Spain, 1600–1660

Philip III had been king of Spain and Portugal since 1598. He kept the power to appoint and dismiss, but he let one man stand between himself and everyone else, so that access to the king, and with it offices and rewards, ran through his favourite.

The Duke of Lerma filled the councils and the royal household with his relatives and clients. In 1601 he moved the court from Madrid to Valladolid, where it stayed until 1606.

Rodrigo Calderón had served Lerma as a page since 1595; in 1601 he became secretary of the king's chamber. He handled petitions and business for the favourite and grew rich on it, which made him especially hated by Lerma's enemies.

Margaret of Austria married Philip in 1599. With the Habsburg ladies of Madrid and the confessors around her, she pressed the interests of the Austrian branch of the family and fought Lerma for influence over her husband. Her brother Ferdinand would be emperor in 1619.

Philip II had left the Netherlands to his daughter Isabella and her husband, the Archduke Albert, as sovereigns in their own right, on condition that the provinces came back to Spain if they had no children. They still depended on Spanish money and Spanish troops.

Maurice of Nassau, stadholder and commander of the Dutch Republic's army, invaded Flanders and in July 1600 beat Albert's army in the dunes at Nieuwpoort. The victory broke nothing, but it showed the Dutch could win a pitched battle.

Albert answered by laying siege, in July 1601, to Ostend, the rebels' last stronghold on the Flemish coast. Two years on the town still held, and the siege was devouring men and money.

Ambrogio Spinola, a Genoese nobleman, had raised nine thousand men at his own cost in 1602. In September 1603 the siege passed from Albert to him, and in September 1604 the ruins of Ostend surrendered. It made him commander of the army of Flanders.

Elizabeth I died in March 1603, and James VI of Scotland became James I of England. He wanted an end to the war with Spain that Elizabeth had fought since 1585, and in May 1604 English and Spanish commissioners sat down to talk at Somerset House in London.

Juan Fernández de Velasco, Constable of Castile, was sent to sign the peace. He arrived so late that the talks at Somerset House went on without him, but in August 1604 he signed the Treaty of London at Whitehall. His daughter had married the Duke of Braganza; their son, born that year, would take Portugal from Philip IV.

In command of the army of Flanders, Spinola carried the war to the Republic's eastern borders in 1605 and 1606, taking Oldenzaal, Lingen, Groenlo and Rheinberg, but he could not break it. In November 1607 the money ran out. In 1608 he led the Archdukes' envoys to peace talks at The Hague.

Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the Advocate of Holland, led the Dutch side; Maurice, who wanted the war fought to the end, stayed away. No peace could be agreed, but on 9 April 1609, at Antwerp, the two sides signed a truce for twelve years. It left the Advocate and the stadholder enemies.

Philip III suspended payments to his bankers in November 1607, and he needed the truce. On 9 April 1609, the day it was signed, he also signed the order to expel the Moriscos, Spain's Christians of Muslim descent, pressed by Lerma and by the Archbishop of Valencia.

Juan de Ribera, Archbishop of Valencia since 1568, had told the king in memorials of 1601 and 1602 that the Moriscos were obstinate heretics and traitors, and that without their expulsion he would see the loss of Spain. He had even proposed enslaving them.

Luis Carrillo de Toledo, Marquis of Caracena and viceroy of Valencia, published the order on 22 September 1609: three days to go to the ports with what they could carry. Tercios brought from Italy held the harbours, and within three months about 116,000 Valencian Moriscos had been shipped to North Africa.

Agustín Mexía, a veteran of the war in Flanders who had served at the siege of Ostend, was sent to command the soldiers. His Castilian troops and Italian auxiliaries would break the resistance in the mountains.

In October several thousand Moriscos of the mountains near Ayora rose and chose Vicent Turigi, of Catadau, as their king. They made their stand on the Muela de Cortes until hunger and Mexía's troops broke them. Turigi was caught in a cave and executed in Valencia on 16 December 1609, declaring that he was a Christian.

Jerónimo de Ayanz, a soldier who had run the kingdom's mines since 1587, turned the miners' troubles, flooded galleries and foul air, into inventions. In 1606 Philip III granted him a privilege covering 48 of them, among them a steam-driven machine to raise water out of the mines.

Andrés García de Céspedes, chief cosmographer, published his Regimiento de navegación in 1606: instruments and star-sights for the pilots of the Indies fleets, written by order of the Council of the Indies, whose president was Lerma's nephew, the Count of Lemos.

André Furtado de Mendonça, a Portuguese commander sent from Goa to retake Ternate in the Moluccas, ran short of men. Because Philip III was king of Portugal too, he asked the Spanish governor of the Philippines for help. Their joint siege of Ternate in 1603 failed when the powder ran out.

Pedro Bravo de Acuña, governor in Manila, had crushed a rising of the city's Chinese in October 1603; more than five thousand were killed. In 1606 he led his own fleet south and on 1 April took Ternate from its sultan and his Dutch allies. He died in Manila that June, leaving garrisons in the Moluccas.

