Olivares was not blind to Spain’s mounting problems. He launched a number of reforms designed to strengthen Felipe’s monarchy. While in many ways smart and well-intentioned, they were also characteristically ambitious and expansive, and so provoked even more trouble for the king and his chief minister. By 1623 Olivares was proclaiming the need to reform the tax system, to end currency devaluations, to streamline the bureaucracy, and to eliminate excessive spending on luxuries. He also called for nothing less than a transformation of Spanish society: he hoped to make the Spanish entrepreneurial merchants more like the Dutch, and simultaneously to reduce the migration to cities that was undermining Spanish agriculture. The success of these reform proposals really depended on events abroad. Not only did Spain need peace to be able to rebuild itself internally, but Olivares needed to curtail the vast sums being spent on the military in order to get the monarchy’s financial house in order. Neither came about. As the war progressed and the hoped-for quick victory in Italy was dashed, the most regressive aspects of the tax system were increased, not abolished. Forced to raise ever more revenue, Olivares took steps that were ultimately counterproductive, such as seizing American silver shipments, selling more titles and offices to the nobility, and debasing the coinage.
The signature element of Olivares’s reforms was called the Union of Arms, and it was founded on a valuable insight. He wrote that Felipe IV should make himself truly “king of Spain” rather than just “king of Portugal, of Aragon and Valencia, and count of Barcelona,” that he should “reduce these realms that make up Spain to the style and laws of Castile.”3 This was not merely an attempt to subjugate all the other realms to Castile, but rather to tie the composite monarchy more tightly together so that the other realms would share the fiscal burden of world power more equitably with Castile. The inequity was serious. In the early part of the seventeenth century, Castile paid some three-quarters of all costs of maintaining the empire, while Portugal paid 10 percent, Naples 5 percent, and Aragon only 1 percent.4 Olivares’s plan was to institute a new property tax across all the realms that would help support a large reserve army. In return for this burden sharing, the people of these other realms would get greater participation in the empire’s governance than they currently enjoyed. The plan meant a significant reworking of the monarchy’s constitutional relationships. It therefore received a cold response. The realms apart from Castile regarded it as a Trojan horse for complete Castilian domination; the Catalans fought it with special bitterness.
Almost everywhere, in fact, Olivares’s reforms sparked resistance, which smoldered into the 1630s. The Portuguese refused to increase financial contributions even to help protect their possessions in Brazil. There were sporadic riots against the idea of union with Castile in various Portuguese towns in 1637, and the Portuguese nobility and merchant classes increasingly began to see the costs outweighing the benefits of belonging to the Spanish monarchy. The Catalans also refused any new subsidies and left Felipe fuming at their intransigence. Rebellion there, too, was brewing. The Union of Arms was not a complete failure, since Naples and the Spanish Netherlands did increase their contributions to the crown. It is perhaps unlikely that the Union would have solved Spain’s problems of overstretch, even had the plan been realized as fully as Olivares hoped. It was common in the seventeenth century that provinces would insist upon their contractual relationship to the crown as justification for resistance to growing royal power. The inability to increase the monarchy’s cohesion (and hence the effectiveness of the monarch’s government) was a major long-term weakness for the dynasty. But Olivares’s response to that resistance—intimidation and threats taking precedence over negotiation—provoked serious short-term problems for his own leadership. Besides the growing antagonism in Portugal and Catalonia, his impatient and hectoring nature was making enemies within Felipe’s court.
