Iberian world empires and the globalization of Europe 1415-1668

ibe rian w orl d emp ires and the g l obaliz a tion of eur ope 1 4 1 5 – 1 6 6 8 Bart olomé Y un-C asalil la Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global Histor y Series Editors ManuelPerezGar cia Shanghai Jiao T ong University Shanghai,China LucioDeSousa T okyo University of Foreign Studies T okyo,Japan This series proposes a new geography of Global Histor y research using Asian and W ester n sources, welcoming quality resear ch and engaging outstanding scholarship from China, Eur ope and the Americas. Promoting academic excellence and critical intellectual analysis, it of fers a rich source of global histor y r esearch in sub-continental areas of Eur ope, Asia (notably China, Japan and the Philippines) and the Americas and aims to help understand the divergences and convergences between East and W est. Advisor y Board: Patrick O’Brien (London School of Economics) Anne McCants (Massachusetts Institute of T echnology) Joe McDermott (University of Cambridge) Pat Manning (Pittsburgh University) Mihoko Oka (University of T okyo) Richard V on Glahn (University of California, Los Angeles) Bar tolomé Y un-Casalilla (Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla) Shiger u Akita (Osaka University) François Gipouloux (CNRS/FMSH) Carlos Marichal (Colegio de Mexico) Leonard Blusse (Leiden University) Antonio Ibarra Romer o (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, UNAM) Giorgio Riello (University of W ar wick) Nakajima Gakusho (Kyushu University) Liu Beicheng (T singhua University) Li Qingxin (Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences) Dennis O. Flynn (University of the Pacific) J. B. Owens (Idaho State University) More infor mation about this series at http://www .palgrave.com/gp/series/15711 Bar toloméY un-Casalilla Iberian W orld Empir es and the Globalization of Eur ope 1415–1668 Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global Histor y ISBN 978-981-13-0832-1 ISBN 978-981-13-0833-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0833-8 Librar y of Congress Control Number: 2018953325 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Cr eative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://cr eativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or for mat, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the sour ce, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. 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The registered company addr ess is: 152 Beach Road, #21- 01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Bar toloméY un-Casalilla Pablo de Olavide University Sevilla, Spain The Open Access publication of this book has been financially suppor ted by GECEM (‘ Global Encounters between China and Europe: T rade Networks, Consumption and Cultural Exchanges in Macau and Marseille, 1680–1840 ’ http://www .gecem.eu ), a pr oject funded by the European Research Council-Star ting Grant, r ef. 679371 (under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme) and of which the Principal Investigator is Professor Manuel Perez-Gar cia. vii “In this impor tant and ambitious book, based on the command of a massive literature and illuminated by shafts of insight, Bar tolomé Y un-Casalilla challenges the stereotype of early moder n Spain as a society incapable of responding to the demands of an increasingly globalized world. Using a comparative appr oach that embraces other European states of the period, he explor es to striking ef fect what the joint Spanish-Por tuguese possession of Europe’s first global empir e meant to the peoples of the Iberian peninsula.” —Sir John Elliott, Regius Professor Emeritus, Oxford University, UK “This book is seminal. It provides the facts and the histor y r equired to rescue the histories of state formation, institutional development and imperial expansion in Iberia from the condescension displayed by neo-liberal economists and historians to the contributions of Southern Eur ope to the early modern pr eparations and pre - conditions for early breakthr ough in the Nor th to industrial market economies.” —Patrick Karl O’Brien, FBA Emeritus of Oxford and London Universities, UK “A comparison that seemed obvious but that only now begins to be seriously made. Beyond similarities that seemed probable and imaginaries about mythic dif ferences, the first two great Eur opean political spaces (the Iberian empires) of the early mod - ern era ar e here studied in their complexity and multileveled interconnections.” —António Manuel Hespanha, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Por tugal “While the early modern histor y globalization has substantially progressed in recent years, ther e has been a surprising tendency to keep the Iberian Empires on the peripher y . This new work by Bar tolomé Y un-Casalilla corr ects this view and puts them back in the center . His thesis is that both Spain and Por tugal con- str ucted the first world-wide empires and hence wer e fundamental actors in the political, militar y and economic foundations of early globalization.” —Carlos Marichal, El Colegio de México, Mexico Praise for Iberian W orld Empir es and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668 ix A cknowledgements This book is a result of several years of work into and r eflection upon Iberian societies in general and Castilian society in par ticular . 1 It began as an English translation of a study published in Spanish (Y un 2004) and took on a life of its own, expanding to of fer new perspectives and to engage in debates with a broader literature, in par ticular in regar d to the phenomenon of globalization. It is aimed at both specialists in the Iberian worlds and the general reading public and of fers a general discussion and a critical perspective on these fields of study . It attempts to pr ovide a basic narrative account of backgr ound events. A long list of thanks is requir ed for those with whom I have worked and collaborated, but here I can only mention Sir John Elliott, A. M. Hespanha, Carlos Marichal, P . O’Brien, H. V an der W ee, B. Aram, O.Svriz W uchener , I.Pér ez T ostado, L. M. Córdoba Ochoa, S.Ser rano, M.Fabián Figueroa, A. Romano, L.Molá, J.Flor es (who also read some par ts of this work), I. A. A. Thompson, M. Soar es Da Cunha, N. Monteiro, 1 This work has been financed by the project ‘Nuevos pr oductos atlánticos, ciencia, guerra, economía y consumo en el Antiguo Régimen’ (P09-HUM 5330) and by ‘Globalización Ibérica: redes entre Asia y Eur opa y los cambios en las pautas de consumo en Latinoamérica’ (HAR2014-53797-P), which is included in the activities of the P AIDI research group HUM 1000 “Historia de la Globalización: violencia, negociación e interculturalidad” of which the PI is Igor Pérez T ostado. I have also received the financial suppor t of the ERC Star ting Grant GECEM (‘Global Encounters between China and Europe: T rade Networks, Consumption and Cultural Exchanges in Macau and Marseille, 1680–1840’). Principal investigator Manuel Pérez García. x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS P .Cardim, L. Ribot, R.Grafe, J.P . Dedieu, and J.Owens (these last four made some excellent criticisms of my book Mar te contra Miner va ), and F .Ramos and M.Diaz Ordóñez and M. J. Milán (to whom I am grateful for their help with the maps and graphs). I must thank my magnificent doctoral and post-doctoral students at the European University Institute in Florence (and the institution itself), among whom I should mention J. L. Gasch, A. García Montón, B. Lindor fer , I. Sosa, I. Pugliese, I. Fattacciu, M. Pérez Gar cía, B. Fernández de Castro, H. Silva, J. Gouveia, G. Almeida Borges, J. M. Escribano (who helped with the bibliography and footnotes), and I. López Mar tín (who helped with the maps on urban Europe). Mention should also be made of Phillip W illiams, patient trans - lator , with whom I have discussed some of the themes mentioned close to his field of study . And ver y special thanks is deser ved again by B. Aram, who made a revision of the style of this book, helped with its editing, and advised on par ticular aspects of its content. This book is dedicated to Angeles. Thanks a lot for the happy decades together . xix Graph 2.1 Sugar and pepper prices in regard the prices index in Castile 79 Graph 4.1 Crown’s r evenues in England, France, Holland, and Castile, 1500–1701 (curr ent English pounds. Index: 1581–90=100) 164 Graph 4.2 Interest rates of the public debts in Nor ther n and Southern Europe, 1450–1800. ( a ) England, France, the Netherlands, and Austria. ( b ) Bologna, Florence, and V enice. ( c ) Milan, Naples, and Castile 170 Graph 5.1 Convents founded in Spain, 1474–1799 231 Graph 5.2 Convents founded in Spain by the main aristocratic families 231 Graph 7.1 Ships arriving fr om Asia to Lisbon and Holland 362 Graph 7.2 Guilder/Real ratio in gold and silver 366 Graph 7.3 The distribution of the Spanish Crown American income 368 Graph 8.1 The demographic crisis—and recession—of the cities of the Duero V alley and the expansion of Madrid 421 Graph 8.2 Interior and peripher y in Spain: baptisms in r ural areas, 1585–1800 430 l ist of g rAphs xxi T able 3.1 Demographic gr owth in sixteenth-centur y Iberia 106 T able 3.2 Demographic gr owth in sixteenth-centur y Europe 119 T able 3.3 Urban population in W estern Eur ope 123 T able 3.4 Urban population in Por tugal, c. 1530 137 T able 4.1 Charles V’s incomes in dif ferent ter ritories of the Habsburg composite monarchy 163 T able 7.1 The distribution of the American Income (Spain) 369 l ist of t Ables xxiii Over the last few years, the histor y of empir es has undergone something of a renaissance. This is due in par t to the new interest in global histor y and the privileged status it has acquired in academic cir cles. This volume tries to explore the r elations between globalization and empires, two developments or phenomena that are often considered complementar y but should not be confused. In recent years, economic historians have enter ed into debate about the degree of globalization prior to the late nineteenth centur y . For Williamson and O’Rourke, the late 1800s saw the beginning of this process, with an identifiable tendency towards the convergence of economic variables, especially prices. 1 Discussion has tended to turn on the use of ter ms such as hard or soft globalization, primitive globalization, the first globaliza- tion, and so on. These are debates of gr eat interest. 2 But a few preliminar y obser vations ar e needed. The first is that I find the definition of Flynn and Giráldez (also evident in Williamson and O’Rourke) to be somewhat restrictive, as they pr opose that the economic historian must define global- ization primarily from the perspective of the ‘exchange’ of ‘pr oducts’ and ‘its long-lasting impact’ ‘on all trading par tners’ (2002). While I agr ee with many of their statements about the impor tance of silver in this pr o- cess, I have tried to demonstrate that although the economies of the 1 See, among others, O’Rourke and W illiamson (2002, 2005). 2 In addition to the works of W illiamson and his collaborators, see Jan De Vries (2003, 2010, 2011). i ntroduction xxiv INTRODUCTION sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not meet these criteria—as Williamson and O’Rourke argue—those economies did cr eate connec- tions that would be decisive for the political economies and the constr uc- tion of the state and, in this way , the allocation of resources in Eur ope and its colonies. My approach also star ts from the conviction that global his- tor y is not only impor tant because of what it tells us about non- European worlds but also because it of fers us a dif ferent perspective and overall con- text for Europe itself, and may even allow us to r einterpret it in light of the new vantage points thus acquired. Indeed, this may be its most impor tant contribution (Y un 2007). These two presuppositions are the basis of the book, which attempts to employ them in a concrete for m to understand the internal histor y of Spain and Por tugal, drawing comparisons between them and other countries and exploring the way in which globalizing forces conditioned r elations with other areas of Europe. For this r eason, the debate is not always focused on the histor y of mercantile r elations or the classic literature on ‘world economies’ of W allenstein but also on some of the classics of the new institutional economics, such as Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson. Another of the purposes of this book is to use this perspective to approach the histor y of empires and the processes of state building in Iberia, using the concepts of monarchies and composite states. 3 It also attempts to challenge some stereotypes and views that, although anachr o- nistic, have resulted in a highly negative understanding of Iberian societ- ies. T o the extent that it looks at pr oblems of statecraft, a basic purpose of this book is to analyse the ef fects of war on society . This aspect of Mar te contra Miner va (Y un 2004) which was largely ignored by its r eaders is vital in understanding the pacts between elites and central power and the forms of organizing coercion and its ef fects on society . Empires and the political for mations of this period cannot be understood, however , by a study focusing exclusively on what we could call formal institu - tions. Above all, an analysis of informal institutions—and personal r ules—is requir ed, something which is not present in the studies of D.Nor th and his co-authors but which remains essential fr om our point of view: the family , the extended lineage of family and the kinship relations it entailed, patr onage and friendships, recipr ocity , pr estige, and so on. An analysis of these informal institutions is vital not only to understand political organizations and their dynamics but also the political economies of the time and the forms of 3 Some ideas in Yun (1998). xxv INTRODUCTION resour ces allocation. 4 It may , of course, be dif ficult to distinguish between formal and infor mal institutions (Grafe 2012). This is even more the case when we deal with Old Regime societies in which the separation between the public and the private is not clear and in which institutions such as the family are ver y regulated by the law . The exercise is, however , without doubt of considerable heuristic value. This study will tr y to set out the inter nal dynamic of elites, in which recipr ocity and conflict were two sides of the same coin and vital to any understanding of political dynamics as well as economic and ter - ritorial expansion, including the establishment and nature of empir es. Also the relations between the dif ferent local and r egional elites and the central power of the state is also constitutes a central par t of my arguments. Another cr ucial argument is that these informal institutions developed in contexts of great political and jurisdictional fragmentation, which cr eated enormous competition for resour ces. From this perspective, it becomes essential to dis - cuss how the institutional framework af fected the allocation of pr oductive factors and economic growth or r ecession. The conclusion is paradoxical, because although this institutional framework explains some of the most negative aspects of the economic behaviour of these societies, it is obvious that the final ef fect of these (supposedly) inef ficient institutions (inef ficient, i.e. from the perspective of the new institutional economics) could ver y well be economic growth of a notable scale within the parameters of pr e-industrial societies. Such was the case when the available resour ces and the ecosystems in which they were inser ted acted positively . And this may be tr ue not only for territories in Eur ope but also for the colonies. From a heuristic and methodological point of view , a study of the sor t under taken her e has obvious roots. Comparative histor y and what is some - what unfor tunately called ‘transnational histor y’ are undoubtedly among the creditors. 5 While the work of authors such as D. Nor th appears continually as a point of discussion, this is only possible in the context of a critical use of their own concepts and ideas. Bourdieu’s theor y of capital reconversion has been useful to the extent that it allows us to link economic and political fac - tors and explains the decision-making process of historical agents in general and of elites in par ticular (Y un 2011). And I have also found inspiration in the theor y of organizations of H.Simon and others (Y un 2011). 4 A good number of studies of political economies have focused only on mercantile institu- tions, the state, the judicial system, and the consulates. See, for example, the innovative book by Hough and Grier (2015). 5 My theor etical approach in Y un (2007, 2014a). xxvi INTRODUCTION I have adopted a narrative str ucture in order to pr ovide the reader new to this area with the basic facts upon which my conclusions ar e based. I have also included conclusions from chapters and papers published elsewhere and focused on r elated phenomena. This is done in the hope that they broaden perspectives and tie in with impor tant and ongoing debates but do not requir e a lengthy narrative description of these parallel processes and for ces. I am aware that this nar rative strategy can give place to some repetitions, but I also want to think that in many cases this is good for those readers who pr efer to read only par ticular chapters of the vol- ume. Lastly , this study approaches the life of the two empires fr om a top- down perspective, but there is a complementar y perspective still to adopt by looking at the empires fr om below and by analysing how the dif ferent local societies established some of the limits for the elites’ negotiations. Arguments are always based on choices, and I had to make mine. I do really hope that fur ther resear ch will address the problem fr om this other perspective and illuminate many aspects that are less explicit her e. In or around 1450, Eur ope began to emerge from the ashes of the crisis of the four teenth centur y . This recover y would be the r esult of a series of internal for ces, the role of the institutions being perhaps the most signifi- cant of them. The process, mor eover , would entail a fundamental qualita- tive leap for war d in the long process of globalization, by which the dif fer ent regions of the planet would come to be tied together by ever tighter bonds. In light of this growth, an overly pessimistic and anachr onistic vision of the Iberian economies has prevailed. This view underlined their ar chaic character and held that they were bar ely expansive. Such an interpretation is hardly surprising when many historians have worked backwards, influenced by ver y negative visions of the Iberian countries and their empires pr evalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover , many scholars have subscribed to a simplistic idea of empires as a sour ce of growth, and the r esult was—and is—a perception of the Iberian empires as historical anomalies (Y un 2010). Some scholars, for example, wrote of the for mation of a semi-periph - eral economy , whose function was simply to constr uct a bridge for the transfer of primar y materials fr om America to Europe, with manufactured products flowing back in the opposite dir ection (W allerstein 1979; Frank 1978). A few years ago, it was even normal to think that America’s riches had been bestowed upon a countr y lacking the technical and institutional means necessar y to face the challenge of the New W orld, Castile being the domain of warriors and priests and ther efore unable to take advantage of P AR T I The Iberian Grounds of the Early Moder n Globalization of Europe 2 THE IBERIAN GROUNDS OF THE EARLY MODERN GLOBALIZA TION OF EUROPE this gift from Pr ovidence. Spain, in other words, was not qualified to build a more dynamic economy capable of suppor ting the development of capi - talism. Other scholars described the Spanish economy of this period as one unable to generate development and even growth (Cipolla 1976, p. 233; Kamen 1978, p. 25). Others, E. Hamilton pr ominent among them, considered that the flood of pr ecious metals out of America caused ravages in the Spanish economy: it raised salaries—and, therefore, the costs of production—thus pushing back industrial investment, at the same time that it increased the price of Spanish manufactur es, thus lowering their competitiveness in relation to those of other countries (Hamilton 1934, Spanish translation 1975). Even Keynes liked this opinion and made it his own (Keynes 1936). As perhaps had to be the case, some his - torians have seen this as evidence of the Spanish and Por tuguese way of life—specifically , their alleged dedication to the culture of honour , disap - proval of manual work, and even lack of entr epreneurial spirit—and argued that these cultural norms hinder ed a genuine long-term economic development. 1 For Pierr e Vilar the Spanish empir e embodied ‘the supe - rior phase of feudalism’, one that necessarily led to a profound and endur - ing decadence (Vilar 1974). W orking fr om the theories of Max W eber on the role of the Pr otestant ethic as a motor of capitalism, D. Landes has written of Spain’s self-imposed intellectual isolation and its adherence to a form of Catholic intolerance that would have abor ted any process of technical and economic developments (Landes 1998). This vision dove - tails with the view of the Iberian economies as being subject to an iron law of decreasing agrarian r eturns due to the far ming of increasingly poor soils and the inevitable contradiction that had to emerge with evidence of demographic growth and the development of cities (Braudel 1976; Anes 1994). More r ecently Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson have applied the ideas of the new institutional economy , already tested by Douglas Nor th, to illustrate the supposedly predator y character of Spanish abso - lutism and underline the weakness of proper ty rights and the lack of posi - tive institutions. These features, they postulate, cr eated high transaction 1 This idea was pr esent in the work of Sánchez Albornoz, in which the war rior condition of the Spanish in the Middle Ages was a ‘psychosis’ which was inherently inimical to the development of manual and commercial activities. His phrase ‘neither feudalism nor bour - geoisie’ neatly encapsulates many of these ideas (1976, vol. I, pp. 678–703). Echoes of Sánchez Albornoz’s idea could be still noticed—albeit phrased mor e elegantly—in the work of leading historians such as Bennassar (1976). 3 THE IBERIAN GROUNDS OF THE EARLY MODERN GLOBALIZA TION OF EUROPE costs and heightened levels of risk, both of which were ver y negative for economic development (Acemoglu etal. 2005). Visions of this sor t have led to exaggerations that recent r esearch has either entirely dismissed or , at the ver y least, nuanced. Indeed, some of the above theories would be unacceptable today . This section pr oposes to revise many of these ar eas. It will focus on an analysis of the institutions and political systems that emerged from the crisis of the four teenth cen - tur y . T o this end it aims to set out the most impor tant of the dynamic forces in the development of feudal society , with special refer ence to the situation in the Iberian Peninsula (Chap. 1 ). In addition, an analysis of this sor t requir es us to consider the context of globalization, empire, and growth during the sixteenth centur y , thus pr oviding a critical over view of a few of the old ideas and stereotypes (Chap. 2 ). This will also set out a new characterization of economic growth in the sixteenth centur y (Chap. 3 ). The basic thesis is that medieval societies were subject to an inter nal dynamic within their elites that obliged them to search for ever -gr eater resour ces. These tensions were the basis of the political instability of the fifteenth centur y; they would shape the transaction for mulas at the hear t of the dominant coalition 2 composed by the dif fer ent elites and would result in the ver y dif ferent political systems that emerged in the Iberian Peninsula. 2 I use the expression in the same way as Nor th et al. (2009). Such a term does not mean here a complete political agreement among the elites but rather as a sor t of pact that is not exempt of internal tensions, on the bases and general str uctures of the epoch’s society (see Chap. 4 ). 5 © The Author(s) 2019 B. Y un-Casalilla, Iberian W orld Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668 , Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global Histor y , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0833-8_1 CHAPTER 1 Global Context andtheRise ofEurope: Iberia andtheAtlantic Historians remain convinced of the impor tance of the changes that occurr ed in the European economies between 1450 and 1550. Whether these processes ar e seen as the result of a par tnership with Asia or as the beginning of the European miracle, the scale of the transfor mation is undeniable. It would af fect the entir e planet (Jones 1981). Changes such as these were the r esult of the convergence of global forces, manifested above all in the development of a technology that made possible the oce- anic discoveries and overseas expansion. But, fundamentally , they wer e the outcome of internal transfor mations that took place in the institutions that regulated social life, in the str uctur e of landlords’ rents, pr oper ty rights, and political systems. The coincidence of these two processes unleashed a series of unexpected oppor tunities. G lobal l inks and i nterna tional e xchanGes in e urope and  the i berian p eninsula The Global For ces andthePor tuguese Atlantic Expansion Ever since Marco Polo’s famous voyages to China, the Italian city-states, and above all V enice and Genoa, had initiated a series of contacts with Asia whose ef fects in Eur ope were immediately felt (Fernández-Ar mesto 2006). T rade in silks, spices, and other products characterized by their 12 the propor tion of children per family r ose from 1:1 in 1350–1410 to 1:4in 1440–1510 (Neveux et al. 1975, p.140). Are we facing a situation of lower seigniorial pr essure upon agrarian activities leading to an improving standar d of living for the peasantr y , as set out by G. Bois many years ago (1976)? It is probable that a change along these lines did occur in many areas. But the factors behind this situation were mor e complex than the French historian allowed. In addition to the burden of the r ents and seigniorial taxes, the peasantr y also faced new demands made by the monarchy , whose fiscal system was increasingly developed and ef fective in many r egions. Moreover , landlords’ incomes were also subject to a logic of extensive incr ease because of the foundation of new estates, which meant that the pressur e fell on an increasing number of peasant families. And yet, notwithstanding these obser vations, we might also consider a series of factors which Bois did not contemplate and which might even lead us to strengthen his overall interpr etation. The growth of seigniorial demands upon an ever -increasing number of vassals and peas - ants frequently af fected a r ural population that had been, until this point, free of seigniorial charges. Therefor e, these new extractions perhaps had fewer detrimental ef fects, at least in the shor t term. Fur ther more, if land - lords and r oyal tax collectors now demanded to be paid in coin, then this encouraged the commercialization of agrarian pr oducts by the peasantr y as a means of obtaining the cash needed to pay these new extractions. It must also have given impetus to the r ural manufactures and their commer cializa - tion as well as to the transpor t systems—especially the car ting sector . Additionally , there were many gr eat nobles who actively sought to attract trade fairs and weekly markets to their domains as a source of income and, therefor e, a means of sponsoring commercial and industrial activities. 6 In this context the opening up of the German silver mines provoked a ‘pre-r evolution’ of prices (Braudel and Spooner 1967). But, what could be the impor tance of a factor that af fected only a marginal aspect of the economy of the time, such as prices and the circulation of high-quality specie? In reality , the flow of money acted in the context of an incipient urban network that would be decisive in providing dynamism to cr ucial zones of overland trade, such as those of the imperial territories. Fr om this moment the Rhine ar ter y ser ved for the dif fusion of English and Flemish textiles into the markets of central Europe. The valley of the Rhone and 6 For Castile, see Lader o (1994) and Y un (1987). For England, Wilson (1959). B. YUN-CASALILLA 13 the fairs of L yon ser ved to unite Nor thern and Central Eur ope with the south of France and Catalonia, where Ger mans sought light dyes and saf- fron. The Central Eur opean region also developed, as Ger man industries (fabrics, copper , and iron) expanded into Silesia and Bohemia. This network gave rise to a system of fairs based upon centres such as L y o n, Nuremberg, Frankfur t, V ienna, or Krakow , which were also connected w it h the Brabant region, Castile, and Flanders (Pach 1968, pp. 310–1). Th e h ea r t of Eur ope was recovering thanks to this mor e fluid overland com - merce, and this energizing circuit was completed after the conclusion of the Hundred Y ears W ar (1453) and the pacification of Castile (1479), dragging in its wake goods such as Castilian wool, Ibizan salt, Biscayan iron, and the wines of Opor to. This trade br ought the Nor th Sea into closer contact with the Mediterranean (Childs 1978). Europe witnessed the bir th of a new model of economic expansion, one which had its roots in a closer linking of the peasant economies with the market; a broader spectr um of pr oductive activities; a more fluid and better - organized overland commerce, which was completed by the inter - linking of decisive circuits of maritime trade; and the overall advances in the sophistication and security of international commer ce as well as the mental apparatus and horizons of Europeans. This expansion cannot be explained by subordinate economic r elation- ships between the distinct regions. The Eur opean recover y appears in principle to be better explained by the model of poly-nuclear growth set out by H. V an der W ee (1990) or J. Israel (1990), than by a system of hierarchical r elations, as W allerstein suggested some time ago (1979). The Iberian Peninsula This broad tide had a dramatic impact upon the Iberian Peninsula, wher e growth was not delayed once the dif ferent for ces began to combine and reinfor ce a series of ar teries binding internal commer ce with the zones of the coastal areas. The Atlantic areas wer e, by now , exhibiting signs of incipient dyna- mism. In Andalusia, from the fifteenth centur y , the flow of Sudanese gold towards the coast of Nor th Africa had attracted the Genoese who, pushed for war d by their fierce rivalr y with the V enetians, had established themselves in Malaga, Cadiz, and, later , Seville. The presence of the Ottoman T urk in Asia Minor and the reduction of the production of sugar in Egypt left the market open to the Genoese, who expanded into Madeira and the Canar y Islands. On the coastal estates of Huelva’s local aristocrats GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 14 in southern Castile, nobles such as the Medinasidonia and Niebla gained access to abundant African fisheries and the wheat of the Maghreb. The Canaries, conquered by Castile, ser ved as a magnificent bridgehead from which to extend the cultivation of sugar cane (Fernández Ar mesto 1982, pp. 13–5). The abundance of available lands in the Guadalquivir V alley fed continual emigration from the nor th and advanced the formation of gr eat noble estates producing food cr ops for the swelling cities. But the Andalusian axis was nothing more than a par t of a line of expansion that had another pivot on the Por tuguese coasts and, mor e concretely , in Lisbon. In this way a tendency was carried out that led to a gr eater depen- dency upon Castile’s economy and society , and that would be the basis for Por tugal’s political neutrality (Thomaz 1994). Her e contacts with Africa and the Canar y Islands fed the slave trade, while the docks saw the ar rival of unprecedented quantities of wood, peppers, sugar , gold, wine, and other products coming not only fr om Africa but also now from the Madeira islands and the Azores (Disney 2009, vol. II, pp.84–93). Lisbon and Opor to wer e becoming the most dynamic par ts of the Por tuguese economy; the products that passed thr ough these hubs were found, in increasing numbers, in Antwerp (V an der W ee 1963). The Atlantic fr ont, r unning from Cadiz to Opor to, was establishing itself as more and mor e relevant to Eur opean patterns of trade. A key factor in all of this was the gold brought fr om the Sudan to Por tugal, which also fed trade with the nor th of Europe and was cr ucial for the str engthening of the Atlantic front of the Old W orld. Not only Por tugal but the whole Luso-Atlantic area would be now more closely linked to the nor th of Europe. This vitality was equally discernible in the str ength and vigour of the Cantabrian por ts, which ser ved as ar teries connecting the nor th of Europe with the interior dynamism of Castile and the Duero V alley . 7 Castilian mer - chants were favour ed by changes in the Flemish markets and by the pro - duction of new and lighter cloth of a high quality (V an der W ee 1988, pp. 329–36). This thriving commerce, r eflected in the foundation of the Universidad de Mercader es , a trade guild, and, in 1494, in the Consulado de Bur gos (Consulate of Burgos), would be accompanied by the development of maritime insurance and the expor t of wool, salt, wine and Basque ir on 7 On the connections with Britany , see T ouchard (1967). Childs (1978) studies the links with England and Munro (1973) stressed the positive ef fects on Castilian wool trade of the English protectionist bullion acts. B. YUN-CASALILLA 15 to satisfy the increasing demand generated by the Eur opean economy’s recover y . It was also accompanied by an ever -growing trade in the impor t of fabrics, ar twork, and luxur y items from Flanders. 8 The activation of Mediterranean trade was accompanied by a displace- ment of the commercial centr e of gravity from Barcelona to the Mallor ca- V alencia axis and the increasing pr esence of the Genoese in these areas. This network incorporated two trade routes: one came fr om the East and the Near East; another ran from Genoa to Nor th Africa. But the expan- sion of Genoese interests into Castile and Por tugal would also enhance the connections between the western Mediter ranean and the nor th of Europe (Iradiel and Sarasa 1989, pp.103–6). These axes of expansion linked to international commerce converged in the Iberian inlands and were the basis for an impr essive development of commerce and financial techniques on the peninsula. Fur ther more, this par t of Europe was a cr ossroad that necessarily saw its dynamism reinfor ced. Institutions, Political Economies, andRegional For ces From the four teenth centur y , the demographic problems derived fr om the Black Death tied into dif ficulties originating from the involvement of the Iberian kingdoms in various phases of the Hundred Y ears W ar , as well as a series of internal conflicts which, in tur n, became mixed up with factional disputes. 9 But if the problems had common r oots, the responses, set out in the respective polities’ institutional systems, underlie their dif fer ent pat- terns of economic r ecover y . It should not surprise us that Por tugal should be one of the first ter rito - ries to recover economically . The stability of its political system was a deci - sive contributing factor to this recuperation. But behind this phenomenon there stood the imperial expansion itself, which str engthened the king eco - nomically , as he controlled taxes paid by the Cor tes, another stabilizing factor . The abundance of African gold af for ded the Crown a greater degr ee of monetar y availability and helped to avoid cur rency devaluation, thus providing security to domestic commer ce (Thomaz 1994). But, above all, such an expansion of fer ed an outlet for aristocratic tensions, reduced the degree of inter nal conflict, and af for ded the chance to reduce the pressur e 8 Bilbao (1987, pp. 51–2); V an der W ee (1988, p. 330) Childs (1978, p.89 and Chap. 4 ). 