When Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were engaged in 1469, many of the opposing voices thought that the marriage would not end well. The following year, the genuinely loving couple had their first daughter, Isabella, who were followed by Juana, Catherine, Maria, and several children who did not live to adulthood.
Catherine married Prince Arthur of Wales and remarried Henry, who was still the crown prince after Arthur's early death, and the couple's fertility problems will bring a bloody storm to Britain; In her later years, Juana, who had fallen into madness, married the Duke of Burgundy, Philip of the Habsburgs, and their eldest son, Charles, never imagined that one day he would inherit his grandfather's kingdom, and he did not learn Spanish and thus incurred a lot of complaints there.
Isabella and Mary became queens of King Manuel I of Portugal, first Isabella and then Maria, whose daughter (also known as Isabella) became queen of Charles V. The confusing web of royal marriages has not only become a rich source of literary and artistic creation** (such as the 2001 film Juan La Loca), but also made it impossible for European countries to cut off each other in terms of development.
The result of a series of carefully planned plans.
It would take Europe to another era, more so than the reluctant Indians or the addictive chocolates that Columbus brought from the Americas in 1492.
For historians, a group of people who rarely agree on this, the complex relations between European royal families were only a stepping stone to enriching the library collection, in the eyes of the eternally greedy scholar, from the late fifteenth century to the sixteenth centuryPyreneesAt the other end of the mountains, the primitive world of animal husbandry seems to be heading towards an empire. It took her a century or so to grow to the top, but within a century she had fallen from superpower to second-rate power, leaving only a few fashionably dressed, Cervantes Don Quixote and novelties from the colonies to occasionally amaze the elite of England and France, and nothing more than the powerful behemoths of the sixteenth century.
There is a great deal of literature on the decline of the Spanish Empire, ranging from humanist scholars of the time, travelers, and diplomats, to historians such as Earl J. in the early twentieth centuryHamilton (1899-1989) and the reinterpretation of the history of the Spanish Empire by chronographers show that the concern for this subject is long-lasting.
Hamilton presents the rise and fall of empires in an elegiac manner, making the reader read as if the suffering faced by the Spanish people, the decline of the royal family, and the inevitable loss of glory. This argument was seen centuries ago in authors such as diplomatic envoys, and it can be seen that the concept of Spanish decline (decline or decadencia) has been around for a long time.
Recently, different voices have revisited the concept of the decline of Spain, and these studies have attempted to reinterpret the process of decline and its many factors based on more precise data, and even put forward a very different view of the use of the term "decline", as Henry Kamen (1936-) argues in his work, why did the Spanish Empire never recover after its decline? The so-called decline should be accompanied by another rise, but Spain did not happen to have a new rise, so he doubted whether the decline could be used to properly explain the phenomena of Spain in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
By using historical sources from 1680 to 1700 that have not been studied in the past, Kamen's argument sheds new light on the main line of discussion of the decline of the past, and makes the researcher rethink the question of whether the phenomenon of decline was real in the Spanish Empire in the late sixteenth century, or was it the result of the misunderstanding of the concept of decline and confusion between Castile and other kingdoms, Spain itself and her subjects? In the following, I will analyze the works of Hamilton, John Elliott (1930-), and Kamen, trying to find out the common views and differences between the three views on the decline of the Spanish Empire, and finally organize the evolution of research directions and perspectives in the twentieth century.
Back in the summer of 1492, what is traditionally seen as the rise of Spain, or the Kingdom of Castile. Columbus and his fleet prepared to leave for India, and he sincerely believed that sailing west would reach a paradise full of spices.
Unfortunately, Columbus didn't find much ** and spices in his discovery of India, but more seafaring would make the Americas a paradise for these conquistadors. The entry of resources from the Americas transformed Spain from a poor pastoral region into a land of abundance, albeit only in cities and ports.
The population of the Iberian Peninsula also increased significantly at this time, but it is estimated that in the 16th century the Iberian Peninsula had about 7.5 million people, and Castile had 6.5 million people. Populations flocked to cities such as Serbia (Seville) in an attempt to travel to the Americas to gain vast wealth that could not be obtained on the mainland.
In 1516, Charles and his mother Juana (who by this time suffered from severe mental illness) came to Spain to succeed his maternal grandfather Ferdinand II, and was subsequently elected Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V.
Charles V's residence was not fixed, nor was there a permanent palace, he often traveled around the empire, and even stayed in Spain for short, not once did he stay there for more than ten years before his abdication. For this reason, the Spanish bureaucracy had to be able to function while the king was away.
Thus, the ** organization of Charles V inherited the Castilian system of the past and developed into an effective bureaucratic system, without the king himself intervening much, and he did not have the time or the will to intervene excessively. In 1555, when the old and new religions were irretrievable, Charles V relinquished his rule in discouragement, and the throne of Spain was succeeded by his only son, Philip.
The great difference in the reign of these two kings led to the concentration of Castilian government in the time of Philip II on the king. Spain under Philip II became a continental power, however, under the glory, Spain has borne multiple burdens of diplomacy and war since Charles V, and the foundation of the empire has not yet been solid, such as the economy is still dominated by the export of raw materials in exchange for foreign goods, factional conflicts in the ** institutions, and the financial situation is gradually falling into a bottleneck. Spain at this time was as large and fragile as a giant with clay feet. In Spain, later in the reign of Philip II, signs of Castile decline were already visible on the wall.
