[290] Spain's seventeenth-century decline has received less study
than any other major period of Spanish history. In part, this is because
it is more remote than the modern phase that began in the eighteenth century,
but it must also be explained by the painful reactions that comparisons
with the glories of the late-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries evoke. By
the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, perceptive Spaniards
were clearly aware that they were living in an age of marked decline, and
the sense of frustration and of waning accomplishment became steadily more
conscious and general as the decades advanced. Subsequently, in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, historiographic opinion viewed the period as
decadent, a description still commonly used. More recently, twentieth-century
nationalist historiography has questioned the judgment of decadence, suggesting
that the time was merely one of stagnation in which the country was unable
to develop at a rate equal to more expansive powers, because of the weight
of imperial responsibilities. While it is true that Spain would have had
to run faster than she had in the sixteenth century in order not to lose
ground in the seventeenth century--a period of greater competition and
development among west European powers--she was unable to maintain even
the pace of 1600. The seventeenth century was, in fact, more than a time
of stagnation; it was a period of general decline. Moreover, the society
[291] and culture showed signs of decadence in the strict sense
of the term.
An actual decline was reflected, first of all, in population. At the
end of the sixteenth century, the Spanish homeland (excluding Portugal)
had nearly 8,500,000 people, but in 1700 only about 7,000,000. Epidemic
disease was the major cause for this decline, especially the bubonic plague
but also typhus, smallpox, and other maladies. They were particularly lethal
because the growth of towns in the sixteenth century had crowded many tens
of thousands of the poor together in filthy conditions, and because economic
decline brought a drop in food production, higher prices, lower purchasing
power, reduced imports, and widespread malnutrition, particularly after
years of poor harvests. The great plague of 1596-1602 attacked widespread
areas of Castile and claimed 600,000 to 700,000 lives, or about 10 percent
of the population, a figure almost equal to the gain of the preceding century.
A second plague of great magnitude struck the eastern and southern parts
of the peninsula in 1647-1652, and other devastating outbreaks occurred
during the trough of the economic decline, between 1676 and 1685. Lesser
epidemics raged intermittently throughout the century. It appears that
altogether more than 1,250,000 deaths resulted from the extreme incidence
of plague in seventeenth-century Spain. the worst era of epidemics in recorded
peninsular history save for the period of the Black Death.
The other principal causes of population loss were emigration to America,
deaths from warfare, and the expulsion of the Moriscos. The official emigration
statistics indicate little more than 40,000 "legal" emigrants, but most
were not licensed and the true figure was probably several times that.
Military campaigns in the seventeenth century became increasingly costly
in lives, especially during the middle years when there was widespread
fighting and destruction in Catalonia. Deaths from disease and malnutrition
far outnumbered combat fatalities, and the number of lives lost from war
during the heaviest period of fighting from 1635 to 1659 may have reached
a quarter million. The expulsion of the Moriscos early in the century lost
the peninsula approximately 275,000 people.
Castile was affected more severely than the eastern principalities.
The population of Catalonia, Navarre, and the Basque provinces was about
the same at the end of the century as in the beginning. That of Aragón
declined slightly, but proportionately not as much as Castile's. By 1700
Valencia was able to make good only half the losses suffered by the expulsion
of the Moriscos, and showed a net loss of about 50,000 to 75,000 people.
Castile, which bore the main financial and military weight of empire and
provided most of the emigrants, suffered a net loss of some 1,250,000.
Its population, excluding the [292] Basque country, dropped from
around 6,750,000 in 1600 to 5,500,000 in 1700.
Jaime Vicens Vives has suggested seven prime causes of the seventeenth-century
economic decline: 1) continued increase in the size of entailed domains
held by the aristocracy and the church, which had the effect of withdrawing
land from use and of lowering production; 2) increasing social disruption
and vagrancy; 3) deforestation; 4) an overabundance of clerics; 5) the
status orientation of society; 6) the negative, charity-oriented religious
attitudes toward poverty that precluded serious thought of reform and new
enterprise; and most important of all, 7) government policy, which maintained
prohibitive taxes in Castile, produced capricious waves of alternating
inflation and deflation that led to monetary chaos, over-regulated some
aspects of the economy, and was incompetent in planning and execution.
The tax burden on Castile, already destructive during the reign of
Felipe II, became unbearable during the course of the seventeenth century.
The constitutional systems of the eastern principalities continued to protect
them from all special levies save sporadic grants made grudgingly by their
Cortes, which averaged out to a per capita annual rate considerably less
than that paid by Castilians. The only institution in the east that paid
anything approaching a proportionate share of taxes was the church. In
fact, the eastern principalities paid much less than did the Italian territories
of the crown--Sicily, Naples and Milan--which in some years by the end
of the sixteenth century were paying over five million ducats and carrying
much of the cost of imperial defense in the Mediterranean and in south-central
Europe. But the main responsibility still fell on Castile, which from the
1590s on was called upon to pay two-thirds of the cost of government out
of its ordinary taxes. The nominal tax rates were not in themselves exorbitant,
but the power of the aristocracy to shove the weight of them onto the middle
classes and the peasantry, together with the exactions of tax farmers and
agents who raked off much of the proceeds, led to crushing imposts on production
that drove tens of thousands of peasant families off the land and into
emigration or poverty in the crowded cities.
This situation was aggravated by a capricious, irresponsible royal
monetary policy. During the sixteenth century the Spanish monarchy had
maintained a sound currency based on a fairly steady silver value, but
by 1599, with the bulk of royal income already going for [293] debt
service, it was decided to debase the coinage by issuing copper money.
This led to a two-year bout of inflation, and after a temporary end to
monetary debasement, a slight price decline from 1601 to 1610. During the
next decade prices were generally stable, but further debasement led to
serious inflation in the 1620s and sporadic inflation from 1636 to 1638
and in the 1640s. Altogether, prices rose nearly 40 percent in the quarter-century
1625-1650. This in itself would not have been so serious had it not been
for the pendular swings from inflation to deflation that discouraged production
and commerce even further.
Capital and credit were increasingly scarce from the latter part of
the sixteenth century. The bankruptcy of 1596 was the final blow that completed
the ruin of Medina and the other financial centers of northern Castile.
The problem was not the absence of capital, for it existed among the aristocracy;
it was a problem of values and priorities. The upper classes and the church
had already established a pattern of preferring the moderately high rate
of interest from state bonds and short-term loans to long-term investments
involving greater risk. In view of these preferences, the existence of
more capital would not in itself have guaranteed more productive undertakings.
At any rate, even the favored "safe" investments proved less and less lucrative
with the eventual near collapse of the state financial system and the decline
of agriculture, the source of income from many short-term loans. In turn,
the crown came to rely almost exclusively on foreign sources of credit.
The most serious domestic aspect of the seventeenth-century economic
decline was in the most fundamental area -- food production. Agriculture
declined fairly steadily, with brief moments of recovery due mainly to
better weather, until it reached a secular trough in the 1680s. The principal
factor was probably the enormous weight of taxation on peasant agriculture
in Castile. In some regions, the peasant paid five or six different kinds
of duties -- a tithe to the church that in certain districts amounted to
nearer a fifth than a tenth of his production, seigneurial dues to his
lord, rent to the landlord who held immediate economic jurisdiction (usually
a different and lesser personage than the former), taxes to the crown,
and in many instances, interests and payments on short-term loans without
which he could not have stayed in production. In parts of Castile these
amounted to more than half of an income which was often only marginal at
best, and thus made it impossible to maintain a family on the land. The
pressure of sheep-herding interests was lessening, for wool exports were
also declining in a more competitive international market, and market price
restrictions on the food producer could often be evaded, [294] but
in general, nonagrarian prices rose more rapidly than did those for food
produced, trapping the peasantry in a price scissors. All the while, land
rents increased with the general inflation of the period. There was no
escape from taxation and dues, and even the weather grew worse during the
second half of the century. The result was drastic rural depopulation in
large areas, particularly in the Duero valley of León and Old Castile,
and in the Toledo and Guadalajara districts of New Castile.
Domestic manufactures, which had begun to decline in the late sixteenth
century, continued their decline during the seventeenth century. The chief
textile-producing towns of New Castile suffered a disastrous drop in population.
During the course of the century, Toledo fell from 50,000 to 20,000 inhabitants,
Segovia from 25,000 to 8,000, and Cuenca from 15,000 to 5,000. Much of
the Spanish clothing market was lost to foreign competition, especially
to durable, light-weight English woolens. Again, the chief reasons were
the absence of enterprise, the failure to adapt to new demands and possibilities,
the lack of technological improvement in production, and the loss of skilled
labor. Relative inefficiency coupled with comparatively high wages resulted
in high production costs that priced many Spanish manufactures out of the
market.
The other two domestic industries that had been important were Basque
iron production and shipbuilding along the northern coasts. These also
declined rather precipitously, for the same factors were at work. After
the general volume of shipping and commerce started to contract in the
1620s, demand for new vessels naturally lessened, but even the boats that
were bought and chartered were increasingly apt to be foreign, because
of superior design and construction. The cost of naval stores had been
disproportionately high in the peninsula for a long time. This, plus the
failure to improve techniques or design, left the north Spanish shipbuilding
industry in the doldrums throughout the century. Similarly, Basque iron
production, which at times had exceeded 3,000 tons annually in the sixteenth
century, dropped off markedly and was unable to supply the domestic market
or sustain the needs of the Spanish military. There was, however, some
revival in the last two decades of the century.
Regional light industries and local crafts were affected much less
by the general downturn than were the three major industries that had been
directed toward national and international markets. Simple household goods
were still supplied by local artisans, and this relationship was in most
instances little disturbed by the rise of imported manufactures.
