![]() Whereas the sixteenth century had been a period of remarkable population growth, the seventeenth was one of demographic decline. ![]() 1590 (above) owed something to some serious domestic problems. Seen in this light, those reports – and those of the many English consuls resident in Spanish ports, and in those of other parts of the Spanish monarchy, notably Naples and Sicily (SP 93) – offer an invaluable and hitherto largely untapped insight into Spain's difficult seventeenth century. Whatever their personal opinions, successive diplomats were expected to provide their own Court with the 'correct' intelligence regarding Spain and its material resources which would enable monarch and ministers at home to formulate an effective policy vis-à-vis Spain and the other sovereigns of Europe. It also has to be said that some of those diplomats, for example, Alexander Stanhope in the 1690s, had a largely jaundiced view of Spain, its government and people, such that what they write about monarch, ministers and subjects cannot always be taken at face value some others, however, were more sympathetic. Unfortunately, these records do not cover the whole of the period, reflecting the fact that for years at a time diplomatic relations were broken off most obviously in wartime. #CENTUARY LONG LOST TO TIME SERIES#The rise and apparent decline of Spain can be pursued in the State Papers (mainly in series SP 94), drawing above all on the despatches of successive English diplomats resident (often for long periods) at the Spanish Court. In 1648, after a near eighty-year struggle to suppress the Dutch Revolt in the Low Countries, Philip IV (1621–65) acknowledged the independence at last of the Dutch Republic in 1655, the English admiral Blake seized the island of Jamaica while further losses were sustained inside and outside Europe in the following decades. ![]() For many historians, this finally extinguished Spanish military power. Spanish forces continued to win victories in the 1620s and 1630s, in the Thirty Years War, but in 1639 another Spanish fleet, convoying troops to Flanders was destroyed off the English coast a few years later, in 1643, Spain's Army of Flanders suffered defeat in France at Rocroi. Nevertheless, the Armada's failure is widely regarded as a turning point, the beginning of a decline which became pronounced in the seventeenth century. Philip secured Portugal and its empire in 1580–1 and in 1588 launched an attempt to conquer England – the Spanish Armada – which almost succeeded. Forty years later, Spain, Spanish Italy (Naples, Sicily, Sardinia and Milan), the Spanish Low Countries (Flanders, Luxembourg and Franche Comté) and an expanding Spanish America ("the Indies") from which foreigners were excluded and which was yielding growing revenues, passed to Charles's son, Philip II (1556–98), under whom Spanish power and influence reached new heights. ![]() In 1516, this inheritance passed to their grandson, the Habsburg Charles I of Spain (1516–56), the future Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. They not only united "Spain" by bringing together, very loosely, these disparate territories, but they also conquered the last Islamic realm (Granada) in Iberia, supported Columbus' Atlantic voyages, and extended Spanish dominion in north Africa and Italy. Spain's rise to be a European and global power began with the marriage (1469) of queen Isabel of Castile (1474–1504) and king Ferdinand of Aragon (1479–1516), whose realm included Aragon proper, Valencia and Catalonia. One of the most striking phenomena of the early modern period was the rise and then the decline of Spain between the late fifteenth and the late seventeenth centuries. ![]()
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