Enlightenment Spain
History of Spain
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The Age of Enlightenment (in Spanish, Ilus-
tración) came to Spain in the eighteenth cen-
tury with a new Bourbon dynasty after the
decay of the Spanish economy, bureaucracy,
and empire in the latter years of the former
Habsburg dynasty. This period of reform and
’enlightened despotism’ focused on modern-
izing the Spanish government, infrastructure,
and institutions, culminating in the rule of
King Charles III and the work of his minister,
José Moñino, count of Floridablanca.
The century began with the War of the
Spanish Succession over the ascension of a
relation of Louis XIV of France to the throne
of Spain and ended with the Napoleonic Wars
in which Spain would become a bloody
battleground.
Charles
III’s
successors,
fraught by war, foreign intervention, unrest
in the empire, corruption, and the pain of re-
form, would face an increasingly restive and
unstable Spain, the painful consequences of
which would become the civil wars that dom-
inated Spain in the nineteenth century.
War of Succession
(1700-1715)
Prince Philip of Anjou, grandson of King
Louis XIV of France, future King Philip V of
Spain
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Enlightenment Spain
1
The last years of the rule of the mentally
challenged and childless Charles II, were
dominated by the politics of who would suc-
ceed the unfortunate monarch, the last Span-
ish king of the Habsburg dynasty. Economic
troubles, the decay of the Spanish bureau-
cracy, a series of defeats in wars against
France, and the erosion of imperial institu-
tions in the seventeenth