Port of Seville, Spain in the late 16th century. Painting by Alonso Sánchez Coello. In the lat 16th century. No changes made. Public domain. View license here.

By Santiago Dominguez

Abstract: Spain’s so-called ‘Golden Age,’ spanning from 1500s-1700s is commonly misappropriated as a period of wealth and affluence. However, wealth extracted from the Americas—particularly silver—failed to enrich the Spanish nation as commonly believed, largely due to the Spanish government’s inability to reinvest vast silver profits into productive industries. The influx of American silver and the economic disparity within Spanish society also highlights significant economic mismanagement, societal inequality, and an outdated feudal framework that hindered Spain’s growth. Through an analysis of Spain’s economic policies, it becomes evident that small elite aristocracies reaped the benefits of wealth from both silver and wool exports, while most peasants and labourers remained impoverished. Furthermore, Spain’s participation in costly wars, such as the Thirty Years’ War, further strained its finances, and depopulated the Peninsula, leading to repeated bankruptcies and a lack of fiscal control. This essay contends that Spain’s medieval feudal system, perpetuated by the legacy of the Reconquista, created an economically repressive and socially stratified society, which exacerbated poverty despite vast colonial wealth. Spain’s economic difficulties during its ‘Golden Age’ were not the result of inevitable decline, but rather the outcome of a failure to adapt to emerging economic structures and global markets, ultimately leaving much of the population impoverished and the nation.

Keywords: Mercantile-Economics, Spain, Colonialism, Conservatism, Poverty

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Historian Henry Kamen cynically claimed that “seldom [have historians] been more in accord than over the decline of Spain,” suggesting that there is a rare consensus that Spain reached some great point from which to decline.^[1] Spanish history is often viewed as though Spain experienced a ‘golden age’ during the early modern period (1500s – 1700s), wherein gold and silver from the Americas funded a global mercantile empire. However, Kamen reveals that Spain’s great rise was fraught with impoverishment and limited economic growth. In reality, Spain was devastated by the violent era of the Reconquista (translates to the ‘reconquest’), ruled by a form of medieval feudalism, and was in a poor position to transition into the emerging capitalist market. Even in its ‘golden age,’ poverty and emptiness were frequent throughout Spain, to the point that contemporary travellers and writers noted the desolation.

Historian, John Lynch, echoes Kamen quoting Francesco Guicciardini, an envoy of Florence to Ferdinand of Aragon in the spring of 1512 who called Spain an “utter deserted country, where there is not a lodging to be found nor a tree to be seen, only vast stretches of rosemary and heather, for this arid land.” Lynch asserted that “much of Spain was, indeed, deserted and if its land was ill-cultivated it was partly because it was under-populated” noting also that “it was no coincident that Don Quixote and Sancho travelled most of the time in solitude along deserted routes.”^[2]

How did Spanish society tolerate so much poverty in the early modern period, given the wealth of colonies? One answer appears from how Spain entered the early modern period with powerful conservative institutions which perpetuated oppressive social and political structures. This answer suggests that Spanish society entered the early modern period retrogressively compared to other societies in Europe. Analyzing how the Spanish medieval framework repressed Spanish peasants, and how its mismanagement and over-exportation of American silver and Spanish wool served to impoverish Spanish society, provides an economic explanation for poverty in the Spanish Empire amidst their ‘golden age.’

Historical Background

The medieval period of early modern Spain began when Umayyad Muslims invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 711 CE. This invasion marked the beginning of a territorial conflict between Muslims and Christians, ending in 1492 with the Spanish Reconquista of the peninsula. The experience of 800 years of religious war and discrimination shaped Spanish attitudes of the early modern period (1500s-1800s).^[3] Daniel Peralías Oto and Diego Romero-Ávila have studied this period to understand the effects of the Reconquista on Spain’s history to the present day. Oto and Ávila argue that the Reconquista happened quickly once the Christians had the upper hand over the Muslims. The speed by which the Reconquista occurred led to “imperfect colonization,” or a disproportionate and racially discriminatory expansion of the area creating an “inegalitarian society with negative consequences for long-term economic development.”^[4] The rapid rate of the Reconquista contributed to the cost of human capital in the region; it continued to plague Spain into the early modern period. In 1609, 120,000 Moriscos (Muslims in Spain) were expelled from Valencia alone. These expulsions were frequent in the early modern era, as well as in the Reconquista.^[5] Violence and expulsions through a proto-colonial structure had long-term economic effects on the region because of the displacement of populations, loss of manpower, and the formation of an “inegalitarian society.”

