The title of this book is misleading. It is not a military history, except in one section, but an extended exposition of the thesis that the “oligarchy” and the kings of Castile, especially the Hapsburgs and particularly Philip II, “conspired” (p. 147) to prevent the success in Spain of a bourgeois, individualistic, capitalistic seafaring class such as arose in Tudor England under Elizabeth I. The force of this antimodern set of values was such that the Spaniards even failed to learn the supposed “lesson” of the Armada of 1588, long afterwards continuing to try to fight sea battles by boarding rather than with artillery.
In support of this thesis, Ortega y Medina musters not only a selection of materials from secondary sources but also from literature and poetry, materials that seem to show attitudes toward the sea and seafaring more succinctly than do extended narrations of historical events. Only a few references are to primary sources, and most of them are in a discussion of the Armada of 1588.
While there is little doubt that England and Spain followed different developmental paths after 1500 and that England’s involved a love of the sea and a use of it that the Spaniards never mastered, this book does not really explain how the values (Weltanschaung, mentalities) of the “statechurch” and “aristocracy” and “oligarchy” were translated into law and actual practices. Nor are these key terms defined and linked to specific people, except to a degree for the reign of Philip IV. Discussion of historical events is limited to the thirteenth-century struggle between Pedro the Cruel and Henry II, a few odds and ends from then until the 1580s, the fitting of the Armada of 1588, and some additional consideration of later Spanish fleets, to about 1650. At almost every point where this reviewer expected a use of evidence about royal policy, actions by the Casa de la Contratación, demography, capital investment, and so forth, he got only a quick jump to a new denunciation of the antimodern attitudes of Spain’s ruling class. That there is some truth in this thesis seems beyond doubt, but how, exactly, did that set of attitudes affect events on a day-to-day basis? And what other factors played a part in the maritime decline of Spain?
In sum, this is an interesting restatement of the charges that the values and power of the landed aristocracy, the Seville merchant oligarchy, the church, and the crown prevented Spain’s bourgeoisie from realizing its destiny upon the seas, but it does not add anything of importance to our understanding of how that result occurred. The book is nicely illustrated, including a color reproduction of Claudio Coello’s portrait of Philip II.
