Sir John H. Elliott was fond of recounting how, as a young man, on a six-week trip to Spain he discovered and, without having sought it, found the calling of his life.

It was in the Prado, in the Velázquez halls.

There hangs the equestrian portrait of the Count of Olivares, the most powerful minister under King Philip IV, who wanted to set ambitious reform plans in motion until his fall in 1643, but suffered many setbacks: Portugal broke away from the Spanish crown, Catalonia rebelled, and the political The decline of the once mighty empire seemed inevitable.

Paul Ingenday

Europe correspondent for the feuilleton in Berlin.

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John Huxtable Elliott, born in Reading in 1930, magically attracted by the aura of an oil painting, turned to Spanish history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

He not only wrote the most influential portrait of Conde-Duque Olivares as a statesman (1986), but also fundamental ones with Imperial Spain: 1469-1716 (1963) and the essays in the volume Spain and Its World, 1500-1700 (1989). Studies on the power and economy of the Spanish crown that are still read today.

Analyzing the empire included looking at the fringes: when Elliott went to Barcelona he was primarily researching a book about the Catalan rebellion that hastened the fall of the Conde-Duque Olivares.

In later essays, too, he repeatedly returned to the figure of this dazzling statesman,

Over the course of a long career, Elliott has taught in Cambridge, London and Princeton, among other places.

He ended up being Royal Professor of Modern History at Oxford.

If you read his impact on the simplest level, you could say that he examined prejudices and gently corrected national clichés.

He trusted export statistics more than high-flying metaphysics of history.

He read the concept of the “decadence” of the Spanish empire as having its own symptoms of decay.

And about the colonial spirit that subjugated a foreign continent in 1492, he wrote in his book Die Neue in der Alten Welt 1492 – 1650 (German 1992) in a calm and unbiased way that he wanted to show “how those people lived a world that was new and strange to them, tried to understand”.

The fact that these words sound courageous today does not speak for the present.

The Spanish historian José Álvarez Junco wrote in “El País” that attending a seminar with Elliott initially disappointed him a little because the eminent professor, instead of expressing himself, so often let others speak.

Álvarez Junco later realized that this was Elliott's strength and idiosyncrasy: getting others to speak and weighing different opinions in a spirit of togetherness.

This enabled the historian to be heard in the conflict over Catalan independence with his anti-separatism book "Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion" (2018) without being considered an enemy party.

The man whose first and last academic book was on Catalonia, and who spoke Spanish as well as Catalan, has not received about two of his eight Spanish honorary doctorates in Catalonia.

For the depth and clarity of his works he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in 1996 and the Balzan Prize in 1999.

On March 10, Sir John Elliott died in Oxford at the age of 91.