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THE SPANISH CHARACTER

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 THE
SPANISH CHARACTER
Attitudes and Mentalities from the
Sixteenth to the Nineteenth
Century by Bartolome
Bennassar
Translated & with a Preface by

BENJAMIN KEEN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

MCMLXXHC

Onf-m! r u,'« Collaq® Library;

Missouri
Originally published as LHomme Espagnol: Attitudes et mentalite's
du XVle au XIXe stecle par Bartolome Bennassar
© Librairie Hachette 1975

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
Copyright © 1979 by
The Regents of the University of California
ISBN 0-520-03401-5
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-55563
Printed in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
 (patents

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE IX

INTRODUCTION 1

I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MODELS 6

Portraits, 6
Antiportraits, 18

II. THE RHYTHMS OF TIME 27

Qualitative Perception of Time, 29
The Rhythms of Winter, 31
The Rhythms of Summer, 39
The Week and the Day, 43

III. THE PERCEPTION OF SPACE, OR

THE PERMANENCE OF THINGS 47
Permanence of an Urban Landscape, 47
Ever the Same Space, 53
Growing Mastery of Space? 59

IV. CATHOLIC FAITH AND DISSIDENCE 69

Golden Age of Spanish Catholicism: The Sixteenth
Century, 70
A Religion Deserted by Its Spirit, 80 -
A Unanimous Faith? 92
Anticlericalism, 97

V. POWER, WORK, AND WEALTH 103

The Passion for Domestic Servants and
the Search for Workers, 103
Slavery: Service, Prestige, Profit, 106
Attitudes Toward Work, 117
Historical Interpretations: Americo Castro and
Claudio Sanchez Albornoz, 123

v
VI Contents

Power, Passion, and the Poor, 132

The Rich, the Church, and Pauperism, 136
An Illustration: Extremadura, 142

VI. FESTIVALS, DIVERSIONS, AND FINERY 146

The Permanence of Festival, 151
Functions of the Festival, 156
A National Festival: The Bullfight, 158
From Festival to Diversions: Dance, Gambling,
and the Tertulia, 163
Finery, 170
VII. ALL THE FORMS OF LOVE 178
A Question of General Interest, 180
Marriage and Love, 182
The Problem of Prostitution, 191
Love Out of Wedlock, 195
Sodomy, 207
Bestiality, 211

VIII. HONOR AND VIOLENCE 213

Honor as a National Passion: Its Nature, 213
Honor: Privilege or Universal Possession? 217
The Metamorphoses of Honor, 223
Honor as a Source of Violence, 233
Rejection of Honor, 235

IX. TO DIE WELL 237

Death as the Moment of Truth, 239
Before God and Man, 245

CONCLUSION 249

APPENDIX: DOCUMENTS 255

The Institution of the Mayorazgo, 255
A Case of Scandalous Behavior, 256
The Quest for Religious Unity, 257
The Feastday of Corpus Christi, 259
Concern for Purity of Blood, 261
 Contents vii

A Love Match? 262

Seville and Bullfighting, 263
Disparagement of Marriage, 265
A Glorious Malady, Syphilis, 266
Love and Resort to Magic, 267
A Writ of Pardon and the Cost of a Life, 269

A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF SPANISH HISTORY,

1469-1833 271

GLOSSARY 275

NOTES 279

BIBLIOGRAPHY 297

INDEX 301
 Translator's Tteface

BARTOLOME BENNASSAR’S BOOK makes a major contribu¬

tion to the study of the Spanish character, a subject of
seemingly inexhaustible interest, in the first place for the
Spaniards themselves. The Spanish passion for national self-
analysis and self-criticism is proverbial. As early as 1455,
Fernando de la Torre complained to Enrique IV that the
Castilians were “proud and slothful and not so ingenious or
industrious” as other Europeans.1 A century later Luis de
Ortiz wrote in a memorial to Philip II (1558) that “Spaniards
are ready to die for their religion and their king. If they
cannot find a foreign war, they will fight among themselves,
for the majority are by nature choleric and proud. And since
most live in idleness, and possess neither learning nor any
mechanical art, they are more prone to violence than any
other nation.” And he continued: “So great is the love of ease,
so far advanced Spain’s perdition, that none, whatever his
state or condition, will hear of working at any craft or busi¬
ness, but must go to the University of Salamanca, or to the
Italian wars or the Indies, or became a notary public or
attorney, all to the ruin of the commonwealth.”2
In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with decay
spreading into many areas of Spanish life, this self-criticism
became increasingly tinged with pessimism, fatalism, and
cynicism. The picaresque novel, that peculiarly Spanish
genre, portrayed a world teeming with rogues and vag¬
abonds; the ferocious indictment of the Guzman de Alfarache
of Mateo de Aleman (1599): ‘All steal, all lie. . . . You will
not find a soul who is man unto man,” sums up its verdict on
Spanish life and character. False pride and honor, and a preju-

IX
X Translator's Preface

dice against manual labor continued to be cited as the beset¬

ting Spanish sins. Baltasar Gracian denounced the Spanish
“self-esteem, contempt of others, pride in being Don Diego
and ‘descended from the Goths,’ showing off, excelling,
boasting, much speaking, tall and hollow, gravity, pomp,
daring with every kind of presumption, and all this from the
noblest to the most plebeian.” Francisco Gomez de Quevedo
described the dismal social consequences of pundonor: ‘A poor
gentleman is starving, he has nothing to wear, his clothes are
tattered and patched, perhaps he becomes a thief; yet he does
not ask for anything because he says he has honor, nor does he
want to serve because he says it is dishonorable.”3
In the eighteenth century a new dynasty, the Bourbons,
tried to raise Spain from its miserable decadence with a
many-sided movement of reform. In the more hopeful
atmosphere of that movement of reconstruction, the bitter
satire of Quevedo gave way to the more genial irony of such
writings as the Cartas marruecas (1789) of Jose Cadalso. But
the targets of Cadalso’s wit are the same: false honor and
disdain for labor. One of his sketches portrays a provincial
hidalgo, muffled in his worn cloak, who stalks majestically
through the sad square of his little town; contemplating the
coat-of-arms above the door of his tumbledown house, he
thanks God for making him Don so-and-so. Cadalso blamed
Spain’s industrial decadence upon the universal hunger for
noble status. In London, he wrote, one could find a
shoemaker’s shop which had been passed down from father to
son for five generations. In Spain, however, every father
wanted his son to rise above him in the social scale. “For
every one who works at his mechanical art, an infinite
number of others are ready to close up shop and leave for
Asturias or their mountains in search of letters patent of
nobility.”4
 Translator’s Preface XI

Here, then, we have a complex of traits—they include

militarism, the sentiment of honor, and prejudice against
manual labor—that were believed to set the Spaniards apart
from other peoples and that thoughtful Spaniards blamed for
their country’s economic and social backwardness. Spanish
testimony was corroborated by that of many foreign observ¬
ers; I shall cite only the Italian historian and diplomat
Francesco Guicciardini, who represented Florence at the
court of King Ferdinand and left an acid, yet often percep¬
tive, account of the Spanish character at the opening of the
sixteenth century:

They believe no other nation can compare with them; in speech

they brag and puff themselves up all they can. ... In war they
have a high regard for honor, and would rather suffer death than
dishonor. . . . Spaniards are generally regarded as ingenious and
astute people, but they have little taste for the mechanical or
liberal arts. . . . Nor do the Spaniards devote themselves to com¬
merce, for they think it shameful, and all give themselves the airs
of an hidalgo. . . . True, in some places they have begun to pay
attention to industry, and in some regions they are now producing
textiles, clothing, crimson damasks, and gold embroideries. . . .
In general, however, the Spaniards have no use for industry. Thus
the artisans work only when driven by necessity, and then they
rest until they have used up their earnings. . . . Aside from a few
grandees of the realm, who live sumptuously, the Spaniards live
in very straitened circumstances, and if they have some money to
spend, they spend it on clothing and a mule, making a greater
show in the street than at home, where they live so meanly and
eat so sparingly that it is a marvel to see.5

We note that Guicciardini adds two items to what may be

called the standard index of Spanish traits under the Old
Regime: Spanish austerity in eating, and excess in spending
on dress and finery.
xii Translator's Preface

Bennassar does not dispute the existence of this complex of

traits or its negative impact on Spanish economic and social
development. Indeed, in his conclusion he indicates his
agreement with the traditional thesis by defining the mental
attitudes which largely contributed to the absence of an in¬
dustrial revolution in Spain as “a tendency toward overcon¬
sumption, social prejudice based on birth without stain, and
scorn for productive activity and for science, which alone
makes possible the mastery of nature.”
What distinguishes Bennassar’s work, in the first place, is
his finely nuanced treatment of Spanish attitudes and men¬
talities, his insistence on the importance of differences as well
as of uniformities. Characteristically, his first chapter, “The
Significance of Models,” presents a section of “Portraits” fol¬
lowed by one of‘Antiportraits,” designed to show the variety
of roads to fortune and honor followed by some representative
figures of the Old Regime. The same chapter offers the re¬
sults of a study of some ten generations of an hidalgo lineage
of Burgos, the Quintanos, that clearly contradicts the famil¬
iar literary image of an hidalgo class living in want or even in
misery. Bennassar’s carefully nuanced approach and occasional
revisionism is also illustrated by the chapter on “Catholic
Faith and Dissidence,” which demonstrates how vigorously
anticlericalism throve from the sixteenth century on in this
most fervently Catholic of lands.
A second valuable feature of Bennassar’s work is its close
exploration of the material milieu which molded the Spanish
mental universe, the systems of land use and tenure, the
technology, and the differences in these areas between the
more progressive “peripheric Spains” and the more stable
“interior Spain.” In Bennassar’s work Spanish mental at¬
titudes appear as the natural results of certain historically
determined circumstances; those attitudes gradually yielded
 Translator''s Preface xiii

to new ways of thought as the Spanish economic and social

climate changed in the nineteenth century, although “certain
age-old traits survived thanks to considerable mental resis¬
tance to change,” continuing down to our own time. In the
dispute between the late Americo Castro, who appeared to
believe that certain traits of the Spanish character were a kind
of fatality or hereditary disease, and the historian Claudio
Sanchez Albornoz, who insists that those traits were the re¬
sult of historical accidents or errors which could be corrected,
Bennassar clearly sides with Sanchez Albornoz.
Finally, Bennassar’s book reveals throughout a contagious
affection for Spain, its people, and many of their ways, and is
written in a style of considerable charm that occasionally rises
to poetic heights, as in the description of the Spanish fiestas
in the chapter on “Festivals, Diversions, and Finery.” As an
historian Bennassar is perforce something of a moralist who is
well aware of the negative consequences of some traditional
Spanish attitudes and mentalities, but he is not indifferent to
“the color of the days, to the joy and movement of life,” and
his pleasure in a way of life that is rapidly receding into the
past will certainly communicate itself to the reader.

Benjamin Keen
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, Illinois
1978
+
 Ir\tt6ductioi\

A HISTORY worthy of the name cannot be written without

several thousand hours of labor. Perhaps that is why histo¬
rians until recently dealt almost exclusively with man’s work,
whether in the form of their political, administrative, or
judicial activity, or of the production and distribution of
goods and the conflicts that arise therefrom. Historians
turned aside from the study of work only to study revolu¬
tions, those moments when new modes of political activity,
new modes and relations of production, arise. To be sure,
historians admitted the need for the history of ideas and the
history of art to record the quests and expressions of the
human spirit, but still regarded ideas and the production of
art in the light of work.
This is odd, for in the Western world, excepting only the
cruel nineteenth century, the time reserved for labor has by
and large represented only one-third of human time. Another
third, the time of sleep, almost completely escapes the histo¬
rian. There remains the last third, the time for living, prayer
and worship, eating and drinking, festivity and diversion,
travel, human relations, and love. Its exploration was barely
begun some twenty years ago. To this theme I devote my
work.
I am far from conceiving of time, however, as cut off from
the others, independent of the order of days and the con¬
straints or suggestions of the space in which it was lived; all
the less so because, to my thinking, the existence of the
people of the Old Regime was much more integrated than
ours, much more homogeneous. The sacred and the profane
were indissolubly mingled, to the point where they did not
i
2 Introduction

constitute separate concepts; the bounds of work and leisure

could be blurred. This is difficult for us to conceive of today,
when work and leisure are ever more sharply separated and
even tend to be lived in different spaces.
Upon reflection, I decided to leave certain topics out of
this book; one so omitted is nutrition, to which I had
thought of devoting a chapter. But the information I had
gathered, although important, was too fragmentary and het¬
erogeneous to permit even tentative conclusions.
The chronological limits I assigned myself, although not
very rigid, may surprise readers by their breadth. They will
probably agree, however, that the themes of this study are of
long duration and that their change becomes perceptible only
when they are studied over a span of several centuries. For the
rest, these limits are logical. The end of the Reconquest
brought a number of important changes to Spain: the associa¬
tion of Castile and Aragon through the marriage of Ferdinand
and Isabella; the conquest of America, which secured consid¬
erable new resources for Spain and led to the flowering of
Seville and Andalusia; the religious enthusiasm of a trium¬
phant Catholicism, and the establishment of the Inquisition.
At the other end, in the course of the nineteenth century,
the Spanish Old Regime crumbled. In addition to the loss of
the Spanish American empire, which was consummated in
1824, leaving only the Greater Antilles, we note the succes¬
sive disappearance of such basic institutions as the privileges
of feudal type, abolished by the Cortes of Cadiz through the
law of senorios; the Inquisition, first suppressed by the same
Cortes, reestablished by Ferdinand VII, and definitively
abolished by the decree of 1834; the ecclesiastical tithes, first
cut in half in 1821, later abolished by the Mendizabal Law in
1837; the great military orders of Santiago, Alcantara, Cala-
 Introduction 3

trava, and Montesa, suppressed in 1813. Finally, the destruc¬

tion of the Old Regime was completed by the laws affecting
ownership and use of land, which could henceforth be freely
bought and sold. The Law of Disentailment of 1829 sup¬
pressed all mayorazgos; another of 1836 abolished the great as¬
sociation of sheep raisers, the Mesta, six centuries old. The
great disentailment laws of 1836—1837 and 1855 (called the
Mendizabal and Madoz Laws, respectively) resulted in consid¬
erable redistribution of land. Disentailment meant above all
the incorporation into the state of the assets of the Church
and especially of the religious orders, which were suppressed
(excepting only the orders devoted to social welfare). The
operation had a triple aim: financial—extinction of the pub¬
lic debt; political—reduction of Church influence; social—
creation of a large class of small landowners. It largely failed,
for the enormous quantity of land thrown on the market and
sold at public auction caused the price of land to fall sharply,
and most of it passed into the hands of the bourgeoisie. As a
result, the state did not reap the anticipated benefits, and the
Church was replaced as owner of the soil by a new latifundist
bourgeoisie, with no advantage to the peasantry, since the
new owners were often more greedy than the old ones. The
nineteenth century also saw the entrance into Spain of new
ideas which slowly penetrated large social strata; such was the
case with anarchism and socialism, in Catalonia and An¬
dalusia above all. There was a certain development of indus¬
try in the Basque-Cantabrian northwest and in Catalonia. It
was a time of economic colonization by foreign capital,
French capital above all, illustrated by the Pereires’ Sociedad
General de Credito Mobiliario Espahol, the Rothschild com¬
mercial and industrial enterprises, and the Guilhou Sociedad
General de Credito. This new Spain of railways was truly
 Introduction
4

different from the old. But certain age-old traits survived,

thanks to considerable mental resistance to change, and I
have traced their manifestations down to our own time.
To achieve the goals of this book I have made large use of
the abundant but extremely scattered secondary literature,
whose information is often unintentional or indirect, but I
have used above all three kinds of sources, two of which have
hitherto been much neglected by historians of Spain, perhaps
because they demand, at least in part, use of the rigorous
methods of serial history. I refer first of all to notarial docu¬
ments (marriage contracts, inventories of the goods of de¬
ceased persons, testaments, writs of pardon, acts of founda¬
tion of mayorazgos, and the like); second, to certain series of
the section “Inquisition” in the Archivo historico nacional of
Madrid (blasphemies, indecent speech and behavior, bigamy,
sodomy, “purity of blood,” and so on), which contain ex¬
tremely rich material. The third category, that of travel ac¬
counts, is well known: I have used above all the accounts of
French, Flemish, Italian, and English travelers. The Flem¬
ings and Italians were particularly useful for the sixteenth
century. For the eighteenth century, however, I have leaned
heavily on the English travelers, especially the admirable
Joseph Townsend, because, coming from an England in full
process of transformation into an industrial, rationalist coun¬
try, they perceived better than others how different Spain
was.
The first chapter may disconcert some readers, for it pro¬
poses to grasp the reality of a people and its way of life with
the help of some exemplary portraits. An outworn formula? I
see it rather as a way of combatting some traditional ideas by
opposing to the familiar old images, reassuring because they
conform to a certain mental representation of Spain, other
images, more prosaic but just as true. I see it also as a way of
 Introduction 5

rejecting the uniform vision of a linear history that would

erase the diversities of the centuries and of the Spains.
The next two chapters basically seek to define the spatial-
temporal frame in which the Spaniards lived for three or more
centuries. What especially strikes the historian is the as¬
tounding stability of this frame. Not only the organization
but the consciousness of time and space appear to have re¬
mained essentially the same for centuries. Whether we con¬
sider the significance of the different periods of the year, the
calendar of tasks and days, the relation between men and the
soil, the plants, and the animals, or the relation between
distance and time, no fundamental change occurs. We must
not conclude from this that there is some elemental principle
of causation or arbitrary determinism at work here. We shall
see, on the contrary, that despite the permanence of the
rhythms of time and the management of space, beliefs and
manners were profoundly modified during those three cen¬
turies. But mental structures could not remain totally inde¬
pendent of the conditions of existence, conditions which,
moreover, they helped to transform and which were suffi¬
ciently different from our own to merit special attention.
I need not say that it was impossible to enclose in some
two hundred and fifty pages all the contradictions exhibited
by the men and women of that vanished time. I am well
aware that some of my hypotheses and ideas rest on fragile
bases.
Let me thank my Spanish friends, the historians and ar¬
chivists of Madrid, Valladolid, Barcelona, Bilbao, Santiago
de Compostela, Salamanca, and other places, for the precious
aid they gave me. Let me also express my gratitude to All
Souls College at Oxford, whose generous hospitality for a
period of three months allowed me to complete my research
in the admirable Bodleian Library.
 I. THE SIGNIFICANCE OFEMODELS

HERE ARE some brief biographies which deal with men of

recent and more distant times. They resemble each other. I
am not sure, however, that their significance is obvious.

PORTRAITS

Ignacio Sanchez Mejias. A bullfighter. And why not?