The decline in food and textile production was met by a corresponding
rise in imports from abroad. Spain was largely dependent [295] on
northern Europe for naval stores, and relied increasingly on countries
in that region and on France for textiles, hardware, paper, and enough
grain to try to make up food deficits. Such increasing need, coupled with
the military failures of the second half of the reign of Felipe IV, led
to a series of commercial treaties between 1648 and 1667 with Holland,
France, and England, granting these powers broad commercial privileges
and comparatively low tariff rates on their exports to Spain. Spanish exports
steadily declined. Wool remained the staple export, and Spanish wool continued
to be of comparatively high quality. However, the size of the Mesta's herds
had been dwindling since the late sixteenth century as a result of soil
erosion, lack of credit, high export taxes, and legal pressure against
the Mesta that was finally reducing its grazing privileges. The volume
of wool export remained respectably high through the first half of the
seventeenth century, but then sagged irretrievably. The other basic exports--wine,
olive oil, Basque iron, and American cochineal--also declined as a result
of the depression in agriculture and domestic manufacture and the slump
in the American trade. The only general exception to this pattern was the
trade of Bilbao, which remained fairly constant as a belated increase in
iron exports helped to make good much of the loss suffered in the decline
of the wool trade. Overall, however, the balance of Spanish foreign trade
during the second half of the century was overwhelmingly unfavorable, and
was sustained only by the re-export of American bullion. Yet the decline
in bullion production reduced the possibilities of importing enough to
compensate for the failure of domestic production and resulted in poverty
and hunger for much of Spanish society.
The foreign share in Spanish commerce grew throughout the century until,
by the second half, it was dominant. Not only was the volume of imports
extremely high, but foreign capital established its control of the intra-Hispanic
trade from the Andalusian ports, while east coast shipping, at least during
the middle years of the century, was dominated largely by French and Genoese
financiers and merchants.
The greatest single achievement of the Spanish economy during the sixteenth century had been the development of a prosperous colonial trade with the American empire. This had provided an outlet for Spanish textiles and food products and had brought a return in bullion that served to balance Spanish commerce with Europe. Indeed, the development of the Spanish American colonial economy in [296] that period was by far the greatest overseas economic accomplishment of any European power. The height of the Hispanic colonial trade was reached during the last third of the sixteenth century, though the high for a single year came in 1608; colonial trade in general remained rather static during the thirty-year period from 1593 to 1622. From there it fell into serious decline, dropping to a low by mid-century. Between 1606-1610 and 1646-1650 the volume of the colonial trade declined by 60 percent, as indicated in table 6, and remained in that trough for nearly one hundred years, until the middle of the eighteenth century.
Period | Departures | Arrivals | ||
Ships | Toneladas (1) of goods | Ships | Toneladas of goods | |
1600-1604 | 55 | 19,800 | 56 | 21,600 |
1640-1650 | 25 | 8,500 | 29 | 9,850 |
1670-1680 | 17 | 4,650 | 19 | 5,600 |
1701-1710 | 8 | 2,640 | 7 | 2,310 |
This brought a steady decline in the wealth and population of Seville,
the second city of Spain, after the 1620s. Seville was plagued not only
by the falling off of trade in general, however, but also by the silting
of the Guadalquivir, which made its harbor increasingly difficult to use.
Thus the great Andalusian city could not maintain its place of leadership
even within a diminished commerce. More and more traffic moved to Cádiz,
which grew from 2,000 to 40,000 inhabitants between 1600 and 1700, and
in the eighteenth century replaced Seville altogether as the main entrepôt
of the American trade.
Imports of American treasure followed a roughly similar pattern. They
averaged approximately 7,000,000 pesos per year in the 1590s, then dropped
to between 5,000,000 and 6,000,000 annually between 1600 and 1625. From
that point they fell rapidly, dropping to little more than 2,000,000 annually
between 1646 and 1650 and only 500,000 in the years 1656-1660. The crown's
share of the American treasure began to fall both earlier and more rapidly.
Royal treasure receipts of American bullion averaged somewhat more than
1,500,000 pesos from 1595 to 1615, dropped to less than 1,000,000 annually
[297] from 1616 to 1645, dwindled to less than 400,000 during the
ten years after that, and averaged little more than 100,000 annually between
1656 and 1660. Other income from American taxes fell at approximately the
same rate. The general decline in colonial trade not only crippled one
of the two main sources of crown income but deepened the general depression
of production in metropolitan Spain.
Colonial trade declined for a variety of reasons. By the seventeenth
century, Spanish America had begun to develop its own domestic production,
at least in food and simple goods, and no longer needed the products of
Spanish agriculture that had formed the staples of Spanish trade in the
sixteenth century. Its economy now required finished industrial goods which
the Spanish homeland was increasingly ill-prepared to supply. This led
the colonies to turn more and more to foreign producers, and contraband
trade increased greatly. In turn, merchants engaged in the American trade
tended more and more to invest in American commerce and production rather
than return their capital to Spain. Coupled with these factors was the
progressive exhaustion of the largest silver mines in northern Mexico and
the southern Andes, while no technique was being developed that would have
made working the marginal deposits profitable. Discovery of several new
but smaller sources of silver did not offset these limitations. Yet another
factor was the drastic depopulation of central Mexico in the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries as a result of epidemics of European diseases
and of the social and economic exploitation of the Indians. To this was
added the growing weight of competition from other imperial powers, competition
which had been nearly nonexistent through most of the sixteenth century.
An increasing proportion of the taxes of Spanish America remained there
to build defenses against English, Dutch, and French intruders. In general,
the resistance of Spanish America was quite effective, reflecting the stability
and rooted-ness of the Hispanic society being formed there, but it used
up funds that the Spanish crown would otherwise have had available for
its expenses in Europe. Finally, the pressure of Spanish taxation and the
decline in Spanish shipping further handicapped the colonial trade. As
volume diminished, taxes and fees on shipping were proportionately increased
to pay for mounting costs of insurance and defense. This led to widespread
fraud in the registration of commerce and gave further encouragement to
contraband.
The shift in the internal economic relations of the Hispanic world
during the seventeenth century thus resulted from the decline of the peninsular
economy coupled with the growth of the Spanish American economy. It revealed
the beginning of what would be an increasingly separate and eventually
independent Spanish America.
The pattern of society during the seventeenth century merely accentuated the trend toward aristocratic dominance established long before. During this period the traditional Spanish nobility reached its apogee. Altogether, nearly l0 percent of the people of Spain were nobles, but wealth was concentrated in the upper strata--the grandes, and just below them, the títulos. With the economy stagnating, Spanish society remained desperately upwardly mobile. Concern was directed almost exclusively toward winning aristocratic status and, if that were already achieved, toward rising into the elite, whose ranks were thus steadily expanded. There had been twenty-five families of grandes when the rank was legally defined in 1520, but ten more were raised to that category in the year 1640 alone. In addition to the grandes there had been thirty-five títulos in Spain in 1520. Table 7 shows the number of titles created in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Ruler | Number of Titles | |||
Dukes | Marquises | Counts | Viscounts | |
Felipe II, 1556-98 | 18 | 38 | 43 | |
Felipe III, 1598-1621 | 20 | 25 | ||
Felipe IV, 1621-65 | 67 | 25 | ||
Carlos II, 1665-1700 | 209 | 78 | 5 |
Basically, what separated the grandes and títulos from the rest
of the nobility was wealth, mainly in landed domains under seigneurial
jurisdiction and protected by right of entail. The proportion of land held
in seigneuries continued to grow in the seventeenth century for the same
reason that it had in the sixteenth. Though the holders of great seigneuries
did not expand their real income from land at the rate that prices were
rising, their preferment at court increased, and many special honors, posts,
and gifts were bestowed on them from a swollen royal treasury. More than
ever before they were living parastically off not only the land but the
royal income as well. Thus, as the overall production of wealth from towns
and commerce declined, the proportionate share of the national wealth held
by the great landholding aristocracy actually increased.
[299] The nobles of middle rank, the caballeros, did not normally
hold seigneuries of importance, but controlled many positions in municipal
government and dominated much of local administration. This provided them
with lucrative posts as well as the control of local taxes and government
finance.
The hidalgos continued to be numerically the great bulk of the nominal
nobility. Though many were indeed poor and lacked land or other possessions
of note, their status was nevertheless of great advantage. It freed them
from payment of most taxes and provided legal privileges in criminal and
civil suits, and for some it was the status derived from not having to
pay taxes, more than the money involved, that was important. If there were
those even worse off than their classic prototype, Don Quijote de la Mancha,
others were well enough to do, and at the very least, the hidalgos were
a stable upper-middle-class elite, between the nobility and the ordinary
middle classes.
A government minister remarked that every Spaniard:
Flight from reality and unwillingness to face new challenge were also
evident in the church. It kept its enormous influence and wealth, nearly
20 percent of the land in the kingdom, and copious tithes and dues that
gave it a huge share, perhaps nearly one-third, of the Spanish income,
but it lost much of the spiritual and missionary zeal. intellectual achievement,
and reformist drive of an earlier time. During the seventeenth century,
the Spanish Catholic church became the institution of middle class bureaucracy.
The great income of the church, contrasted with the general shrinking of
the economy, made holy orders attractive as the chief opportunity for an
"honorable" career for those with some education but few opportunities.
A cadastre of 1656 revealed that the Castilian clergy held nine times the
wealth of the ordinary Castilian population, and this was a powerful lure.
The clergy as a whole were probably never more than 3 percent of the population,
but they were as much as 10 percent of adult males. In Catalonia, where
local church endowments were more common and the middle strata of society
more developed, the clergy temporarily swelled to about 6 percent of the
population. This padding of the ranks of clergy diluted its spiritual zeal
and moral and intellectual quality. There remained a saving remnant of
truly devout and dedicated priests, and impressive overseas missionary
work was still done by several church orders, but nothing to compare with
the preceding century.
The decadence of some of the clergy was simply one aspect of a change
in the spirit of Spanish religiosity, which showed an increasing obsession
with asceticism and the avoidance of sexual sin. The atmosphere [304]
was one of growing gloom and fixation on death and punishment. Mounting
hostility to the world and to religious expression through normal, outgoing
human affairs was probably a not unnatural spiritual-psychological counterpart
to the general sense of failure and decline. Gross superstition, already
common in the sixteenth century, increased, and was accompanied by further
exaggeration of formalism and ritualism.
