In 1688 a Spanish octogenarian could have remembered when Spain was the first nation of Europe. Although in his youth the royal finances were already in ruinous state, no Spaniard at that time need reasonably have dreaded the future. Yet the octogenarian would have lived his remaining years amid disasters. From 1620 until the Truce of Ratisbon Spain was at war, with one or many nations, for 58 of the 65 years. By 1684 she had lost critical areas in Europe and much that she claimed in the Americas. Her naval reputation had perished at the Dunes and her infantry never recovered from the humiliation of Rocroi. Her economy now lay in ruins. Only her culture retained vestiges of its former vitality. Disillusioned by the success of the Neapolitan Luca Giordano at court, the last great painter of the Madrid school, Claudio Coello, was to die in 1693; but native architecture flourished in the ornate work of the Churriguera family. Except for the works of the Mexican nun-poetess, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who died in 1695, few books of great literary worth were published in Spain during the last decades of the century, when political satire, significantly, was the liveliest manifestation of Spanish ingenuity. From 1685 to 1693 Francisco Bances Candamo wrote subtle political plays for the court, striving to revive the drama which, as he saw, had declined since the death of Calderón in 1681. The greatest of Spanish bibliographers, Nicolás Antonio, died in 1684, but his Bibliotheca hispana vetus was not published till 1696.