Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "Why did the Spanish Empire collapse?" video.

  1. "The pain in Spain fell mainly on the plain." Now, repeat!
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  2. The Voice missed it. The Spanish lost an ASTOUNDING amount of treasure over the years to BAD SAILING -- specifically -- permitting wholly unknowledgeable favorites to over-load its treasure ships -- time and time, again. Then, to compound things, the Crown borrowed the missing cash flow from Genovese Jews at extortionate rates. The Crown kept defaulting -- epically -- every time the treasure fleet did not show up. Entire fleets went to the bottom. The King HATED Jews -- and they returned the favor in their money-rent demands. The staggering wealth stolen from the New World was thus squandered on warfare, usury and industrial development up in Holland -- not down in Spain. This latter tic was the basis for the Eighty-Years War. (1568 to1648) The King thought that he had money to burn -- so he burned it. A smart sovereign would've talked his way out of epic conflicts long enough to accumulate a huge stash so that he never had to borrow at brutal rates. Instead, Charles BLEW all of his liquidity on imports from China, wars in Europe and mind-boggling interest outlays to Jewish bankers. ( Due to his theology, the King simply would not borrow from Catholics. So his Big Spending became a huge 'Jewish issue.' It never entered his brain that he had to stop borrowing. Everything points to Charles being innumerate -- as well as irrational.) This is the period when Jews became forever associated with 'International Banking' because they were in Genova and their idiot client was in Madrid. Most all of the basics for international lending to sovereigns were established by the Genovese Jews at this time. Being a serial defaulter, his lenders created a CARTEL to stop him from getting around their syndicate. In the beginning, Charles thought he could get away with doing so. He was not happy when he was brought to heel. When Holland left the Royal Embrace -- Spain lost its heavy industry. So it was the Dutch that then became the Big Player. The loss of Holland was the trigger for the collapse of Madrid's empire. It didn't help that the Crown ruined Spanish agriculture with its insane sheep policy. The king forbade farmers from protecting their crops from HIS sheep. (!) It, crop defense, became a hanging offense against the Crown. Spain's fields have NEVER recovered. Sheep and goats are the END of farmers. That's why in iconography the Devil has twin goat horns on his head. Yup. [ The actual beast that domestic goats came from had HUGE horns. As a percentage of body mass, they are the largest in the animal kingdom.(!!!) ]
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  3.  @Gloriaimperial1  The King defaulted more than six times because the fleet did not show up. The scheme was for the fleet to sail, en masse, at the best time of the year. However, sometimes their luck did not hold. An out-of-season hurricane would bag the fleet.  [ This is what REALLY punished the Spanish fleet in 1588. It was destroyed by the weather, not the Royal Navy. The BBC re-enacted the RN's attack on the Spanish only to discover that Spain's ships were so massive that the petty cannons of the RN would've had virtually no impact. The BBC was gobsmacked.] Even today gold is coming up from the Spanish Main. The problem was that the Crown was pre-spending their loot before it arrived in Europe. Then the Jews charged LARGE to bail the Crown out. [ The Catholics were prohibited from banking -- by the Pope -- pagans didn't lend -- so the king had to turn to the very fellas he hated the most. The usual loan financed Spanish warfare. So you can see why Charles was pressed for time. This entire sequence generated massive anti-Jewish sentiments among the Catholics. ( There were no Protestants with money, yet. ) For the Jewish funding led directly to unrestricted warfare all over Europe. This led to the term "blood money." Think of it as the prequel to 'blood diamonds' -- same concept -- same result. All the while this was going on, Spain was destroying the New World with massive forced-labor mining.  The weirdness of massively repressing Jewry in Spain while borrowing from European Jewish bankers so as to carry on with warfare against Catholics -- well, you'd have to be there to grok it. But, Charles did it.  The Catholic Church was largely a force for good as it was terminating human sacrifice on an epic scale. Gibson's film is all-too realistic. As for Charles, he gutted Madrid's commanding position in Europe. Every time you'd turn around, he was throwing in his army -- even if the dispute was petty. In that era, all armies looted and pillaged -- with or without a battle being fought. Spain was a BIG part of the Thirty-Years War. It was worse for those living than WWI and WWII combined. (!!!) That's why Spain slid down the relevance rankings of history.
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