From the research of the three scholars, it can be found that they still habitually divide the Spanish problem into three parts: population, economy, Moorish expulsion, and American colonies, among which Hamilton is the most special.
in Hamilton"the decline of spain"In this article, he devotes no other two historians to the incompetence of the kings after Philip II, which led to a decline in bureaucratic efficiency, and even uses the terms mediocrity and dissolute to describe the reigns of Philip III and IV. Although Hamilton's eloquent discourse laid the foundation for the study of the decline of Spain, Elliott was one of the new generations of scholars who had been unable to satisfy since the mid-twentieth century due to a lack of data, the demographic loss caused by the expulsion of the Moorish expulsion, the neglect of the economic situation of Spain itself, and the ambiguity in defining the term "decline".
In his eponymous work, Elliott analyzes Hamilton's references to the factors that contributed to the fall of the Spanish Empire.
From an economic point of view, Elliott argues that Hamilton focused too much on external influences such as the silver mines of the Americas when discussing the economic woes of the Spanish Empire, and ignored the state of Spain itself. At this time, the economy of the Spanish kingdoms was still in a state of low development, and most of them were exported to various countries in exchange for luxury goods, and such industries needed human supply, however, when Spain stepped into the European political arena, cultural changes also made most Spaniards reluctant to invest in labor production, and they hoped to become nobles, mostly through buying and selling official positions.
A large number of young men and women devoted themselves to religious affairs and entered the monasteries, which led to a decrease in the number of workers in Spain. It is true that the assets of the Kingdom of Castile in the sixteenth century were large populations, productive forces, and industries in the Americas, but the lack of historical data makes it difficult to describe the slow erosion of these factors, and it can be concluded that the demographic decline of Castile represented almost a decrease in the population of Spain as a whole.
In addition, the depletion of wealth in the Americas, in addition to the reduction of gold and silver mines, was also an important factor, that is, the gradual economic independence of the American colonies, which made the colonies not as much as in the past, and the demand for the products of continental life was not as great as before, which affected the industrial production of Spain.
On the issue of the expulsion of the Moors, Elliott argues that Hamilton overlooked the impact of the loss of these populations on Spain.
In it, Hamilton argues that the expulsion of the Moors was not enough to destroy the agriculture of the Iberian Peninsula, a race that rejected higher education, social privileges, citizenship, and legal equality as one of the most prominent in the country. Most of the expelled Moors, Hamilton writes, were mostly merchants and craftsmen, and were unlikely to be a great hazard to agricultural production.
According to Elliott, between 1599 and 1600, the plague had already deprived Castile and Andalusia of population, and the expulsion of the Moors exacerbated the severity of the labor shortage.
By the way, the population of Andalusia also increased significantly in the middle of the 16th century, with the arrival of the Castilians, who were unable to advance into the New World, and regarded it as the first city (el dorado) on the peninsula.
The number of people deported exceeds Hamilton's estimate of 100,000 in Elliott's article, and Hamilton clearly underestimated the impact of this series of expulsions, with 275,000 Moors already expelled from Spain in 1614 alone. In addition, Elliott also mentions that the Moorish expulsion from Castile was not of the same nature as the expulsion from other kingdoms, and that the Moors expelled from Castile were very urban residents, and their disappearance may have had a much greater impact on the Castilian economy than the agricultural areas of Aragon or Valencia. There is no clear evidence of whether the Moorish vacancies were filled by the Spaniards to restore the collapse of economic production.
In a vast line-up that examines and critiques Hamilton's work, Kamen's"the decline of spain: a historical myth?"Arguably the most dissenting voice in his work, he not only re-analyzes Hamilton's arguments, but also raises doubts about the decline of the Spanish Empire as a historical explanation. Kamen argues that the Decline doctrine itself has four holes.
The first is the ambiguity of defining the time of decline, which makes this idea a belief-like use in research. The second is that researchers often associate unrelated phenomena such as plagues, military defeats, or problems as the causes of the decline of empires, fatalistic as the overall presentation of collapse.
Although it is true that these factors together were the main causes of the decline of the Spanish Empire, it is true that we often unconsciously put these factors into the explanation of the reasons for the decline of the Empire without thinking about each other. The third is that some studies focus all the factors on the problem of Spain itself, without paying attention to the interaction between Spain and the rest of Europe.
Finally, there is the confusion between Castile and Spain, which we tend to think of as a representation of Spain as a whole, and tend to ignore the problems of the other kingdoms or whether the other kingdoms were in the same position as Castile was declining.
The four loopholes that Kamen has raised happen to be the blind spots of most previous studies, but his essay is just one of the many dissenting voices in the narrative of decline, and his rebuttals sometimes seem to have been written to refute the arguments of decline, giving the reader a sense of his strong view that the theory of decline is something he firmly opposes.
However, we should not ignore past studies of the facts of the fall of Spain or Castile, and the works of Hamilton and Elliott have shared the same views in presenting the problems of the Spanish Empire, which have been widely discussed over the centuries, such as the imperfection of economic development, the diminishing wealth of the Americas, and the expulsion of the Moors.
These factors are undeniably present, and Kamen's argument can be said to have emerged in order to correct the misunderstanding of the theory of decline by researchers.
The glory of the Spanish Empire faded into the past after the Thirty Years' War, and although reformers such as Lerma and Olivares addressed Spain's own problems, the inevitable involvement in the war made these good intentions impossible to realize, and even worse, and the kingdoms became increasingly unable to submit to Castilian hegemony.
The rebellions that began in the 1640s were showing the gradual decline of Castile's control over the kingdoms. As Elliott imaginative describes, Spain could no longer bluff at a time when France was gradually moving towards prosperity with Bishop Richelieu in power, like a patient finally taking his last breath dutifully.