Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  The social reputation and practical advantages attached to the possession of a privilege of hidalguía made it an object of universal desire. Vast quantities of time, and considerable mental gymnastics, were devoted to the construction, or fabrication, of genealogical tables which would prove the existence of aristocratic ancestors for the most unlikely families. In spite of the insistent emphasis on ancestry, however, the hidalgos did not by any means constitute a closed caste, nor was membership determined solely by the accident of birth. Ferdinand and Isabella, who depended on leading municipal families as well as on hidalgos for their lawyers, soldiers, clerics, and administrators, were so lavish in their bestowal of patents of nobility that the ranks of the hidalgos were constantly being refreshed by an infusion of new blood. Within a few years the Cortes of Castile were protesting at the number of new creations, but the extension of hidalguía to a wider and wider circle proved impossible to check. The intense, and growing, pressure from among the lower ranks of Castilian society for privileges of nobility, found in course of time an answering chord from an increasingly indigent Crown. From the 1520s privileges of hidalguía were being put up for sale as a means of bringing relief to a hard-pressed royal treasury. These privileges were apparently available to anyone with sufficient cash to spare, as the Cortes of 1592 complained: ‘The sale of hidalguías is giving rise to numerous inconveniences, for they are generally purchased by wealthy persons of inferior quality…. This is hateful to all classes. Nobles resent finding people of inferior condition obtaining equality with them simply through the expenditure of money, to the consequent disparagement of nobility… while pecheros (tax-payers) are annoyed that people of no higher origin than themselves should secure precedence over them merely because of their wealth….’ But there was nothing to be done, and the flood of new creations continued unabated.

  The effect of Ferdinand and Isabella's policies was therefore to confirm and consolidate the importance of rank and hierarchy in Castilian society, but at the same time to offer opportunities of social advancement to many who would have had much less hope of acquiring a privileged status in earlier reigns. One of the keys to advancement was education, which might eventually lead to a place in the royal service. The other was wealth, particularly urban wealth, which made possible the alliance between rich mercantile families (including those of Jewish origin) and families of respectable aristocratic lineage. The grandfather of St Teresa of Ávila, for instance, was a certain Juan Sánchez, a merchant of Toledo, who married into the aristocratic family of Cepeda. Penanced in 1485 for Judaizing practices, he moved with his family to Ávila, where, in spite of the fact that his experiences with the Toledo Inquisition were by no means unknown, he managed to marry all his children into families of the local nobility, and to continue his very successful career as a cloth and silk merchant. The family later switched from trade to the administration of rents and the farming of taxes, and St Teresa's father, Don Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, was generally reputed both a rich and an honourable man, with a total estate in 1507 of a million maravedís (some 3,000 ducats), minus debts to the tune of 300,000 maravedís – at a time when a labourer's wages were some 15 to 20 maravedís a day, or 20 ducats a year.11

  Activities of such families as the Sánchez de Cepeda of Ávila hint at the vitality of urban life in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and at the considerable degree of social mobility to be found in the towns. If the cities were surrendering many of their most treasured privileges into the hands of royal officials, they were still intensely active communities, with an undeniable air of prosperity, and a vigorously independent existence of their own.

  The picture of life in the countryside, however, is rather different. Unfortunately, little is known about Castilian rural life at this time, and in particular about the relations between vassals and their lords. A decree of 1480 released manorial tenants from the last traces of servile tenure, and left them free to sell their property and to move elsewhere at will. But they continued to be liable to seigneurial dues and subjected to seigneurial jurisdiction, which seems to have varied enormously according to the character of the lord; and any improvement in their legal position as the power of the Crown extended into the countryside, was not apparently matched by a comparable improvement in their economic status. There were, however, considerable gradations within a peasantry which constituted some 80 per cent of the population of Castile. There was a small peasant aristocracy – the ‘rich labourers’ who figure so prominently in Castilian literature, and who were the dominant figures in village life; and there was a considerable group of town-dwelling peasants, who combined the cultivation of their land with jobs as artisans or small traders in their home town. But the mass of the peasantry seems to have lived in a poverty-stricken state which could easily become acute. It is true that, except in some areas of Galicia, serfdom had disappeared, and that peasants who paid an annual censo for the rental of their land could feel reasonably secure before the law. It is also true that there was never a peasants' revolt in sixteenth-century Castile. But conditions, in some regions at least, were desperately hard, for the whole system of landed property was so arranged as to place upon the peasants the main burden of agricultural production without providing them with the resources to work the land efficiently. Big landowners seem to have taken little interest in the direct exploitation of their estates. They were content, instead, to lease out much of their land. This land was worked by peasants who had probably been compelled to borrow in the first instance in order to secure a plot, and then found their meagre earnings drastically reduced by tithes, dues, and taxes. After this, it only needed one or two bad harvests to make them fall hopelessly into debt.

