Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  In 1667 Louis XIV declared war on Spain, on the grounds that the terms of the peace of the Pyrenees had not been fulfilled, and his troops seized Lille and other towns in the Spanish Netherlands, which became a permanent part of France when the parties made peace. Further aggression by Louis secured more territorial gains, in part because harvest failures in 1665–8 and 1677–83, plus another plague epidemic in 1676–85 and yet more harvest failures in 1685–8, prevented Spain's demographic and economic recovery. In 1687 the abuses that normally arose from billeting troops during a time of dearth provoked another major rebellion in Catalonia, and thousands of peasants marched on Barcelona. Just as in 1640, some ministers in Madrid advocated firm repression, but others had learned their lesson, recognizing that ‘force is a very dangerous remedy when the civilians are more powerful than the army’. They therefore hesitated to do anything rash lest ‘all Catalonia should be lost in a few hours, as we saw in the days of the count of Santa Coloma’. Nevertheless, France again intervened, conquering much of Catalonia (including Barcelona) and also invading the Spanish Netherlands (destroying most of Brussels in a ferocious bombardment). It is hard to dissent from the verdict of the Venetian ambassador in 1695: ‘The whole of the present reign has been an uninterrupted series of calamities’.96

  Counting the Cost

  What had Philip IV gained by fighting so many wars? In material terms, nothing: he acquired no new territory and instead lost the vast Portuguese empire, Jamaica, important parts of the Netherlands, and northern Catalonia. Yet this negative outcome entailed immense Spanish sacrifices, both political and material. Repeatedly, strategic overstretch forced the crown to postpone measures aimed at recovery and retrenchment, and to make substantial concessions to its rebels. When Barcelona surrendered in 1652, for example, Philip confirmed its privileges almost exactly as they had been in 1640, issued a general pardon that exempted only one person, and swore to respect the ‘Constitutions’.97

  Olivares's attempts to innovate in Catalonia thus neither diminished the principality's independence nor increased its contribution to imperial ventures – but they caused great personal and material losses. Troops had destroyed countless villages like Santa Coloma de Farners and Ruidarenes, and butchered the defenders of numerous towns like Cambrils and Tarragona: between 1640 and 1659 thousands of ordinary Catalans died violently and thousands more fled into exile. The loss was qualitative as well as quantitative: at least 200 gentlemen lost their lives during the revolt – executed, killed in action or disappeared – and over 500 more went into exile. By the time Barcelona surrendered in 1652, its population halved by famine and plague, it had run up a debt of over 20 million ducats; the diocese of Tortosa, which changed hands in 1640 and again in 1648, saw its revenues drop from over 30,000 ducats annually in the 1630s to virtually nothing.98

  Everywhere, Philip IV had far fewer subjects at his death than at his accession. In Naples, the revolt of 1647–8 cost the lives of at least 6,000 people; repeated harvest failures expedited the death of tens of thousands more; and over 150,000 people in the capital city alone died during the plague of 1656 (see chapter 4 above). A census of 1650 in Aragon showed that settlements near the Catalan and French frontiers had fallen at least one-third below the levels recorded at the end of the Middle Ages; while the Castilian population living near the Portuguese border also fell dramatically because the king's troops exacted so much money, food and other local resources. The burden on smaller communities often proved insupportable and their inhabitants fled because they could not feed both themselves and the troops billeted on them. Baptisms in Extremadura fell by more than a quarter (Fig. 29). As Henry Kamen has observed: ‘No other single event in Castilian history of the early modern period, excepting only epidemics, did more to destroy the country’ than the 28-year war with Portugal.99

  Nevertheless, most of Castile lay far from any theatre of operations and so avoided direct devastation by troops; also, thanks to ruthless enforcement of a cordon sanitaire, it avoided the plague for much of the seventeenth century. The steady demographic decline apparent in Figure 29 therefore reflects other causes. It is possible to identify three potential culprits. First came extreme weather, starting with the drought of 1630–1, which ended the viability of many settlements on marginal land. Numerous subsequent floods, droughts and other climatic anomalies also periodically caused sterility, dearth and famine. Second, every year saw the emigration of thousands of people from Castile. Some went involuntarily, as conscripts to fight for the king overseas or as prisoners captured by north African pirates. Many more took ship for America because, in the words of the French ambassador in 1681, ‘they cannot live in Spain’. Inevitably, this reduced the number of subjects left at home.100

