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For 10 years Philip IV’s widow, Maria Anna of Austria, acted as regent for Charles II (1665–1700). She allowed her government to be dominated by her confessor, the Austrian Jesuit Johann Eberhard (Juan Everardo) Nithard. It was weakness, rather than strength, that prompted this government not to summon the Cortes any more. But this policy paved the way for the introduction of effective royal absolutism in the 18th century. In 1669 Nithard was overthrown by Juan José de Austria, an illegitimate son of Philip IV, but the regent still managed to keep him out of the central government. In 1677 Juan José led an army against Madrid and made himself Charles II’s principal minister. This first pronunciamiento, or military coup, inaugurated a tradition that was to bear bitter fruit in the political life of Spain and Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries. Juan José himself planned some promising reforms but died in 1679. Thereafter, the high nobility dominated the government as effectively as it had in the days of Philip III, playing court intrigues, first with the regent and later with the two successive wives of the incapable Charles II. The majority of these aristocrats were self-seeking and incompetent. Some, however—notably Manuel Joaquín Álvarez de Toledo y Portugal, the conde de Oropesa—had considerable ability. They finally restored the coinage in 1680, though not before they had caused another catastrophic deflation. They established a committee for commerce that pursued orthodox mercantilist policies, encouraging trade and industry. They even took the unprecedented step of investigating the Inquisition and recommending a right of appeal to the secular courts.
Even though the woolen industry of Segovia and some other towns expanded and the imports of American silver, now routed through Cadiz rather than Sevilla, recovered at least in some years to about their former levels, a broadly based economic recovery still lay in the future. Until the mid-1680s the Castilian economy declined at such a rate that the French ambassador claimed to see an appalling deterioration between his two visits, in 1668–69 and in 1671–73. In the 1690s the Venetian ambassador characterized the reign of Charles II as “an uninterrupted series of calamities.” The population of Castile declined from about 6.5 million at the end of the 16th century to under 5 million about 1680. Figures for the whole of Spain followed a similar pattern, declining from 8.5 million to about 6.6 million. The reasons for this decline were not so much emigration to the overseas colonies, which averaged 4,000–5,000 per year in the 17th century, as military casualties from all causes, which averaged the frightening figure of 10,000–12,000 a year. More devastating still were the recurrent plagues and, perhaps, the sheer misery of the rural population, who lived on estates that their noble and ecclesiastical owners could not be bothered to manage with even a minimum of efficiency. The shortage of labour, especially skilled labour, and high wages attracted many foreign workers, perhaps as many as 70,000 Frenchmen. Nevertheless, Castilian industries continued to decline. The nadir was reached in the decade 1677–86 with crop failures, earthquakes, an epidemic that sharply reversed a slight upward trend in population dating from about 1650, and, on top of these natural disasters, the government’s deflation of the coinage.
The French wars
In these circumstances it is not surprising that Spain now became the victim rather than the initiator of aggression. In three successive wars with France (1667–68, 1672–78, 1689–97), Spain lost Franche-Comté (Treaty of Nijmegen, 1678) and some Belgian frontier towns to France but still managed to hold on to the greater part of the southern Netherlands and the Italian dominions. The reason was less Spain’s own military efforts, which were puny compared with those of the first half of the century, than the unwillingness of other European powers, especially the United Provinces, to see the Spanish dominions in Europe swallowed up by France. After the last and, for Spain, most disastrous of these wars, the War of the Grand Alliance (1689–97), Louis XIV himself restored Flanders and Catalonia, which his troops had occupied, for he now had his eye on the inheritance of the whole Spanish empire.
The last years of the childless and clearly dying Charles II were occupied by the maneuvers of the European powers for the Spanish succession or, alternatively, for the partition of the Spanish empire. Amid cabals, intrigues, exorcisms of evil spirits, and blood feuds at court, while riots were going on in the streets of Madrid, the rule of the house of Austria came to an end with the death of Charles II, on November 1, 1700.
The decline of Spain
Although there is no doubt that Spain suffered economic and political decline in the 17th century, especially in its second half, it is not nearly as clear that there was also a comparable cultural decline or even decadence, as has sometimes been maintained. Certainly, Calderón, Velázquez, and Murillo had no successors of comparable stature. The court of Charles II was neither financially nor psychologically capable of playing the patronage role that Philip IV’s court had played. Some of the supposed decline, however, may have been more a matter of changing styles in painting and architecture that did not please the more conservative contemporaries, nor many later historians. A good example is the architecture of the brothers Churriguera (see Churrigueresque). Although it has often been dismissed as overly ornate, it has come to be appreciated as a delightful Mediterranean counterpart to the famous contemporary southern German Baroque-Rococo style.
The term decadence, except perhaps when applied to the person of Charles II himself, does not explain the timing of the economic and political decline nor its duration. In the first place, the economic decline was mainly a Castilian phenomenon and did not affect Catalonia or Valencia to anything near the same degree. For Castile, it is perhaps best to see the problem of decline as the arbitristas saw it: in the depreciation by Castilians of economic activity, an attitude that was rooted deeply in Castile’s past history but that was particularly baleful in a period of general European economic depression, such as the 17th century. Moreover, the aggressive militarism that was central to the Castilian aristocratic tradition led to the political hubris of Spanish imperial policy, from Philip II to Philip IV. The Castilian ruling classes never produced, or perhaps gave no chance to, a leader who could break out of this tradition. Velázquez seems to have known it or felt it instinctively when he painted The Surrender of Breda as the beginning of a hoped-for reconciliation of enemies and when, in his portraits of Philip IV, he showed the pathos of a man half aware of his personal inadequacy for the role he was called upon to play. It was the wars, however, that devoured Castile, even though they were fought beyond its borders. They do not directly explain the end of the “Golden Age,” but it may be suggested that a society that invests most of its energies and all of its pride in war, even though it may be ideal for war, is unable to provide a congenial ground for the exercise of creative genius when its ideal has failed and it is left with nothing but a now-hollow pride.
Helmut Georg Koenigsberger The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica