Spanish Navy
The Spanish Navy, officially the Armada, is the maritime branch of the Spanish Armed Forces and one of the oldest active naval forces in the world. The Spanish Navy was responsible for a number of major historic achievements in navigation, the most famous being the discovery of North America and the first global circumnavigation. For several centuries, it played a crucial logistical role in the expansion and consolidation of the Spanish Empire, and defended a vast trade network across the Atlantic Ocean between the Americas and Europe, and the Manila Galleon across the Pacific Ocean between the Philippines and the Americas.
The Spanish Navy was one of the most powerful maritime forces in the world from the late 15th century to mid-18th century. In the early 19th century, with the loss of most of its empire, the Spanish navy transitioned to a smaller fleet but it still maintained a significant shipbuilding capability and produced the first fully capable military submarine. In this time, the Spanish navy also contributed to the development of the destroyer class of warship and achieved the first global circumnavigation by an ironclad vessel.
The main bases of the Spanish Navy are at Rota, Ferrol, San Fernando and Cartagena.
History
Origins: the Middle Ages
The roots of the modern Spanish Navy date back to before the unification of Spain. By the late Middle Ages, the two principal kingdoms that would later combine to form Spain, Aragon and Castile, had developed powerful fleets. Aragon possessed the third largest navy in the late medieval Mediterranean, although its capabilities were exceeded by those of Venice and Genoa. In the 14th and 15th centuries, these naval capabilities enabled Aragon to assemble the largest collection of territories of any European power in the Mediterranean, encompassing the Balearics, Sardinia, Sicily, southern Italy and, briefly, the Duchy of Athens.Castile meanwhile used its naval capacities to conduct its Reconquista operations against the Moors, capturing Cádiz in 1232 and also to help the French Crown against England in the Hundred Years' War. In 1375, a Castilian fleet destroyed a large English fleet at Bourgneuf, and Castilian ships raided the English coast. As Castile developed long-lasting trade relationships with towns in the Low Countries of the Netherlands and Flanders, the English Channel virtually became the "Spanish Channel." In 1402, a Castilian expedition led by Juan de Bethencourt conquered the Canary Islands for Henry III of Castile. In 1419, the Castilians defeated the German Hanseatic League at sea and excluded them from the Bay of Biscay.
In the 15th century, Castile entered into a race of exploration with Portugal, the country that inaugurated the European Age of Discovery. In 1492, two caravels and a carrack, commanded by Christopher Columbus, arrived in America, on an expedition that sought a westward oceanic passage across the Atlantic, to the Far East. This began the era of trans-oceanic trade routes, pioneered by the Spanish in the seas to the west of Europe and the Portuguese to the east.
The Habsburg era
Following the discovery of America and the settlement of certain Caribbean islands, such as Cuba, Spanish conquistadors Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro were carried by the Spanish Navy to the mainland, where they conquered Mexico and Peru respectively. The navy also carried explorers to the North American mainland, including Juan Ponce de León and Álvarez de Pineda, who discovered Florida and Texas respectively. In 1519, Spain sent out the first expedition of world circumnavigation in history, which was put in the charge of the Portuguese Commander Ferdinand Magellan. Following the death of Magellan in the Philippines, the expedition was completed under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano in 1522. In 1565, a follow-on expedition by Miguel López de Legazpi was carried by the navy from New Spain to the Philippines via Guam to establish the Spanish East Indies, a base for trade with the Orient. For two and a half centuries, the Manila galleons operated across the Pacific linking Manila and Acapulco. Until the early 17th century, the Pacific Ocean was dominated by the Spanish Navy. Aside from the Marianas and Caroline Islands, several naval expeditions also discovered the Tuvalu archipelago, the Marquesas, the Solomon Islands and New Guinea in the South Pacific. In the quest for Terra Australis, Spanish explorers in the 17th century also discovered the Pitcairn and Vanuatu archipelagos. Most significantly, from 1565 Spanish fleets explored and colonised the Philippine archipelago, the Spanish East Indies.After the unification of its kingdoms under the House of Habsburg, Spain maintained two largely separate fleets, one consisting chiefly of galleys for use in the Mediterranean and the other of sailing ships for the Atlantic, successors to the Aragonese and Castilian navies respectively. This arrangement continued until superseded by the decline of galley warfare during the 17th century. The completion of the Reconquista with the conquest of the Kingdom of Granada in 1492 had been followed by naval expansion in the Mediterranean, where Spain seized control of almost every significant port along the coast of North Africa west of Cyrenaica, notably Melilla, Mers El Kébir, Oran, Algiers and Tripoli, which marked the furthest point of this advance. However, the hinterlands of these ports remained under the control of their Muslim and Berber inhabitants, and the expanding naval power of the Ottoman Empire brought about a major Islamic counter-offensive, which embroiled Spain in decades of intense warfare for control of the Mediterranean. The war saw cooperation with the Republic of Genoa under the leadership of Andrea Doria, while the Ottomans found an ally in France. In its course, the Spanish under Álvaro de Bazán the Elder would defeat the French in the first large modern battle in the Atlantic in Muros Bay.
