The medieval Crown of Aragon, therefore, with its rich and energetic urban patriciate, was deeply influenced by its overseas commercial interests. It was imbued with a contractual concept of the relationship between king and subjects, which had been effectively realized in institutional form, and it was well experienced in the administration of empire. In all these respects it contrasted strikingly with medieval Castile. Where, in the early fourteenth century, the Crown of Aragon was cosmopolitan in outlook and predominantly mercantile in its inclinations, contemporary Castile tended to look inwards rather than outwards, and was oriented less towards trade than war. Fundamentally, Castile was a pastoral and nomadic society, whose habits and attitudes had been shaped by constant warfare – by the protracted process of the Reconquista, still awaiting completion long after it was finished in the Crown of Aragon.
The Reconquista was not one but many things. It was at once a crusade against the infidel, a succession of military expeditions in search of plunder, and a popular migration. All these three aspects of the Reconquista stamped themselves forcefully on the forms o Castilian life. In a holy war against Islam, the priests naturally enjoyed a privileged position. It was their task to arouse and sustain the fervour of the populace – to impress upon them their divinely appointed mission to free the country of the Moors. As a result, the Church possessed an especially powerful hold over the medieval Castile; and the particular brand of militant Christianity which it propagated was enshrined in the three Military Orders of Calatrava, Alcántara, and Santiago – three great creations of the twelfth century, combining at once military and religious ideals. But while the crusading ideal gave Castilian warriors their sense of participating in a holy mission as soldiers of the Faith, it could not eliminate the more mundane instincts which had inspired the earliest expeditions against the Arabs, and which were prompted by the thirst for booty. In those first campaigns, the Castilian noble confirmed to his own entire satisfaction that true wealth consisted essentially of booty and land. Moreover, his highest admiration came to be reserved for the military virtues of courage and honour. In this way was established the concept of the perfect hidalgo, as a man who lived for war, who could do the impossible through sheer physical courage and a constant effort of the will, who conducted his relations with others according to a strictly regulated code of honour, and who reserved his respect for the man who had won riches by force of arms rather than by the sweat of manual labour. This ideal of hidalguía was essentially aristocratic, but circumstances conspired to diffuse it throughout Castilian society, for the very character of the Reconquista as a southwards migration in the wake of the conquering armies encouraged a popular contempt for sedentary life and fixed wealth, and thus imbued the populace with ideals similar to those of the aristocracy.
The Reconquista therefore gave Castilian society a distinctive character in which militantly religious and aristocratic strains predominated. But it was equally important in determining the pattern of Castile's economic life. Vast estates were consolidated in the south of Spain, and there grew up a small number of great urban centres like Córdoba and Seville, living off the wealth of the surrounding countryside. Above all, the Reconquista helped to ensure in Castile the triumph of a pastoral economy. In a country whose soil was hard and barren and where there was frequent danger of marauding raids, sheep-farming was a safer and more rewarding occupation than agriculture; and the reconquest of Estremadura and Andalusia opened up new possibilities for the migratory sheep industry of North Castile.
But the event which transformed the prospects of the Castilian sheep industry was the introduction into Andalusia from North Africa, around 1300, of the merino sheep – an event which either coincided with, or created, a vastly increased demand for Spanish wool. The Castilian economy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries steadily adapted itself to meet this demand. In 1273 the Castilian Crown, in its search for new revenues, had united in a single organization the various associations of sheepowners, and conferred upon it important privileges in return for financial contributions. This organization, which later became known as the Mesta, was entrusted with the supervision and control of the elaborate system whereby the great migratory flocks were moved across Spain from their summer pastures in the north to their winter pastures in the south, and then back again in the spring to the north.
The extraordinary development of the wool industry under the Mesta's control had momentous consequences for the social, political, and economic life of Castile. It brought the Castilians into closer contact with the outer world, and particularly with Flanders, the most important market for their wools. This northern trade in turn stimulated commercial activity all along the Cantabrian coast, transforming the towns of north Castile, like Burgos, into important commercial centres, and promoting a notable expansion of the Cantabrian fleet. But during the fourteenth century and much of the fifteenth the full extent of the transformation which was being wrought in Castilian life by the European demand for wool was partially hidden by the more obviously dramatic transformations effected by the ravages of plague and war.
