The empire of Charles V and Philip II was one of the largest and most powerful of all time.

Spanning four continents, it was a successor to not only the Roman Empire, but also the bulwark of Catholicism—the Holy Roman Empire. The breadth of its interests rivaled the other great powers of its time—the Ottomans, for instance, as well as the states of northern Europe.

All empires result either from dynastic consolidation or from colonial conquests and expansion. Granting this, Spain was remarkable in its capacity to engage in both simultaneously. In this sense, the Hispanic monarchy constituted a formi­dable example of a composite state (a concept developed by Helmut Koenigsberger and John Elliott), and at the same time, a great engineer of colonial societies in the New World and the Philippines.¹ In this chapter, we describe the interplay between these two aspects, explaining overall change within the context of the challenges facing the empire at any given time. These included both the globali­zation of trading networks of precious metals and goods, as well as the religious­political conflict that pitted, on one hand, northern and southern Europe against one another and, on the other hand, Christian Europe against the great Muslim powers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

¹ Koenigsberger 1986; Elliott 1992.

Josep M. Delgado and Josep M. Fradera, The Habsburg Monarchy and the Spanish Empire (1492-1757) In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0028. the time of Charles V. The emperor's authority was not universally accepted by the great powers of the time: neither by England, France, and the Pope, on one side, nor the rising Ottomans, on the other. The first mentioned, for instance, backed the re­volt of the United Provinces (the root cause of the financial bankruptcy and military exhaustion of the Spanish Habsburgs, as shown by historians Ramon Carande and Geoffrey Parker^[1952]) and the extension of the Protestant dissidence all across Europe. The Turks made serious inroads into North Africa and stopped the Christian power in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

Our plan in this chapter is to sketch the institutional, political, and economic transformation of the Habsburg Monarchy of the sixteenth century—at that time firmly based in its European dominions—into a colonial and Atlantic empire, based upon the remaining indigenous societies in continental America, the Philippine Islands, and the archipelago extending toward China and Southeast Asia.