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Following the return to Spain of the remnant from the Magellan-Elcano voyage around the world (1519–22), various other Spanish voyages attempted to find the elusive return route eastward across the...

Official tax records and other documents provide the sources for an estimation of wool exports overtime. Four main points emerge: after a peak circa 1550, exports stagnated and declined for over a century before rising again strongly; political and economic developments in Spain and the rest of Europe affected both the volume and the direction of wool exports; most exports went to Flanders before 1550, then to Italy for a time, and finally to northern Europe again from about 1650 onward; and Spanish merchants controlled most of the trade until the mid- sixteenth century but lost dominance thereafter, retaining control only over the internal market supplying wool for export.

BECAUSE OF THEIR ABSORPTION in a narrowly defined Renaissance-Reformation, historians of early modern Europe long tended to focus on Italy, Germany, and England, to the neglect of France and particularly Spain. Partly for the same reason, the period 1400-1550 once received far more attention than did the next century and a half. More recently a growing interest in economic and social development, the consequence of contemporary problems of modernization and economic growth, has stimulated research in the period I550-I 700. No longer can that period be passed over as an unimportant transition between the Renaissance-Reformation and the Enlightenment, and no longer can Spain be safely ignored, since the early modern period spans the time of its greatest power and of its decline. Indeed, two major scholarly concerns-"the price revolution of the sixteenth century" and "the crisis of the seventeenth century "-fit the Spanish experience better than that of other areas.' As historians unravel the tangled story of Spain's fall from power, they are taking a fresh look at the revolt of the Netherlands, particularly in its economic implications. For eighty years (I568-I648) the revolt drained tax revenue from Castile and its American empire and weakened the fragile links