Читать книгу Lineages of the Absolutist State - Perry Anderson - Страница 9

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Spain

Such was the general character of Absolutism in the West. The specific territorial States which came into existence in the different countries of Renaissance Europe, however, cannot simply be assimilated to a single pure type. They exhibited wide variations, in fact, which were to have crucial consequences for the subsequent histories of the countries concerned, and can still be felt to this day. Some survey of these variants is therefore a necessary complement to any consideration of the general structure of Western Absolutism. Spain, the earliest great power of modern Europe, provides a logical starting-point.

For the rise of Habsburg Spain was not merely one episode within a set of concurrent and equivalent experiences of State-construction in Western Europe: it was also an auxiliary determinant of the whole set as such. It thus occupies a qualitatively distinct position in the general process of Absolutization. For the reach and impact of Spanish Absolutism was in a strict sense ‘inordinate’, among the other Western monarchies of the age. Its international pressure acted as a special over-determination of the national patterns elsewhere in the continent, because of the disproportionate wealth and power at its command: the historical concentration of these assets in the Spanish State could not but affect the overall shape and direction of the emergent State-system of the West. The Spanish monarchy owed its preeminence to a combination of two complexes of resources – themselves sudden projections of common constituents of ascendant Absolutism to an exceptional magnitude. On the one hand, its ruling house benefited more than any other line in Europe from the compacts of dynastic marriage-policy. The Habsburg family connection yielded the Spanish State a scale of territory and influence in Europe, which no rival monarchy could match: a supreme artefact of feudal mechanisms of political expansion.

On the other hand, the colonial conquest of the New World supplied it with a superabundance of precious metals, which gave it a treasury beyond the range of any of its counterparts. Conducted and organized within still notably seigneurial structures, the plunder of the Americas was nevertheless at the same time the most spectacular single act in the primitive accumulation of European capital during the Renaissance. Spanish Absolutism thus drew strength both from the inheritances of feudal aggrandizement at home and the booty of extractive capital overseas. There was never, of course, any question as to the social and economic interests to which the political apparatus of the Spanish monarchy principally and permanently answered. No other major Absolutist State in Western Europe was to be so finally noble in character, or so inimical to bourgeois development. The very fortune of its early control of the mines of America, with their primitive but lucrative economy of extraction, disinclined it to promote the growth of manufactures or foster the spread of mercantile enterprise within its European empire. Instead, it bore down with a massive weight on the most active commercial communities of the continent, even while threatening every other landed aristocracy in a cycle of inter-aristocratic wars that lasted for a hundred and fifty years. Spanish power stifled the urban vitality of North Italy, and crushed the flourishing towns of half the Low Countries – the two most advanced zones of the European economy at the turn of the 16th century. Holland eventually escaped its control, in a long struggle for bourgeois independence. In the same period, the royal states of Southern Italy and Portugal were absorbed by Spain. The monarchies of France and England were battered by Hispanic attacks. The principalities of Germany were repeatedly invaded by tercios from Castile. While Spanish fleets rode the Atlantic or patrolled the Mediterranean, Spanish armies ranged across most of Western Europe: from Antwerp to Palermo, and Regensburg to Kinsale. The menace of Habsburg dominance, however, in the end quickened the reactions and fortified the defenses of the dynasties arrayed against it. Spanish priority gave the Habsburg monarchy a system-setting role for Western Absolutism as a whole. Yet it also, as we shall see, critically limited the nature of Spanish Absolutism itself within the system it helped to originate.

Spanish Absolutism was born from the Union of Castile and Aragón, effected by the marriage of Isabella I and Ferdinand II in 1469. It started with an apparently firm economic basis. During the labour shortages produced by the general crisis of Western feudalism, increasing areas of Castile were converted to a lucrative wool economy, which had made it the ‘Australia of the Middle Ages’,¹ and a major partner of Flemish trade; while Aragón had long been a territorial and commercial power in the Mediterranean, controlling Sicily and Sardinia. The political and military dynamism of the new dual state was soon dramatically revealed in a series of sweeping external conquests. The last Moorish stronghold of Granada was destroyed and the Reconquista completed; Naples was annexed; Navarre was absorbed; and above all, the Americas were discovered and subjugated. The Habsburg connection soon added Milan, the Franche-Comté and the Netherlands. This sudden avalanche of successes made Spain the premier power in Europe for the whole of the 16th century, enjoying an international position which no other continental Absolutism was ever later able to emulate. Yet the State which presided over this vast Empire was itself a ramshackle assemblage, ultimately united only by the person of the monarch. Spanish Absolutism, so awesome to Northern Protestantism abroad, was in fact notably modest and limited in its domestic development. Its internal articulations were perhaps uniquely loose and heteroclite. The reasons for this paradox are doubtless to be sought essentially in the curious triangular relationship between the American Empire, the European Empire and the Iberian homelands.

