[This chapter mainly explains the situation facing Europe, especially Spain. Please be careful when subscribing. Friends who are not following please do not subscribe]
Gao Pangshi has read a lot, most of which exaggerated the Spanish colonial empire during this period as extremely powerful and invincible, as if the Habsburg dynasty could have swept the world if it hadn't been for the unexpected failure of the Armada.
This is really nonsense.
Today's Habsburg dynasty is of course powerful. If you include Philip II's Austrian co-clan, the Habsburg dynasty is definitely the leading power in Europe.
Philip II's father, Charles V, inherited the crowns of four major dynasties, Castile, Aragon, Burgundy and Austria, and later his family received Bohemia, Hungary and Portugal, with a small section He even won the crown of England during his time.
The occurrence of these dynastic events, coupled with the contemporaneous Spanish conquests and plunder in the New World, brought the Habsburg family wealth and resources unmatched by other European countries. Although there are many holes and inaccuracies in later statistics, and population figures for the period are unreliable, it is assumed that the inhabitants of the territories ruled by the Habsburgs accounted for a quarter of the population of early modern Europe. One, it shouldn’t be a big mistake.
It goes without saying that the power of the Spanish Grand Formation and the Spanish fleet was, but in fact, the power of the Habsburg dynasty at this time was also reflected in its financial resources.
The Habsburg family had five major sources of finance, as well as some minor sources of income. The most important of these is Spain's Castilian heritage. This place is directly ruled by the royal family, and the parliament and the church cede various regular donations and taxes to the royal family.
In addition, the commercial wealth and mobile capital of Europe's two trading areas - the Italian city-states and the Low Countries - were able to provide considerable funding.
A fourth source, increasingly important over time, was income from American countries. The "royal fifth" of mining silver and gold in the Americas, combined with business taxes, customs duties, and ecclesiastical levies, made the New World provide large dividends to the Spanish kings.
This is not only direct, but also indirect, because the American wealth flowing into private hands, whether Spanish, Flemish or Italian, will help these individuals or companies pay increasingly heavy national taxes. Moreover, in an emergency, the monarch could also borrow large amounts from bankers, because in theory he could pay off his debt as soon as the fleet carrying silver arrived.
The presence of many important financial and commercial families in the Habsburg territory, such as those living in southern Germany, Italian cities and Antwerp, should also be counted as an advantage, and this was the fifth major source of finance.
In fact, this source was easier to come by than the taxes from Germany, because the princes and representatives of the free cities in the Holy Roman Empire were always willing to vote for the emperor only when the Turks came to their doorstep.
However, even though the Habsburg dynasty seemed so powerful, Gao Pragmatic did not feel that it was invincible at all, because although its financial and military resources were extremely strong in the eyes of people at the time, they never met the requirements. And this fatal flaw comes from three factors that always interact.
The first factor was caused by the "military revolution" in early modern Europe, that is, in the 150 years after about the 1620s, the scale, cost, and organization of wars expanded dramatically. The change itself was caused by several intersecting factors, tactical, political and demographic.
The armies of the Spanish Empire perhaps provided the best example of a "military revolution." As historians who have studied it said, before 1529, in the struggle for Italy between France and Spain, "there is no evidence that either side used more than 30,000 troops." However, by 1529, Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire only The Lombards raised 60,000 men in one place to defend the newly occupied Milan and invade Provence in France.
In 1552, for a simultaneous attack on all fronts - in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean - Charles V raised 1,090,000 men in Germany and the Netherlands, and another 240,000 men in Lombardy , in addition, there are starters recruited from Sicily, Naples and Spain
In this way, the army under the emperor's command and therefore supported by him must have been about 150,000 people. This upward trend continued, and by 1574 the Spanish army in Flanders alone numbered 860,000 men.
What happens on land happens on a much larger scale at sea.
The expansion of maritime trade, competition between the fleets of trading nations in the English Channel, the Indian Ocean, or the Spanish coast, and the threats posed by North African pirate ships and the Ottoman galleons all interacted with new shipbuilding technologies, allowing ships to be built larger and larger. Equipment is becoming more and more advanced.
In today's era, there is no clear boundary between warships and merchant ships. Merchant ships of a certain size are basically equipped with guns to deal with pirates and other predators. But there was a movement toward the establishment of a Royal Navy, whereby the monarch could possess a certain number of regular navies to form a nucleus. During wartime, armed merchant ships, three-masted warships, and two-masted small ships can move closer to this core.
Henry VIII of England was particularly supportive of this plan, while Charles V was unwilling to build his own navy, preferring to commandeer his private Spanish-style galleons and single-deck galleons from his Spanish and Italian territories.
Philip II, under heavy pressure in the Mediterranean and then in the Atlantic, could not enjoy this luxury, and he had to finance a massive shipbuilding program in Barcelona, Naples and Sicily: by 1574 he had 146 large ships in service The number of sailing boats is almost three times that of more than ten years ago.
Over the next decade, the outbreak of war in the Atlantic forced him to intensify his efforts to secure sea routes to the West and East Indies, protect the Spanish coast from British attacks, and send invading troops to Britain. They all urgently need ocean-going fleets.
Even after Britain and Spain signed a peace treaty in 1604, Spain still needed a large fleet to resist the Dutch maritime attacks and protect communications with Flanders. Moreover, as time goes by and time flies, these warships are equipped with more and more equipment, and the costs are becoming more and more expensive.
It was this spiraling war cost that exposed the real weaknesses of the Habsburg regime.
