Charles II of Spain

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Charles II of Spain ruled an empire that circled the globe, yet one historian wrote that "from the day of his birth, they were waiting for his death". He was king from 1665 to 1700. He was also the last monarch of the House of Habsburg, which had held the Spanish throne since 1516. Charles had no children. Because of that, the question of who would succeed him became central to European diplomacy for much of his reign. Two candidates stood ready to claim the crown, and the rest of Europe watched his health with close attention. What was wrong with his body? Was he truly the feeble, bewitched ruler of later legend? And what happens to a continent when the throne of its largest empire hangs on one sick man's life?

  42524535

• 2. Habsburg Bloodlines

  ›

  Charles was born on the 6th of November 1661, the only surviving son of Philip IV of Spain and his second wife, Mariana of Austria. Mariana was also Philip's niece. Marriage within noble families was common across Europe, but the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs pushed the habit unusually far. Of eleven marriages made by Spanish monarchs between 1450 and 1661, most involved some degree of shared blood. Philip and Mariana were one of only two unions between an uncle and his niece.

  Statutes on limpieza de sangre, meaning "blood purity", may have driven the dynasty inward. They were enacted in the early 16th century and stayed in force until the 1860s.

  The family's intermarriage sharpened what became known as the Habsburg jaw. One contemporary claimed that Charles's jaw was so pronounced that he swallowed food without chewing it properly, which caused frequent stomach trouble. A 2019 study of Habsburg portraits concluded the feature was probably a recessive trait. Without genetic material, such claims remain speculative.

  The true causes of his poor health are still disputed. Drawing on contemporary accounts, some modern researchers suggest one or more autosomal recessive disorders. Others point to a herpetic infection in infancy that led to hydrocephalus, an excess of fluid in the head. The puzzle deepens with his elder sister Margaret, who married her maternal uncle, Leopold I. Neither Margaret nor their daughter showed similar health problems.

  After his birth, Charles was placed in the care of the royal governess Mariana Engracia Álvarez de Toledo Portugal y Alfonso-Pimentel. Under her close supervision he survived measles, chickenpox, rubella and smallpox, any one of which could then kill. Rickets left him unable to walk unaided until he was four. He wore leg braces until he turned five. Even so, contemporaries reported that he spent much of his time hunting.

  45655351

• 3. Mind of the King

  ›

  Ramos del Manzano, a legal expert from the University of Salamanca, became Charles's tutor when the boy was six. The old claim that Charles stayed largely uneducated into his teens is therefore wrong. From the age of 12 he studied music with Juan del Vado and mathematics with Jose Zaragoza, a professor at the Colegio Imperial de Madrid.

  Little about his disabilities is known for certain, and many claims about him are unproven or false. One often cited sign of mental incapacity is the period he spent sleeping beside his father's disinterred body. In fact, Mariana ordered this after doctors advised that it might help him produce an heir.

  Reports of depression follow him through the sources. Yet his part in government, his council's reports and the accounts of observers such as the French ambassador all point to a mind that stayed intact. In 1691 an envoy of the Sultan of Morocco described being received by Charles in person, and the king took a full part in the discussions.

  Costanzo Operti, a Savoyard diplomat, attended regular audiences with Charles during the Nine Years' War. He found the king affable and generous, but shy and short of self-confidence. Other foreign diplomats noticed the same traits. That shy king had come to the throne as a legal minor, and others governed in his name for years.

  851424045

• 4. Regents and Favourites

  ›

  Philip IV died on the 17th of September 1665, and the Council of Castile appointed Mariana as queen regent for her young son. The empire she guarded was still an enormous global confederation. England and the Dutch Republic were challenging its economic lead, and the expansionist policies of Louis XIV of France weakened its position in Europe. Mariana also faced a rival at home, Charles's illegitimate elder half-brother John Joseph of Austria, known as Don Juan. Reform was hard in any case, because Spain was a personal union of the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragon, whose political traditions differed sharply.

  Mariana ruled through a favourite, a valido, as her husband had done. Her first was her confessor, the Austrian Juan Everardo Nithard. He ended the costly wars with France and Portugal through the 1668 treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle and Lisbon. Even so, in February 1669 Don Juan forced Mariana to dismiss him. She chose Fernando de Valenzuela, of the lower hidalgo class, and the Grandees who normally held such posts resented the appointment.

