110 Chapter Three
Philip II did not make such heroic expenditures in vain. The number
of soldiers at his command in the 1550s, when he took over from his
father, Charles V, has been calculated at about 150,000 men; by the
1590s at the end of his reign their number had increased to 200,000;
and, when Spanish military effort reached its crest in the 1630s the
king’s soldiers numbered about 300,000 men.^40
To help carry the growing burden of military expenditure, Philip II
tried to apply to his vast realm the patterns of fiscal administration that
had served Italian cities so well. Thus, for example, the funded debt
that permitted Venetians to pay for their wars and other extraordinary
public expenditures by selling bonds (often to foreigners) was dupli
cated in Spain. But the fiscal-mindedness that constrained Venetian
magistrates to pay interest punctually on the Republic’s outstanding
debts, century after century, was absent from the top level of Spanish
(and most other) royal governments. The result was repeated bank
ruptcy which raised the cost of subsequent loans to unbearable
heights. By 1600 no less than 40 percent of the Spanish government’s
income was earmarked for the service of old debts.^41
Taxation of Castilian peasants had reached a point at which further
- These figures all come from the admirable book by I. A. A. Thompson, War and
Government in Hapsburg Spain, 1530– 1620 (London, 1976), pp. 71, 73, 103. For year-
by-year figures on the number of soldiers in Spanish service (most of them not
Spaniards) in the Netherlands, 1567–1665, see Geoffrey Parker’s equally admirable
Army of Flanders, p. 28. Variations from year to year were very great, depending on
what operations were planned and what money was available; but after the initial
mobilization against the rebels in 1572, the Spanish forces in Flanders usually exceeded
50,000 men.
- These figures come from Geoffrey Parker, “The ‘Military Revolution’ 1550-
1660—a Myth?” Journal of Modern History 48 (1976): 206. Europe’s second army, the
French, was only one-third as large as the Spanish in the 1550s.
- Thompson, War and Government in Hapsburg Spain, p. 72.
1559 1.04
1575 2.17
1607 4.76
Before 1556 less than 2
1560s 4.5
1570s^8
1590s 13
and obligations (arrears of pay to men in service):^39
A few figures will clarify the escalation of Spanish military expen
ditures (in millions of ducats per annum):