  The third culprit for the depopulation of Castile was taxation. According to a recent calculation, the crown's taxes absorbed approximately ‘8 per cent of national income in the 1580s and 12 per cent in the 1660s’ – an increase of 50 per cent – and, on top of this rising burden, taxpayers also had to satisfy the competing demands of the Church, of landlords (for the rural population) and of the towns (for the rest).101 As in any fiscal system, this burden was not shared equally. Some Castilians enjoyed tax exemption: those able to produce certain goods for themselves (olive oil, wine and so on) escaped paying excise duties on what they consumed, while certain social groups achieved collective exemption. Thus when in 1648 the magistrates of Cádiz discussed how to allocate the ‘millones’ tax, they noted that many citizens ‘were tax exempt on a variety of counts: some because they were gentlemen or clerics’, others ‘because they served in the cavalry, as gunners, as ministers of the Cruzada, and as Familiars of the Inquisition’. Hence, they continued, the burden would fall on the relatively few citizens involved in the city's trade, and on the poor, causing them disproportionate hardship.102 The system of making each community pay a fixed quota for each tax, whatever the number of taxpayers, hit smaller communities particularly hard in times of falling population, because almost inevitably a point came when the remaining taxpayers could no longer afford the collective assessment and so abandoned the settlements. Fiscal pressure also caused indirect harm. As the council of finance warned the king in 1634, ‘people need food more than they need clothes and shoes’, so raising taxes reduced demand for manufactured goods and caused lay-offs and migration.103

  29. Baptisms in Castile, 1600–1700.

  Baptismal registers from 115 Spanish parishes all showed a fall during the seventeenth century, but with different rhythms. Old Castile suffered its sharpest fall during the drought of 1630–1, New Castile and Extremadura during the plague years of 1649–50, and León during the famine of 1662. Extremadura also suffered losses because of the war with Portugal between 1640 and 1668. Other regions adversely affected by Philip IV's wars – Aragon, the Basque provinces, Navarre and Valencia – are not represented.

  As Alberto Marcos Martín forcefully stated:

  In the last analysis, we should assess a fiscal system (any fiscal system, past or present) not by what it raises but by what it collects (and by what methods and processes it chooses to accomplish this task), and by what it does, what it creates, and how it spends what it has amassed in taxes and contributions.

  By this yardstick, the record of the Spanish Habsburgs is abysmal. First, they borrowed enormous sums from foreign bankers, creating a ‘sovereign debt’ far beyond Spain's capacity to service: over 112 million ducats by 1623, over 131 million by 1638, almost 182 million by 1667, and almost 223 million by 1687.104 Second, public-sector borrowing drained capital and raw materials from Spain, undercut local manufactures, and encouraged a ‘rentier’ mentality among those sectors of the population with the potential to be entrepreneurs. Third, the need to raise and create taxes to repay lenders led to onerous fiscal expedients with high social and economic costs. Finally, most tax revenues were remitted abroad, to fund armies and navies fighting to achieve international goals that mattered to the dynasty but not to most
Spaniards. Between 1618 and 1648, the government exported at least 150 million ducats – a sum almost exactly equal to the increase in Castile's public debt.

  In the case of China, Timothy Brook pointed out that no previous emperor had ‘faced climatic conditions as abnormal and severe as Chongzhen’, and one could make much the same excuse for Philip IV. During his reign, Spain suffered extreme weather without parallel in other periods, particularly in 1630–2 and 1640–3; but more than any other seventeenth-century ruler, Philip intensified the impact of climate change by disastrous policy choices. In the words of Arthur Hopton, one of the shrewdest ambassadors in Madrid, in 1634: ‘It is no wonder that many of their designs fail in the execution, for though this great vessel [the Spanish Monarchy] contains much water, yet it has so many leaks it is always dry’ – in other words, in trying to do too much, the crown achieved nothing.105