The sport of bullfighting has survived for centuries in this
country in different forms, and not by chance. True, this was
a bullfighter of an unusual kind. Son of a physician of Seville
who wished to bequeath to him his post in charge of the sick
at the municipal charity hospital, he had no interest in such a
comfortable future. He kept company with young gypsies,
Rafael, Fernando, and Jose Gomez, who wanted to become
toreros; in fact, two became famous bullfighters under the
names of El Gallo and Joselito. He admired one of their
sisters, Lola. Together with the gypsies he frequented village
festivals and stock farms, seeking opportunities to expose
himself to the horns of a bull. His father thwarted his wish
for such a dangerous occupation. On the point of beginning
his medical studies, however, he sold his books and embarked
clandestinely for Mexico, whither his brother had emigrated.
In 1909 he got his first job, as sweeper in the arena. Then he
6
 Significance of Models 7

became a banderillero. On an impulse, having met in a pro¬

vincial town a troop of players one of whose actresses seduced
him, he gave up the bullfighter’s costume and became the
company’s prompter. Several months later, penniless, he ob¬
tained from Rafael Gomez, now the matador El Gallo, the
price of a return fare to Spain.
Having become Rafael’s banderillero, he married his sister
Lola. Marrying a gypsy was his own way of marrying into
nobility. His pride, which forbade him to model his conduct
on that of others, demanded that he too become a matador.
Despite a terrible wound in the groin early in his career as a
novillero, he achieved his ambition very late, in 1918, at the
age of twenty-nine. “His style [was] awkward and rough, his
toreo forced,” but the athlete who grew in him sought out
difficulties for the pleasure of overcoming them. He dis¬
played such scorn of danger that he fascinated the crowds,
and his virtuosity with the banderillas was one of his strong
points. Despite a style that placed him “on the margins of the
artistic movement of his time,” from 1918 to 1927 he was a
star of the bullring. During a season in Mexico (1920—1921)
where he took pride in constantly matching himself against
the premier Mexican bullfighter of the hour, Rodolfo Gaona,
he discovered Encarna Lopez, a young Andalusian dancer
with whom he fell in love; he brought her back to Spain and
helped her form a group with other Flamenco dancers. She
became La Argentinita. This gave him the opportunity to
enter artistic and literary circles and to gain the friendship of
young writers and poets: Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Al¬
berti, Fernando Villalon, Jose Bergamin. He accompanied
La Argentinita s group abroad, gave a lecture at Columbia
University, wrote and successfully staged two plays.
Seven years after leaving the bullring, he found himself
short of money. He decided to return to the ring at the age of
8 Significance of Models

forty-three. But he did not regard this return as a farewell

tour, as the disguised quest of an old artist for his youth.
Once again his pride took over, and he challenged the young
matadors who had emerged since his departure: Domingo
Ortega, Victoriano de la Serna, Vicente Barrera, Manolo
Bienvenida, the Mexican Lorenzo Garza. He knew that to
hold the interest of the crowds he must play at tragedy; he
played and died. After his sixth corrida, on August 11, 1934,
the bull Granadino, from the stock farm of the Ayala
brothers, pierced his thigh during one of the very risky passes
that he made while seated on the step of the barrier. Two days
later gas gangrene carried him off. The grief-stricken
Federico Garcia Lorca wrote the Llanto (Lament) that was to
immortalize his name.1

A military man who doubled as a politician: Baldomero

Espartero. He was born in 1793 in a village of New Castile,
the son of a poor carter burdened with many children. Since
the child seemed bright, his father directed him toward the
Church, a recognized means of social ascent, and he entered
the seminary. In 1808, however, came the French invasion,
and he abandoned the cassock to fight in the “sacred battal¬
ion” (batallon sagrado) recruited from students. This was the
start of his military career. Having entered a school for
cadets, he became successively a lieutenant and captain, was
sent to America in 1813, and remained there till 1823, taking
part in numerous battles during the Wars for Independence
and amassing a considerable fortune. He returned to Spain
with the rank of colonel and very soon became the head of an
association of officers who were veterans of the American
wars. Named to command at Logrono, he married the
daughter of a rich landowner. The first Carlist war, which
broke out in 1833, provided him with a decisive springboard
 Significance of Models 9

to glory. A liberal, he proclaimed his support for Isabella II,

distinguished himself by numerous feats in which he risked
his life, displayed opportunism, courage, skill. His victories
and promotions succeeded each other: commander-in-chief of
the armies of the North, captain general of Biscay, count of
Luchana, duke of La Victoria, grandee of Spain. In 1840
he became prime minister and received the duchy of Morelia
and the order of the Golden Fleece. He enjoyed immense
popularity.
That popularity did not survive his two years in power. Yet
the legislative work accomplished under Espartero’s impulse
as regent of the kingdom was important. It led to the de¬
struction of the vestiges of the seigneurial regime through the
abolition of mayorazgos, suppression of tithes, secularization
of clerical property. But revolts of every kind, which he at
first suppressed with moderation, but later harshly—a nota¬
ble instance was that of Barcelona, cruelly bombarded in
1842—rapidly consumed his prestige. In 1843 he had to flee
Cadiz, whence he embarked for England; stripped of all his
titles, he awaited a new turn of the wheel of fortune. In 1848
his titles were restored to him and he retired to Logrono,
where he lived on his lands, shunning politics. In 1854,
however, responding to the queen’s appeal, he again became
prime minister. In 1856 he resigned and returned to Logrono,
which he never left again despite innumerable requests.
In 1868 Spain, searching for a king, offered the crown to the
carter’s son. He refused. In the region of Logrono his popular¬
ity grew and changed to veneration; he was a national idol
when, having been named prince of Vergara in 1871, he died
in 1879.

Another statesman: Manuel Godoy, born in 1767 in Ex¬

tremadura into an hidalgo family of modest means.2 The
IO Significance of Models

youngster proved to be a good student in mathematics,

philosophy, and literature. He entered the Guards Corps at
Madrid; well educated, intelligent, handsome, he quickly
made friends at Court and profited by their protection to
improve himself. He became the lover of the queen, Maria
Luisa of Parma, a position that earned him a salary—and the
salary was royal. King Charles IV, a complacent cuckold,
took a liking to him and soon could not do without him.
Manuel Godoy’s ascent in five years, 1788 to 1792, was truly
vertiginous; he was not even twenty-five when he was named
Teniente general, lieutenant general of the realm. As prime
minister he attempted to save Louis XVI of France and waged
war on revolutionary France, but financial distress forced him
to conclude an honorable peace with the Convention. Godoy
was now Prince of the Peace, captain general of the Spanish
armies, duke of Alcudia and of Sueca.
His good fortune collapsed in 1808 as a result of the fa¬
mous comedy of Bayonne, where he, together with the Bour¬
bon dynasty, became a victim of Napoleon’s machinations. A
prisoner in France, like Charles IV and his queen, first at
Compiegne and later at Paris, he prolonged his exile at Rome
with the royal couple, then retired to Paris, living on a small
pension granted him by King Louis Philippe, and writing his
memoirs. During the long years of misfortune (he died in
1851 at the age of eighty-four), the petty noble from Ex¬
tremadura, once the titular lover of the queen and Prince of
the Peace, gave an example of unfailing stoicism and a per¬
fectly even temper.

Two men of letters who combined literary activity with

love and war, Lope de Vega and Cervantes. The latter, only
fifteen years older than the former, was born in 1547: two
extraordinary lives crowded with mischance and events, two
 Significance of Models 11

stories of adventure. Cervantes took part in the battle of

Lepanto where he lost an arm; captured by the Barbary pi¬
rates, he languished for several years in the prisons of Algiers
before being ransomed in 1580 by the Mercedarian friars.3
Adventures succeeded one another: imprisonment in Seville
through ill luck; an obscure affair with the police at Val¬
ladolid in the last years of his life, an affair that has never
been cleared up.
Lope de Vega, aged fifteen, took part in an expedition to
the Terceira Islands against the Portuguese; ten years later he
sailed aboard the Invincible Armada and returned—men like
Lope always return. Tales of women and love: Cervantes had
his love affairs of which little is known, and Lope even more
and better-known ones that caused scandal—adulteries, kid¬
nappings, trials. Both served several masters: they were sol¬
diers, secretaries of marquises or dukes, officials. Both
traveled up and down Spain and on the sea. Cervantes vainly
applied for a position in the Indies and Lope de Vega finished
his life in the Church, which he entered in 1614; he died in
1636. Two men of little or no wealth and without any real
protectors. Two monumental achievements, that of Cer¬
vantes being one of the glories of world literature, achieved in
defiance of a long train of misfortunes and dangers. Both men
lived out a modest old age, withdrawn from the agitations of
the world, scorned or ignored by the powerful. At the open¬
ing of the seventeenth century a certain French traveler who
wished to meet Cervantes was shocked to learn that such a
man was not rich.

Rodrigo Calderon (no relation to the dramatist Calderon

de la Barca) was born in Antwerp of a Spanish father and a
Flemish mother. We know very little of his childhood and
youth. Living in Valladolid, he studied at the university,
I2 Significance of Models

entered the service of the vice-chancellor of Aragon and then

of the duke of Lerma, the all-powerful favorite of Philip III.
He won the favor of the duke of Lerma, who had him named
gentleman of the royal bedchamber. Cheerful, intelligent,
lively, he charmed the monarch, who married him to a lady of
honor of the queen, Doha Ines de Vargas. Within a few years
Rodrigo was heaped with titles and favors: he received the
habit of Santiago, the commandership of Ocana, the title of
Count of Ocana; he became captain of the German Guard and
councillor of state. His fortune was immense; he inspired
envy.
Haughty, despotic, greedy, he only thought of increasing
his possessions, and his arrogance offended all who had to ask
him for a favor. Despite the open hostility of some courtiers
and Fray Juan de Santa Maria, who enjoyed great influence
over the queen, he continued to accumulate riches and hon¬
ors; he was sent as ambassador extraordinary to the Nether¬
lands and was named marquis of Siete Iglesias. But when
Queen Margarita died as a result of her many lyings-in, his
enemies caused him to be accused of having poisoned her.
Rodrigo was imprisoned in 1619 and his goods were confis¬
cated; he endured torture with firmness and humility. The
accusation of poisoning, in fact a calumny, could not be
proved, but it was proven that he had caused the deaths of
two men. He was condemned to death and was executed on
October 21, 1621, shortly after the coronation of Philip IV.
He displayed such a spirit of resignation, admitted his faults
with such sincerity, and showed such dignity and courage in
his last moments that even his enemies admired him. Hence
the proverb, the man’s supreme consecration: “He is prouder
than Don Rodrigo on the gibbet.”

A swindler, ignored by serious and popular history alike. I

would not have known of him had not Fernand Braudel sent
 Significance of Models *3

me a photocopy of the manuscript in the British Museum

wherein this story had long slept.4 The man called himself
Gabriel de Espinosa, and he was a pastry-cook in Altas
Torres, a town of Old Castile, in the 1590s. Philip II was
then king of Spain; in 1580 he had also become king of
Portugal, thanks to the death of King Sebastian, who had
been killed in Morocco while heading a mad, romantic
crusade. Philip’s right to succeed to the Portuguese throne
was genuine but not exclusive, and many Portuguese were
restive under Spanish domination. Gabriel de Espinosa
doubtless was the very double of King Sebastian; a rumor ran
through Portugal that King Sebastian was not dead but lived
in Castile under a borrowed name, disguised as a pastry-cook.
Nobles and friars made the pilgrimage to Madrigal; a
princess, a nun in the convent of the little town, and
Portuguese lords all paid homage to Gabriel and gave him
money and jewels for the cause. Life was good to the pastry¬
cook. He left for Valladolid, dressed in fine linen, and rode
purebred horses in the Puerta del Campo, a residential quar¬
ter of Valladolid, where his charm and his skill in riding
aroused the curiosity of some highly placed personages. He
prudently assured them, without success, that he was a
pastry-cook. But Gabriel was less prudent with the pretty
girls of small virtue who roamed the city’s streets; one of
them, convinced that he was a thief, denounced him to the
police. The succeeding inquiry traced to its sources the
money Gabriel lavished so freely. The hoax was discovered
and Gabriel, victim of reason of State, disappeared without
leaving a trace.

In 1475 a foundling, one of many found in the cloister of a

church in Almagro, a little town of New Castile, was named
Diego de Almagro. We know nothing of his childhood or
youth, which were doubtless passed in misery. He left: for
H Significance of Models

America, perhaps as a result of a quarrel which may have left

a man dead; by 1524 he had amassed a small fortune which
enabled him to ally himself with Francisco Pizarro and the
canon Hernando de Luque for the conquest of Peru. In 1533,
after the capture of the Incas and their gold, he was rich
beyond all his dreams. The emperor made him an hidalgo,
named him governor of New Toledo, a territory extending
two hundred leagues to the south of Peru, and gave him the
rank of marshal. The capture of Cuzco was the occasion for a
new distribution of treasure. According to witnesses, how¬
ever, his passion for treasure had already changed to indiffer¬
ence. All Almagro’s thoughts now centered on a great expedi¬
tion southward; he invested part of his fortune in organizing
this project of discovery, as Cortes did in the same period
with his expedition to Baja California. Almagro’s company,
five hundred strong, was one of the largest, best prepared,
and best armed bands of the Spanish Conquest.
The expedition was a tragedy, for Almagro and his men
had no idea of where they were going. The geographic infor¬
mation provided by the Indians proved to be false. They
encountered an infinitely hostile nature; they had to cross
mountain passes at 12,000 feet; there was no wood for mak¬
ing fires, no grass for the horses, no shelter for the men. Their
food gave out and the horses and the Indians died of hunger
and cold. The descent into the green valley of Coquimbo
brought relief, but Almagro’s men found no Indians, gold, or
silver. They decided to go back, returning by way of the salt
desert of Atacama; the Spaniards killed llamas and used their
skins to make leather bottles in which they preserved water.
Many perished. This mad adventure, undertaken by an im¬
mensely rich man heaped with honors who challenged a high,
unknown mountain chain, was a quest for the absolute. Yet
this man was almost sixty years old.
Almagro and the Pizarro brothers fell out. During the
 Significance of Models !5

vicissitudes of this struggle a moment came when Almagro

had Hernando Pizarro at his mercy. He spared Pizarro’s life.
Later the situation was reversed. Almagro was condemned to
death. At first he attempted to defend himself, then he re¬
signed himself to his fate and calmly prepared for death. It is
said that the Indians wept when they learned the news, for
Almagro had never injured them. This illiterate, immensely
brave man, more generous and humane than Pizarro but
endowed with less political sense, always more ardently as¬
pired for glory than for riches, in the opinion of Gomara and
other historians of the Conquest.5

I could multiply examples of such careers, all essentially

identical. The men whose tormented lives I have briefly
traced here were fully capable of rational thought. But al¬
ways, or almost always, they placed their reasoning faculties
at the service of an irrational impulse. They were men born
for action and swept along by passion, rather than interpret¬
ers of cool reason.
These men were not born into lordly homes, but they
wished to become lords. To attain their ideal they fought,
suffered, and frequently killed without scruple. But they
never compromised their honor; at every important crisis of
their lives they unhesitatingly risked their most precious pos¬
session, their lives—save for Godoy, perhaps, and that was a
simple matter of opportunity.
They loved wealth and might be greedy. But they did not
assign an excessive importance to riches. They always showed
more aptitude for conquering than for conserving. At the
pinnacle of their fortune and honors, they were almost always
ready to return to the game and risk everything on the turn of
a card without regard to the size of the stake. Some won
again, some lost, all with the same serenity.
All attained the apogee of their careers in a few years,
16 Significance of Models

which was what they sought. The distinguished historian

Claudio Sanchez Albornoz observes that the history of Spain
offers a thousand examples of this irresistible impatience to
enjoy the goods of this world, to enjoy glory and fortune.
Godoy completed all the stages of his ascent in four years,
and Rodrigo Calderon did the same. In three years of war
Espartero transformed a successful military career, no differ¬
ent from many others, into an extraordinary destiny. In 1530
Almagro was unknown in Spain; in 1533 he was rich and a
marshal; in 1538 he was dead. The publication of the first
part of Don Quijote made Cervantes famous in Spain and
Europe in a few months. This definitive celebrity, which he
had sought all his life, came toward the end of his life, and he
achieved it with a single book. One rarely finds examples of
such precipitous ascents in the lives of the heroes of bourgeois
society, even in the most likely cases, those of American
“self-made men,” for with a few exceptions their rise was the
fruit of patience, method, and calculation. John D. Rockefel¬
ler began at the age of sixteen in 1855 as an accountant; it
took him twenty-four years to become the “oil king”; Car¬
negie’s rise was even slower and more difficult.
In Spain, the men who were consecrated to God were
much like those who pursued temporal ends, with this shade
of difference: they did not work for their own good. I speak,
of course, of the most remarkable men among them.
Whether they chose a militant pastorate or the solitary ad¬
venture of the mystic, they were always ready to risk their
lives to gain all—that is, heaven and souls—in the face of
the hostility of others, in defiance of orthodox ideas. After all,
Juan de la Cruz and Luis de Leon knew the interior of prison,
as did Archbishop Carranza, and Francis Xavier suffered mar¬
tyrdom.
Most of these men shared the same tastes. They aspired to
 Significance of Models 17

nobility or, in the case of those closer to our own time, to its
equivalent, and they won it. They married women of superior
social station. They loved women and firmly believed that the
common morality did not apply to them. Some had that love
for the land which founded seigneurial patrimonies. When
they found time for it they were patrons of the arts, while the
artists, for their part, went to war. In their old age some
attained wisdom, sosiego or inner peace: Espartero, Godoy,
Lope de Vega. Others knew how to die with dignity accord¬
ing to the religion of their people. They had a taste for
spectacular, unpredictable gestures, even at a high cost.
Without exception, all were free men who owed their destiny
only to themselves and their good fortune. Almost always
their ideal was free from the bourgeois germ; the bourgeois
mode of thought was alien to them. Their model was an
aristocratic life style which gave free expression to the im¬
pulses of their temperament.
The attachment of the Spaniards to the ideal which they
gladly call “Quixotic” is or rather was not debatable, for in a
later time of desarrollo or development those models were
devalued. But I grant that the function of this ideal was
essentially aesthetic, admired, no doubt, but imitated by few.
The reader has probably noted that the men whose lives I
have evoked did not govern Spain for long, never long pre¬
served wealth and power together. This country had other
roads, more frequented though less prestigious, to fortune
and honor. I must now invoke these other models.
It is true that I myself proposed to entitle the conclusion to
a book of 600 pages “A Seigneurial Ideal.”6 But that book
dealt with a great city (Valladolid), whose analogues certainly
existed (Toledo, Madrid from the seventeenth to the
nineteenth century, and doubtless others), but which cannot
in any case express the most common truth of a nation over a
18 Significance of Models

span of four centuries. For the rest, if the people of Valladolid

in the sixteenth century favored and cultivated the seigneur-
ial ideal, they also displayed in high degree an eagerness
to conserve what they had, and there was nothing heroic
about the ways of the majority. We must guard against sim¬
plification.

