Back to Blog
King charles ii5/22/2023 ![]() ![]() Even artistic production, which had declined in Castile because of a lack of court patronage, flourished in provincial cities such as Seville. In fact, much administrative and fiscal reform that has been attributed to the reign of the Bourbon kings in the eighteenth century may well have had its roots in the last decades of the seventeenth in the regions outside Castile. Although military dominance in Europe clearly passed to the French, recent research indicates that within Spain, population growth, agricultural output, and textile manufacture all began to recover under the reign of Charles II. While the court in Madrid was preoccupied with its internal power struggles, other regions of Spain experienced a gradual recovery. Recent studies of the "decline of Spain" argument, however, have questioned whether Charles's reign was truly as disastrous as it appears. Historians of Spain have paid little attention to the late seventeenth century, and those who have described Spain during the reign of Charles II reserve their harshest criticism for the king, associating his personal weaknesses with Spain's decline. Anticipating this, the other European powers, particularly France and Austria, spent much of his reign designing plans to partition Spain, and his death in 1700 resulted in the twelve-year War of the Spanish Succession. Charles's final failure was his inability to leave an heir. The influence of the aristocracy in the court, but because of factional conflicts, no single minister was able to accomplish much or to remain in power for more than a few years. During the 1680s and 1690s, the king also relied on the assistance of a series of ministers. In addition to Mariana of Austria, the most significant of these were Charles's half-brother Don Juan Jos é of Austria (an illegitimate son of Philip IV), a charismatic and popular figure in the court and a constant focus of opposition to the queen mother, and Charles's second wife, Mariana of Neuburg, whom he married in 1689. As a result, there was constant competition to gain access to the king, and factions developed around the individuals most likely to be able to control him. When Charles came of age in 1676, he too depended on the assistance of others in the court. His mother, Mariana of Austria, acted as regent and relied on a series of favorites (including her confessor, Juan Everard Nithard, and Fernando de Valenzuela, the husband of one of her servants) to assist her in the tasks of government. Charles inherited his throne in 1665 at the age of four. In the last years of his life he was rumored to be bewitched and underwent an exorcism to expel his demons.Ĭharles's reign was characterized by factionalism in which various figures in the court competed for control in the power vacuum left by the absence of a strong king. Even in adulthood he did not often attend the meetings of important government councils or countersign their deliberations official documents generally bear a facsimile of his signature rather than the original. He was never able to read and write well, and did not master other basic courtly skills such as horsemanship and fencing. Given Charles's weak physical condition, it was generally assumed that he was lacking in intelligence as well, and little was required of him in the way of educational training. The product of generations of inbreeding between the Spanish and Austrian branches of the Habsburg family, he was sickly, frail, and possibly epileptic. Plagued by poor leadership, monetary inflation, bankruptcy, and a series of military defeats, Spain in the later seventeenth century surrendered its primacy on the European stage to France.Ĭharles as an individual was sadly symbolic of this decline, as he was known more for his physical infirmity and absence from government than for his accomplishments. The reign of Charles II is perhaps best known for the decline of this empire. From the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in the fifteenth century through that of Philip IV in the mid-seventeenth century, Spain was the major power in western Europe, possessing a rich colonial empire and respected for its military prowess as well as its literary and artistic accomplishments. ![]() CHARLES II (SPAIN) (1661 –1700), king of Spain, Naples, and Sicily (1665 –1700), son of Philip IV, and the last Habsburg ruler of Spain. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |