Castilla - History Lab

Original treaty concluded between the Catholic Monarchs and John II of Portugal on the limits of territories

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:32:42 +0000

Castile and Portugal engaged in long territorial disputes during the Modern Age over the control and administration of overseas territories. This confrontation came to an end in 1494 with the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas, which established an imaginary dividing line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands between the overseas dominions of each.

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Cadastre of the Ensenada

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:32:42 +0000

Between 1750 and 1754 all the towns in “las Castillas” were subjected to an interrogation consisting of the following 40 questions: Name of the town (question 1); jurisdiction (2); extension and limits (3); types of land (4, 5); trees (6, 7, 8 and 13); measures of surface and capacity used (9, 10); species, quantity and value of fruits (11, 12, 14 and 16); tithes and first fruits (15); mines, salt mines, mills and other “artefacts” (17); livestock (18, 19 and 20); census of population, with neighbours, labourers, solemnly poor (21, 35 and 36), census of clerics (38) and convents (39); houses and other buildings (22); goods belonging to the commons (23), sisas and arbitrios (24), expenses of the commons, such as salaries, festivals, paving, fountains (25), taxes (26 and 27); industrial and commercial activities, with the utility of the goods or services produced: taverns, inns, shops, bakeries, butchers, bridges, boats on rivers, markets and fairs (29), hospitals (30), money changers and merchants (31), shopkeepers, doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, notaries, muleteers etc. (32); masons, stonemasons, masons, stonemasons, blacksmiths, cobblers etc. (33, 34); ships (37); alienated goods (28) and the King’s own revenues (40); the answers to these questions are obtained following a previously regulated process. This panoramic view of the Kingdom is a small part of a larger survey, the so-called Cadastre of the Marquis de la Ensenada, set in motion by Royal Decree of Ferdinand VI on 10 October 1749, as a preliminary step to fiscal reform, replacing the complicated and unjust provincial revenues with a single tax, the so-called Contribution. The Single Tax was never implemented, but it has left an important volume of documentation in our archives, the General Answers are kept in various State Archives. The General Archive of Simancas holds the complete certified copy of the replies of the 13,000 localities of the Crown of Castile. Preservation reasons led to the initiation of the microfilming process. In the 1980s, the 545 books of General Answers kept in Simancas were microfilmed. The frequent consultation of these collections and the need to facilitate access made digitisation advisable, which was carried out by the Document Reproduction Service (SRDAE) from microfilm during 2004 and 2005. The result is 350,000 images of documents with very neat calligraphic handwriting, easy to read and with hardly any abbreviations; very few pages have legibility problems, such as faded inks or ink transfer from the back. These images are now available on this page.

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Navarrese lay lordships with jurisdiction in the second half of the 15th century

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:32:25 +0000

At the beginning of the Modern Age, the different Hispanic kings, in their search for support, gradually ceded part of their jurisdiction to the nobility, but during the second half of the 15th century, the towns tried to take advantage of the wars between the Agramonteses and the Beaumonteses to gain the support of the monarchs. The intention of the towns, which did not resign themselves to losing their royal status, was to free themselves from seignorial jurisdiction, a fact that was maintained throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.
Navarre also underwent this process of cession of royal patrimony, with the high nobility receiving noble titles accompanied by extensive lordships with their corresponding rents and jurisdiction. Moreover, they tried to usurp these rights when circumstances were favourable to them.
This situation continued in Navarre until the 17th century, with the recovery of territories by the Crown interceding with new alienations in the search for resources for a royal treasury in crisis.

