The single most splendid monument in the Baroque style, the Buen Retiro Palace just outside Madrid, has not survived (for a discussion of the fine porcelain manufactured there later, see Buen Retiro ware). Built in the 1630s, in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War, at a time when Spain’s military fortunes were beginning to decline, it was designed to reaffirm the greatness of the Spanish monarchy. Like El Escorial, it had a forbidding exterior; its interior decoration, however, like that of the splendid library of Philip II’s monastery-palace, showed, literally or allegorically, Spain’s victorious battles with the enemies of Catholic Christendom. Great numbers of paintings were bought in Spain and abroad, and Spanish courtiers were coerced to lend or even to make presents of their own paintings and other art objects. As in other courts of the period, splendid theatrical and musical entertainments were organized, mainly for the benefit of the court and the diplomatic corps, but occasionally the Madrid public was also invited or allowed to buy tickets. Perhaps it was symbolic of the Spanish monarchy in this period that such a grandiose vision and its overhasty construction should have produced rising and increasingly unacceptable maintenance costs.
The painting of the period does not lend itself as easily to a social interpretation, but certain patterns may still be observed. The greatest painter of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos, from Crete), made his home in Toledo, where the local aristocratic and ecclesiastical society (but not Philip II) seems to have fully appreciated his genius. El Greco’s superb portraits, but, above all, his religious paintings, with their elongated figures rising like so many flames to heaven, seem like the embodiment of the most spiritual aspects of Spanish Catholicism.
El Greco left no school of painting. The painters of the following generation, especially Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, had a different religious sensibility, more naturalistic than that of El Greco, more personal, and more romantic; and again, as did Baroque architecture, they appealed successfully to a popular religiosity. But the greatest of them, Diego Velázquez, was hardly a religious painter at all. His subjects were the king with his family and court and, characteristic for the age and parallel with the drama of the period, the common people. All these he represented with a realism and psychological insight unmatched in the 17th century, except perhaps by Rembrandt. The reign of Philip III
It was the tragedy of Spain that its ruling classes failed to respond to the social and political problems of the age as creatively as its writers and artists. For this failure there are at least some good reasons. In the first place, the system of royal government, as it was understood at the time, depended ultimately on the king’s ability to lead and to make decisions. Philip II’s very consciousness of his divinely imposed obligations, compounded by his almost pathological suspiciousness of the intentions and ambitions of other men, had led him to deprecate independent initiative by his ministers. He thus failed to educate an effective ruling class with a tradition of statesmanlike thinking and decision making.
Philip III, painting by Diego Velázquez, 1631–36; in the Prado Museum, Madrid.Archivo Iconografico, S.A./Corbis
Devout but indolent and passive, Philip III (1598–1621) was incapable of carrying on his father’s methods of personal government. He therefore had to have a minister (privado) who would do all his work for him. His choice, duque de Lerma" class="md-crosslink">Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas, duque de Lerma, however, turned out to be a singularly unfortunate one. Amiable, incompetent, and, inevitably, under heavy attack from those who envied his position, Lerma strove to maintain himself by the lavish dispensation of royal patronage to the high nobility. He was unable to turn the schemes of the arbitristas into effective reforms. During the reign of Philip III the government of Spain either became the victim of events that it did not attempt to control or allowed its hand to be forced by outsiders.
Not all events could have been controlled. In 1599–1600 an epidemic plague claimed some 500,000 victims in Castile. This sudden decimation of the labour force caused a sharp rise in wages, which in turn acted as another disincentive to capital investment by Spaniards. Yet the advantages that the labourers had reaped from the rise in wages were quickly offset by renewed inflation, the result of the government’s decision to solve its perennial financial problems by the massive minting of vellón, a debased copper coinage. Although this action did not prevent the need for another moratorium on government debts, in 1608 the king promised the Cortes of Castile that the government would not issue any more vellón money for 20 years. But in 1617 and 1621 he was forced to ask the Cortes to allow additional issues. The expulsion of the Moriscos
The plight of the Moriscos was the most serious social crisis of the reign. The great majority of the Moriscos lived in the kingdom of Valencia. Like those of Andalusia, they had been forcibly but ineffectively converted to Christianity. Most of them were relatively poor farmers, agricultural labourers, or small tradesmen and hucksters. Although they were hated and despised by the poor Christian peasants, the Moriscos were protected by the landowners for whom they provided industrious tenants and labourers.
For many years a controversy raged between those who wanted to “solve” the Morisco problem by expulsion and those who pleaded for time and money to achieve the genuine assimilation and Christianization of the Moriscos. While the practical economic aspects of these two views were not neglected, it was characteristic of the Spain of the period that the main emphasis of the debate was on the religious and moral problems. In 1609 Lerma’s government ordered the expulsion of the Moriscos. Lerma saw it as part of a policy of disengagement from “Castilian” power politics in central Europe—he himself was a Valencian—and a renewed shifting of Spanish energies toward North Africa and Islam. As a Valencian landowner, he also hoped for personal gain from the confiscation of Morisco land. By 1614 some 275,000 Moriscos had been forced to leave Spain. The majority of Spaniards undoubtedly approved of the expulsion.
The economic effects of the expulsion have generated considerable debate, both at the time and today. In Castile the effects were probably slight. In Aragon and Valencia, where the Moriscos had constituted between 20 and 30 percent of the population, they were certainly much greater. Some but by no means all Morisco land was resettled by “old” Christians. There was a shift from labour-intensive sugar and rice production to mulberry cultivation for silk and viticulture. The greatest difficulties were caused by the indebtedness of the Morisco peasants and the consequent losses suffered by their urban creditors. An ironic footnote to the expulsion was the plight of the Aragonese and Valencian Inquisitions. Although they once favoured expulsion, they were now left without their major source of income, the composition fines for Moorish practices that they imposed on the Morisco villages. Spain and Europe
Neither Philip III nor Lerma was emotionally or intellectually capable of the fundamental reappraisal of foreign policy that Philip II’s failures required. Very few even of the arbitristas had seen this need sufficiently clearly. The court, the nobility, and, above all, the clergy and the king’s confessors remained caught in the now-hardening tradition of Spanish imperialism, simplistically interpreted as the cause of God. This attitude caused a serious misjudgment of the political forces in England, leading to the absurd hope of placing the infanta Isabella on the English throne upon the death of Elizabeth I. In 1601 a small Spanish force was disembarked at Kinsale, in Ireland, to cooperate with the Irish rebels. The English army had no difficulty in forcing it to surrender.