Vicissitudes such as these have their causes, and we cannot conclude this long history of the Inquisition without inquiring what share it and the spirit, which at once created and was stimulated by it, contributed to the misfortunes endured, with few intermissions, by the Spanish people since its organization. These causes are numerous, many of them not directly connected with our subject, but yet to be enumerated in order that undue importance may not be ascribed to the influence of the Inquisition.
To begin with, the Spanish monarchy developed into a pure despotism, based on the maxim of the Institutes—quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem—the prince’s pleasure has the force of law. All legislative and executive functions were concentrated in the crown; the king issued laws, levied taxes, raised troops, declared war, made peace at his will, and the execution of the Justicia Lanuza, in 1591, without a trial, shows that the lives of his subjects were at his disposal. It was the same with their liberties, as illustrated by the imprisonment, without a hearing, of ministers like Cabarrús, Floridablanca, Jovellanos and Urquijo. For awhile the ancient fueros of the kingdoms of the crown of Aragon served as some restraint in those territories, but Philip V, in 1707 and 1714, took advantage of the War of Succession to declare them forfeited. Under such concentration of authority, the fate of the nation depended on the character and capacity of the monarch. Charles V had unquestioned ability, but his ambitious enterprises, while flattering to the national vanity, not only exhausted the resources of Spain, in quarrels foreign to its interests, but crippled its prosperity by the reckless devices employed to supply his needs. Philip II was a man of very moderate talents, irresolute and procrastinating to that degree that the Venetian envoy Vendramino, in 1595, declared that what would cost another prince ten ducats cost him a hundred, in consequence of his dilatoriness.[1040] His enormous and disjointed empire was too much for his narrow intelligence, and his vast expenditures in defence of Latin Christianity consumed all his resources and kept him in perpetual financial straits. At his death, in 1598, he had nothing to show for the ruin of his country but the gloomy pile of the Escorial and the acquisition of Portugal. Holland was hopelessly lost; his rival, Henry IV, was firmly seated on the throne of a reunited France, and the papacy was alienated. The internal condition of the land is depicted in the despairing complaints of the Córtes of 1594—“The truth, which cannot be questioned, is that the kingdom is totally exhausted. Scarce any man has money or credit, and those who have it do not employ it in trade or for profit, but hoard it to live as sparingly as possible, in hope that it may last them to the end. Thus comes the universal poverty of all classes.... There is not a city or a town but has lost largely in population, as is seen by the multitude of closed and empty houses, and the fall in the rents of the few that are inhabited.”[1041]
GOVERNMENT BY FAVORITES
With Philip III we commence the long line of favorites who dominated Spain during the seventeenth century. Well meaning, but weak and incapable, he left everything to the Duke of Lerma, under whose guidance a reckless course of prodigality was followed as though the only trouble was to get rid of surplus revenues. Charles V had cast aside the severe simplicity of the old Castilian court for the stately magnificence of the Burgundian household; his successors followed his example, in spite of the remonstrances of the Córtes, but where Philip II spent on it four hundred thousand ducats a year, Philip III lavished a million and three hundred thousand, while he was begging money of his nobles and prelates and seeking to seize all the plate in the kingdom in order to coin it. He was not alone in this, for the nobility and gentry were consumed with usury and overwhelmed with debt, owing to their extravagance. The Venetian envoy Contarini, in 1605 describes the land as overspread with poverty and general discontent and all the evils attendant upon a corrupt and vicious government, under an indolent king and a rapacious and incapable minister. The worst war, he concludes, that could be made on Spain was to allow it to consume itself in peace under misgovernment, while to attack it would be to arouse the dogged determination of the people. The reports of the Lucchese envoys tell the same story.[1042] Such was the condition when the expulsion of the Moriscos robbed the land of its most productive class.