Spain’s financial problems motivated truces with England and France in the first years of the 1630s. Nonetheless, Felipe continued to send money and men to help his Austrian cousins in their fight against the Swedes and the German Protestants. In 1634 Felipe’s and Ferdinand II’s armies won a stunning victory over the Swedes at Nördlingen. This scared Richelieu sufficiently that the years of on-again, off-again French-Spanish clashes now burst into open war in 1635. This was terrible news for both Felipe and Olivares, since it meant a full commitment from their most dangerous enemy; by the late 1630s Spain was fighting a true world war. Spanish and Austrian troops launched an invasion of France in 1637 that failed to make much headway, and though the French won no major victories, a series of lesser defeats took their toll on Spain’s power. The Dutch retook Breda in 1637. In 1638 the fortress town of Breisach was lost, which cut the vital “Spanish Road” linking Habsburg possessions from Milan to Brussels. Reinforcements for the war against the Dutch now had to arrive by sea. In 1639 the Dutch beat a Spanish fleet at the Battle of the Downs, and in 1640 repelled a combined Spanish-Portuguese fleet in Brazil. Still, Spain’s setbacks have to be set in perspective. It has been estimated that Felipe could put 300,000 men in the field in the 1630s, compared to only 150,000 for France.5 But because Spanish armies were committed on so many fronts, overwhelming force could not be focused at any one point. Moreover, increasing taxes, more currency devaluation, and declining silver shipments were all sapping Spain’s strength at home. Olivares began to seek peace in these years. But in 1640 Felipe and his minister endured two brutal blows to the dynasty’s prestige and the monarchy’s war effort, the revolts in Catalonia and Portugal.
Catalonia was on the front line of the war with France, yet the province repeatedly balked at contributing money and troops to its own defense. Olivares dispatched an army to fight the French but also force a subsidy from the Catalans. This only exacerbated widespread grievances in Catalonia over such things as Olivares’s reform demands and the hardships of the long war. In 1640 peasants rose up and attacked the royal troops, and rebels murdered Felipe’s viceroy. They then turned to France for help, and in January 1641 declared Louis XIII the new count of Barcelona. The situation rapidly deteriorated into a civil war as poor people in the countryside and the towns turned on the aristocracy.
Many of the nobles in fact remained loyal to Felipe; without French help there was no realistic possibility that Catalonia would have split from Spain. But the chaos came at a moment when Felipe and Castile were too weak to suppress the rebellion easily. It took more than ten years before the province was pacified. By the 1650s a plague had ravaged the countryside and France, now under Mazarin’s leadership, was distracted by its own rebellion with the Fronde. Felipe sent a somewhat weak army that besieged the last rebel holdouts in Barcelona. The city fell in October 1652, and Felipe offered a general pardon as well as promised to respect Catalonia’s constitution. Ultimately, the Catalan revolt was not a mass rebellion for separatism. Rather, it was a failed uprising of the disgruntled lower classes, mingled with a conspiracy among a few of the elite, to break away from the Spanish crown. It was, however, a demonstration of the fragility of the ties that bound Spain together as a dynastic state, and of the dynasty’s limited ability to strengthen those ties.
The Catalan revolt was actually a lesser disaster than the simultaneous revolt in Portugal, which had deeper roots and much wider support. Portugal was connected to the other Iberian realms only through its monarch, but it depended on their contributions for the defense of its empire. Felipe’s sorely pressed monarchy had growing trouble fending off the Dutch predations on Brazil. Olivares also managed to antagonize parts of the Portuguese bureaucracy and the elite throughout the 1630s by appointing Castilians to positions of authority and raising taxes. Olivares was not unaware of this anger, but unwisely tried to redirect it by sending a Portuguese army to Catalonia to help quell the rebellion there. This triggered a coup by Portuguese nobles in December 1640 in which the Duke of Bragança was named the new Portuguese king. France provided monetary and military support. Felipe’s resources were stretched
so thin that he could not immediately raise an army to combat this coup. He did try to retake the country in the 1650s and 1660s, however. His armies were defeated by the Portuguese in 1659 at Elvas, and then again in 1663, and finally in 1665 in a battle at Villaviciosa. By now Portugal had allied with England, and Felipe’s ministers were convinced that the country had to be let go. The end of the Iberian Union Felipe regarded as one of his worst failures, and kept swearing that he would get Portugal back.