The Spanish navy was completely reorganized under King Philip II, who disposed of the traditionally semi-private armada operated by Spain. In the Atlantic, Spanish ships had been exclusively private vessels sailing under charter, while in the Mediterranean, the kingdom owned directly only small numbers of ships, hiring the rest by contract from players who acted as both shipbuilders and admirals, chiefly Doria and Bazán the Elder. The disaster of Djerba in 1560 forcefully changed this landscape, driving Philip to initiate a building program which produced and maintained 300 galleys in fourteen years, roughly quadrupling the naval power his father Charles V had enjoyed. In the Atlantic Ocean, similar attempts to form a royal navy peaked after the incorporation of Portugal to the Spanish monarchy, leading to the creation of a strong, 100-vessel armada by the 1580s. Attacks of foreign privateers also caused the emergence of a system of bi-annual convoys, where ships crossing to America would only do so as part of grand fleets to facilitate defense.
From the 1570s, the lengthy Dutch Revolt increasingly challenged Spanish sea power, producing powerful rebel naval forces that attacked Spanish shipping and in time made Spain's sea communications with its possessions in the Low Countries difficult. Most notable of these attacks was the Battle of Gibraltar in 1607, in which a Dutch squadron destroyed a fleet of galleons at anchor in the confines of the bay. This naval war took on a global dimension with actions in the Caribbean and the Far East, notably around the Philippines. Spain's response to its problems included the encouragement of privateers based in the Spanish Netherlands and known from their main base as Dunkirkers, who preyed on Dutch merchant ships and fishing trawlers.
After decisively repealing a large Franco-Ottoman siege of Oran and reinforcing the Christian position in the Great Siege of Malta, Spain was part of the Holy League along with Venice, the Papal States and other Christian allies, inflicting a great defeat on the Ottoman Navy in the Battle of Lepanto and stopping Muslim forces from gaining uncontested control of the eastern Mediterranean.
In 1580, after a successful amphibious campaign by Álvaro de Bazán the Younger, Spain entered a dynastic union with Portugal, reaching the apex of its naval power as a result of the combined might of its navy with the Portuguese navy, and effectively becoming the most powerful maritime force in the world.
In the 1580s, the conflict in the Netherlands drew England into war with Spain, creating a further menace to Spanish shipping. The effort to neutralise this threat led to a disastrous attempt to invade England in 1588, however, the disaster of the English Armada the following year managed to return the balance between the belligerents. The defeat of 1588 led to a reform of fleet operations. The navy at this time was not a single operation but consisted of various fleets, made up mainly of armed merchantmen with escorts of royal ships. The Armada fiasco marked a turning point in naval warfare, where gunnery was now more important than ramming and boarding and so Spanish ships were equipped with purpose built naval guns. During the 1590s, the expansion of these fleets allowed a great increase in overseas trade and a massive increase in the importation of luxuries and silver. Nevertheless, inadequate port defences allowed an Anglo-Dutch force to raid Cádiz in 1596, and though unsuccessful in its objective of capturing the silver from the just returned convoy, was able to inflict great damage upon the city. Port defences at Cádiz were upgraded and all attempts to repeat the attack in the following centuries would fail.
Meanwhile, Spanish ships were able to step up operations in the English Channel, the North Sea and towards Ireland. They were able to capture many enemy ships, merchant and military, in the early decades of the 17th century and provide military supplies to Spanish armies in France and the Low Countries and to Irish rebels in Ireland. In the early 17th century Spanish fleets organized by the Duke of Osuna inflicted major defeats on Ottoman Empire in the Battle of Cape Corvo and Cape Gelidonya, the latter of which demonstrated the now growing gap between western and eastern navies, along with a raid on Constantinople. The Barbary corsairs in the service of the Ottoman Empire would gradually become only a civilian threat after being bested in battles like Gulf of Tunis and Dalmatia and multiple raids on the Ottoman Tunisia. These battles stabilised the situation on the eastern Mediterranean front, while in the Spanish Netherlands the allied privateers and local armada under Francisco de Ribera would successfully disrupt Dutch maritime trade. However, in 1639, an attempt to change their strategy to direct action led to a Dutch fleet under Maarten Tromp decisively defeating a large Spanish fleet in the Battle of the Downs, putting an end to Spanish operations in northern waters.
By the middle of the 17th century, Spain had been drained by the vast strains of the Thirty Years' and related wars and began to slip into a slow decline. During the middle to late decades of the century, the Dutch, English and French were able to take advantage of Spain's shrinking, run-down and increasingly underequipped fleets. Military priorities in continental Europe meant that naval affairs were increasingly neglected. The Dutch took control of the smaller islands of the Caribbean, while England conquered Jamaica and France the western part of Santo Domingo. These territories became bases for raids on Spanish New World ports and shipping by pirates and privateers. The Spanish concentrated their efforts in keeping the most important islands, such as Cuba, Puerto Rico and the majority of Santo Domingo, while the system of treasure fleets, despite being greatly diminished, was rarely defeated in safely conveying its freight of silver and Asian luxuries across the Atlantic to Europe. Only two such convoys were ever lost to enemy action with their cargo, one to a Dutch fleet in 1628 and another to an English fleet in 1656. A third convoy was destroyed at anchor by another English attack in 1657, but it had already unloaded its treasure.
By the time of the wars of the Grand Alliance and the Spanish Succession, the Habsburg regime had decided that it was more cost effective to rely on allied fleets, Anglo-Dutch and French respectively, than to invest in its own fleets. Around this time, a service of defensive privateering based on America named guarda costa was established.