In New Spain, Luis de Velasco, viceroy for the second time from 1607, faced runaway slaves who had held the mountains near Orizaba since about 1570, raiding the road from Veracruz to Mexico City. In 1609 he sent about 550 men under Pedro González de Herrera against them.

Yanga, an African-born leader of the maroons, offered terms. The Spaniards refused and burned his settlement, but could not win. In the end the crown agreed: his people would be free, in a town of their own, San Lorenzo de los Negros, if they handed back other runaways. It freed one community, not New Spain's slaves.

Under the truce Lerma's power reached its height; in 1612 the king ordered his councils to obey the duke as they obeyed himself. His relatives held the great offices: his nephew and son-in-law, the Count of Lemos, governed Naples from 1610.

Luis de Aliaga, a Dominican, became Lerma's own confessor in 1608, and Lerma made him the king's. From that place at the king's conscience he turned against his patron, and joined Uceda.

The Duke of Uceda rose through his father's network and then worked against him. In March 1618 Lerma had himself made a cardinal, which put him beyond the reach of the royal courts; in October the king sent him from court, and Uceda took over his offices about the king.

The Count of Lemos, Lerma's nephew and son-in-law, had been president of the Council of the Indies and was viceroy of Naples from 1610 to 1616. He was the great patron of the writers of the day, though Cervantes had asked in vain to join his household in Naples.

Miguel de Cervantes, who had published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, dedicated to Lemos his Exemplary Novels in 1613 and the second part of Don Quixote in 1615. His last letter, written four days before he died in April 1616, was to the count.

When García de Céspedes died in 1611, the Council of the Indies chose Juan Cedillo Díaz, a canon of Pastrana, to succeed him as chief cosmographer and as professor of mathematics at the royal academy in Madrid. He left in manuscript a defence of the sun-centred system of Copernicus.

The Jesuit historian Juan de Mariana attacked the king's debasement of the coinage in his treatise On the Alteration of Money, published at Cologne in 1609. The book was put on the Index, and its author was confined and tried for lèse-majesté.

Luis de Góngora, a prebendary of Córdoba, set off a storm with the difficult poetry of his Polyphemus and Solitudes, circulating from 1612 and 1613, which Quevedo and Lope de Vega mocked. He wrote a panegyric to Lerma, and in 1617, through Lerma's influence, became royal chaplain.

When the Duke of Mantua died in December 1612 without a son, Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy claimed Montferrat and invaded it in April 1613. Montferrat's fortress of Casale commanded the road between Genoa and Milan, and Spain went to war with Savoy. The peace patched up at Asti in 1615 was disowned in Madrid.

Madrid recalled its governor of Milan and sent Pedro de Toledo, Marquis of Villafranca, with orders for a harder line. He took Vercelli in 1617 and broke into Piedmont, and the peace of Pavia that year ended the war, with Montferrat left to Mantua.

The Duke of Osuna, viceroy of Sicily from 1611 and of Naples from 1616, built up fleets that raided the Turks and the Barbary corsairs. Venice was paying a third of Savoy's war, so Osuna struck at Venetian shipping too. In May 1618 Venice claimed to have uncovered a plot by Osuna and the Spanish ambassador to sack the city.

Francisco de Quevedo went to Italy with Osuna in 1613 as his secretary and agent, carried his business to Nice, Venice and Madrid, and intrigued at court until Osuna got Naples in 1616. When Osuna fell in 1620, Quevedo lost his protector and was exiled to his estate at Torre de Juan Abad.

In Chile the Mapuche had destroyed the Spanish towns south of the Biobío in 1598. The Jesuit Luis de Valdivia argued that forced Indian labour and Spanish raids kept the war alive, and proposed a fixed frontier with only missionaries crossing it. In 1610 he won Philip III's approval for this Defensive War and came back as visitor-general.

At Valdivia's request the king sent back Alonso de Ribera, a Flanders veteran who had governed Chile from 1601 to 1605. The governor, though unconvinced, applied the new system from 1612, and with Valdivia met the Mapuche leaders at the parley of Paicaví.

Anganamón, a Mapuche war leader, saw his wives escape to a Spanish fort and not be returned. In December 1612 his men killed three Jesuits whom Valdivia had sent into Mapuche country, at Elicura. The killings gave the system's enemies their argument; the crown restored offensive war in 1625.

In Peru, the Andean noble Felipe Guaman Poma finished, about 1615, his Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, more than a thousand pages with drawings, denouncing colonial abuses and addressed to Philip III. There is no sign the king ever read it.

Baltasar de Zúñiga came home in 1617 from nine years as ambassador at the Emperor's court and took charge of foreign policy after Lerma's fall. He held that Spain could not stand if the Austrian Habsburgs fell. His nephew was Gaspar de Guzmán, Count of Olivares, in the household of the heir.