The composite realms of Castile and Aragón united by Ferdinand and Isabella presented an extremely diverse basis for the construction of the new Spanish monarchy in the late 15th century. Castile was a land with an aristocracy of enormous estates and powerful military orders; it also had a considerable number of towns, although, significantly, not yet a fixed capital. The Castilian nobility had seized vast quantities of agrarian property from the monarchy during the civil wars of the later Middle Ages; 2–3 per cent of the population now controlled some 97 per cent of the soil. More than half of this, in turn, was owned by a few magnate families who towered over the numerous hidalgo gentry.² Cereal agriculture was steadily yielding to sheep-farming on these great estates. The wool boom which provided the basis for the fortunes of so many aristocratic houses had, at the same time, stimulated urban growth and foreign trade. Castilian towns and Cantabrian shipping benefited from the prosperity of the pastoral economy of late mediaeval Spain, which was linked by a complex commercial system to the textile industry of Flanders. The economic and demographic profile of Castile within the Union was thus from the outset an advantageous one: with a population calculated at between 5 and 7 million, and a buoyant overseas trade with Northern Europe, it was easily the dominant state in the peninsula. Politically, its constitution was curiously unsettled. Castile-Leon had been one of the first mediaeval kingdoms in Europe to develop an Estates system in the 13th century; while by the mid 15th century, the factual ascendancy of the nobility over the monarchy had for a time become far-reaching. But the grasping power of the late mediaeval aristocracy had not set in any juridical mould. The Cortes, in fact, remained an occasional and indefinite assembly: perhaps because of the migrant character of the Castilian kingdom as it shifted southwards and shuffled its social pattern in doing so, there had never developed a firm and fixed institutionalization of the Estates system. Thus both the convocation and composition of the Cortés was subject to the arbitrary decision of the monarchy, with the result that sessions were spasmodic, and no regular three-curia system emerged from them. On the one hand, the Cortes had no initiatory legislative powers; on the other, the nobility and clergy enjoyed fiscal immunity. The result was an Estates system in which only the towns had to pay the taxes voted by the Cortes, which otherwise fell virtually exclusively on the masses beneath it. The aristocracy thus had no direct economic stake in its representation within the Castilian Estates, which formed a comparatively weak and isolated institution. Aristocratic corporatism found separate expression in the rich and formidable military orders – Calatrava, Alcantara and Santiago – which had been created by the Crusades: but these by nature lacked the collective authority of a noble Estate proper.

The economic and political character of the Realm of Aragon³ was in sharp contrast to this. The high interior of Aragon itself harboured the most repressive seigneurial system in the Iberian peninsula; the local aristocracy was vested with a full range of feudal powers in the barren countryside, where serfdom still survived and a captive morisco peasantry toiled for its Christian landlords. Catalonia, on the other hand, had traditionally been the centre of a mercantile empire in the Mediterranean: Barcelona was the largest city in mediaeval Spain, and its urban patriciate the richest commercial class of the region. Catalan prosperity, however, had suffered grievously during the long feudal depression. The epidemics of the 14th century had struck the principality with especial violence, returning again and again after the Black Death itself to ravage the population, which fell by over a third between 1365 and 1497.⁴ Commercial bankruptcies had been compounded by aggressive Genoese competition in the Mediterranean, while smaller merchants and artisan guilds revolted against the patriciates in the towns. In the countryside the peasantry had risen to throw off the ‘evil customs’ and seize deserted lands in the remença rebellions of the 15th century. Finally, a civil war between the monarchy and nobility, pulling other social groups into its maelstrom, had further weakened the Catalan economy. Its overseas bases in Italy, however, remained intact. Valencia, the third province of the realm, was socially intermediate between Aragon and Catalonia. The nobility exploited morisco labour; a merchant community expanded during the 15th century, as financial dominance passed down the coast from Barcelona. The growth of Valencia, however, did not adequately compensate for the decline of Catalonia. The economic disparity between the two Realms of the Union created by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella can be seen from the fact that the population of the three provinces of Aragon together perhaps totalled only some 1 million inhabitants – compared with Castile’s 5–7 million. The political contrast between the two Kingdoms, on the other hand, was no less striking. For in the Realm of Aragon, there was to be found perhaps the most sophisticated and entrenched Estates structure anywhere in Europe. All three provinces of Catalonia, Valencia and Aragon had their own separate Cortes. Each had, in addition, special watchdog institutions of permanent judicial control and economic administration derived from the Cortes. The Catalan Diputadó – a standing committee of the Cortes – was the most effective exemplar of these. Each Cortes, moreover, had statutorily to be summoned at regular intervals, and was technically subject to a rule of unanimity – a device unique in Western Europe. The Aragonese Cortes itself had the further refinement of a four-curia system of magnates, gentry, clergy and burghers.⁵ In toto, this complex of mediaeval ‘liberties’ presented a singularly intractable prospect for the construction of a centralized Absolutism. The asymmetry of institutional orders in Castile and Aragon was, in fact, to shape the whole career of the Spanish monarchy henceforward.

For Ferdinand and Isabella, understandably, took the obvious course of concentrating on the establishment of an unshakeable royal power in Castile, where the conditions for it were most immediately propitious. Aragon presented far more formidable political obstacles to the construction of a centralized State, and much less profitable prospects for economic fiscalization. Castile had five or six times the population, and its greater wealth was not protected by any comparable constitutional barriers. A methodical programme for its administrative reorganization was thus set in train by the two monarchs. The military orders were decapitated and their vast lands and incomes annexed. Baronial castles were demolished, marcher lords ousted, and private wars banned. The municipal autonomy of the towns was broken by the planting of official corregidores to administer them; royal justice was reinforced and extended. Control of ecclesiastical benefices was captured for the State, detaching the local Church apparatus from the reach of the Papacy. The Cortes was progressively domesticated by the effective omission of the nobility and clergy from its assemblies after 1480; since the main purpose of summoning it was to raise taxes for military expenditure (on the Granadan and Italian wars, above all), from which the First and Second Estate were exempted, the latter had little reason to resist this restriction. Fiscal yields rose impressively: Castilian revenues increased from some 900,000 reales in 1474 to 26,000,000 in 1504.⁶ The Royal Council was reformed and grandee influence excluded from it; the new body was staffed by lawyer-bureaucrats or letrados, recruited from the smaller gentry. Professional secretaries worked directly under the sovereigns, dispatching ongoing business. The Castilian State machine, in other words, was rationalized and modernized. But the new monarchy never counterposed it to the aristocratic class as a whole. Top military and diplomatic positions were always reserved for magnates, who kept their great viceroyalties and governorships, while lesser nobles filled the ranks of the corregidores. Royal domains usurped since 1454 were recovered by the monarchy, but those appropriated earlier – the majority – were left in the hands of the nobility; new estates in Granada were added to its possessions, and the immobilization of rural property by the device of the mayorazgo was confirmed. Moreover, wide privileges were deliberately granted to the pastoral interests of the Mesta wool cartel in the countryside, dominated by Southern latifundists; while discriminatory measures against cereal farming eventually fixed retail prices for grain crops. In the towns, a constricting guild system was foisted on nascent urban industry, and religious persecution of the conversos led to an exodus of Jewish capital. All these policies were pursued with great energy and resolution in Castile.

In Aragon, on the other hand, no political programme of comparable scope was ever attempted. There, on the contrary, the most that Ferdinand could achieve was a social pacification, and restoration of the late mediaeval constitution. The remença peasants were finally granted remission of their dues with the Sentence of Guadelupe in 1486, and rural unrest subsided. Access to the Catalan Diputació was broadened by the introduction of a sortition system. Otherwise, Ferdinand’s rule unambiguously confirmed the separate identity of the Eastern realm: Catalan liberties were expressly acknowledged in their entirety by the Observança of 1481, and new safeguards against royal infractions of them actually added to the existing arsenal of local weapons against any form of monarchical centralization. Rarely resident within his native country, Ferdinand installed viceroys in all three provinces to exercise a delegated authority for him, and created a Council of Aragon, mostly based in Castile, to liaise with them. Aragon, in effect, was thus virtually left to its own devices; even the great wool interests – all-powerful beyond the Ebro – were unable to secure sanction for their sheep-runs across its agricultural land. Once Ferdinand had been obliged solemnly to reconfirm all its thorny contractual privileges, there was no question whatever of an administrative merger at any level between Aragon and Castile. Far from creating a unified kingdom, their Catholic Majesties failed even to establish a single currency,⁷ let alone a common tax or legal system within their realms. The Inquisition – a unique creation in Europe at the time – should be seen in this context: it was the one unitary ‘Spanish’ institution in the peninsula, an overwrought ideological apparatus compensating for the actual administrative division and dispersal of the State.

The accession of Charles V was to complicate, but not substantially alter, this pattern; if anything, it ultimately accentuated it. The most immediate result of the advent of a Habsburg sovereign was a new and heavily expatriate court, dominated by Flemings, Burgundians and Italians. The financial extortions of the new regime soon provoked a wave of intense popular xenophobia in Castile. The departure of the monarch himself for Northern Europe was thus the signal for a widespread urban rebellion against what was felt to be foreign fleecing of Castilian resources and positions. The comunero revolt of 1520–1 won the initial support of many city nobles, and appealed to a traditional set of constitutional demands. But its driving force was the popular artisan masses in the towns, and its dominating leadership was the urban bourgeoisie of northern and central Castile, whose trading and manufacturing centres had enjoyed an economic boom in the preceding period.⁸ It found little or no echo in the countryside, either among the peasantry or rural aristocracy; the movement never seriously affected those regions where towns were few or weak – Galicia, Andalusia, Estremadura or Guadalajara. The ‘federative’ and ‘proto-national’ programme of the revolutionary Junta which the Castilian communes created during their insurrection clearly marked it as basically a revolt of the Third Estate.⁹ Its defeat by royal armies, behind which the bulk of the aristocracy had rallied once the potential radicalism of the upheaval became evident, was thus a critical step in the consolidation of Spanish Absolutism. The crushing of the comunero rebellion effectively eliminated the last vestiges of a contractual constitution in Castile, and doomed the Cortes – for which the comuneros had demanded regular tri-annual sessions – to nullity henceforward. More significant, however, was the fact that the Spanish monarchy’s most fundamental victory over corporate resistance to royal absolutism in Castile – indeed its only actual armed contest with any opposition in that realm – was the military defeat of the towns, rather than nobles. Nowhere else in Western Europe was this true of nascent absolutism: the primary pattern was the suppression of aristocratic rather than burgher revolts, even where the two were closely mingled. Its triumph over the Castilian communes, at the outset of its career, was to separate the course of the Spanish monarchy from its Western counterparts thereafter.

The most spectacular development of Charles V’s reign was, of course, its vast enlargement of the Habsburg international orbit. In Europe, the Netherlands, the Franche-Comté and Milan were now added to the personal patrimony of the rulers of Spain, while Mexico and Peru were conquered in the Americas. During the life-time of the Emperor himself, the whole of Germany was a major theatre of operations over and above these hereditary possessions. This sudden territorial expansion inevitably reinforced the prior tendency of the emergent Absolutist State in Spain towards devolution via separate Councils and Viceroys for the different dynastic possessions. Charles V’s Piedmontese Chancellor, Mercurio Gattinara, inspired by universalist Erasmian ideals, strove to confer a more compact and effective executive on the unwieldy bulk of the Habsburg Empire, by creating certain unitary institutions for it of a departmental type – notably a Council of Finances, a Council of War and a Council of State (the latter theoretically becoming the summit of the whole imperial edifice), with overall responsibilities of a trans-regional character. These were backed by a growing permanent secretariat of civil servants at the disposal of the monarch. But at the same time, a new series of territorial Councils was progressively formed, Gattinara himself establishing the first of these for the government of the Indies. By the end of the century, there were eventually to be no less than six such regional Councils, for Aragon, Castile, the Indies, Italy, Portugal and Flanders. Outside Castile itself, none of these had any adequate body of local officials on the ground, where actual administration was entrusted to viceroys, who were subject to often fumbling control and direction from a distance by the Councils.¹⁰ The powers of the viceroys themselves were usually very limited in their turn. Only in the Americas did they command the services of their own bureaucracy, but there they were flanked by audiencias which deprived them of the judicial authority they enjoyed elsewhere; while in Europe, they had to come to terms with resident aristocracies – Sicilian, Valencian or Neapolitan – who normally claimed by right a virtual monopoly of public offices. The result was to block any real unification either of the international imperium as a whole, or of the Iberian homelands themselves. The Americas were juridically attached to the kingdom of Castile, Southern Italy to the realm of Aragon. The Atlantic and Mediterranean economies represented by each never met within a single commercial system. The division between the two original realms of the Union within Spain was, in practice, if anything, reinforced by the overseas possessions now subjoined to them. For juridical purposes, Catalonia could simply be assimilated in statute to Sicily or the Netherlands. Indeed, by the 17th century, Madrid’s power in Naples or Milan was actually greater than in Barcelona or Zaragoza. The very sprawl of the Habsburg Empire thus overextended its capacity for integration, and helped to arrest the process of administrative centralization within Spain itself.¹¹

At the same time, Charles V’s reign also inaugurated the fateful sequence of European wars which was to be the price of Spanish power in the continent. In the Southern theatre of his innumerable campaigns, Charles achieved overwhelming success: it was during this period that Italy fell definitively under Hispanic ascendancy, as France was driven from the peninsula, the Papacy intimidated, and the Turkish threat held off. The most advanced urban society in Europe henceforward became an elongated military platform for Spanish Absolutism. In the Northern theatre of his wars, by contrast, the Emperor was forced into a costly stalemate: the Reformation remained unvanquished in Germany, despite his repeated attempts to crush or conciliate it, and hereditary Valois enmity survived every defeat in France. The financial burden of constant war in the North, moreover, had gravely strained the traditional loyalty of the Netherlands by the end of the reign, preparing for the disasters which were to overtake Philip II in the Low Countries. For the size and expense of Habsburg armies had escalated steeply and regularly throughout Charles V’s rule. Before 1529, Spanish troops in Italy had never numbered more than 30,000; in 1536–7, 60,000 soldiers were mobilized for war with France; by 1552, there were perhaps 150,000 men under the Emperor’s command in Europe.¹² Financial borrowing and fiscal pressures increased commensurately: Charles V’s revenues had tripled by the time of his abdication in 1556,¹³ yet royal debts were so great that a State bankruptcy had to be formally declared a year later by his heir. The Spanish Empire in the Old World inherited by Philip II, always administratively divided, was becoming economically untenable at mid-century: it was the New World which was to refurbish its treasury and prolong its disunity.

For from the 1560’s onwards, the multiple effects of its American Empire on Spanish Absolutism became increasingly determinant for its future, although it is necessary not to confuse the different levels at which these worked themselves out. The discovery of the Potosi mines now enormously increased the flow of colonial bullion to Seville. The supply of huge quantities of silver from the Americas henceforward became a decisive ‘facility’ of the Spanish State, in both senses of the word. For it provided Hispanic Absolutism with a plentiful and permanent extraordinary income that was wholly outside the conventional ambit of State revenues in Europe. This meant that Absolutism in Spain could for a long time continue to dispense with the slow fiscal and administrative unification which was a precondition of Absolutism elsewhere: the stubborn recalcitrance of Aragon was compensated by the limitless compliance of Peru. The colonies, in other words, could act as a structural substitute for provinces, in a total polity where orthodox provinces were substituted by autarchic patrimonies. Nothing is more striking in this respect than the utter lack of any proportionate contribution to the Spanish war effort in Europe during the later 16th and 17th centuries from Aragon or even Italy. Castile was to bear the tax burden of interminable military campaigns abroad virtually alone: behind it, precisely, lay the mines of the Indies. The total incidence of American tribute in the Spanish imperial budgets was, of course, much less than was often popularly supposed at the time: at the height of the treasure-fleets, colonial bullion directly accounted for only 20–25 per cent of its revenues.¹⁴ The bulk of the rest of Philip II’s income was furnished by domestic Castilian charges: the traditional sales tax or alcabala, the special servicios levied on the poor, the cruzada collected with the sanction of the church from clergy and laity, and the public bonds or juros sold to the propertied. American metals, however, played their part in sustaining the metropolitan tax-base of the Habsburg State: the extremely high fiscal levels of successive reigns were indirectly supported by the private transfers of bullion to Castile, whose volume averaged well over twice that of public inflows;¹⁵ the notable success of the juros as a funding device – the first widespread use of such bonds by an Absolute monarchy in Europe – is, no doubt, partly explicable by its capacity to tap this new monetary wealth. Furthermore, the colonial increment to royal revenues was in its own right quite decisive for the conduct of Spanish foreign policy, and for the nature of the Spanish State. For it arrived in the form of liquid specie which could be used to finance troop movements or diplomatic manoeuvres directly, all across Europe; and it afforded exceptional credit opportunities to the Habsburg monarchs, who could raise sums in the international money market to which no other princes could aspire.¹⁶ The huge military and naval operations of Philip II, from the Channel to the Aegean, and Tunis to Antwerp, were possible only because of the extraordinary financial flexibility provided by the American surplus.

