Urban Decline and Regional Economies: Brabant, Castile, and Lombardy, 1550–1750

Abstract

Urban troubles were endemic in early modern Europe. Not only did cities undergo sieges, conquests, and epidemics, but the rapid spread of rural protoindustrial manufacturing threatened established markets and employment patterns. The acute problems of Antwerp, captured by Spanish troops in 1685, or of Como, whose textile industry collapsed in the early seventeenth century are not isolated examples of cities in trouble. Many more could be offered. Indeed, descriptions of cities in the seventeenth century, particularly those of the Spanish Empire, stress depopulation and decay. Contemporaries saw around them scenes of urban desolation. Sir Thomas Overbury, travelling in the Spanish Netherlands around 1610, wrote of the “ruinous” towns, while visitors to Ciudad Real in Spain around 1620 noted vacant, tumbledown houses, unemployment, and urban land gone to waste (Parker 1977:253; Phillips 1979:29). After several years in which Spanish Lombardy was devastated by wars, famine, and plague, the Milan City Council complained of “the destitution of all sorts of persons and the threat of impending ruin.” Moreover, throughout the state, values of houses and landed property had allegedly plummeted (Sella 1979:57,63).