Religious sensibility was heightened by the expansion of the "missionö
movement, particularly in the two Castiles and Andalusia. This was almost
exclusively the work of some of the orders, and consisted of local evangelistic
campaigns in villages and small cities by small groups of monks. They preached
an intense and graphic brand of hellfire-and-damnation revivalism, illustrated
by vivid paintings and sketches of the nether regions. The effect of these
visits on the lower classes was often extreme, if rather temporary, and
brought many people into formal confrontation with religion who otherwise
paid relatively little attention to it.
All the while, moral irregularity abounded in the larger towns, and
the stress on external orthodoxy often resulted in a heavy overlay of hypocrisy.
As far as behavior patterns were concerned, the extreme "religiosity" of
Spanish society was belied by the life styles of the highest and lowest
in the social order, high aristocrats living in self-indulgence, a large
lower-class underworld in the towns battening off crime and vice. A singular
aspect of moral degeneration was the perverse fascination with the image
of the nun in the romantic imagination of upper-class men. The galán
de monjas (wooer of nuns) became a stock figure in the erotic typology
of the period.
Ecclesiastically, the Spanish church became increasingly divided. Factional
disputes within the clergy were pushed to the point of fanaticism. There
were intense quarrels between orders and among various prelates, as well
as disputes over control of parishes, descending even to vendettas over
the style of clerical clothing.
As had been the rule before, the overweening formal piety of the crown
did not prevent it from asserting a degree of authority over the church.
It retained the regium exequator, dating from the fourteenth century,
that enabled it to control all papal communications. The majority of church
spokesmen in Spain sided with the authority of the crown, and during the
first half of the seventeenth century, a considerable number of regalist
treatises were written by both lay and clerical Spanish jurists. In 1617,
Felipe III protested the fact that the papacy had placed several of these
on the Index. There were lengthy conflicts between leading Spanish prelates
and papal nuncios, though at the same time there was also an ultramontane
party within the church. During the reign of Felipe IV some efforts, largely
unsuccessful, [305] were made to reform the clergy and limit the
increase of entailed church estates.
After the first quarter of the seventeenth century, little was seen
of the kind of theological, philosophical, and scientific study that had
flourished among the intellectuals of the sixteenth-century church. Not
only did this work decline, but the Hieronymites, Reformed Carmelites,
and other orders which had stressed serious work and systematic spiritual
meditation did not prosper. Their program was not attractive to most of
those being drawn into religious orders.
The church did spend a significant amount of its great income on education
and on charity for the poor, for whom it was the only source of relief,
usually of the sopa boba, simple soup kitchen, variety. In addition,
orphan asylums and homes for the wayward young were maintained.
By any comparison with other countries, basic educational facilities
were extensive in Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century, though
in the years following they declined. According to one survey, there were
32 institutions of higher learning and at least 4,000 grammar schools,
many of them founded in the sixteenth century and largely supported by
the church. In 1590 there were 7,000 students attending the universities
and 20,000 in higher education as a whole, proportionately the largest
student body in Europe. The dynamics of seventeenth-century Spanish education,
however, belie the notion that extensive nominal education is the main
precondition to societal progress. The Spanish system was increasingly
oriented toward the mere attainment and maintenance of status. The colegios
mayores, originally endowed to finance education of students from the
middle classes, were taken over as status symbols for aristocratic youth.
Despite these and other limitations, there remained significant school
opportunities for the middle classes, and the number of degrees or certificates
earned was not inconsiderable. Yet such diplomas were basically licenses
in formal letters that served as entrees to the bureaucracy whose ranks
in church and state were swelled with diplomates. Such an educational system
did not encourage a more critical or inquiring attitude or a more productive,
efficient elite. Curricula sank into a routine that was backward even by
contemporary European standards, but leading universities maintained a
placement service for clerical and bureaucratic posts that, in terms of
sustained pressure on behalf of graduates, might be judged to have outdone
the efforts of twentieth-century American institutions. The educated were
largely unconcerned with practical problems or with creative service. On
their professional level, they aped the nonproductive status-security fixation
of the nobility. The involution of Spanish society, general resistance
to the analytic dimension, stress on the medieval intellectual [306]
disciplines in opposition to change, and prizing of personalism rather
than objectivism and achievement, converged to block intellectual development.
The exception in this general trend of decline was the continued flowering
of Hispanic esthetic culture during the first half of the seventeenth century,
when Spain led Europe in the development of baroque art. The painting of
Velázquez, the dramas of Calderón, and the extravagant poetry
of Góngora were achievements of the highest level in the European
culture of the period. Through the years of midcentury, the prestige of
Spanish culture remained high, as attested by the use of Spanish art motifs
and the vogue of certain writers, such as the Jesuit Baltasar de Gracián,
in France and other countries. Hispanic literature reached its height in
the writing of Miguel de Cervantes. His Don Quijote was on one level a
satire of extravagant and unrealistic ambitions held by Spanish society
of the imperial period and was the most profound expression of the mood
of disillusionment that was setting in. On another, it was the most eloquent
expression of those ideals, a universal work, and the first modern novel.
Church patronage was largely responsible for this paradox of brilliant
literary achievement in an age of social and economic decline. Another
important factor was the great wealth of the high aristocracy, whose elaborate
tastes led them to patronize art at a time when society lacked resources
for more mundane accomplishment. Yet the Spanish elite were unable to sustain
even these values, leading more and more to what has been termed the paradox
of the Spanish baroque: growing contrast between extravagant style and
increasingly poor materials used to express it in architecture and art.
During the second half of the century, the effects of depression, depopulation,
disillusion, and flagging energy made it impossible to continue the level
of esthetic activity, which also began to fall into decadence.
The Spanish system of government changed during the seventeenth century
with the distinctly less competent monarchs and the rising magnitude of
the problems facing royal administration. The institution of the valido,
the favorite and surrogate of the king, became the norm for the weak monarchs
of the time. There was a sense in which the valido was understood to be
the chief minister for the crown, but he was more than that, becoming the
substitute for rulers unable or unwilling to fulfill their responsibilities.
He also represented the triumph of the high aristocracy, for their system
of personal status [307] relationships and dispensation of patronage
then dominated the government as well.
The Duke of Lerma, valido of Felipe III, was above all interested in
prestige and fortune. He had no special policy for Spanish affairs, but
established his control over patronage to the aristocracy and became the
wealthiest man in Spain. The king himself took great satisfaction in depleting
royal resources by granting concessions to aristocratic favorites. From
this time forward, the ascendancy of the aristocracy in government increased.
Membership in the Council of State had always been restricted to the aristocracy,
but its work had been to some extent administered and coordinated by professional
secretaries drawn from the petty hidalgo class. In the seventeenth century,
the Council of State was directed entirely by the high aristocracy.
The counciliar system of state administration was maintained, but there
was a growing tendency to appoint subcommittees to deal with special problems
and concentrate executive attention. This resulted in further dispersal
of leadership and greater division in administrative organization. The
numbers in state service continued to increase, but a rational, central
bureaucratic system was never worked out. The Council of Castile, which
served as a ministry of sorts for the kingdom of Castile, lacked an integrated
system of administration which could enforce its laws and regulations.
Though corregidores were still appointed for the towns, local areas were
often administered as decentralized units by local notables, and what was
true in Castile held for the empire as a whole.
The government system tended more and more to get out of control. Social
and institutional pressure to hire university diplomates resulted in a
fantastic degree of featherbedding. As the government bankrupted itself,
every possible device for raising money was snatched at. Sale of offices
in all branches of state affairs became a standard device for raising revenues,
and in the Indies the practice was extended from fee-earning positions
to more important salaried posts as well. Twice, seats on the Council of
Indies were sold, and it was ruled that offices bought might in many instances
be resold to secondary buyers. The treasury system itself was an enormous
rat's nest. Nearly all tax collection was indirect, either farmed out to
tax collectors, many of them Portuguese cristâos novos, or recruited
secondhand from municipal officials. One estimate has calculated that nearly
150,000 full or part-time agents were involved in Spain and America, and
that after so many local notables, tax farmers, and agents had siphoned
off funds for themselves, little more than 20 percent of the sum originally
collected reached the crown.
[308] Financial stress, favoritism, and maladministration eventually
led to protest even among the upper classes. By 1618, Lerma had to appoint
a special reform junta to think of ways of remedying the government's ills.
Rule by valido normally meant direction of affairs by a personal faction
of the favorite. Lemma's greed and selfish use of patronage, which he controlled
absolutely between 1612 and 1618, built up strong hostility among the majority
of the nobility who were not favored. After twenty years even the indolent
Felipe III grew restive, and before the close of 1618 he dismissed his
veteran valido. Yet the change was slight. For the remaining three years
of the reign a new favorite, Lerma's own son the Duke of Acadia, coordinated
government affairs, though he never held the full authority once enjoyed
by Lerma.
Felipe IV succeeded his father in 1621 when only sixteen years old.
Though he was more energetic, he was also more frivolous and líttle
disposed to devote himself to public affairs. Since he was young, inexperienced,
and not well educated, it was inevitable that he devolve direction of government
on a favorite of his own. This personage was a thirty-three-year-old Andalusian
noble, Gaspar de Guzmán, later known as the Conde-Duque de Olivares.
The new head of affairs was altogether different from Lerma. Olivares was
well trained and used to responsibility, a man of great vigor and energy
as well as overweening ambition. He was not after personal gain, however,
but sought power--the direction and vindication of the Spanish empire.
The dark, heavy count-duke was by far the most forceful Spanish figure
of the century--authoritarian, stubborn, but also hardworking, attentive
to detail, persistent, and devoted to government rather than patronage.
Unlike Lerma, he had a policy, which was to strengthen the Spanish empire
and lead it to victory over its many foes despite the formidable obstacles
that were mounting against it.
The predominant policy in the Council of State since the death of Felipe
II had been conservative, devoted simply to preserving and defending the
empire as it existed. In terms of international law as well as of actual
circumstance in most of the empire, this was not unrealistic. The American
empire was developing a unique, symbiotic society that was just beginning
to achieve its own natural growth. The European possessions of the crown
were in general satisfied with Spanish rule, conducted on the confederal
Aragonese pattern and respectful of local rights and customs. None of its
principalities at [309] that time sought or were capable of surviving
independently and no other major power had so good a legal claim to them
as the Spanish crown. There were four major difficulties: a) the size and
potential wealth of the overseas empire made it an almost irresistible
target for European rivals; b) the extent of the empire's European territories
placed it in a dominant position that was eventually intolerable to a revitalized
France determined to cut Spain down to size; c) the geographic pattern
of the European empire was awkward, for the Low Countries and the France
Comte were isolated from the southern base and were difficult to defend;
and d) the government refused to recognize the independence of the only
dissident part of the empire, Holland, which had long since broken away
and made its own place in the world. This led to endless, futile, wasteful
warfare on land and sea with a new power that was the most modern and efficient
in Europe in the early seventeenth century. Such conflict in turn made
the defense of the southern Netherlands, which Spain retained, more difficult.
During the first half of the seventeenth century, the Spanish crown enjoyed
the services of the finest diplomats to be found in the employ of any power,
but the skill of Spanish diplomats, great as it was, could not offset the
enormous burdens imposed by a policy determined to retain an anachronistic
dynastic claim that kept the empire perpetually at war.
When the Thirty Years War began in central Europe in 1618, the Spanish
government plunged in to prevent the triumph of hostile Protestant forces
that would side with Holland and threaten Spain's remaining position in
the southern Netherlands. In addition to subsidizing the Austrian Habsburg
cause, the main Spanish field army, stationed in the southern Netherlands
under an outstanding general, Ambrosio Spinola, intervened to seize the
Lower Palatinate in western Germany and safeguard direct land communications
with Spanish Italy.
The ten-year truce with Holland expired in 1621, and hostilities were
resumed on a naval and commercial front that was literally worldwide. By
1625, England had come into the struggle against Spain while France moved
against the imperial position in northern Italy, but the years 1625-1626
were a time of success for Spanish arms. Dutch invaders were thrown out
of Brazil by a large Hispano-Portuguese fleet, the offensive was resumed
in the Low Countries where Breda was captured (1625), the French were once
more forced out of Italy and peace was signed with them in 1626. To increase
the pressure on the French crown, the Spanish government had even been
negotiating terms of assistance to French Protestant rebels.
Yet there was a serious drop in American treasure shipments that same
year, and the crown was unable to sustain its huge military [310]
expenses and was forced to another declaration of partial bankruptcy in
1627. The entire annual treasure fleet from New Spain was captured by a
Dutch squadron along the Cuban coast in 1628. The struggle continued against
both Holland and England, while income to finance it dropped, and Spain's
Catholic allies in central Europe showed no inclination to assist in fighting
the Dutch.
Military commitments were increased still further in 1628 when a dispute
arose over the succession to the duchy of Mantua in northwest Italy. The
strongest legal claimant was a French duke, but Olivares ordered Spanish
forces to seize the stronghold of Montferrat to prevent a French succession
and secure the Alpine communications to the other Spanish possessions farther
north. This led to a disastrous three-year war with France in northwest
Italy that Spain was no longer in a position to win. In 1629, the Spanish
army lost ground on the border of the southern Netherlands, and in 1630,
the Dutch resumed more forcefully their invasion of Brazil. Spain was finally
able to reduce the pressure on herself by negotiating peace with England
in 1630 and ending the three-year Mantuan War by dropping claims to the
duchy, bringing peace with France in 1631.
The quarrel with Holland remained, though it was becoming clear that
Spanish resources alone were not sufficient for victory. Thus a major feature
of Spanish policy was the effort to win Austrian Habsburg support. Such
a policy was counterproductive, for it required major Spanish assistance
to the Catholic forces in the Thirty Years' War in Germany, particularly
after Sweden entered that struggle and turned the tide in 1631-1632. A
mutual assistance treaty was signed between the two Habsburg crowns at
the beginning of 1632, and a strong Spanish army was later built up in
northern Italy. Its commander was the king's younger brother, the Cardenal
Infante D. Fernando, by far the most vigorous of seventeenth-century Spanish
Habsburgs, who had been placed in holy orders but found his true calling
on the field of battle. In conjunction with Austrian forces, his army reversed
the momentum of the conflict in Germany by smashing the main Swedish army
at Nordlingen in 1634. This involvement increased the strain on Spanish
resources, but the Austrian crown never lent any notable assistance against
Holland. Rather, the joint Habsburg alliance and its victories in Germany
so alarmed the French government that it officially entered the war on
the other side, attacking the Spanish Netherlands. In the main northern
theater of operations, Spain's position had become more difficult.
What made prospects more and more discouraging in the l630s was that
government receipts were not recovering from the decline of the previous
decade, payment of state obligations was now falling years behind, and
no relief was in sight. New excise taxes were imposed and old ones were
raised further. For the first time, wealthy [311] nobles were required
to make direct contributions, but it was difficult to raise more money
from a declining economy. Olivares himself had never been oblivious to
the need for basic fiscal and administrative reforms. In 1622-1623, soon
after he rose to power, he had appointed a reform Junta that tried to promote
fundamental changes: the establishment of strict sumptuary laws in Castile,
import restrictions, curbs on corruption, and a steep reduction in local
government offices. Almost nothing had been accomplished, for the effort
met with apathy among the aristocrats who dominated public affairs in Castile.
Even before the fifth declaration of partial bankruptcy (1627), it had
become increasingly difficult to raise state loans. A new source was found
by encouraging the gravitation to Madrid of wealthy Portuguese cristâo
novo financiers, but this provided only limited assistance. Olivares also
tried to promote formation of a sort of national bank to float the royal
debt, but could not muster the resources. The crown could only ask more
from the already nearly exhausted Castilian taxpayer.
During the seventeenth century the powers of the Cortes of Castile, already minimal, lapsed completely. There were still occasional assemblies. Cortes were summoned six times during the reign of Felipe III and eight times during that of Felipe IV. Currency devaluation was carried on in both reigns with scarcely any attempt to win the approval of the Cortes, and new taxes were forced through with declining opposition. Though the demands of the crown were greater, there was less resistance than during the sixteenth century. The main reason for this was the structure of Cortes representation. The eighteen towns of Castile that had retained the right of representation were dominated by aristocratic oligarchies, and so was the representation in Cortes. The procuradores were allowed a 1.5 percent commission on new taxes which they voted, and appearance in Cortes also helped to win patronage in the form of appointments, pensions or honors from the government. During the reign of Felipe IV, there were efforts by unrepresented towns to win a voice, and a vote was given to Palencia, as well as single collective votes to Galicia and Extremadura. The main motive here was not to resist taxation or fight for local rights against royal power, but rather to cut the governing aristocracies of these regions into the lucrative business of fiscal votes. The idea of representing any interest other than that of the aristocracy was dead, and in a civic sense the Cortes had become completely nonfunctional. After the Cortes of 1662, no regular assembly was summoned for the remainder of the century.
Throughout the reign of Felipe III and the first part of that of Felipe
IV, the crown had been unsuccessful in bringing the Aragonese principalities
to submit to regular taxation or make systematic contributions to the crown
for imperial defense. Only meager, irregular grants were made by the regional
Cortes of the eastern principalities. In Catalonia, the urban oligarchs
even resisted the payment of the town excises which were owed to the crown;
instead, they pocketed the proceeds themselves. Throughout the early seventeenth
century, the Catalan countryside continued to be plagued with bandits led
by the rural gentry. This banditry, along with contrabandage and counterfeiting,
was sheltered by the Catalan constitutional system. To make matters worse,
commerce took a downturn after about 1600 and the Catalan elite were determined
to resist any kind of change or concession to the crown.
As early as 1625, Olivares had conceived a long-range plan, called
the Union of Arms, by which each region of the empire would pay its share
toward imperial defense. Aragón and Valencia reluctantly agreed
to partial cooperation in 1626, and Spanish America, already heavily taxed,
assumed an even greater permanent contribution, fully attending to its
own protection. The Catalans, however, were still refractory and made only
token contributions. Olivares merely proposed to redistribute the burden
of taxation and recruitment more equally; he did not intend to alter the
constitutional systems of the eastern regions, though he did plan greater
centralization of leadership. He hoped to make heavier contributions more
palatable by providing new economic opportunities within the empire for
the eastern principalities, though this was difficult in that period of
depression. Unfortunately, he also shared a common belief that there were
approximately a million Catalans, instead of the four hundred thousand
who actually existed.
The financial problem became even more acute after outbreak of war
with France in 1635. Taxes in Castile were raised arbitrarily, new loans
made, the currency devalued, and offices sold more recklessly than ever,
but by 1637, annual expenses were nearly twice the annual state income.
The war itself went badly both in Germany and the Netherlands. In 1638,
the French invaded the Spanish Basque country, besieging Fuenterrabia.
The relief force that drove them out included contingents from all major
regions save Catalonia, which refused to help the rest of Spain.
Desperate to get the Catalans to make some contribution to the war
effort, Olivares and his advisers decided to route the campaign of [313]
1639 directly through Catalonia. A counteroffensive was planned across
the eastern Pyrenees through the Catalan counties of Rosselló and
Cerdanya. It was poorly organized and led. The Catalans did participate
in sizable numbers, however, and after the border fortress of Celtuce was
lost to the French through military incompetence, Catalan forces suffered
heavy casualties in trying to retake it. Shortly afterward, disaster struck
in northern waters as the last major Spanish fleet to sail against the
Dutch was destroyed by Admiral van Tromp at the Battle of the Downs in
October 1639. It was clearer than ever that the empire lacked the resources
to deal with such manifold military commitments.
Having committed the principal home forces to the Catalan front, Olivares
resolved to continue the offensive from that base in 1640. Strong measures
were taken to force the Catalans to pay many of the expenses involved,
and some 9,000 troops, many of them disorderly and obstreperous, were billeted
on the civilian population, causing intense resentment. Hatred of the exactions
of a "foreign" soldiery erupted in general revolt in the north Catalan
countryside in May 1640, as peasants attacked Spanish troops throughout
the district. By June, the rebels had moved into Barcelona, where they
mobilized the segadors, or farm laborers, into a revolutionary mob that
took over the city and murdered royal officials, including the viceroy.
