Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "What Happened After Christopher Columbus Discovered The Americas" video.
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@marlonalexis3080 It was an empire built on royal marriages between Aragon and Castile, and later on did they inherit Burgundy, and gained Portugal through royal marriage and became allied with the Habsburg Austrians. So it was not an empire mainly built on economic and military superiority. But rather more on skillful medieval style diplomacy with royal marriages.
The country never built a succesful economic model. Indeed, as a medieval country it had much knights and this warrior class had contempt for hard work. They rather wanted to live off resource extraction instead.. using slaves on plantations and working people to death in silver mines.
And then was a few tonnes of silver shipped to China each year, or used for trading spices and other goods in India, and the indian ocean and pacific. This economic model worked well to make Spain rich for some time. But later on would the silver mines not produce as much silver as before... and the global demand for Spanish exports sunk as markets became saturated with all the big flows of gold and silver.
And the overextended Spanish empire constantly failed to balance its expenses with incomes and went bankrupt after fighting Dutch, Turks, English, Swedes, Germans, Italians, Portugease, French, Native americans, north african berbers and so on.
So even if Spain managed to construct Europes first standing army, with superior capabilities on the battlefield... would other countries soon learn to build better armies themselves. And as the Spanish empire started to fall apart, did money become scarce and it was no longer possible for Spain to maintain troop quality, which only made Spains problems worse. Now it no longer was just the Dutch that wanted independence from Spain, but also Italy and Portugal. And the local rulers in America wanted more power for themselves and their Spanish motherlands expense.
And the list of foreign enemies of Spain was long, and it was mostly Spains own arrogance, hubris and extreme religious intolerance that was at fault for those many wars. Spain should have choosen diplomatic solutions to further its interests than trying to use its powerful military as a solution to every problem. When it did that, then did the enemies soon to became too many to handle.
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