At the same time, however, the impact of American metals on the Spanish economy, as distinct from the Castilian State, was no less critical, if in another way. For the first half of the 16th century, the moderate level of shipments (with a higher gold component) provided a stimulus to Castilian exports, which quickly responded to the price inflation that followed the advent of colonial treasure. Since the 60–70 per cent of this bullion which did not go straight into the royal coffers had to be bought as a commodity like any other from the local entrepreneurs in the Americas, a thriving trade with the colonies developed, mainly in textiles, oil and wine. Monopoly control of this captive market initially benefited Castilian producers, who could sell at inflationary prices in it, although domestic consumers were soon complaining bitterly of the cost of living at home.¹⁷ However, there were two fatal twists in this process for the Castilian economy as a whole. Firstly, increased colonial demand led to further conversion of land away from cereal production, to wine and olives. This reinforced the already disastrous trend encouraged by the monarchy towards a contraction of wheat output at the expense of wool: for the Spanish wool industry, unlike the English, was not sedentary but transhumant. and therefore extremely destructive of arable farming. The combined result of these pressures was to make Spain a major grain-importing country for the first time by the 1570’s. The structure of Castilian rural society was now already unlike anything else in Western Europe.

Dependent tenants and peasant small-holders were a minority in the countryside. In the 16th century, more than half the rural population of New Castile – perhaps as much as 60–70 per cent – were agricultural labourers or jornaleros;¹⁸ and the proportion was probably even higher in Andalusia. There was widespread unemployment in the villages, and heavy feudal rents on seigneurial lands. Most striking of all, the Spanish censuses of 1571 and 1586 revealed a society in which a mere one-third of the male population was engaged in agriculture at all; while no less than two-fifths were outside any direct economic production – a premature and bloated ‘tertiary sector’ of Absolutist Spain, which prefigured secular stagnation to come.¹⁹ But the ultimate damage caused by the colonial nexus was not limited to agriculture, the dominant branch of domestic production at the time. For the influx of bullion from the New World also produced a parasitism that increasingly sapped and halted domestic manufactures. Accelerating inflation drove up the costs of production of the textile industry, which operated within very rigid technical limits, to a point where Castilian cloths were eventually being priced out of both colonial and metropolitan markets. Dutch and English interlopers started to cream off the American demand, while cheaper foreign wares invaded Castile itself. Castilian textiles were thus by the end of the century the victim of Bolivian silver. The cry now went up – España son las Indias del extranjero: Spain has become the Americas of Europe, a colonial dumping-ground for foreign goods. Thus both the agrarian and urban economies were ultimately stricken by the blaze from the American treasure, as numerous contemporaries lamented.²⁰ The productive potential of Castile was being undermined by the same Empire which was pumping resources into the military apparatus of the State for unprecedented adventures abroad.

Yet there was a close link between the two effects. For, if the American Empire was the undoing of the Spanish economy, it was its European Empire which was the ruin of the Habsburg State, and the one rendered the extended struggle for the other financially possible. Without the bullion shipments to Seville, the colossal war effort of Philip II would have been unthinkable. However, it was just this effort which was to bring the original structure of Spanish Absolutism down. The long reign of the Prudent King, covering nearly the whole of the latter half of the 16th century, was not itself a uniform record of foreign failures, despite the immense expense and punishing setbacks which it incurred in the international arena. Its basic pattern was, in fact, not dissimilar to that of Charles V: success in the South, defeat in the North. In the Mediterranean, Turkish naval expansion was definitively checked at Lepanto in 1571, a victory which effectively confined Ottoman fleets henceforward to home waters. Portugal was incorporated smoothly into the Habsburg bloc by dynastic diplomacy and timely invasion: its absorption added the numerous Lusitanian possessions in Asia, Africa and America to the Hispanic colonies in the Indies. The Spanish overseas empire itself was augmented by the conquest of the Philippines in the Pacific – logistically and culturally the most daring colonization of the century. The military apparatus of the Spanish State was honed to a steadily greater degree of skill and efficacy, its organization and supply system becoming the most advanced in Europe. The traditional willingness of Castilian hidalgos to serve in the tercios stiffened its infantry regiments,²¹ while the Italian and Walloon provinces proved a reliable reservoir of soldiers, if not of taxes, for Habsburg international policies; significantly, the multi-national contingents of Habsburg armies all fought better on foreign than on native soil, their very diversity permitting a relatively lesser degree of reliance on external mercenaries. For the first time in modern Europe, a large standing army was successfully maintained at a great distance from the imperial homeland, for decades on end. From Alva’s arrival onwards, the Army of Flanders averaged some 65,000 troops over the rest of the entire Eighty Years’ War with the Dutch – a feat without precedent.²² On the other hand, the permanent disposition of these troops in the Low Countries told its own story. The Netherlands, already rumbling with discontent at Charles V’s fiscal exactions and religious persecution, had exploded into what was to become the first bourgeois revolution in history, under the pressure of Philip II’s Tridentine centralism. The Revolt of the Netherlands posed a direct threat to vital Spanish interests, for the two economies – closely linked since the Middle Ages – were largely complementary: Spain exported wool and bullion to the Low Countries, and imported textiles, hardware, grain and naval stores. Flanders, moreover, ensured the strategic encirclement of France and was thus a lynchpin of Habsburg international ascendancy. Yet despite immense exertions, Spanish military power was unable to break the resistance of the United Provinces. Moreover, Philip II’s armed intervention in the Religious Wars in France and his naval attack on England – two fatal extensions of the original theatre of war in Flanders – were both repulsed: the scattering of the Armada and the accession of Henri IV marked the double defeat of his forward policy in the North. Yet the international balance-sheet at the end of his reign was still an apparently formidable one – dangerously so for his successors, to whom he bequeathed an undiminished sense of continental stature. The Southern Netherlands had been regained and fortified. The Luso-Hispanic fleets were rapidly reconstituted after 1588 and successfully checked English assaults on the Atlantic bullion routes. The French monarchy was, in the last resort, denied to Protestantism.

