Imperial Spain 1469-1716

by John H. Elliott

  It was precisely this absence of ‘people of the middling sort’, lamented by González de Cellorigo, which tended to differentiate the Spain of Philip III from other contemporary societies in western Europe (and conversely to approximate it to east European societies like Poland). Contrasts between wealth and poverty were not, after all, an exclusively Spanish phenomenon. The return of peace at the beginning of the seventeenth century had everywhere heralded the opening of an age of opulence characterized in the European capitals by a round of masques and fetes, by lavish spending on building, costumes, and jewellery, and by a relaxation of moral standards which made courts the symbol of every kind of vice to the puritanically inclined. The uniqueness of Spain lay not so much in this contrast, as in the absence of a middling group of solid, respectable, hardworking bourgeois to bridge the gulf between the two extremes. In Spain, these people, as González de Cellorigo appreciated, had committed the great betrayal. They had been enticed away by the false values of a disorientated society – a society of ‘the bewitched, living outside the natural order of things'.The contempt for commerce and manual labour, the lure of easy money from investment in censos and juros, the universal hunger for titles of nobility and social prestige – all these, when combined with the innumerable practical obstacles in the way of profitable economic enterprise, had persuaded the bourgeoisie to abandon its unequal struggle, and throw in its lot with the unproductive upper class of society.

  Lacking a middle class which remained true to its own values, seventeenth-century Castile was sharply divided into the two extremes of the very rich and the very poor. ‘There are but two families in the world,’ as Sancho Panza's grandmother used to say, ‘the haves and the have-nots’ (el tener y el no tener); 6 and the criterion for distinguishing between them ultimately lay not in their rank or social position, but in whether they had anything to eat. Food, indeed, created new social classifications of its own:

  Al rico llaman honrado,

  Porque tiene que comer.7

  The rich ate, and ate to excess, watched by a thousand hungry eyes as they consumed their gargantuan meals. The rest of the population starved. The endless preoccupation with food that characterizes every Spanish picaresque novel was no more than a faithful reflection of the overwhelming concern of the mass of the populace, from the impoverished hidalgo surreptitiously pocketing crumbs at Court, to the pícaro making a desperate raid on a market stall. ‘Hermano, este día no es de aquellos sobre quien tiene jurisdicción la hambre’ – ‘hunger holds no sway today’.8 But the days on which hunger held no sway were rare indeed; and the long weeks of emptiness were passed in scheming for a square meal, which itself would soon be consumed in an orgy of eating, and then forgotten as the pangs of hunger returned.

  The best guarantee of a regular supply of square meals was, by tradition, service in Iglesia, o mar, o casa real – Church, sea (trade), or the royal service (at Court or in the army). By the seventeenth century the refrain had been narrowed down to Iglesia, o casa real. Castilians from all walks of life had come to look, as a matter of course, to the Church, Court, and bureaucracy to guarantee them the living which they disdained to earn from more menial occupations, at once despised and unrewarding.

  The Church was both rich and welcoming. Although it suffered from heavy taxation, it had received over the years enormous gifts of money, jewels, and real estate. Bishoprics may have had heavy pensions charges against their revenues, but there were still fat benefices available, like the canonries of Seville, which had risen in value between the early sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries from 300 to 2,000 ducats – a sixfold increase which shows that, at least in this diocese, the revenues of the cathedral chapter had risen faster than prices. The proliferation of new Religious Orders had opened up the possibilities of a religious life to large numbers of men and women whose anxiety for food and shelter tended to exceed their sense of religious vocation. A total figure of 200,000 regular and secular clergy has been suggested for the Spain of Philip IV, but there are no reliable statistics. A contemporary writer, Gil González Dávila, put the number of Dominicans and Franciscans at 32,000, and according to the Cortes of 1626 there were some 9,000 religious houses in Castile simply for men. ‘I am a priest,’ wrote González Dávila, ‘but I confess that there are more of us than are necessary.’9

  Alongside the Church stood the Court, with its glittering prospects of favour, position, and wealth. The Court of Philip III was very different from that of his father. The age of parsimony was over and the new King ‘increased the service in his royal palace, and admitted many grandees as gentlemen of his household, departing from the style of his father’.10 The break with the House of Austria's traditional practice of keeping the higher aristocracy away from Court came at a moment when the great Spanish nobles were in urgent need of help. The price rise, taken in conjunction with the general increase in expenditure that was expected of the aristocracy during the sixteenth century, had played havoc with the fortunes of the grandees. Since detailed studies of the higher Spanish aristocratic families do not exist, the changing pattern of their fortunes is still unknown, but a comparison of the annual incomes of thirteen ducal families between the early sixteenth century and 1600 (as given by Lucio Marineo Sículo and Pedro Núñez de Salcedo respectively)11 gives some picture of what was happening:

  Title Early 16th century 1600

  (ducats) (ducats)