9 For a synthesis of the political histor y of this period and the role of war, see Mackay (1980). GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 16 on peasants and vassals (Thomaz 1994). At this moment the new proper ty systems were consolidated: these wer e based on enfiteusis (in which land was conferr ed by estates through long-ter m lease agreements) which of fer ed good farming conditions to peasants. Moreover , the development of Atlantic trade favoured the gr owth of population centres between Galicia and Lisbon, with the riverside settlements—above all, those of the T agus— also benefitting. This also improved the conditions for commer cialization of peasant produce, some of whose goods (above all, wine) wer e hence - for th expor ted to the nor th of Europe. This process did not lead to the disappearance of dif fer ences between the more populated r egion to the nor th of the T agus and the more sparsely populated areas to the south, towar ds the Algar ve, which were also posi- tively af fected by the new commer ce and enjoyed climates and soils that were kinder than those of the Alentejo. Mor eover , this pattern was consis- tent with a cer tain dif ference originating in the r espective institutional systems: to the nor th, the seigniors wielded enor mous authority; in the large zone to the south of the T agus, the gr eat councils, sometimes under the domination of the Militar y Or ders, shaped the society and institutions that regulated the assignment of r esources (Mattoso 1997, pp. 528 and f f.). Fr om 1450 population began to grow for the first time since the Black Death, and by around 1500 it had superseded its levels in 1348 (Mattoso 1997, p. 333). From this point the gr owing workforce helped to maintain the expansive rhythm of the noble economies. According to the most common interpr etation, in the Crown of Castile , the abundance of available lands after the demographic crisis ser ved to strengthen the development of sheep and livestock br eeding and, conse - quently , of an economy based upon wool expor ts. 10 This is, however , only par t of the pictur e. The recover y would depend to a gr eat degree upon the institutional framework and how it came to regulate the assignment of eco - nomic resour ces. A key development was the rise of a new fiscal system based on two types of taxes: the tercias (the two ninths of the tithe ceded by the Church to the Crown) and the alcabala (a local tax of Muslim origin set in theor y at 10% of commer cial transactions). The latter was conceded ini - tially only as an annual ser vice by the Cor tes but became permanent without ever being formally r enewed by them. Contrar y to what would happen in the Crown of Aragon, the King of Castile r etained a high degree of freedom of action over both the collection and use of taxes of this sor t. 10 This traditional view is set out in the classic study of Klein (1979). B. YUN-CASALILLA 17 It was one thing to create laws, consolidate r oyal jurisdictions, and obtain taxes yet quite another to ensure their enfor cement, integrity , and collection. In fact, since the four teenth centur y , and in a climate character - ized by continual conflict, the Castilian sovereigns had found themselves forced to alienate the right to collect tercias and alcabalas to the nobility; they were also compelled to create new seigniorial estates as a means of maintaining clients in this group. Thus, the r oyal demesne, theoretically inalienable, was progr essively reduced. T o exacerbate this situation, the collection of royal taxes was not at all easy on the noble estates. As a r esult, by 1450 the economic basis of the new nobility had been established: large-scale livestock herding, landownership, and alienated royal incomes. 11 And this pattern was not only applicable to the aristocracy but also to the ecclesiastical institutions. Moreover , in exchange for their help, a few monarchs had ceded privileges, jurisdictions, and even r oyal taxes to the cities. 12 Thus, the cities’ rights of lordship (urban señorío ) and their con- trol over common lands and privileges became mor e defined. As might have been expected, many of these privileges and sources of income wer e acquired by towns r epresented in the Cor tes, and many of these wer e cities situated in the Duero and Guadalquivir V alleys. The development of this institutional system helped to shape the patterns of economic gr owth. Even when facing considerable geographical obstacles, the emergent urban networks ser ved to advance the greater integration of large eco- nomic spaces. The consequent links and connections were visible in com- mercial r outes which, in turn, fed into the larger international networks described above. From the coasts of Cantabria trade flowed down, invigo- rating the economy of the Duero V alley . From Seville, the ar teries ascended up to T oledo, passing thr ough Córdoba and La Mancha. The commerce of Lisbon would tie in with the fairs of Medina del Campo and the Duero regions and with the traf fic of Seville in the Guadalquivir V alley . A multi- tude of annual fairs and weekly markets scattered thr oughout these regions ser ved to tie the local economies with the international cir cuits. The strengthening of the cities facilitated the concentration of agrarian incomes in them, which in turn fed their economic activities and thus benefited a growing gr oup of ar tisans and businessmen. 11 Suárez (1975), Mar tínez Sopena (1977), Quintanilla (1979), Cabrera (1977), Mata (1987), Atienza (1987). 12 Rucquoi (1987, vol. I, pp, 293–310), Diago (1993, pp. 181–206), Sánchez (1989), Jara (2000). GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 18 The other side of Castile’s institutional development—the strengthening of the seigniorial estates of the nobility and the Church—would also have positive ef fects for economic gr owth. The emigration of peasants towards the south obliged many landowners of the nor ther n Meseta to tr y to retain their population; to this end they ceded the right to use extensive tracts of land to r ural communities, a trend which would incr ease agrarian output. The possession of alcabalas and tercias , as well as the privileges to stage markets and fairs, redoubled the inter est of the aristocracy in spon- soring trade and in settling populations in their lands. In Andalusia, the great estates situated near impor tant urban centres took advantage of a more r egular pattern of commer cialization and benefited from the ar rival of a workforce and the gr owing urban demand (Collantes 1977). In addition to the increasing pr oduction of cereals, wine, olive oil, and other products, economic expansion was evident but the livestock econ- omy . In the case of sheep, pr oduction was organized into local and regional guilds or unions ( mestas ), as well as in the great association called the Honourable Council of the Mesta (Bishko 1978). Economic growth took place in the industrial and commercial sectors. W ith regard to the first, change was evident in the potential of the urban guilds but also in the emergence in some areas of a r ural and urban cycle often controlled by a merchant-businessman (a r eal verlager , in many senses). The flowering of these commercial and financial activities was evident in many cities. Burgos and Seville are the best known examples (Pike 1978; Casado 1987). The evolution would be subtly dif fer ent in the Crowns of Navarre and Aragon . The repopulation for mulas applied there wer e similar to those of Castile and had given rise to the emergence, next to the feudal nobility , of towns with well-defined seigniorial jurisdictions and diverse ethnic and religious populations. But these r egions’ emergence from the crisis had been dif fer ent, and some institutional variations are visible. Navarr e had been hemmed in between France, Castile, and Aragon, three of the most power ful political for mations of the period, a fact that reduced its oppor tunities for overcoming the crisis thr ough ter ritorial expansion. Only a policy aimed at ensuring diplomatic equilibrium among its three neighbours—and, above all, between Castile and France—allowed the king - dom of Navarr e to sur vive as an independent political entity until 1515. As a result of this inher ent limitation, the fiscal capacity of the kingdom was lower . As in Castile, the alcabalas were appr opriated by the high nobility (Usunáriz 1997, p. 71). But the dif ficulties in incr easing the yield of these taxes limited the scope for the extension of the nobles’ incomes, a trend B. YUN-CASALILLA 19 which redoubled the conflict between the dif ferent factions of the kingdom, in which the nobility played an impor tant par t. The territories of the Cr own of Aragon (the kingdoms of Aragon, Mallorca, and V alencia and the principality of Catalonia) also displayed marked dif fer ences to those of Castile. The Cor tes were characterized by a system of a balance of power between king and kingdom that was much more for malized institutionally than in Castile. These assemblies’ greatest strength lay in their capacity to pass legislation and the fact that they wer e convened periodically and as separate assemblies repr esenting the king- doms or , as was the case in Catalonia, the principality . As in Castile, the royal patrimony had been exhausted, above all in Aragon. But the power of the Cor tes and the Delegations of the Cor tes ( Diputació ) would impose noticeable limitations on the monarchy’s capacity to cr eate an indepen- dent and ef ficient fiscal system. A good deal of r oyal income would come from the monar ch’s negotiations with cities such as Zaragoza, Barcelona, V alencia, or Palma de Mallorca to obtain cash advances in exchange for royal privileges, financed thr ough the sale of municipal bonds ( censals ). These procedur es would restrict the possibility of confer ring royal incomes upon the nobility in the way that had occurr ed in Castile and led the Aragonese nobility to overcome the crisis by r einforcing its jurisdictional rights and its capacity to change the legal framework in the Cor tes. In the kingdoms of Aragon and V alencia, the large size of the Morisco (originally Islamic) communities and their social weakness allowed landlords to increase peasant ser vitude and the duties on family production. 13 But the Christian vassals were not to escape the demands of the nobility either , as a good par t of its income was based upon monopolies, tithes, and ‘various other forms of payment and taxation, but always ver y high ones’. Likewise the landlord r etained impor tant privileges of precedence in the sale of products, which, in markets that were less developed than those of Castile, also had a negative ef fect on peasant commercialization of any surplus (Lacarra 1972, pp.135–6, 175). The ef fects of this institutional framework in shaping models of economic growth in the Cr owns of Navarr e and Aragon were obvious. As in nearly all of Europe, the ver y favourable relation between population and available land created adequate conditions for expansion. But for mal 13 The Cor tes of 1423, 1436, and 1461 r enewed the landlords’ ‘right to mistreat’ their vassals and consecrated their judicial autonomy , which became the cr ucial par t of the agree- ment between king and kingdom in some areas (Iradiel and Sarasa 1989, p.648). GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 20 political institutions would shape the dif fer ent patterns of development and the distinct political economies of each kingdom. The strip of land that encompasses today’s regions of Navar re and Aragon was perhaps the least dynamic in economic terms. In both ter rito- ries the urban network was less developed or depended too heavily upon the macrocephaly of Zaragoza, ar ound which it gravitated. The new aris- tocracies were not as active as their Castilian counterpar ts in promoting commerce, due to their incomes depending less heavily upon it. Agricultur e had a number of strong points. A Morisco agricultur e existed, often based upon irrigation systems and exhibiting high levels of pr oductivity . The extension of the enfiteusis system fed peasant commercialization. But, in contrast to Castile, the payment of land rents in pr opor tion to production, as well as the landlord’s monopolies upon the sale of agrarian pr oducts, limited peasant commercialization and the chances of developing an agrar - ian and population growth cycle similar to that of Castile. The urban net- work was less dense in Navarr e and Aragon than in Castile. This fact, together with a trade pattern based upon expor ts by major merchants of commodities obtained by leasing seigniorial rents, r educed the positive ef fects of commer ce upon producers. Economic growth was palpable, and symptoms of improvement can be per ceived in the living conditions of peasants and in the expansion of the livestock economy (Laliena 1987). But these areas’ demographic and pr oductive dynamism lagged behind that of Castile. From the point of view of its r esource endowment, Catalonia was one of the peninsula’s areas with the gr eatest economic potential. Never theless, in Catalonia, an increase in the landlor ds’ pressure upon vassals unleashed situations of social instability and had negative ef fects on economic growth even more serious than those of Castile. The issuing of municipal bonds diver ted capital away fr om commercial development. The macrocephaly of Barcelona cr eated provisioning problems and accentuated its depen- dence upon wheat impor ted by sea. This situation not only contributed to increase the city’s debts due to the need to pay for foodstuf fs but also encouraged the flight of money out of the principality and thus contrib- uted to monetar y instability . The shift of Genoese trade towards V alencia and Seville worsened the state of af fairs. Mor eover , as R. S. López and Vicens underlined years ago, Catalonia did not count upon a domestic market in its hinterland that would have allowed it to ‘face the onslaught of the crisis’ (Vicens V ives 1974, p. 213). The Catalan economy recov- ered, but the r ecession would last until the end of the fifteenth centur y . B. YUN-CASALILLA 21 In V alencia there existed the vestiges of ser fdom—in par ticular this was tr ue among the Morisco population—and a ver y solid patter n of seigniorial jurisdictions, even when set against the authority of king, had emerged as the solution to the problem of the maintenance of aristocratic power . As in the kingdom of Aragon, the relative autonomy guaranteed to the land - holders in the enforcement of the ter ms of contracts ser ved as the basis for the collection of incomes derived from their lands. In addition to shar e cropping, the r enting out of individual farms (by enfiteusis ) and monopo - lies, as well as the tercias , constituted impor tant par ts of landlords’ income. Some of these landlords, as was the case with the Gandía family , also received impor tant incomes from sugar mills. As in Aragon, the crisis had helped to strengthen the position of a minority of well-of f workers. The dimensions of the farms they owned wer e to increase, as did other factors or trends in their favour . But, above all, and in contrast to Aragon and Catalonia, the shift of international trade towar ds V alencia made it one of the peninsula’s more impor tant commercial and ar tisanal centr es. With 70,000 inhabitants in 1480, its role as inter mediar y between the Mediterranean and the hinterlands of Castile and Aragon intensified, at the same time as its industrial base grew and expanded (to incorporate wool and silk textiles, paper , the printing press, and—of course—constr uction) (Furió 1995). In these circumstances a commer cial agriculture developed which produced goods for both local markets and expor t. It was based on the direct commer cialization of peasant production thanks in par t to the favourable conditions created by the enfiteusis . Next to non-traded cultiva - tion, the growth of market-oriented pr oducts such as sugar cane and the white mulberr y tree (tied to the production of silk) also became str onger . This does not mean, however , that we can speak of a regional gr owth marked by harmony and balance. The capital’s over whelming demand for resour ces compelled the authority to source wheat from Castile and Sicily , and paying for these impor ts had to be met by the expor tation of sugar and, above all, silk. A similar combination of factors explains Mallorca’s economic expan- sion. Even if a good par t of the nobility had ploughed their investments into municipal debts, the crisis had favoured them by the for mation of farmsteads of a considerable size which would give rise to a for m of agri- culture that was intensively commer cialized and based upon a paid labour force, r eplacing obsolete and residual for ms of slaver y . As it became increasingly impor tant to the Mediterranean trade systems thanks to the Genoese alliance, Mallorca appear ed to have strengthened its (by now) GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 28 balance out the situation by introducing the so-called tasa de señoríos . 27 Y et these measures pr oved largely inadequate, and the king had to initiate a policy of monetar y devaluation. The outcome was a reaction by the nobles, whose incomes in cash were depr eciated, and the cities, whose commerce was adversely af fected (Mackay 1981, pp. 87–104). He was also unable to control local r evolts. In the cities of Andalusia and Galicia, a series of conflicts between urban or r ural noble factions exploded and even paved the way to more radical peasant pr otests, leading the authori- ties to unite to suf focate the r ebellion (V aldeón 1975, p. 171). Complaints about the usurpation of royal patrimony led to uprisings in many of the towns (Haliczer 1981). In the Crown of Aragon, the tensions became ver y evident during the reign of John II (1398–1479). In Catalonia the r ebellion of the r emensa peasants, infuriated by the ef for ts of the landlords to over come their prob- lems by resur recting the old feudal rights, superimposed itself upon the pre-existing conflict between the urban factions of Bar celona. Here, the tension was between the so-called Busca , mainly ar tisans, and the Biga , composed of members of the patriciate, financiers, and those whose incomes derived from the city’s debts ( censals ). The for mer were in favour of a protectionist policy and monetar y devaluation that ensured the com- petitiveness of their goods in the international markets. The latter wer e inclined to call for monetar y stability , hoping to retain the value of their censals . Conflicts within the nobility and the patriciate were also seen in Zaragoza, T er uel, Huesca, Mallorca, and V alencia, where dif ferent fac- tions locked horns to secur e a slice of the available political and economic resour ces. In Navarr e the tensions between dif ferent factions with a pr o- nounced noble character (the beamonteses and the agramonteses ) took the form of an authentic civil war that pitted prince Charles of V iana against his father , John II of Aragon. T raditional historiography usually considers the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand as a tur ning point in this process, the outcome of which was political order . Pr obably it was. Y et the ‘Catholic monar chs’ were not able to impose an unrestricted for m of absolutism, as has sometimes been suggested. Political stability was rather the outcome of social transactions and bargaining with the elites. 27 The ‘tasa de señoríos’, often considered a concession to the nobility on the gr ounds that the king acknowledged the landlords’ right to collect the alcabalas within their señoríos , was in fact a mutual concession between king and nobles (Y un 2004, p. 62) See also Nueva Recopilación , lib. IX, tit. XV , f. 93 v . B. YUN-CASALILLA 29 Isabella and Ferdinand’s ar rival on the throne was the result of a long period of political instability and a civil war . By this juncture a sector of the aristocracy had taken to the idea that the only way out of the near - permanent chaos that thr eatened the established order was a strong mon- archy . There were sound political r easons for this conclusion, but economic ones were also impor tant. The civil war in Castile had demonstrated to many members of the elite the need for a strong monar chy that guaran- teed the political and fiscal system (Haliczer 1975, 1981, pp.56–8; Perez 1989). The same could be said of the Catalan nobility and the elites of Barcelona, who wer e ever more convinced of the need for the king’s arbi- tration. Castilian cities were at this point convinced that they had to ‘sub- ordinate their own ambitions to the conser vation of the “power and union of the royal cr own”’. 28 The movement of the Hermandades , coalitions or ‘brotherhoods’ of cities that signed pacts for mutual defence, r eflected the need for domestic pacification. For these reasons the ability of the Cr own to push through refor ms depended upon a policy of negotiation and bargaining which was often twofold. In Castile the creation of the Royal Council consolidated the power of the king over the nobility . But this same council continued to protect the corporate jurisdictions of the nobles, Chur ch, and cities. The creation of the r egional cour ts, the Audiencias and the Chancillerías strengthened the superiority of the king’s justice over the landlor ds’ pri- vate jurisdictions. But, cr ucially , the lay and church estates retained their cour ts, and they continued, ther efore, to exercise their power of enfor ce- ment as first instance cour ts. The r eform of the Castilian fiscal system was also highly significant. In the Cor tes of 1476, the kings managed to obtain a huge ser vice, but they wer e again reminded of their duty to preser ve the integrity of both the realm and royal taxes. The consequence was a series of measures aimed at the closer contr ol of the royal debt and at limiting any fur ther usurpation or donation of the r oyal patrimony . 29 These mea- sures culminated in 1480 when the juro ’s inter est rates (paid by the Crown) wer e decreed and orders wer e given that all those who had 28 González Alonso (1988, p. 254). This idea was made ver y clear in the r eminder of the Cor tes of Ocaña (1469) to the king that he was obliged to rule and keep peace in the king- dom. Patronato Real , 69, doc. 18. AGS.The idea was also ver y prominent in Castilian poli- tics, as similar notions were expressed in the Cor tes of 1455, ibid., 69, doc. 14, fol. 14. AGS. 29 All grandees of the kingdom were obliged to swear that they would never usurp the royal patrimony , and it was also decided to limit the grants and concessions given by the kings ( Nueva Recopilación , Lib. IX, Tit. VIII, ley XV and Lib. V , Tít. X ley III). GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 30 received or usurped the r oyal demesne since 1464 had to retur n it. 30 But, at the same time, this policy was a long way from pr oposing a complete break with the nobility or the er osion of its institutional and economic power . The application of these measures was done in a ver y selective way depending on the families involved. Moreover , acceptance of the r estora- tion of the royal patrimony pr ovided the nobility a means of consolidating par t of its achievements over the pr evious decades, at the time that the kings increased their incomes and impr oved their means of collection while the cities achieved a political success that they could exhibit before the eyes of the kingdom. The same was tr ue in Catalonia. Here the uprisings that followed the Cor tes of 1481 convinced Ferdinand that the only means of pr oceeding was through agr eement. The so-called Sentence of Guadalupe (1486) rec- ognized the right of the landlords to maintain their leasehold upon the land ( dominio eminente ) and jurisdictional control over their estates, thus guaranteeing them par t of their income. But the same Sentence also recognized the fr eedom of the peasantr y and abolished the landlords’ so- called bad practices. Overall this measure r esolved the conflict by benefitting the landlords and mor e power ful peasants and recognized the social changes that had occurr ed over the previous centuries at the expenses of the lower peasantr y (V ilar 1962, vol. I, p. 509). Ferdinand was not, therefor e, a liberator king who subjugated the nobility to the benefit of the peasants: rather he played the role of an arbiter who guarantied exist- ing social relationships. Something similar happened in the kingdom of Aragon, where the Sentence of Celada (1497) consecrated the power of the landlords, r ecognizing their privileges and power to the detriment of the rights of the peasantr y . Royal policy with regar d to cities was also double-edged. The kings employed all available means to increase their contr ol over them. The insti - tution of the corregidor , an of ficial repr esenting the king in the town coun - cils, became a permanent featur e of the political landscape and the Crown put in place a series of refor ms aimed at limiting the involvement of the great nobility and r estricting the penetration of local government by noble clienteles (Lunenfeld 1987). The inter vention of the Cr own was aimed at the appointment of skilled personnel to town and city of fices, which was also a way to increase its power for arbitration among local factions (Belenguer 1976, pp. 197–201; Amelang 1986, p. 41). During most of the 30 Patronato Real , Libr o 15, AGS. B. YUN-CASALILLA 31 reign, the alcabalas wer e collected through their being rented out, a mea - sure that demonstrated r oyal authority and exasperated local oligarchies who complained that it frequently r esulted in excessive collections. 31 The Santa Hermandad , based on the model of the urban her mandades , was conver ted into an instr ument under the ever mor e direct control of the monarchs (Lunenfeld 1987, pp. 47–9). But on the other hand, the cities and their oligarchies r etained a high degree of autonomy . For this r eason peace brought with it a sudden deluge of confir mations of city and town privileges. 32 Many corregidor es fell into the subtle but complex networks of local factions, rivalries, and solidarities, and the power and influence of many aristocrats upon urban clientele networks were notable in big cities such as Córdoba, Seville, and Mur cia, and others, par ticularly in the South. In the Crown of Aragon—and not only ther e—the overall consequence of these refor ms was the strengthening of the oligar chies and of the direct channels of communication between the monarchy and the cities, some - thing which ser ved to str engthen both of them and allowed them to bypass the Cor tes, which often wer e too slow and unwieldy in this regard. 33 In Castile the farming out of tax collection was to be selectively and gradually replaced by the encabezamientos of cities, a system by which the tax collec - tion was ceded to the local councils which, therefor e, gained fiscal auton - omy . This system was destined to constitute one of the cor nerstones of both the political system and of the patterns of economic behaviour over the coming decades (Chap. 4 ). All of this came accompanied by a strength - ening of the power of the municipal authorities in the management and regulation of guilds and corporations, as is showed by the case of Cuenca (Iradiel 1974, pp.86–97). Foreign W ars forDomestic Peace As impor tant, if not mor e so, for political stability was the war against the Nazarí kingdom of Granada. The fact was per fectly understood at the time, to the extent that, as late as 1580, Jerónimo Zurita would write: 31 See the case of Córdoba in Actas Capitular es , 12, 22 de mayo, 28 de junio, 5 de julio, Archivo Histórico Municipal de Córdoba (her eafter AHMC) and Registro General del Sello , julio 1506, s.f. AGS. 32 Registro General del Sello , legs. 147501 to 147507 (from Januar y to July 1475) passim AGS. 33 See the case of Barcelona in Amelang (1986, pp.41–2). In Zaragoza and V alencia, dia- logue was cr ucial for the concession of subsidies paid by emitting more censals which were highly attractive to the patriciate (Belenguer 1976, p.45). GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 32 Princes … should remember that this [domestic peace] can only be pr operly achieved by conquest and conflict, which have to be sustained perpetually for the glor y and prosperity of their state and the gr owth of their dominions. 34 With these wor ds the chronicler and historian of the Crown of Aragon set down the expansive principle that Fernando del Pulgar had pr eviously detected in many noble households. The dif ference was, of course, that Zurita was writing about the monarchy as a whole. What he possibly did not know was that this period—the conflicts that stretched fr om the W ar of Granada (1482–1492) to the arrival of Charles V in 1517—was to be decisive. Not only did this cycle of conflict, which continued with the Italian wars and the expansion into Africa, repr esent a key moment for the continuity and expansion of a seigniorial society . It would also be a key moment in the refinement of a theor y about how to finance these wars and the role of the kingdom and of the king’s patrimony to this end. The ef fects of the war upon the r elationship between the monarchy , the cities, the aristocracy , and the Church are dif ficult to exaggerate. The cam- paigning, in fact, began as a medieval conflict, with nobles and towns mobilizing troops and ar med retinues and leading them on the battlefield. But this str uggle also marks the beginning of the ‘militar y r evolution’, the character and impact of which will be discussed below . Thus, in its last phase, the war would requir e unprecedented levels of expenditure, mili- tar y technology , and manpower . It therefor e presented the monarchy with what was to become the great pr oblem facing the fiscal systems in the early modern period: the financing of a militar y apparatus that no longer was sustained purely by the nobility or the cities but rather depended upon a more sophisticated financial system and a mor e centralized logistical apparatus. The immediate outcome was for the Crown to appeal to the auxilium of the nobility , consisting now not only of militar y assistance but also of the advancement of money , on the pr oviso that compensation would be made at the end of the war by the Crown’s tur ning a blind eye to the taxes and lands usurped by the nobles. In this way , a system was established which kept some medieval features of the auxilium and subsequent r oyal 34 Jerónimo Zurita, Historia del rey don Hernando el Catolico: de las empresas y ligas de Italia , Zaragoza, 1580, vol. 1, p. 5 (edition by A. Canellas López and revised by M. Canellas and A.López, Zaragoza, 1989, 6 vols.). B. YUN-CASALILLA 33 compensation. But this was done not only by conferring jurisdictions and feudal rights upon the nobles but also by recognizing the r evenues and rights that they had misappropriated. W ith regard to the urban oligar- chies, war presented a unique oppor tunity to establish a relationship of mutual commitment with the monarchy , thus opening the door to the possibility of the conferral of titles of nobility or even of estates in the new domains won in the fighting (Gerber t 1979). The conflict also af fected r elations with the Church and led to the cre- ation of new revenue str eams. Preached as a cr usade and in par t financed by bulls sold and promoted in ser mons by churchmen, it gave rise to the concession by Rome of two ser vices that would continue after 1492, the ‘cr usade’ ( cruzada ) and the ‘tenth’ or ‘subsidy’ ( décima or subsidio ). It is highly significant that, though they had to be negotiated with the Pope, both were beyond the contr ol of the Cor tes, meaning that they quickly became, in Ladero’s wor ds, ‘the object of envy of the other European kings’. Moreover , to help finance the conflict, the Pope conceded to Ferdinand the title of Grand Master of the Militar y Orders and, with it, a basic source of patr onage. This gave him the suppor t of a nobility seeking to enjoy the estates and honours of these organizations. Thus, the war not only enhanced the alliance between the monarchy and Chur ch but also led to new sources of income and patr onage that ‘overlapped with the previ- ous one without replacing it’ (Lader o 1973, pp. 238, 245) and that was at the free disposal of the Cr own with no limit imposed by the Cor tes. The W ar of Granada was an episode in a much larger cycle of events, one which had already led to the conquest of the Canar y Islands and which would also lead to the campaigns in Nor th Africa. These conquests had a religious component but also wer e aimed at securing access to Africa’s gold, slaves, and land, mainly for sugar production (Fer nández- Armesto 1982). The outcome was, again, a r einforcement of the r elations between the Crown, the nobility , the Church, and the towns. The for mer extended its domains. The Church again projected the conflict as a cr u- sade, which brought it incr easing economic and political resources and, in turn, justified the pr olongation of the concession of the ter cias to the Crown. The members of the urban patriciate found ways of achieving social and economic advancement in these campaigns. Accords wer e signed with the Genoese investors in sugar plantations, thus strengthening links to a group that was destined to ser ve as the financial ner ve system of the empire. GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 34 This ef for t to project power abr oad was extended from 1494 with involvement in the Italian W ars against France. Aimed at defending Aragonese interests, this conflict was in large par t financed by Castilian funds and ser ved as a way of testing the mettle of many second-bor n sons of the Castilian nobility . Thus the novelty in this cycle of war abr oad lay not in its political or diplomatic consequences but rather in the justifica- tion for conflicts fought in distant lands whose purpose was not the defence of the kingdom of Castile itself nor the defence of Christendom. While the W ar of Granada was fully justified by the age-old duty of Christian kings to defend Christendom, the Italian campaigns did not appear to fall under the same umbrella. This dif ference was even mor e significant in that the wars of Italy were not at all cheap. Thr ough them new militar y strategies led to long, expensive and exhausting conflicts (Hale 1985, pp.48, 63). A large par t of the funds that paid for these campaigns came from the ecclesiastical subsidies and the cruzada . But one other impor tant innova- tion emerged: now debts accumulated from contracts ( asientos ) for the payment of troops in Naples and Sicily , where in ef fect Aragonese interests were being defended, wer e being met with ser vices voted by the Cor tes of Castile. In other words, the cost of a conflict that was dif ficult to justify from a strictly r eligious perspective and went against constitutional prin- ciples established throughout Eur ope was being levied upon the kingdom of Castile (see Chap. 4 ). How were the wars of Italy helping to defend Castile or Christendom? W as the King of France r eally the enemy of Christendom? The line of response to such questions was developed by Fer dinand himself, who in the text of the Holy League convened by the Pope expressed the notion that France was acting against the inter est of Christendom, an argument that was to be repeated later on in the Cor tes of 1512. 35 And a few years later , in 1515, the convocation of the Cor tes once again turned on similar criteria and r eferr ed to the obligation to defend the Church of Rome, using ideas justified by a comparable concep- tual framework. In this way , the war in Naples reinforced a series of inter - linked—but not always harmonious—inter ests and established an innovative line of argument that would be key to the political, institu- tional, and, therefor e, economic evolution of Castile and, indeed, of Spain as a whole. 35 Patronato Real , legs. 60, f.26 and 69, 49. AGS. B. YUN-CASALILLA 35 T o r ecapitulate: Isabel and Fernando had ar rived at a cer tain equilibrium— an unstable one, it is tr ue, but an equilibrium nonetheless. Navigating through negotiations and pr essures leading in dif fer ent directions, they had succeeded in momentarily lessening the str uctural tensions within the elites. Their policies would result in dif ferent political systems. In Castile they had engineered one of r elative fiscal centralization, with a cer tain capacity for obtaining funds from the Cor tes. In Aragon, the fiscal system had evolved to a far lesser degree. W ar had been cr ucial in this process and had ser ved to satisfy the expansive needs of the nobility , the urban patriciate, and, indeed, even the Church. But finally , it had not resolved the basic pr oblem of the alienation of royal patrimony , and at the same time, it created a new series of tensions with the Cor tes in Castile—the debate over the use of the taxes and ser vices of the kingdom for campaigns which did not benefit it dir ectly , a theme which would be central to subsequent Iberian histor y , as we shall see. Por tugal: TheBases foraPr ecocious andEnduring Political Stability Between 1449, when the Crown managed to pacify the last concer ted attempt at noble rebellion, and 1822, when Brazil was lost, Por tugal lived the longest period of political stability enjoyed by any European countr y in the early modern period (Thomaz 1994, p. 131). This stability , largely due to the imperial regime, had some parallels in Castile. As we have just seen, this kingdom was not free fr om tensions similar—or even identical— to those seen in other polities of the time. Mattoso (1993, p.459 and f f.) has even written that the coexistence of the nobility appears to have been based on the continuous discord. However , as in Castile, ef for ts had been made to channel existing tensions. From the end of the fifteenth centur y , the nobility’s needs for social consolidation and extension star ted being satisfied by overseas campaigns initiated by the Crown and even by involve- ment in the Castilian wars on Granada (Thomaz 1994). At the same time, the Crown had made several attempts to satisfy the noble lineages’ expan- sive tendencies by ceding possessions belonging to the royal demesne (Disney 2009, vol. I, pp. 132–40). But, above all, the involvement of many lineages in the imperial project had ser ved to alleviate tensions; revealingly , many second-born sons—whose status was dir ectly threatened by inheritance r ules—were pr esent in these wars of conquest (Thomaz 1994). T o the extent that the empir e was also a commercial ventur e, it also of fer ed a considerable number of members of the urban classes ways to GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 36 satisfy their needs. The blurring of boundaries within the African vent ur es — and, above all, in the colonies—ser ved to dilute the fr ontier between these groups, pr oviding each with what it most desired: the merchants acquir ed noble status, and the nobility obtained money and wealth. Por tuguese Atlantic expansion had thus ser ved the same purposes as the W ar of Granada, which it, in fact, predated. In the overall W ester n European picture (see above), the Por tuguese case was also peculiar in cer tain r egards. Here the ‘domain state’ continued to be the outstanding feature of its development. A sizeable par t of the Crown lands was ceded and recover ed in successive cycles, a process that created tensions in the kingdom and its councils. But, much more impor tant, Atlantic expansion had allowed the amplification of this patrimony and expanded the king’s revenues. Ar ound 1459, in response to the wars with Castile, the Cor tes had ceded to the king the sisa tax, ver y similar to the Castilian alcabala and administered by the municipalities (Mattoso 1993, pp.521–4). 36 But colonial r evenues allowed for the development of a fiscal system that only demanded a limited commitment from the kingdom. The result was a situation ver y similar to that of Castile, although some impor tant degrees of nuance ar e needed in our analysis. In these condi- tions, the monarch r etained a high degree of power . This was consistent with the ef for ts to strengthen r oyal justice (Mattoso 1997, p. 516). The Cor tes had become an integral par t of the political system, but its advance was less impor tant in comparison with the situation in Castile, principally because of the lesser development of the tax state in Por tugal. This fact, together with the expansion of foreign trade, helps to explain the ver y limited evolution of the urban network and its polarization in Lisbon and Opor to. The equilibrium between Cr own and nobility was increasingly obvious, even if the relationship was gover ned by tensions and periodic concessions, above all after the series of crises and was periodically deep- ened by the temptation among the nobility to turn its loyalty towar ds the Castilian monarch. The promulgation of the Ley Mental (1434), which recognized that the seigniorial estates belonged in the final instance to the king, who was periodically requir ed to renew his confer ral of them upon the nobility , contributed to creating a dif ficult equilibrium but one which 36 It is worthwhile underlining that one of the r easons for the cities believing that the king was facing financial dif ficulties was not only his involvement in wars but also the concession of his patrimony to the nobles. B. YUN-CASALILLA 37 led to overall stability . It is impor tant to note that, in this context, the House of Braganza had distinguished itself and managed to be the excep- tion to end-of-centur y attempts to recover par ts of the royal patrimony that ceded over the previous decades (Disney 2009, vol. I, pp. 134–5). This reduced the gap with the r uling house of A vis and created a consider - able distance between that family , the Braganza, and the rest of the fidal- guia . But, in any case, the oppressive tendencies of the nobility towar ds its peasantr y , if considerable, could be tempered, and, this being the case, it was possible to maintain forms of land cession and pr oper ty rights similar to enfiteusis . The resulting political economy would not lead to the disappearance of tensions which were, after all, str uctural. But it did create an institutional framework that was cr ucial to understanding the histor y of Por tugal in the coming centuries. It is ver y r evealing that, in contrast to other areas of the Iberian Peninsula, there wer e hardly any movements or protests r esem- bling the Comunidades or Germanías . i berian s t a te f orma tion in e uropean p erspective Comunidades and Germanías The political equilibrium established by the Catholic Kings was broken by Isabella’s death in 1504, and this r upture would unleash the comunero and the ager mando rebellions of the years 1519–1521. 37 These wer e not iso- lated events but rather sprang from constitutional pr oblems that were present, in one for m or another , across Europe. But, above all, they deser ve to be consider ed from the perspective of the development and consolidation of the elites which have been mentioned previously , even if the historiography dedicated to them has almost always pointed in another direction. The economic growth and the wars of the last decades of the fifteenth centur y alleviated the inter nal tensions. But these tensions, being str uc- tural in nature, had to manifest themselves in many ways. By 1500 it was again obvious that many aristocrats needed to expand their incomes and to obtain loans. They were involved in constant competition to secur e revenues, sometimes even usurping the r oyal patrimony and the demesne 37 For a detailed analysis of these movements, see Per ez (1976) and Durán (1982). GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 44 pensions and of fices granted by the Cr own; the payment of the salaries due to the holders of these positions depended, of course, on a healthy royal patrimony . From 1516, thanks to royal patr onage, the great families also increased their pr esence in ecclesiastical of fices. Given these develop- ments, it is not surprising that historiography , led by the work of Russell Major (1981), has rejected the idea, pr oposed by M.Bloch, of the inexo- rable decline of the French aristocracy . The strength of the aristocrats is even more clear if we consider that, in addition to the extraor dinar y reve- nues derived from the Cr own, many high nobles were able to increase their regular or or dinar y incomes and to manage successfully their private patrimonies and estates. As in many areas of Castile and Por tugal, this interlinking of mutual interests at the summit of the monar chy would confer stability upon the political system and, therefor e, suppor t the established social order . The reinfor cing of the r ural community , the incr easing economic power of a peasantr y that had diversified its sour ces of income as it emerged from the crisis, and the formation of a peasant elite which found itself caught between the preser vation of the forms of local gover nment and an alliance with the great landlor ds halted the process of deterioration of r ural society (Neveux et al. 1975, pp.134–55). Though things were quite dif ferent in England , a few deter mined early steps had also been made towards the pr ocess of political centralization. Whereas in France the Parliament ( États généraux ) had been unable to transcend regional inter ests, from a ver y early stage, the monar chy of England was requir ed to form a r elationship with its Parliament that rep- resented ‘the community of the kingdom’. But this dif ference did not imply that in England there had been a gr eater development of the king- dom as a fiscal unit nor that new and undreamt of possibilities now lay before the king, his high nobility , leading clergy , or urban rentiers . The English Crown had maintained the gr eater par t of its demesne estates and patrimony . Mor eover , the incorporation into the Crown of the estates of extinguished noble families during the W ars of the Roses and the reorganization of the royal lands by Henr y VII (1485–1509) ser ved to keep it intact as a provider of considerable sour ces of income. At the same time, the lands of the Crown could be used as a fountain of royal patr on- age through their temporar y cession to the nobility . However , the chances of exploiting the fiscal system of the kingdom and the development of the tax system were much smaller than in France or Castile. The king could recur to subsidies granted by Parliament, but these had to be appr oved B. YUN-CASALILLA 45 and renewed by the assembly and wer e even controlled by it through its capacity to oversee the collection and use of these monies. In reality , in the fifteenth centur y , the financial resour ces of the Crown were comparatively meagre. Aside fr om the monies collected from the royal estates, its r egular permanent r evenues depended upon tolls and other impositions of a feu- dal type which did not provide the quantities—nor anything like them— that were collected in Castile thr ough the alcabalas or in Por tugal through the sisas and the empire (Russell 1988, pp.31–8). At the same time, the main for um for political relations between the king and the kingdom was Parliament. This had been the case since the time of the war with France. More than simply a gathering of delegates repr esenting dif ferent cities and their urban patriciates, the House of Commons repr esented the kingdom as a whole. Given the ver y low level of development of the jurisdictional and fiscal functions of the cities and their relatively minor demographic impor tance, their relationship—dir ect or indirect—with the Cr own was much less decisive for the political equi- librium of the kingdom than was the case in France or Castile. In the last instance, Parliament cannot be described as a gathering of deputies who were dependent upon and contr olled by their respective local oligarchies but rather a group that made little or no ef for t to seek to incr ease the privileges of the municipalities. Although the political equilibrium and the repr oduction of the social system depended to a large extent on the bilat- eral relationships that bound the king to the aristocracy , gentr y , and Church, these r elations were catalysed largely through Parliament. If W estminster was to see its political role diminished during the r eign of Henr y VII (1457–1509), the impact of this r elationship upon the model of overcoming the medieval crisis was alr eady established. All of this created a situation that was subtly dif ferent fr om that of France. If, thanks to the improvements in the management of the Cr own lands, the King of England had increased his chances of using patr onage to control the nobility , then the limited character of this type of transaction (which, in any case, was not easily extended over time), the control of Parliament over a large por tion of other royal finances and the ver y limited development of the royal bur eaucracy—without doubt, England represented a much less evolved form of tax state than did Castile or France—made it ver y dif ficult for the monarchy to subsidize the nobility in a systematic and gener ous way . At least it could not do so to the point that the needs of this group wer e met during the fifteenth centur y (Dyer 1989, p. 47). It is ver y probable that this situation had been one of the causes of the attack launched by the English GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 46 aristocracy upon the peasant and communal village economies in some par ts of the countr yside and whose most obvious manifestation lay in the enclo - sure of communal lands. The figur es presented by R. Allen demonstrate that these enclosures wer e especially intense towards 1524. At the hear t of all of these changes lay the fact that, in distinction to Castile and France, the English r ural community had never developed its militar y powers. From the perspectives of the kingdoms of France and England, the peculiarities of the Iberian Peninsula may be seen in a clearer light. The parallels are obvious. As has been emphasized, the case of Castile of fers some noticeable similarities with France. In both kingdoms r ela- tively strong fiscal systems wer e emerging and would allow for a cer tain degree of r oyal autonomy (with the limitations that we will see). These fiscal systems also became a way to nur tur e aristocratic incomes. But, even then, the dif fer ences between Castile and France were notice- able. In France these transfers to the nobility consisted mainly in the appointment to of fices and the concession of temporar y or lifetime grants. In Castile the contemporar y equivalent was the encomienda of the militar y orders and the of fices in the army and administration. But the lion’s shar e of these transfers consisted in the more or less legal cession of alcabalas , tercias , and par ts of the royal patrimony , which provided the nobility with a permanent and r egular source of income. Thus, the economic bases of the Castilian aristocracy were to be even str onger than those of their French counterpar ts, and par t of the agreement’s r enewal would consist in a pact of silence regar ding the rents that had not in fact been given by the Crown but simply usurped by the nobles—and which wer e, therefore, of dubious legality in the eyes of the Cor tes. (See Chap. 4 below .) At the same time, the case of Castile goes against a cer tain number of the ideas set out a few years ago on the role of these extraor dinar y incomes as a mechanism that reduced the pr essure of the landlords on the peas- antr y . Without doubt, these revenues and concessions did have this func- tion at cer tain moments, but the histor y of Castile until (at least) 1520 demonstrates that access to the royal fiscal system did not pr event the nobles from tr ying to extend their lands by assuming control or ownership of soils belonging to communities or the royal estates themselves. In other words, the aristocrats sought r evenues from additional sources. Comparison of the models of the dif fer ent polities of the Crown of Aragon and the kingdom of Navarr e invites a number of obser vations. Looked at as fiscal systems, the similarities with England and, therefor e, the dif fer ences from France and Castile are clear . In none of these B. YUN-CASALILLA 47 kingdoms did the monarchy succeed in establishing a fiscal system that was as accessible (and as easily manipulated) and developed as was the case in France or Castile. In these polities, as in England, the most impor tant source of income that the kingdom of fered its r uler (the ‘subsidies’ of one kingdom; the ‘ser vices’ of another) could not be alienated or confer red upon the aristocracy or could only be done so with considerable dif ficulty . Pensions and of fices of fered the best and, indeed, almost the only means of patronage and of over coming the nobility’s economic problems. But at the same time—and in contrast to the situation in England—the Crown of Aragon had established fiscal-financial relationships with a number of cit- ies (above all Pamplona, Zaragoza, Barcelona, V alencia, and Palma de Mallorca) that clearly did pr ovide the urban oligarchies with an additional source of income in the for m of censals . Nor can the relationships between landlor ds in these kingdoms and their vassals be easily identified with those of England. In all of these areas, the ef for t to overcome the dif ficulties faced by the nobility had been expressed in the pressur e applied upon vassals and lands. But the results would be ver y dif ferent fr om what is usually refer red to (although often debated) for England. In the kingdom of Aragon and, in cer tain r espects, in V alencia, the power of the nobility would be directed not only towar ds the acquisi - tion of additional land but also—and mainly—to deepening its existing rights of jurisdiction and even forms of for ced labour , something which in turn was favour ed by the presence and numerical impor tance of a Morisco minority , which was seriously disadvantaged in terms of its rights and legal conditions. In Catalonia the tensions in the hear t of the aristocracy wer e overcome thanks to for mulas designed to provide the nobles access to the ecclesiastic tithe ( diezmo ) and that led them to share cr opping. These rev - enues, in contrast to the English model based upon the extension of aristo - cratic proper ties, would provide the pr edominant type of rent available to these groups. They would constitute along with the censals and a number of incomes derived from r oyal of fices, the nobles’ most impor tant sour ce of income. At the same time, the Sentence of Guadalupe had made it as dif fi cul t for the principality to follow the Aragonese model as the English or the Castilian ones. This was because it had allowed a free peasantr y to consoli - date itself, liberated from many of the landlor ds’ demands and among whom it was possible to find a r ural elite with rights over the soils that it farmed, a featur e which would ser ve to paralyse any attempt by the great families to accumulate territories by for ce. The case of Mallorca also has its own specific characteristics. Here the possession of censals would give the GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 48 nobility in general a significant por tion of the r evenues extracted by the centralized fiscal system and the municipal financial apparatus. But, pro - gressively , the agrarian relationships pivoted upon the for mation of large latifundia whose ef fective contr ol would be ceded in the form of ‘pose - sions’, an arrangement that would lead to a limit on the availability of lands for the lords and nobles (Jover 1997). The dif fer ences and contrasts between Por tugal, France, and England also deser ve attention. In Por tugal the royal financial system had begun to develop, as in France and Castile, and the kingdom was increasingly involved in a tax system of notable propor tions. But the development of the empire, and the funds obtained fr om it, would progressively marginal- ize the impor tance of the kingdom’s contribution. Thanks to the empir e, the needs of social repr oduction of the fidalgos had been given an outlet, and this would limit their interest in str engthening their jurisdiction or acquiring peasant proper ty (this does not, obviously , mean that no incen- tives existed for these actions). The Por tuguese imperial ventur e also led to an urban jurisdictional network that was weaker than its counterpar t in Castile and in which only some cities such as Lisbon and Por to exercised considerable force and weight. This over view of the ver y dif ferent political, institutional, and economic trajectories found in the histor y of W ester n Europe makes clear that the Iberian kingdoms did not present any exceptional or unique paradigm. On the other hand, it is evident that a number of models emerged, each subtly dif fer ent, even if many common denominators can be found. * * * The Iberian kingdoms had been the great pr otagonists of the phase of globalization that initiated the ‘rise’ of the W est. This was in par t due to the convergence of global forces (the circulation of technical knowledge and previous commer cial development) but can be explained above all by the action of forces and needs that wer e present across all of Eur ope and that would materialize in Iberia in a ver y specific way . The elite’s need for consolidation and extension, and in par ticular the needs of the nobility , had been at the root of the first leap into the Atlantic and can be seen as little more than a continuation of pr evious actions and practices typical of the Reconquista . The involvement of the peninsula in ever -expanding commercial r outes, allied to changes in the institutional system and prop- er ty rights, had helped the economic r ecover y and brought about a cer tain B. YUN-CASALILLA 49 relaxation of the tensions between the social classes. At the same time, impor tant lines of tension were emerging: the fight for the royal demesne, the debate over the use of the kingdom’s resour ces, and the impor tance of royal patr onage, thanks to its increased ability to capture r esources and consequent tensions over their use, were among the most impor tant of these points of prospective conflict. In any case, and despite the dif ference between them, two exceptional powers—Castile and Por tugal—wer e emerging, both driven by clear expansive vocations and able to nullify internal tensions as they established their r espective empires. The dif ferent institutional patterns that would condition the political economies of the Iberian W orld were more or less consolidated by 1520. Open Access This chapter is licensed under the ter ms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://cr eativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/ ), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and r eproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appr opriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, pr ovide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third par ty material in this chapter ar e included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated other wise in a cr edit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutor y regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain per mission directly fr om the copyright holder . GLOBAL CONTEXT ANDTHERISE OFEUROPE: IBERIA ANDTHEA TLANTIC 51 © The Author(s) 2019 B. Y un-Casalilla, Iberian W orld Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668 , Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global Histor y , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0833-8_2 CHAPTER 2 Iberian Overseas Expansion andEuropean T rade Networks In 1526, Charles V married Isabel of Por tugal. In doing so he put in place the groundwork for the dynastic union with the last of the peninsular kingdom to have escaped the gravitational pull of the Habsburgs. At this point the Por tuguese and Castilians wer e involved in collaborations, entanglements, and conflicts stretching fr om Asia to America, thus forging the foundations of a global system. Clearly , this system was precocious and sophisticated, simulta - neously par titioned and interconnected (Subrahmanyam 2007; Bethencour t 2013). In spite of that sophistication, paradoxically , this imperial experience has provided the basis of a ver y negative interpretation of the histor y of the Iberian Peninsula. According to this interpr etation, oceanic expansion con - ver ted Iberia a ‘semi-peripher y’ within Europe, ser ving simply as a conduit for the expor t of raw materials, some of them obtained fr om their colonies, to the nor th of Eur ope, while industrial products manufactured in the ‘centr e’ of this emergent world economy—in other words, in the nor th of the old continent— would flow in the opposite direction (Frank 1978; W allerstein 1979). S ailing the a tlantic , c onquering a merica In 1492, the Spaniards made the leap into America. In 1497–1499 V asco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and r eached India. In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan sailed thr ough the straight that would take his name, 52 and following his death Juan Sebastian Elcano retur ned to Spain as the first man to circumnavigate the world (1522). What was behind these names? Columbus was not of Castilian origin: he was Genoese and had acquired much of his knowledge in Por tugal. Magellan, sailing on behalf of Charles V , was in fact a subject of the King of Por tugal. If these details are appar ently super ficial, they should not blind us to the fact that from the ver y beginning of the primitive globalization, these initiatives wer e the result of cr oss-border entanglements and patterns of knowledge that wer e profoundly inter related. Challenges andT ools When in 1519 Cor tés landed in Mexico and began to take an inter est in this ‘second America’, the gold reser ves of the Caribbean were nearing exhaustion. The following years would see the conquest of both Mexico and Per u, where the Spanish found extensive political for mations that were over come so rapidly that one historian has obser ved that by the 1540s the New W orld ‘was already conquered, in so far as Spain would conquer it’ (Davis 1976, p. 52). But the extraor dinar y speed of the con- quest should not lead us to forget the problems posed by it and by the control of these vast new domains. America was, perhaps, seen by many as a promise. But it presented, to all and sundr y , a challenge of dimensions that were dif ficult to imagine. This most definitely was the case for Castile, which faced not only the chal- lenge of conquest but also the str uggle to control and to exploit American peoples and wealth. 1 America was a distant continent of vast, unimagined propor tions, with ecological and geographical conditions ranging from deser ts to rainfor ests. Europe’s best sailors and car tographers took some time to repr esent a geographical reality that was, in the first instance, unfathomable. After the exhaustion of Caribbean gold reser ves, Spain faced the problem that some of the riches that the Spaniar ds were seeking, such as Inca gold and silver , were found in par ticularly r emote and inhos- pitable areas. This having been said, the richest ar eas would turn out to be 1 A definitive study of the global impact of what could be called the ‘globalisation of America’ has yet to be written. This is not the place to under take any such ef for t. Here we can only underline a number of the most impor tant aspects of it for the purposes of this book. B. YUN-CASALILLA 53 just to the nor th (the Aztec confederation) and to the south (the Inca Empire) of the Caribbean Sea, which quickly emerged as the cornerstone of interactions with the Iberian Peninsula. Geography and environmental systems imposed serious constraints upon communication. Dependence upon the winds and the ocean cur - rents led to long stationar y periods during voyages and caused lengthy delays in travel across the oceans. Even after a communication system was organized, Chaunu has calculated that a round trip between Andalusia and Mexico took some eighteen and a half months, of which only five were actually spent in sailing. In the first place, this posed a political pr ob- lem due to the delays af fecting or ders and communication between the metropolis and the colonies (Chap. 7 ). But it also constituted a serious financial drawback, resulting in a long period in which capital would be immobilized, with the subsequent high costs for traders. In addition, given the unpredictability of the weather , the inevitable and long delays, and the need for security , vessels were loaded with as many foodstuf fs, weapons, and ammunitions as possible. While these measures r epresented sensible planning, they propor tionally decreased the voyages’ overall pr of- itability . The incr ease in the vessels’ dimensions, moreover , would bring new problems when the convoys came to pass over the sandbars at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River . In ef fect, they wer e often forced to wait for high tides near the Cape of San Vicente, the ar ea of maximum danger for corsair attack. These were some of the r easons why trade was skewered towards goods that wer e ver y expensive relative to their weight, such as gold, silver , or slaves, and made use of others, such as hides and leathers, as a kind of ver y low-cost ballast freight, whose function was to balance outgoing loads (Chaunu 1977, p.45). There wer e also problems of a more strictly social—or human—origin. The conquest and organization of territor y were relatively rapid in the areas wher e extant political str uctures were mor e advanced. In this regard it was impor tant that the Aztec confederation and Inca Empire wer e mini- mally centralized and that, with the fall of their centres of power , Spaniards took control of extensive and ef ficient networks apt for the r uling of their territories. But the limitations on the contr ol of territor y were ver y con- siderable across much of the continent, wher e there remained many tribal societies in inhospitable areas that wer e ver y dif ficult to access (and often, also, these were of relatively little inter est to the conquistador es ). In any case, the problem lay not only in conquering distant regions but also in maintaining them. This is to say that the question was how to mobilize IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 54 resour ces—human and technical—for conquest or how to incentivize this process without r elinquishing control of these ter ritories. But it also con- cerned how to maintain a small gr oup of colonists in situ among a popula- tion that dwar fed them. Y et even where conquest had been achieved, it was not always easy or possible to exploit the available resour ces. As the Por tuguese had exploited well-established trade routes in the Indian Ocean, the Castilians took advantage of extant tributar y networks. However it was dif ficult to force the population to toil for its conquerors. Mor eover , no labour market existed to provide a workfor ce. Of course, Indian institutions existed for the use of forced labour in r eturn for the exchange of gifts and compensa- tions (Menegus 1991). But to get these to function on the necessar y scale was a major problem. The most sought-after r esources in the initial phase—gold and silver—were not easy to obtain and posed technological problems. During the first phase, in fact, the pr ogress in mining was based upon a ‘mixing of European techniques and those inherited fr om the old settlers’. But towards 1550, and despite the abundance of mineral depos- its, ‘diminishing retur ns’ star ted to make themselves felt (Sánchez 1989, vol. I, pp. 311–2) that could only be overcome by a technological leap for war d. For silver mining this meant addressing the basic technical prob- lem of mineral amalgamation. This had to be done with mercur y , a prod- uct then available only in Europe and China, which obviously incr eased the final cost of production (Sánchez 1989, vol. I, p.324). And these ar e only a few of the examples of the dif ficulties faced by these cr ucial sectors during the conquest. The situation can be better understood if we also consider the shock that the discover y of this New W orld was provoking among Eur opeans. As is well known, the mere existence of America and its inhabitants com- pelled Europeans to r eject the authority of traditional ideas and star t to envisage reality fr om a platform pr ovided by empirical obser vation (Elliott 1972), as would the later discoveries of Kepler and Galileo. Over the course of the sixteenth centur y , empirical obser vations would pr ogress in auxiliar y sciences such as botany and thr ough the collection of words or the study of languages such as Quechua. The encounter between dif fer ent civilizations also af fected the concept of the Indian and led to discussions about his status as a human being. On the one hand, for the first Dominicans, the Amerindian embodied an unblemished soul, the clean slate ( tabula rasa ) described by Aristotle upon which the values of the most pristine forms of Christianity might be B. YUN-CASALILLA 61 the colonies and the imperial system sensu lato (Chap. 7 ). Moreover , the conquest was a disaster and a failure in humanitarian, demographic, and ecological terms. In distinction to modern empir es of the nineteenth centur y , Iberia’s sixteenth-centur y imperial enterprises wer e not paid for in economic cur - rency dispatched fr om the metropolis or other colonies. Rather , they were financed through a multitude of accor ds made at the local level between the king and the conquerors and colonizers, including the religious or ders. These negotiations had no jurisdictional framework as defined and formal - ized as in the composite monarchies of Eur ope, in which the cities, nobles, and Church exer cised legal powers of coercion (Chap. 1 ). For reasons set out (above), the Crown took gr eat care not to cede ef fective jurisdiction to private individuals. This has sometimes led to the impression that the gov - ernment of America was based upon the unanswerable and absolute power of the king. Y et the ver y system of conquest, based on capitulaciones and general concessions of political rights and economic privileges by the Crown to the conquer ors, created a form of do ut des and depended upon the exchange of privileges in the use of natural and political resour ces that from the ver y beginning nuanced the ef fective power of the king. What the conquistador—Columbus himself is the most evocative example—received was the recognition of his ‘privileges’ to use r esources or to gover n in retur n for his extending the dominions and resour ces of the king. The encomiendas and r epar timientos of Indians also implied this type of transac - tion. Both were based on the Crown’s ceding of tributar y advantages or the use of a workforce in r eturn for colonization. Fr om this basis sprang the later problems faced by the monar chy in revising the conditions it had set down for the first conquistador es , as did the settlers’ subsequent r evolts and obstr uctionism, both of which were fully justified fr om their point of view . The empir e was built on an exchange between the Crown, which saved the most precious of all r esources—money—by confer ring political and social capital, and the ef fective capacity for enfor cement upon the col - onists. This was done, however , on the grounds of the pr eser vation of royal jurisdiction and the creation of for mal institutions of government that were, in appearance, at least, dependent upon the king. A process of this sor t did not avoid permanent conflicts. An attempt to institute refor ms in 1542 known as the Leyes Nuevas provoked settlers’ rebellions. The policy on encomiendas , for instance, the suppr ession of vacant ones, triggered considerable r esistance among their holders. In Per u things went as far as open conflict in 1544. It proved possible to IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 62 avoid this outcome in New Spain thanks to the necessar y adjustment being made in time, but in 1564 a new wave of discontent broke out and led the rebels to name the son of Cor tés as their legitimate king. The other step to the ar ticulation of dominion, the r elations between colonials and Amerindians, led to more than one flar e-up and resulted in armed uprisings. As early as 1536, this dif ficult r elationship led to the Per uvian rebellion of Manco Cápac, giving vent to for ms of dissent that would last until 1572 and would lead to the foundation of the indepen- dent kingdom of Vilcabamba and the spr ead of millenarian beliefs that encouraged resistance. Attitudes wer e, clearly , changing. In this period, ‘rebels’ not only lear nt to fight against horses by constr ucting pits or throwing balls at their legs but also, according to the account of Titu Cusi, son of Manco himself, reinfor ced their old religious beliefs by identifying the Christian deity as a false God consisting of nothing more than painted cloth and clearly bettered by the visible gods—the Sun and the Moon— who communicated with their people. The emergence, from 1564, of the religious movement of the T aqui Ongo was consistent with these develop- ments and with the traditional cyclical conception of histor y . This pro- gramme assumed a messianic character and announced the resur rection of Pachacamac and a victorious revolution against the Spaniards. These beliefs would become so enduring and deep-rooted that they would r esur - face in the eighteenth centur y . The same could be said of the forms of frontier r esistance, such as that of the araucanos (in today’s Chile, and which lasted until the nineteenth centur y and displayed a r emarkable degree of militar y adaptability), and uprisings in the humid zone of Mexico, among the Chichimeca, who would never in fact be conquered. Indeed, it has even been argued that ‘the entire colonial histor y is marked by resistance and r evolts’ (Bennassar 1980, pp.221–52). In the midst of such unrest, the encomenderos cer tainly became progr es - sively stronger and cr eated the conditions for political bargaining with the Crown on a new basis. The demographic crisis, leaving huge unpopulated spaces, provided the encomenderos with a pr etext to dominate peoples and to control their land. Some encomenderos pr oclaimed themselves owners of the possessions—principally the land—of greatly diminished or entirely absent communities. By the middle of centur y , ‘much of the Mexican pla - teau had fallen into the hands of a few wealthy individuals’ (Davis 1976, p. 57). In ar eas devoted to mining, which held such enormous interest for the Crown, the needs for labour led to similar pr ocesses and changes. With the demographic recession and technological innovations, mining became B. YUN-CASALILLA 63 a high-cost activity that relatively few settlers could af ford to enter . These developments were accompanied by a r emarkable ef for t by the mer chants of Lima and the ecclesiastical institutions to finance mining operations, making ef for ts that were decisive in pr oviding liquid funds for a key sector of the colonial economy . Such developments cemented in place another impor tant facet of the r elationship between the monarchy and its subjects, the basis of which was a flexible application of the law and which allowed the Crown to claim its shar e—the ‘royal fifth’—of production. This ‘accord’ would pr ove to be the basis of the great cycle of American silver flowing onto the peninsula between 1550 and 1600–1610. If it wanted to make the Indies a source of income, the Cr own had to facilitate the work of these merchants and ecclesiastics. Its r elationship with them, if usually marked by tensions, was always based upon recipr ocal and mutual need. The understanding between local authorities and the Crown was reflected in the decentralization of the Derecho Indiano , something which even permitted the sur vival of indigenous laws and customs. Common to all of these developments was recourse to the long-established Castilian tradition of ‘obeying but not complying’ with the law , a custom used by the municipal councils of many cities as a way to ‘oppose the authoritari- anism of the King and his of ficials’ (T omás y V aliente 1992, pp.337–41). This mixture of pr essure, resistance, and asymmetric transaction was also clear in the process of the r eligious acculturation of the indigenous population—and, indeed, in the limits to this process. Anthr opologists have shown that the ef for ts to change the culture and mental world of the Indians had cer tain limits, in large par t because of the syncr etic nature of many religious beliefs. As the case of the Maya makes clear , the outcome was often a hybrid type of religion that displayed on the one hand a capac- ity for resistance and, on the other , the negotiating str uctur es that had to be adopted (Farris 1984, pp. 442–536). Religious syncretism entailed another way of compromising, one paid for in blood in many cases but not less impor tant than the other accord with the king: this was the agr eement that the local chiefs and indigenous lords should not only organize the collective tasks to pay the tribute but also its transfer , a par t of which they duly retained for themselves (Menegus 1991). The r elationship was also based upon the Church, whose expansion implied the development of another impor tant actor in political and economic af fairs as well as reli- gious ones. The Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits acted as mediators between colonists and Indians and were subject to the same exchange of forms of capital, including economic r esources, with the monarchy . IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 64 From the demographic and humanitarian point of view , this system and the contact between these two worlds resulted in a catastr ophe without precedent in the histor y of humanity . A key star ting point to understand sixteenth-centur y America is the way the combination of ecological for ces and institutions led to what Las Casas called the ‘destr uction of the Indies’, the demographic catastrophe following the conquest. Whatever the popu- lation figures of America in 1491, it is clear that the indigenous population was sizeably reduced in the following decades. Thus, for central Mexico—a region that has generated considerable contr oversy—Borah and Cook postulate a fall from 25million inhabitants in 1519 to 1.38in 1595. This is, perhaps, overly dramatic. But, even taking more r ecent attempts at revi- sion by scholars such as Zambardino (fr om between 5 and 10 million to 2.2 and 3 million in 1568), it is impossible to deny that the Amerindian population fell between 50% and 70%. This obviously entailed dramatic consequences for the economy of the area and workfor ce availability . Some calculations even suggest a fall of between 60 and 80 million inhabitants in 1500 to 10million in 1600, including European immigrants. 