Though the revolts in Catalonia and Portugal were the most consequential of Felipe’s reign, there were a series of lesser ones that seemed as if the monarchy might come completely unglued. The Andalusian nobility briefly rose up in 1641, and Naples and Sicily rebelled in 1647. The French tried to encourage Aragon to break off in 1648. There were also smaller revolts throughout the 1630s to the 1650s, as villages, towns, and cities protested worsening socioeconomic conditions, as in Granada in 1648 and Seville in 1652. While these revolts tested the adherence of the various provinces to the Spanish monarchy, they were rarely unified attempts at separatism. In many cases they threatened to slide quickly into the kind of anarchic social revolution that Catalonia’s rebellion became. Elites in these provinces, whatever their grievances with the crown might be, still generally saw Habsburg rule as worth upholding. The crown, for its part, promised to respect the provinces’ constitutional liberties and refrain from aggressive centralization efforts like those implied by the Union of Arms. Since this arrangement by and large promised to maintain the existing power structure within these provinces, and since there was no realistic alternative for Catalonia, Naples, and the other dominions, membership in the Habsburg dynastic union persisted.
The revolts in Catalonia and Portugal spelled doom for Olivares. Criticism of the count-duke had been mounting for years, from satirists’ pens but also from the high nobility. Though Felipe and Olivares had always had periodic disagreements, by the late 1630s their relationship had cooled noticeably. Moreover, the failures of Felipe’s government were translating to direct criticisms of himself, as well as privations in his household. He and his family had to sell off jewels, furnishings, and land in a desperate attempt to raise money for their many wars. Felipe finally dismissed his chief minister in 1643, ending their 20-year partnership. Olivares died just two years later, and in his last months he began to go mad. Despite the evident foresight and necessity of his many reform plans, nearly all of them ended in failure. The balance sheet of Olivares’s achievements is so consistently negative that he is rarely as esteemed as his contemporary, Richelieu. He was as hard-working as the Frenchman, and less venal, but Olivares’s misfortune resulted in Felipe IV’s larger misfortune of conscientious governance undone by recurrent disaster.
After he dismissed Olivares, Felipe swore that he would have no other valido, but rather manage his affairs himself. He did appoint Olivares’s nephew, Luis de Haro, to a position of great influence, and Haro gradually became Felipe’s prime minister, but he never fully took over the position Olivares had occupied. It was after 1643, as well, that Felipe increasingly turned to Sor María for advice. He worried that God had begun to punish Spain for deviations from its divine course. He wrote to Sor María in 1645, “All the parts of my Monarchy are in a terrible state, surrounded by wars in every quarter. But I believe that if only I could correct my own behavior, everything will have its own remedy.”6 He was certainly correct that Spain hit a new nadir in the 1640s. Besides the multiple rebellions, there was a major loss to the French at the Battle of Rocroi in 1643. The alliance with the Austrian Habsburgs was also fraying at this time, as the two branches’ military objectives diverged. State bankruptcy struck in 1647, then again in 1653. So dire was the financial state of the monarchy that observers reported that on some days the royal household could not even afford bread. Thus Felipe was finally pushed to seek a costly peace. As part of the negotiations at Westphalia, the Spanish Habsburgs made a separate deal from the Austrian branch. The 80-year-long conflict with the Dutch was ended, and Spain officially recognized the independence of the United Provinces. Spain kept the southern Netherlands but gave up other aims such as the opening of the Scheldt River for Antwerp’s port.
