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it was inevitable that the patchwork union of dynastic patrimonies should come apart: the secessionist revolts of Portugal, Catalonia and Naples were a judgment on the infirmity of Spanish Absolutism. It had expanded too fast too early, because of its overseas fortune, without ever having completed its metropolitan foundations.
Ultimately, the outbreak of the Fronde saved Catalonia and Italy for Spain. Mazarin, himself distracted by domestic turmoil, relinquished the one, after the Neapolitan baronage had rediscovered loyalty to its sovereign in the other, where the rural and urban poor had erupted in a menacing social revolt, and French intervention was abbreviated. War, however, dragged on for another fifteen years even after the recovery of the last Mediterranean province – against the Dutch, the French, the English, the Portuguese. Further losses in Flanders occurred in the 1650’s. The slow-motion attempt to reconquer Portugal lasted longest of all. By now the Castilian hidalgo class had lost all appetite for the field; military disillusion was universal among Spaniards. The final border campaigns were mostly fought with Italian conscripts, eked out with Irish or German mercenaries.33 Their only result was to ruin much of Estremadura, and reduce government finances to a nadir of futile manipulation and deficit. Peace and Portuguese independence were not accepted until 1668. Six years later, the Franche-Comté was lost to France. The paralytic reign of Charles II witnessed the re-capture of central political power by the grandee class, which secured direct domination of the State with the aristocratic putsch of 1677, when Don Juan José of Austria – its candidate for the regency – successfully led an Aragonese army on Madrid. It also experienced the darkest economic depression of the century, with a shut-down of industries, collapse of currency, reversion to barter exchange, food shortages and bread riots. Between 1600 and 1700 the total population of Spain fell from 8,500,000 to 7,000,000 – the worst demographic setback in the West. The Habsburg State was moribund by the end of the century: its demise in the person of its spectral ruler Charles II, El Hechzado, was awaited in every chancellery abroad as the signal at which Spain would become the spoils of Europe.
In fact, the outcome of the War of the Spanish Succession renovated Absolutism in Madrid, by destroying its unmanageable outworks. The Netherlands and Italy were lost. Aragon and Catalonia, which had rallied to the Austrian candidate, were defeated and subdued in the civil war within the international war. A new French dynasty was installed. The Bourbon monarchy achieved what the Habsburgs had failed to do. The grandees, many of whom had defected to the Anglo-Austrian camp in the War of Succession, were subordinated and excluded from central power. Importing the much more advanced experience and techniques of French Absolutism, expatriate civil servants created a unitary, centralized State in the 18th century.34 The Estates systems of Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia were eliminated, and their particularism suppressed. The French device of royal intendants for the uniform government of provinces was introduced. The Army was drastically recast and professionalized, with a semi-conscript base and a rigidly aristocratic command. Colonial administration was tightened and reformed: freed from its European possessions, the Bourbons showed that Spain could run its American Empire competently and profitably. In fact, this was the century in which a cohesive España – as opposed to the semi-universal monarquía española of the Habsburgs – finally and gradually emerged.35
Yet the work of the Caroline bureaucracy which rationalized the Spanish State could not revitalize Spanish society. It was now too late for a development comparable to that of France or England. The once dynamic Castilian economy had received its quietus under Philip IV. Although there was a real demographic recovery (population rose from 7 to ii million) and a considerable extension of cereal cultivation in Spain, only 60 per cent of the population was still employed in agriculture, while urban manufactures had been virtually excised from the metropolitan social formation. After the collapse of the American mines in the 17th century, there was a new boom of Mexican silver in the 18th century, but in the absence of any sizeable domestic industry, it probably benefited French expansion more than Spanish.36 Local capital was diverted, as before, into public rents or land. The State administration was numerically not very large, but it remained rife with empleomanía, the job-hunting pursuit of office by the impoverished gentry. Vast latifundia worked by gang labour in the South provided the fortunes of a stagnant grandee nobility, parked in provincial capitals.37 From the mid-century onwards, there was a reflux of the higher nobility into Ministerial office, as ‘civilian’ and ‘military’ factions struggled for power in Madrid: the tenure of the Aragonese aristocrat Aranda corresponded to the high point of direct magnate influence in the capital.38 The political impetus of the new order, however, was now running out. By the end of the century, the Bourbon court was itself in a full decadence reminiscent of its predecessor, under the slack and corrupt control of Godoy, the last privado. The limits of the 18th century revival, whose epilogue was to be the ignominious collapse of the dynasty in 1808, were always evident in the administrative structure of Bourbon Spain. For even after the Caroline reforms, the authority of the Absolutist State stopped at municipal level over vast areas of the country. Down to the invasion of Napoleon, more than half the towns in Spain were not under monarchical, but under seigneurial or clerical jurisdiction. The regime of the señoríos, a mediaeval relic dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, was of more directly economic than political importance to the nobles who controlled these jurisdictions: yet it assured them not only of profits, but also of local judicial and administrative power.39 These ‘combinations of sovereignty and property’ were a telling survival of the principles of territorial lordship into the epoch of Absolutism. The ancien régime preserved its feudal roots in Spain to its dying day.
1. The phrase is Vicens’s. See J. Vicens Vives, Manual de Historia Económica de España, pp. 11–12, 231.
2. J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469–1716, London 1970, pp. 111–13.
3. The Aragonese Kingdom was itself a union of three principalities: Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia.
4. Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 37.
5. The spirit of Aragonese constitutionalism was expressed in the arresting oath of allegiance attributed to its nobility: ‘We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than we to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws; but if not, not.’ The formula itself was perhaps legendary, but its sense was engraved in the institutions of Aragon.
6. For the work of Ferdinand and Isabella in Castile, see Elliott, Imperial Spain, pp. 86–99.
7. The only step towards monetary unification was the minting of three high-denomination gold coins of equivalent value in Castile, Aragon and Catalonia.
8. See J. A. Maravall, Las Comunidades de Castilla. Una Primera Revolución Moderna, Madrid 1963, pp. 216–22.
9. Maravall, Las Comunidades de Castilla, pp. 44–5, 50–7, 156–7.
10. J. Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, II, Oxford 1969, pp. 19–20.
11. Marx was aware of the paradox of Habsburg Absolutism in Spain. After declaring that, ‘Spanish liberty disappeared under the clash of arms, showers of gold, and the terrible illuminations of the auto-da-fé’, he asked: ‘But how are we to account for the singular phenomenon that, after nearly three centuries of a Habsburg dynasty, followed by a Bourbon dynasty – either of them quite sufficient to crush a people – the municipal liberties of Spain more or less survive? that in the very country where of all feudal states absolute monarchy first arose in its most unmitigated form, centralization has never succeeded in taking root?’, K. Marx and F. Engels, Revolutionary Spain, London 1939, pp. 24–5. An adequate answer to the question, however, escaped him.
12. G. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567–1659, Cambridge 1972, p. 6.
13. Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, I, Oxford 1965, p. 128: prices had also risen greatly in the interval, of course.
14. J. H. Elliott, ‘The Decline of Spain’, Past and Present, No. 20, November 1961, now in T. Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe 1560–1660, p. 189; Imperial Spain, pp. 285–6.
15. Lynch makes