4 As it is well known, this breakdown in American histor y has been the cornerstone of the so-called Black Legend, which por trays Spain as a cr uel countr y destr oying not only American resources but above all native American populations and cultures. Over the last few decades, however , a rich vision of the ecological clash of these two worlds has emerged and has gone a long way towards explain- ing the ‘means’ of conquest—in other words, the envir onmental factors that facilitated this process. The ‘ecological imperialism’ analysed by Crosby was, no doubt, a key factor (Cr osby 1988). Diseases such as small- pox r uined the lives of thousands of Indians (and strengthened their belief in the divinity of the Spaniards, whose r esistance to the epidemic was far higher). Focusing upon illnesses, John Elliott has written that ‘the most ef fective of all the allies for the imposition of Eur opean supremacy was not human, but rather biological’ (2006, p.112). Plants such as white clover , which quickly spread thr ough Per u as fodder , displaced the Incas from fields that had been vital for their livelihood. The pig, an omnivore r equir - ing high quantities of carbohydrates, competed with the Indians for high- calorie foods. Semi-wild cattle spread ver y quickly throughout Mexico and other regions. T ogether with pr oliferating numbers of horses, they helped 4 See figur es in Maddison (1995) or some dif ferent but equally meaningful estimates in Romano (2004, Chap. 1). B. YUN-CASALILLA 65 destroy much of the foliage that was ver y delicately balanced in some zones. 5 This vision somewhat shifts the accent from human action and cr uelty to more impersonal factors and, no doubt, contributes to a less maniquean view of the ‘destr ucción de las Indias’. Y et one needs to consider ecological imperialism not only as the encoun - ter of flora, fauna, and microorganisms, as is usual, but also in relation to the role played by the institutions, cultural beliefs, and patter ns of knowledge regulating the uses of r esources and ecosystems. T oday it is clear that the logic of how the encomienda functioned would be cr ucial. Amerindians were awar ded to the encomenderos as a workforce or as tributaries for a tem - porar y period designed to be cancelled at some point, when the Indians would rever t to the Crown. Hence ther e emerged a tendency towards the quickest possible exploitation of the Amerindian population as an essential par t of this drama. In the same way , the r epar timientos of indigenous peo - ples and the use of mitas (personal labour ser vices that the Indians had to per for m in the mines) involved the massive displacement of individuals from their communities to the mining areas, thus exer ting a dramatic ef fect upon the original social str uctures and demographic equilibrium. These institu - tions, moreover , did not act in a vacuum but, rather , in combination with environmental for ces. The settlers’ ef for ts to maximize pr ofits—an objective inherent to their cultural beliefs and aspirations—came on top of intensive rhythm of work that these institutions demanded of the Amerindians and for which the physiology of the native population was entirely unprepar ed. In many areas the diet of the Amerindian population—and diet is a cr ucial component of all living beings in any ecological system—was based on car - bohydrates drawn from the manioc plant, maize, potato, and other cr ops; physiologically , such natives were unprepar ed for the encomenderos ’ demands for continuous exer tions in the fields and mines (Bennassar 1980). On the other hand, the destr uction of the original ecological systems combined with forms of social and institutional organization unpr epared to confront the ensuing environmental challenges. The intr oduction, for example, of European cr ops and technologies associated with the new institutional frameworks created by the Spaniar ds arrived but spr ead too late to avoid the demographic catastrophe. 6 5 Cr osby (1988), McNeill (1977, pp.176–207). 6 The results of the work in pr ogress of Bethany Aram and her research gr oup, ‘Ar tEmpire’, should clarify many of these questions, which are often absent from the r elevant bibliography . IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 66 The institutional component of this process, if often marginalized by historians, was highly significant. Legislative measures wer e clearly unable to stop or prevent the exploitation of the Amerindian population, nor was the medicine of the time capable of meeting the challenges posed by the ‘microbial unification of the world’, in Le Roy Ladurie’s memorable expression (1973). Las Casas denounced this situation to Charles V at the ver y moment of the emission of the ‘New Laws’ ( Leyes Nuevas , 1542), which sought to supress the encomiendas (and in fact did so in cer tain areas), and attempted to end the exploitation of the Indian. The logic of Las Casas’ programme lay not only in human rights and r eligion, as has often been said. It was also based upon the peninsular experience of a continual stripping away and usurpation of the royal patrimony (Chaps. 1 and 4 ), it being somewhat of an obsession of the Crown to aver t a similar process in the Americas. In fact, this was what was occur ring from the ver y moment that subjects of the king—the Indians—died in harsh labour sys- tems. But the remedy was worse than the illness. The new measur es unleashed even more fer ocious desires for exploitation of the workforce. Legislation camouflaged, but did not prevent, abuses in a distant world in which the capacity of enforcement of the r oyal cour ts—and, therefor e, their ability to arr est abuses—was ver y limited (see below). The need for a labour force justified wars of conquest often based upon the idea of the existence of cannibalism (this was not always cer tain), which was seen as a symptom of barbarity . The notion of the barbar ous ser ved to justify not only war but also forced work systems such as the repar timiento , which were thought to of fer the redemptive and civilizing power of work to the barbarian population (Córdoba 2013). As is well known, the New Laws were also the pr etext for the trade in American slaves, something legal and consistent with the cultural beliefs of the period. In this way and to an extent, the Black Legend emerges as a rhetorical excess that under value the context of events and with pr ofound conse - quences on the image of Spain. Such is even more the case considering attempts to aver t the catastr ophe, at least on paper and in some of the Crown’s acts. At the same time, a pur ely ecological vision, based solely on flora, fauna, microbes, and so on, overlooks the human and institu - tional components of the process, especially if the period’s cultural beliefs, in which humanitarianism and human rights were much less developed than today but were alr eady in the mind of people such as Las Casas, provided the foundations of this institutional framework. Between both extremes lies a thir d more complex, but also more r ealistic and less B. YUN-CASALILLA 67 maniquean, possibility . The envir onmental problems, illnesses, interests, and abuses combined with cer tain political economies that neither acted nor were capable of acting to avoid a pr ocess of resource destr uction that implied, even in the midterm, a disaster with characteristics new in the histor y of humanity . The Por tuguese Empir e andAsia: Bar gaining, Diversity, andLimits At the conclusion of the reign of Manuel I of Por tugal (1465–1521), the Por tuguese wer e present on both the nor ther n and eastern coasts of Africa, across the Indian Ocean, and even in the Chinese Sea. Mor eover they had created a genuine Atlantic system that connected a range of archipelagos with the metr opolis and with Africa and which was extended as far as Brazil. Rounding the Cape of Good Hope early in 1498, V asco Da Gama had sailed the coasts of East Africa with just two ships. Beyond this point the navi - gation became easier . Shor tly after war ds he discovered that the coasts of the Indian Ocean were ver y navigable, although danger ous during the monsoon season. As with the great American empir es—those of the Incas and Aztecs— the pre-existence of communication networks was vital to the giant strides subsequently made by the Europeans. Da Gama took mor e than a year to retur n to Lisbon with two great achievements (Par r y 1990, Chap. 7). The first of these was profit and, mor e impor tant, he compiled informa- tion regar ding the seas and coasts, language dif ficulties, societies, and reli- gions. In Lisbon many intelligent Por tuguese believed that, if conquer ed, India ‘would weaken the forces of the kingdom to such an extent that it would be without those necessar y for its conser vation’. 7 But money and information was all that King Manuel—although par tly mistaken— requir ed to embark upon a campaign of conquest. As we have seen, the Por tuguese empire was cer tainly not a work of Miner va—no empir e, in fact, has ever been. A mixture of violence, piracy , for tr esses, and factories, it included, when necessar y , a for m of diplomacy that went as far as the formal submission to local kings or the pr ovocation of a massacre as a lesson to the others. Such methods ser ved to overcome 7 ‘Debilitaría tanto as forças do reino que ficaria ele sem as necessárias para a sua conser va- çao’. Quoted by Romero Magalhães (1997, vol. III, p.521). IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 68 the resistance of the V enetians, the Mamelukes of Egypt, and the Ottoman T urks, who looked unfavourably upon this new competitor—one who was, to make things worse, a Christian (Godinho 1982–1987). The strat- egy employed in these early phases demonstrated what would be the great strength and principal weakness of the Por tuguese empire: the contr ol of chain of key coastal positions, Goa (1510), Malacca (1511), and Ormuz (1515). Ormuz, an enclave ceded thanks to an agr eement with the Safavid Persian dynasty that was confronting the Ottoman Empire, allowed for the control of the Persian Gulf and the chance to pr essure the T urks in the Red Sea with the aim of cutting their involvement in Indian Ocean com- merce. Goa opened up trade to India and constituted an excellent step towards the East. Malacca allowed Malaysia to be appr oached, thus mak- ing the Spice Islands (one of the principal foci of commerce in the area) reachable and allowing trade in the Chinese Sea, even touching Japan (Magalhães 1997, vol. III, p.446). From the 1530s the expansion would be slowed and more focused on the consolidation of positions in this ar ea. In 1529 the Por tuguese had to r ecognize Castilian rights to the Moluccas (Indonesia). The Por tuguese ef for ts against the T urk in the Red Sea ended in failure, and until 1555–1557 they wer e unable to establish themselves in Macao, where the Chinese reaction to the violence that they had used would stop them in their tracks (see the Por tuguese r outes in Map 2.1 ). Enterprises of this sor t capitalized Por tugal’s r elatively few advantages, as a distant and small countr y with, consequently , ver y limited demo- graphic resour ces. Never theless, to face the Muslim merchants connected to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf trade, the Por tuguese called upon ar til- ler y-bearing ships of huge dimensions. The br oadside ( andanadas ) tactic, consisting of bombarding enemy ships from the gr eatest possible distance, allowed the Europeans to sink or incapacitate their adversaries befor e direct hand-to-hand fighting—in which their adversaries’ mor e numerous crews would have pr evailed—could take place. This tactic also enabled the Europeans to sow panic in enemy por ts and enclaves, sometimes with the aim of conquering them but, more often and simply , to make a show of strength. Obviously , the practice did not lead to the conquest of large ter - ritories, which would have been impossible from Por tugal. The compari- son with the Ottoman Empire, which had by this point conquer ed Mameluk Egypt, is revealing. The trade in spices in Antwerp af forded the Por tuguese access to the timbers of the Baltic, while the T urk was making use of the woods of Anatolia and therefor e facing extremely high transpor t costs (Headrick 2010, Chap. 2). B. YUN-CASALILLA 69 The development of the sugar economy in Madeira, the Azores, Santo T omé, and Cape V erde was followed by the emergence of Brazil. On V asco da Gama’s retur n from India, King Manuel immediately charged Pedro Álvares Cabral, un fidalgo da casa del rei , to sail for Brazil, a zone to the east of the line drawn by the T reaty of T ordesillas and, ther efore, a land recognized as belonging to Por tugal for exploration. This was followed by later expeditions along the eastern shor es of South America and brought about contact with the Amerindians. Although trading concessions were made and some factories ( feitorias ) were cr eated, at this point the countr y was too committed to the Indian Ocean in order to make gr eat progress elsewhere (Disney 2009, vol. II, pp. 204–12). The halt in Por tuguese expansion in Asia in the 1530s may be the reason for its subsequent atten- tion to South America, where the Fr ench were gaining ter ritor y and seek- ing to obtain the wood ( pao ) of Brazil, a dye product ver y much sought by the businessmen of Nantes and Brittany and by the tapestr y pr oducers and tailors of Europe (Lockhar t and Schwar tz 1983, p.181). After 1550, however , Por tuguese expansion in Asia slowed down largely due to confrontations with highly developed states and empires that were absorbing some of the W est’s militar y techniques (Dar win 2008, p. 74). Attacks upon T urkish positions in the Red Sea did not bring about decisive conquests, and the Por tuguese dr eam of reaching Suez disap- peared for a period of time. Indian Ocean piracy marked the Por tuguese system. A realistic policy had led Por tugal to abandon enterprises in Nor th Africa, which came to be dominated by the rivalr y between Charles V and Süleyman (Disney 2009, vol. II, pp.125–9). By the mid-centur y , the dif- ferences between the Por tuguese empire in Africa and Asia and the Spanish in America (and, indeed, the Por tuguese dominions in Brazil) wer e already ver y clear: the Por tuguese had encounter ed ver y solid political for mations, with highly developed militar y technology (at least in comparison with the Aztec and Inca empires) and highly evolved inter nal social and economic systems and ecosystems adapted to European illnesses after centuries of contact. T ogether with the scar ce population of Por tugal, these circum- stances explain the empire’s highly limited capacity for penetration and domination. All of these factors would be decisive for the histor y of the empire. As was the case for Castile in America, the system for the acquisition and control of ter ritor y had been based upon ceding political capital to private agents who would conquer and exploit the lands on behalf of the monarch in Lisbon. That is to say that feitorias and capitanias donatarias IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 70 were cr eated (above all this was the case in Brazil, which was divided into 12 such districts) each with the prer ogative to penetrate into the hinter - land (Lockhar t and Schwar tz 1983, Chap. 6). These districts wer e ver y similar to the metropolitan senhorios , and the gover nment ceded the right to govern them in r eturn for the conquest (W eckmann 1993). Another option was to employ a system of contrato in which private individuals received privileges to make use of the land. These wer e negotiated rela- tions (Hespanha and Santos 1998, vol. 5, pp. 351–66) characterized by their ver y low cost to the r oyal exchequer , although, of course, they had a high oppor tunity cost for it in ter ms of its capacity for political control. In the case of Brazil use was also made of the foundation of cities (usually coastal ones), the outcome being that the population density of the hin- terland would be noticeably lower than in Spanish America. These arrange- ments were conditioned not only by the dif ficulties in penetrating the hinterland but also by their character as enclaves within expor t-orientated economies that acquired slave labour fr om abroad and in retur n sent prac- tically all of their produce overseas. As a r esult, royal influence in the cities of the Por tuguese colonial world would be less marked and slower to establish itself than was the case in the Castilian colonies (Lockhar t and Schwar tz 1983, Chap. 6). This having been said, it was obvious that the proper exploitation of this extensive network of contacts depended upon cer tain r egulator y ef for ts and government fr om above. As in Spanish America, institutions with a strong centralizing tendency wer e established above the r udimen- tar y ones on the gr ound. In fact, the Por tuguese oriental empire was divided into two dif fer entiated zones (Boyajian 1993) with interdepen- dent but individualized institutions. The Casa da Índia , founded in 1503 and later imitated in Castile, was charged with regulating maritime space and overseas commerce and oversaw the r oyal monopoly in trade between Lisbon and Goa. Moreover , in theor y the Por tuguese system had a clearer monopoly than the Castilian one: while in Seville the Crown only r egu- lated the trade between private individuals and attempted to respect the privileges of each city as a commercial licence holder , in Lisbon the king himself reser ved the right to trade in determined products. The second institution was the power ful Estado da Índia , whose gover nor or viceroy was appointed by the monarch, resided in Goa, and was charged with the costs of protection, diplomacy , and enforcement in the Asian colonies. The Estado da Índia was charged with controlling and r egulating Asian trade, a ver y impor tant par t of which was in private hands (Boyajian 1993, B. YUN-CASALILLA 77 of curr ency exchanges. Rather , it is significant because it accustomed mer - chants to operate in a world where monetar y manipulations, although in existence, were mor e exceptional, thus contributing to a cer tain sense of security which was a guarantee for the development of business. If, as it has been said, the output of German mines had exer ted a relative— but decisive—ef fect on the commer cial growth of the last decades of the fif - teenth centur y and the first of the following centur y , then so when, from 1530, the American mines began to take over , they would become a factor— not the unique one but cer tainly an impor tant one—in bestowing upon an increasingly commer cialized economy the means of payment that constituted the essential lubricant of this development. Markets andT rade Networks Due in par t to eighteenth- and nineteenth-centur y theories, the possession of colonial empires has often been consider ed an impor tant factor in eco - nomic growth and industrialization. Accor ding to these ideas, empires have played a cr ucial role in obtaining colonial raw goods and developing over - seas markets for European industries. Fundamentally , W allerstein (1979) continues this basic approach, although his vision is a much mor e refined one, and he and others have used dependency theor y to interpr et the six - teenth and seventeenth centuries. The Spanish and the Por tuguese empir es, in this long- standing paradigm, were missed oppor tunities already in the sixteenth centur y; dependency theor y has strengthened even fur ther this vision of the histor y of Iberia and Eur ope in general. The Castilian and Por tuguese imperial ventur es have, therefore, been seen as anomalies in the histor y of moder n empires (Y un 2010). The basis of this idea has been, however , highly criticized by some histo - rians. Y ears ago, P . O’Brien (1980) drew attention to the extremely small size of colonial markets and the dif ficulty of attributing a decisive r ole to them before 1750. Whether or not this was a useful model for the British or European economy of the 1700s, its application to the situation of Castile and, indeed, to the old continent in general in the 1500s is ver y convincing. Indeed, for some time I have been arguing that something similar to this model is a good fit for the Spanish empire (Y un 1998, 2004, 2010). Fur ther more, in contrast to the common opinion among historians, the chances of the emergence of high demand for Castilian (or European) goods in America or in Asia were not that gr eat. In order for a power ful colonial market for European pr oducts to emerge, it was first necessar y for IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 78 the local society to pass through a complex pr ocess of acculturalization, which matched local demand to the European patter ns of consumption and industrial production. Mor eover this change could only be achieved in the long term and by non-commer cial mechanisms that were more closely connected to violence, war , and the creation of intra-colonial cir cuits of trade (Y un 2013). The demographic crisis brought about in America by contact and conquest fur ther r educed the potential capacity of this market. Around 1580, when smuggling was only just beginning in ear nest, annual shipments to the Indies were not gr eater than the internal trade of a city such as Córdoba. Quite possibly , the amount of textiles being expor ted to the overseas dominions did not reach the quantity sold on the market of this city (Y un 1998). Although often forgotten by economic historians, this is entirely logical: ar ound 1580 only 250,000 white settlers lived in Spanish America, meaning that the potential demand for the products from the Old W orld was rather small. This signified the equivalent to between 4% and 5% of the existing theoretical additional demand of the Iberian Peninsula. At this juncture, a number of local industries in sectors such as textiles were also emerging, while constr uction (one of the most impor tant) and other branches were largely tied to essentially r egional cir - cuits and had a ver y small impact upon the industrial sector of the metr op - olis. The rise of the American empire was not, ther efore, an extraordinar y missed panacea for Iberian industrial development, simply because the oppor tunity was rather small until ar ound 1580 at the earliest. And this context must inform our understanding of the evolution of the European economy in general and of the Spanish economy in par ticu- lar during the sixteenth centur y . In shor t, the first phase of this primitive globalization does not seem to have been based on the creation of ver y dynamic overseas markets for European (or Castilian) industrial pr oducts. Moreover , Europeans soon were able to use American silver to level their balance of trade with Asia— the tr ue centre of the world economy , contrar y to the pr eaching of an overly mechanical application of dependence theor y—thus making it unnecessar y to incr ease their expor ts to Far Eastern markets, and, ther e- fore, the need to develop an industr y able to balance or compensate its trade with the East. But it is also obvious that, from a commercial point of view , there can be no doubt that this process saw an incr ease in the movement of goods at the global level and, in par ticular , a rise in those heading to Europe. Even scholars such as O’Rourke and Williamson (2002), who have B. YUN-CASALILLA 79 relativized the impact of this period’s inter national trade in the process of globalization, have shown that the increasing flow of pepper into Eur ope was cr ucial for the fall in the real prices of this commodity , a trend that demonstrates the relevance of this commer ce. Other products reveal the same pattern. In Graph 2.1 the evolution of sugar and pepper prices in relation to the price index in Andalusia shows a similar tr end. It is also evident that globalization produced an exponential incr ease in the slave trade, and the same happened with products such as cacao, cochineal and other dyes, and many other goods. This process also facilitated a gr owth in intra-European trade. A high propor tion of the Por tuguese cargoes that arrived in Lisbon fr om Asia and Africa to be re-expor ted to Nor ther n Europe were compensated by an inverse trade of tin, copper , lead, mercur y , wood, alum, and other goods towards Por tugal. The ar rival of American silver into Europe, via Spain, had similar ef fects. It not only enhanced pr evious trade from Nor ther n Europe to the Iberian Peninsula but was also a positive factor in allowing for more Iberian, and in general Mediter ranean, commodities, such as salt, wool, and others, to be expor ted to the nor th. T o what extent, then, did this commer ce break with the poly-nuclear model of development that previously existed in Eur ope (Chap. 1 )? The answer to this question allows us to provide a mor e in-depth analysis of the concrete ef fects on inter national commerce. 100 1000 10000 1501 1521 1541 1561 1581 1601 1621 1641 Su gar prices/prices in de x Pepper prices/prices inde x Graph 2.1 Sugar and pepper prices in regard the prices index in Castile Sources: My own elaboration based on data from Hamilton (1975, Appendix III, IV and V) and Reher and Ballesteros (1993). Prices of sugar and pepper from Old Castile. IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 80 Spanish silver and the products of the Castilian and Por tuguese Atlantic economy that arrived in the Low Countries and England also encouraged the connections with the faraway areas of the Baltic Sea. 15 Thus, Nor thern Europe, and, in par ticular , Antwerp, was greatly favour ed by the commer - cial development of the Atlantic front and the Iberian trade with America, Africa and Asia (V an der W ee 1963, vol. II, Chap. 6). The beginning of the rise of the city was related to the ar rival, from the star t of the centur y , of Por tuguese cargoes. Until the 1530s Lisbon merchants, many of them of converso origin, faced the problem of not having suf ficient quantities of African gold to meet payments for spices and so sought in Antwerp the silver and copper that the Fugger and the W elser obtained through the lease of the royal mines of Tyrol. This also contributed to enhance the trade between Iberia and the nor th of Eur ope. The first impact of this new connection was quick to make itself felt on the functioning of European commer cial circuits. If until this juncture products fr om Asia were unloaded at V enice and then redistributed across Europe, now they would descend fr om the Low Countries, through the fairs in L yon, while silver and copper fr om Central Europe was sent up to Antwerp in increasing quantities (Gascon 1972). This transfor mation was accompanied by a greater dynamism of overland continental trade, evident in the increase in the movement of cattle fr om Denmark, Nor th Germany , Hungar y , and Central Europe towar ds the Netherlands (for the European routes, Map 2.1 ). The aftermath of the dif ficulties of the 1520s saw the decisive moment for Antwerp, a city which, despite the persistence of cer tain pr oblems symptomatic of fluctuations in American trade, would now experience an unprecedented phase of expansion (V an der W ee 1963). It then forged increasingly close connections with England and developed its own luxur y goods and linen industr y , thanks largely to the Low Countries’ growing links with Iberia, one of the main markets for its manufactures, which it exchanged for wool and other raw materials. 16 Mid-centur y Antwerp was, 15 T o give just one example, trade in r ye r ose from 20,900 tonnes in 1490 to 46,200 tonnes in 1557 (Zytkowicz 1985, p. 66). W e might also consider the gr owing quantities of furs, wood, wax, salted-fish—Iberian salt was already common in the Dutch provinces—and many other heavy but widely dispersed items whose consumption was growing. 16 Pach (1968). V an der W ee (1988) underlines the impor tance of the Castilian market for Flemish production (tapestries, high-quality fabrics, all types of ar tistic objects, etc.). B. YUN-CASALILLA 81 therefor e, a commercial and industrial centre of the first rank. It was the meeting point for select and expensive products fr om the south and the heavy and popular products of the nor th. And it also ser ved as a point of redistribution thr oughout Nor thern and Central Eur ope for Iberian silver; sugar , spices, and many other Atlantic, African, and Asian goods; and a sizeable par t of Italian pr oduction. In addition, the city’s economy was based on a power ful and diversified industr y that was increasingly tied to th e production of high- quality and ar tistic goods. Antwerp oversaw the emer - gence of cer tain trading techniques and financial developments (V an der W ee 1988, pp. 184 and f f.). Fr om the beginning of the centur y , German houses (the W elser and the Fugger) had displayed through Antwerp their interest in financing businesses in the Por tuguese and Castilian colonies and in advancing monies to Charles V ; now the city saw the emergence of methods conducive to the streamlining of cr edit (Ehrenberg 1955). Political factors were impor tant to all of these changes. The for mation of the dispersed composite monarchy of Charles V did not pr esage the disappearance of the numerous existing trade bar riers among his territo - ries. All were gover ned by dif fer ent constitutions and a diverse array of commercial and political elites, and each one of them would r etain its juris - dictional specificities. A genuine process of economic integration as it is understood today was all but inconceivable. The fiscal and monetar y diver - sity of these territories and the existence of corporations of local mer chants staunchly determined to maintain their privileges cr eated barriers to out - side penetration of many sectors and regions. However , the for mation of this complex and dispersed political network in W ester n Europe also would have some positive ef fects for the inter nationalization of commercial net - works and the integration of regional economies within this ter ritorial mosaic. The consciousness of having a shared king gave an elite of busi - nessmen close to the Cour t a cer tain security in r egard to the stability of commercial links. That Charles implemented a policy of monetar y stability in some of his domains no doubt helped deepen relationships between them. The case of Flanders and Castile and the relations of exchange in relation to silver is a good example. Although caution should be exer cised in approaching this theme, Graph 7.2. demonstrates how , if the seven - teenth centur y was characterized by both cur rencies being pr one to con - siderable fluctuation, the sixteenth centur y , above all until 1569, would be marked by a high degree of stability and, ther efore, predictability . IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 82 Political factors would also have a definite impact upon international trade for financial reasons. Despite the so-called Castilian monopoly on American trade, the Fugger penetrated into the colonial economy by contracting asientos with the king in exchange for the impor t of goods which were traded in Eur ope (Kellenbenz 2000). And the same can be said of the penetration of the W elser into the slave trade that was present across extensive ar eas of Europe (Kellenbenz 2000, p. 225). The growing ease with which Spanish wool was travelling to Flanders, and with it the ever more fluid trade of Flemish and Ger man goods into Castile, was related to the loans that these bankers, together with the Genoese, pr o- vided to the Emperor and which, given the ban on expor ting curr ency from this kingdom, led to the r epatriation of their loans and the interests accr ued on them by sending commodities to other areas of Eur ope (Ruiz Mar tín 1990a). The gr owing trade in silk between Granada and Italy orig- inated in the lease that Charles, always needing money , conceded to the Genoese for this commerce. But did the emergence of the Atlantic and this growing trade repr esent a setback for the Mediterranean economy? Did it lead to a mor e polarized economy with a dynamic Nor th and a r etarded South? It would appear that it did not. Cer tainly , there wer e some areas in the South that drew benefits from this pr ocess. Among them is the obvious case of Genoa. Favoured by the vacuum left by the expulsion of the Jews, and having gained access to monarchy’s finances, the gr eat bankers consolidated Genoa’s for tune. If Ger man bankers were able to capture par t of the pro- duction of raw materials in Iberia, Genovese connections were not weaker—on the contrar y (Carande 1987, vol. I, pp. 295–315). Their hand would be greatly str engthened after 1528, when Genoa in ef fect became a protectorate of Charles V , who, in turn, would cr eate the fairs in Besançon as a means of counterbalancing the weight of the fairs of L yon, while the T uscans became the allies of the King of France. These develop- ments would extend the influence of the Genoese into the Nor th and the Netherlands, which would be decisive for the splendour of Genoese bank- ing during the reign of Philip II and the establishment of a commercial and financial network unprecedented in Eur ope (De Maddalena and Kellenbenz 1986). As early as the 1540s, the Genoese were alr eady the largest foreign colony in Flanders after the Castilians. V enice also resisted the pull of the Nor th. Fr om the 1520s it reacted with noticeable results in the spice trade, and the impor tance of the V enetians in L yon’s spice trade recover ed up to 85% by 1533–1534 (Gascon 1972, p. 646), thanks to B. YUN-CASALILLA 83 new routes thr ough Asia Minor and Aleppo. In the lagoon city , many resour ces were ploughed into industr y , a sector that would diversify in response to the demand for quality that would, in tur n, encourage fur ther industrial diversification and boost new and ver y dynamic sectors such as printing, glassware, and others (Sella 1957; Lane 1973, pp. 308–12). If the Genoese were able to cope with financial competition fr om German banking in the Cour t of the Habsburgs and even, through it, to contr ol sectors strategic for trade, T uscan banking would fur ther strengthen its position in the market of L yon, where it established str ong bonds of finan- cial and political complicity with the King of France (Gascon 1972). Such developments took place while the Florentine industr y maintained a remarkable rate of gr owth that would reach its climax in the 1560s (Malanima 1982). Despite the impor tance of colonial trade and the development of the Atlantic front with its links to the global economies of America, Africa and Asia, the European economy did not fit the model applied to it in a mechanical application of the theor y of dependence. Far fr om leading a hierarchical r elationship of subordination with regar d to a central axis, the growth of the first decades of the centur y remained a process based upon various centres (see Chap. 1 ). One needs to think also that, despite the striking development of the Atlantic façade, the penetration of interna- tional trade into family economies and regional markets was still too small to determine the models of economic gr owth of large geographic areas. 