Ricky Crocamo

Paintings of battles from the early modern age have always offered detailed insights on the strategies and the type of weaponry used at that particular time in history. In this case I have chosen the painting " The Battle of Gibraltar, April 25 th 1607 " , by the Dutch Golden Age painter Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen from 1622, located at the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, it depicts a decisive battle between the United Provinces of the Netherlands and the Spanish forces during the Eighty Years' War (1566/68-1648), also known as the Dutch Revolt, an exhausting conflict that was fought both on land and at sea. This painting caused me to wonder how Spain, once the most powerful colonial Empire in the known world, following its many military campaigns in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, slowly declined. But did it really occur? There is, in fact, a vastness of scholarly articles and books on this specific subject that will subsequently be employed, the majority of which state that Spain went through a gradual downfall and focused on trying to revitalise its economy following Philip II's miscues in implementing his economic strategy. The book " The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy, 1665-1700 " by Christopher Storrs, offers a unique view from the other sources; it denies Spain's decline by emphasising that, through efforts in the financial, administrative and military sectors, king Carlos II and his ministers were able to maintain the Spanish empire at that time. What I wish to do in this paper is to compare these opposite beliefs by conducting a historiographical case study where there will be a thorough analysis of these different literary sources and then be able to assert whether the Spanish Monarchy did in fact decline or if it tenaciously resisted until the eighteenth century. The method by which I intend to answer this research question is to examine how different historians perceived the consequences of the outcome of the Dutch Revolt, the many military campaigns against England, France and in the Thirty Years' War, for the Spanish economy in the later seventeenth century.