The Black Death of the fourteenth century, although less catastrophic in Castile than in the Crown of Aragon, provoked at least a temporary crisis of manpower, which may have helped to give the economy a further twist in the direction of sheep-farming. Momentary economic confusion was accompanied by continuing social strife. The aristocracy was steadily gaining the upper hand in its struggles with the Crown. Enriched by the royal favours they had extorted, and by the profits from the sale of their wool, the magnates were strengthening their economic and social position during the course of the century. This was the period of the foundation of the great aristocratic dynasties of Castile – the Guzmán, the Enríquez, the Mendoza.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, some of these aristocratic houses enjoyed fabulous prestige and wealth. The famous heiress Leonor de Alburquerque, known as the rica hembra (the rich woman), could travel all the breadth of Castile, from Aragon to Portugal, without once setting foot outside her own estates. With such vast economic resources at their disposal, the magnates were well placed to seize the maximum political advantage at a time when the power of the Crown was fatally weakened by minorities and by disputed successions. There was, indeed, nothing to restrain them, for as yet the towns of north Castile were insufficiently developed to provide a bourgeoisie strong enough – as it was in the Crown of Aragon – to serve as an effective counterbalance to aristocratic ambition.
The political chaos in fourteenth-century Castile thus contrasted markedly with the public order that prevailed in the Crown of Aragon, guaranteed as it was by elaborate governmental organs. Admittedly the Castilians, like the Aragonese, had their parliamentary institutions, the Cortes of Castile, which reached the summit of their power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But there were important differences between the Cortes of Castile and those of the Crown of Aragon, which prevented them from exercising the effective political control enjoyed by their Aragonese counterparts, and which in the end were fatally to undermine their authority. There was no obligation on the kings of Castile, unlike those of Aragon, to summon their Cortes at specified regular intervals, and no one in Castile, even among the nobles and clergy, possessed a right to attend. Although it was already a recognized custom from the middle of the thirteenth century that the King of Castile must appeal to the Cortes whenever he wanted an additional subsidy or servicio, the strength that might have accrued to the Cortes through this practice was diminished by the Crown's ability to find alternative means of supply. It was diminished also by the fiscal exemption of nobles and clergy, whose consequent lack of interest in financial proceedings compelled the representatives of the towns to fight their battles with the Crown single-handed. Even more important, the Castilian Cortes, unlike those of the Crown of Aragon, failed to obtain a share in the legislating power. Theoretically, the Cortes's consent had to be obtained for the revocation of laws, but the power to mak
e new laws lay with the Crown. The Cortes were allowed to draw up petitions, but they never succeeded in turning this into a right of legislation, partly because of their own lack of unity, and partly because of their failure to establish the principle that redress of grievances must precede supply.
Everything, then, conspired to make the prospects seem gloomy for Castile, and the opening years of the fifteenth century did nothing to dispel the gloom. The Castilian kings, their title dubious, had become pawns in the hands of the magnates; the Cortes were disunited and ineffectual; government had broken down, public order had collapsed, and the country was in turmoil. In the Crown of Aragon, on the other hand, the problem of succession had been solved between 1410 and 1412 without recourse to civil war, and the second king of the new dynasty, Alfonso the Magnanimous (1416–58), presided over a great new phase of imperial expansion which gave the Catalans and Aragonese a firm foothold in the Italian peninsula. The future seemed as bright for the Catalan-Aragonese federation as it appeared dark for Castile. But appearances were deceptive. Behind the grim façade of civil war, Castilian society was being transformed and invigorated by the economic changes which the growth of the wool trade was bringing in its train. If the country could once be pacified and the aristocracy be curbed, there was a real chance that Castile's great reserves of energy could be turned to new and valuable ends. In the Crown of Aragon, on the other hand, appearances were more hopeful than the reality warranted. The new overseas expansion of the fifteenth century was of itself no indication of prosperity or stability at home. On the contrary, the Catalan-Aragonese federation was now entering a period of crisis from which it took long to recover: a crisis which ensured that, in the joint monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella, the lead, from the very first, was taken by Castile.
3. THE DECLINE OF THE CROWN OF ARAGON
The unexpected eclipse of the Crown of Aragon during the fifteenth century was largely the result of the eclipse of Catalonia. For Valencia the fifteenth century was something of a golden age, but for Catalonia it was characterized by a succession of disasters. Since it was the Catalans who had been primarily responsible for the great achievements of the confederation in the High Middle Ages, these disasters could only serve to weaken the Crown of Aragon as a whole, and leave it ill-equipped to face the many challenges which would inevitably accompany the Union of the Crowns.
The Catalan crisis of the fifteenth century has traditionally been regarded as, above all, a political crisis, caused by the accession to the throne of an alien, Castilian dynasty in 1412. It has been argued that the new line of Castilian kings neither understood nor sympathized with the political ideals and institutions of the Catalans. As a result, the fifteenth century marked the end of that close co-operation between dynasty and people which had been the distinguishing characteristic of Catalonia at the time of its greatness. The very fact that Alfonso the Magnanimous chose to live in the kingdom of Naples, which had fallen to him in 1443, itself symbolized the divorce between the Catalans and a dynasty from which they found themselves increasingly estranged.