  Spain was drawn into the Franco-Dutch War in 1673, which strained the economy further, and Don Juan renewed his campaign against the regent. A month before Charles came of age on the 6th of November 1675, he signalled that he meant to take control, with his brother's support. On the 4th of November the Regency Council asked for a two-year extension of its power. Charles first refused, but was later pressured into agreeing. He was also forced to sign a decree ordering Don Juan to leave Madrid.

  Don Juan finally took control of the government in January 1678 and exiled Valenzuela to the Philippines. He made peace with France in the 1678 Treaties of Nijmegen, giving up Franche-Comté along with areas of the Spanish Netherlands that had been returned in 1668. To reduce future conflict, in August 1679 he arranged a marriage between Charles and the 17-year-old Marie Louise of Orléans, eldest niece of Louis XIV. It was his last significant act. He died shortly before the wedding in November 1679.

  In February 1680 Juan Francisco de la Cerda, 8th Duke of Medinaceli, became the new valido. He clashed with the new queen over the influence she allegedly gave the French ambassador, Pierre de Villars. Villars was expelled from Madrid in 1681, which badly damaged relations between the king's household and the queen. The loss of Luxembourg after the 1683 War of the Reunions weakened Medinaceli further. In June 1684 he appointed the Count of Oropesa as President of the Council of Castile, the second most powerful post in the state. Medinaceli resigned in April 1685 because of ill health, and Oropesa then held the role of valido in practice until 1690.

  404152254

• 5. Empire on Credit

  ›

  In Castile, the population fell from 6.5 million in 1600 to fewer than 5 million in 1680. Across Spain as a whole, it dropped from 8.5 million to 6.6 million. The so-called Little Ice Age of the 17th century caused poor harvests and economic decline throughout Europe, and Spain suffered especially. Wars with France and the cost of defending the empire drained the public purse.

  In 1663 Philip IV had converted state debt into government bonds called juros. Interest rates were so high that taxes were often assigned to creditors years in advance. Silver imports from the Americas rose, yet the vast majority went to pay foreign debtors. The Crown had declared bankruptcy nine times between 1557 and 1666, including in 1647, 1652-1662 and 1666.

  By the 1670s, Dutch and English merchants controlled most exports, while the domestic economy relied on French labour and imported wheat. In 1687 a senior colonial official observed that the empire continued to exist "only because it enables the English, Dutch and French to exploit it more cheaply". Foreign interests often had the most to lose from a Spanish collapse.

  The weakened Spanish Navy could no longer protect its own merchant ships. Royal decrees in 1674 and 1692 set up a formal system of privateering in the coastal territories, known as the guarda costa outside Europe. Hundreds of privateers were commissioned during the last decade of Charles's rule. In 1684 the king himself acquired at least one corsair ship, the San Antonio, to encourage private initiative.

  In the 1680s, Spanish officials issued drastic deflationary decrees that revalued the coinage at 25% of its previous value. Commerce was thrown into disruption and financial credit collapsed. Debtors were given three months to repay government debts at the old rate, later extended to six months. In 1686 the coinage was readjusted to a more favourable rate, and the rate was never altered again.

  1329574614

• 6. The Empty Cradle

  ›

  Marie Louise took the blame when no child came. She was subjected to primitive fertility treatments that caused her severe health problems. She died in February 1689, probably from appendicitis, shortly after the Nine Years' War with France broke out.

  For his next queen, Charles's advisers chose a woman from a family famous for its fertility. Maria Anna of Neuburg was the daughter of Philip William, Elector Palatine, and sister-in-law to Emperor Leopold. A proxy marriage took place in August 1689, followed by a formal ceremony in May 1690. She too bore no heir. The cause was almost certainly Charles himself, as his later autopsy would reveal.

  Charles's mother died on the 16th of May 1696, and by then his health was plainly failing. The succession grew more urgent every year. The Crown of Spain passed by cognatic primogeniture, which meant it could be inherited through the female line. That allowed Charles's sisters Maria Theresa and Margaret Theresa to pass their rights to the children of their marriages to Louis XIV and Emperor Leopold.

