When it comes to Spain, it seems difficult for modern people to associate it with a big country, at best it can only be regarded as a well-known tourist country, and La Liga, which is popular in the world, is the symbol of this country. People may not be able to say that there are any well-known heroes or historical figures in this country, but they recognize many of the country's football stars.
In the recent history of Europe, Spain did not have much influence, or outstanding things, in the two world wars, Spain silently hid in the southwest corner, watching Britain, France, Germany and Russia and other countries kill you and me in the distance, to preserve their many historical relics in the two world wars.
It is such a seemingly indisputable southern European country, the people live and work in peace and contentment, but it was once the world hegemon in the sixteenth century, as one of the main pioneers of the Great Navigation Age, Spain's colonies spread all over the world, west to the vast American continent, east to the African Lawin and Taiwan, far before the British Empire was known as the "Empire of the Sun Never Sets", Spain has long been many ahead of the realization of the real sun does not set.
But as we all know, it was the British Empire that later became the hegemon of the seas, and Spain became a second-rate country, and even once it was destroyed.
<h1>First, the Silver Empire</h1>
Due to the demand for spices and silks, from the fifteenth century onwards, Europeans began to seek routes to the East outside Europe. Spain and Portugal were the great seafaring powers of the time, and Columbus and Vasco da Gama each discovered a route to the East and the West (although both believed they had discovered the Orient Route). However, in contrast to Vasco da Gama's bypass of South Africa's Cape of Good Hope and his voyage to the East, the American continent discovered by Columbus was actually a wild land that was even more backward than Europe.
What Spain did not expect was that in 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued an edict designating a prime meridian on the Atlantic Ocean, with Portugal to the east and Spain to the west, so that Spain completely died in the heart of the east and focused on plundering the American continent. In 1545, Spain found a rich silver mine in Potosí, Peru (now in Bolivia), which was the world's largest silver mine at that time, and almost at the same time, the method of extracting silver from ore with mercury was greatly improved, and the new method was called amalgamation.
Under the dual advantages of technology and resource exploration, the production of silver in the Americas erupted, through the global route, not only transported to Europe, but also all the way through the Spanish transshipment station in Asia, into the Eastern Ming Empire, but also with the huge amount of silver inflow, making China a silver standard country.
From the discovery of the New World in 1492 to the fall of the Spanish Empire in 1640, according to incomplete statistics, Spain seized a total of 875 tons of gold and 45,000 tons of silver from the American continent. This large amount of income overnight made Spain the richest country in the world.
Abundant funds supported Spain's armament and foreign wars, with nearly 200,000 elite troops and an unprecedentedly large navy, the "Armada". In this way, the Spanish Empire seems to have a continuous influx of gold and silver from the Americas, and the sunset of the "Empire that Never Sets" will never come.
<h1>Second, economics beat Spain</h1>
The Spanish royal family basically completely controlled the mining rights of American silver, and the general private sector was prohibited from participating in such economic activities, so even if the silver flowed into Spain in large quantities, the people basically did not benefit from it. At that time, people lacked the concept of economics, did not understand what inflation was, and only pursued the maximization of silver mining, which led to the increase in the money supply and led to an increase in prices, forming a typical situation of rich and poor people.
In addition, at the national level, the then King Philip II of Spain did not invest huge amounts of capital in Spain's infrastructure and industry, which made Spain completely without any industrial base, relying solely on huge funds to build a navy and army, and the arms to start wars had to be purchased from Italy and France. In addition, due to the rise of Protestant power at that time, Spain, as a Catholic power, needed to spend a lot of military expenditure to support the Catholic repression of Protestantism and Islam in various places.
Coupled with the Spanish Empire, which once occupied 40% of the land of Europe, it is conceivable that Spain was attacked on all sides, not only to guard against its neighbors, France, but also to be careful that the civil war had just subsided, and gradually set its sights on Britain at sea. For this reason, even Spain, which owns the silver mines in the Americas, was difficult to support, and even took large-scale borrowing to maintain foreign wars in times of financial crisis, and in 1552 alone, military expenditure was 10 times the inflow of gold and silver. At the time of Philip II's death, Spain was saddled with huge debts and nearly went bankrupt, and over the next fifty years, the Spanish Empire went bankrupt several times.
<h1>Third, the sample of silver mine mining has decreased sharply</h1>
As the saying goes, to be rich is nothing more than open source. To be poor is nothing more than a decrease in income and excessive expenditure. The large amount of military expenditure has made the Spanish Empire breathless. Unexpectedly, since the 1970s, the mining of silver in the Americas has been tortuous. First, the rest of Europe, red-eyed by Spain's monopoly business, often cooperated with pirates to plunder Spanish ships.
In addition, the increased difficulty of silver mining is also a major factor, the most intuitive reason is the increase in local labor costs, the lack of unpaid labor, and the crisis of mercury mines necessary for mining and refining silver mines, and the depletion of local mercury mines in South America, these factors have led to a sharp decline in silver mining in the Americas.
Of course, it also directly affects Spain's fiscal revenue, because of the long-term dependence on the extraction of such natural resources, once the amount of extraction changes, it will be like many of our countries that rely on oil exports today (such as Venezuela), the country's economy will suddenly turn upside down, and the people's living standards will instantly fall to the bottom.
Spain's rise and fall is undoubtedly the best precursor for every hegemonic country. The story of Spain has made it clear to future generations that it is not a long-term way for the country to develop by relying solely on the advantages of resources, without regard to the development of the country's basic strength. Several of the hegemonic powers that came after them, such as the British Empire and the United States, also avoided the mistakes made by Spain and understood the importance of developing their own industrial base, so there was the industrial revolution that originated in Britain and the technological innovation in modern America. The slogan often heard in recent years, the scientific and technological power, is really not a simple slogan.
bibliography
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Time of Philip II
Fernand Braudel