Catalan resistance to the crown had originally been the work of the privileged
upper-class oligarchy determined to lose none of its financial or administrative
prerogatives, but the revolt of 1640 swelled into something approaching
a social revolution. Poor peasants rose against their overlords, the laborers
and unemployed in the towns took over the streets, and bandit gangs reasserted
themselves in many parts of the countryside. Catalonia was not merely in
revolt against the crown but nearly beyond the control of its own oligarchy.
The principality could not defend itself alone against the Spanish
state. On the one hand, it was simply too small and on the other, Catalans
were no more willing to submit to organized authority for the purpose of
self-defense than for any other. The only alternative seemed to be help
from Spain's powerful enemy, the crown of France. The Diputació
of the Catalan Corts had begun secret negotiations in April 1640, one month
before the revolt. In October, an agreement was concluded to supply French
military assistance, largely at Catalan expense, and in January 1641, the
Catalan leaders officially placed the principality under French protection.
Meanwhile, a Spanish force of nearly 20,000 had been laboriously assembled
during the summer and fall of 1640. It occupied Tortosa but was stopped
outside Barcelona by the joint French and Catalan resistance. Its leadership
was [314] incompetent, and the killing of a number of Catalan prisoners
only increased the will to resist. For the time being, the crown had to
give up any hope of holding a military position in central Catalonia.
The Spanish were thus driven out, but only at the cost of turning Catalonia
into a French protectorate. A French viceroy was appointed for Barcelona
and his administration was packed with French supporters, while steep payments
were exacted for the support of French troops. In 1642, French units occupied
the north Catalan regions of Rosselló and Cerdanya and seized the
westernmost city of the region, Lérida. Meanwhile, the French exploited
Catalonia economically much more than had the Spanish crown. The depressed
wartime Catalan economy had little opportunity to sell to France, but French
exports poured into Catalonia. Food production declined drastically, taxes
skyrocketed, inflation and monetary devaluation wracked the economy, and
famine among the poor set the stage for the great plague of 1650-1654,
which halved the population of Barcelona and decimated the population in
many parts of the principality. As the years passed, many of the rebels
began to feel that the yoke of France was heavier than that of Spain.
The forces of Felipe IV rewon Lérida and western Catalonia in
1643-1644 and blocked any further French advance. In 1644, the king took
a formal oath to uphold the Catalan constitutional laws. After a slow but
steady weakening of the French and Catalan position, a considerable Spanish
army moved in to besiege Barcelona in mid 1651, and the city surrendered
a year later. The Spanish crown pledged a general amnesty and preservation
of the laws of Catalonia, ending the revolt on the terms of the pre-war
status quo. Catalonia gained nothing from the revolt but years of misery
and death. Conversely, the Catalan uprising further weakened the Spanish
crown at a time when it was struggling desperately against great odds,
and the Pyrenean districts of Rosselló and Cerdanya were never regained.
The Catalan revolt was paralleled by the secession of Portugal from the Spanish crown in the same year, 1640. Portuguese separation was a response to the crisis of the Spanish empire, the frustration of its leadership, the burden of its defense, and above all, the decline of its economy. The Spanish crown could no longer offer Portugal either the protection or the opportunities of a generation or two earlier. Rather, it would involve Portugal further in the suffering of its wars and their heavy cost. The Catalan revolt provided Portuguese leaders with a model which they were able to imitate more successfully. [315] Unlike the Spanish trade in the Atlantic, that of the Portuguese was in a phase of moderate expansion and helped to provide Portugal with an economic base for independence. After 1640, the Spanish crown was in no position to build a new army for the subjugation of Portugal.
The ambitious policy of Olivares broke down completely after 1640. The
American trade had taken yet another drastic downturn and showed no prospects
of recovery, leaving the crown even more desperate financially. The withdrawal
of the Castilian population from involvement had become marked. Even the
military aristocracy tried to avoid volunteering, and new levies could
scarcely be assembled. Failure of leadership was profound, and those forces
that were organized failed through incompetent command. Even the Castilian
grandes withdrew from the crown. The powerful and wealthy duke of Medina
Sidonia, a cousin of Olivares and brother-in-law of the new king of Portugal,
headed a short-lived conspiracy to oust the count-duke and turn Andalusia
into an independent kingdom. The high aristocracy were bitterly opposed
to Olivares and determined to break his power. They abandoned the court
en masse and pressed the king for his dismissal.
Olivares recognized the failure of state policy and resigned at the
beginning of 1643, leaving Felipe IV resolved to serve as his own chief
minister, encouraged by his correspondence with the noted mystic Sor María
de Agreda. He had a quick enough mind but was simply too self-indulgent
and undisciplined, given to a lechery remarkable even among seventeenth-century
kings, and by mid-1643, Olivares had been replaced with a new valido, his
own nephew (and enemy), the Conde de Haro. Haro was more discreet and prudent
than Olivares and never enjoyed the same overarching authority, for Felipe
IV devoted more personal attention to state affairs in the second half
of his reign than during the rule of Olivares. After the death of Haro
in 1661, the king directed the government himself for the remaining four
years of his life.
The resignation of Olivares brought no real change in policy or problems.
The financial burden continued to mount. By 1644, the crown's income was
pledged four years in advance, bringing further exactions on the shriveled
Castilian economy. Still, there was no compromise in the objectives of
royal policy. In 1643, an underequipped Spanish army was destroyed with
great loss at Rocroi near the northern French border, the first disastrous
field defeat suffered by [316] Spanish infantry since the union
of the crowns. Though the southern Netherlands held fast, Dunkirk was lost
in 1646. In 1647-1648, there was a major revolt in Naples and Sicily, where
taxes had recently been raised, that was somewhat like the Catalan rebellion.
This led to yet another suspension of payments and a new forced debt conversion
by the crown. When the Thirty Years' War was finally brought to an end
in Germany in 1648, the Spanish crown was forced after enormous expense
and losses to recognize the obvious. It signed a separate peace conceding
the independence of Holland, bringing seventy years of warfare against
that power to an end.
Yet the war with France remained. The French crown was itself seriously
weakened by the outbreak of a major civil war (the Fronde), but Spain lacked
the strength to exploit this opportunity beyond regaining Dunkirk and ending
the Catalan revolt. A new round of devaluation and attendant inflation
was resorted to which, together with a major crop failure, resulted in
some of the worst suffering of the century, and it was at this time that
the Pendón verde riot broke out in Seville. Another partial
bankruptcy was declared in 1652. The only fiscal reform of the 1650's was
the extension of taxation to pensions and honors that had been granted
to the upper classes by the crown, but before long it was common practice
to evade this impost.
With the Franco-Spanish conflict stalemated, England entered the struggle
aggressively in 1654 by seizing Jamaica and preparing a fullscale naval
offensive against Spain. In 1656 and 1657, major portions of the American
treasure fleets were seized by the English, who put the peninsula under
a partial blockade for nearly two years. Nevertheless, in 1656 Spanish
troops won an important victory at Valenciennes--the last they would ever
win in northern Europe--and Felipe IV had an opportunity to make a compromise
peace with a France that was also weary of the long contest. This he spurned,
still hoping for a decisive victory, though his advisers urged him to accept
a graceful withdrawal from the war.
By this time Spanish resources, both financial and human, were almost
exhausted. In June 1658, the combined French and English forces defeated
the Spanish army on the northern French front, recapturing Dunkirk. The
Portuguese, emboldened by Spanish weakness, seized the offensive, invaded
Extremadura, and besieged Badajoz. Bled white by a quarter-century of warfare,
Spain possessed scarcely enough men to defend her own frontiers. Galicia,
the most heavily populated region of Castile, had already been heavily
recruited. The Portuguese front was left largely to the amateur militia
of the Extremaduran towns, who were untrained, ineffective, and reported
in increasingly short numbers. The siege of Badajoz was finally [317]
lifted in October by a force of 15,000 sent from Madrid. This army then
pursued the retreating Portuguese across the border and itself laid siege
to the Portuguese town of Elvas. About 20 percent of its effectives promptly
deserted, and a new Portuguese army routed the Spanish, who left 4,000
casualties behind. In the Spanish Netherlands, the enemy front had advanced
almost to the gates of Brussels. There were no reinforcements to send,
and not enough naval strength to transport them had they existed. Even
within Spain, new military units were filled mainly with recruits from
Spanish Italy and with German and Irish mercenaries. The militarily skilled,
valiant, and patriotic elements of the aristocracy had themselves been
thinnned by casualties. They no longer provided leadership, and most of
the nobility simply dodged the call of duty.
Felipe IV had no real alternative to signing the compromise Peace of
the Pyrenees with France in 1659. Its terms were lenient. France retained
Rosselló and Cerdanya, now a center of diehard anti-Habsburg Catalan
emigres, and picked up the Artois district on its northeastern frontier,
as well as minor border concessions in the Spanish Netherlands. The main
consideration for the French crown was winning the hand of Felipe IV's
daughter, Maria Teresa, for the heir to the French throne, Louis XIV. a
valued match in view of the fact that the Spanish king had no male heir
at that time.
In his last years Felipe IV was extremely depressed and full of remorse,
certain as he was that God had punished his economically ruined kingdom
for its monarch's sins. Indeed, Felipe IV had never held any concept of
Spanish interests, but had relentlessly subordinated other considerations
to regaining the dynastic territories of the Habsburg crown, an enterprise
in which he failed completely. In the north, the crown retained the France
Comte and the southern Netherlands, which remained staunchly loyal to their
Habsburg sovereign largely because he allowed them almost complete autonomy.
These territories remained with the crown, however, not because of the
strength of imperial defense, which was now negligible, but because other
European powers were also eager to thwart French expansion. The crown's
original goals--complete control over the Low Countries and Habsburg hegemony
in the Germanies, along with secure land communications from Spanish Italy
to the north--were all frustrated. Felipe IV's last consolation had been
that peace with France and England would leave him free to reconquer Portugal,
but even that was not to be. The border district of Extremadura was being
depopulated by the war, and Portugal gained new assistance from England.
The king's last years were a time of unrelieved defeat, and three years
after his death the independence of Portugal had to be officially recognized.
A male heir, the future Carlos II (1665-1700), was born to the royal
family in 1661. When his father died in 1665, Carlos II was only four years
old, and, moreover, a sickly, retarded child of less than average intelligence
who suffered from rickets. In his will, Felipe IV appointed his Austrian
queen to be regent for the minority of the new king, and also created a
Junta de Gobierno to serve as executive council for the crown. Doña
Mariana, the regent, was herself in a difficult situation as a woman and
foreigner, poorly educated, of only mediocre intelligence, and distrusted
by the powerful Spanish aristocracy. While at first cooperating with the
Junta, composed of nobles, church hierarchs, and leading state officials,
she looked for a personal adviser on whom she could rely and found one
in the person of her Austrian Jesuit confessor, Johann Nithard. He was
made a naturalized Spaniard and appointed to the Junta de Gobierno. Though
sincere and pious, Nithard lacked talent or preparation for government.
He was strongly opposed by royal officials and the aristocracy, not so
much for his inability as for the fact that he was the foreign appointee
of a foreign queen.
In 1667, Louis XIV launched the first of his aggressive wars against
the Spanish Netherlands, basing his claim to the territory on fictitious
inheritance rights of his Spanish wife. The "War of Devolution" lasted
only a year, thanks not to the feeble Spanish defenses but to the anti-French
alliance formed by England, Holland, and Sweden. In the settlement of 1668,
Spain was forced to make more territorial concessions to France in the
southern Netherlands. This further weakened the position of Nithard, who
lacked any support in Spanish opinion and was considered to be usurping
the role of the aristocracy and high royal officials, undercutting the
succession arrangements made by Felipe IV.
Nithard's chief rival was Felipe IV's most ambitious bastard, D. Juan
José de Austria. This dark, handsome prince was restless and intermittently
energetic, popular with the aristocracy and with Madrid opinion. He had
fought on many fronts in his father's wars, was indisputably Spanish, and
cut the figure of gallant and seducer of women that impressed society.
Forced from Madrid, D. Juan José gained a following in Aragón
and Catalonia by posing as a defender of regional fueros. Collecting local
military forces, he moved on Madrid at the beginning of 1669 and forced
the queen regent to send Nithard into exile.
This represented the triumph of the aristocracy in royal government,
[319] eliminating the supervision of a royal valido. Don Juan was
satisfied with appointment as vicar-general of Aragón and Catalonia.
From 1669 to 1673, the government was administered jointly by the queen
regent and the Junta de Gobierno. A new favorite emerged in 1673 in the
person of Fernando Valenzuela, a petty noble and adventurer, but Valenzuela
served mainly as personal confidant and patronage boss. He was not a true
valido in the sense of directing the government.
Carlos II was officially declared of age in 1675 when he reached fourteen.
By that time, however, it was clearer than ever that this pathetic prince
would never rule. The degenerate product of five generations of Spanish
Habsburg inbreeding, he remained in a permanent state of decrepitude, sick
more often than well, unable to lead a normal life or even to think clearly.
His face was so long and his jaw so malformed that he could not even masticate
food properly and he suffered continually from digestive disorders. He
was neurotic and superstitious in the extreme and dominated by priests.
Although later twice married he was unable to father children. The Junta
would have to govern for him, and the king would never do more than sign
papers, and even that but intermittently. His real adviser was the queen
mother, and it was she who arranged the dissolution of the Junta in 1676
and the appointment of Valenzuela as full valido and head of state affairs.
Valenzuela was given the tital of primer ministro of government,
the first time that such a designation was ever made officially by the
Spanish crown.
Within a matter of weeks, the high aristocracy declared their united
and unremitting opposition to this new valido. They were determined that
royal government would not be exercised by a favorite who failed to reflect
the interests of the nobility, and particularly not by an upstart of comparatively
modest birth. A joint manifesto was signed by twenty-four high aristocrats,
and at the beginning of 1677, D. Juan José crossed into Castilian
territory from Aragón at the head of 15,000 troops. Supporters of
the befuddled young king stood aside as the aristocratic faction, led by
D. Juan José, took over the government. The queen mother was banished
to Toledo, and Valenzuela was sent into colonial exile, where he later
died.
For the first time in the history of the united Spanish crown, the
nobility had taken control of the government from the king. Their leader,
D. Juan José de Austria, was hailed by ecclesiastical leaders [320]
and by much of common opinion in Madrid, and directed the government for
two and a half years. He operated simply as a dispenser of patronage to
the victorious aristocracy and persecutor of the former appointees of Valenzuela.
Thus the aristocracy came into almost complete control of affairs during
the reign of Carlos II, making a mockery of the strong monarchy of Fernando
and Isabel, Carlos I (V), and Felipe II. During the minority of Carlos
II and the first years of his formal reign, there was scarcely any attempt
at central state regulation, even in Castile. The only major institution
that might have matched the influence of the aristocracy, the church, was
entirely unable to. Though ecclesiastical income was great, most of it
was committed to specific church expenses, and the leaders of the Spanish
hierarchy had at their disposal only a fraction of the wealth of the grandes.
The wasteful style and attitudes of the high aristocracy made it impossible
for most of them to foster, or in many cases even to preserve, the wealth
derived from their estates, but new sources were always available from
government, which nobles controlled; during the financially prostrate reign
of Carlos II, the mercedes and honors taken from the royal treasury
reached a new volume, perhaps three million ducats a year, draining from
the government the last reserves with which it might have defended a tottering
empire. The aristocrats had no pity for the lamentable state of the crown's
affairs or the defense of the empire. The fact that their status was based
essentially on wealth did not mean that the shrinking economy would bring
a decline in their numbers. Instead, a quasi-monopoly of the sources of
true wealth enabled more and more of the middle-rank to rise. The 41 families
of grandes that were recognized in 1627 had been increased to 113 by 1707.
The apogee of the aristocracy coincided with the
nadir of the kingdom and the empire. While the remains of Spain's government
and economy were picked clean by the nobility, the empire suffered repeated
assaults from the voracious French monarchy of Louis XIV. This aggressively
expansionist state had nearly three times the population and four or five
times the wealth of Spain. The only hope of resistance lay in the fact
that the naked greed and aggression of Louis XIV roused the opposition
of the other major states of western Europe. In 1672, the French king launched
an invasion of both Holland and the Spanish Netherlands. Weak Spanish forces
were swept aside, while Catalonia was also invaded and French forces intervened
in Spanish Sicily, aided by another local rebellion. The northern powers
nonetheless fought the French military machine to a standstill, but in
the peace of 1678 Spain was forced to cede Franche Comté and a few
minor territories on the border of the Netherlands. [321] These
losses, humiliating but not actually important, came as the seventeenth-century
economic depression in Castile reached its depth. The government of D.
Juan José de Austria had neither a foreign nor a domestic policy
but existed on the basis of patronage to its supporters among the aristocracy.
Amid unrelieved defeat, general dissatisfaction, and political bankruptcy,
it ended with D. Juan José's death in September, 1679.
The depression hit bottom in the disastrous decade of 1677-1687, in
which the unhappy people of Castile were struck by every kind of economic
misfortune. The basic cause was the catastrophic weather. This was not
altogether unusual, for the severity and extremes of the Spanish climate
have always retarded agriculture, but the alternation of torrential rainfall
and great floods with years of extreme drought during that decade reduced
Castilian harvests to their lowest level in many generations. Andalusia
was the hardest hit, but famine was widespread in other parts of the kingdom
as well. Severe malnutrition encouraged another outbreak of plague, which
claimed another quarter million lives in those years.
Economic disaster was intensified by the severest monetary crisis of
the century. Inflation had continued, due mainly to the persistent depreciation
of currency by the government to lighten its debts. Between 1660 and 1680,
the price level in Castile increased nearly 65 percent and almost all the
coinage in circulation was copper vellon. Madrid had become the most expensive
city in Europe, and public complaints increased. Finally, in 1680, the
new royal government imposed drastic revaluation. Prices fell nearly 50
percent in two years, but the new money supply was totally inadequate for
commerce and finance, and much of the economy virtually ceased to function.
Taxes and bills could not be paid, producers now received minimal prices
for their goods, and the commercial economy went into a complete tailspin.
Many local districts had to revert temporarily to a barter system, for
lack of money. All this further depressed trade and production at a time
when new goods, food, and imports were more desperately needed than ever.
Particularly in the south, towns filled up with desperate, begging peasants
looking for the smallest scrap of relief. It was a time of misery unparalleled
even in seventeenth-century Castile.
Since the thirteenth century, the social and economic development of
Catalonia and that of Castile have moved according to markedly different
rhythms. The creative phase of the medieval Catalan economy came at a time
when Castile had just begun to build a modest base of urban manufactures
and finished production. The fifteenth century, which saw the rise of Castile,
was a time of decline in Catalonia, and during the sixteenth-century phase
of Castilian expansion, Catalan society remained comparatively static and
secluded.
Another reversal came again in the late seventeenth century, when Catalonia
became the first region to recover from the great economic decline. After
1652, the eastern principalities had complete autonomy under their regional
systems of law during what, as it turned out, was the last period of the
Aragonese constitutions. Several factors were responsible for Catalonia's
economic regeneration: a) the eastern principalities still enjoyed relative
monetary autonomy, and after a currency adjustment in the l650s Catalonia
was not affected by the brusque swings of inflation and deflation that
wracked the Castilian monetary system; b) nonetheless, during the years
1688-1699 Catalofha experienced a rather mild inflation, unaccompanied
by a rise in wages, that permitted a somewhat more rapid capital accummulation;
c) the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 stipulated freedom for French exports
into Catalonia and vice versa, opening the Catalan textile market to modern
competition that stimulated improvement in the region's own production
techniques and the quality of its textiles; and d) population growth and
lower taxes in the smaller towns stimulated a more rapid economic development
in them and in parts of the countryside than in Barcelona. Wine and brandy
exports increased markedly, and textile shops in some of the towns made
greater technical advances than did those of Barcelona. The Catalan capital
nevertheless remained the great commercial and financial center of the
principality. Maritime activity entered an expansive phase beginning about
1675 and grew rapidly in the l680s. During the final years of the century.
traffic in the port of Barcelona was almost twice as great as in 1600.