17 This consideration, of course, does not preclude r ecognition of the cr ucial role of Atlantic trade in the working of the commercial networks within Europe. These arguments lead to a consideration cr ucial for our case: the nota- ble capacity that, from a r elatively low level of use of resources, could be achieved by institutions that were appar ently inef ficient in generating growth accor ding to the model of the new institutional economics. As a matter of fact, this international commer ce, like the incipient trade with America, Africa and Asia was based on economic privileges and on the monopolistic access to resour ces and information. 17 A comparison is instr uctive: the annual remittances of American silver that were paid to private individuals in Castile for commercial sales, ser vices, and inheritance came to 2250 mil- lion maravedís in 1590–1591, when the gross domestic product of Castile was wor th 30,000million (Y un 1998, p.131, n. 25). IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 84 i beria in  the g lobal e conomy : l owering t ranSaction c oStS An Expor t Economy? The increasing r ole of the Iberian Peninsula in the expansion of foreign trade was clearly expressed by indicators such as the almojarifazgo of Seville or the periatge of Barcelona (Y un 2004, pp. 147–51). As was the case for Europe as a whole, incipient globalization may have induced a series of changes of great impor tance in patter ns of consumption. The ever -easier access to foreign pr oducts, the expanding availability of meth- ods of payment, and the increase of income derived fr om domestic eco- nomic growth would activate the demand for pr oducts of all kinds in the Iberian kingdoms. The rise of prices in the Iberian Peninsula must also have attracted foreign manufactur ed products. The fact that this economic growth was accompanied by the development of access to easy cr edit for privileged groups (see Chap. 4 ) would give fur ther impetus to a form of ostentatious consumption that was already pr ominent in the societal mores of the time and which was satiated primarily with exotic, rare, or expensive goods usually sourced fr om abroad. The growing devotion of Iberian aris- tocracies and elites to the culture of the Italian and Flemish Renaissance would pull in the same direction (Br otton 2002). Par tly as a result, a pat- tern of conspicuous consumption and ostentation took hold among the nobility and urban patriciate that was clearly linked to the cultural shifts experienced by these groups. As early as the r eign of Charles V , many for - eign travellers in Iberia refer red not only to the spices consumed ther e but also to the rich clothes and the damask and taf feta that ador ned the per - sons and homes of the nobles and great businessmen or to the ornamental richness of the churches and palaces. 18 Demand of this sor t was met by the consumption of expensive fabrics and objets d’ar t impor ted fr om Italy and Flanders, whose industries quickly benefited from this demand, 19 as did 18 N. Popielovo V iaje de Nicolás de Popielovo , in García Mercadal (1999, vol. I, p.300), J. Munzer , V iaje de Jerónimo Munzer . Ibidem, p. 309, 310, 374–5. Guicciar dini Relación de España , Ibidem, p.585. 19 V an der W ee (1988). Dámaso de Frías, a traveller of the epoch, refers to the ‘alteration of the costumes, customs and manners of living that we see in all of Spain since the Flemmish entered into it’, specifying the abandonment of ‘temperance’ and the ‘old parsimony in eat- ing habits of the Spaniards’, Diálogo de Alabanza de V alladolid García Mer cadal Ibidem. p.247. B. YUN-CASALILLA 85 their counterpar ts in France (Rouen and Nantes above all). And it would seem that this process was incr easingly influential as the reign wore on as new lifestyles, linked in par t to the palace and the adoption of mor e refined habits, took root (Checa 1988, pp.195–216). This trend would even fur ther encourage the reverse flow of expor ted raw materials from the peninsula to the r est of Europe. W ool shipments, undoubtedly the most impor tant of all of the Spanish expor t pr oducts, increased thr eefold in volume during the first half of the centur y . The same thing occurr ed in Aragon where, in addition to wool, leathers and saf fron were also pr ominent in expor ts (Gómez Zor raquino 1987, pp. 87–98). Sugar and silk were expor ted from V alencia in gr owing quantities, as was silk from Granada and Mur cia and the alum of this latter region. 20 From the middle of the centur y (the star t of the second cycle of the Atlantic economy), the role of Castile and Por tugal as bridges in the trade of raw materials coming from the New W orld was accentuated as large quantities of cocoa, hides, sugar , cochineal, and other products ar rived, par t of which was expor ted to other ar eas of Europe (Phillips 1990, pp.58, 80, 70). Several factors contributed to these changes. In Castile, the improve- ment of the fairs system pivoting around Medina del Campo, Medina de Rioseco, and Villalón was, without doubt, one of them. These wer e insti- tutions whose commercial r egulation would help reduce an initially ver y high level of transaction costs and risks. For some time these fairs had constituted an impor tant meeting point for for eign merchants and Castilians. During the sixteenth centur y , the co-ordination of payments between the Castilian fairs and those of Antwerp and Bergen op Zoom was established on near -per fect footing, as was the inter nal trade fair circuit within Spain (Carande 1987, vol. I, p.331). Links of this kind fur - ther reduced infor mation costs and uncer tainty and guaranteed spatial and temporal convergence of supply and demand, thus allowing the establish- ment of a regular system (and ther efore one of more pr edictable opera- tions involving fewer risks) for transferring funds between them. The increasing impor tance of fairs allowed the monar chy to channel payments through them, thus per mitting it to borr ow from and make r epayments to asentistas and bankers present at these gatherings. In tur n this practice provided a stimulus to large-scale businessmen who, needing money to 20 Furió (1995, pp. 244–5), Pér ez and Lemeunier (1984, pp. 77–9). Cor tés and Vincent (1986), Ruiz Mar tín (2005). IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 86 meet their commitments to the king, channelled growing quantities of products and bills of exchange thr ough these meetings. (Abed Al-Hussein 1982). During the middle years of the centur y , the annual amount paid by the king in this way could even touch 2,000,000 ducats, a figure of signifi- cance if we consider the gross annual income of the monar chy in Castile might reach five or six million at this point (Y un 2004). 21 The impulse behind the fairs was also linked to the development of the American econ- omy that forged sudden, and intense, ties. Around 1520, of 186 letters negotiated with fairs from Seville, 107 r eferr ed to trade with L yon and only 79 with the other fairs of Castile (Otte 1986). But this ratio, if itself of some impor tance in a year of civil war and intense conflicts in Medina del Campo, would rise during the following decades. The fairs became a circuit linking the whole global economy , from Southeast Asia to the Caribbean, Lisbon, Seville, and Antwerp, and reaching as far as the more developed areas of Italy . Its impor tance with regar d to the development of foreign trade is ther efore undeniable. A similar result emerged from the foundation and development, begun in the fifteenth centur y , of consulates in Castile that were similar to the existing ones in the Crown of Aragon. The Consulate of Burgos was established in 1494. Bilbao followed suit in 1511. Seville, where by 1503 the Casa de la Contratación alr eady existed, would have to wait for the Real Provisión of 1543 and the ordenanzas of 1556. 22 The ef fects of this type of institution would be immediate. Despite friction between them (especially between those of Bilbao and Burgos) and the not-so-positive future evolution (see Chap. 5 ), the consulates would initially impr ove the organization of the convoys and maritime insurance system. Above all, they enabled special cour ts and arbitration systems to r educe transaction costs by making judicial review a mor e agile, rapid process (as is specifically clear from the ordenanzas of Burgos and Seville) and so increased guaran- tees of responsibility and agr eement among their members. 23 Membership in a consulate created bonds of tr ust and even, in some cases, of shar ed responsibility among mer chants, traits which were especially valuable in 21 Dirección General del T esoro , Inv° 24, legs. 490, 1299, 1458, 815, 1432, 491, 492, 494, 495, 561, 561 bis, 562, 563, 564, 565, 566, 567, 568, 569, 570, 571, 572, 573, 574, 575, AGS. 22 Basas (1994, pp.25–40) and Gar cía-Baquero (1992, pp.57–84). 23 Basas (1994, pp.33–6) and Gar cía-Baquero (1992, pp.74–9). B. YUN-CASALILLA 93 the town or city in question. 31 Y et, piecemeal legislation was handed down that regulated the for mal conduct of these of ficials, with the aim of impr ov - ing their status as bondsmen for contracts, something which was in princi - ple positive for trade and transactions in general. 32 Although the regulation of notaries and scribes pr oduced no decisive qualitative change, this sor t of measur e may well have had some positive ef fects, especially if we consider the r elatively insecure initial situation. 33 This policy would strengthen with the impr ovement of the Chancillerias , whose suppor t for the fulfilment of contracts and judicial functions is well known (Kagan 1991). It resulted in legislation that pr ovided guar - antees on commercial transactions, contracts, and compliance, 34 with 31 In this r egard, see law III (of 1534), or law XVIII, in which an order is given with the aim of extending the scope of action of the scribes, with the corr esponding ef fect of enlarg- ing their role as guarantors and so reducing uncer tainty in transactions. Specifically it states that ‘we order the corregidores and justices of cities and towns of these our kingdoms that they should compel and reward the scribes of a number of them that go out into the land to take writs and despositations as they are asked [to do]’. Nueva Recopilación , Libro IV , Tit. XXV , ley XVIII. 32 An attempt was made to avoid nepotism in the actions of the scribes, who often fell into this trap when dealing with the networks of monasteries and religious institutions. New norms wer e set down, with annual checks, new protocols, and norms of behaviour stipulated for testimonies, and writs, with the aim being to guarantee the ef ficacy of the system. See Nueva Recopilación , Libro IV , Tit. XXV , passim . 33 The impor tance of the measures intr oduced in regard to scribes should be underlined. They were not brought about by a new drive by the Cr own to set down r ules and control social life, although at times the towns criticized these measures on these grounds. On the contrar y , on more than one occasion, the Cr own asked for the extension and strengthening of the powers of these of ficials, without doubt because of their quest to inculcate greater respect among private individuals, a quality that was increasingly impor tant for the urban oligarchies as a means of reducing risks and incr easing security in economic relationships of an ever more impersonal and market-orientated nature. Thus the City of Granada included among its petitions of 1542 that the clause should be respected that anyone using his proper ty for a censo should register it befor e a scribe of the council and that no alternative arrangement should be allowed. It is ver y necessar y , it went on to note, for the good of these kingdoms that those who engage in contracts should not be misled. Patronato Real , 69–82, AGS. 34 Aside fr om the Nueva Recopilación , other collections of legislation of this period can be found. See the wealth of norms and r ules on companies that ar e found in Hugo de Celso, Reper torio de las Leyes de Castilla , Madrid, 2000 (edited by Alvarado Planas), specifically , f. LXXV f f. IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 94 provisions that aimed to standar dize weights and measurements 35 and the publication of compendia of laws. 36 Although these measures wer e apparently aimed specifically at lawyers and men of justice, in all cases they sought to improve the legal system with the aim of building confi - dence in commercial activities and achieving a quicker settlement of disputes—a trait which, as is well known, is one of the keys to the devel - opment of trade. All of these measures, in themselves conducive to the integration of markets, were accompanied by a fall in the costs of transpor t. The phe - nomenon is dif ficult to measur e, and, indeed, no series of prices for transpor t costs can be given. But the signs are ver y clear . In the first place, prices were clearly rising, and, on the other , the supply of trans - por tation was evidently expanding, tr ends which will be explained later (see Chap. 3 ). These circumstances must have led to a decline in r elative prices of transpor t. In conclusion, the formation of vibrant inter nal commercial networks could be interpreted as a negative phenomenon for endogenous develop- ment if it had ser ved only to encourage the penetration and distribution of industrial products and the expor t of raw materials. But there cer tainly were industries which, although they had to suf fer foreign competition, also drew benefits fr om the abundance of raw materials or the commercial advantages drawn from the expansion of the exter nal sector . In addition there wer e sectors that were able to under take a pr ocess of technical 35 According to Hamilton (1975, pp. 168–9), the real advances in this regard wer e achieved during the reign of the Catholic Kings, while Charles, ‘weighed down by the burden of the Empire and the cares of state, had har dly any time to devote to such prosaic tasks’ (p.169). W e do not know the extent to which the reign of the Emperor saw an advance in this regar d. As late as the 1570s, there were some who stated that in Salamanca a number of figur es were ‘somewhat lacking in their measurements and weights’, ‘pesas y medidas algo faltas’, Cámara de Castilla, Libros de Cédulas , lib. 62, AGS. 36 The collections of laws cited in this chapter should be seen in the same light. Their ver y sur vival implies a greater capacity to apply laws dealing with responsibility , commerce, risk, guarantees, and so on. As set down in the Nueva Recopilación of 1571, the new volumes use and cite pre-existing texts such as that of Diego Pérez de Salamanca, Reper torio de todas las Leyes y pragmáticas y Bulas …, Medina del Campo, 1549, or that of Hugo de Celso cited above ( Reper torio de las leyes de Castilla… Op. cit. ). In tur n, this tome was first printed in V alladolid in 1538 and included new nor ms, r ules, or guidelines on a wide number of matters such as ‘debts and debtor’ ( deudas y deudor ) f. XCII, ‘contracts’ f. LXXVII, ‘guarantor and guarantee’ ( fiador y fiaduría ) f. CXLV–CXL VII, ‘buying and selling’, f. LXXV , and so on. B. YUN-CASALILLA 95 development and impor t substitution. As we will see in the next chapter , the expansion of urban networks and industrial development were both ver y consistent with such developments. * * * Spain and Por tugal cr eated a highly complex system in their colonies. Cer tainly it is pr oblematic to describe it as an absolutist one (meaning one in which the king’s authority was unchallenged and unrestrained), much as this has been the view of many scholars. Far from being a monolithic, well- controlled instr ument whose logic can only be explained by the decisions taken in its hierarchical ver tex, the Spanish and Por tuguese colonial systems emerged as a complex binding of powers and working interests, simultane - ously delicate and characterized by relatively decentralized decision- making processes. This is not to deny that major ef for ts at centralization and con - trol wer e under taken from the Lisbon and Madrid or that, as we shall see, these attempts became even more fr equent from the end of the sixteenth centur y . The juridical code itself helped towards this, in par t because it con - sidered the colonies as belonging to the Cr own (nor should it be forgotten that the king continued to hold rights over the land). The result was a high degree of autonomy , with a diverse number of decision-making centres but the existence of a central power that took responsibility for the gover nment and regulation of social and commer cial relations. In societies as complex as these, where the pr esence of the Crown and its degree of penetration into the social fabric varied, these arrangements would lead to levels and for ms of negotiation that were ver y dif ferent fr om one another and which are dif - ficult to set within the (usual) formulas of polycentrism and centralism. Spanish and Por tuguese institutions in both empir es had in fact provided positive results for economic gr owth and expansion in the peninsula. But, being also appropriate to a society whose development had been based upon war and conquest, they also had a notable capacity for destr uction. In other words, the r ules of play wer e shaped by mechanisms leading to both the capture and destr uction of wealth. At times, they wer e highly inef ficient in replacing lost r esources, largely due to the extremely limited develop - ment of medicine and the other tools necessar y to r esist death, which was the main challenge to emerge from the conquest. This fact was also seen in the way that the Spanish adapted existing American institutions to their use. The impact of all of this in the colonies and therefor e in the dif ferent patterns of empir e had to be, however , ver y uneven. After 1492 a period IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 96 of ecological imperialism took place in America, and the European insti - tutional systems were to pr ove more adept at destroying the existing pr o - ductive systems than at reconfiguring them rapidly with a more ef fective apparatus. Few episodes in the histor y of humanity have had such dra - matic ef fects or such long-lasting ones. On the contrar y , the ef fects in Africa and Asia were dif ferent. In the for mer , the slave trade, developing with Atlantic expansion, would lead to convulsions within the original societies. But the lower degree of penetration of the Eur opeans until the nineteenth centur y and their gr eater resistance to disease produced less profound social changes in Africa than in America (Headrick 2010). The population would even continue to grow thr oughout the sixteenth cen - tur y . But in regard to Asia, the scope for the decomposition of the original societies and the establishment of destr uctive (European) institutions was also highly reduced. This was, mor eover , a world with a microbial system close to that of the old continent and more r esistant to diseases brought by the Europeans. On the other side of globalization, Europe was af fected as, especially , was Spain but not in the way we have supposed for years. The growth of trade to which America, the African coast, and Asia contributed did not break the model of poly-nuclear development of the fifteenth centur y , and the Iberian societies did not move to the semi-peripher y of this New W orld economy . In this regar d the institutional framework was cr ucial. The informal mechanisms for the cr eation of confidence and the reduction of risk appear to have been ef ficient, as can be seen in the trading networks based upon personal accords, familial ties, and r eputation. The expansion of international trade is incompr ehensible if we fail to understand this. And these institutions overlapped with the formal institutions cr eated by the monarchy in both countries in a way that was beneficial for economic growth. This was not because of the intrinsic natur e of these institutions but rather because of the huge number of resour ces available to them. The benefits were manifested in impr ovements to the system of justice, con- tracts, the use of money , inter national commercial organization, and inter - regional trade. Attention should also be placed upon the fact that even institutions based upon privilege, the use of the monopoly or expensive and asymmetrical information, appear to have had positive outcomes. T o put this another way , they did not abor t the capacity for growth pr evalent in a society of abundant but unexploited resour ces. B. YUN-CASALILLA 97 This leads us not only to relativize the impact of political or formal institutions on economic growth but also to think that their ef fects depend directly upon the context and the quantity of available r esources. These conclusions will only gain strength in the following chapters, which exam- ine the internal evolution of Iberian societies. Open Access This chapter is licensed under the ter ms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://cr eativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/ ), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and r eproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appr opriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, pr ovide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third par ty material in this chapter ar e included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated other wise in a cr edit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutor y regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain per mission directly fr om the copyright holder . IBERIAN OVERSEAS EXP ANSION ANDEUROPEAN TRADE NETWORKS 99 © The Author(s) 2019 B. Y un-Casalilla, Iberian W orld Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668 , Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global Histor y , https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0833-8_3 CHAPTER 3 Domestic Expansion intheIberian Kingdoms During the last decades of the twentieth centur y , historians became convinced by the model of the economie immobile . This interpretation, heavily influenced by the Annales school, postulated an almost total absence of economic growth prior to the Industrial Revolution. 1 The application of this model to the Iberian kingdoms—sometimes even avant la lettre—pr esented a highly negative interpretation of their economic development in the early modern period. Indeed, some authors even argued that the economy was dominated by an extensive agriculture which was fundamentally incapable of increasing its levels of pr oductivity . The result was, it has been argued, a demographic increase that absorbed any expansion in production and which unleashed a crisis of Malthusian pr o- por tions at the end of the sixteenth centur y that was followed by reces- sion. According to the assumptions of the new institutional economics as practiced by Douglas Nor th, this outcome was also the inevitable result of the imper fect development of pr oper ty rights in Spain; this imper fection was, in Nor th’s view , linked to the absence or extremely limited develop- ment of the capitalist system of land ownership (Nor th 1981). Y et the realities of the ‘Spanish case’, which have so often been taken as ir refutable proof of these theories or models, in fact constitute excellent examples of 1 See, for example, Le Roy Ladurie (1966). But the idea has been taken up again recently in a more sophisticated way by Clark (2007). 100 the limits of these visions in explaining the behaviour of the economy . Above all, this is tr ue in regar d to Castile but also for most of the Crown of Por tugal. A T echnologicAl c rossroAd 2 Beyond economic considerations, a negative and pessimistic vision has long been ver y pr esent in the dif ferent views on Iberian technological development. It is as if the technological delay characteristic of the Spanish and Por tuguese industrial r evolution of the nineteenth centur y had been projected r etrospectively , giving rise to a sor t of black legend according to which the development of useful knowledge had been always impossible in the Iberian countries. It is in par t a consequence of the Enlightenment view of Spain and Por tugal, expr essed by Masson de Mor villers who, in a famous ar ticle in the L’Encyclopédie Méthodique , inquired: ‘In two centu- ries , in f our , or even in six, what has Spain done for Europe?’ Spain, he adde d, is a cou ntr y wher e it is necessar y ‘to ask priests for permission to read and think?’ (Eamon 2009). In the last few years, however , histori- ans of both science and technology have drawn attention to the capacity of sixteenth-centur y Spain and Por tugal—frontiers in this aspect did not exist—to expand in these fields. 3 They have also underlined the capacity of the peninsula to transfer this type of knowledge to the American colonies, with emphasis falling on the idea that these advances were vital to the con- trol, conquest, and exploitation of these ter ritories. But this process had its origins in Europe. Some of the keys to it will be developed in this chap- ter: the use of the mule, of agrarian instr uments made from ir on, leather , espar to grass, and canvass, all of which wer e to be evident in the develop- ment of r ural industries in the Old and New W orlds. These were not revo- lutionar y technologies but did take their place in this pr ocess of piecemeal, widely dispersed improvement whose overall impact would be impor tant. Although no diachronic studies have been attempted, it is evident that the use of mills to grind flour advanced, with windmills being ver y pr ominent. V er y probably Cer vantes was venturing beyond the anecdotal when he set technology and knightly ideals as opponents and rivals in his two great 2 A more elaborated and detailed version of what follows in Y un (2017). After writing these lines, Icould read Cañizares-Esguer ra (2017) who goes indepth onthese ideas. 3 See the cases studied in López Piñer o (1979), Goodman (1988), and Barrera-Osorio (2006). For a brilliant defence, Eamon (2009). B. YUN-CASALILLA 101 scenes evoking the windmill and fulling hammer: logically , don Quijote , a noble himself, identified these two monsters as his natural enemies. As we have seen, improvements wer e also made in the field of iron production. The introduction of techniques bor rowed fr om German mining in the quarr ying of silver and other sectors was a par t of this process (Sánchez 1989). For obvious reasons, Iberian societies quickly adopted American dye products (indigo, the Campeche stick, or cochineal) that allowed it to make changes in the textile production pr ocesses. If maritime expansion cannot be explained without refer ence to the tech - nological and scientific progr ess achieved in fifteenth-centur y Iberian coun - tries, then additional improvements in these fields wer e also the cause of the qualitative leap for war ds made in the sixteenth centur y . The cr eation of the School of Pilots and Car tography in Seville, the Academy of Mathematics (founded by Philip II), the treaties on car tography such as those of F r a n c i s c o Faleir o or Pedro de Medina and many other initiatives give the lie to the old stereotype of sixteenth-centur y Iberia being a society disin - terested in technology (Goodman 1988). Something similar can be said of figures such as Juan de Monar des, a medic from Seville whose relatives wer e merchants involved in the Car r era de Indias and who br ought him grasses from the New W orld so that he could study them and test their medicinal qualities. But this was just one par t of a br oader trend. What was really going on was the systematic amplification of forms of empirical knowledge gathering that would shor tly culminate in Sir Francis Bacon’s consecration of this type of scientific knowledge as a cr ucial par t of moder n thinking. In reality , Monardes’ contemporaries included figur es such as García de Or ta, a conver ted Jew , medical doctor , and botanist from Por tugal whose works would go around the world (Boxer 1963). 4 Something similar could be said of engineering and hydraulics, which were set out in the works of Juanello T urriano (Zanetti 2012). The numer ous proposals of the arbitristas were comparable in scope to modern patent applications (Gar cía T apia 1990). Though there ar e several examples in Joan Thirsk’s influential study on English projectors (1978), scholars have systematically overlooked the fact that some English proposals for economic impr ovement and the modern- ization of its industr y and mining sector depended upon intr oducing changes whose origins lay in Spain or Por tugal. 5 Perhaps not too many 4 García de Or ta, T ratado de las drogas, y medicinas de las Indias Orientales , Burgos, 1578. 5 See, for example, some cases quoted by the author (Thirsk 1978): stockings knitted of silk (p.45), hard white soap (pp.53–4), and Spanish leather (p.55). DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 102 hasty conclusions should be drawn from an ar ea that still requires mor e in-depth and detailed study , but it is impor tant not to forget the known contributions when attempting to reach a balanced assessment of the tech- nological evolution of early modern Iberian Peninsula. It is also wor thwhile to r emember that Iberian naval technology was cr u - cial to Dutch maritime development and that Castilian financial techniques— with marked Italian roots—would spr ead in Europe in the sixteenth centur y (de V ries and V an der W oude 1997; V an der W ee 1967). Though, as we will see, impor tant advances took place, it is quite pos- sible that a weak point of this technological development lay in the failure to adapt agrarian techniques, cr ucial for the economy of the time. Here, perhaps, improvements in organization were mor e impor tant, even if they are sometimes dif ficult to separate from technological impr ovements, with which they often went hand in hand. In any case, it is impor tant to remem- ber the reasons for this pr ogress, although here, again, mor e resear ch is needed. A hypothesis can at least be presented. The Iberian Peninsula combined two necessar y conditions: it was, first, the cr ossroads of techno- logical development and cultural cross-fer tilization; and, second, technol- ogy was vital to maintaining the empire. Oceanic expansion had been possible thanks to the meeting of dif fer ent cultures (Chap. 1 ). And this continued to be the case. Being the centre of a composite monar chy spread out acr oss Europe, the enormous power of the King of Spain and his needs generated a strong gravitational pull upon ‘mechanics’, inven- tors, and intellectuals from acr oss the world. Juanello T ur riano was from Cremona. Monar des had one eye on America and the other on Castile. De Or ta was bor n in Castile, emigrated to Por tugal, and travelled to Goa. The W elser and the Fugger , who car ried American and Iberian mining for war d, gathered their knowledge in Germany , the most advanced coun- tr y of its time in this sector . Even the pr ocedure for the amalgamation of mercur y came from a German, who put it into practice in America (Sánchez 1989). And we cannot overlook the fact that many of those who proposed ‘r emedies’, reforms, and patents—sometimes it is dif ficult to dif fer entiate between them (Y un 2016)—were Italians and Ger mans, Flemish, and French. Not all of these proposals had much sense, of course. The term ‘arbitrista’ car ried the connotation of madness or oppor tunism (Y un 2016). But the ver y fact of their existence demonstrates an intellec- tual ef fer vescence. This circulation of techniques and inventions, the sponsorship of hybrid forms that br ought about new knowledge, is typical of the period in which the word ‘invention’ was not taken to be that B. YUN-CASALILLA 103 dif fer ent from the ter m ‘imitation’ and was understood as such in many areas of Eur ope, where what was presented as an invention in one countr y was ver y often mer ely a copy of something common elsewhere. The type of networks that allowed these new inventions and forms of knowledge and exper tise to circulate was also highly impor tant for other activities. In par t they wer e similar to the webs through which ar tisans moved (Epstein 2002). These would be ver y pr ominent in relation to mining, which benefited from being a sector with an almost non-existent degree of guild gover nance, thus ensuring a higher degree of r eceptivity when faced with innovation. But this was also tr ue in relation to the cir cu- lation of men, science, and ideas through princely cour ts and noble house- holds. This was the case in the circuits that spr ead the new knowledge on mining, hydraulics, mathematics, and watchmaking and in which Juanello T urriano moved (Zanetti 2012). The same was tr ue of many other special- ists and inventors who proposed patents to the monar chy . But the king was also concerned, as wer e institutions such as the Council of the Indies, to develop new types and fields of knowledge, often being conscious that these areas wer e ver y poorly repr esented in the universities. The trans- frontier character of the monar chy and its elites (Chap. 4 ) pulled in this same direction, favouring the cir culation of knowledge. The presence of books on geometr y , mathematics, geography , and histor y (disciplines inti- mately linked to war and to natural philosophy) in noble libraries is eye- catching. Questions of personal and familial prestige aside, this was a type of knowledge that was not confined to the nobles and that, moreover , revealed an interaction with the ‘mechanics’ and other intellectuals who played such a role in the ar t of war . These contacts wer e especially intense with Italy , the most impor tant centre for the pr oduction of scientific and technical knowledge of the time. And this helps us to understand a phe- nomenon that until recently was largely overlooked by scholars. l ocAl i nsTiTuTions , r egionAl e cosysTems , And l And P roPerTy r ighTs But if the capacity to produce and, above all, to adapt and r ecycle tech - nology was one of the keys to Iberia’s economic and geographic expan - sion, then this growth can only be understood thr ough a description of the dif fer ent regional economies and land proper ty rights. In the end, this economy was fundamentally a regional one conditioned by its physi - cal characteristics. DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 110 a labour -intensive crop, whose cultivation was under taken thanks to the protectionist by-laws of the r ural centr es. The greater cities fur ther to the south, where considerable distances separated the inhabited centr es from the farming ar eas, saw impor tant changes. These were br ought about by the replacement of the ox by the mule, a quicker beast of bur den and so one capable of ploughing more rapidly and travelling to mor e distant areas—an impor tant consideration given the pr ogressive concentration of proper ty and the dispersion of plots of cultivated land. The dif fussion of the mule constituted, probably , one of the more impor tant technical advances imple - mented from the fifteenth centur y . The predominance of her editar y systems based upon the division of proper ty among all of the peasant family’s sons resulted in patter ns of early marriage. Unfar med and communal lands were widely accessible; many councils specifically reser ved these for local married couples or widows. These conditions resulted in a zone of unquestionable demographic vigour , with high levels of population mobility . Seigniorial incomes, boosted by their jurisdictional rights and the con- sequent increase in landlor ds’ capacity to collect excises, were enhanced by lands rented on shor t-ter m, renegotiable leases and, at times, as enfiteusis . In some cases, owners directly exploited their estates (above all, this was tr ue for pastureland and meadows). But the basis of their income lay in the tercias and alcabalas paid by the peasant communities as institutions. 