  Frías (Condestable de Castilla) 60,000 65,000

  Medina de Ríoseco (Almirante de Castilla) 50,000 130,000

  Alba 50,000 120,000

  Infantado 50,000 120,000

  Medina Sidonia 55,000 170,000

  Béjar 40,000 80,000

  Nájera 30,000 55,000

  Medinaceli 30,000 60,000

  Alburquerque 25,000 50,000

  Arcos 25,000 80,000

  Maqueda 30,000 50,000

  Escalona 60,000 100,000

  Sessa 60,000 100,000

  565,000 1,180,000

  The figures show that the incomes of these thirteen families had barely doubled over a period when prices quadrupled, and it is not surprising that most of the families were heavily indebted by the end of the sixteenth century. While the entail system saved the great houses from having to sell off their estates, they were compelled to mortgage them in order to pay the interest on their debts. According to one of the Venetian ambassadors at the Court of Philip III, the grandees actually received no more than a fifth of their revenues, since the remaining four-fifths were being used to service their debts. This at least was the lot of the Dukes of Infantado, to judge from the will of the fifth duke, dated 4 March 1598. He explains his heavy debts by the failure of his parents to pay him the portion of an elder son, which had obliged him to mortgage his wealth in order to maintain his household; in addition he had been indebted by lawsuits, by marriage settlements for his children, and by the expenditure of over 100,000 ducats on repairs and improvements to the ducal palace at Guadalajara. The Duke's successors met the challenge in the same way as other impoverished aristocrats. They left their 85,000 vassals and their 620 towns and villages to the care of stewards and administrators and transferred themselves to Madrid. Life at Court might be expensive (indeed, the Duke of Infantado is said to have spent more than 300,000 ducats in the course of the King's visit to Valencia in 1599), but the grandees expected to make up for their losses by plundering the royal treasury, just as their ancestors had plundered it when another favourite ruled Spain, in the reign of John II.

  It was not only the grandees who benefited from the affluence of a generous King. The Spain of Philip III, like the England of James I, saw an inflation of honours. During the sixteenth century there had been a relatively moderate increase in the number of Spanish titles:

  Early 16th century 1600

  Dukes 17 21 (21 grandees)

  Marquises 16 42 ( 8 grandees)

  Counts 44 56 ( 3 grandees)

  77 119

  In the twenty-three ye
ars of his reign, Philip III created three dukes, thirty marquises, and thirty-three counts. This addition of new titles played its part in keeping a large share of the national wealth in aristocratic hands, in spite of the relative diminution of the wealth of the old grandee families. The combined rent-rolls of the aristocracy in the early sixteenth century totalled some 1,500,000 ducats; by 1630, when there were 155 titled nobles, their nominal combined incomes exceeded 5,000,000.

  Although the real incomes of the nobles were far less than their nominal incomes, they still contrived to spend on a vast scale. Like the King, they had found it impossible to adjust their way of life to a new age in which prices were no longer automatically rising and debts were gratifyingly reduced by the process of inflation. At a time when less good money was entering Spain and more was leaving it, the King still managed to live beyond his means by striking a copper coinage for domestic use and then manipulating it at times of need; and the nobles, paying their servants – as the King paid his – in debased vellón, followed the ways of their royal master and spent more than they had. Their households grew larger and larger, swollen by the Castilian custom of automatically re-employing all old servants when the mastership of the house changed hands, even if the new master already possessed a large household of his own. Thus the Conde Duque de Olivares had 198 servants, the great Duke of Osuna 300, and, in the later years of the century, the Duke of Medinaceli, heir to an imposing array of estates, no less than 700. Royal pragmatics to limit the number of lackeys and servants were useless, for domestic service was one of the few important industries of Castile, and it obeyed the laws of social custom and economic necessity rather than those of the State. A large household enhanced the standing of its owner; and service in a noble household, even when it entailed being underpaid and underfed, was on the whole to. be preferred to no employment at all.

  Inevitably, therefore, as grandees and lesser aristocrats drifted to Court, they were followed by thousands who either possessed, or aspired to, a place in their service. At a time when the population of Castile had fallen, that of Madrid continued to grow: from 4,000 in 1530 to 37,000 in 1594, to anything between 70,000 and 100,000 in the reign of Philip IV. The Court acted as a great magnet, drawing to it from all over the country the rootless, the dishonest, and the ambitious. Recognizing this, the Government ordered the great nobles in 1611 to return to their estates in the hope of clearing the Court of parasites, but the order suffered the fate of most of Lerma's good intentions, and the arbitristas continued to fulminate in vain against the unchecked growth of a monstrous capital which was draining away the life-blood of Castile.

