ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the changes that took place in seventeenth-century Europe were greatly influenced by social considerations and that the various results were related to the outcomes of struggles between the dominant social groups in the different regions. In many respects the historical experience of medieval Iberia was a unique phenomenon on the European continent. In the late fifteenth century, the nations of the Iberian peninsula would suddenly and violently burst forth into the wider world. Venice had achieved complete supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean by the end of the fifteenth century. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Mediterranean represented one of the most prosperous regions of Europe. As was the case in many important regions of the Mediterranean, where traditional forces resisted modification and anachronistic forms remained dominant, the adjustments required by the challenges of the seventeenth century were too demanding for the brittle regimes that remained in force.
