at affected the economy.
             Merriman attributes the onset of the economic depression in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century to events like the exhaustion of New World mines and the disruption of the Thirty Years War. Merriman claims that income from the New World mines had caused serious inflation within the Spanish economy, which had debased the currency, but that the exhaustion of the mines went so far as to completely disrupt the money supply. The impact of inflation within Spain could potentially lead not only to starvation, but to a disruption in international trade as well.
             Military spending further aggravated the Crown's economic woes. At one point, Merriman notes, Spain was spending five times as much on its military as other European powers combined. The military spending, however, was the result of trying to defend the empire, which was by far and away larger than anything the other European nations had to deal with. To give a couple o
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