ANTIPORTRAITS
Here is a different example of an individual career. Thanks to
the remarkable monograph of Hayward Keniston,' we now
know as thoroughly as is possible the life of Francisco de los
Cobos, for more than fifteen years the almost all-powerful
secretary of Charles V
Francisco de los Cobos was born into a family of the old
nobility; an ancestor was one of the three hundred infanzones
who in 1234, after the definitive reconquest of Ubeda from
the Moors, received from the king a grant of lands together
with the privilege of exemption from taxes—an old nobility
but, at least in the sixteenth century, one with little income.8
Francisco’s father, Diego de los Cobos, regidor of Ubeda,
could not assist his only son to rise in the world.9 At sixteen
the youth had no taste for arms or for the Church. The father
was only too happy to accept for his son the post of clerk in
the accounting office of Queen Isabella, where an uncle by
marriage was also employed. This was in 1493-
For some nine or ten years Francisco was trained in the
methods of the royal accountant’s office and official diplo¬
macy. But the lad was intelligent and a pleasant companion,
and he worked well and quickly. Isabella’s chief accountant,
Hernando de Zafra, took note of him and took him into his
service; in 1503 Cobos received the title of escribano real (royal
scrivener) with a salary of 9000 maravedis, nothing extraordi-
 Significance of Models 19

nary, but enough to enable him to live decently. Five years

later he was chief accountant for the kingdom of Granada (a
title he retained until his death), and by King Ferdinand’s
favor a regidor of Ubeda. This first royal favor was soon fol¬
lowed by another: a merced or gift of 200 ducats in 1509—the
equivalent of his salary for eight years! This means that
Cobos’ competence was already recognized. In 1510 he was
entrusted with responsibility for the service of the mercedes
(royal favors), meaning that he was accountable for all the
pensions and concessions granted by the king. It was a post of
trust and influence; his salary for 1515 was 65,000 maravedis,
seven times that of 1503- At this time he became the princi¬
pal collaborator of Conchillos, King Ferdinand’s secretary,
and his reputation began to grow. In 1516 he took a chance:
on the death of Ferdinand, he backed Flanders against Spain.
Despite his ignorance of French and lack of ties with the
Burgundian court at Malines, he preferred to join the secre¬
tariat of the new king, Charles of Ghent, rather than stay
with Cisneros, who had become regent of the Spanish king¬
doms. Cobos was certainly liked by Chievres and Jean Le
Sauvage, who guided the first faltering steps of the novice
king. When in Valladolid in 1517 Le Sauvage got rid of
Conchillos, whom he considered corrupt, Cobos mounted
another rung on the ladder of power. By 1522, after the revolt
of the Comuneros, Chievres, Le Sauvage, and the most influen¬
tial royal counsellor, the Bishop of Badajoz, Ruiz de la Mota,
were all dead. From this moment Cobos became indispens¬
able; he had now been in the royal service almost thirty years.
From then on his ascent to the highest circles was rapid; by
1521 and 1522 titles and prestige were already his. Named
commander of the order of Santiago in 1521, Cobos made a
fine marriage with Maria de Mendoza y Pimentel, daughter
of the count of Ribadavia and cousin of the powerful count of
20 Significance of Models

Benavente. When it was decided to organize a Council of

Finances in Castile (1523), Cobos was chosen as its secretary.
The royal marks of favor multiplied; the king, now Charles
V, offered his secretary two jewels of great value, part of the
confiscated property of Maria Pacheco, heroine of the revolt of
Toledo.
The years 1529—1530 were decisive: Lallemand, the prin¬
cipal collaborator of the Grand Chancellor Gattinara for impe¬
rial affairs, was accused of treason, and Gattinara died. But
Charles did not replace Gattinara; henceforth he relied on the
Councils and, daily, on his two secretaries, Granville and
Cobos. For several years Cobos accompanied Charles on all his
travels: we see him at Barcelona, Turin, Naples, in Flanders,
at Tunis, Nice, Aigues-Mortes, and Fitou. From 1539 on,
however, he remained in Spain, where until his death in 1547
he exercised a quasi-royal function by the side of Prince
Philip, who was only twelve in 1539- He placed his own men
in the royal secretariat. In almost perfect accord with Gran-
velle, each man respecting the other’s sphere of action, he
exerted a continual influence on the emperor; he supervised
and cleared up the most perplexing financial questions, and
advised Charles on the selection of men for appointments
ranging from the royal councils to the order of the Knights of
the Golden Fleece. In 1538, on the occasion of the marriage
of the emperor’s natural daughter, Margarita de Parma, to
Ottavio Farnese, grandson of Pope Paul III, a marriage that
posed certain difficulties, Giovanni di Montepulciano ex¬
plained to the pontiff that nothing was done at the imperial
court without Cobos’ advice.
When he died in 1547, it was a major piece of news in
Europe. The circle of his relationships was immense: it
ranged from the great of this world—the Pope, kings,
princes—to the modest employees of the royal service. He
 Significance of Models 21

had built up a colossal fortune: he had a palace in Valladolid,

another at Ubeda where he had built the admirable chapel of
San Salvador, a church rather than a chapel; he was lord of
Sabiote and of Camena, two towns which he had purchased
together with their castles in 1537 and 1539- He founded a
mayorazgo for his son, whom he married to a daughter of the
nobility, while his daughter, Maria de Sarmiento, married the
young duke of Sesa, grandee of Spain and grandson of Gon-
zalo de Cordoba; the marriage ceremony, with Prince Philip
as sponsor, was the occasion for a great festival. He owned
canvases by Titian, and Andres de Vandelvira designed for
him the magnificent patio of the castle of Colmena. Let me
add that he virtually organized and created the Castilian
administrative system which, together with the Burgundian,
was undoubtedly the best in Europe in the second half of the
sixteenth century. Strangely enough, this man, who was
heaped with wealth and honors, who wielded an immense
power, appears to have had no enemies.
Here, then, is a case of a large fortune, and a preeminence
which lasted until the man’s death, acquired by patient,
persevering effort and much industry by an unknown from
the lower nobility, who had little education but possessed a
flair for social relations, the lucid intelligence of a great ad¬
ministrator, the talent of a financier, and a genius for concilia¬
tion. I should add, perhaps, that he possessed a statesman’s
vision and certainly the trait of loyalty. His life never resem¬
bled a lottery and he never had to give proof of heroism.
Here, then, is an example that contrasts with those that I
presented at the beginning of this chapter. It is an example
with some close variants, such as that, two and a half cen¬
turies later, of Monino, later count of Floridablanca, first
procurator of the council of Castile, then prime minister.
Floridablanca, son of a notary public in the bishopric of
22 Significance of Models

Murcia, began his career under the patronage of the duke of

Arcos, whose attorney he was; then, under the patronage of
the count of Aranda, whom he served in the affair of the
expulsion of the Jesuits, he advanced to the rank of prime
minister. It was a slow, patient ascent by the same route as
that of Cobos.
Yet, examined closely, the career of Cobos was not totally
different from that of those other figures, save for Cervantes
and Lope de Vega. In the first place, his career, like the
majority of the others, was a political one. Like those men, he
loved wealth and honors; if not venal in the strict sense, he
willingly accepted presents from the emperor and from the
nobles for whom he had done favors, as was the rule at that
time. He probably took advantage of the crisis of the revolt of
the Comuneros to enrich himself by the spoils. He was greedy
for social prestige, titles, and flattering invitations that made
his importance plain to the world, like the invitation from
Charles V to a banquet at Brussels at which there were only
twenty-four places. Like the others, he had little interest in
ideas; he was above all a man of action, and the great current
of humanism hardly touched him. There is no reason to
suppose that he was ever interested in Erasmus and his dream
of the ideal Christian prince. His religion was a formal one;
he seems to have worried not at all about the excommunica¬
tion that lay upon him for four years, from 1523 to 1527,
after the affair of the bishop of Zamora, Diego de Acuna,
whose death sentence and execution he had advised. His
founding of the chapel of San Salvador was much more an
ostentatious gesture than proof of devotion.
Yet, like the others, Cobos could feel true passion, as
shown by his brief liaison with a young Italian woman, Cor¬
nelia Malespina, a lady-in-waiting of the countess of Novel-
lara, whom he met when he was more than fifty. A brief
 Significance of Models 23

encounter; yet for twelve years, until Cornelia’s death, he

maintained a correspondence with her which his exemplary
discretion caused to disappear. Like those others, finally,
Cobos had a profound sense of clan loyalty, finding places for
the members of his family, following the careers of his subor¬
dinates, and assuming their defense. The essential differences
between him and those other men were their love of risk and
force, their arrogance, which Cobos never shared, and finally
and above all his liking for work well done.
Now, Francisco de los Cobos is but one individual in a
multitude; the same is true of Floridablanca. Behind the
adventurers of genius or talent whom I presented at the
beginning of this chapter, we can easily discern the guerrilla
fighters of 1808 or 1936, the conquistadores, the adventurers
of letters or of the Faith, that multitude of men who yearned
to conquer rather than conserve. But there were other mul¬
titudes in Spain. Hopefully, given the opportunity, I shall
some day examine the hearts and minds of that multitude of
peasants who for centuries bore the burden of Spanish history.
But since we speak of models, we must first of all consider the
powerful of this world. In another book I have tried to offer a
glimpse into the life, struggles, and ideals of the letrados
(lawyers) of Valladolid in the sixteenth century. Joseph Perez
has magnificently brought to life two important figures at the
summit of the social hierarchy, the constable and the admiral
of Castile during the crisis of the Comuneros’ revolt, an exces¬
sively brief episode, perhaps, but a decisive time in Spanish
history. We have been promised the early appearance of a
study of the councillors of Castile in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. For the present, let me turn to an
important group: hidalgos and cabal lews.
We know that the term hidalgo results from the contrac¬
tion of three words: hi jo de algo, “son of something,” meaning
24
Significance of Models

that the hidalgo can boast of noble parents and ancestors, in

short, of a noble origin. The cahallero is literally a cavalier, a
horseman, in the old days a man rich enough to be able to
serve his king or lord by bringing an accoutered horse and
one or several armed men to battle. In fact, the caballero was a
member of the middle nobility. In the noble hierarchy he
ranked below the grandees or titulos and above the hidalgos.
We deal here with but a sample, to be sure, that of the
Burgos lineage of the Quintanos. But Burgos is a land of
hidalgos, and the sample, some 240 persons strong, involves
nine or ten generations that we can follow from the end of the
sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. Now, it
is difficult to conceive of greater continuity or more complete
control over a subject for its duration. The lineage spread
out, without a doubt; it emigrated to Alava, to the region of
Campos in Extremadura. Everywhere, however, this human
group lived in the same way, engaged in the same activities,
acknowledged the same values. A little richer here, there a
little poorer, it adapted itself to the conditions of its time in
order to maintain its social position.
The Quintanos avoided all mesalliance, marrying only
into families that belonged to their world and sometimes
practicing endogamy, with marriages between cousins repre¬
senting about 15 percent of the total. The Church served as a
refuge, notably in the seventeenth century: cathedral chapters
and convents received younger sons or daughters of many
families; more rarely, it was a springboard to a great political
career; but almost never was it regarded as a demanding
calling capable of inspiring a spiritual adventure or a
missionary quest. Thus almost a quarter of the Quintanos
served the Church, almost exclusively in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. A good many others served in the tercios
(infantry regiments) in the sixteenth century, in Flanders or
 Significance of Models 25

Italy or, when the Spanish navy regained its luster in the
eighteenth century, in the royal frigates. They played a role in
the public affairs of their towns: Medina de Pomar and Salas
de Bureba in the Burgos region; and Fuente del Maestre and
Jerez de los Caballeros in Extremadura, holding the offices of
alcalde ordinario, alcalde de la Santa Herman dad, or regidor.10
Several obtained the habit of one of the great military
orders—Santiago, Alcantara, Calatrava, Malta. In their
youth they often served as pages or ladies-in-waiting in the
houses of the titulos or grandees of Spain, especially in those
of the constable of Castile, the duke of Frias (whose domains
lay in the Burgos region), and the marquis of Poza.
Over a space of three centuries they never forfeited their
nobility, and when not occupied with managing their do¬
mains they served in the Church, on the sea, or in the royal
service according to whether they had chosen the career of
arms or that of letters by way of the University of Salamanca
or of Valladolid. Often they had a taste for intellectual pur¬
suits; in the eighteenth century, when the royal colegio for the
education of young nobles was founded in Madrid, three
Quintanos appear on its rolls in three years (1731 — 1733). But
they never lost sight of their material interests.
To the original mayorazgo, founded in Medina de Pomar as
early as 1449, were added those of Salas de Burebas (1550—
1551) and Salas y Valmayor (1679), while still others were
absorbed through the play of matrimonial alliances and inher¬
itances. We see the landed patrimonies fill out, and some¬
times the holdings of government bonds accumulate. The
dowries, when known to us, are always large or even very
large: 2,000 to 12,000 ducats.
The Quintanos did not obtain titles of nobility until the
end of the eighteenth century, and their first grandee dates
only from 1817. But they disprove the notion of a petty
26 Significance of Models

nobility living in poverty if not in misery, the traditional idea

encouraged by literature. For the rest, their demographic
behavior was typical of that of the ruling classes. The major¬
ity of complete families were numerous, with six to ten
children. Concerned with conserving and enduring, these
people knew how to calculate, look ahead, and arrange their
inheritances as well as possible. They were rarely idle and,
without compromising the ethics of their class, knew how to
adapt to the changed circumstances of their age. Marked by
complete solidarity, despite lawsuits and litigations, they of¬
fered little opportunity for the erosion of time. We are far
removed from Almagro or Rodrigo Calderon.
The case of the Quintanos sheds a good deal of light on our
subject. The history of Spain down to the first third of the
present century displays more continuity than change. The
whirlwind of events was powerless to shake that stability.
Such a continuity of situations, ideals, and behavior is incon¬
ceivable without the existence of profound affinities, some¬
times profound constraints, common to most if not all
Spaniards, that went well beyond social appearances and
political vicissitudes. But this continuity, while the world
and even Spain itself—no matter how slowly—were chang¬
ing, inevitably nourished and inflated the germs of dissi-
dence, developed doubts, negations, all the conflicts that
every society bears within itself, .leading to the frequently
superficial explosions of the nineteenth century and the
tragedy of the twentieth century. This book is an effort,
tentative and incomplete, to be sure, to understand the
Spanish Old Regime, considered on the existential level
rather than on that of institutions or events. The inventory of
uniformities is doubtless impressive; many described in this
book are still visible today. But it is the differences, as every¬
one knows, that historians regard as most meaningful.
 II. THE "RJIYTHMS OF TIME

AT THE END of the Middle Ages, and for several centuries

thereafter, the Spaniards, like the other peoples of Europe,
did not conceive of time as a mathematical abstraction, di¬
visible into units that were always of equal length and easily
measurable. To be sure, they knew that time was counted in
years, months, days, and hours, and official documents are
always dated by the day, month, and year. But if the succes¬
sion of the nights and days, of sleeping and waking, sufficed
to give men and women an arithmetical knowledge of the
order of the days (not that they retained a memory of that
order), they lacked a clear consciousness of the order of the
hours. Besides, measuring instruments were rare, costly, and
unreliable, and sundials few in number and ineffective. Only
great cities possessed public clocks, which were often out of
order, and this was not the rule even for great cities. Henry
Cock, an officer of Philip II’s guard of archers, probably of
Dutch background, who lived in Valladolid, one of Castile’s
largest cities, in 1591 observed that the only things lacking in
this city were fountains and clocks so that one might know,
hear, and see the time.1 It is an exception to find a watch in
the inventory of a deceased person’s goods, and almanacs are
suprisingly rare.
27
28 Rhythms of Time

The Inquisition is celebrated for the meticulousness of its

procedure. Its bitterest enemies concede its concern for de¬
tail, for exact information. Yet my inspection of a very large
number of Inquisition trial proceedings has yielded very few
precise references to hours. When hours are mentioned, it is
almost always in round figures, for example, las doce del
mediodia (at twelve noon), whose meaning is doubtful; or
approximations like “between ten and eleven o’clock at
night.” Even such details are rare. They are given, however,
when it is a matter of establishing the circumstances of a
crime or of the death of a person who plays an important role
in the trial, for example, the circumstances of the death of a
nephew of Gongora following a brawl at Cordoba, at the
beginning of the seventeenth century.2 Only once have I
found a document that consistently gives the exact hours and
days; this is a long refutation by an accused man of the
charges against him, and some of his arguments are chrono¬
logical. But Fray Manuel Sanchez de Castellar, of the Merced -
arian order, accused at the end of the seventeenth century of
having sodomized half the population of a Valencian convent,
was an extraordinary person, as unusual as his reckoning of
the hours.3
The assignment of fixed hours for various tasks, at least in
theory, seems to have been a prerogative of civil or ecclesiasti¬
cal authorities on different levels. Municipal officers might
have a precise schedule of work; this was the case with the
controllers of provisions, who were to have been in the butch¬
ers’ shops or the fish markets from five to nine in the summer,
from six to ten in the winter. At Madrid in the eighteenth
century the church bells sounded at eight in the evening;
men in the streets removed their hats and everyone prayed.
At Seville the town’s principal clock signalled, by twelve
strokes at midnight, the beginning of the feast of Lent. But
 Rhythms of Time 29

people hardly ever referred to the hours, even when it was a

question of economic life or of an appointment. We know
that day laborers were hired from sol a sol, that is, from dawn
to dusk. The notary of Teruel, Miguel Marco, who was ac¬
cused of having organized at his house, in 1753, an obscene
and sacrilegious ceremony, had placed on his door a note
inviting people to visit him desde las oraciones en adelante, that
is, any time after the hour of prayer in the evening.4
Indeed, the numbers of the days of the month appear only
in official documents, and then not for all purposes. Witness¬
es in trials do not often refer to the number: the affair in
question took place on the day of the procession of Our Lady
of the Rosary, the Sunday in the octave of the Epiphany,
during Lent, at the time of the solemn mass of the feast of the
Transfiguration, during Holy Week, and so forth. We know
also that leases had for their termination date Christmas, the
feast of Saint John the Baptist in June, the feast of the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in August or Sep¬
tember, the feast of Michael the Archangel. The goldsmith of
Salamanca, Juan de Arfe, bound himself to deliver a silver
custodial ordered by the principal church of Valladolid one
month before the day of Corpus Christi, and so on.5

QUALITATIVE PERCEPTION OF TIME

I have said enough to suggest that the perception of time was
more qualitative than quantitative, and not just because
people lacked a precise instrument for measuring time. They
defined a period of the year or a moment of the day by
reference to its content, and almost always it was a religious
content that was evoked either explicitly or implicitly.6
Thus the quality of the time during which an act was
performed could modify its meaning. The fact that Hassan
Danadolia (Hassan of Anatolia) committed the sin of sodomy
3° Rhythms of Time

with some adolescents during Lent in 1624 aggravated his

offense in the view of the witnesses of Valencia, who took no
notice of the fact that Hassan was a Turkish slave to whom
the obligations of Lent meant nothing. The inhabitants of the
village of Los Sauces in the kingdom of Toledo noted with
strong reprobation that Pantaleon de Casanova neither con¬
fessed nor took communion during Lent, or even during the
more joyous feasts. The fact that he kept a concubine is noted
only as a secondary aggravating factor, although it was the
true reason for his conduct: he did not want to give up his
concubine and acted with perfect logic from his point of
view.7
Julio Caro Baroja has, I believe, best expressed the pro¬
found relation between the old conception of time and the
dynamic of nature and its successive transformations.8 But
Caro Baroja did not stop there. He stressed that Christianity
intimately associated itself with this perception of time, es¬
tablishing what he called “a passionate order of time” in
which days of jubilation and grief, days of austerity and
prohibitions, days of toleration and release, succeeded each
other in a way that gave vent to the human passions. This
interpretation takes perfect account of the conduct of indi¬
viduals and crowds, prey to a permanent conflict between the
moral order and Dionysiac impulses, and therefore incapable
of being encased in a simple structure.
In El Carnaval, Caro Baroja was concerned only with the
winter, but his analysis of the vital rhythm of the society can
easily be extended to the whole year. Joseph Blanco White,
in his Letters from Spain, sensed the importance of this
rhythm, to the point of devoting his ninth letter to an
“almanac” of the feasts of Seville. But a lack of con¬
ceptualization—of which he was aware, for he made
excuses for it—leaves the impression of a series of episodes
 Rhythms of Time 31

poorly linked to each other. More thorough reflection,

by providing him with the guiding thread that he vainly
sought, doubtless would have led him to the same conclu¬
sions as my own.9

