Spain: A Unique History

Chapter 7: Decline and Recovery

7 Decline and Recovery 128 Spain is the only western European country for whom “decline” became an obsessive theme, first for foreign writers and then for Spanish historians and commentators. It is sometimes observed that the seventeenth century was a time of crisis and decline for the greater part of Europe—most of the south and east, and also much of the center. This is true enough, but the case of Spain has seemed more extensive and spectacular than those elsewhere, even though internal decline and destruction was probably in proportionate terms equally severe in the case of Germany, due to the Thirty Years’ War. To take a different example, the tsardom of Muscovy suffered a profound political and military crisis early in the century, but after some years recovered to become stronger than ever. More recently, Henry Kamen has challenged the idea that Spain declined, maintaining that Spain itself (as distinct from the Habsburg empire) had never risen very far in the first place. It is certainly correct that the literature on the “rise of Spain” is smaller than that treating the “decline of Spain.” Thus before considering decline, it seems legitimate first to ask the question—to what extent was there a “rise of Spain”? Skeptics point out that creation of what foreigners called the “Spanish Habsburg empire” was simply a product of contingency, a marriage alliance that yielded extensive dynastic crownlands. This was obviously the case, yet a closer reading indicates that there was indeed a “rise” of peninsular Spain itself (see chap. 5). From the fifteenth to the late sixteenth century, population increased to about 8.5 million and the economy expanded . This made possible increased military and overseas activity, the taxes of Castile providing for much of the cost of an enormous military program, as a tiny proportion of that kingdom’s population conquered the largest empire in world history. This was accompanied by the most extensive cultural flowering in any European country of that era. Thus there is no question that a major “rise of Spain” indeed took place, and the issue of decline is a fully relevant one, just as most historians have contended. Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who became one of the first modern historical specialists on the seventeenth century, at first concluded that the decline constituted a genuine decadence, though with further research, he retreated from that position. Later nationalist writers and historians insisted that it merely constituted a case of natural exhaustion following a protracted titanic enterprise. The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive. Virtually all historians agree that the principal sources of decline were the enormous strains of the endless dynastic wars, after 1640 further extended by the two major rebellions in the peninsula, whose great tax burden exhausted an already deteriorating economy, especially in Castile. The Spanish case was simply the most dramatic and extensive of what would later be called examples of “imperial over-reach” in European history. Many societies have been ground down by long and costly wars, but by the middle of the seventeenth century Spain seemed to reveal a deeper malaise than temporary fatigue. While it is true that the country would have had to have run faster than it had in the sixteenth century merely in order not to lose ground during the seventeenth century—a period of greater competition and development among the “modernizing” northwest European countries—it was unable to maintain even the pace of 1600. By the second half of the century the society and culture , not just the economy or the military, showed signs of decadence in the stricter sense of the term. The society of 1670–80 was weaker in every respect than that of a century earlier. Population loss was not relative but, for Castile, absolute, dropping by approximately a million people before beginning to recover in the last part of the seventeenth century. This was the worst period of epidemic disease in the country’s history , except for the Black Death of the fourteenth century, to which were added the effects of war, heavy taxation, economic decline, and extensive malnutrition. The accompanying economic decline began in a few regions as early as the 1580s, but had become generalized by the mid-seventeenth century. Reduction in the Atlantic trade was equally steep, and the shipment of silver bullion diminished in Decline and Recovery 129 much the same proportion. Similarly troublesome was the sharp rise...