17. Vilar, Oro y Moneda, pp. 180–1.
18. Noel Salomon, La Campagne de Nouvelle Castille à la Fin du XVIe Siècle, Paris 1964, pp. 257–8, 266. For tithes, dues and rents, see pp. 227, 243–4, 250.
19. It is a Portuguese historian who has underlined the implications of this extraordinary occupational pattern, which he believes to hold for Portugal as well: Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, A Estrutura na Antiga Sociedade Portuguesa, Lisbon 1971, pp. 85–9. As Magalhães Godinho remarks, since agriculture was the main branch of economic production in any pre-industrial society, a diversion of manpower away from it on this scale inevitably resulted in long-term stagnation.
20. For the reactions of contemporaries by the turn of the 17th century, see Vilar’s superb essay, ‘Le Temps du Quichotte’, Europe, XXXIV, 1956, pp. 3–16.
21. Alva characteristically commented: ‘In our nation nothing is more important than to introduce gentlemen and men of substance into the infantry, so that all is not left in the hands of labourers and lackeys.’ Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, p. 41.
22. Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, pp. 27–31.
23. Philip II limited himself to reducing the powers of the local Diputació (where the unanimity rule was abolished) and of the office of Justicia, and introducing non-native Viceroys in Aragon.
24. Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, II, pp. 12–13.
25. Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, II, p. 11.
26. Parker, The Army of Flanders and Spanish Road, p. 6.
27. Elliott, Imperial Spain, p. 343.
28. For the financial record of the Italian possessions, see A. Domínguez Ortiz, Política y Hacienda de Felipe IV, Madrid 1960, pp. 161–4. In general, the role of the Italian components of the Spanish Empire in Europe has been least studied, although it is evident that no satisfactory account of the imperial system as a whole will be possible until this lacuna has been remedied.
29. The best discussion of this scheme is provided by Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans, Cambridge 1963, pp. 199–204. Domínguez has argued that Olivares had no internal policy, being exclusively preoccupied with foreign affairs: La Sociedad Española en el Siglo XVI, I, Madrid 1963, p. 15. This view is belied both by his early domestic reforms and the breadth of his recommendations in the memorandum of 1624.
30. Olivares was aware of the magnitude of the risk he was taking: ‘My head cannot bear the light of a candle or of the window. . . . To my mind this will lose everything irremediably or be the salvation of the ship. Here go religion, kingdom, nation, everything, and, if our strength is insufficient, let us die in the attempt. Better to die, and more just, than to fall under the dominion of others, and most of all of heretics, as I consider the French to be. Either all is lost, or else Castile will be head of the world, as it is already head of Your Majesty’s Monarchy.’ Cit: Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans, p. 310.
31. Elliott, The Revolt of the Catalans, pp. 460–8, 473–6, 486–7.
32. A. Domínguez Ortiz, The Golden Century of Spain 1556–1659), London 1971, p. 103.
33. Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs, II, pp. 122–3; Domínguez Ortiz, The Golden Century of Spain, pp. 39–40.
34. See Henry Kamen, The War of Succession in Spain 1700–1715, London 1969, pp. 84–117. The main architect of the new administration was Bergeyck, a Fleming from Brussels; pp. 237–40.
35. It was in this epoch that a national flag and anthem were adopted. Dominguez’s dictum is characteristic: ‘Smaller than the Empire, larger than Castile, Spain, precellent creation of our eighteenth century, emerged from its nebula and acquired solid and tangible shape. . . . By the time of the War of Independence, the ideal plastic and symbolic image of the Nation as we know it today, was essentially complete.’ Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La Sociedad Española en el Siglo XVIII, Madrid 1955, pp. 41, 43: the best work on the period.
36. Vilar, Oro y Moneda, pp. 348–61, 315–17.
37. There is a memorable portrait of this class in Raymond Carr, ‘Spain’, in Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 43–59.
38. Domínguez Ortiz, La Sociedad Española en el Siglo XVIII, pp. 93, 178.
39. Domínguez provides an ample survey of the whole pattern of the señoríos in his chapter, ‘El Ocaso del Régimen Señorial’, La Sociedad Española en el Siglo XVIII, pp. 300–42, in which he describes them in the phrase cited above.
France presents an evolution very distinct from the Hispanic pattern. Absolutism there enjoyed no such early advantages as in Spain, in the form of a lucrative overseas empire. Nor, on the other hand, was it confronted with the permanent structural problems of fusing disparate kingdoms at home, with radically contrasted political and cultural legacies. The Capetian monarchy, as we have seen, had slowly extended its suzerain rights outwards from its original base in the He de France, in a gradual movement of concentric unification during the Middle Ages, until they reached from Flanders to the Mediterranean. It never had to contend with another territorial realm within France of comparable feudal rank: there was only one kingship in the Gallic lands, apart from the small and semi-Iberian State of Navarre in the remote folds of the Pyrenees. The outlying duchies and counties of France had always owed nominal allegiance to the central dynasty, even if as vassals initially more powerful than their royal overlord – permitting a juridical hierarchy that facilitated later political integration. The social and linguistic differences that divided the South from the North, although persistent and pronounced, were never quite as great as those set the East off from the West in Spain. The separate legal system and language of the Midi did not coincide, fortunately for the monarchy, with the main military and diplomatic rift which split France in the later Middle Ages: the house of Burgundy, the major rival power ranged against the Capetian dynasty, was a Northern duchy. Southern particularism nevertheless remained a constant, latent force in the early modern epoch, assuming masked forms and novel guises in successive crises. The real political control of the French monarchy was never territorially uniform: it always ebbed at the extremities of the country, progressively decreasing in the more recently acquired provinces farthest from Paris. At the same time, the sheer demographic size of France in itself posed formidable obstacles for administrative unification: some 20 million inhabitants made it at least twice as populous as Spain in the 16th century. The rigidity and clarity of the domestic barriers to a unitary Absolutism in Spain were consequently balanced by the thicker profusion and variety of regional life contained within the French polity. No linear constitutional advance thus occurred after the Capetian consolidation in mediaeval France. On the contrary, the history of the construction of French Absolutism was to be that of a ‘convulsive’ progression towards a centralized monarchical State, repeatedly interrupted by relapses into provincial disintegration and anarchy, followed by an intensified reaction towards concentration of royal power, until finally an extremely hard and stable structure was achieved. The three great breakdowns of political order were, of course, the Hundred Years’ War in the 15th century, the Religious Wars in the 16th century, and the Fronde in the 17th century. The transition from the mediaeval to the Absolute monarchy was each time first arrested, and then accelerated by these crises, whose ultimate outcome was to create a cult of royal authority in the epoch of Louis XIV with no equal anywhere else in Western Europe.
The slow concentric centralization of the Capetian kings, discussed earlier, had come to an abrupt end with the extinction of the line in the mid 14th century, which proved the signal for the onset of the Hundred Years’ War. The outbreak