At home, on the other hand, the legacy of Philip II at the turn of the 17th century was more visibly sombre. Castile now had for the first time a stable capital in Madrid, facilitating central government. The Council of State, dominated by grandees, and deliberating on major issues of policy, was more than counterbalanced by the enhanced importance of the royal secretariat, whose diligent jurist-functionaries provided the desk-bound monarch with the bureaucratic tools of rule most congenial to him. Administrative unification of the dynastic patrimonies, however, was not pursued with any consistency. Absolutist reforms were pressed in the Netherlands, where they led to a debacle, and in Italy, where they secured a modest measure of success. In the Iberian peninsula itself, by contrast, no progress in the same direction was even seriously attempted. Portuguese constitutional and legal autonomy was scrupulously respected; no Castilian interference ruffled the traditional order of this Western acquisition. In the Eastern provinces, Aragonese particularism gave truculent provocation to the King by shielding his fugitive secretary Antonio Perez from royal justice with armed riots: an invasion force in 1591 subdued this blatant sedition, but Philip abstained from any permanent occupation of Aragon, or major modification of its constitution.²³ The chance of a centralist solution was deliberately foregone. Meanwhile, the economic situation of both monarchy and country was deteriorating ominously by the end of the century. Silver shipments ran at record levels from 1590 to 1600: but war-costs had by now grown so much that a new consumption tax levied essentially on food – the millones – was imposed in Castile, which henceforward became a further heavy burden on the labouring poor in the countryside and the towns. Philip II’s total revenues had more than quadrupled by the end of his reign:²⁴ even so, official bankruptcy overtook him in 1596. Three years later, the worst plague of the epoch descended on Spain, decimating the population of the peninsula.

The accession of Philip III was followed by peace with England (1604), a further bankruptcy (1607), and then by the reluctant signature of a truce with Holland (1609). The new regime was dominated by the Valencian aristocrat Lerma, a frivolous and venal privado who had established his personal ascendancy over the King. Peace brought with it lavish court display, and multiplication of honours; political influence deserted the old secretariat, while the Castilian nobility congregated again towards the now softened centre of the State. Lerma’s only two governmental decisions of note were the systematic use of devaluations to extricate royal finances, by flooding the country with the debased copper vellón, and the mass expulsion of the moriscos from Spain, which merely weakened the Aragonese and Valencian rural economy: price inflation and labour shortages were the inevitable result. Much graver in the long-run, however, was the silent shift that was now occurring in the whole commercial relationship between Spain and America. From about 1600 onwards, the American colonies were becoming increasingly self-sufficient in the primary commodities they had traditionally imported from Spain – grain, oil and wine; coarse cloth was also now starting to be locally produced; ship-building developed rapidly, and inter-colonial trade boomed. These changes coincided with the growth of a Creole aristocracy in the colonies, whose wealth was derived from agriculture rather than mining.²⁵ The mines themselves were subject to a deepening crisis from the second decade of the 17th century onwards. Partly because of a demographic collapse in the Indian labour-force, due to devastating epidemics and super-exploitation in underground gangs, and partly because of lode exhaustion, silver output began to contract. The decline from the peak of the previous century was initially a gradual one. But the composition and direction of trade between the Old and the New World was irreversibly altering, to the detriment of Castile. The colonial import pattern was switching to more sophisticated manufactured goods, which Spain could not supply, brought as contraband by English or Dutch merchants; local capital was being reinvested on the spot rather than transferred to Seville; and native American shipping was increasing its share of Atlantic freightage. The net result was a calamitous decrease in Spanish trade with its American possessions, whose total tonnage fell 60 per cent from 1606–10 to 1646–50.

