 410 the second time, and 318 the third time. This was a policy continued by private individuals and town councils, which eventually painted Alentejo a distinctly Castilian shade. Likewise, Juan Pelayo and his successor, Gabriel, also induced a number of their subjects in the Aragonese piedmont of the Pyrenees and the crowded northwest of Portugal to settle along the Sierra Morena in Castile, hoping to suppress banditry and ease transportation across that traditionally desolate region. Such scattered bursts of population exchange were rare concessions by the many institutions guarding the old autonomy of their homelands, but they ultimately served to relax the rigidness of Spain’s internal boundaries.