While I researched a couple other scenarios, it hit me that I hadn’t realized deep down just how badly the war tore at the infrastructure and people of European civilization—millions dead out of a relatively small population, areas devastated again and again by armies living off the land and the peasants, leaving starvation behind.
So didn’t they suffer enough? Sure, but one of the things you learn as an author is that making things worse often makes a more interesting story.
I’m especially interested in making it worse for the powers involved in the New World, Spain especially. Spain hit a crisis in 1640-41. Portugal had been under the Spanish king. It revolted in 1640, along with Catalonia, which resented Castile’s increasing dominance. France intervened in the resulting war and it looked briefly as though Spain might collapse into German-style anarchy. Then France lost its leadership, with Cardinal Richelieu dying at age 57 and King Louis the Thirteenth dying a few months later, in his early forties. That left France with a four-year-old king and a regency more occupied with internal affairs than following up on Spain’s weakness.
And Spain dodged the bullet. Portugal regained its independence, but the rest of Spain hung together. What if France had been in a position to press its advantage? What if French help allows the civil war grinds on, devastating Spain in much the way parts of Germany were devastated?
The powers of Europe were exhausted by this time, nearing bankruptcy and trying to find a way out of the war. However, the disintegration of Spain appears to offer the chance of a decisive France-Protestant-Swedish victory, so their peace proposals harden, and the Thirty Years War becomes the Thirty-Two Years War, or maybe the Thirty-Five Years War.
At the end of it, Spain is no longer a Great European Power or even a unified country, at least for a while.
Then what? A European scramble for Latin America? A defeated Spain probably wouldn’t be allowed to continue getting the gold and silver bonanzas that they got
historically with every treasure fleet.
On the other hand, historically when Spanish power declined, other Europeans mostly picked away at the periphery of Spanish control in the New World, and mostly got their cut of the Spanish treasure by trade concessions of various kinds, rather than a frontal assault on the cores of Spanish power.
So didn’t they suffer enough? Sure, but one of the things you learn as an author is that making things worse often makes a more interesting story.
I’m especially interested in making it worse for the powers involved in the New World, Spain especially. Spain hit a crisis in 1640-41. Portugal had been under the Spanish king. It revolted in 1640, along with Catalonia, which resented Castile’s increasing dominance. France intervened in the resulting war and it looked briefly as though Spain might collapse into German-style anarchy. Then France lost its leadership, with Cardinal Richelieu dying at age 57 and King Louis the Thirteenth dying a few months later, in his early forties. That left France with a four-year-old king and a regency more occupied with internal affairs than following up on Spain’s weakness.
And Spain dodged the bullet. Portugal regained its independence, but the rest of Spain hung together. What if France had been in a position to press its advantage? What if French help allows the civil war grinds on, devastating Spain in much the way parts of Germany were devastated?
The powers of Europe were exhausted by this time, nearing bankruptcy and trying to find a way out of the war. However, the disintegration of Spain appears to offer the chance of a decisive France-Protestant-Swedish victory, so their peace proposals harden, and the Thirty Years War becomes the Thirty-Two Years War, or maybe the Thirty-Five Years War.
At the end of it, Spain is no longer a Great European Power or even a unified country, at least for a while.
Then what? A European scramble for Latin America? A defeated Spain probably wouldn’t be allowed to continue getting the gold and silver bonanzas that they got
historically with every treasure fleet.
On the other hand, historically when Spanish power declined, other Europeans mostly picked away at the periphery of Spanish control in the New World, and mostly got their cut of the Spanish treasure by trade concessions of various kinds, rather than a frontal assault on the cores of Spanish power.