coalition, sending subsidies to all who would fight the imperial and Spanish forces. Now the conflict was out in the open, and each coalition began to mobilize even more troops, arms, and money. The language correspondingly became stiffer. ‘Either all is lost, or else Castile will be head of the world’, wrote Olivares in 1635, as he planned the triple invasion of France in the following year.13
The conquest of an area as large as France was, however, beyond the military capacities of the Habsburg forces, which briefly approached Paris but were soon hard stretched across Europe. Swedish and German troops were pressing the imperial armies in the north. The Dutch and the French were ‘pincering’ the Spanish Netherlands. Moreover, a revolt by the Portuguese in 1640 diverted a steady flow of Spanish troops and resources from northern Europe to much nearer home, although they were never enough to achieve the reunification of the peninsula. Indeed, with the parallel rebellion of the Catalans – which the French gladly aided – there was some danger of a disintegration of the Spanish heartland by the early 1640s. Overseas, Dutch maritime expeditions struck at Brazil, Angola, and Ceylon, turning the conflict into what some historians describe as the first global war.14 If the latter actions brought gains to the Netherlands, most of the other belligerents were by this time suffering heavily from the long years of military effort; the armies of the 1640s were becoming smaller than those of the 1630s, the financial expedients of governments were the more desperate, the patience of the people was much thinner and their protests much more violent. Yet precisely because of the interlinked nature of the struggle, it was difficult for any one participant to withdraw. Many of the Protestant German states would have done just that, had they been certain that the Swedish armies would also cease fighting and go home; and Olivares and other Spanish statesmen would have negotiated a truce with France, but the latter would not desert the Dutch. Secret peace negotiations at various levels were carried out in parallel with military campaigns on various fronts, and each power consoled itself with the thought that another victory would buttress its claims in the general settlement.
The end of the Thirty Years War was, in consequence, an untidy affair. Spain suddenly made peace with the Dutch early in 1648, finally recognizing their full independence; but this was done to deprive France of an ally, and the Franco-Habsburg struggle continued. It became purely a Franco-Spanish one later in the year when the Peace of Westphalia at last brought tranquillity to Germany, and allowed the Austrian Habsburgs to retire from the conflict. While individual states and rulers made certain gains (and suffered certain losses), the essence of the Westphalian settlement was to acknowledge the religious and political balance within the Holy Roman Empire, and thus to confirm the limitations upon imperial authority. This left France and Spain engaged in a war which was all to do with national rivalries and nothing to do with religion – as Richelieu’s successor, the French minister, Mazarin, clearly demonstrated in 1655 by allying with Cromwell’s Protestant England to deliver the blows which finally caused the Spaniards to agree to a peace. The conditions of the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659) were not particularly harsh, but in forcing Spain to come to terms with its great archenemy, they revealed that the age of Habsburg predominance in Europe was over. All that was left as a ‘war aim’ for Philip IV’s government then was the preservation of Iberian unity, and even this had to be abandoned in 1668, when Portugal’s independence was formally recognized.15 The continent’s political fragmentation thus remained in much the same state as had existed at Charles V’s accession in 1519, although Spain itself was to suffer from further rebellions and losses of territory as the seventeenth century moved to its close (see Map 4) – paying the price, as it were, for its original strategical overextension.
Strengths and Weaknesses of the Habsburg Bloc
Why did the Habsburgs fail?16 This issue is so large and the process was so lengthy that there seems little point in looking for personal reasons like the madness of the Emperor Rudolf II, or the incompetence of Philip III of Spain. It is also difficult to argue that the Habsburg dynasty and its higher officers were especially deficient when one considers the failings of many a contemporary French and English monarch, and the venality or idiocy of some of the German princes. The puzzle appears the greater when one recalls the vast accumulation of material power available to the Habsburgs:
Charles V’s inheritance of the crowns of four major dynasties, Castile, Aragon, Burgundy, and Austria, the later acquisitions by his house of the crowns of Bohemia, Hungary, Portugal, and, for a short time, even of England, and the coincidence of these dynastic events with the Spanish conquest and exploitation of the New World – these provided the house of Habsburg with a wealth of resources that no other European power could match.17
Given the many gaps and inaccuracies in available statistics, one should not place too much reliance upon the population figures of this time; but it would be fair to assume that about one-quarter of the peoples of early-modern Europe were living in Habsburg-ruled territory. However, such crude totals* were less important than the wealth of the regions in question, and here the dynastic inheritance seemed to have been blessed with riches.
There were five chief sources of Habsburg finance, and several smaller ones. By far the most important was the Spanish inheritance of Castile, since it was directly ruled and regular taxes of various sorts (the sales tax, the ‘crusade’ tax on religious property) had been conceded to the crown by the Cortes and the church. In addition, there were the two richest trading areas of Europe – the Italian states and the Low Countries – which could provide comparatively large funds from their mercantile wealth and mobile capital. The fourth source, increasingly important as time went on, was the revenue from the American empire. The ‘royal fifth’ of the silver and gold mined there, together with the sales tax, custom duties, and church levies in the New World, provided a vast bonus to the kings of Spain, not only directly but also indirectly, for the American treasures which went into private hands, whether Spanish or Flemish or Italian, helped those individuals and concerns to pay the increasing state taxes levied upon them, and in times of emergency, the monarch could always borrow heavily from the bankers in the expectation of paying off his debts when the silver fleet arrived. The fact that the Habsburg territories contained the leading financial and mercantile houses – those of southern Germany, of certain of the Italian cities, and of Antwerp – must be counted as an additional advantage, and as the fifth major source of income.18 It was certainly more readily accessible than, say, revenues from Germany, where the princes and free cities represented in the Reichstag voted money to the emperor only if the Turks were at the door.19
In the postfeudal age, when knights were no longer expected to perform individual military service (at least in most countries) nor coastal towns to provide a ship, the availability of ready cash and the possession of good credit were absolutely essential to any state engaged in war. Only by direct payment (or promise of payment) could the necessary ships and naval stores and armaments and foodstuffs be mobilized within the market economy to furnish a fleet ready for combat; only by the supply of provisions and wages on a reasonably frequent basis could one’s own troops be steered away from mutiny and their energies directed toward the foe. Moreover, although this is commonly regarded as the age when the ‘nation-state’ came into its own in western Europe, all governments relied heavily upon foreign mercenaries to augment their armies. Here the Habsburgs