This traditional interpretation has much to commend it, for in essentially monarchical societies royal absenteeism created grave problems of adjustment. It is also undeniable that the glittering imperialism of Alfonso V, dynastic in inspiration and militaristic in character, differed sharply from the commercial imperialism of an earlier age, and, by encouraging lawlessness in the western Mediterranean, directly conflicted with the mercantile interests of the Barcelona oligarchy. The policies of dynasty and merchants no longer coincided, and this itself represented a tragic deviation from the traditions of the past.
But an essential prerequisite for the coincidence of royal and mercantile policies had been the economic vitality and expansion of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. By the fifteenth, these were things of the past. This ending of the expansionist phase of the Catalan economy inevitably produced repercussions in the political system. The political crisis of fifteenth-century Catalonia therefore needs to be set – as modern historians are setting it – in the wider context of the economic recession and social upheaval of the later medieval world.
The background to the Catalan crisis was plague, recurrent and remorseless: 1333, a year of famine, came to be known as the ‘first bad year’, but it was between 1347 and 1351 that the Principality was first ravaged by plague. The Black Death of these years took a heavy toll of a population already stretched to its limits by the imperial adventures of the recent past. Where the visitation in Castile was harsh but swift, it proved in Catalonia to be only the first of a long and terrible succession. Although the first losses were made up with surprising speed, further waves of epidemics – 1362–3, 1371, 1396–7, and then periodically throughout the fifteenth century – steadily sapped the country's vitality. The 430,000 inhabitants of 1365 were reduced to 350,000 by 1378 and 278,000 by 1497, and the population did not return to something approaching its pre-Black Death figures until the second half of the sixteenth century. It is hardly surprising that this terrible drop in population, sharper than that experienced by Aragon or Valencia, dislocated the Principality's economic life and drastically affected its ability to adjust itself to the changed economic conditions of a plague-stricken world.
The first and most obvious consequence of the pestilence was the crisis in the countryside. Manpower was scarce, farmsteads were abandoned, and, from about 1380, the peasantry began to clash violently with landlords who, like landlords elsewhere in late fourteenth-century Europe, were determined to exploit to the full their rights over their vassals at a time when feudal dues were diminishing in value and the cost of labour was rising fast. During the fifteenth century agrarian unrest became endemic. Armed risings, murder, and arson were all employed by a class determined to emancipate itself from a legal servitude which seemed all the more bitter now that the shortage of men held out new hopes of economic gain to those who had survived. This class, technically known as the remença peasants – peasants tied to the land – constituted almost a third of the Principality's population. It was by no means a united social class. Some remença peasants were relatively wealthy, others desperately poor, and the interests of the two groups ultimately proved incompatible. But all were united at the start in their determination to win their freedom from the ‘six evil customs’ to which they were subjected, 7 and to obtain for themselves the abandoned farmsteads which they saw all around them. Banding together, they effectively challenged the hold of the ruling class over the countryside, and helped push the Principality towards the abyss of civil war.
In spite of the plague and the agrarian unrest, there were still impressive signs of commercial activity and of urban wealth in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Many of the most imposing public buildings in Barcelona date from this period. But the foundations of Barcelona's economic activity were less solid than they had formerly been, and were being subjected to increasing strain. Between 1381 and 1383 there were spectacular failures of Barcelona's leading private banks. The financial crisis gravely weakened the city's standing as a market for capital, and eased the way for Italian financiers to assume the role of principal bankers to the kings of Aragon. Genoa in particular made skilful use of the opportunities created by the failure of Catalan finance, and succeeded in converting itself into the financial capital of the western Mediterranean. But it was not only in the market for capital that the Catalans saw themselves progressively outmanoeuvred by the Genoese. The late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries were a time of bitter conflict between Catalonia and Genoa for the control of the spice, cloth, and corn trades – a conflict in which the mastery of the entire trading system of southern Europe was at stake. While the war in the Mediterranean was waged indecisively throughout the fifteenth century, the Genoese won an early and lasting victory in another vital region. This was central and southern Spain, where the expansion of the Castilian market offered the successful contender an exceptionally rich prize. The growth of
Castile's wool trade had created new commercial opportunities, which the Catalans, embattled on so many fronts, were in no position to seize. It was, instead, the Genoese who settled in Córdoba, Cadiz, and Seville, built up a solid alliance with Castile, and secured control of the wool exports from Spain's southern ports. Once they had obtained this foothold, the Genoese were well placed to entrench themselves at one strategic point after another in the Castilian economy, and so prepare the way for their future participation in the lucrative trade between Seville and Castile's colonial empire. This Genoese predominance decisively influenced the course of sixteenth-century Spanish development. If the Catalans rather than the Genoese had won the struggle for entry into the Castilian commercial system, the history of a united Spain would have taken a profoundly different turn.
Imperial Spain 1469-1716 Page 4