Structure of Spanish Society

Spanish society entered the early modern period with an antiquated social framework. In the thirteenth-century, the Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile were governed by a repressive feudal system that originated in the late Middle Ages called the seigneurial.^[6] This system was akin to ancient slavery, from which lords exploited serfs living on their land to produce a profit.^[7] Spain did not deconstruct this feudal framework in the early modern era, creating social and economic complications.^[8] The reliance of peasants and serfs on local authorities for aid and support led to the decentralization of Spanish society in the late fourteenth-century.^[9]

Despite the Spanish Monarchy’s attempts to unify the realm, Spain remained decentralized throughout the early modern period. In 1476, “Spain destroyed feudal castles, declared private wars illegal, and [displaced] frontier governors.”^[10] In 1581, Spain attempted to abolish confraternal hospitals in major cities to form a centralized general hospital,^[11] and in 1532 the crown abolished encomiendas and the use of “Indian slavery” in America to promote self-sufficient colonies.^[12] However, these efforts did little to quell the powerful aristocracy and mitigate the capacity of regional groups in enforcing their authority in local communities. For instance, confraternities re-emerged in 1592 because the Cortes of Madrid determined that “the reduction of hospitals had not been useful and asked that consolidated hospitals be returned to their previous state.”^[13]

Centralized hospitals could not afford to treat the influx of patients amidst several deadly epidemics, exposing a weakness in the Spanish state. Likewise, settlers in the colonies continued to aspire to live a life “free of menial work” and continued to find other methods to outsource labour, such as African slavery, defeating the crown’s attempts to entice Spanish settlers to farm.^[14] While the extent to which Spain was successful in centralising their state is difficult to assert, this evidence suggests that, unlike other contemporary nations, Spain struggled to transition into a modern nation-state. Meanwhile, Spain’s decentralized structure was exploited for profit by a small, powerful elite group at the detriment of the common people.

The Mestas, a tiny but powerful elite group, benefited tremendously from Spain’s decentralization in the sixteenth-century. The Mestas controlled a sheep monopoly, which was Spain’s primary export before silver,^[15] and despite making up only 2-3% of the Spanish population, they controlled 97% of the land (see Figure 1).^[16] With this tremendous wealth, the Mestas could choose whether to pay taxes and would receive benefits if they did.^[17] Spanish policies provided protections and benefits to this group, such as the Land Lease Law of 1501, which prevented pasturage from being converted to tillage to protect the sheep routes. This policy contributed to the increasing cost of living as peasants could not grow sufficient food crops, resulting in shortages and a reliance on grain imports.^[18] While inflation increased the cost of living throughout the sixteenth-century, wages did not rise until 1580 further impoverishing the population.^[19]

Figure 1. Migratory sheep routes and some Mesta land ownership in sixteenth-century Spain, Found in Jaime Vicens Vives, “The Economies of Catalonia and Castile,” In Spain in the Fifteenth Century: Essays and Extracts by Historians of Spain, 39.

Despite making up 95 percent of the population, tenant-farming peasants remained exceptionally poor, and buying power was reduced dramatically with the introduction of imported silver and gold.^[20] By 1530, the vast quantity of silver imports had rippling effects on the economy (see Figure 2).^[21] Between 1501 and 1550, prices for goods doubled, and doubled again between 1551 and 1600.^[22] Increasing prices of goods harmed Spanish manufacturing, which failed to compete with the market as other nations produced goods at lower prices.^[23] Furthermore, agriculture prices rose faster than non-agriculture prices, creating starvation-like scenarios for many Spaniards. Yet, these conditions hardly affected the smaller demographic of wealthy landowners because they used their lands to profit from inflation by producing wool and cattle or increasing tenant rent.^[24] This security inequality was coupled with questionable economic decisions made by the Spanish government to agitate poverty further.

