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000859 Visit since May 31, 2004
| TRIUMPHS and TRAGEDY, a History
of The Mexican people (Chapter 1) |
by Prof. German Estrada
July, 2004 |
THE FOREFATHERS (part
12) continues..
....... By sailing westward, Columbus
would reopen the trade with the Indies, shut down
almost completely when the Turks captured Constantinopla.
Unfortunately, it was too late. Already, Aragón's
fortunes had fallen on evil days. As early as the
middle of the fourteenth century, trade and commerce
had declined and the textile industry of both Castilla
and Aragón stopped
growing, while the bubonic plague and Turkish disruptions
of the Mediterranean trade had blunted the prosperity
of the port cities. Ferdinand, who assumed the throne
of Aragón in 1479, inherited a troubled kingdom.
The Catholic kings left Spain,
now controlled by Castilla, to Charles I, monarch
from 1515 to 1558, who ruled Spain for nearly forty
years but spent less than sixteen of them at home.
The Conquest of ancient Mexico, and that of almost
the entire New World, occurred in his lifetime. It
was to Charles I that Hernán Cortés
wrote his famous Cartas . But Charles I of
Spain was also Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman
Empire, which took in Germany and Austria. The first
of the Hapsburgs, Charles was only partly Spanish,
being German by birth and speaking a rudimentary Spanish.
He wasted much of his reign trying to keep Europe and
the conquistadores in the New World under his control.
Unlike the earlier Spanish kings, he faced outward,
plotting a costly imperialism that put much of the
Western world in Spanish hands.
Phillip II, the son of Charles,
governed Spain until 1598, dying a feeble old man.
Legend says that Charles I led his soldiers into
battle; Phillip, by contrast, loved sedentary life
and spent his days "surrounded
by piles of documents," a fitting commentary of the
passage of Spain from the epoch of the conquistadores
to the days of the civil servant. Phillip's penchant
for record keeping plunged public officials into an
ocean of paper work. The chief bureaucrat, the title
best suited for Phillip, had eventually an army of
clerks at his beck and call. Phillip, however, kept
alive the imperialism of his father, mainly with silver
pilfered from the New World, participating conflicts
in the Netherlands, intervening in France, and dispatching
the Glorious Armada to punish England for meddling
in Holland and relying on pirates to rob Spain of its
New World loot.
But imperialism requires vast sums of money to finance.
Unable to promote his foreign policy on taxes culled
from Spaniards, Charles I had, ultimately, to borrow
from foreign bankers. His reliance on credit bankrupted
the economy of Castilla and placed the financial burden
on the classes least able to carry it. Despite the
flow of silver from the New World, Phillip, too, had
to turn to foreigners to pay for his imperialism. Even
so, the Spanish crown went bankrupt in 1557, in 1575,
and again in 1596.
Charles I and Phillip II brought to a successful close
the struggle to unify Spain. But in doing so, they
converted the crown into a despotic master, a transformation
that had its roots in the battle for supremacy between
the landed nobility and the burguesía of
the commercial cities of the late fifteenth century,
above all in Aragón. Wanting national blueprints
more to their liking, merchants, traders, and bankers
asked the king for help. For its part, the crown had
long waged a struggle against the privileges of the
nobility, including the freedom from paying royal tribute. Source: From the book Triumphs
and Tragedy, a History of the Mexican People by his
author Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, and with his authorization.
(W.W. Norton & Company. New York-London). We'll continue with this fascinating
book.
estradanav@yahoo.com
Prof. Germán
Estrada is the author of the best selling book,
"México
Mágico: Everything You Wanted To Know
About... But Nobody Told You..." available in Puerto
Vallarta at The Net House, Mail Boxes, Etc., Books,
Books as well as directly from the author by internet.
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