Some firms now dealt in extremely large volume, exporting Catalan goods
to western Europe and dealing in the American market by way of Cádiz
and Lisbon. Their growing interest in the commercial possibilities of a
developing Spanish America was a sign of an historic change in Catalan
interests and energies. After strong objections, the crown in 1674 removed
Catalan merchants dealing through Cádiz from the category of foreigners,
allowing them to trade on an [323] equal footing with Castilians.
Another sign of change was the significant contribution that a more prosperous
and cooperative Catalonia made to the crown during the second half of the
century, whereas before 1640 it had contributed very little.
The situation in the other two eastern principalities was less promising.
Throughout the century, Aragón stagnated under its regional fueros.
Its population did not increase appreciably, and no significant change
occurred in its society. The landed aristocracy retained its overwhelming
predominance, though now more embarrassed than before by the responsibilities
involved in the derecho de maltratar (the right to punish), and
there were no signs of new economic development. As for manufactured goods,
the principality became virtually a colony of France in the second half
of the century.
Valencia was scarcely any better off, for it did not recover from the
expulsion of the Moriscos, either in terms of population or agriculture,
until the middle of the eighteenth century. The economy of the city of
Valencia did begin to expand in the l660s, but the countryside, under more
stern seigneurial control than most of the rest of the peninsula, was slower
to respond. Peasants settling on ex-Morisco land were subjected to steep
feudalistic exactions. Resentment grew more intense toward the end of the
century as population expanded. The aristocratic oligarchy and church leaders
of Valencia were intensely jealous of regional rights, yet they refused
reform or greater rights to peasants on seigneurial domain. A semi-clandestine
peasants' league was founded in the Játiva region south of the city
of Valencia, and in 1693 its members refused to pay seigneurial dues. They
chose a sindic, or leader, for their syndicate and were assisted
by a few village notables. Their crudely organized force of 2,000 was labeled
by its chief the Eixércit dels Agermanats, recalling the great revolt
of 1520. This rebellion was put down rather easily, but bitter discontent
remained and flared once more during the Succession War that followed the
turn of the century.
The depth of the Castilian depression lasted from 1640 to 1685, and
during the l660s and l670s the quality of government declined further.
The point of reversal may, for convenience's sake, be put at [324]
about 1680. After that new efforts were made to improve government and
stimulate the economy. Catalonia was already recovering, and though there
was no similar revitalization in Castile, modest economic gains were made
in the l690s, lifting the Castilian economy out of the trough of the preceding
decade.
The restoration of government began early in 1680, when young Carlos
II appointed the duke of Medinaceli primer ministro. Medinaceli
was one of the wealthiest and most important of the grandes, but he was
neither vain nor overweeningly ambitious. Though lacking original ideas,
he was genuinely interested in commercial, financial, and colonial reform.
His government held fast to the drastic currency revaluation imposed by
the finance council, devastating though its short-term consequences were.
After this reform, and a corrective devaluation of silver in 1686, the
Spanish monetary system held steady for the remainder of the century and
beyond. Though there was some slight inflation after the mid-1680s, the
general price level stayed comparatively stable for the next fifty years.
Medinaceli also appointed a capable general secretary to assist the primer
ministro and prepare plans to increase colonial trade and revenue. The
government tried to stimulate commerce and discussed the reform of taxes,
though nothing was accomplished during Medinaceli's tenure, which coincided
with the trough of the Castilian depression.
The Medinaceli government, like its predecessors, was soon impaled
on the horns of French imperialism. After reports of the severe want in
Castile, Louis XIV deemed the moment propitious for another assault, invading
Catalonia and the Spanish Netherlands in 1683-1684. This aggression was
soon ended, but only after France received another pound of flesh from
the nórthern possessions, in this case the duchy of Luxemburg.
Economic and imperial misfortune forced Medinaceli to share power with
a new figure, the Conde de Oropesa, who became president of the Council
of Castile in 1684 and replaced Medinaceli altogether as primer ministro
in 1685. Like his predecessor, he had won office in large measure through
skill in personal intrigue and factional maneuver. Dynamic, able, and innovative,
Oropesa became the outstanding reformist head of government in seventeenth-century
Spain. Plans for tax reform were pressed. The government reduced expenditures,
cut the budget for the royal household, eliminated superfluous offices,
canceled some of the mercedes to the aristocracy, and drew up plans to
shift more of the fiscal burden from the lower to the upper classes, though
these plans were largely blocked. A general effort was made to reduce the
bureaucracy and the number of seats in state councils, as well as to control
the sale of offices. Oropesa also tried to arrest the parasitical growth
of the clergy, and in 1689 the hierarchy was asked to suspend temporarily
the ordination of new [325] priests. Oropesa thus met head on the
key problems of state finance and taxation and the waste of resources by
the three chief institutions of Spain--aristocracy, church, and state bureaucracy.
His government also upheld earlier reform measures of 1679 and 1682 that
encouraged immigration of skilled foreign craftsmen, reduced taxes for
manufacturers, and specifically affirmed that commercial and industrial
activity were compatible with aristocratic status. A Junta General de Comercio
was later set up to stimulate commerce and finance.
Oropesa made many powerful enemies, but his administration was a domestic
success and would not have ended when it did (1691) but for the latest
round of French aggression. This stemmed from the anger of Louis XIV over
the arrangement of Carlos II's second marriage (after the early death of
his first queen, a French princess) to Mariana of Neuburg, a German princess
related to the Austrian Habsburgs. The new invasion prompted the usual
anti-French coalition in western Europe, and the resulting War of the League
of Augsburg lasted from 1689 to 1697. It placed still greater pressure
on Spanish finance, and brought a new invasion of Catalonia as well as
defeats in the Netherlands and northern Italy.
During the l690s, royal government relapsed into weakness, confusion,
and disunity. The new queen dominated appointments, and there was another
scramble for lucrative positions as the state suffered through the remainder
of the decade without effective leadership. The only bright spot was the
peace treaty of 1697 ending the latest French war without territorial loss
to the Spanish crown.
The feeble and degenerate Carlos II survived until the age of thirtynine,
which was longer than many had expected. In his last years it became clearer
than ever that, second marriage or not, he would never produce an heir
to the throne. Since he had no younger brother, the succession would have
to pass through his sisters or a collateral line. One of his sisters, Maria
Teresa, was queen of France, and another had married Leopold I, the Austrian
Habsburg emperor. The issue thus resolved itself into the question of a
French Bourbon versus an Austrian Habsburg succession. After 1696, with
the king more and more decrepit and likely to die at any time, the contest
became acute. Though Louis XIV had invested much of the wealth and energy
of his realm in efforts to conquer Spanish domains on the eastern border
of France, he realized that any attempt to secure the entire inheritance
for a French prince would upset the balance of power and bring forth a
powerful international alliance against France. Similarly, he was [326]
determined to frustrate the development of a great, new pan-Habsburg
empire in western and central Europe, reminiscent of the territorial hegemony
of Carlos V, that would result if the two branches of the Habsburg crown
were reunited by an Austrian inheritance of the Spanish domains. Consequently,
at various times during the reign of Carlos II he negotiated three different
partition treaties with other European powers that attempted to provide
for a balanced division of the Spanish empire in Europe.
Such proposals infuriated the Spanish crown, for the only clear goal
that the miserable Carlos II retained was to transmit the entire inheritance
of the Spanish empire undivided to a capable successor. French and Austrian
diplomacy employed extreme pressure at the Spanish court, rallying factions
to each side, and this pulling and hauling completed the prostration of
government administration in the last years of the century. French interests
had the better of it for four reasons: a) the prestige of the Bourbon dynasty,
ruler of what was now the strongest state in Europe, compared with which
the Austrian Habsburgs were distinctly less impressive; b) general distrust
among most Spanish opinion, provoked by the intrigues and manipulations
of the German queen, Mariana of Neuburg, and of her German-Austrian favorites
and appointees at court; c) an increasingly strong desire for some kind
of renovation and new leadership, which it was felt that a successor from
the powerful new Bourbon state in France would more likely provide; and
d) the fact that the prime French candidate, Philippe, duke of Anjou, was
a younger grandson of Louis XIV and Maria Teresa, and hence removed from
the direct line of French succession. This would enable him to establish
himself as a separate and independent Spanish king, whereas the Habsburg
candidate, Archduke Karl, was a younger son of the reigning Leopold, and
the succession to his elder brother, Josef, was somewhat uncertain, raising
the possibility that a Habsburg heir might treat the Spanish domains as
a mere appendage to his central European empire. In October 1700, one month
before his death, Carlos II made his final will, leaving the Spanish crown
and all its empire to Philippe of Anjou on condition that he preserve it
undivided under a Spanish Bourbon monarchy.
The last years of the seventeenth century revealed certain signs of
recovery. The reforms of Oropesa, after about 1687, strengthened royal
finance and permitted a modest expansion of the fleet and the [327]
formation of several new military units to bolster Spanish resistance in
the War of the League of Augsburg. The economic resurgence of Catalonia
was fully apparent, and Valencian textile production and commerce were
also advancing. Levantine agriculture finally began to expand, for the
first time since expulsion of the Moriscos. Even in Aragón, a new
group of reformers had emerged who were trying to revive industry and commerce.
In 1684 they had finally managed to eliminate local toll duties within
Aragón. The commerce of the north Castilian ports was increasing
slowly, Basque iron production was expanding, and there was also a slight
growth in Andalusian wine exports. Some efforts were now being made to
encourage Castilian agriculture, and some of the secondary cities that
had formerly been productive centers and fallen into decline were now growing
once more in population
There were also signs of new intellectual stimulation. The principal
foreign influences came from the University of Montpelier just across the
French border and from scientists in Italy. The most important intellectual
center in Spain by the 1690s was the University of Valencia, which proved
receptive to new currents of learning from France and Italy. A new society
for the study of modern philosophy had also been formed in Seville, and
the basic problems of developing science in Spain were clearly analyzed
by Juan de Cabriada's Carta filosófico-médico-chymica,
published in 1687.