  These troubles of the peasantry were particularly serious in that Castile's population was growing, and there were already moments when it was difficult to feed it. Agricultural techniques were extremely primitive; the soil, which was anyhow poor, was given too little rest, and the usual method of increasing production was to bring waste land under the plough – land which after a few seasons produced a rapidly diminishing yield. Traditionally, at least in good seasons, the Castilian meseta produced a certain amount of corn for export, but certain parts of the peninsula were incapable of feeding themselves – notably Galicia, Asturias, and Vizcaya, which were supplied from Castile by sea, and the Crown of Aragon, which imported grain from Andalusia and Sicily. But in years of bad harvests Castile itself was dependent on imports of foreign corn. The opening years of the sixteenth century in particular were years of serious harvest failures. Grain prices rose sharply from 1502, and remained high until 1509, when a spectacularly good harvest brought them down so drastically that many farmers were ruined.

  The Government responded to the crisis by authorizing a massive importation of foreign grain in 1506, and by instituting in 1502 the so-called tasa del trigo, imposing a fixed maximum price for corn. This attempt at price-fixing, sporadically applied in the first decades of the century, was to become a permanent feature of the Crown's agrarian policy from 1539. Since it was designed to protect the interests of the consumer and not of the producer, it only served to add to the difficulties of an industry which already found itself in serious difficulties, and which – even more seriously – was consistently deprived of royal encouragement and support.

  In spite of the increasingly grave problem of the national food supply, Ferdinand and Isabella adopted no vigorous measures to stimulate corn production. On the contrary, it was in their reign that the long-continuing struggle between sheep and corn was decisively resolved in favour of the sheep. The great expansion of the mediaeval wool trade had revitalized the economic life of Castile, but there inevitably came a point at which further encouragement of Castilian wool production could only be given at the expense of sacrificing agriculture. This point was reached in the reign of the Catholic Kings. The importance of the wool trade to the Castilian economy, and the value to the royal treasury of the servicio y montazgo, the tax paid the Crown
by the sheep-farmers, naturally prompted Ferdinand and Isabella to pursue the policies of their predecessors and to take the Mesta under their special protection. As a result, a whole series of ordinances conferred upon it wide privileges and enormous favours, culminating in the famous law of 1501 by which all land on which the migrant flocks had even once been pastured was reserved in perpetuity for pasturage, and could not be put to any other uses by its owner. This meant that great tracts of land in Andalusia and Estremadura were deprived of all chance of agricultural development and subjected to the whim of the sheepowners. The aims of this policy were obvious enough. The wool trade was easily subjected to monopolistic control, and, as a result, it constituted a fruitful source of revenue to a Crown which, since 1484, had found itself in increasing financial difficulties, exacerbated by the flight of Jewish capital. An alliance between Crown and sheepowners was thus mutually beneficial for both: the Mesta, with its 2½ to 3 million sheep, basked in the warm sunshine of royal favours while the Crown, whose control of the Military Orders gave it some of the best pasturing lands in Spain, could draw a regular income from it, and turn to it for special contributions in emergencies.