THE RHYTHMS OF WINTER

Let us begin our inventory of the year with Advent. This is a
period of intense labor—the last agricultural tasks before the
onset of winter, putting in of wood, completion of urban
works, repair of bridges and roads—but it is also a time of
austerity. Parish demography, however, seems to indicate that
in Spain Advent is marked by a reduction in the number of
marriages but not their almost complete absence, as in
France; indeed, in Galicia almost no decline is visible.10
Then comes the joyful episode of the Nativity, a religious
celebration and, by its association with the Holy Family, the
occasion for family rejoicings. In the homes of the well-to-do
and in the chapels of religious brotherhoods are set up gigan¬
tic mangers: the Catalan pesebres, the Castilian nacimientos. In
towns and villages, from Christmas to Epiphany families pay
friendly visits to each other: they sing pastorals, recite poems,
play social games that may, as a result of successive de¬
viations, turn into orgiastic affairs.
Now the nature of the gaiety changes: we are in the period
of Carnival, whose duration varies according to the time and
place. It may commence as early as January 7, but more
frequently begins on January 20, the feast of Saint Sebastian,
as at Seville; it may even be reduced to the three days which
precede Ash Wednesday. In any case, Carnival is a child of
Christianity. It is personified by Don Carnal (Lord Meat),
who accents the freedom to eat meat, and ends with the day
of Carnes tollendas (that is, forbidden meats). Above all, it
authorizes the satisfaction of all the appetites that Christian
32 Rhythms of Time

morality, with the approach of Lent, will soon restrain. By

allowing free expression of those appetites for a period, be it
short or long, it pays its due to flesh, to carnalidad. Thus
Carnival, in addition to its religious significance, has a social
and psychological meaning, and its function of restoring so¬
cial and psychological equilibrium is apparent on all levels:
this is the time of playing at social inversion, of mocking the
hierarchies; it even happens that the secrets of individuals,
their reprehensible acts, are exposed to the public. Numerous
Castilian villages have preserved this custom, in weakened
form, to be sure, down to the twentieth century. At Casar de
Talamanca (Guadalajara), on the day of Candlemas, a public
reading of such reprehensible acts, which their authors
thought to be unknown, was still made from the balcony of
the Ayuntamiento (the town hall), in the 1920s.
The social inversion of Carnival could assume strange
forms. The customary benevolence toward the poor, unfail¬
ingly in evidence down to the end of the eighteenth century,
then gave way to derision and cruelty toward them, unless
some scapegoat was designated to serve as the butt for the
public malice: such a personage still existed at Oviedo as late
as 1867. Carnival might even become the means of expressing
political opposition without any legal channel. This hap¬
pened during the Carnival of 1637 at Madrid, where a gigan¬
tic masquerade explicitly attacked Philip IV and Olivares for
their fiscal policies, for selling the commissions of command¬
ers in the military orders.
Carnival also signified an opportunity to give vent to irra¬
tional impulses, to engage in disorderly, violent, and even
aggressive gestures, accompanied by insults to passersby, to
produce unusual and incongruous sounds with the aid of
various devices. It created a climate of considerable insecurity
in the popular quarters of towns, in Seville, for example,
 Rhythms of Time 33

where the women deliberately provoked brawls. Coming be¬

tween Advent and Lent, periods of abstinence and austerity,
Carnival filled a profound need, and the length of the litany
of official prohibitions from 1585 to 1776, designed to check
the excesses of Carnival, suggests their ineffectiveness.
During Carnival itself certain games announced the com¬
ing repressions. Such was the barbarous amusement called
the gallo. In this game horsemen or runners on foot tried as
they passed to cut the neck of a cock, which was either buried
in the ground with only its head showing, or dangling from a
string. Sometimes, in villages like Poza de la Sal, Cas-
trogeriz, and Gamonal in the Burgos region, the task of
cutting the cock’s neck fell to girls. The old authors inform
us of the meaning of this game. Thus Alejo Vanegas (1565)
explains: “Because the cocks are very lascivious, [they are
killed] to signify that lust should always be repressed.” And
Covarrubias: “For mortification of the carnal appetite—
because this bird is so furiously lustful that the son kills the
father in order to mount the hen.” The search for a Christian
symbol is clear. Carnival represented the forces of paganism
to be conquered by Christianity, in the framework of a society
wise enough to allow itself a time for Dionysiac release.
The triumph of Carnival was also the eve of its death, a last
fling where pork, bacon, and ham had the principal role,
perhaps a gesture in defiance of Islam. Be that as it may, Don
Carnal gave a feast where the tables were heaped with the
flesh of the animals that furnished the best eating: wild boars,
stags, hares. Wine ran freely. The culinary rites reached the
height of refinement in Galicia, as was logical, since this
region boasted the most elaborate gastronomy in Spain. Then
arrived Dona Lent, with an army of fish and vegetables, to
defy Don Carnal. The day after came his fall, trial, and
execution. This theme was treated with astonishing variety
34 Rhythms of Time

all across Spain. At Leri da, Don Carnal was carried away by
devils; at Madrid, on Ash Wednesday, he was led to his tomb
by a grotesque procession, the celebrated “burial of the Sar¬
dine,” immortalized by Goya, which was enacted down to
1936. Almost everywhere, Carnal had to listen to the venge¬
ful sermon of a friar, sometimes pronounced in the hour of his
judgment; the sins of which he was accused, gluttony, drunk¬
enness, lust, idleness, were precisely those which the mul¬
titude had committed during its time of license. Curiously
enough, revealing the contradiction inherent in the human
condition, people sometimes wept for Carnal after his con¬
demnation: this happened in the villages of the Durro.
With the arrival of Lent, the setting changed. Already the
days grew longer and with them the length of the working
day. In the cold regions, the snow melted and the soil became
ready for new labors; the vines required cutting, hoeing,
weeding. It was also the time for pressing the olives.
The more sustained labor of this period was associated, for
seven long weeks, with a mood of gravity and reflection. No
more games or spectacles; in towns where the theatre had
become an almost daily event, as at Valladolid from the
mid-sixteenth century, and at Madrid in the following cen¬
tury, in the corrales de la Cruz and del Principe, the players
were unemployed or rehearsed the autos of Holy Week.11
Marriages were now much less numerous than in January and
February, save in Galicia, where Lent caused no decline ex¬
cept during Holy Week. Even the cult of the saints had to be
suspended.
In principle, a rigorous fast accompanied this period of the
year. The faithful, meaning at this time the whole popula¬
tion, were to limit themselves to a single meal, excluding
meat, eggs, milk, and cheese. But the Spaniards enjoyed the
privilege of eating eggs and milk through the purchase of the
 Rhythms of Time 35

“bull of the cruzada. ”12 The war with England at the end of
the eighteenth century occasioned another easing of the reg¬
imen with the “bull of meat,” permitting the consumption of
meat dishes four days a week. In any case, the mass of the
Spanish population was not in a position to profit fully by
this privilege, and Lent was a time of large consumption of
fish, especially of cod and sardines, which were relatively
cheap fish. Many people, however, tried on different pretexts
(especially poor health) to escape the dietary prohibitions.
The English clergyman Joseph Townsend, a guest of the
archbishop of Seville during Lent of 1787, noted that at his
Eminence’s table, where a number of aged and infirm persons
were assembled, Lent was not observed.13
Some of the representations of Lent were very expressive.
Almost everywhere Lent was depicted as an old woman of
cardboard or paper whom some anthropologists have wrongly
identified with Death. As Julio Caro Baroja observes, how¬
ever, there is no room for doubt: at Madrid, in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries at least, the old woman was pro¬
vided with seven thin legs that symbolized the seven weeks of
Lent; she was conducted in triumph in the procession that
buried Carnal. But gradually, as the weeks passed by, her legs
were cut off one by one and finally on Saturday of Holy Week
her head was cut off. On Minorca, Sa Savia Corema was an old
woman with wrinkled skin, dressed in the typical island
dress, who carried a piece of cod in one hand, a grill in the
other, and had a large rosary fastened around her waist. Simi¬
lar, though not so descriptive, customs existed in Navarre
and the province of Segovia. In certain regions, however (and
this variant poses a problem), the old lady was replaced by a
doll or an actor impersonating Judas who at the end of Holy
Week was charged, condemned, and executed: this was done
in the province of Burgos, in the region of Rioja (Clavijo,
36 Rhythms of Rime

Calahorra), at Tafalla de Navarra, and in certain villages of

Cordoba. Such was the realism of the trial that sometimes it
ended in tragedy, with the crowd putting to death the un¬
happy lad who had played the role of Judas, as happened at
Villanueva de Odra (Burgos province). Celebrations of this
kind took place down to the middle of this century.
Lent was clearly a favorite time for sermons, preached
especially by the mendicant orders. At Valladolid in the six¬
teenth century the great monasteries, like those of San Pablo
(Dominican) and San Francisco, and the cathedral church
took great care to recruit the best preachers, and the high
quality of the Spanish Church at that period ensured that
some of the sermons were very effective and prepared men’s
souls for the Passion of Christ. In other times they were mere
rhetorical dronings. Townsend, who, despite his very English
aversion to Papism, was of a kindly spirit, heard numerous
preachers during Lent of 1786, at Seville and Cadiz. He
found none interesting; they were notable only for the vehe¬
mence of their voices and gestures.14
Lent culminated in Holy Week and especially in the pro¬
cessions of Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of that week.
On Wednesday the clergy busied themselves in the churches,
decking the altars with flowers; enormous crowds visited the
churches on that day and on Thursday. At Barcelona,
Townsend estimated at more than 100,000 the number of
people, joined by numerous peasants from neighboring
villages, who went from church to church, kissing the feet of
the various statues of the Virgin and the recumbent Christ.15
The richness and elaborate character of the offices on Maundy
Thursday made it a special day. White effectively evokes
those of Seville at the end of the eighteenth century. Thus
after the office of the Tenebrae on Wednesday of Holy Week,
came the great mass of Thursday: “A splendid commemora-
 Rhythms of Time 37

tion which leads the mind from gratitude to sorrow. The

service, as it proceeds, rapidly assumes the deepest hues of
melancholy. The bells, which were joining in one joyous peal
from every steeple, cease at once, producing a peculiar heavy
stillness, which none can conceive but those who have lived
in the populous Spanish town long enough to lose the con¬
scious sense of that perpetual tinkling which agitates the ear
during the day and a great part of the night.”16
A temporary “monument,” erected in all churches but of
gigantic size at Seville, in which reposed the consecrated host
of Maundy Thursday, occupied the center of the temple,
illuminated by wax candles borne by one hundred and sixty
silver chandeliers. The canons took turns before the sanctuary
during twenty-four hours for the rite of the perpetual adora¬
tion. In the middle of that same day, the archbishop served a
sumptuous banquet in his palace for twelve paupers who had
been dressed at his expense. Then he proceeded to the cathe¬
dral where, stripped of his vestments, he washed their feet.
More or less solemnly and sumptuously, this rite was cele¬
brated in all Spanish churches.
Throughout the country, however, in both large towns and
humble villages, Holy Week was above all a time of inter¬
minable processions whose army was composed of parish and
penitential brotherhoods who paraded over the traditional
routes, displaying the holy imagery of the Renaissance and
the Baroque. At the opening of the seventeenth century,
according to the Portuguese Pinheiro da Vega and the
Frenchman Joly, the processions of Valladolid were the finest
in Castile. The procession of Tuesday of Holy Week, which
departed from the Church of the Magdalene, was that of the
prostitutes and was designed to give them an opportunity to
repent and be saved, but the pimps who looked on hurled
terrible threats against those who yielded to repentance.
38 Rhythms of Time

Thursday saw the procession of the prisoners who, behind

their bars, sang coplas (songs) to the Virgin and her son; it
was followed by the liberation of several prisoners. Then
came the great processions of Good Friday: the first, that of
the Trinity, which departed from the monastery, went to the
royal palace, and returned by the Plaza Mayor, was composed
of 1,400 disciplinants and 650 members of confraternities
who surrounded the pasos of three brotherhoods:17 they de¬
picted Our Lady at the foot of the Cross, the prayer in the
Garden of Olives, the Descent from the Cross with Christ in
the arms of the holy women, and the Virgin prostrate before
the Cross. Still more remarkable was the procession which
departed from the Franciscan monastery: it assembled 2,000
disciplinants and 1,000 members of confraternities who car¬
ried numerous pasos, some as large as a house and sometimes
very lovely—the Lord’s Supper, Saint Veronica, the Descent
from the Cross. Finally, on the evening of Wednesday of Holy
Week, there got under way the most famous procession, that
of La Soledad, which lasted three and a half hours. It departed
from the monastery of San Pablo and returned there after a
long march; members of confraternities, carrying candles
with four wicks, were joined by penitents who lashed them¬
selves or were lashed by persons hired for that purpose. Lights
flickering in the night, rollings of drums, mysterious hoods,
odors of incense and wax, the odor and sight of blood, dra¬
matic images of the Passion of Christ carved in wood and
painted in blazing colors, held up by sweating bodies: this
was the spectacle offered each year to the crowd, a spectacle
that appealed directly to its senses and hearts.18
From the fifteenth to the twentieth century travelers saw
and described those processions. At Barcelona on Maundy
Thursday, Townsend saw a procession in which several
thousand persons, including 800 burghers, took part; there
 Rhythms of Time 39

were twenty barefoot penitents, trailing heavy chains and

carrying large crosses. They preceded the statue of a recum¬
bent Christ, accompanied by twenty-four priests in their
finest vestments. An orchestra of clarinets, flutes, and oboes
played sweet, ceremonial music. Townsend had tears in his
eyes. On the next day, Friday, he attended two other pro¬
cessions where he saw very young children, some barely three
years old, carrying little crosses. But on Saturday the ringing
of bells announced the Resurrection and an end to mourning:
“Drums beating, cannons firing, people shouting, colours
flying, and, in a moment, all the signs of mourning were
succeeded by tokens of the most frantic joy.”19
Until the prohibition of 1777, some evening processions
were attended by violent self-flagellations. The next day the
ground in the squares and streets was covered with a track of
dried blood. In the seventeenth century flagellation, taking a
strange turn, acquired a clearly erotic character. On the pre¬
text of confessing their sins of adultery, a number of flagel¬
lants proclaimed their passion for their mistresses by paying
them the homage of their blood. In 1785 Townsend rejoiced
at the disappearance of this practice: following the example of
the rest of Europe, Spain had at last emerged from its “Gothic
”20
ignorance.

THE RHYTHMS OF SUMMER

In the thinking of the people, Easter Sunday began the sum¬
mer season. For the majority, indeed, the year had only two
seasons: winter and summer. For such writers as the Arch¬
priest of Flita and Saint Teresa of Avila, verano begins at the
end of March or the beginning of April, the term estio being
reserved for the months of the dog days. Palm Sunday was the
day of the Resurrection of the Savior, but it was also the day
of the resurrection of nature (flower petals were often sprin-
4o Rhythms of Time

kled in the streets) and the resurrection of life: numerous

marriages were celebrated and the curve of parish births
reached its annual peak. May and June, moreover, were the
months of the year in which references to love multiplied.
In Madrid and Catalonia, people chose the May queens
(hence the name mayas, later majas). In each parish and
quarter the May queen, decked with garlands of flowers,
presided over the popular dances. At Madrid from the seven¬
teenth century down to our own time the connoisseurs of
beauty made the rounds of the town to judge the merits of
the May queens. Especially in the north, this was the time
when youths made overtures to their beloved by methods
both direct and subtle, depositing a bouquet of flowers on her
threshold or singing under her window a serenade whose
meaning she could easily divine. More prosaic was the ap¬
proach to marriage in the valleys of the Pyrenees, where
young men who wanted to settle down all went to “the fair
for girls,” and the sources sometimes crudely speak of “buying
a wife” (comprar mujer). At this time families began negotia¬
tions, which sometimes proved difficult. The high point of
the erotic cycle, however, was the night of the feast of Saint
John: “San Juan saca las mozas a pasear” (Saint John brings
the girls out to promenade). In fact, at nightfall the custom¬
ary areas for promenading filled up with a crowd of young
people whose whole purpose was flirtation: all the games or
gestures of this evening were saturated with amorous mean¬
ing, sometimes mere pretense (and the game remained a
game), sometimes sincere (and the game committed the fu¬
ture). A widespread custom was for young unattached girls to
sit in the dark behind the grills of a window on the ground
floor and await the coming of love in the shape of a passing
youth whose words evoked a variety of responses. The chal¬
lenge was to be inventive and quick; to be dull meant losing
the game. June was a fine month for marriages.
 Rhythms of Time 41

With the triumph of nature and life the Church associated

that of the Eucharist. The feast of Corpus Christi and its
procession was a glorious ceremony far removed from the
manifestations of grief and mourning proper to Holy Week.
The Reformation unintentionally served to enhance this
triumphant character, for it appears that the procession of
Corpus Christi, the only day in the year when the consecrated
host was exhibited in the streets for the adoration of the
crowds, was from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century an
occasion to affirm the truth of the real Presence against the
Protestants who denied it in various degrees: certain mon¬
strous beings represented in this procession, such as the hydra
in Seville, could be identified with heresy.
The summer proper was marked by a frenzy of toil. Along
with the lengthening course of the sun from one horizon to
the other, the length of the working day increased; this was
reflected in day laborers’ wages, which were now double those
of December.21 This was the time of the great agricultural
tasks of harvesting and threshing the grain, executed in most
parts of the country with the trillo,22 in the Cantabrian
mountains and Galicia with the flail; it was also the time of
the long migrations of the flocks of the Mesta along the
cahadas (sheepwalks);23 of the gathering of fruits and later of
maize which, beginning at the end of the sixteenth century,
had conquered wide areas in the northwest, but whose spread
was slow. From Galicia and Catalonia to lower Andalusia,
this was also the season for grape gathering and later for col¬
lecting chestnuts, important in the north and west. Harvest¬
ing and grape gathering caused large population movements
that were the inverse of today’s, that is, oriented from north
to south. In the towns it was a time of accelerated tempo of
construction and repair of roofs damaged by the winter; it
was also a favorite time for holding great markets and fairs.
But summer was also the season which most painfully
42 Rhythms of Time

revealed the fragility of life. In ordinary years, overin¬

dulgence in melons or salads, and above all the drinking of
infected and stagnant water, unleashed intestinal ailments
that might prove mortal. Children died in the greatest num¬
bers, probably of enterocolitis or toxicosis. The years of poor
harvests, the months of transition to the harvest (May to July)
were times of ordeal: food shortages weakened organisms
which summer’s fevers sometimes finished off. In years of
pestilence the plague reigned at the height of summer and
created terrible gaps in the population from July to Sep¬
tember: this happened in 1506, 1530, 1557, 1566 (in the
Burgos region), 1599, 1617, 1630, 1648—1649, 1651,
1677—1685, and so on.24 During 1597—1599, for example,
the great majority of the victims of the plague fell ill and died
during the hot months. At Madrid in 1599 the number of
deaths was about thirty a week during May, rose to sixty and
then eighty in June, and reached its maximum of 154 during
the last week in July. At Valladolid the curve followed the
same course but at a higher level, with an apogee of 955 dead
between July 23 and 30. At Segovia in the same year the
plague raged from the month of May; however, two-thirds of
the 4,500 deaths were registered between the end of June and
September 9. -In the village of Villanubla (Valladolid prov¬
ince), 139 of the 161 who died of the plague perished between
July and October. At Pomar de Valdivia (Palencia province)
30 percent of the population died between May and Sep¬
tember 1598. The 2,199 deaths of Fontarabie took place
between August 8 and October 21, 1597. At a later time,
yellow fever and cholera took over: serious epidemics of yel¬
low fever ravaged Spain, especially Andalusia, in 1800,
1804(?), 1810, and 1819, and new epidemics broke out down
to 1870 at Alicante, Valencia, Palma, and Barcelona. Then
came cholera epidemics, beginning in 1833, followed by
 Rhythms of Rime 43

sharp attacks in 1853-1856 and at Valencia in 1885. Some

cholera epidemics, it is true, raged rather in the fall, that of
1834, for example, which reached its apogee about October
15. In 1885, however, the great pandemic struck above all
during the dog days.
Summer: an exhausting and sometimes tragic season that
had almost nothing in common with summer as we know
it.25 Yet it brought some days of jubilation, glorious feasts
like that on July 25 of Saint James, patron of all the Spains,
or the celebrations of the Virgin on August 15 and September
8. If the summer had been a good one, then once the heaviest
tasks had been completed, in August, there began the long
procession of local festivals. They have continued to this day,
and it is not by chance that every day in September is marked
by an impressive number of local festivals. But these festivals
were only pauses in the work-filled tail-end of autumn, that
continued until the approach of winter.