Lerma's fall left Calderón with no protector. He was arrested at his house in Valladolid on 20 February 1619 and tried for murder and witchcraft; he confessed only to having a soldier killed. The case outlived the reign.

The Count of Oñate, Zúñiga's successor as ambassador in Vienna, had helped secure the succession of the childless Emperor Matthias for Archduke Ferdinand, and in 1617 signed the secret treaty that bears his name between the two branches of the house.

Ferdinand, the late Queen Margaret's brother, was King of Bohemia when the Protestant lords threw his governors from a window in Prague in May 1618. Zúñiga pressed Philip III to stand by him. In August 1619 the Bohemians deposed Ferdinand; that same month he was elected Emperor.

The Bohemians gave the crown to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, a Calvinist and James I's son-in-law. In 1620 Spinola marched the army of Flanders up the Rhine into Frederick's own Lower Palatinate, and in November Frederick's army was routed at the White Mountain, outside Prague.

In the Republic the truce had turned into a quarrel between Maurice and Oldenbarnevelt over religion and power. Maurice, Prince of Orange since February 1618, backed the strict Calvinists. In August 1618 the Advocate was arrested; he was beheaded at The Hague on 13 May 1619. The man who had made the truce was gone.

Philip IV became king on 31 March 1621, eight days short of his sixteenth birthday. The old reign's men fell at once: Uceda was turned out of the royal chamber, Aliaga was sent from court, Osuna was arrested, and on 21 October Rodrigo Calderón was beheaded in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid.

Zúñiga took charge of the government, with his nephew Olivares at his side, and let the truce with the Dutch run out in April. He died in October 1622.

Gaspar de Guzmán, Count of Olivares, had won the young king's trust in the prince's household. With his uncle dead he was master of the king's business, set on reform at home and on restoring Spain's reputation abroad.

Elisabeth of Bourbon, Louis XIII's sister, had married Philip in 1615, in a double match that also gave Philip's sister Anne to Louis. She was now queen, and Olivares kept her out of politics. In 1629 she gave Philip a son, Baltasar Carlos.

Archduke Albert died childless in July 1621, and the Netherlands returned to the Spanish crown. Isabella stayed on in Brussels to govern them for her nephew, and the war with the Dutch began again.

Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, commanding Spanish troops in the Palatinate after Spinola's campaign, fought alongside the Catholic League at Wimpfen in May 1622 and in August beat Mansfeld and Christian of Brunswick at Fleurus. The German war made his name.

The Count of Gondomar, Spain's ambassador in London from 1613 to 1618 and again until 1622, had kept James I out of the German war by dangling a marriage between Prince Charles and a Spanish infanta. James hoped it would also get his son-in-law's Palatinate back.

The bride was the Infanta Maria Anna, Philip IV's sister, sixteen in 1623. Her marriage to a Protestant prince needed a papal dispensation and concessions for England's Catholics, and on religion the talks would founder.

Charles, Prince of Wales, rode into Madrid incognito in March 1623 to win her in person. Months of talks broke down over religion, and that October he went home without a bride, set on war.

George Villiers, his father's favourite, rode with him and was made Duke of Buckingham while in Spain. His manner in Madrid helped wreck the talks, and he came home the loudest voice for war with Spain.

Diego Velázquez of Seville had come to Madrid in 1622 with letters to the royal chaplain Juan de Fonseca, and painted Góngora. After the king's painter died that December, Olivares called him to court. His portrait of Philip IV won him appointment as painter to the king in 1623.

Charles became king in March 1625 and went to war with Spain. Buckingham chose the commanders and sent about a hundred ships and 15,000 men under Sir Edward Cecil against Cádiz.

Fernando Girón, a veteran of Flanders and councillor of war, directed the defence of Cádiz from a chair, crippled by gout. Between 1 and 7 November 1625 the English landed without food or drink, got drunk on the wine they found in the houses, and were driven back to their ships.

Louis XIII had married Philip IV's sister Anne in 1615, but the marriage did not end the rivalry. In 1624 he made Cardinal Richelieu his chief minister.

Anne of Austria, Philip's elder sister, had been queen of France since 1615 and was still childless. Richelieu's war on the Habsburgs set her against him, and she was drawn into the intrigues against his policy at court.

Richelieu struck at the routes that tied Spain's lands together: French troops entered the Alpine valley of the Valtellina, and in 1625 a French and Savoyard army besieged Genoa, the republic whose bankers and galleys served Spain.

Álvaro de Bazán, Marquis of Santa Cruz, son of the great admiral, brought the Spanish galleys to Genoa in 1625 and broke the siege from the sea while troops came from Milan by land. The republic stayed with Spain.

In August 1624 Spinola closed his lines around Breda, the Nassau family's own town, though Madrid had wanted no great sieges. Maurice could not break them, and died in April 1625.

Justinus van Nassau, William the Silent's son, had governed Breda since 1601. After eleven months he surrendered in June 1625 and was allowed to march out to Leiden. Velázquez would paint the moment.

