due to devastating epidemics and super-exploitation in underground gangs, and partly because of lode exhaustion, silver output began to contract. The decline from the peak of the previous century was initially a gradual one. But the composition and direction of trade between the Old and the New World was irreversibly altering, to the detriment of Castile. The colonial import pattern was switching to more sophisticated manufactured goods, which Spain could not supply, brought as contraband by English or Dutch merchants; local capital was being reinvested on the spot rather than transferred to Seville; and native American shipping was increasing its share of Atlantic freightage. The net result was a calamitous decrease in Spanish trade with its American possessions, whose total tonnage fell 60 per cent from 1606–10 to 1646–50.
In the days of Lerma, the ultimate consequences of this process still lay hidden in the future. But the relative decline of Spain on the seas, and the rise of the Protestant powers of England and Holland at its expense, were already visible. The reconquest of the Dutch Republic and the invasion of England had both failed in the 16th century. But since that date Spain’s two maritime enemies had grown more prosperous and powerful, while the Reformed religion continued to advance in Central Europe. The cessation of hostilities for a decade under Lerma thus merely convinced the new generation of imperialist generals and diplomats – Zuñiga, Gondomar, Osuña, Bedmar, Fuentes – that, if war was expensive, Spain could not afford peace. The accession of Philip IV, bringing the masterful Conde-Duque de Olivares to chief power in Madrid, coincided with the upheaval in the Bohemian lands of the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family: the chance to crush Protestantism in Germany and settle accounts with Holland – an inter-related goal, because of the strategic need to command the corridor through the Rhineland for troop movements between Italy and Flanders – now appeared before them. European war was thus unleashed once again, by proxy through Vienna, but at the initiative of Madrid, in the 1620’s. The course of the Thirty Years’ War curiously reversed the pattern of the two great bouts of Habsburg arms in the previous century. Whereas Charles V and Philip II had scored initial victories in the South of Europe and suffered eventual defeat in the North, Philip IV’s forces achieved early successes in the North only to experience ultimate disasters in the South. The size of the Spanish mobilization for this third and last general engagement was formidable: in 1625 Philip IV claimed 300,000 under his orders.26 The Bohemian Estates were crushed at the Battle of the White Mountain, with the aid of Hispanic subsidies and veterans, and the cause of Protestantism permanently beaten in the Czech lands. The Dutch were forced backwards by Spinola, with the capture of Breda. The Swedish counterattack in Germany, after defeating Austrian or Leaguer armies, was undone by Spanish tercios under the Cardinal-Infante at Nordlingen. But it was precisely these victories which finally forced France into hostilities, tipping the military balance decisively against Spain: the reaction of Paris to Nordlingen in 1634 was Richelieu’s declaration of war in 1635. The results were soon evident. Breda was retaken by the Dutch in 1637. A year later, Breisach – the key to the roads into Flanders – had fallen. Within another year, the bulk of the Spanish fleet was sent to the bottom at the Downs – a far worse blow to the Habsburg navy than the fate of the Armada. Finally, in 1643, the French army ended the supremacy of the tercios at Rocroi. Military intervention by Bourbon France had proved a very different matter from the Valois contests of the previous century; it was the new nature and weight of French Absolutism which was now to encompass the downfall of Spanish imperial power in Europe. For whereas in the 16th century, Charles V and Philip II had both profited from the internal weakness of the French State, by utilizing provincial disaffections to invade France itself, the boot was now on the other foot: a maturing French Absolutism was able to exploit aristocratic sedition and regional separatism in the Iberian peninsula to invade Spain. In the 1520’s Spanish troops had marched into Provence, in the 1590’s into Languedoc, Brittany and the He de France, with the alliance or welcome of local dissidents. In the 1640’s, French soldiers and ships were fighting together with anti-Habsburg rebels in Catalonia, Portugal and Naples: Spanish Absolutism was at bay on its own soil.
For the long strain of the international conflict in the North eventually told in the Iberian peninsula itself. State bankruptcy had to be declared again in 1627; the vellón was devalued by 50 per cent in 1628; a sharp drop in transatlantic trade followed in 1629–31; the silver fleet failed to arrive in 1640.27 The huge war costs led to new taxes on consumption, contributions from the clergy, confiscations of interest on public bonds, seizure of private bullion shipments, swelling sales of honours and – especially – seigneurial jurisdictions to the nobility. All these devices, however, remained inadequate to raise the sums needed for the pursuit of the struggle; for its costs were still borne virtually alone by Castile. Portugal yielded no revenues whatever to Madrid, since local subsidies were confined to defense purposes in the Portuguese colonies. Flanders was chronically deficitary. Naples and Sicily had contributed a modest but respectable surplus to the central treasury, in the previous century. Now, however, the cost of covering Milan and maintaining the presidios in Tuscany absorbed all their revenues, despite increased taxes, sale of offices and alienations of land: Italy continued to provide invaluable manpower, but no longer money, for the war.28 Navarre, 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