  Maria Theresa, however, had renounced her inheritance rights on her marriage, to prevent a union between Spain and France. In exchange, Louis was promised a dowry of 500,000 gold écus, a huge sum that was never paid.

  923154759

• 7. Partition and Death

  ›

  The Peace of Ryswick, which ended the Nine Years' War in 1697, came from mutual exhaustion and left the succession unresolved. Leopold I signed it reluctantly in October 1697 and saw it as a temporary pause in the fighting. Leopold and Margaret's daughter Maria Antonia had married Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria. Before her death in 1692 she gave birth to a son, Joseph Ferdinand.

  In the Treaty of The Hague of 1698, England, France and the Dutch Republic tried to impose a diplomatic solution. They made Joseph Ferdinand heir to the bulk of the Spanish monarchy, with France gaining Naples, Sicily and the province of Gipuzkoa. In return, Leopold's younger son Charles was made ruler of Milan, which was considered vital to the security of Austria's southern border. The Spanish government refused to approve any division of its territories, though it accepted Joseph Ferdinand as successor.

  Joseph Ferdinand died of smallpox in 1699. The Treaty of London in 1700 then named Archduke Charles as the new heir, and split the Spanish possessions in Europe between France, Savoy and Austria. Charles II altered his will in favour of the Archduke, but once again insisted on an undivided Spanish monarchy.

  In September 1700 the king fell ill, and by the 28th he could no longer eat. Luis Manuel Fernández de Portocarrero persuaded him to name Philip of Anjou as heir. Philip was the 16-year-old grandson of Louis XIV. Charles died on the 1st of November 1700, at the age of 38.

  The autopsy recorded that his "heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous". It also noted that "he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water". The water in the head points to hydrocephalus, a disease often linked to childhood measles.

  Either candidate inheriting an undivided Spanish Empire threatened the European balance of power. Philip was proclaimed king of Spain on the 16th of November 1700, and the War of the Spanish Succession formally began on the 9th of July 1701.

  4748192255

• 8. Legacy and Reputation

  ›

  On the 7th of November 1693, a royal decree offered sanctuary in Spanish Florida to escaped slaves from the English Province of South Carolina. The aim was to bolster Florida's population and undermine the neighbouring colony, which claimed the Spanish capital of St Augustine. Philip V formalised the policy in 1733. It led in 1738 to the founding of Santa Teresa de Mose, the first legally sanctioned free black town in the present-day United States.

  The Caroline Islands were named after Charles in 1666, and the town of Charleroi in modern Belgium followed in 1686. Decrees issued in his name approved universities in South America that still exist. In Peru they included San Cristóbal, established in 1680, and the National University. In Guatemala they included the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, the fourth-oldest university on the continent. Santo Tomas Aquino followed in 1688, and is now part of the Central University of Ecuador. In 1694 came the Universidad de San Nicolás de Mira in Bogotá, Colombia.

  Charles was less fond of the arts than his father, but he employed the Italian painter Luca Giordano and Claudio Coello to decorate El Escorial. In 1690 Coello created Charles II adores the Holy Eucharist, one of the last and most significant examples of Spanish Baroque painting.

  A foreign ambassador remarked in 1691 that "it is incomprehensible how this monarchy survives". Traditional historiography saw Charles as ineffectual and mentally disabled, a symbol of Habsburg decline after the wars of the 17th century. More recent studies argue that "both the myth of decline and an incapable king are simplistic and inexact". The historian Luis Ribot García judges him "neither so bewitched, nor so decadent" as once believed. Recent scholarship adds that the older view was heavily shaped by propaganda from the Bourbon successors, who had reason to diminish the dynasty before them.

  Historians now credit the financial measures taken by his advisors with ending the chronic currency instability of the 17th century, and with helping to drive sustainable growth. Spain's role in the wars of his reign has also been reassessed. His army remained relevant in the anti-French alliances, and the empire kept its core territories. Many of the commercial and political policies begun under Charles formed the basis for reforms enacted by his Bourbon successors.

  453165320