Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
over five years, Spain was ethnically cleansed, despite pleas by the
Moriscos for mercy and offers of cash payments to secure exemptions
or at least deferments. While some old Christians argued in their favor,
the general will of the people was reflected in the king's orders. He
remained unmoved by stories of exiled families being slain upon their
arrival in North Africa because they refused to abjure Christianity, and
he seemed equally indifferent to the departure of so many productive
subjects, just as his predecessors had been by the expulsion of the Jews
and earlier contingents of Muslims. Philip, devout and totally under the
influence of an ardent clerical elite, took pride in ruling a now com-
pletely Catholic state.
A depleted population was merely one dimension of Spain's prob-
lems. Its agriculture was minimally productive, its once-great pastoral
activity (reflected in the great herds of sheep moving annually across
the Castilian plains) was much diminished, and its urban manufactures
were strangled by an archaic guild system. Dependent on foreign
imports, encumbered by foreign debt, and constricted by a large yet
unequal tax burden, the country was increasingly compared to the bib-
lical “whited sepulchre,” externally splendid but inwardly filled with
“rottenness and corruption.” The 32 families of grandees and the hun-
dred or so lesser nobles, who owned much of the land, were exempt
from taxes. So, too, in large part, were the hidalgos, who numbered in
the thousands. Many others enjoyed tax exemption, including a multi-
tude of clergy and a swarm of hangers-on who benefited from clerical
patronage. The highways in the rural areas and the crowded streets of
the towns teemed with uprooted peasants, vagabonds, bandits, and
those picturesque but unproductive figures known as picaros, who
lived by their wits and mingled with smugglers, swindlers, and other
petty criminals. The weight of taxation fell upon honest folk: the trades-
men, farmers, and laborers who were stripped of all but a bare living in
order to fund the idleness of the rest and the fantastic extravagance of
a royal court that was maintained on an imperial scale, although the
revenues of the empire were pledged for decades in advance to foreign
bankers.
To foreigners, Spain appeared to be a country of insane contrasts,
where lords and bishops lived in regal state while beggars lived off the
scraps they discarded. It seemed a nation of parasites, where everyone
who possessed credentials or connections (such as the graduates of the
32 universities producing an unending stream of useless scholars)
sought employment at court or council chamber. It was not only out-
siders who recoiled from the spectacle. One commentator declared that
Spain had become “a republic of the bewitched, living outside the natu-
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