Aragon and Valencia at best consented to a few small grants to the dynasty in its emergency. Catalonia – the richest region of the Eastern kingdom and the most parsimonious province of all – paid nothing, permitting no taxes to be spent, and no troopsto be deployed, outside its borders. The historical price of the failure of the Habsburg State to harmonize its realms was already patent by the outset of the Thirty Years’ War. Olivares, aware of the acute dangers in the lack of any central integration to the State system, and the isolated and perilous eminence of Castile within it, had proposed a far-reaching reform of the whole structure to Philip IV in a secret memorandum of 1624 – effectively a simultaneous equalization of fiscal charges and political responsibilities between the different dynastic patrimonies, which would have given Aragonese, Catalan or Italian nobles regular access to the highest positions in royal service, in exchange for a more even distribution of the tax-burden and the acceptance of uniform laws modelled on those of Castile.29 This blueprint for a unitary Absolutism was too bold to be released publicly, for fear of both Castilian and non-Castilian reaction. But Olivares also drew up a second and more limited project, the ‘Union of Arms’, for the creation of a common reserve army of 140,000 to be maintained and recruited from all the Spanish possessions, for their common defense. This scheme, officially proclaimed in 1626, was thwarted on all sides by traditional particularism. Catalonia, above all, refused to have anything to do with it, and in practice it remained a dead letter.
But as the military conflict wore on, and the Spanish position worsened, pressure to extract some Catalan assistance for it became increasingly desperate in Madrid. Olivares therefore determined to force Catalonia into the war by attacking France across its southeastern frontiers in 1639, thereby putting the uncooperative province defacto into the front-line of Spanish operations. This reckless gamble back-fired disastrously.30 The morose and parochial Catalan nobility, starved of remunerative offices and dabbling in mountain banditry, were enraged by commanders from Castile and casualties suffered against the French. The lower clergy whipped up regionalist fervour. The peasantry, harried by billeting and requisitioning, rose against the troops in a spreading insurrection. Rural labourers and unemployed streaming into the towns set off violent riots in Barcelona and other cities.31 The Catalan Revolution of 1640 fused the grievances of all social classes except a handful of magnates into an unstoppable explosion. Habsburg power in the province disintegrated. To head off the dangers of popular radicalism, and block a Castilian reconquest, the nobility and patriciate invited in a French occupation. For a decade, Catalonia became a protectorate of France. Meanwhile, on the other side of the peninsula, Portugal had staged its own revolt within a few months of the Catalan rebellion. The local aristocracy, resentful of the loss of Brazil to the Dutch and assured of the anti-Castilian sentiments of the masses, had no difficulty in reasserting its independence, once Olivares had made the blunder of concentrating royal armies against the heavily defended East, where Franco-Catalan forces were victorious, rather than the comparatively demilitarized West.32 In 1643, Olivares fell; four years later, Naples and Sicily in their turn threw off Spanish rule. The European conflict had exhausted the exchequer and economy of the Habsburg Empire in the South, and disrupted its composite polity. In the cataclysm of the 1640’s, as Spain went down to defeat in the Thirty Years’ War, and bankruptcy, pestilence, depopulation and invasion followed, it was inevitable that the patchwork union of dynastic patrimonies should come apart: the secessionist revolts of Portugal, Catalonia and Naples were a judgment on the infirmity of Spanish Absolutism. It had expanded too fast too early, because of its overseas fortune, without ever having completed its metropolitan foundations.
Ultimately, the outbreak of the Fronde saved Catalonia and Italy for Spain. Mazarin, himself distracted by domestic turmoil, relinquished the one, after the Neapolitan baronage had rediscovered loyalty to its sovereign in the other, where the rural and urban poor had erupted in a menacing social revolt, and French intervention was abbreviated. War, however, dragged on for another fifteen years even after the recovery of the last Mediterranean province – against the Dutch, the French, the English, the Portuguese. Further losses in Flanders occurred in the 1650’s. The slow-motion attempt to reconquer Portugal lasted longest of all. By now the Castilian hidalgo class had lost all appetite for the field; military disillusion was universal among Spaniards. The final border campaigns were mostly fought with Italian conscripts, eked out with Irish or German mercenaries.33 Their only result was to ruin much of Estremadura, and reduce government finances to a nadir of futile manipulation and deficit. Peace and Portuguese independence were not accepted until 1668. Six years later, the Franche-Comté was lost to France. The paralytic reign of Charles II witnessed the re-capture of central political power by the grandee class, which secured direct domination of the State with the aristocratic putsch of 1677, when Don Juan José of Austria – its candidate for the regency – successfully led an Aragonese army on Madrid. It also experienced the darkest economic depression of the century, with a shut-down of industries, collapse of currency, reversion to barter exchange, food shortages and bread riots. Between 1600 and 1700 the total population of Spain fell from 8,500,000 to 7,000,000 – the worst demographic setback in the West. The Habsburg State was moribund by the end of the century: its demise in the person of its spectral ruler Charles II, El Hechzado, was awaited in every chancellery abroad as the signal at which Spain would become the spoils of Europe.
In fact, the outcome of the War of the Spanish Succession renovated Absolutism in Madrid, by destroying its unmanageable outworks. The Netherlands and Italy were lost. Aragon and Catalonia, which had rallied to the Austrian candidate, were defeated and subdued in the civil war within the international war. A new French dynasty was installed. The Bourbon monarchy achieved what the Habsburgs had failed to do. The grandees, many of whom had defected to the Anglo-Austrian camp in the War of Succession, were subordinated and excluded from central power. Importing the much more advanced experience and techniques of French Absolutism, expatriate civil servants created a unitary, centralized State in the 18th century.34 The Estates systems of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia were eliminated, and their particularism suppressed. The French device of royal intendants for the uniform government of provinces was introduced. The Army was drastically recast and professionalized, with a semi-conscript base and a rigidly aristocratic command. Colonial administration was tightened and reformed: freed from its European possessions, the Bourbons showed that Spain could run its American Empire competently and profitably. In fact, this was the century in which a cohesive España – as opposed to the semi-universal monarquía española of the Habsburgs – finally and gradually emerged.35
Yet the work of the Caroline bureaucracy which rationalized the Spanish State could not revitalize Spanish society. It was now too late for a development comparable to that of France or England. The once dynamic Castilian economy had received its quietus under Philip IV. Although there was a real demographic recovery (population rose from 7 to ii million) and a considerable extension of cereal cultivation in Spain, only 60 per cent of the population was still employed in agriculture, while urban manufactures had been virtually excised from the metropolitan social formation. After the collapse of the American mines in the 17th century, there was a new boom of Mexican silver in the 18th century, but in the absence of any sizeable domestic industry, it probably benefited French expansion more than Spanish.36 Local capital was diverted, as before, into public rents or land. The State administration was numerically not very large, but it remained rife with empleomanía, the job-hunting pursuit of office by the impoverished gentry. Vast latifundia worked by gang labour in the South provided the fortunes of a stagnant grandee nobility, parked in provincial capitals.37 From the mid-century onwards, there was a reflux of the higher nobility into Ministerial office, as ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ factions struggled for power in Madrid: the tenure of the Aragonese aristocrat Aranda corresponded to the high point of direct magnate influence in the capital.38 The political impetus of the new order, however, was now running out. By the end of the century, the Bourbon court was itself in a full decadence reminiscent of its predecessor, under the slack and corrupt control of Godoy, the last privado. The limits of the 18th century revival, whose epilogue was to be the ignominious collapse of the dynasty in 1808, were always evident in the administrative structure of Bourbon Spain. For even after the Caroline reforms, the authority of the Absolutist State stopped