The overseas empire had held firm despite numerous assaults from a
variety of enemies. From among these vast territories, only the island
of Jamaica had been lost, while Spanish American society was beginning
to develop on the basis of its own strength. The Spanish colonial administration
had demonstrated surprising vigor. Despite venality and widespread sale
of offices, the Council of the Indies continued to function with a certain
amount of efficiency, and the colonial bureaucracy proved more able than
might have been expected.
Nevertheless, Castile in the 1690s remained socially and economically
depressed. Seville, whose population had declined greatly, was handling
only one-tenth the commercial traffic that it had registered at the beginning
of the century. Agriculture and manufacture in Castile, in general, remained
scarcely at the subsistance level. After further bad harvests in 1698-1699,
riots broke out in Madrid and several other cities. At that moment there
was promise of renewal and future achievement in Spain, but the country
had lost much ground compared to the advanced regions of northwest Europe
during the second half of the century, and the Spanish resurgence would
not be fully affirmed for half a century more.
The seeming paradox in the degeneration from the power and glory of
sixteenth-century Spain to the misery of the late seventeenth-century have
fascinated historical commentators for more than two hundred years. Since
the seventeenth century was the first great age of modernization for the
countries of northwestern Europe who became prototypes of modernism and
subsequently the leaders of European civilization, the contrast has usually
been drawn in terms of differences in economic function and moral values
between the societies of those lands and of Spain. Spanish society stood
in opposition, both figuratively and literally, to them. As for the reasons
for Spain's growing social and economic weakness, these have been understood
in their basic lines for more than a century, and recent scholarship has
only added details and sharpened comprehension of certain points.
Yet the Spanish experience appears much less anomalous when compared
with countries other than Holland, England, France, and Sweden. Only a
corner of Europe was actually "modernizing" in the seventeenth century,
and it might be argued that this region was out of step with the greater
part of Europe rather than vice versa. The Spanish pattern was very close
to that of all southern and eastern Europe and much of the center of the
continent as well. A refeudalization resulting in the expansion of the
numbers and power of the aristocracy, the decline of cities and the middle
classes, the deterioration of the situation of the peasantry, severe regional
and social revolts, economic stagnation, and the weakening of the state
or public power--these were common phenomena throughout half of Europe
in the seventeenth century. Even the advanced regions of Germany, among
the best developed in Europe in the early sixteenth century, had lapsed
into a kind of stagnation by the end of that century, and then were dealt
a further serious blow by the Thirty Years' War. The decline of the rural
economy of central and southern Italy in the seventeenth century was very
much like that of Spain, and the experience of the broad peripheral empires
of Poland and Muscovy in the east also reveals some striking similarities.
Poland, like Castile, developed in the Middle Ages as the strongest
bastion of Latin Christendom on one of the crucial frontiers of the continent.
The eastward expansion of the kingdom of Poland from the fourteenth century
paralleled the southward and transoceanic expansion of Castile, and the
union of Poland-Lithuania played a dynastic and expansionist function similar
to the union of the Castiíjan and Aragonese crowns and the Habsburg
succession in Spain. Polish society was also dominated by a militant warrior
aristocracy [329] engaged in a broad geographic expansion that during
the sixteenth century carried far eastward into the Ukraine. The Polish
elite were quite conscious of the historical comparison between Polish
expansion and imperial Spain: in the advance on Moscow in 1613 Polish aristocrats
likened themselves to the conquerors of Mexico and Peru. This imperial,
expansionist experience solidified the power of the aristocracy, which
usurped economic dominion in Poland to a degree at least as great as in
Spain. Indeed, in Poland, as in most of eastern Europe, the process developed
even further, as state and aristocracy imposed a second era of serfdom,
beginning in the sixteenth century, that progressively shackled peasants
to aristocratic estates and placed them under steep exactions. The opportunities
and importance of the towns and middle class correspondingly shrank. In
the early seventeenth century, aristocrat-dominated Poland became involved
in a series of major imperialist wars that wasted her resources, and was
shaken by the great Ukrainian revolt of 1648. With her economy unbalanced
and retarded, Poland then relapsed into a deepening stagnation in the second
half of the seventeenth century. The power of the nobility only increased,
eventually negating the sovereignty of the monarchy itself, destroying
national unity, and leading to the dissolution of Poland.
Farther east, the sprawling, backward Muscovite empire also underwent
an era of stagnation and decline in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. There, too, the situation of the peasantry greatly deteriorated
with the steady development of neo-serfdom. Throughout the eastern 60 percent
of the continent, the seventeenth century, in particular, was a time of
general social regression.
Seen against this panorama of rural decline and growing caste oppression
in most of Europe during the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the Spanish decline no longer seems so anomalous. Spanish society was at
least spared the disaster of the mass enserfment that retarded east European
development. By the end of the seventeenth century it could even display
a few minor foci of development on the northwest European pattern. In general,
the Spanish experience may be placed in a secondary category of stagnation,
but not total regression, that embraced most of southwestern and central
Europe.
The great differentiating factor in the case of Spain--and Portugal--was
the American empire. This provided a unique source of wealth in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries that might be compared with the new imperial
domains and serf labor of Poland and Russia in the same period. Though
it would be incorrect to say that the Castilian peasantry were spared only
because of the empire, it is nonetheless correct that the semiservile Indian
society of Spanish [330] and Portuguese America (or, perhaps more
correctly in the case of Brazil, the African slaves) constituted to a lesser
degree the Hispanic equivalent of the serf economy that provided the economic
surplus for the Polish and Muscovite states and their aristocracies during
this period. The divergence of Spain and Portugal from the pattern of modernization
being developed in northwestern Europe was fully apparent. Compared with
Europe as a whole, however, the Hispanic problems of backwardness were
not anomalous but to a greater or lesser degree common to most of the continent.
[348] The best introduction to seventeenth-century Spain is volume 2 of John Lynch's Spain under the Habsburgs, entitled Spain and America 1598-1700 (London, 1969). It should be supplemented with La sociedad española en el siglo XVII, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1964-70), an excellent social history by the chief Spanish specialist in that period, Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, who has also published an important volume of articles, Crisis y decadencia de la España de los Austrias (Barcelona, 1969). The classic studies by the great Spanish statesman, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, still retain their usefulness. See his Historia de la decadencia española (Madrid, 1854, 1911), and Estudios del reinado de Felipe IV, 2 vols. (Madrid, 1888-89, 1927); and also Martin Hume's The Court of Philip IV (London, 1907). José Deleito y Piñuela has written a series of seven books on Spanish life during the era of Felipe IV. Perhaps the best of these is La vida religiosa española bajo el cuarto Felipe (Madrid, 1952), but see also his El rey se divierte (1928), Sólo Madrid es corte (1942), and El declinar de la monarquía española (1947), all published in Madrid. The best history of court and government affairs under Carlos II is Gabriel Maura y Gamazo's Vida y reinado de Carlos II, 3 vols. (Madrid, [349] 1942); there is a superficial biography by J. Langdon Davies, Charles the Bewitched (London, 1962). J. A. Maravall's La teoría española del Estado en el siglo XVII (Madrid, 1944), helps to explain political attitudes. The only biography of Olivares is Gregorio Marañón's El Conde-Duque de Olivares (Madrid, 1952), primarily a psychological study. There are also useful monographs on the issue of the validos, aristocratic conspiracy, the "Jewish problem," and financial problems: Francisco T. Valiente, Los validos en la monarquía española del siglo XVII (Madrid, 1963); R. Ezquerra Abadía, La conspiración del Duque de Hijar, 1648 (Madrid, 1934); J. Caro Baroja, La sociedad criptojudía en la corte de Felipe IV (Madrid, 1963); Domínguez Ortiz, Política y hacienda de Felipe IV (Madrid, 1960); and J. L. Sureda Camón, La Hacienda castellana y los economistas del siglo XVII (Madrid, n.d.).
The Catalan rebellion is the subject of one of the major studies in
seventeenth-century Spain, John Elliott's The Revolt of the Catalans
(Cambridge, 1963). See also José Sanabre, La acción de
Francia en Cataluña (Barcelona, 1956); and Joan Regla, Els
virreis de Catalunya (Barcelona, 1962), and El bandolerisme catalá
del barroc (Barcelona, 1966). Social problems in the Valencia region
are treated in Regla's Aproxiniació a la história del
País Valencia (Valencia, 1968), and F. de P. Momblanch y Gonzálbez,
La segunda Germanía del reino de Valencia (Alicante, 1957).
S. García Martínez, Els fonaments del País Valencia
modern (Valencia, 1968), is a key work that deals with the Valencian
resurgence of the late seventeenth century.
Three basic studies in cultural history are Ludwig Pfandl's Spanische
Kultur und Sitte des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Kempten, 1924); R. Bouvier,
L'Espagne de Quevedo (Paris, 1936); and Carl Justi's Diego Velázquez
und sein Jahrhundert (Zurich, 1933). For science and the beginning
of modern critical philosophy, see J. M. López Piñero, La
introducción de la ciencia moderna en España (Barcelona,
1969), and O. V. Quiroz Martínez, La introducción de la
filosofia moderna en España (Mexico City, 1949).
The classic comparison between Spain and Poland in this period was
J. Lelewel's Parallèle historique entre l'Espagne et la Pologne
au XVI, XVII, XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1836). This thesis is updated
by M. Malowist, "Europe de l'Est et les Pays Ibériques: Analogies
et Contrastes," in the University of Barcelona's Homenaje a Jaime Vicens
Vives, vol. 1 (Barcelona, 1965), pp. 85-93. Janusz Tazmir, Szlachta
i konkwistadorzy (Warsaw, 1969), provides interesting examples of the
attitude of the Polish elite toward Spain.
1. A tonelada was equal to about three cubic meters.
2. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española en el siglo XVII, 1:47.
3. Los judíos en la España moderna y contemporánea (Madrid, 1961), 3:258-59.
4. Martin González de Cellorigo, Memorial de la Política (Madrid, 1600). This was one of the first and most incisive analyses of Spanish problems by the arbitristas of the period.