13 In many cases the uneven division of productive r esources had created a r ural elite of farm workers ( labradores , a sor t of yeomen) who regulated the use of resour ces belonging to the municipal institutions. Thus, the Meseta was a dynamic and growing r egion. The solidity of peas - ant economies in the Duero V alley and mounting urban development favoured the gr owth of production and population, which was only limited by its high demographic density and elevated rates of land occupancy (see T able 3.1 ). 14 Fur ther south, in New Castile, Extremadura, and Murcia, less solid peasant economies, with lower levels of urban density , were blessed with 13 As it has been said before (Chap. 1 ), the tercias were the 2/9 of the ecclesiastic tithes and the alcabala an ad valorem tax on commer cial transactions. Both were often ceded to the jurisdictional seigniors. 14 W ith demographic densities of 16 inhabitants per square kilometre, the highest of the peninsula in 1530, the population growth would have been 0.3% annually (T able 3.1 ). B. YUN-CASALILLA 111 enormous quantities of exploitable land as yet unfar med (their densities around 1530 wer e 8.4, 7.3 and 2.8 inhabitants per square kilometre, r espec - tively), and this would attract new settlers from the nor thern ar eas who sought small plots, a salaries, or , more commonly , both. Commercial devel - opment, which in Murcia’s case depended upon distant and sometimes even foreign markets, would be one of the keys to gr owth across this broad swathe of territor y , as can be understood thr ough an analysis of population figures. From a political and institutional perspective, the r ural communities of Andalusia also enjoyed extensive legal and coercive powers. W ith a more concentrated urban and semi-urban population, the ample communal estates of fer ed abundant oppor tunities in the foothills to the nor th of the region and, indeed, in upper Andalusia in general; but ther e were also many oppor tunities in the lowlands of the Guadalquivir . These lands wer e allo - cated as small plots, thus lending a degree of solidarity to the humbler peas - ant families and anchoring the population to the soils. 15 In addition there were a large number of unfarmed and council lands, communally owned and managed by the municipalities. These were dedicated to livestock far m - ing or the production of wool. The community constituted, ther efore, an impor tant element in the exploitation of r esources in Andalusia. It also played a significant role in the transfer of incomes to the landlor ds, who claimed alcabalas , and monopolies on slaughterhouses, flour and oil mills, and taverns, as well as taxes on the passage of commodities. The collection of these revenues was entr usted to the municipal authorities or contr olled through the jurisdiction that the seigniors exer cised over r ural centres. 16 Y et, this region had the most highly developed for ms of large estates ( latifundia ) belonging to the great lor ds, the clergy , and even the mid- ranking nobility . Fr om the fifteenth centur y onwards, the organizational basis of these latifundia was the countr y house or cor tijo , the centr e of an extensive farmstead boasting granaries, various kinds of mills, stables, a cour tyard, pens, and a r esidence where the pr oprietor or tenant would live (Collantes 1977, p. 115). Large enterprises of this kind were usually leased out over six-year periods in exchange for rents paid in specie or coin. In some cases they were dir ectly farmed by the landowner . Their logic was 15 Cabrera (1977, p. 350), V assberg (1986, pp. 168–9), and Mata (1987, vol. I, pp. 180–6). 16 Atienza (1987, pp. 234–79). For ar eas of the Sierra Morena, see Cabr era (1977, pp.250–330). DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 112 therefor e ver y dif fer ent from those of the family units that distinguished other areas to the nor th. In Andalusia, and mor e in par ticular in the Guadalquivir V alley , on the other hand, salaried seasonal work predomi- nated; agricultural surpluses were sold in the highly populated urban cen- tres or even sent to for eign markets. But there also existed a network of smallholdings; additionally , many small plots of land belonging to the local lord or municipality wer e leased out. These smaller exploitations sup- por ted a working population employed seasonally on the gr eat estates, thus ser ving as a means of exter nalizing maintenance costs. It would, however , be wrong to speak of unifor m conditions across the region. On the contrar y , a wide range of characteristics wer e found in lower and upper Andalusia. In general terms, however , Andalusia appear ed to be a society characterized by levels of inequality that were even more marked than those of the nor th of the peninsula, and this was tr ue not just in economic terms. Because its population was continually augmented by immigration, the lower strata of peasants played a relatively insignificant role in local gover nment. Above all, this was the case in the large towns, where the councils wer e controlled by local oligarchies that wer e never entirely independent of the nobility . Familial or client relationships united these dif fer ent factions with the great nobles, creating a ver y fluid and complex dynamic. As in the zones of La Mancha and Extremadura analysed above, the abundance of both available land and salaried work in the great estates attracted immigrants from the nor th of the peninsula. The constitution of the great cities stimulated both the commer cialization of the surpluses of these huge estates and their dynamism in attracting settlers. The resulting demographic growth, if less dramatic than in New Castile (in par t because of the loss of people sailing for America), was never theless clearly evident in the economic dynamism of this large region (T able 3.1 ). An advanced form of r ural council organization that formed an impor tant link in the regulation of pr oductive resources and the transfer of landlor d incomes had also developed in the region of Aragon . The concejos collected the pechos , taxes on the members of the peasant community , on behalf of the landlord. They also collected the symbolic rights inher ent in the lord’s juris - diction as well as monopoly rights on slaughterhouses and mills. Often coun - cils had been granted the control of communal lands conceded by the seignior in exchange for a censo enfitéutico or ‘treudo’ (Colás and Salas 1982, pp. 33–42; Colás 1988, pp. 24–6). However , in Aragon the lords’ income also included revenue str eams derived from a more dir ect and unmediated B. YUN-CASALILLA 113 relationship with their vassals in which the councils often played little or no par t. Ther e were also full or allodial proper ties, rented to peasant families or farmed dir ectly by the landlord using hired workers and, in the case of the Moriscos , groups who wer e compelled to ser ve their lord with personal labour whenever this custom had not been commuted to direct payment in money . But this type of proper ty , fully owned by the seignior , was less developed than in Castile, and, whether it was with the inter vention of the community or without it, Aragon was ‘the world of shared pr oprietorship’. A long time previously , the lords had handed over their lands in r eturn for a ‘censo enfi - téutico’ or ‘treudo’, sometimes contracted out in perpetuity and paid in money , coin, or by a por tion of the yield (Colás 1994). The vestiges of ser vitude and the impor tance of shared pr oper ty dif fer - entiated Aragonese from contemporar y Castilian landownership, but the major dif fer ence stemmed from the evolution of the jurisdictional power of the lords. Jurisdictional pr erogatives in themselves hardly generated any economic income; however , here, as in Castile, cer tain landlor ds’ posses - sion of absolute jurisdiction conver ted them into judges whose decision could not be appealed, thus marginalizing the authority of the king him - self. The lords’ capacity for enfor cement and the control of violence was even more marked in Aragon than in the Cr owns of Por tugal and Castile. Shared pr oper ty , which acknowledged the peasants’ right to cultivate the land, and the abundance of communal lands helped to stabilize both Christian and Morisco peasant family economy . Y et peasant society r emained characterized by marked internal dif ferences, with many far mers continuing to live in small holdings often based upon an intensive agriculture depend - ing upon irrigation systems and auxiliar y activities directed towards the mar - ket (crops such as saf fron, the vine and olive, etc.) (Atienza 1988, p. 147; Colás and Salas 1982, p.38). The combination of absolute seigniorial jurisdiction and the presence of the Morisco population, whose legal status was weaker , contributed to the formation of a society in which the power of the nobility was almost unlimited in terms of both its contr ol over vassals and its capacity to inter - fere with the organization of the economy . Growth was, ther efore, limited in Aragon by its relatively inflexible economy , which in turn can be understood as a result of the shackles of feudal origin, the exercise of noble jurisdiction, and the minimal level of urban development. Annual demographic growth was thus r estricted in the kingdom to rates of around 0.4%—and this despite its low demo- graphic densities (5.3 habitants per km squared) (Y un 2004). These DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 114 characteristics may be seen, in par t, as a consequence of the juridical insecurity of peasant existence and the extr emely arbitrar y justice to which seigniorial authorities submitted r ural communities. The communities of the kingdom of V alencia also ‘possessed a great vitality’ (Ardit 1994, vol. II, p. 190). They constituted centres ar ound which social and economic life was organized. But, at the same time, the majority of the land belonging to the seigniors and to the large ecclesiasti- cal institutions was rented out, either in enfiteusis or as leases, directly to farmers with no for m of intermediation by the community (Peris 1989, p. 86). In some areas, such as those ar ound the Huer ta, a r egion where the irrigation network had been extended, the use of plots of land conceded in enfiteusis ser ved to r educe the dif fer ences that had emerged from the inequitable division of peasant proper ty . The r esult was a situation of great variety in the distribution and str ucture of far mlands (Furió 1995, p. 308). In general the coastal zones and those near the capital witnessed a form of agriculture that was highly influenced by the market and consequently was dedicated to commercial pr oducts. This was especially tr ue in areas around the r egion of Huer ta, where an intensive far ming of fr uit, mul- berr y trees, and vegetables predominated, and in the coastal zones and those near the capital. From the sixteenth centur y , viticultur e was spread- ing into the dr y lands (those without guaranteed ir rigation), producing raisins, almonds, and crops expor ted for industrial use (Halperin 1980, pp. 21–2, 26). These trends contributed to the diversification of peasant incomes and fed economic growth. In many areas, the ‘decision on the use of the fallow land was made by individuals, not collectives, and depended on the quality of the terrain’. Far mers who directly exploited their soils possessed thus ‘an unlimited degree of contr ol over their lands’ and ‘an almost-absolute liber ty in deciding which cr ops to grow’ (Ciscar 1977, p. 44; Peris 1989, p. 37). This progr ess was fed by the availability of capital from cities, mer chants, and even the aristocracy , as in the case of the Genoese interested in sugar cane pr oduction, silk, and other products or the duke of Gandia, who invested with the aim of expanding the cultiva- tion of these crops. Another positive factor lay in the need to provision the capital, V alencia, which was growing because of inter national commerce (Chap. 1 ) and the exploitation of cr ops such as sugar , silk, and other prod- ucts. Cereals wer e sourced from acr oss the Mediterranean (and especially from Sicily) and fr om Old Castile. As in Aragon, the jurisdiction of the landlords had developed signifi - cantly in V alencia and even of fer ed a cer tain degree of autonomy fr om the B. YUN-CASALILLA 115 king’s legal authority . This jurisdiction was wielded thr ough the authorities named by the community government and played an impor tant role in the transfer of rents to the landlords who r eceived par t of their income from their land through dir ect exploitation but whose principal income derived from lands confer red upon tenants in censos . Another of the most impor - tant income streams was the tercio diezmo and r egalías (rights of the king ceded to the landlords) and privileges linked to jurisdiction that wer e paid by the community as a whole. 17 These trends r esulted in highly diverse agrarian systems, ranging from the extensive exploitation of livestock (in the interior uplands) to the intensive agriculture of the meadow or huer ta . In all cases they wer e exer - cised with vigorous for ms of feudal jurisdiction. But this was also a highly flexible agrarian economy , ver y much orientated towards the market, where enfiteusis ser ved as the basis for impr ovements in production under - taken by the peasants enjoying perpetual use of the land that they farmed. In this context, the region’s commer cial development around the capital sparked a growth surge that was clearly manifested in the figures detailing demographic progr ess. 18 Similar paradoxes can be found in Catalonia , where, never theless, the landowners’ vigour was considerably less noticeable. The idea first out- lined by Pierr e Vilar (1962, vol. I, p. 562), that the Sentence of Guadalupe brought about ‘a feudal r estoration and a social pact that confirmed feudal revenues’ (Ser ra 1988, pp. 46–9) and created a new social equilibrium in the countr yside (see Chap. 1 ) has been widely accepted. The basic motor of late fifteenth-centur y growth does not appear to have been the r ural community . As in all of Eur ope, it continued to be the funda - mental unit upon which the jurisdictional power of the landlord and king was exercised thr ough local authorities and delegated legal representatives. But, in general, their involvement in economic life was less common than was that of their counterpar ts in Castile or the r egion of Aragon. On the contrar y , the key to both the r ural economy and Catalan agrarian expansion was the fam - ily , always tightly tied to the land through the mas (Elliott 1963, pp.28–31) and whose role had been strengthened by the Sentence of Guadalupe to the 17 Ciscar (1977, pp.228–35), Ar dit (1994, vol. I, pp.92–3). 18 Accor ding to Ardit, the population may have increased between 0.25% and 0.41% annually between 1510 and 1609, depending on the population at the star ting point (1994, vol. I, p.19). DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 116 extent that it consecrated the proper ty rights of the peasant elite and established the pr ecedent that only by its abandonment could a proper ty retur n into the hands of the landlord. The crisis of the four teenth centur y and the subsequent concentration of lands appear to have led to the increase in the habitual size of the mas (Vilar 1962, vol. I, p. 577). These larger dimensions brought about an impr ovement in their capacity to mobilize pro - ductive resour ces. Inheritance rights tended to reser ve the lion’s shar e of goods for one of the sons (usually the eldest), and this custom also favoured the stability of the family farm, even if it pr ejudiced the other children. This explains the coexistence beneath the same roof of not only the head of the family but also a number of his brothers and sisters, who thus constituted a complex variant of the family unity and one capable of mobilizing a large amount of labour (Elliott 1963, pp.28–31). But this was not the only con - sequence of the Sentence of Guadalupe. At the same time, the establishment of this strata of masovers (an elite of proper ty owners exploiting its rights over the mas ) had contributed to the cr ystallization of another wider sector of small peasants—the other side of the coin—who found themselves com - pelled to rent the plots of the mas or to work upon them for a salar y during the periods of greatest agricultural activity (Elliott 1963, p.30). These conditions gave rise to a form of peasant society with a high capacity for production. Fr om an early point, it suppor ted the emergence of masías , assisted by the security and permanence of pr oper ty rights. In many cases this was fed by impor tant investments in fixed capital (build- ings, granaries, and stables) and brought about a reorganization of far ms which, in turn, would have an impact upon pr oduction. The renting out in enfiteusis of plots of the mas to small peasants ser ved to tie the work- force to the land and consolidated the position of the humblest groups in r ural society , thus feeding demographic and agrarian growth. These devel- opments were accompanied by the expansion of industrial and market- orientated crops that diversified both r esources and sources of income for the r ural population. The result of all of these changes was the expansion of the vineyard, or the incr easing exploitation of millet, rice and vegeta- bles, dr y fr uits, hemp, silk, and saf fron (the latter pr oducts tied to the commercial networks established by Ger man merchants trading through Perpignan and the fairs of L yon). Catalonia, ther efore, suppor ted r ela- tively dynamic and flexible agrarian systems, in which polyculture was made possible around the masía , whose pr osperity was based ‘upon the size and the variety of its production’ (V ilar 1962, vol. I, p.584). B. YUN-CASALILLA 117 The collection of revenues was ver y seldom channelled through the community as such, and by the sixteenth centur y , all prospect of r esurr ect - ing the personal r emensa (the payment due to the lor d for the chance to leave the land) and many of the feudal rights claimed by landlords in the previous centur y had vanished. This led to a higher degree of security for their vassals and tenants (see Chap. 1 ). But, at the same time, the landlord claimed a number of impor tant pr erogatives which allowed him to seize an impor tant par t of the surplus pr oduction and to par ticipate in the agrarian growth br ought about by the extension of this ever -more flexible and var - ied agriculture (Duran 1982). Y et the overall equilibrium was not thr eat - ened by the enforcement powers wielded by the landowners; on the contrar y , and in comparison with previous periods, these seigniorial pr e - rogatives in fact limited the landowner’s pr opensity to commit abuses and so came to form the basis of a new period of demographic and economic growth. Catalonia’s population gr ew at an annual rate of 0.8% from 1530 to 1590 (T able 3.1 ). As was the case in other souther n zones of the Iberian Peninsula, one of the reasons for its attractiveness to settlers fr om the nor th—in this case, the Fr ench side of the Pyrenees—lay in a combination of institutions, natural resour ces, and economic factors. More than an ecological unity , Por tugal was a set of regions made up of ver y distinct physical components. The dif ferences ar e ver y marked: fr om the mountainous zones of the nor th, such as the pr ovinces of Entre- Douro- e-Minho and T ras-os-Montes, with their Atlantic climate, to the plains of the Alentejo and even the more mountainous zone with the high- est rates of precipitation, such as the Algar ve in the South. The role of the concelho (equivalent to the Castilian and Aragonese r ural council or con- cejo ) was impor tant acr oss the countr y . The system for the concession of privileges established by the Por tuguese kings was governed by the idea that the monarchy should not grant excessive power to any one nucleus. It had, however , given rise to a more homogenous and less hierarchical political sphere than in Castile, as above all dif ferences wer e caused by economic activities (Mattoso 1997, pp. 205–40). Moreover , in overall terms long-ter m leasehold ( enfiteusis ) had developed to a significant extent during the last centuries of the Middle Ages, to a considerable degree due to the stagnation of the population at ver y low levels between 1350 and 1450 and the consequent need to attract settlers to many zones of the countr y (Mattoso 1997). The nor th of the countr y had seen the establish- ment of more seigniorial estates, while in the south the gr eat councils were abundant, with extensive municipal estates and sometimes existing under DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 118 the jurisdiction of the Militar y Or ders. This dif ference between the nor th and south—and above all between the nor th and south of the T agus River—was perhaps one of the most impor tant traits of the Por tuguese economy . In any case, the far ming system regulated by councils predomi- nated across the countr y , with r otation timetables for cereals, at times combined with the vine, olive, and ovine livestock. The nor th, being mor e populated, was characterized by a variety of crops and natural r esources that permitted a higher density of population, which was well above the peninsular average. This being the case, it witnessed the strongest for ms of emigration, above all towards the T agus V alley , Lisbon, the settlements of the lower T agus V alley , and even in par t towar ds Alentejo, to the extent that its poor soils allowed such a movement. Moreover , in addition to the diversity of resour ces, the nor th of Por tugal was mor e open to the Atlantic through Lisbon and the cities and towns between Por to and the frontier with Galicia. This was a region wher e the impact of the oceanic and com- mercial expansion would have a notable ef fect. The poor soils and arid summer climate of Alentejo between the T agus and the Guadiana meant that it was less conducive to economic activities. Its ver y low demographic densities (among the lowest of the peninsula), the concentration of commercial activities to the nor th of Lisbon, and the coastal characteristics meant that its openness to and interaction with the sea were ver y limited, despite its boasting almost 300 km of shor eline between Lisbon and the Cape of St. Vincent. Her e wheat and transhumance live - stock farming (above all in the fr ontier zones with Castile) had a relatively greater impor tance (Magalhães 1997, pp.230, 239), and it is not surprising that pasturelands wer e hired out to Castilian shepherds. But the chances of the commercialization of peasant pr oduction were ver y modest, not only because of the absence of an attractive outside market but also because of the low density of the urban mesh that was, in Castile, a cr ucial factor in growth. e conomic e xP Ansion in  A P re - indusTriAl s ocieTy The expansive cycle that had begun in the last decades of the 1400s was sustained throughout the following centur y . But what type of expansion was achieved? What were its dimensions and limits? Did it fit the model of an extensive agriculture sur render to diminishing marginal retur ns or yields whose surplus production is systematically absorbed by the upwar d evolution of land rents or seigniorial extractions, the r esult of which is a debilitating tension between resour ces and population? B. YUN-CASALILLA 119 Growth andDevelopment It should immediately be stated that the present-day definition of moder n economic growth, based upon a continuous pr ocess of expansion in per capita product, must be applied with gr eat caution to pre-industrial econ- omies. Even if they did not achieve this increase of income per inhabitant, in economies which existed on the margins of subsistence, success lay in the simple production of mor e foodstuf fs that allowed them to suppor t more inhabitants. But the Iberian cases allow us to go fur ther than this. The population increase in Spain is, without doubt, evident and even more accelerated than in most par ts of Europe, as can be seen fr om T able 3.2 , which presents some cor rected numbers for Spain, following the calculations of J.De V ries and my own estimates by using data from Nadal (1984) and Miranda (2016). The population of Por tugal also had risen from some 1.2 million inhabitant households around 1527 to some 1.5–1.6 million inhabitants at the end of the centur y (See Ser rão and Marques 1998, p. 44, Graph 1; Miranda 2016). Whatever the point of refer ence, it is clear that the Spanish and Por tuguese population increased T able 3.2 Demographic growth in sixteenth-centur y Eur ope (Millions of inhabitants) 1500 1530 1550 1590 1600 % growth per year Scandinavia 1.5 1.7 2 0.28 England 2.3 3.1 4.2 0.86 Scotland 0.8 0.9 1 0.22 Ireland 0.8 0.9 1 0.22 Holland 0.95 1.25 1.5 0.45 Belgium 1.25 1.65 1.3 0.04 Germany 12 14 16 0.28 France 16.4 19 20 0.19 Switzerland 0.6 0.75 0.9 0.4 Italy 10.5 11.4 13.1 0.22 Spain 4.69 6.63 0.7 Por tugal 1.2 1.5 0.6 Austria-Bohemia 3.5 3.6 4.3 0.2 Poland 2.5 3 3.4 0.3 Sources: My own elaboration from De Vries (1994, p.13) and Nadal (1984, p. 74, T able 9) and Miranda (2016), using a ratio vecino/inhabitant of 4 for Por tugal (see T able 3.1 ) DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 126 irrigation ditches. 31 In many r egions, from Malaga to Mallor ca and V alencia to Lisbon or Cáceres, the municipal by-laws pr ompted and regulated the expansion of fr uit and mulber r y trees in combination with other for ms of activity and in harmony with the cycles of agricultural far ming. 32 This com - plementar y balance in exploiting resour ces was also found in the trend towards the specialization of pr oducts on the local level. In the Duero V alley , areas such as the Tier ra de Medina, to the south of V alladolid, took steps towards specializing in viticultur e, while the nearby area around Tierra de Campos began to focus on cer eal production. This complemen - tarity was determined not so much by the connections between these regions as by the ef fects of the growth of V alladolid, equidistant between both regions, due to its dif ferent ecological and institutional conditions. Similar movements were found in the Rioja r egion or in Murcia (Pérez and Lemeunier 1984, pp.69, 78–9). Indeed, these r egions were not so dif fer - ent from many ar eas around Lisbon where complementarity led to mor e interr egional trends: her e the chance to impor t cheap wheat over several decades allowed for the extension of the vine and other products in the regional hinterland. All of this brought about a mor e ef ficient and secure use of the land. It also led to a greater ef ficiency in the use of labour and in the balance between soil and labour . In fact, this equilibrium adapted to the dif fer ent agrarian cycles throughout the year and, by mobilizing hands at times previously marked by r elative idleness, forged a more ef ficient work cycle over the year . 33 31 Apar t fr om the examples cited above, see those for V alencia in Peris (1989, p.255) and Murcia in Pérez and Lemeunier (1984, p. 84) or the form by which Morisco agricultural techniques were blended into the systems of Christian communities, bringing about notable advances in Ponsot (1986). 32 See the surprising case of Cácer es, where the ordenanzas or by-laws brought about the expansion of mulberr y tr ee groves and fr uit trees (Pereira 1991, pp.128–32). On the devel- opment of this type of products in Por tugal, ver y much connected to what Thirsk called alternative agricultur e, see Magalhães (1997, pp.234–9). 33 The example of the peasants of Mur cia is illustrative in this regard. They car ed for the vines in March and collected the leaves of mulberr y tr ees so that between April and June, the silkworms could feed on them while the labour ers were cutting the barley and leaving it to dr y between June and July . Wheat was then also har vested. Some could even work in the salt farms fr om May to September and in the trap nets in June and September; from the latter month, it was possible to sell some products in local fairs, before har vesting the wine in B. YUN-CASALILLA 127 The intensification of work patterns in combination with the agrarian cycles was often accompanied by the interr egional migration of tempo - rar y workers. The peasants of the nor th of the peninsula, highlanders, Galicians, and Asturians were incr easingly present in the Castilian Meseta during the har vest weeks, after which they gradually made their way back towards their homes in a rhythm set by the ripening wheat, taking employment in each region for a few weeks at a time as they steadily moved nor thwards. Of course some labour ers did remain in the Duero V alley for the grape and olive har vests in September and, after this, to work as peddlers and in the transpor t of goods to their homelands, car r y - ing with them a variety of products acquired or commissioned in Castile’s summer fairs (V assberg 1996, pp. 67–77). Equally impor tant were the shor t-distance movements, such as those of the settlers of the Castilian Extremadura who went down to har vest olives in Seville and of the peo - ple of La Mancha who farmed their lands during nearly the entir e year but descended upon Murcia between April and June to far m the silk - worms and har vest the wheat. 34 The permanent migration of people indicated the existence of a surplus workforce and, ther efore, a decreasing marginal productivity in the zones of the nor th of the Central System (both in Por tugal and in Castile), in France, or in upper Aragon; labour moved from these ar eas to ones where high-quality soils could be farmed and, consequently , where labour’s mar - ginal productivity was higher . The r esult of a reallocation of this sor t between land and labour could only be an overall increase in productivity per person. 35 Despite there being ver y few incentives for investment for many land - lords, ther e were some improvements in fixed capital and agrarian tech - niques. As we have seen, in Galicia and Mallorca, the tendency among proprietors was to r ent lands as units of production with ever ything necessar y October . Fr om this point to the end of the year , the cereal fields could be prepar ed, but, in addition, in December and Januar y , the olive har vest had to be collected. Peasants might still be involved in the storage of olives or the shovelling of snow . See Pérez and Lemeunier (1984, p.89). 34 Her rera (1980, p.232), Pérez and Lemeunier (1984, p.90). 35 This is more impor tant if we take into account that in many ar eas of the South, which had low densities in the first half of the centur y , there must still have been an abundance of good lands which had yet to be farmed. DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 128 on them, something which shows an interest in agrarian equipment as the base for cultivation. As we have seen, in Catalonia the masía , whose basic constr uction repr esented the investment of fixed capital, was emerging as a productive unit in which the weight of the buildings, installations, and means of production incr eased, thus sparking a concomitant pr opor tional improvement in peasant labour pr oductivity . In Andalusia they were now building small cottages in the fields where the jour neymen could spend the night in order to save time by avoiding long-distance displacements during periods of work (the sewing and har vest of olives and grapes), thus allowing the farming of lands which wer e not necessarily poorer but, mor e simply , had gone unused for centuries. The cor tijos not only of fer ed the necessar y buildings, stables, or areas of temporar y lodgings for the seasonal workers but also increased the number of mills for cer eal and olive oil production in propor tion to the expansion of olive farming (Her rera 1980, p.232; Elliott 1963, p.30). There wer e technical advances in farming that, despite their r elatively limited impact, should not be dismissed entirely . These improvements repr esented modest, but accumulative, advances. As we have seen, in Galicia and Asturias, a sor t of pr e-revolution of maize was brought about by millet. If the cultivation of millet had relatively modest beginnings in Spanish Galicia, its introduction into many r egions of Por tugal would be extensive and impor tant. In the humid ar eas of the Atlantic Nor th, the new species of African maize were r eally successful, in par t due to the endemic scarcity of wheat, which was mor e apt for the plateau of the South, while r ye was extended in the hills of the interior (Magalhães 1997, p. 231 and f f.). The spread of new cr ops such as sugar , rice, and the mulberr y tree in many areas of V alencia, Aragon, or Granada and Malaga repr esented a decisive step for ward that, mor eover , often took place in the gaps between farmed fields and could be combined with other crops in the ir rigated meadows as a form of alter native agriculture. In Murcia some of these small advances—significant due to their accu - mulative ef fect—ran fr om improvements in the measurement systems to the dif fusion of water wheels as a method of raising water in the irriga - tion ditches (Pérez and Lemeunier 1984, p. 65). And, if the ef fects of these improvements wer e most spectacular in the irrigated zones, ther e was no shor tage of pr ogress in the dr y lands, manifested, for example, in the system of ‘pasture and cr op’ and in the progress made in the enclo - sure of pastur eland and use of fallow in combination with cereal cropping B. YUN-CASALILLA 129 and the winter grazing of livestock in oakland ( adehesamientos ). 36 This system had a parallel in the combination of olive and cereal cultivation in some zones of Coimbra (Magalhães 1997, p. 245). Of course, specific forms of pr oper ty and seigniorial rent wer e sometimes behind these advances. As said above, while a good deal of landlord r evenue was not usually ploughed back into productive investment, in the context of a growing population and demographic mobility , it often created the insti - tutional conditions that allowed peasant initiatives to have free r eign. Some of these improvements—above all those implemented in lands rented out as enfiteusis for a lifetime or in perpetuity—wer e tied to the interests of the peasant to optimize the pr oductivity of soils over which he enjoyed complete control. Ther e were also for ms of renting land, such as letting in retur n for a propor tion of the pr oducts (share cr op - ping), which created a positive stimulus towar ds improvement in some areas of the peninsula, specifically when guarantees wer e given that the landlord’s por tion or shar e would not be increased (Miranda 2017). In some areas the gr owth of seigniorial income could be achieved by rolling out new crops or using new technology . One example of this was the duke of Gandía’s interest in expanding the gr owth of sugar cane and installing trapiches , mills to grind it, in his estates; many other landown - ers were keen to pr oduce silk. And, of course, in all estates there was a clear movement towards the repopulation of the land, something which lay behind the productive enhancements of the centur y . As agrarian historians have often remarked, the substitution of oxen for mules in some areas reduced the soil yields but was compensated by a resultant incr ease in the level of human productivity per hour worked. In many regions overall factor pr oductivity must have increased until the top 36 For example, in many r egions of southern Spain, the system of ‘pastur e and crops’ was extended, generally in the ‘mountains of holm oaks’, ( monte hueco de encinas ), meaning on one sur face or area, a number of dif fer ent forms of far ming were under taken, ranging from grazing lands to cereals, thus generating a wide range of products—woods, fir ewood, acorns, and so on (Pereira 1991, p. 99). In Salamanca, Extr emadura, and Andalusia, examples of creating enclosed pasture ( adehesamiento ) have been found, which do not necessarily mean the displacement of cereal by livestock. On the contrar y , it pr obably represented a mor e ef ficient form of combining both practices within large estates r eser ved for communal use and in which integrated systems for the use of soils were in place, ‘to the great impr ovement of the ecological components of some zones’ (V alle 1985, pp.536–8). DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 130 ear th was finally exhausted. The development of complementar y activities outside of agriculture entailed the mobilization of other wise idle hands. This resulted in the expanding use of female and male labours. David V assberg has written that ‘many peasants, especially those resident in the mountains, spent two or three months a year as itinerant mer chants, or as muleteers or transpor ters, ear ning extra money’. Cer tain towns and areas of course played a prominent r ole in these networks, above all those situated in or near the fr ontier mountain ranges that separated these natu- ral regions. 