Jacob Willekens, a former herring merchant who went back to sea for the new Dutch West India Company, sailed in December 1623 with Piet Hein as his vice-admiral, and in May 1624 took Salvador da Bahia, the capital of Portuguese Brazil, with little resistance.

Philip IV sent Fadrique de Toledo, captain-general of the Ocean Sea fleet and son of the Marquis of Villafranca, with 52 Spanish and Portuguese ships and some 12,000 men. On 30 April 1625 the Dutch in Salvador surrendered.

In New Spain the Marquis of Gelves, viceroy from 1621, set out to clean up the government: he hanged highway robbers, broke the grain merchants' ring, and opened an inquiry into the archbishop. He made powerful enemies.

Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna excommunicated the viceroy's judges and closed the capital's churches. When Gelves tried to ship him to Spain, a crowd attacked and partly burned the palace on 15 January 1624; Gelves fled in disguise and the archbishop declared him deposed.

Philip IV sent the Marquis of Cerralvo, who took over in November 1624 with orders to find out what had happened and punish the guilty. The archbishop was moved to a Spanish see; the rioters had shouted against bad government, not against the king.

Lope de Vega, the master of the commercial theatre, turned the recovery of Bahia into a play, El Brasil restituido, first staged in November 1625. Its victory later hung, painted by Maíno, in the king's new palace of the Buen Retiro.

Olivares wanted every kingdom of the monarchy to give men to one common reserve army, the Union of Arms. Each kingdom had its own laws and assemblies, and in 1626 the Catalan Corts refused. On 31 January 1627 the crown suspended payments to its Genoese bankers.

Olivares had already opened the door to Portuguese merchant-bankers, many of them New Christians of Jewish descent: a decree of 21 January 1627 let them lend to the crown. The Genoese lost their grip, and Olivares used the newcomers to hold down Genoese interest.

Olivares sent his cousin Diego Mexía, made Marquis of Leganés in April 1627, to Brussels that September to sell the Union of Arms to the provinces. He had served Archduke Albert for twenty years and was Spinola's son-in-law; the provinces' answer had to be bargained for, not ordered.

In January 1628 Spinola left Flanders with Leganés for Madrid, to argue with Olivares over money and strategy for the Dutch war. He did not get his way, and he did not go back to the Netherlands.

Piet Hein, who had been Willekens's vice-admiral at Bahia, now commanded his own West India Company fleet. On 8 September 1628 he caught the New Spain treasure fleet in the bay of Matanzas, off Cuba, and took about eleven and a half million guilders.

Juan de Benavides, the fleet's commander, ran his ships aground in the bay and abandoned them with their silver. Back in Spain he was arrested and tried, and on 18 May 1634 he was beheaded in Seville.

Vincenzo II Gonzaga died in December 1627, the last of the main line of Mantua. His cousin and heir, Charles of Nevers, was a French prince, whose son had married the heiress of Montferrat three days before. Madrid would not have a French client beside Milan.

Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, now governor of Milan, laid siege to Nevers's fortress of Casale in March 1628 with Savoy as his ally. Casale held, and in March 1629 Louis XIII and Richelieu forced the pass of Susa and relieved it. Gonzalo was recalled.

Spinola was sent to Milan in his place in 1629, with full powers in Italy. He laid siege to Casale again and died before it on 25 September 1630.

Rambaldo di Collalto led the Emperor's army over the Alps against Mantua itself. His troops took the city in July 1630 and sacked it. A truce followed in October, and Collalto died in November.

Frederick Henry, Maurice's half-brother and successor as stadholder, besieged 's-Hertogenbosch, the great Spanish fortress in Brabant, in 1629, and took it in September. Piet Hein's silver had eased the Republic's finances for the campaign.

Peter Paul Rubens, court painter to Albert and Isabella, also served Isabella as an envoy. He spent eight months in Madrid in 1628 and 1629, painting for the king and befriending Velázquez, then went to London to talk peace with Charles I. He gave the king his Allegory of Peace and War and was knighted.

With Buckingham murdered in August 1628 and his wars a failure, Charles was ready to settle. The Treaty of Madrid, signed on 15 November 1630, ended the war with Spain.

Hendrick Lonck led a West India Company fleet against Pernambuco, Brazil's great sugar captaincy, where the invasion had long been expected. In February 1630 it overran Olinda and its port, Recife.

Matias de Albuquerque, born in Olinda and governor of Pernambuco, could not hold the towns. He burned the sugar warehouses of Recife and dug in on high ground at the Arraial do Bom Jesus, from which he kept the Dutch penned in the towns for five years.

Velázquez and Rubens had planned to see Italy together. In 1629 the king paid for Velázquez to spend a year and a half there, in Venice, Rome and Naples, where he painted the Infanta Maria Anna on her way to her wedding.

Giulio Mazzarino, a young secretary in the Pope's peace mission, had shuttled between the armies all through the Mantuan war. On 26 October 1630 he rode between them outside Casale crying for peace, and a truce followed.

The peace of Cherasco in 1631 confirmed Nevers as Duke of Mantua and Montferrat, and left France holding Pinerolo, a gate through the Alps. Madrid had spent heavily for a settlement it never wanted. Mazarin's work brought him to Richelieu's notice and, in the end, into French service.

Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had landed in Germany in 1630 and turned the war against the Emperor. He was killed at Lützen in November 1632, but his army and his alliances outlived him.

The Dutch used Spain's troubles while its money went to Italy and Germany. In 1632 Frederick Henry marched up the Meuse and took Maastricht, the river's great fortress, three years after 's-Hertogenbosch.

Isabella died in Brussels on 1 December 1633, the last of the generation that had ruled with Albert since 1598. Philip IV had already chosen her successor: his younger brother.

Ferdinand, the Cardinal-Infante, marched an army from Milan through the Tyrol into Germany in 1634, on his way to Brussels, with the Marquis of Leganés as one of his commanders.

In Swabia he joined his cousin Ferdinand, King of Hungary, the Emperor's son, who had married the Infanta Maria Anna in 1631. On 6 September 1634 their armies destroyed the Swedish army before Nördlingen.

Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar and the Swedish marshal Gustav Horn had led the beaten army; Horn was taken prisoner. Bernhard fought on, and in 1635 took French pay.

Olivares ordered Fadrique de Toledo, the victor of Bahia, to take a fleet to win back Pernambuco. Fadrique refused, pleading his health and the state of the ships. He was tried for disobedience and disgraced, and died in Madrid on 11 December 1634.

Velázquez came home from Italy in January 1631. For the king's new palace of the Buen Retiro he painted equestrian portraits of the royal family and, in 1634–35, The Surrender of Breda, turning Spinola's victory of 1625 into an image of Philip IV's monarchy.

Pedro Calderón de la Barca, who had served as a soldier in Italy and Flanders, wrote for the new palace stages; by 1635, when Lope de Vega died, he was the foremost playwright in Spain, and the king made him a knight of Santiago.

Jean-Charles della Faille, a Flemish Jesuit, taught mathematics at the Imperial College in Madrid from 1628 and advised Philip IV on fortification. In 1632 he published his theorems on centres of gravity. The king later made him tutor to his son, Juan José.

Richelieu had so far fought the Habsburgs at one remove, paying for Sweden's war in Germany. After Nördlingen he went to war himself: on 19 May 1635 France declared war on Spain.

The Cardinal-Infante answered by invading France. In August 1636 he took Corbie on the Somme, and Paris panicked; the French won it back that autumn.

With Spain's armies divided between the Dutch and the French, Frederick Henry laid siege to Breda in July 1637, and on 11 October the Spanish garrison marched out. The town of Spinola's triumph, which Velázquez had just painted, was Dutch again.

Bernhard, now in French pay, swept up the Rhine in 1638 and in December took Breisach, the fortress that guarded the Spanish Road from Milan to the Netherlands. He died in July 1639, and France kept Breisach.

With the road cut, Olivares sent troops and silver for Flanders by sea. In September 1639 Antonio de Oquendo led a great convoy into the Channel; after a first clash he took refuge in the Downs, off the English coast.

Maarten Tromp blockaded him there, and on 21 October 1639 attacked with fireships. Most of the troops had already crossed to Dunkirk, but the Spanish fleet lost more than twenty ships, taken, burned or run ashore. The sea road was closed too.

Olivares made his cousin Leganés governor of Milan in September 1635. He held off France's Italian allies and the French army in Lombardy, but in 1640 his attempt to take Casale ended in a disastrous retreat.

Quevedo had come back to court under Philip IV, but turned against Olivares. In December 1639 he was arrested, his books seized, and he was taken to the monastery of San Marcos in León. The exact grounds are still disputed.

Domingos Fernandes Calabar of Porto Calvo had fought for Matias de Albuquerque. In April 1632 he went over to the Dutch, and his knowledge of the rivers and swamps let them ambush and outflank the defenders of the Arraial.

Forced back in 1635, Albuquerque led some eight thousand men south. At Porto Calvo he caught Calabar, who was garrotted and quartered as a traitor. Recalled to Lisbon, Albuquerque was blamed for the loss of Pernambuco and imprisoned in the castle of São Jorge.

Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen landed at Recife in January 1637 as the West India Company's governor of Dutch Brazil. He pushed the colony's borders out, rebuilt Recife as a new town, and brought scholars with him.

Willem Piso, a young Leiden physician, came out with him as the colony's doctor and studied Brazil's diseases, its remedies and its medicinal plants, under the governor's patronage, until 1644.

Georg Marcgrave, a German astronomer, arrived in 1638 and travelled the colony collecting and drawing its plants and animals and mapping it. He died in Luanda in 1644; his notes and Piso's appeared together in 1648 as the Historia naturalis Brasiliae.