THE WEEK AND THE DAY

As is natural and inevitable, within this annual rhythm were
inserted shorter rhythms. The week existed, in the first place
because Sunday was strictly observed until the end of the
eighteenth century. I could multiply examples, but three
simple ones will suffice. Among the numerous charges lev¬
eled against Don Francisco de Aguayo, a caballero of Cor¬
doba and a familiar of the Inquisition, who had difficulty
restraining his aggressive impulses, figured the accusation
that he had struck an alguacil who prevented a boy from
working on Sunday. At the other end of Spain, in the juris¬
diction of Xallas, west of Santiago de Compostela, the popu¬
lation was compelled to respect Sunday rest on pain of very
heavy fines—and this was in the eighteenth century.2b Sun¬
day was also the day which provoked the greatest number of
44 Rhythms of Time

quarrels. It was the day of the week for letting off steam: for
drinking, gambling (which went well with drinking), love
affairs, insults ending in battles with knives, and blasphemy.
The “Inquisition” series in the national historical archives
testifies to this, as do the writs of pardon which sometimes
brought to an end litigations provoked by some bloody
scuffle.
The weekly rhythm also produced repetitive acts or situa¬
tions that date from this epoch: market days, days of “free”
fairs (like those held on Thursday in Valladolid and Oviedo,
for example); alternation of meat and fish days. In the
eighteenth century in many towns, journeymen, employees,
and even day laborers did not work on Mondays.
Certain repetitive acts became the key moments of each
week. This was true in various convents, such as those of the
congregation of Saint Philip Veri, whose monks flagellated
themselves on Wednesday and Friday evenings. Townsend
attended their ceremonies at Barcelona, Cadiz, and Malaga
and concluded that the Catalans and Malaguehos put much
more heart into it than the Gaditanos (the inhabitants of
Cadiz). His account of the flagellations in Barcelona suggests
the dramatic intensity of the event. The congregation was
plunged into total darkness, then began the singing of the
Miserere, grave and slow, and the monks began to lash them¬
selves, at first slowly, then ever more rapidly, while the vio¬
lence of the blows increased. After some twenty minutes the
spectators heard only a deep moaning in which the sound of
the blows and the cries of suffering were inextricably min¬
gled. Townsend had expected something terrible, but the
reality surpassed his expectations: his blood ran cold, and one
of his companions burst into tears.27
The day also had its own movement. At dawn the day
laborers assembled in a public square for work whose dura¬
tion varied with the season. In the nineteenth century when
 Rhythms of Time 45

society became more profit-minded, sometimes, especially in

Andalusia and Extremadura, they had to make long journeys
on foot before dawn in order to get to their place of work.
Church bells signalled the start and end of labor and the
times for prayer, and summoned the indigent to the door of
the bishop’s palace, where there was one, or to those of parish
churches and convents, for the distribution of bread or soup.
When the bishop was a resident bishop (as was generally the
case in Spain in the second half of the eighteenth century, by
contrast with France), he personally supervised the distribu¬
tion made each morning at the gates of his palace; in 1785
and 1786 Townsend attended such distributions at Oviedo,
Malaga, and Granada. Evening was the time for a paseo
(promenade), then for a gathering of friends around the fire
or, beginning in the eighteenth century, a tertulia, which
became very popular, and which brought together a number
of acquaintances for a game of cards (the most common ac¬
tivity), flirtation, or conversation; some of these discussions,
excessively free in tone, brought the participants before the
Inquisition, revealing the extreme frequency of these gather¬
ings.28
We would be wrong to underestimate the power of this
rhythm of life, which in its totality was alien to ours, on the
shaping of men’s ways, conduct, and ideas. It could affect
national policy. Let me give a simple example: only once
during his reign, in 1523, did Charles V fail to make the
pious retreat which he was accustomed to make during Eloly
Week; and then only because he was under the pall of an
excommunication. During every other year of his long reign,
for those few days he abandoned the affairs of the world. The
correspondence and the memoranda prepared by Gattinara,
Cobos, or Granville piled up on his desk. Charles V was
elsewhere.29
I know that during the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
46 Rhythms of Time

turies, at least, Spain differed little from the other nations of

the West. But this was not entirely true in relation to the
countries where the impact of the Reformation had disrupted
the order of time.30 The specific traits of Spain had already
appeared: the rhythm of its historical demography, for exam¬
ple, differed from that of France in that Advent and Lent
altered very slightly the seasonal movement of marriages and
births, while the celebration of the great religious feasts
(Holy Week, Corpus Christi) assumed more sumptuous forms
than were found elsewhere. It is no coincidence that the
French region where the processions of Holy Week retained a
special stamp was Roussillon, which remained Spanish until
the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659). But in Spain that same
order long endured in all essential details, in an almost im¬
mutable framework.
 III. THE "PERCEPTION OF SPACE,
OR THE "PERMANENCE OF THINGS

PERMANENCE OF AN URBAN LANDSCAPE

The waning age of Enlightenment had a taste for statistics;
some forcibly suggest an urban landscape.
In Aragon, take Daroca: 2,683 inhabitants, one collegiate
church and seven parish churches, six convents. In Old Cas¬
tile, Arevalo: 1,600 houses, eight parish churches, eight con¬
vents, two hospitals; Avila, 1,000 houses, a cathedral, eight
parish churches, sixteen convents, five hospitals; Valladolid:
20,000 inhabitants, fifteen parish churches, forty-six con¬
vents, seven colleges, six hospitals. The town of Leon had
6,170 inhabitants, a cathedral and thirteen parish churches,
nine convents; Benavente, with only 2,234 inhabitants, had
the imposing castle of the counts of Benavente, nine parish
churches, and six convents; Alba, with only 300 houses,
could boast of the castle of the dukes of Alba, two churches,
and six convents.
In New Castile, Madrid, the capital of the country, with
147,543 inhabitants, had sixteen parish churches—a modest
figure—but also sixty-six convents, sixteen colleges, and
eighteen hospitals. Toledo, with 25,000 inhabitants, had
thirty-six parish churches, thirty-eight convents, twelve

47
48 Perception of Space

chapels, nineteen hermitages, four colleges, seventeen hospi¬

tals! And Ocana, with only 4,836 inhabitants, maintained
four parish churches and ten convents.
Now turn to Andalusia: Cordoba, 32,000 inhabitants,
fourteen parish churches, and forty-four convents; Ecija,
28,176 inhabitants, six parish churches, plus eight chapels,
twenty convents, six hospitals; Seville, 80,268 inhabitants,
30 parish churches, eighty-four convents, twenty-four hospi¬
tals. Granada had 52,385 inhabitants, twenty-three parish
churches, forty convents, and eight hospitals, in addition to
seventeen hermitages. Lorca, in the Levant (Valencia and
Murcia), had 21,856 inhabitants, nine parish churches, ten
convents. Oviedo, in Asturias, had 7,495 inhabitants, a ca¬
thedral, four parishes, eight chapels, six convents. All these
figures are taken from the census of 1787, called Floridablan-
ca’s census. They merit reflection.
With a few exceptions to which I will return, these
churches, hospitals, and hermitages already existed by the
middle of the seventeenth century. Their rise had accom¬
panied the growth of the towns and the development of the
mendicant orders from the thirteenth century to the end of
the Middle Ages, but the golden age of the movement of
urban construction had been the sixteenth century and the
first half of the seventeenth century. From that time on,
dozens of church steeples reigned over the urban landscape,
in which the convents, their dependencies, and their gardens
formed vast and spectacular enclaves. For almost two cen¬
turies in the majority of towns the great construction sites
had been those of the cathedrals, churches, convents, col¬
leges, and hospitals. The construction of the cathedrals of
Salamanca, Segovia, and Seville continued during the whole
of the sixteenth century; the cathedral of Valladolid, never
finished, remained open to the winds during a large part
 Perception of Space 49

of the seventeenth century. At Valladolid, Toledo, Avila,

Granada, and Cordoba, parish geography was stable by the
end of the sixteenth century; at Seville, by 1640; at Oviedo,
it did not change from the end of the sixteenth century
to 1787, and the same seems to be true of Valencia. The
chapels and hospitals, like the charitable foundations in
general, were the offspring of wealth; they may be counted
by the dozens before 1640, by isolated units during the dec¬
ades that followed.
Similarly, by the end of the sixteenth century the majority
of these towns had attained a topographic extent that they
were not to surpass before the middle or the end of the
nineteenth century. Indeed, in a good many cases the urban
framework, dilated by the demographic advances of the six¬
teenth century, had become too large and contracted together
with the population: this was the case with Avila, Burgos,
Caceres, Ecija, Jaen, Medina del Campos and Medina de
Rioseco, Ocana, Salamanca, Segovia, Toledo, Valladolid,
and, after 1640, Seville. At the time of Floridablanca’s census
none of these towns had regained its population level of 1590,
and some were down by more than half. In other cases, where
the population had hardly diminished, the existing limits
sufficed: this was the case with Cordoba, Granada, Leon,
Gerona, and Santiago de Compostela.
Examples of the contrary trend are quickly told. At first
sight, the growth of Madrid was spectacular. At about 1550,
Madrid was a very small town with some 5,000 inhabitants.
Chosen by Philip II as his capital, it grew rapidly in the
second half of the sixteenth century, probably reaching a
figure of 40,000 to 45,000 inhabitants, and it continued to
grow in the following centuries. The census figure of 147,543
inhabitants in 1787 is very likely below the true one. At
Madrid, to be sure, the urban landscape did not cease to
 Perception of Space
5°

change, but its essential traits remained the same: the

churches, the convents, the palaces of the king and the great
lords continued to dominate the setting. Madrid offered no
novelty.
The only towns which give the feeling of a break with the
past are those which deviated from the model, which carried
in themselves the seeds of change. This was probably the case
with Barcelona. After a long period of prostration the Catalan
capital resumed its upward movement toward the end of the
seventeenth century, and that advance continued. But it was
commerce and manufacturing that made it grow, and
Barcelona’s prosperity at the end of the age of Enlightenment
rested on different foundations than in the past. Its manufac¬
turers had adopted modern techniques: Townsend found that
the mills for the making of chocolate were superior to those of
England, the spinning wheels were those of Arkwright, the
machines for spinning cotton were imported from Manches¬
ter, the printing of cloth was done with cylinders as in En¬
gland. And in Barcelona’s wake followed little neighboring
towns like Mataro, whose mechanical looms and hand looms
were of the most advanced type.1
It is the same story with Cadiz: 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants
at the end of the sixteenth century, 65,987 in 1787. Here
large-scale commerce with America and Europe had swelled
the town’s population and caused the growth of shipping and
counting-houses, storehouses and wharves. On an infinitely
more modest scale, Gijon followed the example of Cadiz: a
little town of 500 to 600 inhabitants at the end of the six¬
teenth century, noted only for its distant whaling voyages,
two hundred years later Gijon still had only 5,000 inhabi¬
tants, but its spanking new port, built at great expense, and
its large activity announced decisive changes. To a lesser
degree Alicante and Malaga, which had grown despite the
 89046
Perception of Space 51

ravages of pestilence and claimed 41,512 inhabitants in the

census of 1787, demonstrated that the new towns were those
of the Spanish periphery.
Elsewhere the stability, the immobility, of the milieu was
almost absolute. We must not be too quick to cry misery, but
in fact the wealth was gone, and the towns lacked the means
for monumental follies. They were reduced to considering
how to maintain, repair, and save what they had. There were
exceptions, to be sure, for which we may be thankful: at
Salamanca, for example, a revival of wealth, of rural origin,
produced the admirable Plaza Mayor. At Santiago de Com¬
postela the large revenues of the archbishopric and the cathe¬
dral chapter and the growth of Galicia’s prosperity in the
eighteenth century assured the financing of the great, mon¬
umental composition capped by the Baroque paroxysm of
the Obradeiro.2
Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, certain towns
developed a different aspect. This was especially true of the
towns of Extremadura, Caceres, and Trujillo. In these towns a
monumental spirit of ostentation produced palaces instead of
churches. They were the palaces of the conquistadors. Even
today, the monumental Caceres that looks down on the
modern town is a collection of palaces. It is not church
steeples that dominate Trujillo but the tower of the Chaves,
the palace of the marquises of San Carlos, that of the mar¬
quises de la Conquista (the Pizarros), and finally the Moorish
castle. By the middle of the seventeenth century, however,
those palaces had already been built; thereafter it was only a
question of maintaining them.
We must reflect on the power of these immutable settings
to create habits, the mechanisms of thought, and to ensure
their enduring quality. The plaza mayor, multiplied by as
many towns and villages as existed in the country, was both

Gsmlrai Bibi* Cottage Library

Springfield, Missouri
52 Perception of Space

the seat of the closest and best-known authority—that of the

ayuntamiento, also called Casa de Corregimiento because the
corregidor3 resided there—and the site of important civil and
religious ceremonies; it was in the plaza mayor of Valladolid
that the great autos-da-fe of 1559 and 1561 were held; around
the plaza mayor, century after century, crowded the same
unchanging streets or specialized quarters: carnicena (meat
market), pescadena (fish market), especiena (groceries), lenceria
(linen goods), mercerta (haberdashery), ropen'a (clothes),
platena (silversmiths), frenena (harness shops), and so on.
The bishop’s palace (if there was one), the convents, and the
hospitals attracted at certain fixed hours a multitude of beg¬
gars who formed one of the constant elements in the urban
landscape. From generation to generation the public walks
remained the same; the Espolon, today still the favorite
promenade of the inhabitants of Burgos, was already popular
in the sixteenth century; the meadow of the Magdalena and
the Puerta del Campo played the same roles at Valladolid (the
second of those places, now the Acera de Recoletos, is still
popular today); and the same was true of the Prado at Madrid
and the Gradas at Seville.
The important signs which class and rank a society’s values
remained perfectly obvious, drawing clear directive lines for a
people which has always delighted in seeing, for whom sight
was always a favored sense. Now, this was not a universal
condition at that time, if we may believe Lucien Febvre and
Robert Mandrou, who claim that sixteenth-century people (I
would prefer to speak of the people of northern Europe)
heard, smelled, and touched rather than saw. Those signs
affirmed the glory of God and the churches demonstrated that
God has a prior claim to the treasures of this world. They also
underlined the power of authority and the social hierarchies:
the square towers of the palaces and their patios with ornate
 Perception of Space 53

figured medallions, and especially the blazoned doors, iden¬

tified and recalled the presence of the Caballeros and hidalgos
who dominated the urban societies and almost everywhere
occupied the posts of regidor (Castile), conseller (Catalonia), or
veinticuatro (Andalusia). Even today, hundreds of blazoned
facades in the Montana (Santander), Alava, and Asturias
remind us that these regions once had a very large proportion
of nobles.

EVER THE SAME SPACE

Reading the travelers who journeyed through Spain, from
Munzer and Antoine de Lalang in 1494-1495 and 1500—
1501 down to those of the eighteenth century—Bourgoing,
Laborde, Swinburne, Townsend—and even of the nineteenth
century, such as George Borrow and Theophile Gautier, we
see that they speak to us of the same country.
Not that nothing changed, but rather that the salient
features of the landscape and man’s mastery of this landscape
remained the same. Their observations are all the more in¬
teresting because, down to the time of the railway revolution,
with some variations travelers followed the same routes.
Their accounts emphasize some features that were not specific
to Spain, to be sure, but were much stronger there than
elsewhere: to begin with, the absence of enclosures, of groves
(save in the often forgotten northwest), and the general rarity
of trees.
For more than three centuries travel accounts continued to
stress the reign of the “open field” in virtually all parts of the
country. This naturally impressed an Englishman, and when
Townsend finally discovered some enclosures between Ecija
and Seville he inserted a long tirade on the evils of that vast
“common field” that was Spain, and that he held responsible
for so much idle land. But sixteenth-century travelers like the
54 Perception of Space

Venetian Navagero had already noted the overwhelming dom¬

ination of the “open field.” Travelers were also impressed by
the rarity of woods: the same Navagero made a point of
contrasting the Basque country, where he journeyed through
the lovely oak forests of Alava, with the Meseta. Accordingly,
they called attention to forests when they came across them:
the bright forests of Leon, between Zamora and Salamanca,
the great expanse of pine trees planted by the Catholic
sovereigns and Charles V to the south of Valladolid, in the
interfluve of the Posuerga-Duero, the dense plantings of holly
oaks of eastern Andalusia, noted by Blanco White east of
Osuna, and so on. It is of interest, too, to discover that the
landscape is the same at intervals of many years: from Fraga,
on the borders of Catalonia, to the approaches of Saragossa, it
is always the same desert (and this was true as late as 1950):
not a single village, man, or farm. The Valencian coun¬
tryside, on the other hand, inspired enthusiasm in all
travelers. They admired the luxuriance and variety of the
vegetation, the orange and lemon groves, the fig and pome¬
granate trees, the sugarcane and rice fields, the orchards and
kitchen gardens. The Fleming Antoine de Lalang lavished
eulogies on this Garden of Eden. The year was 1500; a cen¬
tury later, in 1603, a few years before the expulsion of the
moriscos, the Frenchman Barthelemy Joly was also highly
admiring. To be sure, another Frenchman, Brunei, declared
in 1655 that the disastrous effects of the expulsion had not
been repaired and echoed the nostalgic historian of Valencia,
Escolano, who mourned “the lovely garden of Spain,
transformed into a dry and desolate steppe.” At the end of the
eighteenth century, however, it was again an enchanting
country that Townsend crossed, a country where water, care¬
fully distributed and channeled, worked miracles as before.
The reactions of these travelers to the Valencian landscape are
true expressions of exoticism; they express astonishment and
 Perception of Space 55

the charm of a different, glamorous land. Antoine de Lalang

observed that around Valencia extended “the loveliest gardens
one could find, adorned with fig trees, orange trees, pome¬
granate trees, almond trees, and other fruit such as one does not
see in our country. ”
Turning to another region, recent studies in historical de¬
mography have shown that the dense population of the coast¬
al zones and low valleys of the Cantabrian northwest was an
old reality, already visible at the end of the sixteenth century:
in 1597 the nine valleys of the ‘Asturias de Santillana” had a
density of about 40 inhabitants to the square kilometer,4 a
result obtained by applying the coefficient of only four per¬
sons to a household, with slight variations for different val¬
leys (43.1, the maximum, in the valley of Camargo; 36.5,
the minimum, in the valley of Penagos, both close to Santan¬
der). In the same period the council or jurisdiction of Tineo,
which included 100 hamlets or isolated farms in Asturias,
had a density of 57 inhabitants per square kilometer; in 1708
the parish of Dena, in the Rdas Bajas of Galicia, already had a
density of 106 inhabitants per square kilometer. Since port
activity was still limited and industry was still in its infancy,
these population densities explain the large movement of
seasonal or permanent migration (the inverse of that of the
twentieth century, save in the case of Galicia), which drew
the people of the northwest to the fields of the Meseta at
harvest time or to the large cities of the interior. These cities
recruited their apprentices, their domestic servants, their
laborers in the Montana, Asturias, Galicia, and the Basque
provinces; a large part of the labor force for the prolonged
construction of the Escorial came from Cantabrian Spain.
All this brings us closer to our main theme, for our chief
interest is in the relation that men established with space
and, if that relation changed, when and how.
Among those relations one of the most important, from
 Perception of Space
56

both an economic and a psychological point of view, was the

system of land tenure. Now, two institutions which span the
whole period under consideration in large measure froze the
existing pattern of land tenure. First, the Church, whose
continuity assured the preservation of its patrimony, regarded
as inalienable land derived from donations until the disen-
tailments of the mid-nineteenth century. Second, the
mayorazgo, a fundamental element of Spanish social history,
appeared in the fifteenth century and later had an extraordi¬
nary diffusion; although curbed by Charles III, it remained
intact until abolished by the Cortes in 1820.
I have already noted that the use of the mayorazgo was not
limited to the nobility; at Valladolid in the sixteenth century
merchants, shopkeepers, and distinguished artists made use
of it.5 Inalienable save with royal permission, it perpetuated
from generation to generation an estate or an aggregate of
possessions, generally landed property. To be sure, ownership
of the land changed and sometimes even left a family through
the extinction of certain lines, but this contingency was fore¬
seen in the clauses of the act establishing the mayorazgo,
which passed in toto to a single heir, so that estates once
established retained the same bounds, the same forms, over
the centuries and ultimately their possession acquired an al¬
most sacred character despite or perhaps because of the absen¬
teeism of the great landowners.6 The extinction of lines,
combined with family alliances, only reinforced the concen¬
tration of landed property. As a result, by the end of the
eighteenth century the ducal houses of Osuna, Alba, and
Medinaceli among them possessed a large part of Andalusia.
The dukes of Medinaceli, succeeding to the mayorazgo of the
dukes of Cardona, additionally inherited immense domains
in Catalonia.
In this respect Spain is clearly different from the rest of
Western Europe. In England in the sixteenth century, the
 Perception of Space 57

