13.1.56 to 13.1.59

The final decades of the seventeenth century saw utter decay and stagnation in Spain; while the rest of Europe went through exciting changes in government and society—the Glorious Revolution in England and the reign of the "Sun-King" in France—Spain remained adrift. The Spanish bureaucracy that had built up around the charismatic, industrious, and intelligent Charles I and Philip II demanded a strong monarch; the weakness of Philip III and IV led to Spain's decay. Charles II was retarded and impotent, dying without a heir and leading to the war of succession. As his final wishes, the childless king of Spain desired that the throne pass to the Bourbon prince Philip of Anjou, rather than to a member of the family that had tormented him throughout his life. The Bourbon Spanish Empire (1713-1806) Under the Treaties of Utrecht (April 11, 1713), the European powers decided what the fate of Spain would be, in terms of the continental balance of power. the new Bourbon king Philip V retained the Spanish overseas empire, but ceded the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Milan, and Sardinia to Austria; Sicily and parts of the Milanese to Savoy; and Gibraltar and Minorca to Great Britain. Thus the Emire decisively turned its back on European territories. Moreover, he granted the British the exclusive right to slave trading in Spanish America for thirty years, the so-called asiento ,as well as licensed voyages to ports in Spanish colonial dominions, openings, as Fernand Braudel, remarked for both licit and illicit smuggling (Brudel 1984 p 418). With a Bourbon monmarch came a repertory of Bourbon mercantilist ideas based on a centralized monarchy, put into effect in America slowly at first but with increasing momentum during the century. The Spanish Bourbons broadest intentions were to break the power of the entrenched creole aristocracies, and, eventually, loosen the territorial control of the Society of Jesus too: the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish America in 1767. In addition to the established consulados of Mexico City and Lima, firmly in the control of local landowners, a new rival consulado was set up at Vera Cruz.