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Epidemics of plague in Spain: 16th and 17th centuries

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:32:12 +0000

The plague epidemic had an early manifestation in Spain. There is evidence of outbreaks of plague along the Mediterranean strip of the peninsula as early as the 6th-8th centuries. During the 14th century, the Black Death appeared in Europe, an epidemic which, interspersed with others such as influenza and typhus, reappeared in the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1596 the plague reached the peninsula via Santander, a port area. It spread virulently through the territories of Extremadura and the two Castiles, especially the area around Madrid. The Cantabrian coast and Andalusia were also affected, as well as the area between Alicante and Valencia. It was in the latter city that another plague epidemic broke out years later, in 1647. From Valencia it spread to the northern part of the Crown of Aragon: Catalonia and the Aragonese territories themselves were affected. Andalusia was also hit again, with the city of Seville suffering significant human losses, where it is estimated that 45% of the population died. It was in Seville that another epidemic appeared in 1676. With no time to recover, cities such as Seville, Cordoba, Malaga, Cadiz and Jaen were the protagonists of the horror. They were joined by Cartagena, in the Kingdom of Murcia. These were the last large-scale epidemics to occur in the peninsular territories of the Hispanic Monarchy. Once the epidemic, demographic and food crises of the 17th century were overcome, the 18th century ushered in a period of generalised growth.

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Revolt of the Comuneros of Castile

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:30:33 +0000

The War of the Communities of Castile, or the Revolt of the Comuneros, took place during the reign of Charles I, between 1520 and 1522. It was an armed uprising led by the so-called “comuneros” from the inland cities of Castile, with Toledo and Valladolid at the head of the uprising. This uprising has been interpreted in different ways, as an anti-seigneurial revolt, as one of the first bourgeois revolutions, or even as an anti-fiscal movement. It was motivated by the political instability present in the Crown of Castile from the beginning of the 16th century. The arrival of Charles I in Castile around 1517, barely knowing how to speak Castilian and bringing with him a large number of Flemish nobles and clerics as his court, provoked misgivings among the Castilian elites, who felt a certain displacement and feared the loss of their power and status. This discontent was transmitted to the popular strata. This was compounded by tax demands that provoked a series of urban revolts. After a year of rebellion, the communist leaders Padilla, Bravo and Maldonado were beheaded in 1521, and the communist army fell into disarray. Toledo maintained its rebellion until 1522. In some territories such as Andalusia, for example, the uprising had little impact, as the cities were dominated by the nobility and remained loyal to the king. Only Jaén, Baeza and Úbeda supported the rebellion until 1521. The image is a photograph of the work by Antonio Gisbert Pérez, “Ejecución de los Comuneros de Castilla” (“Execution of the Comuneros de Castilla”), kept in the Palacio de las Cortes in Madrid, which was photographed by Juan Laurent y Minier in 1871 for the National Exhibition of that year. It depicts the execution of the Comuneros Juan de Padilla, Juan Bravo and Francisco Maldonado on 24 April 1521 at Villalar.

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Payment of the guards in Castile (1523-1524)

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:30:03 +0000

From the end of the medieval period, the power accumulated by the monarch allowed him to create a series of armies that were far removed from institutional channels but always loyal to his orders. These troops were loyal to the monarch, but they also required an extra cost to sustain themselves, which in practice materialised in an increase in the tax burden on the population, in an attempt to balance the always complex balance between monetary income and expenditure.
For the Castilian Hispanic Monarchy, this particular army was the guards of Castile, paid for thanks to the role of international banking and the extraordinary rents obtained by the crown. From the end of the 15th century, the army was essentially paid through obligados, people who advanced a large sum of money in exchange for a continuous salary, until the amount was paid off. This financial tool was of great use to the crown, but at the same time it meant that credit had to be kept in constant movement. Thanks to the resource, we can see the monthly fluctuation in the king’s liquidity, and therefore, of credit in Castile. The figures are more or less stable, but suffer large ups and downs in the central summer months and from September to November.