The treaty with the Dutch did not end the conflict with the French. Felipe hoped to exploit France’s own troubles, namely the Fronde revolt, which lasted until 1653. Spanish forces won some notable battles at Barcelona and Dunkirk, but both France and Spain were too weak to deliver a knockout blow, so the war reached an impasse. The tide turned against Spain when England under Oliver Cromwell joined the war on France’s side. The English took Jamaica in 1655, then destroyed the Spanish silver fleets in both 1656 and 1657. In 1658 a joint French-English force won the Battle of the Dunes. This led directly to the crucial Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659. Spain was utterly exhausted and the war had to end. Felipe also felt more secure in seeking a treaty because his second wife Mariana had given birth to a son. This was important because per the terms of the treaty, Felipe married his daughter María Teresa to Louis XIV. Without a son, this marriage posed the danger of the Bourbons succeeding to the Spanish throne. Otherwise, the terms were not unfavorable to Spain because France under Cardinal Mazarin’s leadership also desperately wanted peace. Territorial losses were not severe. The historic import of the treaty was rather that it sealed the end of Spain as the leading European power. In the remaining four decades of Habsburg rule in Spain, though the monarchy was still sometimes active in broader European affairs, it began to look inward. What it saw was appalling.
Historians have theorized a “General Crisis” of politics, economics, and demographics that afflicted Europe in the seventeenth century. Castile suffered more than most areas. The phenomenon of trying to meet excessive imperial commitments with insufficient fiscal resources, evident already under Felipe II, only worsened. The heavy tax burden increased, much of it borne by the lower classes. Changes in Castile’s economic relationship with its overseas colonies also eroded its vigor. After the later 1620s the crown found that it could no longer depend on regular, substantial shipments of American silver; the bullion was sometimes captured by pirates, sometimes fluctuated dramatically in output, and often was quickly reexported elsewhere in Europe to pay other costs. Additionally, the colonies were becoming more self-sufficient economically, and so depended less on Europe for their imported goods. Thus the monarchy benefited less from its colonies even as it had to spend more to defend them against English, Dutch, and French attacks. The colonies’ economic maturation accompanied other failures of economic development in the metropole. The American silver was spent less on investments to develop new industries and exports, but instead on consumption and foreign policy ventures.
The silver influx also contributed to inflation and the attendant “price revolution,” which was common throughout Europe, but especially deleterious in Castile. Prices there more than quadrupled over the course of a century. These increases impoverished many people in the lower classes, and made Spanish industries uncompetitive. Traditional strengths like shipbuilding and textiles withered. Armaments manufacture declined to such an extent that Spain had to buy many of its military supplies from England and France. Serious maladies in agriculture added to the other problems. A decrease in arable land and outputs meant that many rural people could no longer live from farming, and many people left the countryside. Famines and plague outbreaks repeatedly struck the Iberian peninsula in the first half of the 1600s. Around 1650, bad harvests and disease killed off some 500,000 people, including roughly half of the populations of Barcelona and Seville. This contributed to a terrifying overall decline of the population in many parts of the peninsula. Castile had about 6.7 million people in the 1590s, but only around 5 million in 1665.7 Relatively little of this decrease came from war deaths.
This dreary picture has given rise to an enduring narrative of decline in Habsburg Spain. Laments of such decline (by Olivares among others) were heard even during Felipe’s IV reign and before. And while it
is indisputable that Spain by 1659 had fallen from the seemingly hegemonic position of Felipe II’s time, an overemphasis on Spanish decline is misguided. First, the most serious of the above problems drained Castile above all, rather than Spain as a whole. Second, Castile at the beginning of its meteoric rise to international prominence—in the opening decades of the 1500s—was a fairly poor country to begin with. It had never been one of Europe’s most developed economies. Yet thanks to a strong crown, colonial riches, and high taxes, it managed to support a hyperactive imperial policy for roughly a century. At least as striking as its decline from such a lofty position was Castile’s improbable and vertiginous rise. Third, the focus on decline obscures the many stupendous achievements of Habsburg Spain. That this loose-limbed bundle of realms provided such a solid power base for so many years, despite their limited natural endowments in manpower and wealth, was extraordinary. In fact, the Habsburg kings and their subjects managed to create a reasonably efficient structure for ruling an empire vastly larger than any previous European state. Even in the disastrous last years of Felipe IV’s reign, his monarchy was still somehow able to field armies and fleets across much of northern and central Europe, as well as in the Americas. No other king of the time could match it.
The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty Page 19