Under both of them meetings of the Cortes were frequent.
Though never directly attacked, the powers of the Cortes declined through the growth of vast interests outside their competence.

The direction of foreign policy, so absorbing under Charles, and the charge of the enormous and growing commercial interests, was confided not to the representatives of the people, but to the Royal Council of Castile, an appointative body of nine lawyers, three nobles, and one bishop.
Though not absolutely, yet relatively, the functions of the Cortes diminished until they amounted to no more than those of a provincial council.
What reconciled the people to the concentration of new powers in the hands of an irresponsible council was the apparently dazzling success of Spanish policy throughout the greater part of the sixteenth century.
No banner was served like that of the Lions and Castles; no troops in the world could stand against her famous regiments; no generals were equal to Cortez and Alva; no statesmen abler than Parma, no admirals, until the Armada, more daring than Magellan[1] and Don John, no champions of the church against heretic and infidel like Loyola and Xavier.
[Sidenote: The Spanish Empire] That such an empire as the world had not seen since Rome should within a single life-time rise to its zenith and, within a much shorter time, decline to the verge of ruin, is one of the melodramas of history.
Perhaps, in reality, Spain was never quite so great as she looked, nor was her fall quite so complete as it seemed.

But {430} the phenomena, such as they are, sufficiently call for explanation.
First of all one is struck by the fortuitous, one might almost say, unnatural, character of the Hapsburg empire.

While the union of Castile and Aragon, bringing together neighboring peoples and filling a political need, was the source of real strength, the subsequent accretions of Italian and Burgundian territories rather detracted from than added to the effective power of the Spanish state.

Philip would have been far stronger had his father separated from his crown not only Austria and the Holy Roman Empire of Germany, but the Netherlands as well.