Widespread inflation caused food prices to quadruple and industrial product prices to triple from the previous year. This was an extremely heavy blow to the government's finances. The doubling or tripling of the army and navy added fuel to the fire. As a result, the Habsburgs were constantly struggling to remain solvent.
In the 1640s, after various battles against Algiers, France, and German Protestants, Charles V found that his normal and extraordinary income could not cover his expenses at all. His taxes had been mortgaged to bankers many years in advance.
Only by taking drastic measures, confiscating the wealth of the West Indies and seizing all Spanish coins, could money be found to support the war against the Protestant princes. In 1552, he spent 2.5 million ducats on the battle of Metz, which was about 10 times his normal income from the Americas at that time.
As a result, he was forced to continuously borrow new debt, but the conditions became increasingly harsh. The credit of the Crown was declining, and the interest charged by the bankers was increasing, so that a large part of the normal income could only be used to pay interest on past debts. When Charles abdicated, the national debt left to Philip II was approximately 20 million ducats.
Philip also inherited the war with France. How expensive was this war? In 1557, the Spanish royal family had to declare bankruptcy on its own. At the time, big banking families like the Fuggers had to succumb.
It can be said that in the same year, France was also forced to declare bankruptcy, which was the main reason why both sides agreed to the peace talks at Chateau Cambrezy in 1559.
But then, Philip was about to deal with the powerful Turkish enemy, the 20-year Mediterranean War, the campaign against the Moors of Grenada, and intricate military operations in the Netherlands, northern France, and the English Channel, forcing the royal family to seek all possible income. source.
During the reign of Charles V, Spanish taxes tripled, while Philip II doubled taxes in 2007 alone, and by the end of his reign, they almost doubled again.
Philip's expenses were even greater. During the Battle of Lepanto, it was estimated that the cost of maintaining the Christian fleet and soldiers would exceed 4 million ducats per year. Although Venice and the Pope shared a large portion, Spain also chipped in a lot of money. .
By the 1570s, the costs of the Flemish army were huge, and they were always not paid on time, which led to military riots. The situation worsened in 1557 when Philip stopped paying interest to Genoese bankers. Although the surge in mining revenue from America temporarily alleviated the royal family's financial and credit crisis, in the 1680s, there were about 2 million ducats per year, compared with only 110 about 40 years ago; however, the cost of the Armada in 1588 It amounted to 10 million dhaka, and its tragic fate was not only a naval disaster, but also a disaster for the royal family's finances.
In 1596, after Philip borrowed an unprecedented amount of public debt, he once again refused to pay. When he died two years later, the total debt amounted to Dh100 million. The interest on this huge debt is equal to almost two-thirds of all taxes.
Although Spain quickly reached a peace agreement with France and England, the war with the Netherlands continued to be arduous. It was not until 1609 that a ceasefire was achieved, and the ceasefire itself was urgently promoted by the Spanish mutiny in 1607 and its further collapse.
During the following years of peace, Spanish government expenditures did not decrease substantially. Putting aside the issue of huge interest rates for the moment, the continued tension in the Mediterranean requires a large amount of money to build a coastal defense fortifications; the vast Spanish coast has been repeatedly robbed by privateers, and it also requires the Philippines, the Caribbean and the High Seas Fleet. Considerable defense costs were incurred.
After 1610, the ceasefire in Europe did not make the proud Spanish leaders consider reducing military expenditures. The Thirty Years' War that broke out in 1618 only turned a cold war into a hot war, causing more and more Spanish troops and money to flow into Flanders and Germany.
It is worth noting that the Habsburgs' initial victories in Europe and effective defenses in the Americas during this period largely coincided with, and were supported by, the significant increase in gold and silver ingots they brought from the New World .
But for the same reason, financial revenue decreased after 1626, and it declared bankruptcy the following year. In particular, the shocking move of the Dutch to hijack the silver fleet in 1628 caused Spain and its residents to lose as much as 10 million ducats. This also suspended Spain's war efforts for a period of time, but its income was absolutely unable to make up for the huge deficit. .
This was how Spain dealt with the war for the next 30 years, pooling together newly borrowed debt, adding new taxes, and using any windfalls from the Americas to support a major military campaign. For example, Cardinal Infante intervened in Germany in 2001, but wars that drained financial resources always eventually eroded these short-term incomes, and the financial situation worsened within a few years.
After the revolts of the Catalans and Portuguese in the 1640s, wealth from the Americas dwindled significantly, and a long, slow decline became inevitable. Even if a country has excellent soldiers, can anything good be expected if it is run by a government that spends two or three times more than its normal revenue?
The second main reason for the failure of Spain and Austria is not difficult to see from the above brief description: Habsburg had too many things to take care of, too many enemies to deal with, and too many fronts to defend!
Although the Spanish army was strong on the battlefield, it was beyond their capabilities and incompetent to disperse them to the domestic garrison and disperse them to North Africa, Sicily, Italy, the New World and the Netherlands.
Just like the British Empire three centuries later, the Habsburg Group combined a widely distributed territory. It was an amazing stunt for a political dynasty, but it required huge material resources and scheming to maintain its operation.
This situation is the biggest example of strategic overexpansion in history. Once a vast territory is occupied, the price is to establish many enemies. Fortunately, one of its biggest enemies, the contemporary Ottoman Empire, also carries the same baggage.
So, looking back, even though Spain was powerful at this time, how could it threaten the Ming Dynasty?
It cannot even threaten the highly pragmatic Jinghua Group!
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The word count is controlled to 3900+, not reaching 4k, to save some money for friends who like an international perspective.
