How Did The Rise And Fall Of The Spanish Empire

The year was 1600, and Spain was unquestionably at the zenith of its power. After a successful Reconquista and explosion of colonization, the Spanish Empire had built a powerful military, a cohesive empire throughout Europe and the North and South of the Americas, and was looking forward to Cultural Revolution and continued growth in overseas trade. This was the Spanish Golden Age, when the Iberian Nation was unrivaled as the cultural and economic hegemon of Europe. It seems insanity that in one short century, Spain would suffer a complete national breakdown, a partition, and one of the greatest falls from grace Europe had ever seen. It was a rotting national pyramid and administration, coupled with declining industry competitiveness and
a governmental inability bordering on outright refusal to achieve internal or external stability that lead to the seemingly sudden collapse of the Spanish Monarchy. From the ascension of Philip III to the end of the Spanish Hapsburg line, the Spanish social and governmental layout became more and more inefficient and top heavy to the point of collapse.
Castile, the Center of the Empire, was dying from within, as plague and migration caused the population to drop by over twenty-five percent, a disastrous amount in a period of warfare and constant need for a steady supply of crops (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict the Period 1500 to 2000, Paul M. Kennedy). Those who did survive had little motivation to rebuild the nation’s heartland, as Spanish society became a rush to avoid work; the clergy grew to almost ten percent of the national male demographic, the people more likely motivated to avoid hard but economically valuable work in farming or industry and to gain tax-exempt status than for any religious or theological revival within the nation (Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, Jon Cowans). Tax exemption for students meant that many Spaniards would spend much longer in new universities than warranted instead of working in the nations body-starved industries, all the while propped up by the growing number of churchmen (Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, Jon Cowans). There was another problem with the growth of the Clerical Classes, namely land; by the midcentury, approximately twenty percent of the land in Spain was owned by the church, meaning that by this time, less than
fifty-five percent of the original workforce had only eighty percent of the land available to work on, and taxes on what little money was made could not support the bloated administration (Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, Jon Cowans). The system of local Councils had deteriorated to simple sources of revenue run by the local Aristocracy by the time of Philip IV, rarely enacting any reforms or perusing the will of the King (Philip IV and the Government of Spain, R. A. Stradling). All of these factors contributed to a floundering economy, but the straw that broke the burro’s back was how the government dealt with these issues; Nobles within the Council of Finance would prefer to tax the peasants at an increase of over four hundred percent as opposed to pay any themselves, so that is exactly what they did (Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, Jon Cowans). It is not surprising that this caused more and more peasants to exploit the loopholes of education and church service, as well as a steady decline in production throughout the Empire. Taxes and the avoidance of them caused many issues within the Spanish Empire, and the national industry of Spain was one of the most poorly effected facets of the nation. The inability of the national industries of Spain to compete drained the coffers of the King and slowly bled Spain white. At the beginning of the century, Spain was one of, if not the, world’s leading producer of fabric; merino wool was exported across Europe in quantities upwards of four hundred thousand tons per year (A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal's Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert). However, with the emergence of cheaper textiles from England and the Netherlands, the foreign demand for Spanish merino wool fell to only twenty-five thousand tons per year, putting Spain at odds with the contemporary mercantilist ideals and accruing a massive trade deficit (A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal's Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert). An enclosure movement, wherein Nobles claimed and defined their land, put many rural farmers out of work, and forced them to migrate to the cities (A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal's Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert). The movement also made Spanish farming less competitive and the Estate owners more complacent, so that crop production was never at its full potential (A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal's Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert). This further decreased Spanish production, and forced Spain to import food from across Europe on credit, slipping further and further into debt. The Council of Finance, already overtaxing the peasants, resolved to mint more coins at a lower precious metal percentage to pay for Spanish debts and the current war (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Kennedy, Paul M.). This dangerous action, coupled with the influx of gold and silver form the Americas, lead to spiraling inflation of such magnitude that within a few short years, Spain was operating almost entirely on a barter economy (Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, Jon Cowans). Slowly, Spanish industry and production died, along with Spanish wealth when taxation could not make up the deficit; and the killing blow was landed by leadership that could and did do nothing to save the old order. Constant civil and international warfare and strife throughout the Seventeenth Century ensured that Spain would never achieve any semblance of stability during the period.
In 1607, war with the Dutch lead Spain to bankruptcy, and peace broke out. Spain recovered fairly well, and could have rebuilt their shaky economy through reforms easily managed in this time of peace- however, Spain elected to enter the Thirty Year’s War instead, and soon found themselves fighting the Dutch again (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict the Period 1500 to 2000, Paul M. Kennedy). In response, the Dutch soon began naval raids upon the Spanish, further reducing their export and weakening the Spanish economy, which was already taxed simply to pay for the war on land (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict the Period 1500 to 2000, Paul M. Kennedy). The belief that “One More Victory” would win the war exhausted the Spanish nation and severely weakened their army to the point where National rebellions threatened to tear Spain apart (Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, Jon Cowans). Portugal was able to gain independence, and rebellions in Catalonia crippled the nation, giving France an open doorway to invasion. By the middle of the century, Spain had lost Portugal as a vassal and the Netherlands as a dominion because of their inability to quit (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and
Military Conflict the Period 1500 to 2000, Paul M. Kennedy). The Empire retained much of their Global Empire and would continue to expand, but forever after, Hegemony over Europe, their Atlantic Monopoly, and the rich Eastern Colonies of Portugal where lost, all of which undermined the Monarchy’s prestige, the people’s faith in their government, and the revenue of the Crown. The continuous warfare of the Spanish Crown lead to economic instability, thusly to the demographic shift in Spain, and contributed greatly to the collapse of the Monarchy. The year was 1700 and Spain had almost no real power or influence in Europe. In less than one hundred years, Spain fell from Global Leader to Secondary Nation for over four centuries. While Spain still had a cultural boom ahead of it, and its overseas Empire had not yet reached its period of maximum expansion, the age of Spain had forever passed. Three factors reacted off of each other to bring the Empire to its knees. The bloated national administrations and demographics, as well as the inability for the Spanish economy to compete internationally, combined with constant internal and external strife where able to bring the Spanish Monarchy to collapse.