Rome as a 'Spanish Avignon'? The Spanish Faction and the Monarchy of Philip II

[Extract] In the late sixteenth century Spain seemed to dominate the political culture of papal Rome. Her king Philip II surrounded the pope’s territories with his own dominions and his numerous clients throughout the city at times seemed to populate half the papal court. The new ‘pax hispanica’ across Italy hemmed in every pope from Paul III to the end of the seventeenth century. Save for Paul IV’s brief – and disastrous – attempt to break the shackles, none would confront it directly until the Habsburg dynasty itself. Italy’s clerical elite feared the might of Spanish arms; as a result, they instead looked for ways to accommodate themselves to the de facto realities of Spanish rule. On the surface, at least, the exercise of soft imperial power and the ubiquitous symbols of Spanish patronage thus shaped the Counter-Reformation’s developing cultural milieu. It is no surprise that the historian Thomas Dandelet has drawn parallels with the papacy’s earlier phase under the French thumb. For him, this era of papal history was every bit as Spanish as if Spain had officially ruled in Rome; it was, in effect, a new ‘Spanish Avignon’.