Reformation threw monastery lands on the market; the

northern rebellion of 1569 and, above all, the Civil War
provoked other major redistributions of land, so that land
ownership was not frozen nor did it acquire a sacred charac¬
ter. The same redistribution occured to a lesser degree in
France, where the misfortunes of the Huguenots caused
transfers of land even before the Revolution, which produced
other and much greater transfers. In Germany the seculariza¬
tion of Church lands as a result of the Reformation, followed
by the disasters of the Thirty Years’ War, also redistributed
large quantities of land.
Latifundism—not limited to Andalusia, for to a consider¬
able degree it also affected Extremadura, New Castile, and
even Old Castile and Catalonia—was partly responsible for
the vast extent of idle land which, at least from the end of the
sixteenth century, represented a significant proportion of the
cultivable area.
Whatever one may think of the Mesta (and such an active
and long-lived institution inevitably inspires a variety of
opinions), this powerful association of graziers certainly left
its mark on Castile. Its sheepwalks (canadas) for the seasonal
movement of sheep between mountain and lowland pastures
and its need for extensive pastures required the perpetuation
of the open field and idle land. Each year two or three million
sheep took part in the migration, covering very great dis¬
tances (the merino sheep of the monastery of Guadalupe
might go as far as north of Leon, crossing some ten passes en
route); 900,000 to 1,000,000 sheep a year went through the
pass of Villaharta, which was the route of the cuadrillas
(groups) of Cuenca and Soria; at least 500,000 others moved
through the passes of Abadia (the cuadrilla of Leon) and Torre
Esteban (the cuadrilla of Segovia).7 Such vast movements of
animals could not take place without injury to farmers. But
the Mesta was a complex network of relations between farm-
58 Perception of Space

ers and sheep raisers, an interminable chess game in which,

according to the weather, the demographic pressure, and the
prices of wheat or wool, peasants and shepherds advanced or
moved back their pieces.
Another permanent feature: the royal hunts. The Spanish
kings, from the Emperor Charles V to Charles IV, were
passionate hunters, particularly Charles V, Philip III, Philip
IV, and Charles III. To each sitio real (royal seat), first Val¬
ladolid or Toledo, then Madrid, the Escorial, Aranjuez,
Granja de San Ildefonso (near Segovia), were attached vast
spaces that were preserves, where game of every sort and size
grew and multiplied, inflicting great injury upon the sur¬
rounding farmlands. The hunting ground of the Pardo had a
circumference of about thirty leagues. Throughout the coun¬
try there were other hunting grounds reserved for royal use,
like that of Soto de Roma, near Granada, which covered
almost 2,000 hectares of ground, and which from the time of
Charles V to the end of the eighteenth century was inhabited
only by deer and pheasants.8
Thus for centuries the majority of Spaniards knew from
experience that large portions of the soil had been appropri¬
ated once and for all or, in the case of the land traversed by
the flocks of the Mesta, that they were not easily accessible.
The abundance of idle land (latifundia, pastures, hunting
grounds) and the nature of the country had accustomed
Spaniards to a strong animal presence which continued until
very recently. Proofs abound: travelers who complained of the
difficulty of securing provisions conceded that one could
often find hunters ready to sell partridges and rabbits.
White, journeying with a friend whom he accompanied as
far as Olvera on a mission of inquiry into “purity of blood,”
noted the extraordinary plenty of game in those Andalusian
mountains where wild boars, deer, kites, falcons, cranes, and
 Perception of Space 59

bustards abounded, where the profusion of rabbits had be¬

come a scourge, where even some wolves could be found.9
(Speaking of wolves, Charles III kept an exact account of
those he killed; by the autumn of 1786, at the end of his life,
the number had reached 818!) Townsend attended a royal
hunt during his stay at La Granja and contemplated the
extraordinary spectacle of 145 dead bucks and hinds. Wolves
and bears could be found in Asturias down to the end of the
nineteenth century.10
Castile was also a kingdom of birds: large birds like the
storks (Barthelemy Joly observed many stork nests in the
belfries between Soria and Valladolid); the smaller but more
savory thrush, in Catalonia and the Balearic Isles; quail in
profusion in Old Castile, gray and red partridges especially in
New Castile and in upper Andalusia. Trout abounded in all
the rivers of the mountain systems of the center and the
north; in the sixteenth century, basketsful of trout could be
found not only in the markets of Soria, Segovia, Avila, and
Leon, as is normal, but also in Valladolid and Madrid. Sal¬
mon swarmed in the streams of the northwest, from Santan¬
der to Galicia. And the development of new forms of bull¬
fighting according to the methods of Pedro Romero and
Cuchillares caused large areas to be assigned to wild bulls.

GROWING MASTERY OF SPACE?

A fundamental question remains: for the mass of the popula¬

tion that lived in the countryside, that made its living from
the earth, did this long period of three centuries mean a
growing mastery of space?
We must say, in the first place, that in the main the
cultivated plants on which men relied for food and other uses
remained the same. It comes as no surprise that almost
everywhere the cereals—wheat and barley above all, replaced
6o Perception of Space

by rye in colder lands (Segovia, for example)—occupied the

greater part of the cultivated land area and furnished the bulk
of agricultural production: the calculations of Jose Gentil Da
Silva for New Castile, those I have offered for the Tierra de
Campos, and those of Francis Brumont for the region of
Bureba to the north of the Meseta, all indicating that cereals
furnished 55 to 90 percent of the agricultural production in
the second half of the sixteenth century, held good for the
middle and the end of the eighteenth century. Ensenada’s
register and the work of Eugenio Larruga confirm this.11 Let
me add that mixed grains (mixed crops of wheat and rye, and
the like) and small grains have not played in Spain the impor¬
tant role they have in France.
For the country as a whole, the vine and the olive rank
immediately after cereals in the inventory of agricultural pro¬
duction (as in that of cultivated land area). The vine and the
olive certainly were factors for change, favoring population
growth and more intensive integration of producers in the
money economy, which is to say, favoring a different system
of thought. First in the sixteenth century in the Andalusia of
the Guadalquivir river valley, in the heart of Old Castile (the
region of Medina and Valladolid), and in Catalonia, and again
in the eighteenth century in Catalonia and lower Andalusia
especially, the two cultures together or the vine alone drove
wheat back or conquered idle lands in response to foreign
demand and promising juridical instruments like em¬
phyteusis (perpetual and transmissible leases), to which
numerous authors, beginning with Campomanes, attributed
Catalan prosperity in the eighteenth century. But these cul¬
tures were well known and, save in Catalonia where they were
the source of a “take-off” and primary capitalist accumula¬
tion,12 they affected business conjuncture more than the eco¬
nomic structures. True, in the northwest, where the expan-
 Perception of Space 61

sion of viniculture was considerable, and even in Asturias (the

region of Tineo), it remained an element making for eco¬
nomic stability down to the coming of the railway age.
Rice and sugarcane, despite their large interest, were then
limited to a few narrow plains or vegas of the Mediterranean
littoral. Mulberry trees were already planted in the sixteenth
century in the back country of Valencia and the hills of Toledo
and Granada, but the culture did not progress. The cultiva¬
tion of the orange unquestionably advanced, from south of
Barcelona to Malaga, but here again the quantitative change
was limited. Since almost all these changes took place on the
Mediterranean fringe, their accumulation meant that this
part of Spain was able to obtain greater returns from the soil.
Not by chance, Townsend, searching for “improvements,”
found signs of prosperity at Mataro, Barcelona, Valencia,
Alicante, and even Lorca.
Elsewhere it was a different story, for the yields from the
cultivation of cereals, whose increase could have been a deci¬
sive factor for change, seem to have remained the same if we
take into account annual oscillations. The best yields, like the
median yields, which we know from the replies to Ensenada's
questionnaire, Larruga’s work, and recent researches, do not
differ from those which I calculated for the town of Cigales in
the sixteenth century or those established by Francis Bru-
mont: five or six to one in the case of white wheat (trigo candial)
remained a good yield. The last example has a special inter¬
est, for Brumont was able to calculate the yield for 1586 in
thirty-five villages in Bureba, near Burgos, a good agricul¬
tural region in the northern part of the Meseta. Thirty of
those villages had yields higher than five to one, and eighteen
even exceeded six to one, yet 1586 does not seem to have been
an exceptional year, since the global figures for the years
1579—1584 point to a production higher than that of 1586.
62 Perception of Space

To be sure, the yields calculated by Noel Salomon for the

same period in New Castile are on a lower level. The only
possible novelty might have been the virtual disappearance of
very low yields, but this is only an hypothesis, and not a very
likely one, to judge by the persistence of food crises down to
the beginning of our century.13
The methods of cultivation remained almost everywhere
the same: the system of cultivating land one year and leaving
it fallow the next {ano y vez) or cultivating only one year in
three in the case of poor lands {ano al tercio). Changes in
farming implements diffused very slowly. Townsend, who
carefully studied all the plow models he could find, described
them and published his drawings in the back of his book. He
admired only the plows in the region of Barcelona; he found
that those of Igualada, still in Catalonia and constructed on
the same principles, represented a decline from the model.
He spoke most harshly of the plows of southern Aragon
(Daroca region), Toledo, the Seville region, and the Tierra de
Campos, which “exhibits a want of intercourse with more
enlightened provinces.” He spared only the plow used in the
vicinity of Salamanca, which he considered suited to its light
soils, although he found the Hampshire method more satis¬
factory for this purpose.14
For threshing, farmers used the trillo—a device commonly
consisting of a thick board whose underside was set with
pieces of flint— for separating the grain from the chaff; this
device was pulled about the threshing floor by mules. It was
in use as late as the 1960s, and may still be seen, although it
is rapidly disappearing. This method was used everywhere
except in the Cantabrian northwest, where arms and a flail—
too heavy to produce an optimum yield—performed the
same task. We note that the use of mules for plowing, wide¬
spread in the sixteenth century, seems to have been in decline
or fallen into complete disuse in the eighteenth century.
 Perception of Space 63

Can we assume that irrigation agriculture was advancing?

Probably in Catalonia. Elsewhere the same zones continued
to possess norias, functioning on the same principles: the
valley of Pisuerga around Valladolid; the plateau of La Man¬
cha; the vega of Toledo along the Tagus River; the vega of
Granada and that of Motril on the Mediterranean shore; and
the Levant. Just as ancient were the windmills of eastern
Mallorca, while the distribution of water in the huertas of the
Levant had been perfected in the Middle Ages.
The northwest poses the question of maize.15 The cultiva¬
tion of this miracle plant does not seem to have caused deci¬
sive changes until the eighteenth century. In the light of
recent studies, however, we must push further back the date
when maize was routinely cultivated in the coastal zones. We
may be almost certain that it was the basic culture of the
coastal valley of Pielagos by 1597, and certain that it was
such in 1620 in the neighboring valley of Camargo. In 1630
it was a customary crop in the parishes of Albruqueiro and
Bioro, in the Galician ria or Arosa; it held an important place
in the region of Xallas, west of Compostela; and at the end of
the century, during a food crisis, the authorities of Com¬
postela wished that it might be imported from Asturias as “a
most useful and necessary commodity.” The tithes of the hos¬
pital of Budino, near Xallas, show that maize had, as early as
the beginning of the eighteenth century, caught up with rye
and left wheat far behind: by 1740 it represented 30 to 45
percent of the tithes in grain. The potato, on the other hand,
did not achieve an important position until the beginning of
the nineteenth century.16
Certain conclusions seem inescapable: in interior Spain the
technical relations of production changed little and slowly.
All the major changes which swelled the value of agricultural
production favored the peripheric Spains. Those, in fact, are
the impressions of travelers in the age of Enlightenment: the
64 Perception of Space

Catalan valleys, and not just the huertas of Valencia and

Murcia, impressed them as being so many gardens, well
cultivated and irrigated, where the soil, although not very
fertile, yielded its maximum. Similarly, in Asturias and in
the Montana of Santander, the farms scaled the slopes, the
smallest parcel of land was exploited: the highest lands were
sowed to wheat while the low valleys were given over to
maize, and a peasant would raise two or three bulls and as
many cows, plus some goats.
If over the greater part of Spain there was hardly any
progress in the exploitation of the soil from the sixteenth to
the nineteenth century, travelers, for their part, achieved no
greater mastery of the Spanish space. Indeed, in this respect
one can unhesitatingly speak of a regression. The Voyage en
Espagne of Theophile Gautier (1843) takes note of this fact:

A journey through Spain still is a dangerous and romantic enter¬

prise; one must expose one’s self to danger, have courage, pa¬
tience, and strength; one risks his skin at every step; the priva¬
tions of every kind, the absence of the necessities of life; the
danger of roads passable only by Andalusian muleteers, an infer¬
nal heat, a sun that splits your skull, are the slightest incon¬
veniences; in addition you have the rebels, the robbers, and the
innkeepers, men born to be hanged whose honesty is regulated by
the number of guns you carry with you. Danger surrounds you,
follows you, precedes you.17

It was not only a question of roads, then, although they

ranged from bad, even in Catalonia, to dreadful. Nor was it a
question of the time/distance relationship. From the begin¬
ning of the sixteenth century down to the beginning of the
nineteenth, from Madrid to Hendaye on the French border
was always a journey of ten to twelve days; in 1776, for
example, it took Henry Swinburne 126 hours of travel, or
 Perception of Space 65

about twelve days, to make the journey by way of Segovia and

Valladolid, just as it had in the sixteenth century.18 It took
about fifteen days to go from Barcelona to Madrid, with a
stopover of two days at Saragossa if one wished to avoid
becoming excessively tired. (The royal couriers always made
better time, to be sure, but they were exceptions.) Nor was it
a question of the inns: their evil reputation was established in
the seventeenth century; the custom of travelers buying their
own provisions, which persisted into the nineteenth century,
was not common in the preceding century.
The problem above all was one of security. The Catholic
Sovereigns and their Santa Hermandad, later Charles V and
Philip II, had restored security in their realms. To be sure,
the great towns were poorly controlled and zones of dissi-
dence existed: in Catalonia, bandits infested the western part
of the principality, and the Sierra Morena did not have a very
good reputation. It was in the seventeenth century, however,
that the situation deteriorated, and security on the roads was
not reestablished till the last third of the nineteenth century.
The Cadiz merchant Lentery, “traveling from Ecija to Cor¬
doba in 1687 . . . had to join a troop of nine travelers, armed
with twelve carbines, in order to pass through the ill-famed
desert of La Parilla (still a shrine in the mythology of banditry
for the next two centuries).”19 In the most desolate and dan¬
gerous spots, travelers shuddered at the sight of mon¬
umental crosses commemorating the murder of some un¬
fortunate: such places were found on the borders of Aragon
and Castile, past Daroca; in Old Castile, between Arevalo
and Villacastin, on the passage through the forest; in New
Castile, in the region of Manzanares and some parts of La
Mancha; in Andalusia, in the olive groves of Andujar, the
hilly region to the east of Osuna, and above all in the crossing
of the Sierra Nevada, from Velez-Malaga to Alhama; between
66 Perception of Space

Zamora and Salamanca a place called Confesionarios reminded

passersby of the possibility of a violent death. In order to
discourage aggressors, travelers displayed carbines on the
sides of their mules, or even held them in their hands in the
most dangerous places, as White and his companions did on
the road to Olvera. Moreover, travelers formed companies
when approaching places of ill repute, and one would see
little groups of riders assemble without discussion until they
formed a numerous and well-armed troop. Thus Townsend
journeyed the route of Velez-Malaga-Alhama with a group of
some twenty men, all well armed and accompanied by their
pack mules; they had come together spontaneously, without
unnecessary talk. It was an act of wisdom, for at Alhama they
saw the body of a solitary traveler who had been murdered the
day before. In fact, the total impunity enjoyed by the
brigands and the strong parties of tobacco smugglers who
roamed the countryside and even attacked royal troops made
the majority of journeys real adventures. Peasants knew it
too, and formed parties in order to go from their village to a
neighboring town.
By way of exception, we find a traveler like Henry Swin¬
burne deciding in 1776 that the precautions he had taken
were unnecessary, even in the southern part of the country,
and gradually abandoning them. But the explanation is sim¬
ple: Swinburne always traveled with a convoy. From his tes¬
timony we gather that security had returned to the region of
Barcelona and Valencia, where “travelers journeyed unarmed.”
It was not so elsewhere. The War of Independence, and later
the first Carlist War, which began in 1833, aggravated the
situation, which was at its worst between 1835 and 1850. In
1837 Borrow was in Galicia; there was much talk of “robbers
and flying parties of the factions.” To go from Lugo to La
 Perception of Space 67

Coruna, he arose before daybreak to take advantage of the

escort of the post and, about five or six leagues from Lugo,
found the protection of a troop of fifty “Miquelets” (miguel-
etes). Having made the mistake of pushing forward, he saw
three heads of bandits stuck on poles by the side of the road,
then barely escaped two bandits at the bridge of Castellanos.
Some time later he was at Santiago de Compostela:

To this place I traveled from Coruna with the courier or weekly

post, who was escorted by a strong party of soldiers, in conse¬
quence of the distracted state of the country, which was overrun
with banditti. . . . Hundreds of travelers, both on foot and on
horseback, availed themselves of the security which the escort
afforded: the dread of the banditti was strong. During the jour¬
ney, two or three alarms were given: we however, reached St.
James without having been attacked.

In 1842 Theophile Gautier traversed New Castile and An¬

dalusia. The situation was similar: “We had to sup and sleep
at Ocana in order to await the correo real (royal courier) and
take advantage of his escort by joining him, for we would
soon enter La Mancha, infested by the bands of Palillos,
Punches (Polichinelles), and others. . . . We had to wait till
two in the afternoon for the arrival of the correo real, for it
would not have been prudent to set out on the road without
him. . . . Twenty soldiers packed in a carriage followed the
correo real. ” Further on, past Valdepenas, the travelers noted
posts on which were exposed three or four heads of evildoers.
The diligence which preceded Gautier’s convoy was carried
off by the bandits of La Mancha.20
Despite the innovations of the peripheric Spains, we must
conclude that the relations between man and space were very
enduring and stable. The same forms and colors according to
68 Perception of Space

the cycle of the seasons, the same implements and the same
animals with which man confronted the earth and trans¬
formed its fruits, the same strong presence of animal life,
the lack of land for the majority, modeled a mental uni¬
verse from which few individuals could escape. The ma¬
jority could not conceive of another.
 IV. CATHOLIC FAITH
AND DISSIDENCE

ONE MIGHT at first think that religion must have served to

strengthen the coherence, the homogeneity of the Spanish
mental universe. Who can deny the importance of religion in
Spain, the prestige and immense power of Catholicism in this
country? It was in the name of the unity and purity of the
Faith that the armies of the “Catholic King” were mobilized
for two centuries. Why, then, should we not consider religion
an agent of the national consciousness, perhaps the most
powerful such agent in the Spain of the Old Regime?
Because from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century the
content of Spanish religion was profoundly altered, and its
role was transformed almost as profoundly. It is impossible,
in my opinion, to regard religion as an immutable factor in
Spanish life, whether we consider it as the inspirer of inner
life or the guide of moral life, or as a social and political force.
The religion that men lived in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries was quite different from that of the sixteenth cen¬
tury. But there is more. . . .
In the first place, the unanimity of Christian faith was
probably less real than men have long believed and I myself
until recently believed it to be. Then, too, even if men did

69
7° Catholic Faith and Dissidence

not question the religion, they might well question the

Church. True, it was not so much the institution as its per¬
sonnel that they questioned. In any case, from the sixteenth
century on a vigorous anticlericalism was frequently ex¬
pressed and gradually gained strength until it erupted in the
explosions of our own time.