Matters grew worse when Philip IV ascended the throne, in 1621. Good-natured, affable, indolent and pleasure-loving, his thirty-one unacknowledged natural children, besides the acknowledged one—the second Don John of Austria—serve to explain why he abandoned the cares of state to his favorite, the Count-Duke Olivares, after whose fall in 1643 his nephew, Don Luis de Haro, succeeded to the post. The official historiographer describes Spain, at his accession, as being in extremity, and the people crushed under their burdens; everything was in disorder, and the condition of the nation so weakened that it could only be deplored and not amended. Yet Philip’s first act was to break the truce with Holland and, from that time to the end of his long reign, he was involved in almost continual war. He called together the Córtes and asked for supplies to which they replied by petitioning him to try to stop the general depopulation and find occupation for the people, who were wandering with their families over the country in vain search for work.[1043] Yet Philip, engrossed with his plebeian amours and the pleasures of his court, continued his wars and his extravagance, without giving thought to the misery of his people whom he was crushing with ever new exactions. The courtly festivities were conducted with a magnificence till then unexampled; the carnival festival of 1637 was officially admitted to cost three hundred thousand ducats and was popularly estimated at half a million.[1044] In 1658 the Venetian envoy reports his giving to the son of Don Luis de Haro fifty thousand pesos for skilfully arranging a ballet for the ladies of the court. Every bull-fight cost him sixty thousand reales, and the celebration at the birth of Prince Prosper (who speedily died) involved an expenditure of eight hundred thousand pesos. All this, as the envoy remarks, was extracted from the blood of the miserable people, who were poorer in Spain than anywhere else. The immense resources of the kingdom were absorbed by the rapacity of the ministers or were dissipated by the profuseness of the king.[1045]
RESOURCES AND POSSIBILITIES
In 1665, Carlos II, then but four years of age, succeeded to his father, under the regency of the Queen-dowager Maria Ana of Austria. We have seen how she abandoned affairs to her confessor, the Jesuit Nithard, and when he was dismissed by the efforts of Don John of Austria, in 1669, she replaced him with the worthless favorite Fernando de Valenzuela. Again Don John was called in; Valenzuela was exiled to the Philippines and Don John assumed the reins of government. His limited abilities were unequal to the task; he was driven from power and died soon afterwards in 1679. Carlos had been declared of age in 1675; he was utterly incapable and, though he can scarce be said to have had favorites, under such ministers as the Duke of Medinaceli and the Count of Oropesa, Spain sank deeper in misery and degradation until his death in 1700. The kingdom was reduced to the last extremity, without money, without industry, without means of defence to resist the aggressive wars of Louis XIV, or to defend the colonies from the ravages of buccaneers. The population is said to have shrunk to 5,000,000; in 1586 it had been estimated at 8,000,000 by the Venetian envoy Gradenigo.[1046] Such was the result of two centuries of absolute government, under monarchs not wilfully evil, who merely reigned according to the light vouchsafed them.
Yet it was not so much the extravagance of the court, or the perpetual wars of the Hapsburgs, or the emigration to the colonies, that reduced the population and the power of Spain. The land could have endured all these if its rich resources and vast opportunities had been wisely developed. Lying between two seas and holding Sicily and Naples, it commanded the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; with its wealthy colonies, the source of the precious metals which revolutionized the finances of Europe and furnished the basis for the most profitable commerce that the world had seen, it was invited to become the greatest of maritime states, with a navy and a mercantile marine beyond rivalry, dominating the seas as the Catalans had dominated the Mediterranean in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It was largely secured from hostile aggression by the Pyrenees, and could work out its destinies with little to fear from external enemies. It is true that much of its surface is mountainous, and that large districts suffer from insufficient precipitation, but the Moors had shown what wonders could be wrought by irrigation, and how, by patient labor, even mountain sides could be made to yield their increase. No land could boast a greater variety of agricultural products, including those of semi-tropical and temperate zones which, combined with mineral wealth, should have rendered it self-supporting. All that was needed was steady and intelligent industry, fostered by wise legislation, encouraging production and commerce, and enabling every man to work out his own career with as few artificial impediments as possible, and Spain might be today what she was in the sixteenth century, the leader among civilized nations.
This was not to be. The fatal gift of the Burgundian inheritance distracted the attention of her rulers from the true arena of her expansion in Africa and on the ocean, to distant enterprises wholly foreign to her true interests, while the undeviating determination to enforce unity of faith at home, and to combat heresy elsewhere, led her to drive out her most useful population, and involved her in ruinous expenditures abroad. To extort the means for the furtherance of this policy, industry was strangled with the most burdensome and complicated system of taxation that human folly could devise, the weight of which fell almost exclusively on the oppressed producing classes, who were least able to endure it, while the nobles and gentry and clergy, who held by far the larger portion of Spanish wealth, were exempt.[1047] As taxation was virtually at the discretion of the monarch, imposts were added as the exigencies of extravagance demanded, usually with little thought as to their consequences, until the taxpayer was entangled in a network which crippled him at every step. This moreover was accompanied with regulations to prevent evasions, and to protect the consumer at the expense of the producer, which greatly enhanced the deadly influence of the anomalous and incongruous accumulation of exactions.
OPPRESSIVE TAXATION