[This chapter mainly explains the situation faced by Europe, especially Spain, please subscribe with caution, and friends who do not pay attention should not subscribe]

Gao pragmatic has seen a lot, most of which portray the Spanish colonial empire of this period as extremely powerful and invincible, as if it were not for the unexpected defeat of the Armada, the Habsburgs would have swept the world.

That's.

Today's Habsburgs are of course powerful, and if you count Philip II's Austrian cousins, the Habsburgs are definitely the most powerful power in Europe.

Philip II's father, Charles V, inherited the crown of four major dynasties, Castile, Aragon, Burgundy, and Austria, and later his family received Bohemia, Hungary, Portugal, and for a short time even the crown of England.

These dynastic events, combined with the conquest and plunder of Spain in the New World, brought the Habsburgs wealth and resources unmatched by other European nations. Despite the many flaws and inaccuracies in the statistics of the time, and the unreliable population figures of that period, it would not be a mistake to assume that the inhabitants of the Habsburg-ruled territories accounted for a quarter of the population of early modern Europe.

Needless to say, the strength of the Spanish phalanx and the Spanish fleet was actually reflected in the financial resources of the Habsburgs at this time.

The Habsburgs had five main sources of finance, with a few smaller sources. The most important of these is the Castile heritage of Spain. The land was ruled directly by the royal family, and the parliament and the church ceded various regular taxes to the royal family.

In addition, the commercial wealth and working capital of Europe's two trading regions, the Italian city-states and the Low Countries, were able to provide considerable capital.

The fourth source, which has become more important over time, is income from countries in the Americas. The "one-fifth royal tax" on silver and gold in the Americas, plus sales taxes, customs duties, and ecclesiastical levies, allowed the New World to provide large dividends to the kings of Spain.

Not only directly, but also indirectly, for the wealth of the Americas that flowed into the hands of private individuals, whether Spaniards, Flemishes, or Italians, helped these individuals or companies to pay their ever-heavier national taxes, and in case of emergency, the monarch could borrow heavily from the bankers, since he could theoretically pay off his debts as soon as the fleet carrying the silver arrived.

The presence of many important financial and commercial families in the Habsburg territory, such as the wealthy merchants who lived in southern Germany, the Italian cities and Antwerp, should also be counted as an advantage, which was the fifth major source of finance.

In fact, this source was more readily available than a tax from Germany, for the princes and representatives of the Free Cities in the Holy Roman Empire had always voted for the Emperor only when the Turks had reached their doorstep.

However, even though the Habsburgs seemed so powerful, Gao Shipra did not find it invincible in the slightest, because its financial and military resources, although they seemed extremely strong at the time, never met the requirements. And this fatal flaw comes from three factors that always interact with each other.

The first factor was caused by the "military revolution" in early modern Europe, that is, in the 150 years after the twenties of the sixteenth century, when the scale, cost, and organization of warfare swelled dramatically. The change itself is the result of several intersecting factors, tactical, political and demographic.

The armies of the Spanish Empire provided perhaps the best example for the realization of the "revolution in military affairs". As historians who study it say, before 1529, France and Spain were fighting for Italy, "there is no evidence that either side used more than 30,000 troops", but by the end of the year, the HRE Emperor Charles V had recruited 60,000 men in Lombardy alone to defend the newly occupied Milan and invade French Provence.

In 1552, in order to attack simultaneously from all fronts – in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain, in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean – Charles V recruited 1,090,000 men from Germany and the Netherlands, 240,000 from Lombardy, and a first man from Sicily, Naples and Spain

In this way, the army under the command of the emperor, and therefore his support, must have numbered about 150,000 men. This upward trend continued, and by 1574 the Spanish army in Flanders alone numbered 860,000 men.

What happens on land, it happens on a much larger scale at sea.

The expansion of maritime trade, the competition of trading fleets in the English Channel, the Indian Ocean, or the coast of Spain, and the threat posed by North African corsairs and large Ottoman galleon fleets, all interacted with new shipbuilding technologies, making ships larger and more advanced.

In this day and age, there was no clear distinction between warships and merchant ships, and merchant ships of a certain size were basically equipped with guns to deal with pirates and other marauders. But there was a trend towards the creation of a royal navy, through which the monarch could occupy a certain number of regular navy and form a nucleus. In wartime, armed merchant ships, three-masted warships, and two-masted small ships can move closer to this core.

Henry VIII of England was particularly supportive of this plan, while Charles V was reluctant to build his own navy, preferring to requisition private Spanish galleons and single-deck galleons from his Spanish and Italian possessions.

Unable to enjoy this luxury, Philip II was under heavy pressure in the Mediterranean and then in the Atlantic, and he had to pay for a huge shipbuilding program in Barcelona, Naples and Sicily: by 1574 he had 146 galleons, almost three times as many as he had done a dozen years earlier.

Over the next decade, the war in the Atlantic forced him to make greater efforts to secure sea routes to the West Indies and the East Indies, to protect the Spanish coast from British attacks, and to send the invading army to Britain, all of which urgently needed an ocean-going fleet.

Even after the Anglo-Spanish peace treaty of 1604, Spain needed a large fleet to defend its communications with Flanders against the Dutch at sea. Moreover, as time goes by, these warships become more and more equipped and more expensive.

It was this spiraling cost of war that exposed the true weakness of the Habsburg regime.