GOLDEN AGE OF SPANISH CATHOLICISM:

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

The vigor and fervor of Spanish religiosity in the sixteenth

century cannot be doubted. Daily life was saturated with
religion. We already know that the calendar “spoke Chris¬
tian,” and we need not return to the subject. Economic life
itself was placed under a religious patronage: guild meetings
generally took place in the chapel of a parish church or a
monastery. The guilds doubled as religious brotherhoods that
organized the cultural life of each trade and administered
their institutions of mutual aid. All the disruptions of eco¬
nomic life or simply of the normal course of human existence
immediately produced a religious reply: floods or prolonged
droughts, invasions of locusts, frosts, food shortages, epi¬
demics, all evoked a cycle of processions and prayers, con-
juratory or expiatory ceremonies which the end of the public
calamity transformed into expressions of thanksgiving. All
this confirmed the providential conception of society.
Sin, to be sure, had to be fought. An abundance of “manu¬
als for confessors” or “guides to sinners” came off the printing
presses in order that Christians and their pastors might track
sin down. In time of disaster, as at Santander in 1597 when
the plague carried off two-thirds or three-fourths of the popu¬
lation, a search for scapegoats and scandalous sins began, in
an effort to explain the catastrophe by violations of the moral
order. But sin was part of the order of this world, for it was
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 71

human weakness, the weakness of the flesh. Therefore, the

wages of sin might as well serve Christian ends: often it was
the religious brotherhoods or the hospitals that administered
the houses of prostitution; at Valladolid, for example, it was
the brotherhood de la Concepcion y de la Consolacion.
In this climate of opinion the celebration of the mass
preserved all of its redemptive value. Thus it played the role
of repetitive intercession for the deceased. Rare was the indi¬
vidual of even modest means who did not provide for such
intercession in his will. At Valladolid the peasant Alonso
Martin provided money for 110 requiem masses and two
thirty-years services. Another peasant, Hernando de Urueha,
and the weaver Alonso Carrasco arranged for the saying of
Sunday masses during the year following their deaths, in
addition to a number of other masses immediately after
death. Further, Carrasco, like the silversmith Cristobal Re-
mon, established numerous masses for the souls of his dead
relations and other persons to whom he had contracted some
obligation. When the testator was rich he multiplied the
number of masses and their celebrants: the merchant Pero
Hernandez de Portillo, possessor of one of the town’s great
fortunes, asked for 1,800 masses, assigned to the charge of
various monasteries and churches.1
Elsewhere, we have the case of Antonio Fernandez de Cor¬
doba, veinticuatro of Cordoba;2 although ruined, he provided
3,000 masses for the repose of his soul and the souls of his
parents and persons in regard to whom he had some obliga¬
tion. Another Cordoban, Doha Francisca de Cordoba
Monzalve, paid for 2,000 masses for the same ends.3 In 1559
Pero Gomez de Porras, regidor at Segovia, asked for 1,000
masses during the year following his death, plus 150 for the
souls of his relations.4 This resort to the mass seems to have
remained very popular down to the end of the eighteenth
72 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

century. The mother and father of the poet Juan Melendez

Valdes, members of the petty nobility, of modest wealth, who
died in 1761 and 1776, requested 60 and 360 low masses,
respectively, for their salvation.5 In other parts of Western
Europe such figures are very rare, confined to very special
cases. In the south of France an artisan or small merchant
would not have thought of having a hundred masses said for
the good of his soul, and a thousand masses was absolutely
inconceivable. In England at the time of the Reformation, an
individual who attached a special value to the repetitive
character of the celebration of mass, either to obtain some
reward in this life or for the salvation of a deceased person,
might have five, seven, or nine masses or, at the most, a
thirty-years service.
This concern for intercession inspired a search for the fit¬
test escorts to usher the deceased into the kingdom of heaven,
such as members of the flagellant brotherhoods, parish clergy
or clergy of some cathedral chapter, friars, or, still better,
paupers and poor children, in groups of six, twelve, or
twenty-four. There were twenty-four paupers on hand to con¬
duct the corpse of Pero Hernandez de Portillo into the earth.
The practice of the sacraments was regarded as necessary
for salvation; the overwhelming majority of the people tried
by the Inquisition for blasphemy or “indecent” speech
affirmed during their interrogations that they confessed and
took communion on the days established as obligatory by the
Church. I have previously noted that if the attitudes of Panta-
leon de Casanova scandalized the people of Los Sauces in
1581, it was because he was never seen confessing or taking
communion on the obligatory feast days.6
Slaveowners made sure that their slaves and the children of
their slaves were baptized, and they ordered masses for the
salvation of the slaves’ souls after death. Sometimes the own-
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 73

ers stood as godparents at their baptism and did the same

when they received the sacrament of marriage.7 In 1566,
some humble porters of Toledo contrasted fornication outside
wedlock with legitimate sexual relations, legitimate because
transformed by the sacrament. “It is good to be with one’s
wife, because it is a sacrament.” The Holy Office severely
punished the weaver Lorenzo Bustamante because he spoke
very ill of the sacrament of marriage.8
The religious instruction of the humble classes appears, on
the whole, to have been satisfactory. Practically all minor
offenders before the Inquisition, such as occasional blasphem¬
ers or fornicators who sinned with a clear conscience, could
correctly recite the Pater Noster, the Credo, the Ave Maria,
the Salve Regina, and the Ten Commandments, whether or
not they knew how to read and write. This was no small
achievement.
But the religion of that age was more than recitation. It
was also theological affirmation and discussion. If Spaniards
of that time appeared to be concerned with dogma, it was
partly because many of them, through daily contact with
moriscos and Jews, had long lived their religion as a difference.
Their experience was an original one, contrasting sharply
with that of other Western Christians who, down to the time
of the Reformation, lived in a homogeneous religious milieu
and who, even after the beginning of the Reformation, were
not permanently confronted with religions so different from
their own as the Jewish and Moslem faiths. This age-long
contact very obviously affected the religious sensibility of the
Spaniards, to the point of exaggerating its expression: the
Crucifixion scenes of the great Old Christian artists, whether
painters or sculptors (Ribera, Gregorio Fernandez, Juan
Montanes), were all the bloodier because Islam rejected the
Crucifixion and the Jews rejected human representation. We
74 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

know that El Greco is considered an artist of “New Christian”

inspiration because his Christs are free from effusions of
blood.
Down to the expulsion of the years 1609—1614, contact
with the moriscos provided continuous religious controversy,
at least in certain regions (the kingdom of Valencia, for
example). This controversy doubtless focused on rites and
dietary customs. Unhappy morn cos, frequently invited to
share the repasts of their Christian neighbors during the
Ramadan, might expect to fall into a horrid snare at the offer
of a sumptuous dish of pork. But the controversy went be¬
yond these things: it concerned the Trinity, the Incarnation
and the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, admitted by
those moriscos who best knew the Koran, the Crucifixion,
which they rejected with horror, the institution of the
Church, the sacraments, and the mass.9
Christians unceasingly sought to convert the moriscos by
catechizing them and by preaching the Gospel. Especially
active was the archbishop of Valencia, Juan de Ribera, who
personally visited and preached in morisco villages and sent
them celebrated pastors and preachers, Jesuits and Domini¬
cans; in 1599 he published a Catechism for the Instruction of
Newly Converted Moors. Other methods were tried: mixed
marriages (as late as 1598 Fray Alonso Chacon believed that
these could definitively solve the morisco problem), and the
alternation of policies of clemency (the first pardon seems to
have been granted by Ferdinand of Aragon on February 25,
1500, “to the newly converted Moors ... of Granada”) with
those of repression, directed by the Inquisition. But the
moriscos stubbornly resisted these efforts, first relying on
prophecies of Koranic inspiration which revived their faith by
promising them a liberator, prophecies of which we find
echoes in certain Inquisition trials; later they organized their
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 75

own religious instruction. Despite increasingly severe prohi¬

bitions, their religious books and texts of prayers circulated
clandestinely; those moriscos who could read, read and glossed
them to their illiterate neighbors, while certain families pre¬
served manuscripts that were enriched from generation to
generation. This religious instruction, given in greatest se¬
crecy, often had a polemical character; women did not lag
behind the men in the work of proselytizing, while the al¬
faquis, the teachers of Islam, maintained a clandestine exis¬
tence at Valencia and Aragon down to the expulsion. Aside
from some happy exceptions, the coexistence of Old Chris¬
tians and moriscos was a perpetual confrontation.
In the sixteenth century the Reformation gave Spanish
Catholicism an opportunity to affirm its difference from other
creeds, to deepen and sharpen its dogmatic definitions. It
would be an error, however, to regard this process as a simple
act of rejection, free from curiosity on the part of Spanish
Christians about the new doctrines. Agustin Redondo tells
the story of a French Augustinian friar en route to Salamanca
in 1530 who bought a book by Luther from a pedlar; when he
mentioned the fact in a barber’s shop the customers bom¬
barded him with questions about the German monk. Many
clerics who taught at the universities of Alcala, Salamanca,
and Valladolid read Luther avidly, and the diffusion of his
books in Catalonia, Navarre, and Galicia in the 1530s re¬
flected the curiosity inspired by his ideas.10
The records of Inquisition trials testify to widespread reli¬
gious ferment. If many discussions around an evening fire or
in some shop revolved about such a pragmatic issue as “To
what degree is fornication a sin?” others were much more
disinterested and speculative; anguished concern for salvation
posed such problems as justification through faith and the
role of works, or questioned free will or the existence of
76 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

purgatory. We have seen that the controversy over the Real

Presence contributed to the pomp of the festivals of Corpus
Christi, accenting their triumphal character.11 The dispute
over the cult of saints and their representation in images
revived the old controversies with the Moslems.
Even before the spread of Reformation ideas, concerns of
this kind had given rise to “Illuminism” in Castile. The
dejamiento (abandonment) of the illuminists of Guada¬
lajara—grouped about Pedro de Alcaraz, accountant to
the count of Priego, and the beata12 Isabel de la Cruz who
advocated total surrender to God’s will through annihilation
of the individual will—was not so far removed from Luther’s
free will. These communities were numerous in the sixteenth
century: in New Castile, around Toledo and Guadalajara; in
Extremadura, in the region of Plasencia; and in Old Castile,
/

at Avila, for example. Although our information about the

beatas is unsatisfactory, their proliferation, to which the cen¬
suses attest, is significant. The census of 1561, for example,
records the presence of eleven beatas at Avila; that of 1557,
twelve at Trujillo; and that of 1587, thirty-five at Plasencia.
Finally, the great popularity of Erasmus’s works in Spain and
the diffusion of manuals of spirituality like the Vita Christi of
the Carthusian Ludolf of Saxe and the Spiritual Ladder of
Saint John Climacus, the Consolations of Boethius, and the
Agony and Passage of Death of Alejo Vanegas, among others,
testify that this was a faith that was intensely lived and not a
set of ritual gestures or a mere mechanical affirmation.
The Marian cult, meanwhile, borne along by extraordinary
popular fervor, had assumed in Spain dimensions unknown
elsewhere. Already a number of sanctuaries consecrated to
Mary were famous: Our Lady of Montserrat in Catalonia, Our
Lady of Pilar in Aragon, the Virgin of Guadalupe on the
border between Extremadura and Castile. In the dispute
between Franciscans and Dominicans over the Immaculate
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 77

Conception, the populace passionately endorsed the Francis¬

can thesis which maintained that Mary had been exempt from
original sin; while Spanish theologians vainly tried to make
this dogma prevail at the Council of Trent, in city streets
processions were formed to sing hymns to the Immaculate
Conception. In Andalusia, it transformed the popular style of
greeting into Ave Maria Purissima (Hail Mary most pure), to
which one must respond: Sin pecado concebida (conceived
without sin). In the region of Malaga, the peasants replaced
Vaya usted con Dios with 1day a usted con la Virgen. It was a
prelude to the growth of superstitious practices. White, de¬
scribing the demonstrations of Spanish Marian piety to En¬
glishmen, presented them as aberrations; not even in Italy,
with some exceptions, did the cult of the Virgin attain such
intensity and fervor. The defeat of the Spanish thesis on the
Immaculate Conception at Trent proves this point.
In this epoch, however, faith wore a garland of works. The
brotherhoods, whether devoted to mortification, glorifica¬
tion, worship, mutual aid, or aid to the poor and sick, expe¬
rienced an extraordinary growth. Marcellin Defourneaux es¬
timates their number toward the middle of the seventeenth
century at 20,000. They were largely responsible for the
flowering of Baroque sculpture and the splendor of the reli¬
gious processions. In every town, charitable foundations dis¬
played great solicitude for the poor. The statutes of the fund
of the Children of the Christian Doctrine at Valladolid de¬
clared: “It is a service to God to permit the poor to study.”
Fellowships for poor students had been created in the great
colegios of Salamanca and Alcala de Henares, and had not yet
been diverted from their original purpose. On their
deathbeds many Caballeros, merchants, and ecclesiastics left
funds for important foundations that provided dowries for
poor girls, especially orphans. Each city possessed a brother¬
hood or hospital for the care of foundlings. Such was the
78 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

Brotherhood of Saint Joseph of Valladolid which, from its

founding in 1540, accomplished very remarkable work; be¬
tween 1606 and 1778 it received 17,488 children—a large
proportion of whom, it is true, died at an early age. In
addition, each city possessed several hospices for paupers;
these institutions had not yet become workhouses, with ob¬
ligatory labor. Even more numerous were the foundations
which provided for periodic distribution of money or bread to
the poor. Finally, the Church itself devoted a considerable
part of its revenue to such aid.
Good works implied the giving of oneself: some hidalgos
took care of the poor in hospitals, washed them and made
their beds. During the great plague of 1599 the bishop of
Segovia, the corregidores of Valladolid and Segovia, and reli¬
gious of various orders at Burgos, Madrid, Pampeluna,
Segovia, Sepulveda, Toledo, Valladolid, and other towns
mingled with the sick and sometimes lost their own lives.13
The sense of moral duty was reflected in other ways: some
testamentary provisions forbade heirs to own slaves (on pain
of forfeiting the mayorazgo), or provided for remission of
debts or extension of time to debtors; brotherhoods showed
concern for the restoration of peace and harmony among their
members.
Such behavior, to be sure, was not general. For the major¬
ity the practice of religion and good works was simply a
means of establishing one’s right to salvation. But the exam¬
ples of moral conduct had the value of a model, and they were
widespread enough to give religion a stamp of authenticity,
an authenticity of which the available documents leave no
doubt.
Such a vigorous faith endowed the Church with extraordi¬
nary prestige and power. From the beginning to the end of
the sixteenth century foreign travelers attested to this. The
Fleming Faurent Vital, who accompanied Charles V during
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 79

his first stay in Castile, in 1517, remarked that the clergy

were “invulnerable.” Almost a century later Barthelemy Joly,
who also resided in Valladolid, wrote: “In this land the
monks are in their natural element. . . . Everywhere they are
called ‘Father,’ everywhere they are honored, respected, well
received, and well regarded by all.”14
Throughout the sixteenth century the wealth of the
Spanish Church continued to grow, partly through skillful
management of its property and revenues, including tithes,
but above all because of the donations which it continually
received. Notarial registers offer an inexhaustible mine of
examples of this kind. Here is one: Dona Beatriz de Monzalve
and her daughter Francisca de Cordoba Monzalve, two no¬
blewomen of Cordoba, founded the colegio of the Society of
Jesus at Ecija. After her mother’s death Francisca, remaining
single, bequeathed to this colegio the greater part of her for¬
tune, amounting to a tidy sum, and assigned almost all the
rest, 4,200 ducats, to the colegio of Cordoba of the same
Society of Jesus. Here, then, we have a considerable lay for¬
tune almost all of which passed into the hands of the Jesuits
of Cordoba and Ecija between 1602 and 1605.15
There were hundreds of cases of this kind. By the end of
the sixteenth century the archbishops (there were four in the
kingdom of Castile, three in the kingdom of Aragon), certain
bishops, and cathedral chapters like those of Toledo, Seville,
Barcelona, and Santiago de Compostela were great financial
powers, with revenues on the order of 100,000 to 180,000
ducats, which equalled or exceeded those of the greatest sei-
gneurial houses.16 The same was true of certain convents. We
are not surprised, therefore, to find that many, like the
monastery of Saint Peter Martyr at Toledo and that of Saint
Benedict at Valladolid, mother house of the Benedictine
province of Spain, acted as banks.
This wealthy Church, however, possessed great vitality. It
8o Catholic Faith and Dissidence

produced founders of great orders like Saint Ignatius Loyola;

apostles ready to endure martyrdom like Francis Xavier, and
men of perfect humility like the gentle missionary to the
moriscos of Valencia, Fray Bartolome de Los Angeles; mystics
like Teresa de Avila, Juan de la Cruz, and Luis de Leon;
economists like Tomas Mercado; talented theologians like
Domingo de Soto; statesmen like Cisneros; and, in Bartolome
de Las Casas, the great champion of a lost cause. Bishops and
friars tried to save the Indians by waging a campaign in their
behalf in America and Spain; they were responsible for the
promulgation of the New Laws of 1542. The sermon pro¬
nounced at Santo Domingo on Hispaniola by the Dominican
Antonio de Montesinos was but a signal to launch the strug¬
gle. In that struggle Las Casas had the support of others:
Bernaldo de Santo Domingo, Gil Gonzalez, and Alonso de
Maldonado, for example, and to a lesser degree that of cele¬
brated theologians like Melchor Cano and Domingo de Soto.
In the royal councils and as presidents of Cancillenas or
Audiencias, prelates played political and administrative roles
of the first order. In France prelates rarely served as presidents
of the Parlement or High Court, in the Spanish Audiencias
(which had some analogies with the French Parlements), such
service had long been the rule.
Most of these facts are well known. Sixteenth-century
Spaniards, on the whole, lived an intense and creative reli¬
gious life. But this situation, I believe, was a transient one; the
content of Spanish Catholicism swiftly grew impoverished.
Even in its finest hour, however, it was not the monolithic
block that men have too often imagined it to be.