Figure 2. Gold and silver imports in early modern Spain. Found in, Earl J. Hamilton, “Imports of American Gold and Silver Into Spain, 1503-1660,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 43, no. 3 (May 1929): 468.

Economic Policies amid War and Desolation

The Spanish Cortes enacted problematic legislation to combat the growing inflation in Spain, which led to tremendous debt and an unstable surplus. For instance, by 23 April 1552, the Cortes was importing cloth at the same value as the wool Spain was exporting, so on 25 May 1552, the Cortes prohibited goods made from wool, silk, and leather to anywhere but the colonies. However, the Cortes later admitted that this caused an economic depression and unemployment and returned to exporting these commodities in 1555.^[25] Spain had little room to expand its market in the early modern period. Since Spain had priced itself out of the manufacturing market, it became a primary resource exporter. While wool and silver were quite profitable, Spain poorly administered the trade of these resources and did not reinvest the immense profit from the silver mines into the Spanish economy, which contributed to inflation.^[26]

Eventually, Spain became too dependent on foreign markets. It was unable to develop a closed market in which it sold manufactured goods to its colonies in exchange for American resources as it became reliant on buying these goods from other countries.^[27] Spain became a repository for silver that other nations used to produce wealth and prosperity. Often, great sums of wealth arrived in underdeveloped metropolises like Sevilla, although they were ill-equipped to make up the balance of trade and became dependent on the colonial market.^[28] Furthermore, Spain produced wool, sold it to the lowlands, and bought back Flemish textiles at a loss.^[29] However, Spain’s problems went beyond poor market conditions; the transportation of silver proved costly, and the decision to direct much of the silver toward war proved to be a serious pitfall.

Despite treasures from the colonies lining the Spanish coffers, Spain declared bankruptcy and defaulted on its debt payments in 1557, 1575, and 1596.^[30] For Spain to transport vast amounts of silver safely across the Atlantic, it needed to construct costly ships to ward off pirates and privateers. Thus, the Spanish government mortgaged an annual treasure fleet at ruinous interest rates while waiting for silver to arrive from the colonies. By 1534, a significant part of Spanish revenue was spent paying off the out-of-control interest on public debt. ^[31] The Spanish treasury was further agitated by Spanish participation in the Thirty Years’ War of the early seventeenth-century.^[32] Given that Spain declared bankruptcy just prior to the conflicts’ outbreak, fighting a costly war proved detrimental to its financial stability, indicated by the reduction of Spanish imports of silver from previous years into the seventeenth-century (see Figure 3).^[33]

Figure 3. Receipts of silver coins in Spain. The image is slightly cut off, the top left says “millions,” and the top unit is 14. Found in, Earl J. Hamilton, “Imports of American Gold and Silver Into Spain, 1503-1660,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 43, no. 3 (May 1929): 465.

Impacts on the Quality of Life

Participation in the Thirty Years’ War was costly for Spain, mainly due to the loss of manpower and the vast spending of silver. Between 1649 and 1654, the war cost Spain 66,865,000 ducats, or nearly 26 million kilograms of silver.^[34] The war was so costly that in July 1621, months following the inauguration of King Phillip IV, the Spanish council of finance had to inform the king that he was beginning his rule with an “empty treasury.”^[35] Furthermore, Spain also lost a lot of manpower, as many Spaniards found “an early death” in Flanders, and emigration to the colonies continued.^[36]

Spanish population growth trailed behind other European powers in the early modern era, which may be correlated with the economic, social, and political conditions. Alexander V Avakov compiled data from civilization over a period of 1,000 years, and his analysis reveals notable trends in Spanish population growth. In the sixteenth-century, Spain had a population of 6,800,000 inhabitants,^[37] while in the seventeenth-century, Spain’s population only rose to 8,770,000 inhabitants.^[38] Comparing this to Britain, which had a population of 3,681,000 in the 1500s^[39] to 7,997,000 in the 1700s.^[40] Spain added 1,970,000 people to their population between 1500 and 1700, while Britain added 4,316,000 in the same period.^[41] This data reveals how war, inflation, and social inequality affected population growth, suggesting that the quality of life in Spain in the early modern period was lower than in surrounding nations.

As the data, alongside the political and economic context, reveals, the quality of life for Spanish commoners in the early modern period was poor, and colonization to the Americas intensified the severity of Spanish poverty. Emigrants could not afford to live in “that wretched country because it is only for people who have a lot of money.”^[42] Money was a big determiner of one’s social status; Spain had no legally defined third estate but simply a mass of six million people defined by their exclusion from the aristocracy. Thus, if any peasant were to accumulate a large sum of money, they would be able to, in theory, live nobly in Spain.^[43] However, John Lynch is cynical about that possibility saying:

“the vast majority of Spaniards, peasants in the fields, labourers in the towns, had no hope of advancement, only the fear that they might fall even lower, into that underworld of Spanish society populated by vagabonds, beggars, and bandits, the victims of widespread unemployment.^[44]

Lynch illustrates the insecurity that Spaniards had to live with because of the changing economic climate of the colonial market. The cost of living had increased exponentially due to runaway inflation, and wages did not increase until the 1580s.^[45] Contemporary Spaniards, such as Martin de Azpilcueta in 1556, noticed the changes and observed how a flood of silver created undesirable market conditions.^[46] The lower classes knew that their work was degrading within Spanish society, in the absence of a middle class they only had the aristocracy to compare themselves to.^[47] Peasants were significantly burdened by regressive tax policies which took away any profit that they might have otherwise acquired, leading to a mass exodus of what few middle-class families existed in cities, causing greater growing unemployment, and forcing many to join a religious order or the military.^[48]

In the absence of a middle class, Spanish society was polarized between a ruling, minuscule upper-class and a mass of subservient lower-class peasants; the introduction of American silver in the Spanish economy widened this divide.^[49] Furthermore, discriminatory expulsions of minority groups such as Jews and Moors also contributed to the disconnect.^[50] The lack of a middle-class trapped the lower classes to work in the destitute fields because cities had little prospect.^[51] Spaniards had few opportunities and were under unequal pressure to support the Spanish crown. Meanwhile, as the lower classes were buckling under the weight of economic forces, the aristocracy enjoyed many benefits. For example, social classes, such as the Hidalgos, avoided paying certain taxes.^[52] Thus, during Spain’s ‘golden age’ in the early modern period, the country’s inegalitarian society was fraught with debt, poverty, starvation, and dwindling population growth.

Conclusion

The view that Spain entered a ‘golden age’ in the early modern period ignores the varying degrees of poverty that prevailed in Iberia. Following the Reconquista, Spanish society was organized in a deeply feudal structure, and the deaths and expulsions of peoples left the peninsula barren. Despite copious amounts of silver flooding the vaults of the Spanish palace, much of that money was poorly managed and failed to create a meaningful profit for Spain. The colonies were a double-edged sword, bringing Spain unimaginable wealth while trapping it in debt, inflation, and reliance on the manufacturing of other nations. Few Spaniards benefited from the influx of American silver; those who did were rich aristocrats who used their lands to produce wealth amidst uncontrolled inflation. However, the reality was starkly grim for the vast majority of Spaniards. With the disappearance of the middle class, large masses of the lower-class were forced to retreat into the countryside to work for the aristocracy, reinforcing feudal social structures.

Spanish society was heavily inegalitarian during the early modern period. John Lynch was precise in saying that “the Spanish peasants were hopeless victims of the seigneurialsociety, rigid in its structure and undeviating in its ideals.”^[53] Thus, Spain’s entrance into the early modern period was retroactive and disorganized; the great wealth of American silver was poorly managed and Spanish society was trapped under archaic feudal structures. Despite Spain’s vast empire and its great influx of wealth, its economic, political, and social structure prevented it from adopting an early modern capitalist system. The Spanish Empire did not so much experience a ‘decline’ as it instead struggled to maintain and administer a tremendous wealth of valuable primary resources. Spain’s economic turmoil provides an insight into how the Spanish economy regressively settled into the modern period and exhibits how conservative Reconquista era social policies rooted themselves and negatively impacted the framework of early modern Spanish society.