  The Spanish Habsburgs seem to have sincerely believed their mantra that foreign wars, however expensive and inconclusive, offered the best way to defend Spain itself: ‘With as many kingdoms and lordships as have been linked to this crown it is impossible to be without war in some area, either to defend what we have acquired or to divert our enemies,’ as Philip once observed.106 Nevertheless, although the king spent every day of his 44-year reign at war – against the Dutch (1621–48), against the French (1635–59), against Britain (1625–30 and 1654–9) and in the Iberian Peninsula (1640–68), as well as in Germany and in Italy – he could surely have avoided (or more swiftly ended) some conflicts, and thereby reduced the fiscal pressure that crushed his subjects and provoked so many of them to rebel. In the Netherlands, he could certainly have renewed the Twelve Years’ Truce with the Dutch Republic when it expired in 1621; and he might have exploited the capture of Breda and the simultaneous imperial victories in Germany in 1625 to negotiate an advantageous settlement. The king himself later admitted that he should have stayed out of the war of Mantua in 1628: ‘I have heard it said that the wars in Italy over Casale in Monferrat could have been avoided,’ he wrote ruefully, and ‘if I have made a mistake in some way and given Our Lord cause for displeasure, it was in this’.107 Above all, Spain fumbled every opportunity to make a peace with France. In 1637, after just two years of war, Richelieu sent a secret agent to open informal peace talks, but Olivares insisted on a public overture: ‘Let those who broke the peace, sue for peace,’ he pompously chided the French envoy. Two years later, the count-duke warned his master that ‘we need to think about bending in order to avoid breaking’ and sent a special envoy of his own to Paris to start talks – but his willingness to negotiate ended as soon as the Nu-pieds rebellion in Normandy seemed to weaken his rival.108

  Shortly after his fall in 1643, Olivares realized the foolishness of a faith-based foreign policy, confessing to a former colleague ‘This is the world, and so it has always been, even though we thought we could perform miracles and turn the world into something it can never be’ – but for 22 years he had acted on the assumption that ‘God is Spanish and favours our nation’. In 1650 an English statesman in Madrid still marvelled at the capacity of Spain's leaders for self-deception. They were, he wrote, ‘a wretched, miserable, proud, senseless people and as far from the wise men I expected as can be imagined; and if some miracle do not preserve them, this crown must be speedily destroyed’. A generation later, one of those ministers made the same point: ‘I fear deeply for Italy; I am very worried about Catalonia; and I never forget about America, where the French already have too many colonies. We cannot govern by miracles for ever.‘109 The miracles ceased when Carlos II died childless in 1700, and a savage succession war resulted in the partition of the Spanish Monarchy, with the larger part falling to a grandson of Louis XIV, whose descendants rule Spain to this day.

  10

  France in Crisis, 1618–881

  La Grande Nation?

  BOTH GEOGRAPHICALLY AND SOCIALLY,’ WROTE LLOYD MOOTE IN 1971, THE Fronde revolt in France (1648–53) ‘was the most widespread of all the rebellions in mid-seventeenth-century Europe’.2 Its extent should not cause surprise, because France was the largest state in western Europe, covering almost 200,000 square miles. More striking is the extensive social support for the revolt: almost all the leading nobles defied the crown at some point, including the king's uncle, Gaston of Orléans, as did judges and civil servants, cardinals and curates, lawyers and doctors, industrial workers and field hands. About one million French men and women died, either directly or indirectly, because of the Fronde.

  Like its neighbours, Spain and Britain, France was a ‘composite monarchy’, the product of territorial unification during earlier centuries. Seven provinces on the periphery (Brittany, Burgundy, Dauphiné, Guyenne, Languedoc, Normandy and Provence) retained considerable autonomy, guaranteed by their own fiscal institutions, sovereign law courts and representative assemblies (the États: these seven provinces were therefore known as Pays d'États, ‘provinces with Estates’). The central government in Paris directly controlled the remaining two-thirds of the country (known as the Pays d'élections after the tax officials, the élus, who apportioned tax quotas). Traditionally, legislation and taxes for the kingdom had been voted by another representative assembly, the États-Généraux (States-General), but after 1600 it met only twice. As a result, Louis XIII (r. 1610–43), like two of his brothers-in-law, Philip IV and Charles I, augmented his revenues whenever possible by manipulating existing taxes and by enforcing regalian rights, and he relied on his senior judges (those sitting in the ten Parlements, or sovereign law courts, of the kingdom) to enforce them (Fig. 30).