Across the Pacific, Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera, governor of the Philippines from 1635, carried out a royal order to pacify Mindanao. In March 1637 his Spanish and Filipino troops stormed the fort of the Sultan of Maguindanao.

Sultan Kudarat lost his fort and his guns, retreated to Lake Lanao and called his people to arms in a speech remembered ever since. He was still ruling, and still independent, in 1660.

The Count of Santa Coloma, viceroy of Catalonia, had to quarter Olivares's army on the villages and raise Catalan levies for the French war. On 18 March 1640, on the king's order, he imprisoned Francesc de Tamarit, the Generalitat's military deputy, for obstructing the billeting.

Crowds forced the viceroy to free Tamarit on 22 May. On 7 June, Corpus Christi, reapers rioting in Barcelona killed the viceroy as he tried to escape. Tamarit went on to negotiate with France and to lead the city's defence.

Pau Claris, president of the Generalitat, turned to France: the pact of Céret, signed on 7 September 1640, brought French help. With a royal army coming, he proclaimed a Catalan republic under French protection on 16 January 1641, and a week later made Louis XIII Count of Barcelona. He died on 27 February.

Bernard du Plessis-Besançon, Richelieu's envoy, had signed the pact of Céret with Tamarit and his colleagues and reached Barcelona in October 1640 to organise its defence.

The Marquis of Los Vélez, the new viceroy, marched on Barcelona with some 23,000 men. On 26 January 1641 Tamarit's Catalans and the French broke his assault on Montjuïc, and he fell back. Catalonia stayed with France.

In Lisbon, Margaret of Savoy, Duchess of Mantua and Philip IV's cousin, governed Portugal as vicereine. Olivares ordered the Portuguese nobles to march against the Catalans, and they began to plot instead.

Miguel de Vasconcelos, her secretary of state and the man who carried out Madrid's orders, was the focus of Portuguese resentment. On 1 December 1640 conspirators stormed the Ribeira palace, killed him and held the vicereine.

João Pinto Ribeiro, a lawyer who ran the Braganza family's affairs in Lisbon, had written in 1632 against sending Portuguese soldiers to fight other kingdoms' wars. He was a pillar of the plot and is said to have pressed the hesitant duke to go on.

The Duke of Braganza, grandson of the Constable who had signed the London peace, was acclaimed king as John IV on 15 December 1640. Sixty years of Habsburg rule in Portugal were over, and a long war to keep it so began.

His queen, Luisa de Guzmán, was Spanish, a daughter of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, married to him in 1633. She stood by the new dynasty against her own country.

The Cardinal-Infante died in Brussels on 9 November 1641. Francisco de Melo, a Portuguese nobleman who had stayed loyal to Philip, took over the Netherlands.

Juan de Palafox, made bishop of Puebla and visitor-general of New Spain in 1639, arrived in 1640 with the new viceroy, the Duke of Escalona, to investigate the viceroys before him.

The Duke of Escalona's mother was a Braganza; the new king of Portugal was his first cousin. In 1642 Palafox broke with him, accused him of dealing with Portugal, and on royal orders removed him. Nothing proved the charge.

Palafox governed as viceroy from June to November 1642, then handed over to the Count of Salvatierra. The new viceroy sided with the Jesuits in their quarrel with the bishop, and in 1647 tried to arrest him; in the end Palafox was recalled to Spain.

Calderón de la Barca, a knight of Santiago, rode with a company of cuirassiers against the Catalan rebels in 1640, and in the autumn of 1642 was in the failed attempt on Lleida. The playwright of the palace stages was now one of its soldiers.

Defeats in Catalonia, the loss of Portugal and the defeat of Leganés's army before Lleida in 1642 left Olivares without defenders. A court party led by the queen worked against him, and in January 1643 Philip let him go.

Philip said he would rule by himself. In practice his trust passed to Luis de Haro, Olivares's nephew and his own companion since boyhood, who over the next years became his first minister in all but name.

Queen Elisabeth had governed as regent while the king was at the front, in 1640–42 and again in 1643–44, raising money and supplies. She died on 6 October 1644.

From 1643 the king wrote to María de Ágreda, abbess of a convent in Soria. Their letters, on conscience, war and government, went on for twenty-two years; when the queen died he told her he had lost everything one can lose.

Baltasar Carlos, the heir, was to marry his cousin Mariana, the Emperor's daughter. On 9 October 1646, in Zaragoza, a few days before his seventeenth birthday, he died. Philip had no son.

Quevedo came out of San Marcos in 1643, after Olivares's fall, frail and ill. He retired to Torre de Juan Abad and died in 1645.

In Huesca, the collector Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa kept a house full of books, coins and learned friends, and paid to print the first book of a Jesuit friend.

Baltasar Gracián, that friend, ministered to the soldiers who retook Lleida in 1644 and fell ill on campaign. Recovering, he wrote El Discreto, printed at Huesca in 1646 with Lastanosa in its pages, and the Oráculo manual in 1647.

