augmentation and conservation of all empires and kingdoms.
Fifth … as [the Hebrew prophet] Daniel maintains … total dominion will be given to the saintly people of the Most High. [As we have seen,] the Spanish nation is God’s beneficiary in the Law of Grace [meaning the New Testament], and has assumed the place that the elect [the Jews] had in the time of Scripture [the Old Testament] because it has (like the Israelites themselves) conformed best to the rule of faith enunciated by St. Paul, according to which a Christian’s actions must be measured.
Sixth, [we can infer Spain’s messianic role from] the prophecies and prognostications [of the prophets Daniel, Obadiah, and others] concerning the diminution of the Ottoman house and the enlargement of that of Spain, which according to common knowledge are the two [houses] that aspire to the universal monarchy.… We have already seen fulfilled the first part of [these prophecies] in the marvelous expulsion of the moriscos (last vestiges of the Mohammedans), which the majesty of Philip III accomplished in 1610[;] we may rest assured that the second part [of the prophecies], concerning the ruin of the Turk will also be fulfilled. As Gregory the Great affirms, when many things are announced to us, it is a good sign to see many of them fulfilled, because [this means that] the others too will take their intended effect.27
Notwithstanding the hubris and messianic delirium of imperial power, the stark fact remained that Spanish political might rested on a relatively fragile economic base. Numerous events exposed and aggravated this problem during the seventeenth century.
Historians disagree as to what specific incidents triggered the so-called Spanish “decline” of the 1600s.28 However, there is little dispute about the existence of a multifaceted crisis with economic roots (or, more specifically, a chain of related crises) that brought Spain from its towering position as the military and religious hegemon of the western world to that of an impoverished, second-rate power.
Augured by the state’s bankruptcies of 1575, 1596, and 1627, the economic exhaustion of Spain was blatant by the end of the seventeenth century.29 Gold and silver imports from America diminished considerably throughout the latter 1600s, so much so that in 1654 even the royal court could not find adequate means to pay or feed all of its members.30
Perhaps the most obvious symptom of the crisis was the demise of Spain’s political supremacy in Europe. Downfall came principally via the revolt and secession of Portugal (1640), the signing of the Peace of Westphalia (1648), and the unfavorable conclusion of war with France (1659). The first of these events revealed that Hispania was a romantic illusion. The second event effectively ended the French wars of religion and gave the Dutch provinces their political and religious independence after a draining century of conflict with Spain. The third event confirmed a new balance of power in the continent as Spain ceded parts of Catalonia and the Netherlands to France, the new continental hegemon.31 The French and Portuguese conflicts were especially significant in that, unlike other imperial wars, they brought death and destruction to the Spanish mainland. Furthermore, both conflicts necessitated the conscription of thousands of Spanish civilians, since most of the country’s professional soldiers were fighting the empire’s other wars outside the Iberian Peninsula.32 For its part, the case of the United (Dutch) Provinces provided clear evidence that Spain was incapable of imposing Catholicism on its own imperial turf, much less across the European continent. Finally, all three episodes demonstrated that Spain could no longer shoulder its multiple imperial commitments in Europe.33
Aside from these and other geopolitical misfortunes, there were serious domestic crises that imperiled the political stability and cohesion of the Spanish realm at the end of the “Golden Century.” Regionalist sentiment and lordly recalcitrance erupted at a time when Philip IV and his chief ministers were attempting to harness the resources of all his Iberian subjects for the expensive task of maintaining the empire. From 1641 to 1652, in the midst of a heated war with France, Catalan peasants and burghers rose against the crown. Royal arms alone could not suppress the rebellion, which subsided only under the double impact of a plague and of French encroachment of Catalan territory. Also in 1641, and again in 1648, powerful lords instigated secessionist plots in Andalusia and Aragon. Both conspiracies failed when their leaders were discovered. Nevertheless, these episodes were like the northern revolt in that they revealed a volatile undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Castilian authority in general, and with the Habsburgs’ fiscal demands in particular. Unhappily for the Spanish crown, similar discontent inspired secessionist revolts as far away as Sicily and Naples in 1647 and 1648.34
It is not necessary to dwell here on the disasters of the seventeenth-century crisis in order to explain it. After all, the diminution of Spanish power was not the result of particular military or political setbacks. Rather, these setbacks were signs of a structural corrosion; specifically, they showed that the Spanish economy was not strong enough to sustain the country’s imperial role.
Spain’s economy had at least two fundamental defects that the boom of the 1500s did not eliminate. First, the country suffered from a dearth of cultivable land; second, it suffered from chronically low levels of entrepreneurial investment, especially in industrial ventures.35 In light of recent historiography on the Habsburg colossus, it is clear that historians have for too long exaggerated these and related deficiencies.36 Nevertheless, the consequences of the deficiencies cannot be wholly denied. For example, it is clear that by the seventeenth century Spain had developed an abject dependence on imported products. The country’s heavy reliance on foreign manufactures sometimes caused local industry to decline, particularly in provincial towns and in cities such as Toledo. In addition, the relative absence of a native class of capitalist investors, coupled with ballooning imperial expenses, made for constant governmental insolvency, a large fiscal debt, and the crown’s almost total reliance on the services of foreign financiers and on the sale of local jursidictions.37 To make matters worse, the scarcity of arable land heightened the country’s relative vulnerability to famine.38 When severe food shortages occurred, malnutrition left the surviving peasants and townspeople unable to resist epidemic disease. John Lynch has estimated that the total number of plague-induced fatalities for the period 1600–1700 was an astonishing 1,250,000.39 More than wars and emigration to the Indies, recurrent epidemics caused the decline of the total Spanish population from 8.4 million in the 1590s to barely 7 million a century later.40 It is not an exaggeration to say that, despite the politically motivated exaggerations of local petitioners to the crown, the seventeenth century saw the dramatic hemorrhaging of Spain.
To the picture of structural weakness and demographic loss we must add two key, exacerbating factors. First, large increases in royal taxation; second, the royally decreed expulsion of moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula in 1609–11.
Let us look at the first factor. Throughout the Early Modern Period, but especially during the seventeenth century, the Habsburg crown imposed increasingly onerous taxes on commoners in order to satisfy the demands of the imperial budget. The state thus deepened socioeconomic cleavages and effectively subsidized wasteful consumption at the royal court.41 More importantly, heavy taxation drove many peasants to destitution, out of the countryside, and toward urban centers, principally toward Madrid and Seville.42 The prospect of fiscal exploitation represented a serious, if ultimately surmountable challenge to the economic viability of Castile, where the land was generally arid and infertile relative to that of other regions.43 In the cities, former peasants and townspeople became part of a burgeoning mass of unemployed or underemployed city dwellers. Unhygenic slums grew at a vertiginous pace, making Spanish cities prime breeding grounds of disease.44
As for the second factor: The expulsion of the moriscos was a drastic action that virtually eradicated what Ibero-Catholic chauvinists had for years construed as a principal menace to the religious and physical “purity” of Christian Spain.45 Crucially, the mass eviction diminished Spain’s already limited productive capacities. A high proportion of the nearly three hundred thousand banished moriscos were agricultural