  30. Seventeenth-century France.

  The kingdom comprised both Pays d'élections, governed directly from Paris, and Pays d'États, most of them on the periphery, where the central government ruled through provincial institutions. The crown suppressed the Estates of Dauphiné in 1628, and those of Normandy in 1666, and gradually increased its authority over the rest.

  Louis XIII ruled the most populous state in Europe, with perhaps 20 million inhabitants (against 7 million in the Iberian Peninsula and perhaps the same in Britain and Ireland), and French farmers produced an abundance of staples as well as some new crops, more resistant to climatic adversity, such as maize, buckwheat, beans, tomatoes and potatoes. The duke of Sully, the chief fiscal officer of Louis's father, Henry IV, placed the finances of the French state on a sound basis. He stabilized the public debt by repudiating foreign obligations and unilaterally reducing the interest payable on remaining loans; and he raised revenue by introducing new indirect taxes, including the Paulette: a nine-year agreement (renewable) that allowed holders of government office the right to pass on their posts to anyone they chose in return for annual payments to the treasury. The Paulette soon became indispensable to the government because it yielded 10 per cent of total revenues, but it gave rise to a serious disadvantage. Members of the bureaucracy, who numbered over 50,000 men, including the judges, henceforth enjoyed almost complete job security and could sell or bequeath public offices as they pleased. The crown could no longer control them.

  Seventeenth-century France was also weakened by the coexistence of two religious communities that had spent the later sixteenth century fighting each other. In 1598 Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes, which granted full civil rights to France's Protestants (often known as Huguenots), who made up about 10 per cent of the kingdom's population, and guaranteed their right to think, speak, write and worship as they wished within their own homes. They could also worship publicly in specified areas where they were numerous, and convene at regular intervals in assemblies to discuss both religious and political issues. But the Edict also legalized Catholic worship and assemblies everywhere, and the French Catholic Church rapidly gained in strength. The total number of convents in France doubled between 1600 and 1660, and diocesan seminaries to train the secular clergy rose from 8 to perhaps 70.

  The murder of Henry IV in 1610 and the accession of his 9-year-old son Louis XIII produced sever
al changes. First the Queen Regent, Marie de Medici, dismissed Sully and used the resources he had accumulated to pay pensions and bribes to her noble supporters; then, when several nobles supported by the Huguenots nevertheless challenged her authority, Marie promised to include more nobles in her council and granted the Huguenots permission to turn their principal port, La Rochelle, into an artillery fortress capable of resisting a long siege. In 1617, resentful at his mother's maladroit handling of public affairs, Louis seized power and banished Marie and her chief adviser, Bishop Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, from his court; but Louis rashly allowed his mother to retain all her revenues, lands and offices. These allowed her to defy her son when, in 1619, she escaped from confinement; but the following year, Richelieu mediated a settlement that allowed Marie to resume her place on the royal council. At last, the French crown was free to address three pressing problems: the power of the Huguenots; the insubordination of the nobles; and the growing strength of the Habsburgs, whose territories in Spain, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands encircled and threatened France.

  Louis determined to eliminate the Huguenots before embarking on costly foreign ventures. He claimed that the Edict of Nantes did not apply to Navarre (a kingdom that he ruled separately from France) and when in 1621 the Huguenot National Assembly protested, he invaded. This unleashed a religious war that, combined with a succession of cold winters and summers between 1618 and 1623 which caused widespread dearth, ruled out an assertive French foreign policy; and in frustration in 1624 Louis recalled Richelieu, now a cardinal. His ministry would last 18 years.3 Initially, Richelieu too prioritized domestic over foreign policy, largely because his patron, Marie, supported the dévots, a group of courtiers whose chief political goal was the destruction of Huguenot independence. After some vacillation, he and the king in person laid siege to La Rochelle, despite its impressive fortifications, and did nothing while Spain mobilized troops in northern Italy to prevent a French claimant from acquiring the duchy of Mantua (see chapter 9 above). Luckily for Richelieu, Spain still had not prevailed when La Rochelle surrendered in October 1628. He and Louis immediately led a powerful army across the Alps.