37 Equally impor tant was the development of activities to trans- form agrarian pr oducts. The production of char coal from wood was com- mon from the meadows of the south to the mountain economies fur ther nor th. But in some zones, it became a decisive activity , as was the case in the Basque Countr y and Navar re. For some of these peasants (above all those of the Basque Countr y), agrarian pursuits and the commer cial exploitation of the mountain were combined with involvement in the ir on industr y (Bilbao 1987). For similar r easons, the development of this type of activity was also clear in Catalonia: ‘forges and mills multiplied in the sixteenth centur y along the banks of the rivers and mountain str eams’ (Vilar 1962, vol. I, p. 545). Above all else this incr ease in peasant multi- activity was impor tant in pr oducing textiles and in manufacturing clay objects and leather goods and a multitude of other niche crafts. In many towns the production and sale of wool textiles, straps, far ming tools, leather , clay , and linen pr oducts developed apace. And in some areas, such as the Rioja region, Segovia, Cór doba, the Algar ve, Beira, between the Duero and the Por tuguese side of the Miño region, and many others, the development of the domestic textile industr y had the same ef fect of mobi- lizing unemployed workers, while something similar occurr ed in many Morisco areas of Aragon and Castile. 38 The more pessimistic models and interpr etations cannot be suppor ted either by the available data on the evolution of rents or seigniorial demands. Cer tainly , the extension of the farmed ar ea and pressure on land entailed 37 V assberg (1986, p. 3), Or tega (1974), Salomon (1982), and da Silva (1967). On the role of the Moriscos in transpor t activities and commercialization, see Halperin (1980, p. 73). 38 Br umont (1993, pp. 135–6), da Silva (1967, pp. 29–31, 112), For tea (1981, pp. 281–8). In the Morisco communities of V alencia, ‘entir e villages’ of the duke of Gandía were employed in sugar cane cutting and the mills dedicated to its grinding, in making espar to and linen products, shoes, and mats (Halperin 1980, pp. 66, 70–1). For the Por tuguese regions, see Magalhães (1997, pp.254 and f f.). B. YUN-CASALILLA 131 an increase in payments for the use of the soil. But this pr ocess was thor - oughly shaped and delayed by forms of ownership and proper ty rights that, as we saw in Chap. 1 , were dir ected at the building up of the seignio- rial estate’s population and the development of peasant economies. In Galicia, Castile, V alencia, Catalonia, and other areas, the extensive proper ties let out in enfiteusis to families or communities created r elatively secure conditions for their exploitation. The fact that they paid fixed (and predictable) sums for the use of the land encouraged peasants to take advan - tage of productive impr ovements. Even when the lands were given on shor t-ter m or revisable leases, the ter ms of contracts included fixed clauses or conditions of considerable impor tance: one such accord fr om Andalusia relaxed the r ent payment in case of natural catastrophes. Frequently lands were exploited over long periods by tenants belonging to one family gr oup, with successive generations forging a personal relationship with the propri - etor; for his par t the landowner gained additional security in r ent payments, a trade-of f which tended to lessen the tendency to incr ease these demands. In this way the restriction of the number of potential tenants to the inhabit - ants of a small town or village limited the possibility of raising land rents (Lemeunier 1998; Sebastián 1999, pp. 335–6). This and other similar for ms of behaviour appear to have been especially impor tant in the r enting out of meadows and large proper ties for payment in coin, something which explains the barely noticeable incr ease in rents paid and even their diminu - tion in real ter ms (Y un 2004; Miranda 2017). The abundance of unused lands ( baldíos ) or council lands ( tierras concejiles ) for which either no or ver y low rents had to be paid had a similar ef fect. And, on top of this, the first 40 years of the centur y witnessed a marked ef for t to extend communal rights on the royal estates, with the implicit per mission of the Crown. Of course, mechanisms existed for the adjustment of land rents. Fr om the end of the fifteenth centur y , landowners began to take an interest in revising the foros and censos entifeuticos sometimes in perpetuity , hoping to rent lands on shor t-ter m, revisable contracts and in r eturn for direct pay - ment in specie. It is also clear that many nobles and power ful estate owners were tempted to claim r oyal lands where doubt existed over proprietorship, and this trend clearly r educed the ability of small holders to expand their farms without r enting. But this land grab not only allowed for a period of readjustment but was also at times dif ficult to accomplish. Contrar y to what was occurring in other ar eas of Europe (e.g. those zones of England where claims of full ownership wer e being advanced to change the terms of leases), many peninsular landlords had to face not simply isolated peasant DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 132 families or small alliances of them but entire communities. In cases of this sor t, peasant settlements not only resisted the ambitions of their lord by force but also—and before ar riving at this extreme solution—enjoyed a notable capacity to recur to the r oyal law cour ts (the cases in the archives of Chancelleries are indicative of this facility; see Chap. 5 ), a practice that generated considerable additional cost to the landlord and ser ved as a reminder of the value of pr udence befor e entering into such costly lawsuits. The idea was that the justice system should maintain the laws of the king - dom, and it, in conjunction with the health and resilience of the municipal estates, played in favour of many communities over long periods. Even for those owners of lands ceded in enfiteusis (these were ver y often nobles and ecclesiastical institutions), there was not always much sense in compelling the peasants to revise r ents which, aside from not being easily modified, were tied to other mor e impor tant forms of income, such as the tercias , alcabalas , and others. If we take into account that many noble fami - lies could overcome their income deficits thr ough favourable credit ar range - ments in the form of censos consignativos (mor tgages endorsed by their mayorazgos —Chap. 4 ), it is easy to understand why , despite the str uctural tendency to revise land pr oper ty rights, there wer e also considerable practi - cal reasons mitigating against any such alteration. The results of these developments wer e widely evident. Even in areas of strong demographic pr essure—such as in the Tierra de Santiago or Jaén— it was sometimes the case that the available rise in the revisable r ents on lands was not automatically applied by landlords. 39 Mor eover some of these mechanisms could, in the final instance, be beneficial for quite a few of the farmers. This was because the incr ease in rents and the pr essure of demand upon lower -quality lands, together with the increasing money supply , brought about a rise in prices which in the end benefited the more ef ficient far ms and those that were less exposed to this type of bur den. Cer tainly , the inflation of the sixteenth centur y should not be explained in these rather Ricardian ter ms; nor were prices the most impor tant variables in peasant incomes. But many farmers with surpluses which wer e not sub- ject to higher rents wer e able to obtain this benefit through the market. It 39 Yun (2004). It should be noted how , in the cases cited, the variable remained almost static until at least 1540. Overall, within this expansive tendency set out according to theo- retical for mulations, the trend of this form of extraction on pr oduce should have been stable until the early sixteenth centur y . B. YUN-CASALILLA 133 is, moreover , evident that the ef fects of this change, if marginal, increased over the course of the centur y . In this way , the fixed natur e of seigniorial land rents created better condi - tions for peasant businesses for several decades, while the increase in the productivity of work over a long period compensated for any rise in payments to landlords. The combination of factors was favourable for economic growth and even for an incr ease in the levels of productivity . However , the theme should also be approached with an eye on other for ms of extraction levelled on production, such as the fiscal bur den. T o understand this fully , a more general perspective is needed. The Final Test: Industrial Development and Regional Urban Systems The final and perhaps the most decisive proof of the consistence of the sixteenth-centur y Iberian economic expansion—that is, of its non-semi- peripheral character and of the strength of its agrarian and general domes- tic forces—can be found in the evolution of the changes taking place in the industrial sector and the regional urban networks. Though some ideas have already been advanced (Chap. 3 ), these aspects deser ve additional reflection. The textile industr y , which was to be the most af fected by the impor ta - tion of foreign goods, under went changes and introduced productive improvements which wer e intended to allow it to adapt to demands for higher -quality goods and that were characteristics of a vigor ous and dynamic process of impor t substitution. In Cuenca, for example, we know of the dis - semination of the verlagssystem and the merchant-manufactur ers who came to ‘put workshops in their homes’. Enjoying annual profits that averaged 15% in 1553, this sector had, since the end of the previous centur y , been adopting itself to the ‘new draperies’ (Iradiel 1974, pp. 232–3; Reher 1990, pp. 27, 30). Córdoba also overcame the sector’s pur ely ar tisanal str ucture in order to facilitate the development of the ‘new draperies’ and the pr oducts’ adaptation to the ever -changing demands of a market of greater dimensions and quality (For tea 1981, pp. 271–2). This development was possible thanks to the introduction of agr o-urban production circuits (For tea 1981, pp. 279–80). A pr ocess of this sor t also led to significant progress in the silk industr y . A number of factors were behind it: the greater availability of raw materials, easier access to dyes, and improvements in the workfor ce, largely as a result of the ef for ts of the Moriscos (For tea 1981; Aranda 1984). DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 134 In Segovia the growing weight of a new type of mer chant acting as a verlaguer was significant. The result would be an incr ease in the quality and the wider dispersion of light cloths, which were even adapted to American demands (García Sanz 1987; Lor enzo 1979, p. 435). The verlagssystem , based upon an agrarian-urban cycle, developed in T oledo, advancing both the woollen cloth and silk industries. The wool industr y also developed in the hinterland zones of Por tugal, near the great livestock tracks. But the most dynamic sector was perhaps the one that produced cloth and linen fabrics, tied to domestic consumption but also—impor tantly—to the pro - duction of naval canvas (Costa 1997, pp. 253–81). Acr oss the entire penin - sula, a trend towar ds the production of high- quality items (and even the imitation of foreign fashions) can also be discer ned, par ticularly in the silk industr y . This was possible thanks to access to dyes and colourants through the international commer cial circuits. Something similar happened in V alencia, whose production was str ongly linked to demand in Castile (‘the main customer for V alencian silk fabrics’), or in Barcelona, where the weight of the ar tisan sector gr ew thanks largely to domestic demand. 40 W e do not have in-depth studies of the functioning of the guilds, but ever ything indicates that, at least during the first half of the centur y , these would have been more open than has sometimes been believed. Wher e it has been possible to make accurate measurements, such as in V alladolid, it has been found that only 30% of apprentices came fr om the city itself (Bennassar 1983, pp. 217–21)—and it can be assumed that of these only a fraction came from the families of the masters who did the hiring. Despite later problems, many sectors displayed a cer tain permissiveness with r egard to the activities of the Morisco population, whose technical exper tise was of great impor tance in areas such as the pr oduction of silk fabrics (Aranda 1984). Thus, some sectors at least responded positively to some of the variables that elicited such pessimism from Ogilvie (2011), who has been highly sceptical of the capacity of Old Regime guilds to introduce produc- tive improvements. A comparison of the textile production figur es for a number of Castilian cities against those of their most active rivals in Italy is ver y meaningful. This is especially tr ue in light of the for mer’s low points of depar ture. If, by 1560, 20,000 pieces of cloth were pr oduced in V enice, Cór doba reached the 40 Montemayor (1996, pp.201–33), Casey (1983, pp.88–90), and V ilar (1962, vol. I). B. YUN-CASALILLA 135 fi gur e of 18,000, to which might be added the 7000 of the sur rounding areas, while in Segovia some 16,000 wer e manufactured. It must, of course, be added that these figures can only take us so far and that the gr eat Italian centres of pr oduction in V enice and T uscany definitely produced goods of a higher quality and, therefor e, of higher monetar y value. Moreover , the development of other industries should also be noted. This is tr ue, for example, for the constr uction industr y and associated sec - tors. Behind its dynamism there was the gr owth of population, the main roots of which ar e to be found in the expansion of the primar y sector . But also significant was the new conception of the home and the spread among elites of tastes and lifestyles impor ted fr om abroad and, above all, from Flanders and Italy (Y un 1999c). By the 1540s the notion of the ‘nobility of a city’ had clearly won many minds and hear ts, becoming an incr easingly impor tant facet of the political cultur e of the time and manifested ‘in the people and buildings and memorable things that there are in a place, with temples, hospitals, bridges, castles, public buildings and private homes’. 41 The result was the development of a range of industries r elated to constr uc - tion, including metalwork and carpentr y . 42 The fact that constr uction developed in productive circuits r estricted and closed in on themselves helps us to understand the huge impact of this sector on the domestic and local economies. This change in the habits of consumption, coming on top of demand for cheaper , less sophisticated goods, also lay behind the expansion of the gold - smith (from candlesticks to cutler y), leather , and embossed-leather trades, the latter two being impor tant in Córdoba (For tea 1981, p. 243). New eating habits, which encouraged the use of cutler y and tableware, gave impetus to the porcelain industries of T alavera de la Reina or T riana (Seville), while more popular tastes encouraged the clay furnaces that sprang up in many villages and cities across Spain (Sánchez 1989, vol. I, p. 151). T oledo also boasted industries dedicated to silver ware and jeweller y (also extremely impor tant in Córdoba) and the pr oduction of swords, musical instr uments, sculpture, and painting. Demand for these ar tistic pr oducts often came from churches and clergymen (Montemayor 1996, pp.201–6). 41 Diálogo en Alabanza de V alladolid , en Alonso Cor tés (1955, p.250). 42 See the impor tance of these sectors in Medina del Campo (Marcos 1978, pp. 312–20), Cordoba (For tea 1981, p.243), or Seville (Ber nal etal. 1978). DOMESTIC EXP ANSION INTHEIBERIAN KINGDOMS 241 Moncada dedicated some memorable pages in which he underlined the excessive number of laws (‘there must be mor e than 5000’) and their cr yptic character (‘they speak er roneous wor ds’), which left a wide margin for arbitrariness for the judges, ‘so that they can squeeze whoever they want’ (Moncada 1974 [1619], pp. 201–2). Jer ónimo de Ceballos was ver y pr obably right when he asked in 1623: Where has one seen, in all the countries, so many tribunals and so little jus- tice? Where so many judges and less r egard for the state? Where mor e laws but lawsuits settled unevenly? And where such multitude of lawyers, nota- ries, and scribes, but so little attention paid to the causes of the poor , the young, and the widowed? 45 The old custom of ‘obeying but not complying’ created limits on the king’s capacity of enforcement and transfer red decisions to corporations of citizens, above all to the cities and the Cor tes, thus adding some addi- tional uncer tainties. Many conflicts wer e in the end resolved by systems of self-regulation befor e arriving befor e the tribunals and even, indeed, after having done so. As R. Kagan has written, this society was litigious to the point of exhaustion and might recur to the tribunals—and the cases brought befor e the House of T rade of Seville give gr ounds for suspecting the same (Fernández de Castr o 2015)—not to resolve a conflict but sim- ply to put of f decisions. For this r eason it is not unreasonable to suppose that going before the chancelleries in sear ch of justice was, despite being increasingly fr equent, bitterly criticized by a par t of contemporar y society and that ‘an arbitrated settlement within the confines of the community was the prefer red mechanism for ending disputes’ (Kagan 1981, p. 18). In other words, a system of corporative self-enfor cement was ver y often pref- erable to a decision reached by judges and the use of of ficial law . Mor eover , when tr ying to make use of the tribunals, the impor tant thing in many cases was to decide the cour t or third par ty before which the suit would be brought, as this detail could be decisive in the application of the law rather than the letter of it. And the collision of laws and the superimposition and confrontation of juridical spaces could only incr ease uncer tainty . Even if the decision remained in the hands of the judge, the ef fect of pr ecedent or unwritten law in shaping decisions was inherent to the system itself. This meant that the circumstances of the case—the personality , merits, prior 45 Ar te real para el buen gobierno , 1623 (quoted in Kagan 1981, p.210). THE CRYST ALLIZA TION OF APOLITICAL ECONOMY, C. 1580–1630 242 ser vices and lineage of the par ties, and many other factors besides—that were ver y dif ficult to foresee could have a marked ef fect on the ver dict, and so the application of the law was unpredictable ex ante. 46 The problems ar e evident in relation to the fiscal system. If in one town a cer tain tax had been levied in sisas upon a pr oduct, in the next town it might be set upon another product. Such a disparity was the outcome of a growing degr ee of local-level autonomy in the management of taxes. In many cases—the millones , for example—the methods for the collection of ser vices conceded by the Cor tes had to be approved by the king, but the proposals fr om the towns could dif fer . Likewise, what in the final instance mattered most was not so much how r evenues were collected but rather the enormous variety of collection methods that appear ed on the economic and fiscal map. There wer e even those towns that complied with the ser vicios by using their own municipal budgets (sometimes renting the propios or municipal goods, usually lands), whereas in other villages new taxes on consumables paid by commoners had to be introduced and collected. 47 Fur ther more the collection of taxes was shaped by infor mal networks of local oligarchies, which meant that a situation of ‘unpr edictable arbitrari - ness’ for any outsider arose, with a ver y noticeable tendency towards height - ened risks. 48 This situation ver y clearly became worse during the seventeenth centur y as we will see (Chap. 8 ) and would be denounced as such in the 1700s. Vicente Alcalá Galiano described it in a book whose ver y title is highly expressive of the pr oblems and which concluded with this advice: The contribution paid to the State by each one of its individuals should be clear and set out, not arbitrar y . The time and means of payment should also be specified, and the tax payers should be informed of both of these details. Because, without this knowledge, he is exposed to the injustice of the tax collector , who can raise and lower the tax when it suits his interests and caprices. Any uncer tainty in the imposition of taxes encourages the inso- lence and corr uption of those who depend upon the collection of the r oyal patrimony and can take hold of it without any fear; [and it is clear] that the 46 See also in this r espect Fernández de Castro (2015). 47 The leeway enjoyed by r ural communities that contr olled their own alcabalas was pro- por tionate to their ability to pay the quantities allocated to them by using their own posses- sions; this was the case until the 1570s, at least (García Sanz 1987, pp.333–5). 48 I discussed this in the context of the theories of a new institutional economics in Y un (2001). B. YUN-CASALILLA 243 uneven level of contributions will not bring about nor can have such a preju- dicial ef fect to the people as can that uncer tainty . 49 The problem was even worse for inter regional trade, where the distance increased the dif ficulties in acquiring the cor rect infor mation about local markets, which were ver y heterogeneous and opaque, as Regina Grafe has demonstrated (Grafe 2012). The aims of social and (above all) commercial networks were to r educe costs, to facilitate the transfer of information, and to create the confidence that the for mal institutions could not provide. But the dif ficulties posed by the kaleidoscopic ar ray of local laws and taxes are mor e than obvious. Finally , it is wor thwhile remembering that the pr ogress in the implanta- tion of ‘of ficial law’ ran parallel in the dif ferent kingdoms. In other wor ds, the plurality of pacts between the Crown and each one of its kingdoms led to the preser vation of a mosaic of jurisdictional systems, all of them highly dif fer ent. Sometime previously the various legal systems had bor rowed or stolen from one another , but all r etained their previous characteristics (T omás y V aliente 1992, pp. 232–97). This meant that the pr ospect of the creation of a homogenous juridical-economical space was incr easingly dis- tant, something which af fected transaction costs in operations conducted across their political bor ders. Some details, moreover , suggest that much of the pr ogress achieved in sixteenth-centur y Castile was r eversed relatively quickly from the end of the centur y . Fr om 1580 the activity and ef ficiency of the Chancillerías were clearly r educed. This growing inef fectiveness can be measur ed in the number of decisions passed down by the best-known example (the Chancillería of V alladolid), which fell from ar ound 1400 in 1580 to between 200 and 400 in 1640–1660. 50 And if par t of this reduction evi- dently was due to the interest in pr esenting great lawsuits in the Cour t or before the Council of Castile, it is wor thwhile taking into account that there wer e relatively few of these major cases and that this fall was even more rapid than the decline in population. Fur thermor e, a study of the 49 V . Alcalá Galiano, Sobre la economía política y los impuestos . Academia de Ar tillería de Segovia, Segovia: 1992, facsimile edition, p.321. [original edition, Segovia 1781–1788]. 50 According to Kagan (1981), the phenomenon was in par t due to the progr essive replace- ment of the Chanceller y by the Council of Castile after the transfer of the Cour t to Madrid. But even then, the facts are highly suggestive, as the same conclusion appears from calcula- tions made by subtracting the cases generated in the city itself from the total number . THE CRYST ALLIZA TION OF APOLITICAL ECONOMY, C. 1580–1630 244 delays in law cases demonstrates that those of less than two years’ duration fell by a notable propor tion from 1560 to 1620 (fr om almost 50% to 34%), whereas the pr opor tion of cases that lasted for eight years or more did not fall and may well have risen. 51 What were the causes of this pr ocess? From its inception, the chanceller y system was highly criticized, with elites and the aristocracy being both vocal and active in protesting against lawyers and this new judicial or der . 52 Around 1600 this opinion had taken root among the arbitristas , many of whom repr esented the concepts of the urban patriciate. As many of them rightly pointed out, the costs incurr ed in law cases were bankr upting peasants, businessmen, seigniors, and, of course, cities (Moncada 1974 [1619], pp. 201–4). But these criticisms do not appear to have weakened the justice system. As J. Owens has underlined, the problem lay in the contradiction between the wish for a solid and ef ficient judicial system and the fact that the king could not maintain himself without the backing of the aristocracy on the one side and the mid-ranking nobility and urban patriciate on the other (Owens 2005, pp. 182 f f.). Indeed, this argument might be taken fur ther than Owens himself allows. After 1580 the power ful private jurisdictions, consolidated within the conflictive pact between Crown and elites, wer e able to compete with royal jurisdiction (Thompson 1993, vol. II, p.223). The crisis of the chanceller y system was, ver y possibly , the result of a combination of factors: the growing inef ficiency of these cour ts due to the dif ficult r elationships between their judges and the monarch (Kagan 1981); 53 economic problems and the spiralling debts of cities, seigniors, municipalities, and private individuals, which meant that recur ring to slow-moving and inef ficient tribunals was an ever less attractive option; and—highly impor tant—the continued vigour of the city and seigniorial 51 Kagan (1981, p. 7, Fig. 1). These figures must be tr eated with care, as the final judge- ment was emitted ‘only upon request of the victorious par ty’. But it is ver y impor tant that the figures of the author show that from 1620 the r oyal arrangements worked out as cheaper than the car tas ejecutorias . In spite of this, there occur red a r eduction in numbers at least until 1660. 52 Kagan (1981). For Quevedo’s criticism of the lawyers, pp.72–3. 53 Although this area remains (unfor tunately) poorly studied, it is obvious that many judges and lawyers entered into the dynamic of clientele systems, which also allowed them to achieve social ascent and to be promoted to other positions of fering gr eater remuneration outside of the judiciar y (Kagan 1981). B. YUN-CASALILLA 245 jurisdictions, a lasting feature of the conflictive pact, and the r ecourse to informal accor ds between par ties. The monarch himself was also a sour ce of instability and violence that might r un against the common law and create uncer tainty and risks for economic activities. Despite the nuances introduced above, the r easons and arguments of Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (Chap. 4 ) are basi - cally corr ect as it comes to the negative ef fects of bankr uptcies and the seizure of American cargoes and treasur es (2005). Obviously , the Habsburgs were not exceptional in many of these measures, and it is even possible that other monarchs wer e more arbitrar y or less sensitive than them (see Sardone 2018). It is also impor tant to r emember that, after these measures, ther e were negotiations that alleviated the financial damage they induced. 54 But it is dif ficult to believe that they could not af fect ex ante the feeling of risk and uncer tainty , since those negotiations were always fraught and of an uncer tain end. This negative side of absolutism will become even more evident during the seventeenth centur y with the r epeated devaluations of money , an action that, as theologists like Mariana denounced, was a gesture of tyr - anny that went against the kingdom’s laws. The authority of the king, moreover , and his absolute power might ser ve as a brake on the positive ef fects caused by the development of justice and the chanceller y cour ts, even in Castile itself. The exercise of absoluta potestas by the king over the chancelleries could be the cause of arbitrar y actions. It was on behalf of his absoluta potestas that Philip II could settle an impor tant lawsuit in T oledo in favour of the count of Belalcázar against the Archbishop of T oledo, without paying heed to previous judicial decisions and acting solely as a result of the political alliances at Cour t (Owens 2005). Moreover , it is pos- sible to think that Philip II was much less given to this type of inter fer ence than his sons, above all Philip III. But all that was needed to create a sense of risks and higher transaction costs was the feeling that the lawsuits would be resolved not accor ding to the letter of the law but in reference to the person against whom one litigated. Though a relatively high degr ee of social order was a goal of the mon- archy and its agr eements with elites, the dif ferences among the distinct 54 Y ears ago historians such as Lovett (1977), Ruiz Mar tín (1990b), and Rodríguez- Salgado (1992) devoted ver y detailed studies to the way the big Genoese bankers got com- pensations for these actions. THE CRYST ALLIZA TION OF APOLITICAL ECONOMY, C. 1580–1630 246 kingdoms were many . In Aragon, the pact with elites was made in more challenging conditions because of the absence of American silver and the improbability of establishing fiscal-financial r elationships similar to those in Castile (Y un 2004). This had made the Crown fiscally weaker and reduced its capacity of enfor cement, resulting in positive ef fects in some cases. The reduced ability to palliate inter nal conflicts within the Aragonese, V alencian, and Catalan nobility was one of the reasons for the persistence of banditr y and the related dif ficulty in maintaining law and order . In pr o- por tion to the development of seigniorial jurisdiction, this cr eated a higher degree of insecurity whose impact upon economic activity is not known but—according to contemporar y evidence—appears to have been nega- tive until well into the seventeenth centur y (Chap. 8 ) (T or res 1994). But the way laws and customs were enfor ced is not enough to under - stand the allocation of resour ces. W e also need to consider other less posi- tive aspects of the institutional development and to what extent they also ef fected the criteria for the management of those resour ces—above all, after having previously pointed out some possible positive ef fects. Regarding the señorío , and in spite of the changes, ef for ts to impr ove the methods of collecting rents and monitoring patrimonies wer e still more impor tant than organizational or technical advances. 55 As a general r ule, the for ms or types of proper ty rights wer e also influential. Lands ceded in enfiteusis could not be the object of any (legal) productive improvement fr om the lords’ side, and in a moment of demographic crisis, the actions from the peasants’ side would not be fr equent for several decades. 56 In areas such as V alencia and Aragon, the seigniors wielded considerable juridical rights and enforcement powers. These pr erogatives guaranteed the collection of their rents and the defence of their economic privileges and so lessened the need to recur to for mulas for the amplified repr oduction of capital. 57 The development of the Cour t had similar ef fects. Rather than invest- ing in their proper ties, for many aristocrats a more rational policy was to 55 Pér ez del Barrio (1613, p.235). 56 Her e the role of the señor might be simply to promote the actions of his vassals (Pér ez del Barrio 1613, pp.226v–9v), although this might be incr easingly dif ficult in a moment of demographic recession. 57 On the r ole of privilege and coercion in preventing economic impr ovements, see Nor th etal. (2009). B. YUN-CASALILLA 247 redouble the amount of attention paid to the Cour t and intensify ef for ts to acquire extraor dinar y resour ces through political action, a deter mina- tion that would elevate the practices of rent-seeking to a pr evalent feature of the management of the great houses. 58 Mor eover , aristocratic econo- mies came to be based on an essential duality that explained the strange combination of luxur y and indebtedness into which many of them fell. The aristocratic patrimonies were made up of two inter connected but dif- ferent par ts. On one side, there wer e the mayorazgos (composed mainly of seigniorial estates) whose incomes and management were subject to requir ements and r ules set down by the king. These were possessions whose use was restricted in the sense that they wer e tied down and almost always unmoveable; they could not be sold of f or alienated in any way , and their capacity for generating liquid incomes could also be ver y limited. On the other side, there existed the favours, of fices, pensions, and extraordi- nar y incomes conceded by the Cr own to the aristocrats, which constituted disposable sources of r evenue that could be used immediately . The result was a ver y asymmetric form of management. Being the may- orazgo , a non-alienable and subject to the king’s unpredictable r equire- ments and exigencies, the interest of the landlor ds in the improvement of their productivity was ver y limited. At the same time, the incomes pro- vided by the mayorazgo were used as a means of obtaining political incomes and power , while the extraordinar y incomes derived fr om royal grace and favour were only used in exceptional cir cumstances to improve the enti- tled proper ties. Such management criteria were the key to the coexistence of luxur y and need that, in our eyes, appears an open contradiction but which ser ved as a basis for a moral economy whose overall consequences would be decisive (Y un 1994a). A moral economy of this kind, tied to a series of increasingly fir mly rooted cultural beliefs, existed thr oughout Europe. But it was manifested in Spain, above all in Castile, in a more pronounced way and with mor e evident consequences. As has been said, forces to r educe incentives for improvements existed also among the ecclesiastic institutions. The exercise of privilege and spe- cific proper ty rights over land and rents held by these institutions would 58 See the account records held in Simancas. Accor ding to my calculations, the count of Lemos, for example, enjoyed ‘extraordinar y’ (additional) income, which came on top of those ‘normal’ ones derived fr om his seigniorial estates: the former brought in ar ound 440,000 ducats in 1630 ( Dirección General del T esoro , inv . 1, lib. 5, exp. 81. AGS). These extraordinar y revenues wer e numerous. See Y un (2002a). THE CRYST ALLIZA TION OF APOLITICAL ECONOMY, C. 1580–1630 248 also af fect their management criteria. As had occur red with the mayor- azgo , the ver y character of ecclesiastical pr oper ty—also, by definition, inalienable—led to r entier for ms of management, in which impor tant improvements wer e not necessar y to maintain the patrimony intact. Privilege, in this case embodied in an exclusive type of proper ty right, played a fundamental role. As in the lay señoríos , the notable capacity for enforcement wielded by many of these institutions allowed them to collect their incomes and, in some cases, led to the use of (not necessarily physical) coercion as a substitute for investment. Moreover, the make-up and natur e of their incomes could also fur ther r educe the attraction of introducing improvements: the collection of foros , of tithes, and of other gabelles requir ed improvements in the for ms of monitoring rather than advances in the productive system. The extension of ecclesiastical pr oper ties and their tax privileges reinfor ced the monopolistic advantages of some institutions in the local markets, therefor e increasing their temptation for speculative management rather than for economic investments (Álvarez 1987). In many regions such as the Duer o V alley or Galicia, ecclesiastical prop- er ties wer e made up of small plots of land dispersed over considerable distances (the result of unorder ed and unplanned donations) which were rented out on shor t-term leases. This gr eatly complicated the introduction of improvements for both the far mers themselves and the institutions that owned them. From the end of the sixteenth centur y , the control of r ural credit in the for m of censos consignativos gave rise to mechanisms for the extraction of peasant income that made agrarian improvements even mor e unnecessar y fr om the clerics’ side. Moreover , these censos consignativos became a way of obtaining the ownership of the land itself when borr ow- ers defaulted on their repayments, thus achieving an ‘extensive’ (simple) repr oduction of capital. This became especially clear when the br utal series of epidemics and poor har vests that began in the 1590s combined with the sale of common lands and resulted in the r uin of many far mhands and workers. At least until economic conditions changed at the end of the centur y , the way many ecclesiastical institution managed credit could be negative for economic growth, and that seems to have been the case. The model of economic expansion of these institutions based on donations from the society and in par ticular fr om the elites constituted a form of rent-seeking, in this case one that was not orientated towar ds the Cour t and the state (as was that of the aristocracy) but rather towards society as a whole. Family strategies also became incr usted or fossilized, therefor e, in B. YUN-CASALILLA 249 the economic management of ecclesiastical patrimonies and encouraged a simple form of r eproduction for these institutions. The extension of the ecclesiastic patrimony through these strategies was mor e impor tant than investment in productive impr ovements. 