  There were no doubt certain unintended advantages to Castile, in the intense royal encouragement of the wool industry. Sheep-farming requires less labour than arable farming, and the vast extent of the pasture-lands helped to produce a surplus of manpower which made it easier for Castile to raise armies and to colonize the New World. But on the whole the favouring of sheep-farming at the expense of tillage can only appear as a wilful sacrifice of Castile's long-term requirements to considerations of immediate convenience. It was in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella that agriculture was confirmed in its unhappy position as the Cinderella of the Castilian economy, and the price which was eventually to be paid for this was frighteningly high.

  Castile therefore began its imperial career with a distinctly unhealthy agrarian system. Carestía, or dearth, was always uncomfortably close, and too heavy a burden rested on the shoulders of an agrarian population which received neither adequate incentives nor adequate rewards for its labours. But the potential dangers of a shortsighted agrarian policy were easily ignored at a time when the Castilian economy appeared in other respects to be singularly prosperous. The late fifteenth century was a period of considerable economic expansion. Both internal and international trade were lively, and the restoration of peace after the long period of civil war had brought a new confidence and sense of security to the towns of Castile.

  The economic achievement of Ferdinand and Isabella lay not so much in the making of something new as in the creation of conditions in which Castile's existing economic potential could be amply realized. In the peaceful climate of the late fifteenth century the seeds sown during the preceding hundred years came to fruition. The policies of the Catholic Kings were directed towards ensuring that the harvest should yield its maximum; they saw it as their task to regulate and organize, so that the vigorous but often confused and anarchical economic developments of earlier years should not be wasted or allowed to spoil. It was in this spirit, for instance, that they reorganized the fairs of Medina del Campo in 1483, and later attempted, although without success, to merge the fairs of Villalón and Medina de Ríoseco with those of Medina del Campo, to obtain at once both maximum efficiency and centralization. But it was above all to the regulating of the wool trade that they devoted their attention. Here, as elsewhere, there were obvious foundations on which to build. There was already a system of flotas or convoys for the shipment of Castilian wool to northern Europe; and Burgos, the centre of the wool trade, had a well-established merchants' guild with representatives in France and Flanders. The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 had dislocated the wool market, and it was to restore smooth working to the export system that the Catholic Kings created the famous Consulado of Burgos in 1494.

  The Consulado, like many another institution introduced into Castile under the government of Ferdinand, was Aragonese in origin. It combined the functions of a guild and of a mercantile court, and had existed in several towns of the Crown of Aragon since the late thirteenth century. A Consolat de la Mar had been set up in Valencia as early as 1283; Majorca had followed suit in 1343, and Barcelona in 1347, and by the mid-fifteenth century there were eight Consolats in the Levantine states. Burgos already had its merchant guild, but this lacked the powers of jurisdiction that belonged to a Consulado. The installation of a Consulado in Burgos was therefore as attractive to the local merchants as it was to Ferdinand and Isabella, who saw in it the ideal agency for encouraging a fuller exploitation of the wool trade and for bringing it under efficient centralized direction. Wool was prepared for the market in the interior of Castile, sold to merchants and exporters at the fairs, and then transported to Burgos, which served as a central depot. Burgos, however, was over a hundred miles from the nearest port, and pack mules carried the twelve to fifteen thousand woolpacks from Burgos to Bilbao, from where one or two fleets a year shipped the wool to Antwerp.

  Burgos, although itself no port, thus acquired a complete monopoly in the organization of Cantabrian trade with the north. Acting as a natural link between the wool growers and the wool exporters, it alone could authorize the shipments of wool from the Cantabrian ports. In terms of increasing trade, the system seemed to work well. Wool exports continued to rise, and the Catholic Kings attempted to encourage the growth of a merchant fleet by offering subsidies to assist in the construction of ships of over 600 tons (a size more appropriate to a man-of-war than a merchantman) and by passing, in 1500, a navigation law, by which Castilian goods were to be exported in Castilian ships. But the monopoly enjoyed by Burgos also had its drawbacks, especially in that it sharpened the already bitter rivalry between Burgos and Bilbao. Bilbao possessed natural advantages denied to Burgos, and it was also the centre of the growing Vizcayan iron trade. Already by 1500 capital was migrating to Bilbao from Burgos, and finally, in 1511, Ferdinand yielded to the pressure of the Bilbao merchants, and authorized the creation in Bilbao of a special Consulado for Vizcaya.

