The Moneylender and His Wife, by Quinten Metsys, 1514
A moneychanger weighing coin while his wife turns from her prayer book to watch, painted in Antwerp in 1514. The scales, the mixed foreign coin and the ledger are the working equipment of the credit market that would refuse Philip II forty-three years later.
The bankruptcy of 1557 was a suspension of payments, not an absence of money. Spain had the silver; what it did not have was cash in the right city on the right day, because the debt was short-term, taken at ruinous rates from Genoese and German houses against bullion still at sea. When the crown converted those loans into low-interest perpetual bonds by decree, it did not repudiate the debt so much as rewrite it — and then did the same thing again in 1560, 1575, 1596 and beyond. The panel is in the Louvre. See why the richest empire in Europe broke.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