59 It is wor thwhile remembering that war stood at the basis of all of these developments and that armed conflict was presented in religious ter ms as the only way to justify the taxes derived from it and the ef for ts and sacrifices demanded fr om society . Regarding the commercial institutions, if the consulates could have positive ef fects in r educing risks and transaction costs among their mem- bers, the opposite ef fect was also ver y much pr esent. This would be patent in the evolution of both the Consulate of Seville and the Casa da Índia of Lisbon. One of the keys to this was found in the systems for the control of colonial commerce associated with both empir es. When trade with America boomed from the last thir d of the sixteenth centur y , it became necessar y to compensate the ver y high value of the sil- ver cargoes and the arrival of other commodities with a balancing flow of expor ts to the New W orld (Hough and Grier 2015). Given the dif ficulties in meeting this demand with peninsular production alone (Chap. 7 ), the result was the massive entr y of foreign goods, channelled through Seville, into America (Oliva 2004). It should be emphasized that this process was only made possible through the infor mal and family ties between Seville businessmen and foreign mer chant communities. At the same time, this situation created the basis for a new r elationship between Crown and Consulate. The Seville merchants—and the Consulate of the city , above all—had long provided financial assistance to the king in the for m of fiscal ‘advantages’; from the end of the sixteenth centur y , contributions of this kind would become regular (Oliva 2004). This ar rangement led to forms of commercial management that wer e largely based on advantages derived from privileges and for ms of rent-seeking. In this context, and in light of the notable benefit of intermediation with for eign industrial products, another salient aspect of commercial management is easily explainable: the reduced inter est of merchant capital in general and of Seville capital in par ticular , to invest to dynamize industrial production in Spain. Fur ther more, this combination of institutional restrictions based upon the 59 The fact may be seen in the scarce, if not non-existent, quantities that were dedicated to these ef fects in the Cathedral of Huesca (Lator re, 1992). For the cathedral chapels of Por tugal, see da Silva (2013). THE CRYST ALLIZA TION OF APOLITICAL ECONOMY, C. 1580–1630 250 use of privilege and the permeability of the system to the infor mal institu- tions like the family created significant entr y barriers for non-members of the merchant coalition that pivoted upon Seville. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson are pr obably corr ect when arguing that the Seville monopoly ser ved to slow down the institutional development of the countr y and prevented the establishment of positive institutions. But, having said this, what is cer tain is that emphasis should fall on the image of a parasitical yet weak king rather than on an all-power ful one. Something similar happened with the Lisbon merchant communities, although their point of depar tur e was dif ferent. As in Castile, the Cr own had established control mechanisms for trade with the colonies, par ticu- larly with Africa and Asia. This meant establishing taxes through the con- trol of commer ce. For this reason, the monopoly meant the king’s direct involvement in commerce and especially the pepper trade. By the second half of the centur y , however , it was becoming clear that this control was insuf ficient and that, mor eover , fraud, contraband, and Dutch commerce could not be constrained. This led to the introduction of a system for the licencing of commerce. In exchange for a set payment, per mission was granted to private businessmen to trade with Asia and Africa. This arrange- ment brought two advantages for the Cr own (or , at least this was the hope): it obtained funds derived from the payment of the licence and fiscal yields based upon this commerce. But, as in Castile, the intr usion of infor - mal family networks into the system ended up per ver ting it. In a ver y shor t space of time, a large number of non-Por tuguese families became involved in this commerce; these traders wer e often associated with dense international networks of Jewish businessmen originating in Por tugal. As in the case of the Castilian monopoly , it was an ‘international monopoly’ (or , in other words, it was not a monopoly), in which merchants fr om many countries were involved, and the commer cial management was based upon the exploitation of privileges and institutional advantages that render ed unnecessar y any for ms of investment designed to make the countr y’s economy mor e dynamic. Equally and, again, as in Castile, these practices were br ought about by a weak political system that was incapable of imposing institutions upon dynamic international commer cial networks rather than by a parasitical monarchical absolutism that allowed no right of appeal against its mandates and str uctures. Also a good par t of the urban elites wer e tempted by ways of manage- ment that were in principle less pr opitious for the general ef ficiency of the B. YUN-CASALILLA S t a te B uilding and i nStitutionS The schools or disciplines of historical sociology , histor y , and the new institutional economics have shown par ticular inter est in the state- building process that took place in Eur ope from the fifteenth centur y . In general, they have attempted to determine how medieval political for mations lead to a type of modern state in which the central power monopolizes coer - cion and administration through a pr ofessional bureaucracy that gover ns a geographically coherent ter ritor y . In par ticular , scholars have noted how war brought about the constr uction of a militar y fiscal system that, in par t by overcoming other corporate powers, was able to achieve centralization of resour ces and of coercive capacity in the hands of the central power , thus ser ving as a pr eliminar y step towards W eber’s model of the modern state. This narrative has almost always been compiled by pr ojecting back- wards the boundaries of the nation states that wer e consolidated during— and as a result of—the Congr ess of Vienna (1815) and have ser ved as fundamental units of analysis for the early modern period. The perspective has cer tain logic if we consider that this type of state is, above all, a territo- rial one whose evolution we want to analyse retr ospectively . The problem emerges in another light if we follow the arguments set out in the above pages, through the analysis of the way in which the ter ritorially dispersed composite monarchy developed, a network of geographically sep - arated polities in which the relationship between the prince and each of the polities was based on a series of conflicts and agreements, with jurisdiction Conclusions Par t II ▪▪ 258 CONCLUSIONS P ART II shared with (or delegated to) elites, cities, and the Chur ch, who in turn maintained horizontal relations—often conflictive—with each other . 1 Although his pivotal study hardly touches upon the Iberian countries, Downing (1992) provides some perspectives that may be useful to our understanding of composite monarchies. 2 Building on Tilly’s argument for the ‘exceptional case’—that in a context of sustained militar y pr essure, access to abundant commercial income could cause a polity to avoid bureaucratization and even absolutism—Downing adds that the income extracted from conquer ed territories and exter nal subsidies can have simi- lar ef fects (Downing 1992, p. 9). These variables, and their ver y asym- metric forms, would cr eate an enormous unevenness between the states of the Habsburg monarchy . Around 1530, when Charles V was cr owned Emperor at Bologna, the Habsburgs had established an unprecedented dynastic complex. In an area that was as politically fragmented as Eur ope, whose dynamics were governed by conflict and the balance between dif fer ent polities (Jones 1981), this composite state posed a genuine threat to all. W ithin it, some states—including Castile, although this has not been recognized by his - torical sociology—had the requisites to cr eate incipient bureaucratized and centralized systems: a relatively developed university system that allowed the Crown to r ecr uit specialized personnel, an economy with a cer tain level of commercial development that cr eated the bases of an ef fi - cient fiscal framework by the standards of the time, and a dynamic com - merce and a customs r egime that seemed to favour tax collection according to Tilly’s model (1990). 3 But to understand subsequent developments, it is necessar y to take into account other aspects and factors. In this respect, it is impor tant to underline that—in contrast with the prevailing image that only emphasized the negative aspects—ther e was an evident complementarity between the various par ts of this composite monarchy . Indeed, this complementarity created the conditions for the sur vival of this system. Thus, the fiscal possibilities of Castile and America were r eally made to work thanks to the financial skills of Genoa—a decisive 1 The idea of the composite monarchy encompasses two separate concepts or models: for Koenigsberger it was a polity ‘including more than one countr y under the sovereignty of one r uler’ (1986, p. 12); but this also implied a ‘pr ofound respect for corporate str uctures and for traditional rights, privileges and customs’ (Elliott 1992, pp.68–69). 2 For an over view and discussion, see Er tman (1997, pp.1–34) 3 These ar e keys to a branch of historical sociology , Er tman (1997) or Tilly (1990), to justify the greater capacity to levy taxes in early moder n states. 259 CONCLUSIONS P ART II ally since 1528—and the German ter ritories. In addition, this complemen- tarity was possible insofar as these financial ser vices wer e provided not by states (whose institutional impediments would have been ver y gr eat) but by families such as the W elser , Fugger , Doria, or Spinola; that is to say , by informal networks whose cr oss-border character was an essential feature of their functioning. T o this end, the r ole of the cash provided by the American mines was also vital. Flanders, Castile, Aragon, Naples, and Milan (from 1540) had ver y dynamic and growing populations, which enhanced the system’s political and economic vitality . In the pr evious pages, we have emphasized the dif ficulties involved in the transfer of resour ces, a central argument in our reasoning, but it is obvious that tech- nically the scope for the mobilization of capital and men was ver y devel- oped for the standards of the time and that, in r egard to previous arrangements, the composite monar chy signified a remarkable step for - ward. Soon the Habsburgs created a defensive bar rier against their most impor tant enemy , the Ottoman Empire. This fir ewall ran from Gibraltar to Nor th Africa, Sicily , and Naples and stretched up to V ienna and the imperial territories, Bohemia and Hungar y , with the complicity of Genoa and V enice. Both V enice and Genoa were independent r epublics whose policies fluctuated between obedience and disobedience, depending on circumstances. T r ue, Muslim corso often penetrated this bar rier , but the militar y capacity of this complex would be demonstrated at Lepanto: the forests of the Mediter ranean; the iron of Iberia; the taxes of Castile, Naples, and Milan; the finances of Genoa, and soldiers and mercenaries from Castile, Switzerland, and the imperial ter ritories; wheat from Sicily , Italian militar y , and naval technology; German mining technology; and so on. And, above all, the capacity with which the Habsburgs were able to combine these resour ces and tools was perhaps the ultimate expression of the strength of a system whose weaknesses ar e always stressed in relation to its distance from a moder n state model. This ensemble of dispersed polities was woven into a highly adaptive sys - tem, with an awareness of dynastic legitimacy and the notable flexibility of fer ed by the family as a system of government. The latter had its gr eat weakness in the unpredictable vicissitudes of the life—or death—of its mem - bers and, consequently , of inheritances. But the dynastic family was also a ver y extensive and flexible institution that could pr ove to be ef ficient, as is clearly demonstrated by the division of the two branches of the House of Habsburg in 1558. This was plainly a proof of (obligator y) strategy if one takes into account the solidity of these personal bonds and the chance to use them to maintain dominion in the territories gover ned by each of these two 260 CONCLUSIONS P ART II branches which were now united by bonds of solidarity and r eciprocity as a way of facing their internal conflicts. The annexation of Por tugal, again pro - pitiated by the ef ficiency and for tune of family policy , would take this mosaic of states to an unprecedented situation: a ter ritorial expansion perhaps only comparable to that of the Mongol empire in the thir teenth centur y . The system would be ef ficient for the Habsburgs and would last for decades; it was founded upon negotiations with the local political constitutions of the composite states, its remarkable capacity for pr opaganda, the imperial ideal (Dandelet 2014), and the ver y solid kinship ties that justified the existence of this network. In shor t, the familial character of the composite monarchy was both the strength and weakness of this system. But it had another strength and weakness that was sometimes forgot- ten: this was the confessional character that the Habsburgs would soon impose upon their dominions; this ethos was derived from their own polit- ical justification as heirs to both the empire of Charlemagne and the r e- conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. That they could present themselves, thanks to their policy of alliances with the Pope, as defenders of Christianity and the faith was impor tant in holding together this federation of patri- monial states; no doubt, the fear caused by the T urks on the shores of the Mediterranean helped. This fact, much commented upon by historiogra- phy , has one cr ucial dimension. The Habsburg imperial complex lies between those empires in which political power and r eligious power are separated but are inextricably linked and depend on agents with not- always- identical agendas: the pontificate and the House of Habsburg, in this case. The monotheistic character of Christianity and the dogmatic component within it would be decisive in this context. The dif fer ence, for example, with the Ottoman Empire, is ver y illustrative. The Sultan exer cised both religious duties and authority within Islam (Burbank and Cooper 2010) and could, therefor e, complement them even by implementing some degree of tolerance if it was needed (Barkey 2008). But this division of powers would be the grounds for cr ucial tensions for the Habsburgs. The attempts of Charles V , influenced by Erasmus, to r each agreement with the Ger man princes and the way in which they clashed with papal religious policy are ver y significant in this r egard and repr esent the first line of r upture of the monarchical complex. When Philip II ascended the thr one, the respective positions had been radicalized to such a degree that religion, up to that time the cr ucial cement of this composite monarchy , was hencefor th also one of the most impor tant causes of conflict, as would be demonstrated by the rebellion of the Netherlands. By this junctur e, the defence of ‘Christendom’ (but, to be more pr ecise, Catholicism) had become enmeshed 261 CONCLUSIONS P ART II with political and, above all, fiscal theor y , to the point that it was hence- for th the only way to overcome what was the principal obstacle to the government of this dynastic complex—the transfer of funds fr om one state to another . The religious component, in tur n, had reinfor ced the religious character of the political economy of states such as Castile, where the con- fessional argument justifying this transfer of funds had to be rehearsed exhaustively and so became par t of the cultural beliefs that mediated the use of financial and militar y r esources. In this context, the standard national histories ar e of ver y little use to any understanding of the political economy of the Habsburg domains. T oday the aber rations and anomalies that can lead to a simplistic analysis of the tax revenues of the states of the Old Regime ar e widely appreciated. Although we cannot confuse the gross income and the net income of the state, it is significant that the gross entries of it is significant that the net income of the Habsburgs in Castile had not only grown faster than that of any other European countr y in the sixteenth centur y , but by 1600 it wer e twice the size of that of the King of France. If we add in the incomes of Naples and Milan, it turns out that these thr ee states alone enjoyed gross incomes superior to those of their three principal rivals: France, England, and Holland combined. 4 The costs of the Castilian debt also create the appearance of an ef ficient complex (Dr elichman and V oth 2014; Y un and Ramos 2012). Por tugal had followed a ver y dif ferent path. The House of Avis had r emained a secondar y lineage in European politics, par tly because after the Catholic Kings the policy of the Habsburgs had been to ‘neutral - ize Por tugal and isolate France’ (Maltby 2011, p. 29), by seeking an Iberian union that the avatars would delay to 1580 and that would only be possible through violence. The r esult was a composite monarchy in Por tugal but not in the sense commonly used by Machiavelli, who emphasized the vari - ety of distant and separate states under one dynasty: rather , what emerged here was a kingdom made up of superimposed jurisdictional corporations that were often in conflict with one another . Por tugal would not become an element of instability in Europe. Looking at the Atlantic, Por tugal’s great competitors (and potential ally) wer e Castile and, by extension, the Habsburgs. As we have seen, following Tilly’s model, the chances of build - ing a militar y fiscal state in Por tugal wer e considerable. And if we allow ourselves to be carried away by some of the ideals that ar e now frequently enunciated by cer tain historians of the economy , it could be argued that 4 These calculations, ver y approximate, ar e based on Comín and Y un (2012, pp. 235–238) and the previous pages above. 262 CONCLUSIONS P ART II this was the most ‘absolutist’ state in Europe: the parliament met only rarely in the sixteenth centur y , and yet the system of r esource mobilization functioned with considerable ef ficiency . But Por tugal is really mor e a case of external r esources that fits some of Downing’s r easoning and model. The first steps towards Eur opean globalization—manifested in the expan - sion into the Atlantic—endowed the king with abundant resour ces, but, critically , these originated from outside the kingdom and for a long time render ed unnecessar y the transfor mation from a domain state to a tax state; rather , Por tugal remained a rentier state until well into the sixteenth cen - tur y (Y un 2012). It helped that its militar y needs in Eur ope were smaller in relation to its income, and, ther efore, the system of indebtedness that forced other states to obtain taxes with which to attend to the imbalances between the king’s income and his militar y needs did not lead to an extrac - tion of fiscal resour ces as massive as that of Castile. Por tugal, on the other hand, is the counterexample that allows us to better understand Castile and the composite monarchy of the Habsburgs, to which it would be incorporated in 1580, increasing Madrid’s power but also its problems. In fact, the Habsburg complex was only possible thanks to the impact of globalization. American silver allowed the operation of the international financing system (while putting it to the test at the con- stitutional level). But this was not because of the availability of silver in itself but because Castile found a way of conver ting silver into militar y spending by resor ting to the loans taken out from contractors ( asentistas ), and this allowed it to consolidate its debt, which would not have been possible had the Castilian economy not been a relatively advanced mer can- tile one. This would, in any case, be the most impor tant factor in under - standing the militar y fiscal state in Iberia and in the Habsburg domains. In Por tugal, the local power of the cities and seigniorial lordships and their autonomy with respect to the Cr own would be notable, but this did not translate into an increase in incomes similar to that of Castile in ter ms of its fiscal capacity and the extraction of resour ces. In Castile, this fiscal state operated through a conflictive pact with the elites, the cities, and the Church that r esulted in the enduring—indeed, even growing—power of the urban oligarchies. At the same time, local defensive needs br ought about a reinfor cement of local (seigniorial and urban) militias, which con- tributed to maintaining a system of dispersed coercion and per manent negotiation and overlap with the king’s own forces. This political system had little or nothing in common with the model of the centralized militar y state and the uncontested imposition of its authority . And this process 263 CONCLUSIONS P ART II created a model that was dif fer ent from the image of Iberian absolutism described by Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson. But, above all, this conjunction of global and local forces incr eased the asymmetr y in the Habsburg composite monarchy . States such as the Crown of Aragon or Sicily and some imperial polities evolved towar ds ‘rentier states’ and experienced few changes in their political-fiscal contex - ture. In the imperial ter ritories, ‘the fiscal and political str uctures remained stable from the sixteenth-centur y to the early eighteenth-centur y’ (Pieper 2012, p.168), and the kingdom of Hungar y remained under the control of the ‘states’ until the end of the empire. Although these wer e not immo - bile str uctures, the shift fr om the domain state to the tax state (as defined by Schumpeter) was postponed (not coincidentally , Schumpeter was work - ing on the Austrian case). However , the escalation of war costs meant that this situation could not last forever , and, above all, it signified that other polities more exposed to militar y conflicts for geostrategic reasons or with more favourable constitutions and mor e scope to forge dif ferent pacts with their respective elites found themselves compelled to pay mor e. One recur ring tradition in Spanish historiography is to think that only Castile contributed to the war ef for ts. Nothing could be fur ther fr om the tr uth. Cer tainly , Castile became the backbone of the empire. But Naples had to contribute with increasing amounts during the sixteenth centur y and after 1600 (Chap. 8 ), and the pressur e on Flanders was unrelenting, which meant that their contributions continued to grow even in r elative terms to those of Castile. Along with the fact that the pact with Castile was not at all stable, due in par t to rising costs and the decline in the marginal profit - ability of taxes ever ything led to the first br eakdown of the system in Flanders. It is ver y significant that the r ebellion of the Netherlands coin - cided with the resistance of the Cor tes of Castile to the revision of cer tain taxes (the encabezamientos ), the bankr uptcy of 1557, and, ver y impor - tantly , the dif fusion of Calvinism that put to the test one of the cr ucial elements of the Habsburg system: the religious rigidity that it had acquired and which made it impossible to maintain the dialogue and pact with elites, the two pillars of its existence. It is in this context that the most impor tant r econversion in the histor y of this system took place: the divi - sion of domains between the two branches of the family . It is ver y impor tant to consider that the study of political formations and political economies of the time cannot be under taken simply fr om the perspective of formal institutions (states, cour ts, cities, etc.) that main- tained sovereignty and pr ojected it. Any study must also take into account relationships that appear to be infor mal (family , dynasty , fidelity , patronage, 264 CONCLUSIONS P ART II etc.) but that were as impor tant as formal institutions when deter mining political behaviour , state-building processes, and the use of r esources. As much as a system of cities, principalities, and dominions, composite states were a network of infor mal but decisive families, lineages, and social net- works (Y un 2009). Although implicit in Er tman’s (1997) vision of patri- monial state or Mousnier’s work on the venality of of fices (1971), not many authors interested in state building have taken time to explor e this aspect of them. An exception is J. Adams (2005), who has emphasized the interest of elite families in conver ting ‘positions of sovereignty into the prosperity of their descendants’ (2005, p. 81). This is explained in refer- ence to the relations of conflict and solidarity that occur red within these family formations and wer e manifested in the need to find an outlet for younger sons, women, and even bastards. 5 One of the most interesting aspects of Adams’s study is that she refers mainly to Holland, appar ently a modern r epublic state, and focuses not only upon the aristocracy but also on the commercial bourgeoisie that would control the VOC and was a group in which the nuclear family was pr edominant. The above pages have explored a double—and dif ferent—dir ection. They wanted to demonstrate that the state and in par ticular the empir es were in par t areas into which these elites pr ojected themselves and that this method allowed them to overcome the depr eciation of a par t of their income (this was the case for quite a few aristocratic families) and, on the other hand, also advanced their ef for ts at social consolidation and expan- sion. This also implied a series of agreements with, in spite of the str uc- tural conflicts also inherent to those agr eements, the Crown that bound them to it by relational ties that would facilitate the maintenance of the social order and the political system and that would also condition the changes within the latter . It is to be r emembered that a good number of these conflictive pacts, which implied the assignment of quotas of coercion on behalf of the king, were made thanks to absoluta potestas and the supreme power of the monar ch (this was even set down in the documents and licences granted to the nobles and aristocracy for these measures). Absolutism as a political practice was not necessarily alien to the multipli- cation and reinfor cement of corporate powers. It is these kinds of pr o- cesses that would explain what Er tman called the ‘patrimonial state’, regar dless of the appropriateness of this term (1997, pp. 110–125). On the other hand, none of these processes were at odds with practices of 5 See also Adams (2005, pp.84–85). 265 CONCLUSIONS P ART II restricting tension within the elites that wer e mostly achieved by celibacy and membership in the Church, a tr end whose ef fects on the economy would be decisive. But, above all, I have wanted to show that such developments, although asymmetrical according to imperial spaces and social gr oups, led to the reinfor cement of the cross-border character of the elites. They found ver y dif fer ent spaces in which to expand themselves. America could not become the most impor tant ar ea for the promotion and projection of Castilian aristocratic houses, although it of fer ed them notable economic benefits and additions to their social and political capital. Indeed, the empire pr o- vided their Por tuguese counterpar ts similar benefits overseas. In both cases, the chances of fusing the great families with local elites wer e ver y limited, and this would lead to the formation of colonial elites who, for a long time, were well outside the dynamics of the Eur opean aristocracies. This process of fusion, slow and r eally based on the reaching out of American families to peninsular ones rather than on an expansion of the Iberian aristocracies towards the colonies, would not occur until the emer - gence of an American nobility , which was only beginning to be noted at the end of the period under study and whose ability to link with the old Castilian families would be limited (Mar uri 2007). In the meantime, America cer tainly would pr ovide an outlet—sometimes only temporarily but often by creating transatlantic families for a couple of generations—for many mid-ranking nobles, bastards, clerics, lawyers, and even some heads of lineages; a similar process was also pr esent in Por tugal with the peculiar - ity that the number would have to be smaller given the size of the empire and the countr y itself. From the perspective of the composite monar chy , this phenomenon would accentuate the asymmetr y within it. The families of the Castilian high nobility became the hierarchical centr e of the European Catholic nobility and its marital market. But this relationship would not—and could not—become a definitive or homogeneous system of links and ties. Where these links wer e intense, bonds were created that tended to stabil- ity; where they wer e not, things tended to be more precarious. Looked at this way , a r upture was almost inevitable with areas such as the Pr otestant United Provinces, wher e marriage ties with the Castilian nobility wer e more tenuous in contrast to those with the leading Flemish families (V ermeir 2009; Fagel 2009). Moreover , we must suspect that the distance between the great Castilian families and the nobility of the nor thern Netherlands—and with it, the obstacles to their incorporation into the 266 CONCLUSIONS P ART II imperial system as a whole—may have been one of the keys that led to a rapid change within the latter and the development of bourgeois forms of management to overcome their pr oblems of social consolidation and expansion, with ever ything that this would mean and entail for the coun- tr y’s economy (see V an Nier op (1984) and the next chapter). At perhaps the opposite end of the scale was the Neapolitan nobility . W ith their old connections to the Aragonese families, they found in the monarchy an impor tant suppor t and a guarantor of their for ms of social dominion to the extent that these cross-border r elationships were incr easingly directed towards the gr eat families of Old Castile (Muto 2009). In the Iberian kingdoms themselves—increasingly , this included Por tugal—the marital entanglement of aristocratic elites was a way of bringing these societies closer together and a factor in the process of state for mation and the estab- lishment of relationships between the various centr es of the composite monarchy (Y un 2009). And this was not because it was a frictionless pro- cess, as it often led to divisions within the regional nobility or between it and local society . It should be bor ne in mind that these cross-border aris- tocracies did not have as their basic agenda the formation of political states; rather they sought principally to ser ve their own house and lineage and, in cross-bor der situations, would seek to secure resour ces and to send out free riders, as would be evident on many dif ferent occasions. The conflictive pact in tax matters and the elites’ ability to overcome their problems thr ough various procedures ranging fr om the obtaining of royal mercedes to the use of privileged forms of credit and admission to the Chur ch largely explain the political stability of those states upon which the weight of the empire fell most heavily , in par ticular Castile. This was also the case in Por tugal. Catholic or thodoxy pointed in the same dir ection, until becom - ing an essential element of the political economy of the time and of the patrimonial management norms and guidelines. In the case of these families, entr y into the ranks of the Chur ch was at the same time a strategy of repro - duction for the elites, a par t of their moral economy , and a component of what we have defined as their economy of legitimization. All this resulted in a permanent jurisdictional fragmentation and the sur vival of private militias and armies, which r eproduced the capacity of elites to exer cise coercion. It is not, therefor e, surprising that all of this propitiated a series of char - acteristics in Spanish and Por tuguese societies that have r einforced an image of exceptionalism. But such images do not stand up to comparison. On the other hand, the result of these developments was that these infor - mal institutions and the internal solidarities of the elites per meated the 275 receptive ter rain marked by the growing discontent over the Cr own’s fis- cal policies (Jouanna 1989; W ood 1980, p. 169). This was happening at the same time that the ‘aristocratic str ucture of power was conver ting a civil war into a drama of a religious natur e’ (Chevalier 1994, p. 391). Coming on top of the radicalization of cour t factions, r eligious confronta- tion would lead France into one of the most tragic periods of its histor y . The subsequent conflicts brought into the open pr oblems in the stabil- ity of the social system and, in par ticular , of the noble economies within it. The ‘state of finances’ that had ser ved as a basis for the continuity of the social system was falling apar t, and taxes wer e replaced on both sides by pillaging and sacking (Chaunu 1977, pp. 170–175). And with the collapse of the old arrangements, the social equilibrium achieved in the pr evious centur y also disintegrated. The nobility sought to over come its needs by seizing communal lands and extending its dominions, as it had done dur - ing the Middle Ages. Many cities claimed greater degr ees of autonomy or , as was the case where the Pr otestants formed the majority , boosted and extended their self-government (Knecht 1996, pp.53–54). All of this was combined with peasant uprisings against taxes, resistance to payment of the tithe, and even the radicalization of popular groups in the cities. As had been the case for the war of the Comunidades of Castile and the Germanías of V alencia, the wars of r eligion brought to the light grave problems within the existing social system. But, in the same way as in the Iberian kingdoms, the wars convinced the nobility , magistrates, the Church, the Catholics, Huguenots, and all the well-of f sectors of French society that the only way out was order and political stability . And this order could only be achieved with a strong and absolute monar ch (‘an of ficial of God on the Ear th’). This figure was finally embodied in Henr y of Bourbon, King of Navarr e, proclaimed King of France after his r enun- ciation of Protestantism in 1594. Fr om this moment, the political rhetoric changed in respect to the theories—tyrannicide included—of the sixteenth centur y (Holt 1995, pp. 213–216). The treasur y reforms of Sully str ength- ened royal power and gave it new r esources of patronage that allowed it both to attract elites and to oversee the restr ucturing of the dominant coalition (Salmon 1975, pp. 276–308). If religious conflict did not entir ely disappear , the confrontation over dif ferent cr eeds was overcome for the moment. This supposed a decisive step for war d for order and the repr o- duction of the social and political systems. The economic consequences of this situation would be cr ucial. GLoBAL FoRCES ANDEURoPEAN CoMPETITIoN [Document text truncated for crawler view.]