Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  It was essential to choose capable officials if the momentum of the first years of the reign were to be maintained and the reforms of the 1470s and 1480s take root. Both Ferdinand and Isabella were acutely conscious of this, and took the greatest trouble over appointments, carrying with them on their travels a book in which they noted down hopeful names. Both were monarchs who knew how to be served, and they seem to have possessed an instinctive capacity for picking the right men to serve them. ‘They took care,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘to appoint discreet and capable officials, even though they were only of middling rank, rather than important figures from the principal houses.’6

  But if the Catholic Kings showed a preference for those of more humble rank when appointing to offices, this by no means implied any intention to exalt one social class, as a class, at the expense of another. The aristocracy may have been stripped of much of their political power, but this had been done for the benefit of the Crown and the community at large, and not for gentry or burgesses or any other individual section of society. This soon became apparent in the Crown's treatment of the Cortes and of the municipalities. The Cortes of Castile had been of the greatest use in the early years of the reign, when it was necessary to associate the community of the realm with the Crown in its struggle against the magnates. But Ferdinand and Isabella were well aware of the danger of allowing the Cortes to acquire too great an influence. This danger was likely to last as long as the Crown remained excessively dependent on the financial grants of the Cortes, and this provided a further reason for making every effort to increase the royal revenues.

  The Crown's revenues did, in fact, rise remarkably during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella: the total revenue from taxation, which is said to have stood at under 900,000 reales in 1474, had risen to 26,000,000 reales by 1504. The increase was achieved not by the imposition of new taxes, but by the more efficient handling of old ones at a time when national wealth was growing. The traditional financial departments of the government of Castile were the contadurías mayores, one for account-keeping (de cuentas) and the other for the collection and administration of taxes (de hacienda). These were overhauled after the Cortes of Madrigal of 1476 and their large staff of officials was reduced. Tax-collecting became more effective once the collectors could count on support from the central and local agents of the Crown; the alienated revenues recovered by the Act of Resumption of 1480 helped to swell the royal income; and the value of the Crown's most important single source of income, the alcabala or sales tax, which had first become a general royal tax in 1342, rose dramatically after reforms in the early 1490s.

  These sources of income were entirely independent of Cortes control, and their rising yield enabled the Crown to dispense entirely with the Cortes for a long period during the middle of the reign. Between the death of Henry IV in 1474 and that of Ferdinand in 1516 the Cortes of Castile were summoned sixteen times, and of these sessions four occurred before 1483 and the other twelve after 1497. The new recourse to the Cortes from the late 1490s is to be explained primarily by the heavy new financial demands made by the war of Granada and the Italian campaigns. The Crown's rising revenues had proved to be adequate in peacetime, but the war of Granada forced the Catholic Kings to raise loans and to sell juros or annuities, and financial necessity compelled them to resort to the Cortes in 1501 for a servicio.

  Although it proved impossible to dispense entirely with the Cortes of Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella had no great difficulty in bending them to their will. Their task was eased by the constitutional deficiencies of the Cortes themselves. There was no obligation on the sovereigns to summon nobles and clergy, and after 1480 attendances by members of either of these estates were rare. This meant that the full brunt was borne by the procuradores of the towns. Since 1429 the towns had been limited to two procuradores each, and it became established under Ferdinand and Isabella that eighteen cities should be represented, so that the Crown was confronted by a body of only thirty-six burgesses. It was unlikely that these thirty-six could successfully conduct a prolonged resistance to royal demands, especially at a time when the monarchy, having moved with striking effect against the aristocracy, had begun to tighten its grasp over the towns.

  Closer supervision of the municipalities was an essential prerequisite both for control of the Cortes and for a more effective assertion of royal supremacy over Castile as a whole; for the walled cities and towns which dotted the Castilian landscape had many of the characteristics of city states and enjoyed a high degree of independence of the Crown. Established one after another during the southward march of the Reconquista, they had been given their own fueros or charters of liberties by generous kings, and had been liberally endowed with vast areas of communal land, which extended their jurisdiction far into the surrounding countryside and served to meet the bulk of their expenses. Their charters gave them the right to form a general assembly or concejo, which was ordinarily composed of the heads of families (vecinos), and which chose each year the various municipal officials. The judicial officials, enjoying civil and criminal jurisdiction, were known as alcaldes, while the principal administrative officials were the regidores, who numbered anything from eight to thirty-six, and formed the effective municipal government. Beneath the regidores were many officials concerned with the day-to-day administration in the town – the alguacil, or principal police officer, the escribano, who kept the municipal registers, and the minor functionaries known as fieles, entrusted with such duties as inspecting weights and measures and superintending the municipal lands.