Richelieu died in December 1642, and Louis XIII followed him on 14 May 1643, leaving the throne to a son of four, Louis XIV. He had tried, by his will, to limit the queen's power in the regency.

Anne of Austria, Philip IV's sister, had the late king's will set aside and became sole regent for Louis XIV. She kept Mazarin as chief minister and kept up the war against her brother.

Mazarin, the papal envoy of Casale, had entered Richelieu's service in 1640 and became a cardinal in December 1641. Named to succeed Richelieu, he now ran France for the regent and kept her war with Spain going.

Francisco de Melo, governor of the Netherlands since the Cardinal-Infante's death, had destroyed a French army at Honnecourt on 26 May 1642. In May 1643 he invaded France and laid siege to Rocroi.

On 19 May 1643, five days after Louis XIII's death, the 21-year-old Duke of Enghien attacked Melo's army before Rocroi and destroyed the Spanish infantry. It was a heavy blow to Spain's reputation, not the end of its armies.

Freed when Portugal broke away, Matias de Albuquerque now fought Philip IV. Commanding John IV's army on the Alentejo frontier, he beat the Spanish at Montijo on 26 May 1644 and was made Count of Alegrete.

Diego Fajardo took over the Philippines in August 1644 and put his predecessor Corcuera on trial; Corcuera spent five years in prison. Fajardo made peace with Sultan Kudarat in 1645, and in 1646 Manila beat off a Dutch fleet in the battles of La Naval.

The Duke of Arcos, viceroy of Naples, had to raise money for the wars from a kingdom already squeezed. A new tax on fruit set off the rising of 7 July 1647.

Masaniello, a fisherman and smuggler, led the crowds who opened the prisons and ransacked the armouries. Arcos granted their demands and named him captain-general of the people. On 16 July he was murdered.

Giulio Genoino, an old priest and lawyer, gave the movement its programme: a share for the common people in the city's government, the cause he had pressed in 1619 with Osuna's backing. Arcos tried to govern through him; in August the radicals drove him out.

Cardinal Ascanio Filomarino, Archbishop of Naples since 1641, was an outspoken opponent of the taxes that paid for Spain's wars. In the rising he acted as mediator between the viceroy and the rebels.

Giuseppe d'Alesi, a Palermo goldbeater, had joined the city's riots in May, fled to Naples and watched Masaniello's rising. Back home, in mid-August 1647 he led the guilds against the palace; the viceroy, Los Vélez, the man beaten at Montjuïc, fled by sea. D'Alesi was killed on 22 August.

When Juan José's fleet bombarded Naples in October, the city rose again and on 22 October proclaimed a republic. The Duke of Guise, who claimed an old family right to Naples, arrived in November and was made its doge, but got little help from France.

Juan José, Philip's acknowledged son, eighteen years old, had brought a fleet to Naples in October 1647. Its guns could not retake the city alone.

The younger Count of Oñate, son of the old ambassador, came as viceroy in 1648 and worked with spies and bribes as well as troops. On 5 April 1648 Guise was lured into a sortie and captured, and royal troops re-entered Naples.

The Count of Peñaranda led Philip IV's delegation at Münster. Spain needed its armies for France, and on 30 January 1648 his envoys signed a treaty that recognised the United Provinces as free and sovereign.

Adriaan Pauw, the former Grand Pensionary who had once negotiated the Dutch alliance with France, was Holland's man at Münster and was instrumental in the settlement. The eighty years' war was over.

Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, the Emperor's brother, had commanded the imperial armies in Germany with little success before he came to govern the Spanish Netherlands in 1647. On 20 August 1648 Condé beat his army at Lens.

The Fronde, a revolt first of the Paris parlement and then of the great nobles, turned on Mazarin. In January 1650 he had Condé, the victor of Rocroi, arrested. Released in February 1651, Condé raised his own rebellion, and in 1652 he went over to Spain.

From Naples Juan José went on to govern Sicily, and in 1651 he was sent to finish the war in Catalonia. He laid siege to Barcelona in August 1651, while France was torn by the Fronde.

The Marquis of Mortara, viceroy of Catalonia, had taken Tortosa in 1650 and served under Juan José through the siege. Barcelona capitulated on 11 October 1652, with a general pardon. France held on to Roussillon.

In Lisbon the Jesuit António Vieira, John IV's preacher and envoy, argued that Portugal's sugar fleets needed armed convoys paid for by New Christian merchants protected from confiscation. In 1649 the king founded the Brazil Company on those terms.

Mariana of Austria, the Emperor's daughter and Philip's niece, had been meant for Baltasar Carlos. In 1649 she married his widowed father instead, and Spain had hopes of a male heir again.

In 1649 the king sent Velázquez back to Italy to buy pictures and statues. In Rome in 1650 he painted his enslaved assistant and the Pope, Innocent X. He came home in 1651, and in 1652 the king made him palace chamberlain.

