“It does seem that the countries that went Protestant were far more economically successful than the ones that stayed Catholic.”
Except for 16th century Spain which was the largest, richest and most powerful country in the world.
“Except for 16th century Spain which was the largest, richest and most powerful country in the world.”
Until that Armada thing.
Had to say it.
Spain got wealthy (for a while) off the back of having a huge Empire filled with bountious raw resources, especially silver. However, simply digging wealth out of the ground doesn’t advance a nation socially or provide a lasting basis for wealth creation or industry, the real drivers behind a truly great power. In the end, Spain got lazy and left in the dust as its industrialising neighbours, especially England, unhampered by prohibitions against usury and encouraged to believe that wealth created through hard work was a sign of God’s blessing, developed superior technology and a more advanced political and social mindset, which encouraged the lower orders to feel that they had a stake in the nation they belonged to, not just the perennially abusive and exploitative landed aristocracy as was the case in Spain.
You seem from here, and other threads I have seen you on, to have a real visceral hate for Protestants. I assume you live in the US, a country whose ideals are strictly routed in the Protestant world. It must tear at your soul to walk the very earth that became the greatest nation on Earth, founded by our Protestant Founding Fathers, who were born from the bosom of the Protestant Anglosphere. I assume you prefer to live under a Absolutist Catholic monarch in the order of a Bourbon or Habsburg than the Constitutional Republic created by Madison,Washington, Jefferson, etc, Protestansts all. You strike me as someone who is anti-American to his core, in the same way the corrupt absolutist monarchs of early 19th Century Europe despised the United States. If you despise the Protestant world so much, I suggest you move south of the Rio Grande and find solace with those more like minded.
and why was Spain the ‘largest, richest’ country at that time? could it have more to do with the confiscation of the amassed wealth of their Moors and Jews, or more to do with internal industriousness?