PODs of the Thirty Years War XXI

[Death's Companion]

The biggest effect, it's fair to say, is that the EYW and TYW combined essentially broke Spanish finances while also triggering revolts that saw Portugal successfully break away from a near-century long union (and bear in mind Spain itself was only a thing a century before that) and Catalonia nearly followed.

See I get that, but I think the EYW was just the longest of many long and difficult fights Spain found itself involved in over two hundred years or so and relatively it didn't lose too much from it as opposed to crippling its ability to respond to bigger changes elsewhere. Maybe if it had not been bogged down in a literal bog in Flanders it could have developed its colonies, reduced its economic problems, dealt with the social and political problems that would basically unravel it over the next hundred years etc.

To me tbh the eighty years war just seems a long grinding struggle where a super power somehow massively underperformed in a war it was only fighting after at every step bungling its management of the situation and still would have probably gotten over it if wasn't for literally everything else happening.

Like the Thirty Years war reshaped Europe, the Eighty Years was seemed more of a shaping operation for the things that would change the next century.