31.3 Europe: a.d. 1601 to 1700  (Page 9/30)

Western europe

All of the Atlantic coast nations had overseas empires, but the rise of French and British enterprise was made possible by smooth cooperation between business capital and government administrations. In contrast to Spain's constant constraints of the market and confiscatory taxation of private capital, the northern nations set taxation limits and allowed total wealth, private and public, to expand. (Ref. 279 ) (Continue on page 958)

Spain

The Habsburgs had convinced the Castilian nobility that the Spanish, as the strongest, most orthodox and "purest" people in Europe, should police Germany and the Netherlands, control France and invade England

There was further enfeeblement by the Inquisition and by decline of Spanish industries because of high taxes. The only profitable enterprises seemed to be the making of cheap brandy, production of some cotton and some iron works, particularly in the Basque area where every village seemed to have a forge. Smelting was done with charcoal, which exhausted the forests. Overall, however, it was a period of industrial, commercial and financial failures, along with inadequate government, military defeats and some eleven general famines during the century. (Ref. 260 )

In the 1620s and 1630s a powerful Dutch West India Company cut the Spanish shipping lines and stopped the flow of silver from America and thus indirectly allowed French and English settlements in the Caribbean. (Ref. 8 ) The wool industry was gradually lost to German wool and imported cotton. By 1630 there was violence and revolt. The situation was certainly not helped by terrible epidemics of plague between 1647 and 1654 in which half the population of Seville died. In Galacia the Church and other land owners tried to draw in the land leases (see page 623) and the tenants were thrown into long, legal struggles.

Some migrated to America, Portugal and Madrid. (Ref. 213 ) War with France, which began as an offshoot of the Thirty Years War, continued on for 12 years after the Treaty of Wesphalia but finally ended in 1659 with the Peace of the Pyrenees, after which Spain was pushed back behind the Pyrenees for good and began sinking down to the level of a secondary power. Even so Spain did add to her overseas empire with the addition of the Philippine Islands.

There is little doubt but what religious issues played a great part in the decline of Spain. Besides the terrible effects of the Inquisition, Philip III's deep religious devotion was a great factor in that as he personally developed 9,000 monasteries he put 1/3 of the entire population in the church service and he left the government entirely to the Duke of Lerma. Intrigue, corruption and decline followed. By 1700 the male line of the Spanish Habsburgs died out. Leopold of Austria had trained his younger son, Karl, to be King of Spain, but due to the early death of the older brother Joseph, who was the Austrian-line successor, Karl had to take over Austria instead of Spain. The resulting vacuum resulted in the War of the Spanish Succession, starting in 1700 and carrying on into the next century.