In the days of Lerma, the ultimate consequences of this process still lay hidden in the future. But the relative decline of Spain on the seas, and the rise of the Protestant powers of England and Holland at its expense, were already visible. The reconquest of the Dutch Republic and the invasion of England had both failed in the 16th century. But since that date Spain’s two maritime enemies had grown more prosperous and powerful, while the Reformed religion continued to advance in Central Europe. The cessation of hostilities for a decade under Lerma thus merely convinced the new generation of imperialist generals and diplomats – Zuñiga, Gondomar, Osuña, Bedmar, Fuentes – that, if war was expensive, Spain could not afford peace. The accession of Philip IV, bringing the masterful Conde-Duque de Olivares to chief power in Madrid, coincided with the upheaval in the Bohemian lands of the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family: the chance to crush Protestantism in Germany and settle accounts with Holland – an inter-related goal, because of the strategic need to command the corridor through the Rhineland for troop movements between Italy and Flanders – now appeared before them. European war was thus unleashed once again, by proxy through Vienna, but at the initiative of Madrid, in the 1620’s. The course of the Thirty Years’ War curiously reversed the pattern of the two great bouts of Habsburg arms in the previous century. Whereas Charles V and Philip II had scored initial victories in the South of Europe and suffered eventual defeat in the North, Philip IV’s forces achieved early successes in the North only to experience ultimate disasters in the South. The size of the Spanish mobilization for this third and last general engagement was formidable: in 1625 Philip IV claimed 300,000 under his orders.²⁶ The Bohemian Estates were crushed at the Battle of the White Mountain, with the aid of Hispanic subsidies and veterans, and the cause of Protestantism permanently beaten in the Czech lands. The Dutch were forced backwards by Spinola, with the capture of Breda. The Swedish counterattack in Germany, after defeating Austrian or Leaguer armies, was undone by Spanish tercios under the Cardinal-Infante at Nordlingen. But it was precisely these victories which finally forced France into hostilities, tipping the military balance decisively against Spain: the reaction of Paris to Nordlingen in 1634 was Richelieu’s declaration of war in 1635. The results were soon evident. Breda was retaken by the Dutch in 1637. A year later, Breisach – the key to the roads into Flanders – had fallen. Within another year, the bulk of the Spanish fleet was sent to the bottom at the Downs – a far worse blow to the Habsburg navy than the fate of the Armada. Finally, in 1643, the French army ended the supremacy of the tercios at Rocroi. Military intervention by Bourbon France had proved a very different matter from the Valois contests of the previous century; it was the new nature and weight of French Absolutism which was now to encompass the downfall of Spanish imperial power in Europe. For whereas in the 16th century, Charles V and Philip II had both profited from the internal weakness of the French State, by utilizing provincial disaffections to invade France itself, the boot was now on the other foot: a maturing French Absolutism was able to exploit aristocratic sedition and regional separatism in the Iberian peninsula to invade Spain. In the 1520’s Spanish troops had marched into Provence, in the 1590’s into Languedoc, Brittany and the He de France, with the alliance or welcome of local dissidents. In the 1640’s, French soldiers and ships were fighting together with anti-Habsburg rebels in Catalonia, Portugal and Naples: Spanish Absolutism was at bay on its own soil.

For the long strain of the international conflict in the North eventually told in the Iberian peninsula itself. State bankruptcy had to be declared again in 1627; the vellón was devalued by 50 per cent in 1628; a sharp drop in transatlantic trade followed in 1629–31; the silver fleet failed to arrive in 1640.²⁷ The huge war costs led to new taxes on consumption, contributions from the clergy, confiscations of interest on public bonds, seizure of private bullion shipments, swelling sales of honours and – especially – seigneurial jurisdictions to the nobility. All these devices, however, remained inadequate to raise the sums needed for the pursuit of the struggle; for its costs were still borne virtually alone by Castile. Portugal yielded no revenues whatever to Madrid, since local subsidies were confined to defense purposes in the Portuguese colonies. Flanders was chronically deficitary. Naples and Sicily had contributed a modest but respectable surplus to the central treasury, in the previous century. Now, however, the cost of covering Milan and maintaining the presidios in Tuscany absorbed all their revenues, despite increased taxes, sale of offices and alienations of land: Italy continued to provide invaluable manpower, but no longer money, for the war.²⁸ Navarre, Aragon and Valencia at best consented to a few small grants to the dynasty in its emergency. Catalonia – the richest region of the Eastern kingdom and the most parsimonious province of all – paid nothing, permitting no taxes to be spent, and no troopsto be deployed, outside its borders. The historical price of the failure of the Habsburg State to harmonize its realms was already patent by the outset of the Thirty Years’ War. Olivares, aware of the acute dangers in the lack of any central integration to the State system, and the isolated and perilous eminence of Castile within it, had proposed a far-reaching reform of the whole structure to Philip IV in a secret memorandum of 1624 – effectively a simultaneous equalization of fiscal charges and political responsibilities between the different dynastic patrimonies, which would have given Aragonese, Catalan or Italian nobles regular access to the highest positions in royal service, in exchange for a more even distribution of the tax-burden and the acceptance of uniform laws modelled on those of Castile.²⁹ This blueprint for a unitary Absolutism was too bold to be released publicly, for fear of both Castilian and non-Castilian reaction. But Olivares also drew up a second and more limited project, the ‘Union of Arms’, for the creation of a common reserve army of 140,000 to be maintained and recruited from all the Spanish possessions, for their common defense. This scheme, officially proclaimed in 1626, was thwarted on all sides by traditional particularism. Catalonia, above all, refused to have anything to do with it, and in practice it remained a dead letter.

