1492 Christopher Columbus reaches America
1519-1522 Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigates the globe 1519-1533 Spanish conquests of Native American empires in the Americas 1556-1598 Reign of King Philip II in Spain 1 562-1598 Religious and civil wars in France
1565 “Manila Galleons” open Spanish trade route between Asia and America
1566 Revolt against Spanish control begins in the Netherlands
1588 Spanish Armada is destroyed off the coast of England and Scotland
1598 King Henry IV issues Edict of Nantes; grants religious rights to French
Protestants
1618-1648 The Thirty Years’ War in Germany
1648 Peace of Westphalia recognizes system of sovereign European states
Craft—lighter, smaller, and faster, though well furnished with guns—harried the lumbering mass of the Armada, broke up its formations, and attacked its great vessels one by one. It found no refuge at Calais, and English fireships drove it out again to sea. Then arose a great storm, which the English would later call the “Protestant wind.” The storm blew the broken Armada northward around the tip of Scotland, the Orkneys, the Hebrides, and northern Ireland—forbidding coasts which the Spaniards had to skirt without charts or pilots or adequate provisions, and which they strewed with their wreckage and their bones.
The Results of the Struggle
The war for control of the Netherlands went on for several years, even after Philip died in 1598. In the wars with Spain the English had, above all else, assured their national independence. They had acquired an intense national spirit, a love of “this other Eden, demi-paradise,” “this precious stone set in the silver sea,” as Shakespeare wrote; and they had become more solidly Protestant, almost unanimously set against “popery.” With the ruin of the Armada, they were more free to take to the sea; we have seen how the English East India Company was founded in 1600.
Partition of the Netherlands
In the Netherlands, the battle lines swayed back and forth until 1609. In that year a Twelve Years’ Truce was agreed to. By this truce the Netherlands were par-“ titioned. The line of partition ran somewhat farther north than it had in Parma’s time, for the Spaniards had retaken Antwerp and other cities in the middle zone. The seven provinces north of the line, those that had formed the Union of Utrecht in 1579, were henceforth known as Dutch. The ten provinces south of the line were known as the Spanish Netherlands. Protestants in the south either became Catholics or fled to the north, so that the south (the modem Belgium) became solidly Catholic, while the number of Protestants in the north was increased. Even so, the Dutch were not a completely Protestant people, for probably as many as a third of them remained Catholic. Calvinism was the religion of most Dutch burghers and the religion favored by the state; but in the face of an exceptionally large religious minority the Dutch Netherlands adopted a policy of toleration.
The southern Netherlands were ruined by almost 40 years of war. The Dutch, moreover, occupied the mouth of the Scheldt River and refused to allow oceangoing vessels to proceed upstream to Antwerp or to Ghent. The Scheldt remained “closed” for two centuries, and the Flemish cities never recovered their old position. Amsterdam became the commercial and financial center of northern Europe; it retained its commercial supremacy for a century and its financial supremacy for two centuries. For the Dutch, as for the English, the weakening of Spanish naval power opened the way to the sea. The Dutch East India Company was organized in 1602. Both Dutch and English began to found overseas colonies. The English settled in Virginia in 1607, the Dutch at New York in 1612.
As for Spain, while it remained the most formidable military power of Europe for another half-century, its political and economic decline had already begun.
The beginnings of Spanish decline
At the death of Philip II the monarchy was living from hand to mouth, habitually depending on the next arrival of treasure from the Indies. The productive forces of the country were weakened by inflation, by taxation, by emigration, by depopulation. At Seville, for example, only 400 looms were in operation in 1621, where there had been 16,000 a century earlier. Spain suffered from the very circumstances that made it great. Qualities that developed in the centuries of religious war and in the reliance upon imported gold or silver from America were not those on which a more modern economy and society could easily be built. The long history of campaigns against infidels and heretics had produced an exceptionally large number of minor aristocrats who often saw their class status as a reason to avoid various forms of mundane work. Their relative indifference to the newer, expanding institutions of European commercial activity may have influenced the country as a whole. In any case, many of the ablest Spaniards continued to enter the church, and there were few innovations in Spain’s political and economic life.
The Moriscos
The very unity accomplished under Ferdinand and Isabella threatened to dissolve. After more than a century of the Inquisition people were still afraid of false Christians and crypto-Muslims. The question of the Moriscos rose again in 1608. The Moriscos included some of the best farmers and most skilled artisans in the
Country. They lived in almost all parts of Spain and were in no sense a “foreign” element, since they were simply the descendants of those Spaniards who, in the Muslim period, which had begun 900 years before, had adopted the Muslim religion and Arabic language and culture. They were now supposedly Christian, but the true and pure Christians accused them of preserving in secret the rites of Islam and of sympathy for the Barbary pirates. They were thought to be clannish, marrying among themselves; and they were so efficient, sober, and hardworking that they outdistanced other Spaniards in competition. In 1609 some 150,000 Moriscos were driven out of Valencia; in 1610 some 64,000 were driven from Aragon; in 1611 an unknown number were expelled from Castile. All were simply put on boats and sent off with what they could carry. Spain, whose total population was rapidly falling in any case, thus lost one of the most socially valuable, if not religiously orthodox, of all its minorities.
Nor could the Christian kingdoms hold peaceably together, despite the centralizing projects of the main government minister, the Count of Olivares. Coming to power under King Philip IV in 1621, Olivares sought to curb the independence of the church, increase the king’s revenues, control the aristocracy, and send the Spanish army into both the Netherlands and the religious wars in Germany. His policies provoked strong opposition throughout Spain. In 1640 Portugal, which had been joined to the Spanish crown since 1580 when its own ruling line had run out, reestablished its independence. That same year Catalonia rose in open rebellion. The Catalan war, in which the French streamed across the
Pyrenees to aid the rebels, lasted for almost 20 years. Catalonia was at last reconquered, but it managed to preserve its old privileges and separate identity. Catalan and Castilian viewed each other with increased repugnance. The Spanish kingdoms were almost as disunited, in spirit and in institutions, as in the days of Isabella and Ferdinand. They suffered, too, during the seventeenth century from a line of kings whose mental peculiarities reached the point of positive imbecility. Meanwhile, however, the might of Spain was still to be felt in both Germany and France.
World History