The widespread inflation, which has caused food prices to rise fourfold from year to year, and industrial goods prices to twofold, has dealt a very heavy blow to the government's finances, and the army and navy have doubled or tripled in size, adding fuel to the fire. As a result, the Habsburgs were constantly struggling to be solvent.

In the forties of the sixteenth century, after various campaigns against Algiers, France and German Protestants, Charles V found that his normal and extraordinary income could not pay for his expenses at all, and his taxes had been mortgaged to the bankers many years in advance.

Only by taking drastic measures, confiscating the wealth of the West Indies and seizing all the coins of Spain, could the money be found to support the war against the Protestant princes. In 1552, he spent 2.5 million dhaka on the Battle of Mace, about 10 times his normal income from the Americas.

As a result, he was forced to borrow new debts constantly, but on increasingly harsh terms. The credit of the royal family was declining, but the interest levied by the bankers was increasing, so that a large part of the normal income could only be used to pay the interest on past debts. At the time of Charles' abdication, the national debt left to Philip II was about 20 million daka.

Philip also inherited the war with France, and how much did it cost? By 1557, the Spanish crown had to declare bankruptcy on its own. At that time, big banking families like Fujel had to give in.

It can be said that in the same year, France was also forced to declare bankruptcy, which was the main reason why both sides agreed to peace talks at Chateau-Cambrezi in 1559.

But then Felip was about to deal with the formidable Turkish enemy, and the 20-year Mediterranean War, the campaign against the Moors of Grenada, and the intricate military campaigns in the Netherlands, northern France, and the English Channel forced the royal family to seek every possible source of income.

During the reign of Charles V, taxes in Spain doubled, while Philip II doubled in just one year, and by the end of his reign, they had almost doubled.

Felip's expenses were even greater, and at the Battle of Lepanto, it was estimated that the cost of maintaining the Christian fleet and soldiers would be more than 4 million daka, and although Venice and the Pope shared a large share, Spain also shared a large amount.

By the 70s of the 16th century, the expenses of the Flemish army were very large, and they were always not paid on time, which provoked army rebellions. The situation worsened in 1557 when Felip stopped paying interest to Genoese bankers. Although the surge in mineral revenues from the Americas temporarily alleviated the financial and credit crisis of the royal family, in the 80s of the 16th century, there were about 2 million Dhaka per year, compared to only 110 about 40 years ago; However, the Armada in 1588 cost 10 million Dhaka, and its tragic fate was not only a naval disaster, but also a disaster for the royal finances.

In 1596, after borrowing an unprecedented amount of public debt, Felip again refused to pay. Two years later, when he died, he had a total debt of 100 million Dhaka. The interest on this huge debt is equal to almost two-thirds of the total tax paid.

Although Spain soon made peace with France and England, the war with the Dutch continued to be fought with great difficulty, and it was not until 1609 that a ceasefire was achieved, which itself was urgently brokered by the Spanish Mutiny in 1607 and further disintegrated.

In peacetime in the following years, there was no substantial reduction in the expenditures of the Spanish Government. Leaving aside for a moment the question of huge interest rates, the continuing tensions in the Mediterranean alone require large sums of money for the construction of a coastal fortification; The vast Spanish coast was repeatedly robbed by privateers, and considerable defense costs were spent on the Philippine, Caribbean, and high seas fleets.

After 1610, the cease-fire situation in Europe did not make the arrogant Spanish leaders consider reducing military spending. The Thirty Years' War, which broke out in 1618, turned a cold war into a hot war, sending more and more Spanish troops and money into Flanders and Germany.

It is noteworthy that the Habsburgs' initial victories in Europe and their effective defense in the Americas during this period largely coincided with and supported by the significant increase in gold and silver ingots they brought from the New World.

However, for the same reason, after 1626 the fiscal revenue decreased, and the following year it was declared bankrupt. In particular, the astonishing hijacking of the silver fleet by the Dutch in 1628 cost Spain and its inhabitants as much as 10 million Dhaka, which also put a halt to Spain's war efforts for a while, but its revenues were absolutely unable to make up for the huge shortfall.

This was how Spain dealt with the war for the next 30 years, pooling its newly borrowed debts, adding new taxes, and using any windfall income from the Americas to support an important military campaign. For example, Cardinal Infante intervened in Germany in the last year, but the financially exhausting war always ended up eroding these short-term revenues, and the financial situation deteriorated even more within a few years.

After the uprisings of the Catalans and the Portuguese in the 40s of the 17th century, the wealth from the Americas was greatly reduced, and a long, slow decline was inevitable. Even if a country has excellent soldiers, can it expect any good results if it is run by a government that spends two or three times more than its normal income?

The second main reason for the defeat of Spain and Austria is not difficult to see from the above brief description: the Habsburgs had too many things to do, too many enemies to deal with, too many fronts to defend!

Although the Spanish army was strong on the battlefield, it was impossible to disperse them to garrisons at home, to North Africa, Sicily, Italy, the New World, and the Netherlands.

Like the British Empire three centuries later, the Habsburg Bloc's vast blend of territory was a striking feat of a political dynasty, but it required enormous material resources and ingenuity to keep it afloat.

This is the greatest example of strategic excesses in history, and the capture of vast territories comes at the cost of creating a multitude of enemies – fortunately, one of its great enemies, the Ottoman Empire, is also burdened with the same burden.

So, looking back, even though Spain was powerful at this time, how could it threaten the Ming Dynasty?

It can't even threaten the highly pragmatic Jinghua Group!

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The number of words is controlled to 3900+, not up to 4k, saving some money for friends who like an international perspective.