Spanish Monarchy

History

The Spanish Monarchy grew out of the union of Castile and Aragon and was ruled from the 16th century by the House of Habsburg. Enormous quantities of silver from mines in the Americas arrived by fleet every year, and that money paid for what was called the strongest army in Europe.

Yet the flood of silver also drove prices up, and war cost more than the treasure brought in, so the crown had to declare several times that it could not pay its debts. The symbol of the Spanish army was the tercio - The infantry formation used by Spanish armies in the 16th and 17th centuries. Thousands of soldiers with long pikes packed together into a dense square, with blocks of musketeers (soldiers firing guns lit by a burning cord) at the four corners. The pikes kept enemy cavalry away while the guns fired, and while the musketeers reloaded they could duck inside the wall of pikes for shelter.For over a hundred years this formation was called the strongest in Europe. It could face an attack from any direction simply by turning, and it was so deep that it was very hard to break. Its weaknesses were that such a heavy block moved slowly and that only a small share of its guns could fire at any one moment.In the Thirty Years' War, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden attacked exactly those weaknesses: he spread his units thin and wide so more guns could fire at once, and kept light cannon moving with the troops. When Spanish tercios were broken by the French at Rocroi in 1643, people took it as the sign that the age of the tercio was ending.: a square block of pikemen with musketeers at its corners, a formation that kept its reputation as unbreakable for more than a hundred years.

Because the Spanish kings belonged to the same family as the Habsburg emperors in Austria, Spain fought on the emperor's side in the Thirty Years' War while at the same time carrying on a long war against the Dutch Republic - A union of seven provinces fighting for independence from Spain — a country led by merchants rather than a king, and among the richest in Europe., which was fighting for its independence. Spain is also a land of stories.

Rumours of El Dorado, a golden kingdom somewhere in the Americas ruled by a king covered in gold dust, drew expedition after expedition into the jungle. And the novel Don Quixote, published in 1605, with its knight charging at windmills he takes for giants, captured with laughter the mood of an age in which the time of knights was ending and the time of guns and cannon had come.

When the tercios were broken by the French at Rocroi in 1643, Europe read it as a sign that Spanish power was no longer what it had been.