Historically, the decadent period refers to the decline of the thriving commercial Mediterranean empire that was the Crown of Aragon's exclusive provenance, which was absorbed into the Trastámara and later the Habsburg dynasties.
What this signified was that the thriving bourgeoisie and commerce of the Crown of Aragon became subject to the increasingly inward-looking and absolutist policies that characterized Castile (Elliott 34).
The Catalan-Aragonese empire declined for several reasons: the outbreaks of the black plague in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that decimated the population; banking failures led to increased Italian involvement and loss of Mediterranean market share; the textile trade foundered; and, most importantly, the civil war of 1462-72 left the Crown of Aragon "a war-torn country, shorn of two of its richest provinces [Cerdanya and Roussillon], and its problems all unsolved" (Elliott 37–41).
Since the Habsburg monarchy was more of a federation of separate kingdoms than an absolutely centralized system of power, Olivares ran into serious problems of troop recruitment and financing his frequent military endeavors, as evidenced by his "Unión de armas" project begun in 1624, which never came to fruition.
The year 1640—which Olivares described as "el más infeliz que esta Monarquía ha alcanzado" [the worst that this Monarchy has suffered] in a memorial—saw revolts both in Catalonia and Portugal.
With further conflict looming on the horizon with the War of Succession that finally led to the abolition of all Catalan rights, privileges, and attempted to abolish the language itself with the Nueva Planta Decrees in 1714, these were dire times for Catalans; yet they were also times in which a new identity was being forged under the aegis of a new literary, linguistic, and national consciousness in which the writers of the baroque participated heavily.
Writers such as Francesc Vicenç Garcia and Josep Romaguera wished to revitalize Catalan literary language by importing forms taken from the Castilian Baroque.
A new generation of scholars began to revise the prevailing views of early modern Catalan literature, even deliberately refusing to employ the term ‘Decadència’ in order to highlight its debilitating and contentious nature.