  Younger sons and impoverished hidalgos flocked to the Court in the hope of making or restoring their fortunes – a hope that did not seem unreasonable when a Rodrigo Calderón could acquire the marquisate of Siete Iglesias and an annual income of 200,000 ducats. For the Court had much to offer: not only places in the households of nobles, and even, with luck, in the palace, but places also in the proliferating bureaucracy of the Spanish Monarchy. The only drawback to service as a royal official was that it required a modicum of education; but, over the course of the years the expansion of the educational establishments of Castile had amply catered for this need. According to one arbitrista, Fernández Navarrete, there were thirty-two universities and 4,000 grammar schools in Spain, turning out far more educated, or semi-educated, students and graduates than could ever hope to find employment in the professions. During the sixteenth century there had been a continuous foundation of universities and colleges – twenty-one new universities since 1516, and eighteen new colleges at Salamanca alone. Since the number of applicants for places in the administration far exceeded the number of places available, it became increasingly necessary for colleges to look after their own. Those in the best position to do this were the famous Colegios Mayores, like the four at Salamanca – élite establishments which had virtually acquired the status of independent repub-lics within the universities. The Colegios Mayores, which had originally been intended for the aristocracy of talent, had provided Spain with many of its most distinguished scholars, clerics, and administrators: the Colegios Mayor of Cuenca at Salamanca, for example, produced over the space of fifty years six cardinals, twenty archbishops, and eight viceroys. But in the course of time poverty no longer became a necessary condition for entry, and standards slipped. The position of the Colegios Mayores was, however, impregnable. Their practice was to maintain at Court former pupils known as hacedores – men of rank and influence who would back members of their own colleges for official posts, on the understanding that the colleges would in return reserve places for their own friends and relatives. If no satisfactory position were available at the time, favoured students were installed by the colleges in special hostels, where they could pass the years – sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty – in great comfort, waiting for a desirable post to fall vacant.

  Influence, favour, recommendation, were therefore essential passports. The more talented graduates had little hope of employment unless they could find an influential patron, and consequently a great army of students joined the ranks of the unemployed. Yet a degree conferred at least some status, and there was always the possibility of a lucky break: ‘A man studies and studies, and then with favour and good luck he'll find himself with a staff in his hand or a mitre on his head when he least expects it.’12 Everything, then, conspired to attract the population to the economically unproductive occupations in society. There was always the chance of a sudden piece of good fortune to end the long years of waiting; and anyhow, what alternative was there? ‘The number of religious, and clergy, and students, has doubled,’ it was said in 1620, ‘because they have no other means of living or maintaining themselves.’ In fact, if Church, Court, and bureaucracy absorbed an excessive proportion of the potentially productive part of the population of Castile, this was not only because of their own innate attractiveness to a society which tended to despise the more menial occupations, but also because they offered almost the only prospect of remunerative employment in an underdeveloped economy.

  Most of the arbitristas recommended the reduction of schools and convents and the clearing of the Court as the solution to the problem. Yet this was really to mistake the symptoms for the cause. González de Cellorigo was almost alone in appreciating that the fundamental problem lay not so much in heavy spending by Crown and upper classes – since this spending itself created a valuable demand for goods and services – as in the disproportion between expenditure and investment. ‘Money is not true wealth,’ he wrote, and his concern was to increase the national wealth by increasing the nation's productive capacity rather than its stock of precious metals. This could only be achieved by investing more money in agricultural and industrial development. At present, surplus wealth was being unproductively invested – ‘dissipated on thin air – on papers, contracts, censos, and letters of exchange, on cash, and silver, and gold – instead of being expended on things that yield profits and attract riches from outside to augment the riches within. And thus there is no money, gold, or silver in Spain because there is so much; and it is not rich, because of all its riches….’

  The assumptions of González de Cellorigo about the way in which wealth was being used, or misused, find some confirmation in an inventory of the possessions of a wealthy royal official, Don Alonso Ramirez de Prado, a member of the Council of Castile arrested for corrupt practices in 1607. Besides his house, which he had bought from the Duke of Alba for 44,000 ducats, he possessed the following (figures being given in escudos, which consisted at this moment of 400 maravedís, against 375 maravedís to the ducat):

  Escudos

  Silverware

  40,000

  Jewellery

  40,000

  Tapestries and hangings

  90,000

  Letters of exchange

  100,000

  Juros (in the name of himself and others)

  470,000

  Real esta
te

  500,000

  1,240,000

  Such an inventory gives force to González's constant insistence on the urgent necessity of redeeming juros and reducing the enormous burden on Castile of the Crown's debts, which lured away surplus wealth into unproductive channels.

  The Castile of González de Cellorigo was thus a society in which both money and labour were misapplied; an unbalanced, top-heavy society, in which, according to González, there were thirty parasites for every one man who did an honest day's work; a society with a false sense of values, which mistook the shadow for substance, and substance for the shadow. That this society should also have produced a brilliant civilization, as rich in cultural achievement as it was poor in economic achievement, was no more than one among its many paradoxes. For the age of a copper coinage was the golden age of Spain.

  The country's social and economic organization was by no means unfavourable to artists and writers. Among the upper classes of society there was money with which to assist them, and leisure to enjoy their works. Many nobles prided themselves on their patronage of the arts: the Counts of Gondomar and Olivares built up great libraries; the palaces of the Count of Monterrey and the Marquis of Leganés were famed for their picture galleries. The possibilities of building up collections were greatly enhanced by the frequency of auctions in Madrid, which enabled a connoisseur like Don Juan de Espina to gather together a remarkable collection of curiosities and works of art from the sales of great houses. Espina himself was an eccentric and something of a recluse, but among the upper classes of Madrid many kept open house for poets and painters.