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 (Nijmegen" class="md-crosslink">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 The early Bourbons, 1700–53
Although the wars of the 17th century had weakened Spain’s power in Europe, the country still remained the world’s greatest imperial power. Spain’s central problem in the 17th century had been to maintain what remained of its European possessions and to retain control of its American empire. At the beginning of the 18th century, both tasks appeared to be beyond the military and economic resources of the monarchy. In the 17th century the greatest threat had come from a land power, France, jealous of Habsburg power in Europe; in the 18th it was to come from a sea power, England, while the Austrian Habsburgs became the main continental enemy of Spain. The War of the Spanish Succession
In 1700 (by the will of the childless Charles II) the duc d’Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV of France, became Philip V of Spain. Austria refused to recognize Philip, a Bourbon, and thereby concede the defeat of its hopes of placing an Austrian candidate on the throne of Spain. To England, a Bourbon king in Spain would disrupt the balance of power in Europe in favour of French hegemony. Louis XIV conceived of Spain under a Bourbon king as a political and commercial appendage of France to be ruled by correspondence from Versailles. He wished to regenerate and strengthen his ally by a modern centralized administration, a task both complicated and facilitated by the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), wherein the allied armies of Britain and Austria invaded Spain in order to drive out Philip V and establish the “Austrian” candidate, the archduke Charles (later the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI), on the throne.
An efficient administration had to be created in order to extract resources from Spain for the war effort and thus relieve pressure on the French treasury; at the same time, financial shortages imperiled administrative reform, while war taxation and war levies drove Catalonia and Aragon to revolt against the demands of the Bourbon dynasty. The instruments of centralizing reform were French civil servants Jean-Jacques Amelot, Louis XIV’s ambassador, and Jean-Henri-Louis Orry, a financial expert, and a handful of Spanish lawyer-administrators such as Melchor de Macanaz. They were supported by the queen, María Luisa of Savoy, and her friend the 60-year-old Marie-Anne de la Trémoille, princesse des Ursins.
The opponents of reform were those who suffered by it: the grandees who had dominated the cumbersome, inefficient councils; the councils themselves; the regions such as Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia, in which the establishment of effective royal rule was seen as a Castilian centralizing imposition in conflict with the local privileges, or fueros" class="md-crosslink">fueros; and the church, whose position was threatened by the ferocious and doctrinaire regalism of Macanaz, who wished to subject the independent jurisdictions of the church (especially of the papal nuncios and the Inquisition) to the absolute monarch. The disaffection of all these elements easily turned into opposition to Philip V as king. Opposition to the new dynasty accentuated the determination of Bourbon civil servants to end special privileges that could serve as a cover for treasonable sympathy with the Austrian and English invaders.
Despite severe financial difficulties (owing to the loss of revenues from the Indies), Castile was ferociously loyal to the new dynasty throughout the war. The support of Castile and of France (until 1711) enabled Philip V to survive severe defeats and two occupations of Madrid. In 1705 the archduke Charles landed in Catalonia and took Barcelona. When Philip V tried to attack Catalonia through Aragon, the Aragonese, in the name of their fueros, revolted against the passage of Castilian troops. This revolt, backed by the local nobility, turned the king’s advisers resolutely against local privileges and aristocratic treason. After the victory over the archduke Charles at Almansa (April 1707), the fueros of the kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon were abolished and the property of rebels confiscated. When the archbishop of Valencia resisted attempts to make priests of doubtful loyalty appear before civil courts, the regalism of Macanaz was given full course.