ABSTRACT
In current historical and economic literature, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are painted in black and white. The sixteenth century is painted as “el siglo de oro,” a sort of golden age, not only for Spain, which received substantial quantities of gold and silver from her American colonies, but also for the rest of Europe. In contrast, the seventeenth century is painted gloomily, and it has become fashionable to write of the “crisis of the seventeenth century.”1
