Aside from these and other geopolitical misfortunes, there were serious domestic crises that imperiled the political stability and cohesion of the Spanish realm at the end of the “Golden Century.” Regionalist sentiment and lordly recalcitrance erupted at a time when Philip IV and his chief ministers were attempting to harness the resources of all his Iberian subjects for the expensive task of maintaining the empire. From 1641 to 1652, in the midst of a heated war with France, Catalan peasants and burghers rose against the crown. Royal arms alone could not suppress the rebellion, which subsided only under the double impact of a plague and of French encroachment of Catalan territory. Also in 1641, and again in 1648, powerful lords instigated secessionist plots in Andalusia and Aragon. Both conspiracies failed when their leaders were discovered. Nevertheless, these episodes were like the northern revolt in that they revealed a volatile undercurrent of dissatisfaction with Castilian authority in general, and with the Habsburgs’ fiscal demands in particular. Unhappily for the Spanish crown, similar discontent inspired secessionist revolts as far away as Sicily and Naples in 1647 and 1648.34
It is not necessary to dwell here on the disasters of the seventeenth-century crisis in order to explain it. After all, the diminution of Spanish power was not the result of particular military or political setbacks. Rather, these setbacks were signs of a structural corrosion; specifically, they showed that the Spanish economy was not strong enough to sustain the country’s imperial role.
Spain’s economy had at least two fundamental defects that the boom of the 1500s did not eliminate. First, the country suffered from a dearth of cultivable land; second, it suffered from chronically low levels of entrepreneurial investment, especially in industrial ventures.35 In light of recent historiography on the Habsburg colossus, it is clear that historians have for too long exaggerated these and related deficiencies.36 Nevertheless, the consequences of the deficiencies cannot be wholly denied. For example, it is clear that by the seventeenth century Spain had developed an abject dependence on imported products. The country’s heavy reliance on foreign manufactures sometimes caused local industry to decline, particularly in provincial towns and in cities such as Toledo. In addition, the relative absence of a native class of capitalist investors, coupled with ballooning imperial expenses, made for constant governmental insolvency, a large fiscal debt, and the crown’s almost total reliance on the services of foreign financiers and on the sale of local jursidictions.37 To make matters worse, the scarcity of arable land heightened the country’s relative vulnerability to famine.38 When severe food shortages occurred, malnutrition left the surviving peasants and townspeople unable to resist epidemic disease. John Lynch has estimated that the total number of plague-induced fatalities for the period 1600–1700 was an astonishing 1,250,000.39 More than wars and emigration to the Indies, recurrent epidemics caused the decline of the total Spanish population from 8.4 million in the 1590s to barely 7 million a century later.40 It is not an exaggeration to say that, despite the politically motivated exaggerations of local petitioners to the crown, the seventeenth century saw the dramatic hemorrhaging of Spain.
To the picture of structural weakness and demographic loss we must add two key, exacerbating factors. First, large increases in royal taxation; second, the royally decreed expulsion of moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula in 1609–11.
Let us look at the first factor. Throughout the Early Modern Period, but especially during the seventeenth century, the Habsburg crown imposed increasingly onerous taxes on commoners in order to satisfy the demands of the imperial budget. The state thus deepened socioeconomic cleavages and effectively subsidized wasteful consumption at the royal court.41 More importantly, heavy taxation drove many peasants to destitution, out of the countryside, and toward urban centers, principally toward Madrid and Seville.42 The prospect of fiscal exploitation represented a serious, if ultimately surmountable challenge to the economic viability of Castile, where the land was generally arid and infertile relative to that of other regions.43 In the cities, former peasants and townspeople became part of a burgeoning mass of unemployed or underemployed city dwellers. Unhygenic slums grew at a vertiginous pace, making Spanish cities prime breeding grounds of disease.44
As for the second factor: The expulsion of the moriscos was a drastic action that virtually eradicated what Ibero-Catholic chauvinists had for years construed as a principal menace to the religious and physical “purity” of Christian Spain.45 Crucially, the mass eviction diminished Spain’s already limited productive capacities. A high proportion of the nearly three hundred thousand banished moriscos were agricultural laborers. Their sudden dislocation meant the disappearance of a key productive element in the peninsular economy.46 For the fertile region of Valencia, where moriscos had been a large minority, the expulsion was destabilizing in the short term.47
The case of the moriscos is notable (among other reasons) because the victims were of one ethnicity. Yet the Spanish crisis of the seventeenth century took a heavy toll on ordinary Spaniards across all ethnic lines. I have already alluded to the highly lethal and virtually incessant epidemics and wars of the 1600s; to the rapid growth of Madrid; to the fiscal exploitation of the peasantry and townsfolk by royal overlords; and finally, to the economic challenges that faced Castile, where a number of towns became bankrupt. It therefore goes without saying that the human cost of the Spanish crisis was enormous, not only in terms of lives lost, but in material and in psychological terms. A widespread perception of systemic crisis undoubtedly conditioned Spaniards’ attitudes toward their own society, including, of course, conversos and other disadvantaged groups.
Under what precise circumstances did residents of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre experience the country’s tribulations? How did ordinary men and women live in the century of the Spanish crisis? The present overview cannot answer these questions comprehensively. However, I will attempt to provide a limited answer by sketching a socioeconomic profile of two domains, already mentioned, in which converso merchants were especially active: (1) the Spanish metropolis, Madrid, which became the largest single commercial market in the Iberian Peninsula over the course of the late 1500s and the 1600s; (2) the vast network of Iberian trade routes that served the capital and other Spanish and Portuguese cities.
Madrid in the 1600s
Material scarcity and sheer physical discomfort pervaded daily life in the otherwise vibrant Madrid of the seventeenth century. The main reason for this was that the city lay on a dry and semibarren plain and did not have the advantage of a nearby, navigable river by which to receive supplies and dispose of waste matter. Another reason was that the roads that connected the capital to the rest of the country were of poor quality. They slowed the pace of commerce and occasionally aggravated shortages of food and vital commodities.48 Worse still, the cost of urban living was high for all of Madrid’s residents because of the enormous expense of transporting goods into the city on inadequate roads.
Compounding these problems was a demographic explosion that had begun in 1561, when Philip II made Madrid his permanent capital. From that year onward, the city grew at a dizzying pace. In the first half of the sixteenth century, Madrid had been a town of no more than 30,000 people. By 1650, the city had over 150,000 inhabitants.49 This expansion far surpassed the crown’s ability and willingness to create a viable urban infrastructure, much less control the effects of overcrowding.
Despite its considerable growth, the metropolitan economy evolved primarily in response to the needs and wants of the