But as the military conflict wore on, and the Spanish position worsened, pressure to extract some Catalan assistance for it became increasingly desperate in Madrid. Olivares therefore determined to force Catalonia into the war by attacking France across its southeastern frontiers in 1639, thereby putting the uncooperative province defacto into the front-line of Spanish operations. This reckless gamble back-fired disastrously.³⁰ The morose and parochial Catalan nobility, starved of remunerative offices and dabbling in mountain banditry, were enraged by commanders from Castile and casualties suffered against the French. The lower clergy whipped up regionalist fervour. The peasantry, harried by billeting and requisitioning, rose against the troops in a spreading insurrection. Rural labourers and unemployed streaming into the towns set off violent riots in Barcelona and other cities.³¹ The Catalan Revolution of 1640 fused the grievances of all social classes except a handful of magnates into an unstoppable explosion. Habsburg power in the province disintegrated. To head off the dangers of popular radicalism, and block a Castilian reconquest, the nobility and patriciate invited in a French occupation. For a decade, Catalonia became a protectorate of France. Meanwhile, on the other side of the peninsula, Portugal had staged its own revolt within a few months of the Catalan rebellion. The local aristocracy, resentful of the loss of Brazil to the Dutch and assured of the anti-Castilian sentiments of the masses, had no difficulty in reasserting its independence, once Olivares had made the blunder of concentrating royal armies against the heavily defended East, where Franco-Catalan forces were victorious, rather than the comparatively demilitarized West.³² In 1643, Olivares fell; four years later, Naples and Sicily in their turn threw off Spanish rule. The European conflict had exhausted the exchequer and economy of the Habsburg Empire in the South, and disrupted its composite polity. In the cataclysm of the 1640’s, as Spain went down to defeat in the Thirty Years’ War, and bankruptcy, pestilence, depopulation and invasion followed, 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 this point very well: Spain under the Hahshurgs, I, p. 129.

16. Pierre Vilar, Oro y Moneda en la Historia, 1450–1920, Barcelona 1969, pp. 78, 165–8.

17. Vilar, Oro y Moneda, pp. 180–1.

18. Noel Salomon, La Campagne de Nouvelle Castille à la Fin du XVIe Siècle, Paris 1964, pp. 257–8, 266. For tithes, dues and rents, see pp. 227, 243–4, 250.

19. It is a Portuguese historian who has underlined the implications of this extraordinary occupational pattern, which he believes to hold for Portugal as well: Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, A Estrutura na Antiga Sociedade Portuguesa, Lisbon 1971, pp. 85–9. As Magalhães Godinho remarks, since agriculture was the main branch of economic production in any pre-industrial society, a diversion of manpower away from it on this scale inevitably resulted in long-term stagnation.

20. For the reactions of contemporaries by the turn of the 17th century, see Vilar’s superb essay, ‘Le Temps du Quichotte’, Europe, XXXIV, 1956, pp. 3–16.

21. Alva characteristically commented: ‘In our nation nothing is more important than to introduce gentlemen and men of substance into the infantry, so that all is not left in the hands of labourers and lackeys.’ Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, p. 41.

22. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, pp. 27–31.

23. Philip II limited himself to reducing the powers of the local Diputació (where the unanimity rule was abolished) and of the office of Justicia, and introducing non-native Viceroys in Aragon.

24. Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, II, pp. 12–13.

25. Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, II, p. 11.

26. Parker, The Army of Flanders and Spanish Road, p. 6.

27. Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 343.

28. For the financial record of the Italian possessions, see A. Domínguez Ortiz, Política y Hacienda de Felipe IV, Madrid 1960, pp. 161–4. In general, the role of the Italian components of the Spanish Empire in Europe has been least studied, although it is evident that no satisfactory account of the imperial system as a whole will be possible until this lacuna has been remedied.

29. The best discussion of this scheme is provided by Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans, Cambridge 1963, pp. 199–204. Domínguez has argued that Olivares had no internal policy, being exclusively preoccupied with foreign affairs: La Sociedad Española en el Siglo XVI, I, Madrid 1963, p. 15. This view is belied both by his early domestic reforms and the breadth of his recommendations in the memorandum of 1624.

30. Olivares was aware of the magnitude of the risk he was taking: ‘My head cannot bear the light of a candle or of the window. . . . To my mind this will lose everything irremediably or be the salvation of the ship. Here go religion, kingdom, nation, everything, and, if our strength is insufficient, let us die in the attempt. Better to die, and more just, than to fall under the dominion of others, and most of all of heretics, as I consider the French to be. Either all is lost, or else Castile will be head of the world, as it is already head of Your Majesty’s Monarchy.’ Cit: Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans, p. 310.

31. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans, pp. 460–8, 473–6, 486–7.

32. A. Domínguez Ortiz, The Golden Century of Spain 1556–1659), London 1971, p. 103.

33. Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, II, pp. 122–3; Domínguez Ortiz, The Golden Century of Spain, pp. 39–40.

34. See Henry Kamen, The War of Succession in Spain 1700–1715, London 1969, pp. 84–117. The main architect of the new administration was Bergeyck, a Fleming from Brussels; pp. 237–40.

35. It was in this epoch that a national flag and anthem were adopted. Dominguez’s dictum is characteristic: ‘Smaller than the Empire, larger than Castile, Spain, precellent creation of our eighteenth century, emerged from its nebula and acquired solid and tangible shape. . . . By the time of the War of Independence, the ideal plastic and symbolic image of the Nation as we know it today, was essentially complete.’ Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La Sociedad Española en el Siglo XVIII, Madrid 1955, pp. 41, 43: the best work on the period.

36. Vilar, Oro y Moneda, pp. 348–61, 315–17.

37. There is a memorable portrait of this class in Raymond Carr, ‘Spain’, in Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 43–59.

38. Domínguez Ortiz, La Sociedad Española en el Siglo XVIII, pp. 93, 178.

39. Domínguez provides an ample survey of the whole pattern of the señoríos in his chapter, ‘El Ocaso del Régimen Señorial’, La Sociedad Española en el Siglo XVIII, pp. 300–42, in which he describes them in the phrase cited above.