  During the fourteenth century the vigorous democratic tradition which had characterized Castilian municipal life during the preceding two hundred years began to disappear. As the task of municipal government became more complex, and the monarchy became increasingly jealous of the powers of the municipalities, the concejo was undermined from within, while simultaneously coming under attack from without. During the reign of Alfonso XI (1312–50), the concejo everywhere lost much of its power to the regidores, who were appointed by the Crown instead of being elected by the householders. At Burgos, for instance, which provided the model for many of the towns of Castile, there were six alcaldes with judicial duties, and sixteen regidores, who administered the city as a closed oligarchy. Alongside these magistrates there also appeared in some towns during the fourteenth century a new official known as the corregidor, who was chosen by the King and came from outside the municipality to assist the regidores in its government.

  The collapse of the Crown in fifteenth-century Castile inevitably checked these endeavours to bring the municipalities under effective royal control. In order to help fill its empty treasury, the monarchy under John II began to create and sell municipal offices, in direct contravention of the town charters, which carefully stipulated how many officials there should be. The growth of venality, and the decline of royal control, left the field open for local magnates and competing factions to extend their influence over the organs of municipal government, so that towns were either bitterly divided by civil feuds, or fell into the hands of small, self-perpetuating oligarchies.

  In these circumstances, it was natural that Isabella should resume the policies of her fourteenth-century predecessors. Since the towns of Castile were by now more concerned with the restoration of order than with the preservation of liberty, the moment was particularly favourable. The Cortes of Toledo of 1480 accepted various measures designed to strengthen royal control over municipal administration as well as to raise the standard of urban government. All cities which did not already possess a casa de ayuntamiento, or town hall, were to build one within two years; written records were to be kept of all special laws and privileges; hereditary grants of offices were revoked. Most important of all, corregidores were in this year appointed to all the principal towns of Castile.

  The generalization of the office of corregidor was incomparably the most effective measure taken by Ferdinand and Isabella to extend the Crown's power over the Castilian mu
nicipalities. Like the English Justice of the Peace, whom he resembled in many of his functions, he formed the essential link between the central government and the localities, but he differed from the J.P. in being a specifically royal official, unconnected with the locality to which he was appointed. His duties were both administrative and judicial. The famous decree of 1500 in which these duties were codified, shows that he was expected to watch over all the affairs of the commune, to organize its provisioning, to be responsible for the maintenance of public order, and to prevent any attempts by nobles and clergy to usurp jurisdiction.7 In theory, a corregidor remained in his post for only two years, although in practice his period of office was much longer; and at the end of his term of office he was subjected to a residencia, or inquiry into the way in which he had conducted his duties.

  By the reign of Philip II there were sixty-six corregimientos in Castile. These corregimientos supplemented rather than replaced municipal administration, although at the same time bringing much of the municipal business into the sphere of royal control. The council of regidores, consisting of hidalgos and of substantial citizens who acquired their office by royal appointment (or, as time went on, by inheritance or purchase) remained extremely influential, even though its meetings were now presided over by the corregidor. Municipal government therefore consisted of a delicate balance of perpetual regidores and a temporary corregidor, while a vestige of the old municipal democracy lingered in the continuing right of the vecinos to elect to certain of the town's other administrative offices.

  While the corregidores had heavy administrative duties, they also became the most important judicial officers in the localities, usurping in the process many of the outstanding judicial functions previously exercised by municipal alcaldes. Well before the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella, towns had been losing to the Crown their right to choose their own alcaldes and alguaciles, and the process of royal nomination was carried still further with the coming of the new régime. The loss of this right elicited constant protests from towns and villages, and in some places a compromise was reached, whereby the commune continued to choose its own alcaldes, now known as alcaldes ordinarios, who worked alongside the corregidor and the alcaldes chosen by the King. But, outside a few privileged towns, the alcaldes lost much of their power to the corregidor, and were left with only minor civil and criminal jurisdiction, although there was a saving grace in the provision that corregidores could not arrogate to themselves suits that had been begun before alcaldes.

  Towns and villages under noble or ecclesiastical jurisdiction – the so-called villas de señorío – nominally remained outside this system of royal justice and administration. The Crown was in no position in the late fifteenth century to launch a direct assault on private jurisdictions, and had to content itself with measures which might in process of time come to undermine seigneurial power. In particular, it pursued exactly the opposite policy to that which it had adopted towards towns holding their charters and privileges of the Crown, and insisted, as a counterweight to the power of the lord, on the right of citizens to elect their own officials. In villas de señorío, therefore, the concejo, presided over by the alcalde, continued to elect the alcalde and regidores, and the lord was simply expected to confirm the town's nominees. Justice was exercised in the first instance by the alcalde, and appeals from his decisions came before the judge or corregidor appointed by the lord, and then, if necessary, were carried to the lord's own council, which operated as a kind of miniature private version of the Council of Castile. While Ferdinand and Isabella made no attempt to interfere with the machinery of this private judicial system which ran parallel to the judicial system of the Crown, they did, however, insist that lords should maintain high standards of justice and were always prepared to intervene when miscarriage of justice was alleged. Over the years, the insistence of the Crown on its own judicial primacy, together with the greater competence of royal justice in many fields of litigation, sapped the foundations of the Castilian aristocracy's independent judicial power. As a result, the influence of the corregidor extended by the end of the sixteenth century to every corner of Castile.

  As a member of the gentry class (de capa y espada), the corregidor often lacked sufficient legal training to fulfil his judicial duties adequately, and he was therefore generally given the assistance of two trained lawyers known as alcaldes mayores, of whom one was a specialist in civil and the other in criminal suits. But the jurisdiction remained nominally that of the corregidor himself. He, or his deputies acting in his name, could pronounce sentence in civil suits involving sums of up to 10,000 maravedís, although appeal was allowed to a tribunal which consisted of himself and two members of the town council. In criminal cases he also enjoyed sole right of ordinary jurisdiction, but the accused possessed under Castilian law one right which he was rarely reluctant to employ. This was the right to reject (recusar) his judge, on a pretext either genuine or contrived. If he chose to exercise this privilege, his case had to be retried before his original judge, who was now joined by two assessors chosen by the town council from among their colleagues; and the sentence only became definitive if at least one of them agreed with the corregidor or his deputy. If the assessors proved obdurate, the case had to go up before one of the chancillerías – the highest legal tribunals in Castile. In addition, it was always possible for the accused to bring an appeal before the chancillería when he lost his case in the corregidor's court. These two rights of recusación and appeal, which could be used to spin out interminably the ordinary processes of the law, therefore did something to mitigate the rigours of a system in which almost everything depended in the first instance on the decision of a single judge.

  At the beginning of Isabella's reign there was no more than one chancillería in Castile – that of Valladolid. This was reorganized several times during the Queen's reign and that of Charles V, and came to consist of sixteen oidores or judges, sitting in four chambers and responsible for civil suits, and three alcaldes de crimen, who handled criminal cases. A subsidiary audiencia was established in Galicia, and in 1494 a second chancillería was set up at Ciudad Real. This chancillería was transferred to Granada in 1505, its sphere of jurisdiction being divided from that of Valladolid by the boundary line of the River Tagus. As a last recourse, appeal could be made from sentences pronounced in the chancillería to the Council of Castile itself, which thus acted as the highest court as well as the highest administrative organ in the country. The combined judicial and administrative functions of the Council of Castile therefore paralleled at the highest level the combined functions of the corregidores at the lowest.

  Their reorganization of the Castilian judicial system was typical of the work of the Catholic Kings. The Crown was for them the fountainhead of justice; they constantly insisted on their so-called preeminencia real – the royal pre-eminence which gave them the right to intervene even in matters of seigneurial jurisdiction, in order to secure primacy for the royal power; and their interest in the impartial administration of justice made them set aside every Friday for public audiences in which they personally dispensed justice to all comers. They were the last rulers of Castile to act as personal judges in this way, for their own reforming activity was itself making such measures unnecessary. Justice was acquiring its own machinery, and in 1480 a jurist called Díaz de Montalvo was commissioned to compile the royal ordinances of Castile – the first step towards the codification of Castilian laws which was finally achieved in the reign of Philip II.

  The reassertion of royal authority in the spheres of administration and justice necessarily involved some loss of liberty for the subjects of the Crown. But, after long years of civil strife, this was a price that the majority of them were willing enough to pay. According to the great chronicler Hernando del Pulgar, their wish was to ‘escape from lordship into the royal liberty [libertad real]’, and they saw no incompatibility between freedom and a greater degree of subservience to royal power. The prime reason for this is to b
e found in what was perhaps the greatest of all the achievements of the Catholic Kings – their uncanny skill in identifying the interests of the community of the realm with those of the Crown. Their personal attributes, their capacity to realize in institutional form the aspirations that were often but inarticulately voiced by their subjects, enabled them to shape and mould the consciousness of the community to their own design. They were, in the most real sense, national monarchs, capable of giving even their most humble subjects the feeling that they were all participating in the great task of national regeneration. This by no means implied, however, that Castile was a mere puppet to be manipulated in accordance with the royal will. If Ferdinand and Isabella were all the time giving shape and form to national aspirations, they themselves were in turn being consistently influenced by the hopes, desires, and prejudices of their subjects. The relationship between Crown and people was thus in the fullest sense a two-way relationship; and this was nowhere more apparent than in matters concerning the Faith.