Juan de Pareja, born enslaved and trained in Velázquez's workshop, sat for the portrait that won his master election to the Roman academy. Velázquez freed him, and Pareja became a painter in his own right.

João Fernandes Vieira, from Madeira, had fought beside Albuquerque in 1630, then grown rich under the Dutch, with five sugar mills. When the West India Company called in its loans after Johan Maurits left in 1644, he led the planters' rising of June 1645.

André Vidal de Negreiros, Brazilian-born, came up from Bahia with troops, though John IV, bound by a ten-year truce with the Dutch, at first disowned the rising. With Fernandes Vieira he retook Olinda and penned the Dutch inside Recife.

Henrique Dias, who had led a regiment of Black soldiers against the Dutch since the 1630s, came up from Bahia and brought it into the rising. His men, the Henriques, formed one of the rebel army's four regiments.

Filipe Camarão, a Potiguara leader who had fought the Dutch since 1630 at the head of the Indigenous troops, led the fourth regiment. He fought at the first battle of Guararapes and died that August, in 1648.

Francisco Barreto de Meneses, sent as field commander-general, led the four regiments to victory over the Dutch at Guararapes in April 1648 and February 1649. When the Dutch went to war with England, John IV sent a fleet; besieged by land and sea from December 1653, Recife capitulated on 26 January 1654.

Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, sent a fleet and an army from Portsmouth at the end of December 1654 against the Spanish Caribbean: the Western Design.

Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables landed on Hispaniola in April 1655. Sharing the command, with two civilian commissioners beside them, they were beaten off before Santo Domingo.

The Count of Peñalva, the new governor, had landed at Santo Domingo with reinforcements on 4 May 1655, and the town held. The English sailed on to an easier target.

In May 1655 Venables's troops took Jamaica, thinly peopled and barely fortified. When Penn and Venables came home Cromwell sent them both to the Tower.

Cristóbal de Isasi, Jamaica's governor, fought on from the interior with the island's freed slaves, the Maroons. Beaten at Ocho Rios in 1657 and Rio Nuevo in 1658, and deserted by the Maroon leader Juan de Bolas, he fled to Cuba in 1660.

At sea, Robert Blake blockaded Cádiz; in September 1656 one of his captains destroyed most of a treasure fleet off the port. On 20 April 1657 Blake burned another in the harbour of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, though its silver had been landed.

Philip made Juan José governor of the Netherlands in 1656. That July, with Condé beside him, he broke the French siege of Valenciennes, and Turenne was beaten off.

Turenne had flirted with the Fronde but returned to the king in 1651 and beaten Condé outside Paris in 1652. Checked at Valenciennes, he took the offensive again with English soldiers beside him, and in 1658 laid siege to Dunkirk.

Sir William Lockhart, Cromwell's ambassador in Paris, had helped make the alliance of March 1657 and commanded the English redcoats. On 14 June 1658, in the dunes before Dunkirk, they and Turenne's French broke Juan José and Condé in two hours. Dunkirk fell and was handed to Lockhart.

Mazarin answered Valenciennes with an English alliance: by the Treaty of Paris of March 1657 Cromwell would send six thousand soldiers and his fleet, for the price of Dunkirk.

Spain's answer was the exiled Charles II. By a treaty signed in Brussels in April 1656 Philip IV backed his claim, and English royalist regiments served in the Spanish army in Flanders, against Cromwell's men on the French side.

On 28 November 1657 Queen Mariana gave birth to a son, Felipe Próspero. For the first time since Baltasar Carlos's death, Philip IV had a male heir.

John IV died on 6 November 1656, sixteen years after the coup that made him king, having held Portugal against Philip IV and recovered Brazil from the Dutch.

His son Afonso VI was thirteen and was judged unfit to rule, so his mother, Queen Luisa, governed the kingdom as regent, as she would until 1662.

Luisa kept the war going. When Luis de Haro himself besieged Elvas in the winter of 1658, she called the Count of Cantanhede to command all the Portuguese troops in the Alentejo.

António Luís de Meneses, Count of Cantanhede, one of the conspirators of 1640, led a relief army against the Spanish lines while the garrison sallied out. On 14 January 1659 Haro's army was broken. The Braganza monarchy survived.

Back from Elvas, Haro took up the peace with France. From August 1659 he and Mazarin met on the Isle of Pheasants in the Bidasoa, and on 7 November they signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees: Roussillon and northern Cerdanya, most of Artois and a line of towns in Flanders went to France, and Condé was pardoned.

The peace was sealed with a marriage. Philip's daughter Maria Theresa, Elisabeth of Bourbon's child, married her cousin Louis XIV at Saint-Jean-de-Luz on 9 June 1660, renouncing her rights to the Spanish crown so long as her dowry was paid. It never was.

As palace chamberlain, Velázquez decorated the Spanish pavilion on the Isle of Pheasants for the meeting of the two kings in June 1660. He was back in Madrid on 26 June, fell ill with fever at the end of July, and died on 6 August.