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Revenues of the Holy Brotherhood between 1478 and 1498

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:29:48 +0000

Shortly after the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella to the Castilian throne in 1474, a process of restructuring and reform of the institutional structures of the State began, especially those dedicated to taxation and tax practice in order to cope with the new expenses that the crown would have to bear. The Royal Treasury had to face these circumstances by creating and establishing the “extraordinary” revenue as an additional tax category.
The establishment of the General Brotherhood in 1476 was justified as a means of restoring peace throughout the kingdom, but the intention of creating an army under the direct authority of the throne without putting too much strain on the weak Royal Treasury, which was in the process of reconstruction, could not be concealed for long.
This movement was prompted by the need for large sums of money in a short space of time, as a result of pressing needs such as the war in Granada at the end of the 15th century or the wars in Naples between 1494 and 1504. Revenues, therefore, were calculated in accordance with expected expenditure and not the other way round, denying the redistributive nature of the taxation practice that has presided over most tax systems.
The key to understanding the extraordinary revenues of the crown were the loans, understood at this time as the issuing of a small debt in exchange for financing. Since it was not considered as just another tax on the population, all subjects were eligible to pay loans without being limited by the directives of the General Brotherhood.

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Servants and the average age of women at marriage in the Crown of Castile in 1787

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:29:36 +0000

The graph shows that among men there was no direct connection between access to marriage and the abandonment of servant work. The three provinces with the highest number of servants (Madrid without the capital, Toledo and Albacete) show how the age of access to marriage is among the lowest in Castile, only surpassed by Ciudad Real, Extremadura, Andalusia and Murcia. The latter had the lowest percentage of servants; a fact that put it in line with the central and northern regions of the peninsula. Of all of them, Galicia, Asturias, León and Burgos stood out for having few servants and a high rate of marriage access (over 24 years of age). The demography, socio-economic structure and life cycles are reflected and differentiated geographically in this graph.

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Evolution of the population of Palma de Mallorca (1478-1746)

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:29:36 +0000

Demographic changes and population trends show a clear tendency towards a general increase in population during the Modern Age. This process can be divided into 3 phases, one of stagnation (1478-1573), another of increase with respect to the beginning of modernity (1573-1600), and finally the maintenance phase with cycles of ups and downs caused by subsistence, climatic and epidemiological crises (1600-1746). The dynamics of Palma de Mallorca were in tune with those of the island. It is calculated that the population of Palma was, in 1503, 30% of the total; a figure that was maintained with small variations during the 16th and 17th centuries (in 1695 it fell to 24% of the total). Consequently, the Mallorcan rural environment was very important, so much so that the population density of the island was among the highest in the Crown of Aragon and Castile at the end of the 16th century.

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The age of marriage of women in 18th century Spain. A regional overview

ad_hlab_min — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 16:29:36 +0000

In 18th century Spain, women married on average at the age of 23 and men at the age of 25, as corroborated by the Floridablanca Census of 1787. These ages are lower than in Europe, where it was common for women to marry between 25 and 28 and men between 27 and 30. Even so, however, there was a tendency for first marriages to be later than in previous centuries. This trend, however, was not uniform, but seems to have followed a south/north-northwest upward direction, which confirms the existence of an unequal regional reality that we cannot fail to point out. According to Pérez Moreda (1988), in 1787 the first marriages of women in Extremadura were at 21.9 years of age, those in Andalusia at 22.3; those in Valencia at 22.7; those in Castilla La Nueva at 23.4; Castilla la Vieja, 23.7; León, 24.2; Galicia 25.3 and the Basque Country 26.1. Uneven behaviour for which it is not easy to find unicausal explanations. Rather, it is necessary to take into account a variety of factors that to a greater or lesser extent influence marital behaviour: living conditions, work possibilities, economic opportunities, the existence of complementary activities and levels of pluriactivity, the weight of migratory movements, the form of access to resources -and especially to the exploitation of land-, inheritance law, custom, inheritance practices, cultural aspects linked to the medieval past, the logic of family systems, social differences, marital strategies and other mechanisms of social reproduction.

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The post The age of marriage of women in 18th century Spain. A regional overview first appeared on History Lab.