  For all its teething troubles, the Consulado system possessed such obvious convenience that it seemed natural to extend it also to the new trade with America. The Consulado de Burgos, itself inspired by the Consolat of Barcelona, was thus to provide the model for the famous Casa de Contratación – House of Trade – set up in Seville in 1503. Although the following decades were to see a number of experiments before the details of the system were finally settled, this represented the beginnings of that Sevillian monopoly over trade with the New World which was to last for two hundred years. Monopoly had come, almost imperceptibly, to seem the natural form of commercial organization in Castile.

  The imposition of Aragonese institutions on the economic life of Castile was not exclusively limited to the creation of Consulados. It was also to be found in the reorganization of guilds in Castilian towns. During the Middle Ages the kings of Castile had not looked with favour on guilds, and these had largely remained charitable institutions, of little importance for the country's economic life. In the Crown of Aragon, on the other hand, they were highly organized corporations, meticulously regulating the life of their members, and insisting on high standards of workmanship by means of apprenticeship regulations, examinations, and close supervision. With the advent of Ferdinand to the throne, royal policy towards guilds in Castile was transformed. The Catalan-Aragonese guild system was introduced, and the towns were authorised to set up corporations for the various crafts.

  At a time of economic expansion, therefore, the Catholic Kings had grafted on to the commercial and industrial life of Castile the rigid corporative structure which had already been showing signs of bankruptcy in the Crown of Aragon. It is difficult to determine the economic consequences of this policy, but it would seem on the whole to have been unfortunate that a full-blown guild system, with all its usual elaborate paraphernalia, should belatedly have been imposed upon Castile at a time when other parts of Europe
were making tentative moves towards less rigid forms of industrial organization. Even the short-term consequences to Castilian industry of the tireless legislating activity of the Catholic Kings were not perhaps as favourable as it is sometimes assumed. The three leading industries of the Crown of Castile – iron manufactures in the north, the cloth manufactures of central Castile, and the Granada silk industry need detailed study before judgment is passed, but the general impression is not at present one of startling progress. The Granada silk industry was temporarily dislocated by the revolt of the Alpujarras; the cloth industry was hampered by the import of foreign cloths in exchange for Castilian exports of raw wool. Moreover, the expulsion of the Jews had deprived Castilian industry both of skilled workers and of much-needed capital. Restriction and regulation may well have hindered more than they helped, and it is significant that those industries which appear to have thrived prove on inspection to be local domestic industries, or specialized luxury industries like Toledan jewellery and Sevillian ceramics – industries strictly limited in size, and not amenable to close control.

  The obstacles to industrial advance were, however, formidable. Quite apart from the shortage of capital and of skilled workmen, distances were enormous and communications poor. Mule trains and ox-carts moved slowly and ponderously across the meseta, and the costs of transport added terrifyingly to prices: the cost, for instance, of carrying spices from Lisbon to Toledo was greater than the original price paid for the spices in Lisbon. Under Ferdinand and Isabella serious efforts were made to improve the country's system of communications. Roads were repaired, and certain new routes were constructed in the kingdom of Granada; and in 1497 Castile's wagoners and carters were grouped together into an organization known as the Cabaña Real de Carreteros, which enjoyed a privileged status on the Spanish highways and was exempted from local dues and tolls. Efforts were also made to create a national postal system with international extensions. During the Middle Ages the posts had been less well organized in Castile than in the Crown of Aragon, where the Confraternity of Marcús was responsible for a postal service which seems to have worked with considerable efficiency. Barcelona, which was the home of the Confraternity, became under the Catholic Kings the centre of an international postal network, radiating outwards to Castile and Portugal, Germany, France, and Italy. Meanwhile in Castile the postal system was entrusted to an official known as the Correo Mayor – an office which, from 1505, was held by succeeding generations of a family of Italian origin, the Tassis.