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Endnotes

[1] Henry Kamen, “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?”, Past and Present 81, no. 1 (1978): 24, https://www.jstor.org/stable/650362.

[2] John Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs Volume I: Empire and Absolutism 1516-1598 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 101. Lynch cites a migration of population from the north to the south may have been an important factor in this poverty as Jews and Moriscos were forcefully emigrated and created a vacuum, as well as the migration to America. See also Henry Kamen, “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?”, 29, who cites James Lockhart and Enrique Otte, two sixteenth-century Spaniards who left Spain saying, “that wretched country, because it is only for people who have a lot of money… that poverty and need which people suffer in Spain.” Kamen also cited Francesco Guicciardini who said that “poverty is great here, and I believe it is due not so much to the quality of the country as to the nature of the Spaniards.”

[3] Daniel Peralías Oto, and Diego Romero-Ávila, “The Economic Consequences of the Spanish Reconquest: The Long-Term Effects of Medieval Conquest and Colonization,” Journal of Economic Growth 21, no. 4 (December 2016): 410, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10887-016-9132-9.

[4] Oto, and Ávila, “The Economic Consequences of the Spanish Reconquest,” 410.

[5] Oto, and Ávila, “The Economic Consequences of the Spanish Reconquest,” 411.

[6] Paul H. Freedman, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 211-212.

[7] Freedman, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia, 6. Paul Freedman uses a definition of a seigneurial system from French historian, Marc Bloch, which is “a system of lordship by which nobles exercised formally public powers of a military, political and fiscal nature… comprised substantially more than a collection of legal customs. It was an organization of productive activity.” Freedman also writes that “lords profited from the end of ancient slavery by maintaining a regime of economic exploitation and of semi-liberty.”

[8] Daniel Nemser, “Introduction: Iberian Empire and the History of Capitalism,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 2 (2019): 2, https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2019.0017. Nemser is careful to mention that there is a misinforming myth from the period known as “Black Legends” which were stories perpetuated by the British and the French that characterized the Spanish as “superstitious, backward, greedy, and cruel” to affirm their superiority. Nonetheless, Nemser is arguing that Latin America was more capitalistic than historians assume, he does not argue that Spain entered into a capitalistic structure, rather that Spain was able to integrate its feudal structure within the newly formed capitalist structure of the north-western European states.

[9] Mar Grau-Satorras, Iago Otero, Erik Gómez-Baggethun, and Victoria Reyes-García, “Prudent Peasantries: Multilevel Adaptation to Drought in Early Modern Spain (1600-1715),” Environment and History 27, no. 1 (February 1, 2021): 15, 24, https://doi.org/10.3197/096734019×15463432086964.

[10] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburgs Volume I, 5.

[11] Maureen M Flynn, “Charitable Ritual in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain,” Sixteenth Century Journal 16, no. 3 (1985): 345, https://doi.org/10.2307/2540221.

[12] Edward Cavanagh, and Lorenzo Veracini, ed., “Settler Colonialism in New Spain and the Early Mexican Republic,” In The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 110.

[13] Flynn, “Charitable Ritual in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain,” 347.

[14] Cavanagh, and Veracini, ed., “Settler Colonialism in New Spain and the Early Mexican Republic,” 110.

[15] Jaime Vicens Vives, “The Economies of Catalonia and Castile,” In Spain in the Fifteenth Century 1369-1516: Essays and Extracts by Historians of Spain, by Roger Highfield, 31–56, (New York: Harper & Row, 1972): 43. See also Andrea Finkelstein, The Grammar of Profit: The Price Revolution in Intellectual Context, (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 25-27.

[16] Finkelstein, The Grammar of Profit, 27.

[17] Vives, “The Economies of Catalonia and Castile,” 39-40. See also, David Hacket Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 23.

[18] Finkelstein, The Grammar of Profit, 26.

[19] Finkelstein, The Grammar of Profit, 33. For the large landowners, inflation was negligible as they could increase rent to match the market price, 188.

[20] Finkelstein, The Grammar of Profit, 188. Half of Spain’s national income went to a clergy that numbered 100,000. Most of the wealth produced in Spain did not return to the hands of the vast majority of the Spanish population.

[21] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburgs Volume I, 121

[22] Finkelstein, The Grammar of Profit, 33.

[23] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburgs Volume I, 107.

[24] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburgs Volume I, 104.

[25] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburgs Volume I, 120.

[26] Earl J Hamilton, “Imports of American Gold and Silver into Spain, 1503-1660,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 43, no. 3 (May 1929): 472, https://doi.org/10.2307/1885920. Hamilton suggests that imports of gold and silver created the “illusion of prosperity” while being terribly mismanaged by the crown.

[27] Kamen, “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?”, 42.

[28] Kamen, “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?”, 42. See also Stanley J Stein, and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 42. Stein comments that silver became seen as a harvest-able crop, like wool.

[29] Stanley J Stein, and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 42.

[30] Finkelstein, The Grammar of Profit, 27.

[31] David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 23.

[32] Stein, and Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe, , 41.

[33] Earl J. Hamilton, “Imports of American Gold and Silver Into Spain, 1503-1660,” 465.

[34] Kamen, “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?”, 30. Earl J. Hamilton, notes in “Monetary Inflation in Castile, 1598-1660,” 196, that the ducat was a unit of account representing 375 maravedis. François R. Velde and Warren E. Weber, noted in “Fiat Money in 17th Century Castile,” 1, that 34 maravedis represented 35.24 grams of silver. Therefore, accounting for the value of a ducat, the war would have cost 25,074,000,000 maravedis.

[35] John Lynch, Spain under the Habsburgs Volume II Spain and America 1598-1700, (Oxford: B. Blackwell), 196, 90-91.

[36] Kamen, “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?”, 30.

[37] Alexander V Avakov, Two Thousand Years of Economic Statistics: World Population, GDP and PPP, (New York: Algora Publishing, 2010), 19.

[38] Avakov, Two Thousand Years of Economic Statistics, 37.

[39] Avakov, Two Thousand Years of Economic Statistics, 19.

[40] Avakov, Two Thousand Years of Economic Statistics, 37.

[41] Avakov, Two Thousand Years of Economic Statistics, 37. Avakov created a measure for population growth between periods, the higher the number represents a higher rate of population growth. Avakov determined that Spain had a measure of 0.06 population growth between 1600 and 1700 (Avakov, 126), while Britain had a significantly higher 0.33 population growth during this period (Avakov, 132a). Spain trailed behind most powerful European regions such as Belgium: 0.22 (Avakov, 39), France: 0.15 (Avakov, 124), and Russia: 0.29 (Avakov, 132a). A notable standout from these numbers is Germany, who experienced a marginal population decline (Avakov, 128), likely due in part to the Thirty Years’ War which devastated the land. Population trends reveal that Spain was struggling to keep up with the population trends of other European countries throughout the early modern period.

[42] Kamen, “The Decline of Spain: A Historical Myth?”, 29. Kamen is quoting Francesco Guicciardini from 1512.

[43] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburgs Volume II, 148.

[44] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburgs Volume II, 152.

[45] Finkelstein, The Grammar of Profit, 33.

[46] Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, 23l. The full quote is “in Spain, in times when money was scarcer, saleable goods and labor were given for very much less than after the discovery of the Indies, which flooded the country with gold and silver.”

[47] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburgs Volume I, 108.

[48] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburg Volume Is, 108. On page 15, Lynch expands on how anti-Jewish policy hurt the middle class in Spain. Jewish people made up a vital part of the community, holding key positions as financiers, artisans, and officials, Jews brought capital into the country. However, in 1492, Spain decided to expel an estimated 150,000 Jews, leaving a huge gap in the middle class of Spain.

[49] Finkelstein, The Grammar of Profit, 33.

[50] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburgs Volume I, 15.

[51] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburgs Volume I, 108.

[52] Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History, 23.

[53] Lynch, Spain Under the Habsburgs Volume II, 153.

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