A RELIGION DESERTED BY ITS SPIRIT

/

In the 1920s Alvaro de Albornoz claimed that Spain had

become one of the least religious countries in the world. The
common people had transformed the Faith into foolish super-
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 81

stitions (zafas)\ the enlightened classes had turned it into an

elaborate game (gazmohena).17 It was, Albornoz concluded,
“a religion that influences nothing, vivifies nothing, spiri¬
tualizes nothing.” No doubt Albornoz exaggerated some¬
what, but his comment suggests the extent of the im¬
poverishment of Spanish Catholicism between the sixteenth
century and the end of the nineteenth century. Let us consider
the matter in more detail.
I observed above that Spanish religion, nourished by daily
controversy with Moors and Jews, had affirmed itself as a
difference. In the sixteenth century the Reformation revived
the spirit of discussion. During the age-long adventure of the
Reconquista, Spanish Christianity had become profoundly
impregnated with the crusading spirit. Thus one dimension
of the patron saint of Spain, Saint James, was that of
matamoros, “Killer of Moors,” and the saint’s iconography
often represents him in that aspect. Belief in the miraculous
intervention of Saint James was firmly anchored from the
eleventh century, after the battles of Clavijo (more or less
legendary), Simancas, and Coimbra; it grew stronger at the
time of the great battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, and
Santiago became the war cry of the Christians: Dios ayuda y
Santiago! The military order of Santiago became the most
important Spanish military order, while the myth of Saint
James became a weapon of the Spanish soldiery and especially
an instrument of the American conquests. The great
chroniclers—Bernal Diaz for Mexico, Pedro Cieza de Leon
for Peru—repeatedly invoked it; and from 1518, when the
Conquest began, down to 1892, there were recorded thirteen
miraculous appearances of Santiago mounted on his white
horse.
This crusading spirit, however, did not extinguish the
appetite for controversy and discussion. On the contrary, at
the opening of the sixteenth century the Reformation gave it
82 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

new life, as shown by the conference held at Valladolid in

1527, a debate over Erasmus. During the emperor’s whole
reign, Spanish Christianity remained largely receptive to dis¬
cussion and even reconciliation. Indeed, Charles V and his
councillors made very great efforts to convoke an ecumenical
council that could reconcile Rome and the Protestants. Until
the emperor’s abdication (1556), the controversies inspired by
these and other questions gave Spanish Catholicism consider¬
able freedom of thought.
After mid-century, however, under the influence of exalted
friars of the mendicant orders, of an Inquisition hardened by
the logic of its own system, and of Philip II, troubled by the
sight of a France convulsed by wars of religion, there arose a
tendency to identify the Spanish state with Catholicism, and
one became the secular arm of the other. The spirit of free
inquiry was stifled, Waldensian circles and other groups sus¬
pected of Lutheranism were liquidated at Seville and Val¬
ladolid, and several of their members received death sen¬
tences, carried out in public during impressive autos-da-fe.
Those of 1559 and 1561, in particular, were great spectacles
designed to impress the multitude. As a result of the drawing
up of the Index of forbidden books and the hunt for such
books unleashed after 1560, the religious expression of the
country lost contact with scientific thought and gradually
rejected every mode of expression except the literary and
plastic. It was reduced to acts of faith in which the play of
intellect had almost no role. Curiously, Spanish Catholicism
was transformed through contact with its enemies: Judaism,
preserved within in the form of the conversos, Puritanism,
Jansenism, Islam. It became sombre and gloomy, indeed,
morbid; it piled up prohibitions, and strengthened the spirit
of caste by applying to the religious orders, the cathedral
chapters, the colegios, the brotherhoods, the system of inves¬
tigation into “purity of blood” which reached its climax in
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence
83

the seventeenth century.18 The statutes of the cathedral of

Cordoba (1530) and above all those of the prestigious cathe¬
dral of Toledo (1547) set the style and foreshadowed things to
come. The expulsion of the moriscos (1609—1614), still
numerous in Aragon and the kingdom of Valencia (with a
figure of about 280,000 for all Spain) was the fruit of intoler¬
ance; it was also an opportunity to eliminate the last internal
dissidents. Henceforth Spanish Christianity remained alone,
cut off from the outer world, consecrated to certitudes that
could not be questioned. Theological speculation became the
privilege of narrow circles having no relations with the mul¬
titude; of that multitude nothing was required but words,
gestures, attendance at splendid ceremonies. Periodically the
Inquisition extirpated heresy; there were thirty autos-da-fe
during the reign of Philip IV between 1621 and 1665, eight
in Seville alone.19
But the changing composition of the clergy also contrib¬
uted to this transformation: economic decline, undeniable
after 1620, and a general impoverishment made the wealthy
Church an inestimable refuge, especially for younger sons of
the nobility deprived of an adequate inheritance by the con¬
cern for preserving patrimonies intact through the institution
of the mayorazgo, and for the large number of girls of noble
birth who could not be richly dowered. As a result, the
composition of the best endowed convents and the cathedral
chapters provided with the most substantial benefices tended
to become more and more aristocratic. I have shown this to
be the case in the nunneries of Valladolid by measuring the
growing percentage of donas in the course of the sixteenth
century. Again, we note that all the members of the Quin-
tano lineage who entered the Church did so in the seven¬
teenth and eighteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century, not
one of the twenty-two members of the lineage whose lives are
known to us entered the Church. Thereafter the situation
84 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

changed. The men joined the cathedral chapters of Santiago

de Compostela (two), Burgos, Cuenca, Leon, Orense, Santo
Domingo de la Calzada, Zamora, and became abbots, in¬
quisitors, or bishops, all provided with substantial benefices.
As for the women, eighteen out of twenty-two entered the
convents of the order of Calatrava, which required them to
present proofs of nobility and a sizeable dowry of 800 to
1,200 ducats. A more detailed analysis reveals that almost all
the members of the Quintano clan who took vows came from
large families:20 more than half (twenty-three out of forty-
three) came from eight large families, each with at least five
children and often more—eight in two cases, nine in one, ten
in another, fourteen in still another.
Faith and the yearning for sanctity, one suspects, were not
necessarily the decisive factors in these decisions. Many
churchmen were aware of that fact. The bishop of Badajoz
wrote in 1624: “Some say that religion has now become a way
to gain a living, and many become religious just as they
would enter any other occupation.” And Father Fernandez de
Navarrete, in his Conservacion de monarquias (1626), spoke of
the need “to ask the Pope not to permit the creation of new
religious foundations.”21
Given these conditions, it was to be expected that many
religious, of both sexes, should wish to keep the goods of this
world and to enjoy its pleasures. We know that from the last
third of the sixteenth century there existed the practice of
sending a young noblewoman to a convent accompanied by a
domestic servant; this was even the case with a Cistercian
convent, San Quirce de Valladolid, in 1574.22 In the seven¬
teenth century the practice became general in the Benedictine
convents and in those of the military orders, such as those of
the commanderesses of Santiago and Calatrava, which only
received noblewomen. These convents were comfortably fur¬
nished, set a fine table, and sometimes became salons where
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 85

the conversation turned on the passions of human love. The

literary type of the convent gallant is well known, thanks to
Quevedo and Tirso de Molina, and I shall not dwell on the
subject. This gallantry did not always stop at Platonic rela¬
tionships: abductions of consenting nuns were not rare. In
1611 at Jerez, the Dominican friars and the nuns of the
convent of Espfritu Santo leveled their walls and erected
others that cut across the Royal Street in order to join their
houses for better and for worse. In 1685 a serious problem of
sodomy came to light in the convents of the Mercedarian
order at Valencia, and involved the provincial of the order and
a whole convent.23 Cases of solicitantes, confessors accused of
having debauched their penitents, began to multiply. Cases
of this type constitute a whole series in the Inquisition section
of the Archivo Historico Nacional.
In this period, with some exceptions, the Spanish Church
no longer produced great figures of apostles, mystics, or even
theologians. For its glorification it had to turn to figures from
the past: those of Saint Teresa de Avila, Saint Ignatius Loyola,
and Saint Francis Xavier, whose triple canonization in 1622
was the occasion for splendid festivities. On the other hand,
the Church gave shelter to great literary creators: Gongora,
Tirso de Molina, Calderon de la Barca, and even Lope de Vega
toward the end of his life.
In the eighteenth century this decline continued. Religion
congealed into superstitious practices sometimes carried to
the point of absurdity. Thus an oath of firm belief in the
Immaculate Conception was now required of all members of
guilds, brotherhoods, and cathedral chapters.24 Townsend
reports that even physicians had to swear that they would
defend the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.
Again, great care was taken to prevent the smallest crumb of
the sacred host from remaining in a dental cavity or a corner
of the mouth: sick people were given a glass of water after
86 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

taking the communion and were asked, “Hapasado su Majes-

tad?” (Has His Majesty gone down?). Another practice,
which went back to an ordinance of 1387, required all to
kneel during the passage of the Viaticum or Eucharist, car¬
ried by a priest to a person in danger of dying. Until the
seventeenth century it was observed with moderation. It was
gradually transformed, however, until it assumed incredible
proportions, perhaps in order to invest the celebration of the
Real Presence with greater solemnity. Now the priest, carried
in a chair by porters, was announced by the tinkling of a
small bell; everyone had to stop, fall on his knees, and beat
his breast, remaining in that position until the priest and the
sacrament had passed. For the edification of the people of
Madrid, engravings were made depicting Charles III on his
knees on the ground, offering his carriage to the priest.25
White relates that one day in Cadiz he did not want to kneel
in the mud, but was nailed to the spot by the priest’s cry:
“This man is a heretic!” and had to kneel at once. At Aran-
juez, Townsend saw people prostrate themselves in the dust
at the passage of the consecrated host and the priest.26 Mat¬
ters reached such a point that at the sound of a bell a party in
a private home was halted, and all knelt; at a barracks the
drum was beaten and the soldiers were drawn up in forma¬
tion, touching the ground with the points of their bayonets;
and at the summons of the bell and drum a theatrical perfor¬
mance was suspended, actors and spectators falling to their
knees and crying “God! God!”2'
I need not say that Western Europe knew no practice of
this kind; not surprisingly, foreigners who witnessed it were
astounded.
I could cite many other examples: before embarking on the
crossing of the Bay of Cadiz toward the Puerto de Santa
Maria, and before the reverse crossing, the pilot gravely ad¬
dressed the passengers: “Let us pray for the souls of those who
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 87

perished here.” Conversations immediately stopped and the

people gave themselves up to prayer. To this day many
Spaniards retain the custom of crossing themselves when
boarding a boat; they do the same when entering an au¬
tomobile, a train, or a plane.
From these orthodox superstitions to others, to white
magic, was but a short step. The seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries were the golden age of ensalmadores and saludadom
(casters of spells and healers, respectively). Deriving mystic
powers from the fact that one was born on Wednesday of
Holy Week, the day of the Resurrection, or on Christmas
Eve, another because he had the sign of the cross on his
tongue, and still another (in certain Pyreneean valleys) be¬
cause he was the seventh son of the same woman, these
magicians did not invert Catholic values or invoke demons.
No doubt they possessed real talent as bone-setters and con¬
siderable powers of persuasion, for they often exercised their
abilities successfully to heal broken arms or legs and to exor¬
cise spirits. They used objects belonging to the interested
party and practiced an incantatory ritual whose formulas
( ensalmos) were almost always based on the theology of the
1

Cross and the drama of the Crucifixion. When they ran afoul
of the Inquisition, its judges generally treated them indul¬
gently and were content to inflict some light penance: several
days of fasting, with the injunction not to offend again. Such
was the case, among many others, of a certain Francisco Diaz,
an inhabitant of Tembleque in New Castile, who in disregard
of prohibitions cast spells (of benign character) over numerous
persons, accompanying the spells with invocations which al¬
most always referred to the Crucifixion. He set broken arms
and legs and performed various incantations, using a belt
belonging to the afflicted party. Tried by the Inquisition of
Toledo in 1549, Francisco protested his good faith and his
belief that he had not erred. He claimed that his father, who
88 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

was regarded as a good Christian, had taught him to cast

spells. His penance (two Fridays of fasting, with attendance
at mass) was a light one.
Superstition could have unexpected consequences. Accord¬
ing to Townsend, so dominant was the cult of the Virgin of
Montserrat in Catalonia that in 1779 during the American
War, the insurance companies of Barcelona, under her pa¬
tronage, agreed to insure the French ships trading with the
West Indies at 50 percent, while the English and Dutch
refused to insure at any price. As a result they were
ruined—but the superstition lived on.28
Faith, then survived, but it had crumbled into a multitude
of minor specialized cults which sometimes appeared to be so
many magic precautions in the face of a hostile universe. In
Madrid, for example, between 1702 and 1807 there arose 500
cofradlas, congregaciones, and hermandades, each with its seat
in one of the city parishes. The names of these associations,
whose function was above all a cultural one, are significant,
for they indicate the most popular cults: Marla Santlsima
(eight), Purlsima Concepcion de la Virgen Marla (three), Marla
Santlsima del Filar (two), Nuestra Sehora de Belen (four),
Nuestra Sehora de la Concepcion (three), and so many others
like Nuestra Sehora de la Leche y Buen Parto (Our Lady of
Bountiful Milk and Easy Birth), whose function we easily
guess, Nuestra Sehora de la Purificacion (three), Nuestra Sehora
de la Soledad (three), Nuestra Sehora de la Esperanza or del
Refugio or de las Tres Necesidades or de la Almudena, and so on.
But the Muy Santo Sacramento (nine), the Santlsimo Cristo del
San Gines (three), San Isidro Labrador (three), also had their
faithful, for the triumphant Marian cult did not exclude the
others.29 The significance of this flowering of cults, it seems
to me, is just the opposite of that proposed by the author
from whose article I have gleaned these facts. He views it as
proof of a continuing intense religiosity; to me it proves the
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 89

existence of a bigoted devotion rather than an enlightened

faith or a faith of works.
In the sixteenth century, women’s given names in Spain
were like those in other Christian countries. By the
eighteenth century, however, a mutation had taken place:
now the names almost always referred to some sanctuary of
the Virgin. They have become (Maria del, or de la, or de los)
Incarnacion, Visitacion, Concepcion, Esperanza, Angustias,
Dolores, Amparo, Rocio, Natividad, Soledad, Maravillas,
Nieves, Candelas, Estrella, Pilar, Montserrat, and so on,
given names that are obviously untranslatable. Again we have
a specifically Spanish characteristic: no other country of West¬
ern Europe could produce such a list of given names.
All that remained of the golden age of the Spanish Church
was its charitable role, thanks to its prelates, who were fre¬
quently remarkable men who shunned the vices of their
clergy and of their parishioners. There can be no doubt on
this point, for different sources are in almost perfect agree¬
ment. In 1658 the bishop of Palencia, Antonio de Estrada,
having given away his goods and income in alms, died in a
poverty bordering on misery. We recall that Townsend, a
witness of the charities of the prelates of Leon, Oviedo, Cor¬
doba, Granada, Seville, and Malaga, among others, deplored
what he regarded as excessive generosity because it must
multiply the number of beggars; such was the result of a
“thoughtless benevolence.”30 A few years later the Comte de
Laborde, author of an Itineraire descript if de I’Espagne, ren¬
dered a contrary opinion; he lavished praise on the high
Spanish clergy because it was a resident clergy and spent the
income from its benefices on charitable foundations and alms.
The resident character of the bishop was undoubtedly an
important fact. It maintained and developed an affective rela¬
tionship between the prelate and the Christian people, a
relationship which found especially forceful expression in ex-
9° Catholic Faith and Dissidence

traordinary circumstances. I have already noted the role of the

bishop of Segovia during the plague of 1599 and that of the
bishop of Murica during the epidemic of 1648. Again,
bishops often exercised political magistracy during the war of
1808; witness the cases of the archbishop of Compostela,
Rafael de Musquiz, and the bishop of Orense.
This faith, diminished in content if not in vigor, remained
completely responsive to a summons to a crusade. At home in
an atmosphere of ritual extravagance, it was equally at home
in an atmosphere of violence. For that matter, it was accus¬
tomed to being invoked in violent terms. The preachers who
had the ear of the multitude at the outbreak of the war for
independence, like that Father Gil described by White as “a
wild half-learned monk, whose influence over the Sevillian
mob is unbounded,” were in their majority members of the
mendicant orders. Much less theologians than the friars of the
sixteenth century, they were much more fanatical. This ex¬
plains the character of the War of Independence in 1808,
clearly a war of religion against a France that served Anti¬
christ. This fact disturbed White. Voicing the views of a
friend who shared his anti-Catholic sentiments, he wrote:
“The religious character which the revolution has assumed is
like a dense mist concealing and disfiguring every object
which otherwise would gratify his mind. . . . He sees no
prospect of liberty behind the cloud of priests who
everywhere stand foremost to take the lead of our patriots.”31
In Galicia, in fact, everywhere it was the parish priests who
with the cry of “Santiago!” assumed leadership of the resis¬
tance movement. The same phenomenon surged up again in
the twentieth century: innumerable summons to a crusade
resounded during the Civil War.
In 1808 the result was the winning of independence, but
that independence was accompanied by the destruction in a
few short years of the Europeanizing impact of the En-
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 9i

lightenment and by the triumph of a blind, obtuse reaction

under Ferdinand VII.
When liberalism resumed its offensive in the nineteenth
century, successive disentailments, especially those of Men-
dizabal in 1836—1837 and of Madoz in 1855, suppressed the
charitable foundations. Indeed, at this time the survival of
the faith itself was in doubt. In 1839 at Cadiz, George Bor¬
row, after striking up conversations with a number of differ¬
ent people, declared, “Their ideas respecting religion were
anything but satisfactory, most of them professing total indif¬
ference.” When he showed a bookdealer a London edition of
the New Testament in Spanish, the latter told him that it was
“a work not sought after, and very little known.”32 Later at
Leon, in a very different region, he wrote: “But the palpable
darkness which envelopes Leon is truly lamentable, and the
ignorance of the people is so great that printed charms and
incantations against Satan and his host, and every kind of
misfortune, are publicly sold in the shops, and are the objects
of great demand. Such are the results of Popery, a delusion
which, more than any other, has tended to debase and
brutalize the human mind.”33
Superstition, ignorance, indifference: the picture Borrow
draws is a sombre one, perhaps too much so. In the same
period the Comte de Laborde admired the Spanish people
because they had created for themselves “a life both simple
and sublime, a life of work and prayer.” Asceticism was not
dead everywhere: in the monastery of San Juan de Dios at
Granada, Theophile Gautier witnessed a performance which
left him speechless, that of an old woman “who crawled on
her knees from the door to the altar; her arms, stiff as boards,
were extended in the shape of a cross; the head was thrown
back, the eyes turned up, showing only the whites, the lips
drawn back from the teeth, the face shining and leaden; it
was ecstasy carried to the point of catalepsy.” 34
92 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

Borrow himself recognized that “remarkable men often

spring up in the bosom of the Romish Church and ... to a
childlike simplicity unite immense energy and power of
mind—equally adapted to guide a scanty flock of ignorant
rustics in some obscure village in Italy or Spain or to convert
millions of heathen on the shores of Japan, China, and
Paraguay.” Such a man he found in the parish priest of
Pitiega, Antonio Garcia de Aguilar.30
It was true, however, that faith was on the wane in numer¬
ous provinces of Spain. By the 1920s Diaz del Moral could
affirm that barely one percent of the men in the Cordoban
countryside attended Sunday mass. King Alfonso XIII, visit¬
ing Pope Pius XI in 1923, told him that all Spain was ready
to embark on a crusade, if necessary; the Pope himself had to
remind his visitor of the lack of religious unanimity in his
country.
*

We are back to the pessimistic assessment of Alvaro de

Albornoz. There remains a serious question: Was this lack of
religious unanimity, undeniable in the twentieth century, of
recent or ancient date?

A UNANIMOUS FAITH?
Menendez Pelayo devoted several substantial volumes to the
history of Spanish heterodoxy. More recently, Joan Fuster
devoted half of a small book to Valencian heretics of the first
part of the sixteenth century. There we find the strange figure
of El Encubierto, a popular hallucinatory preacher who seems
to have been strongly influenced by Judaism.
We already have, then, an answer to the question I posed
above. But we have other witnesses. Returning to the six¬
teenth century, we find those moriscos and those conversos
whose presence alongside the Christians, according to Ame-
rico Castro, placed a definitive stamp on the Spanish char¬
acter. It would be naive to see dissidents in these people.
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 93

Certainly the majority of the moriscos, for example, preserved

their Moslem faith to the end, and their forced conversion
had no value for them. They said the Koranic prayer, washed
off their infants after the ceremony of baptism, performed
parodies on the mass, and sought to retain their own religious
instruction by hiding books and manuscripts, as shown by
the morisco library not discovered until the nineteenth cen¬
tury at Almonacid de la Sierra in Aragon. Until 1610 the
moriscos of Aragon regularly celebrated the great Moslem
feasts, sometimes with the covert complicity of their lords,
eager to retain an industrious labor force. When their lives
were in danger they used the taquiyya whose source was the
Koran, and which they justified by the failure of the Chris¬
tians to respect their engagements (the Capitulations of
Granada, for example). This duplicity, however, they always
regarded as a last resort.36
All this was to be expected. But did the religious attitudes
of the moriscos, like those of the Jews, modify the beliefs of
some Christians? When we find that so many Toledan peas¬
ants and artisans, from one generation to the next, were
persuaded that fornication with a prostitute was no sin if she
were paid, may we not suspect infection by Moslem beliefs?
The Inquisition severely punished moriscos for holding this
belief, regarded as a proof of infidelity, while it treated with
indulgence proven Old Christians charged with the same
offense.37 When we find Agustin Coll, a Latin student from
Cantavieja in Aragon, refusing in 1643 to give a woman a
flower with which to decorate a statue of Christ, at the same
time telling her, “This Christ is made of wood; even if you
struck it, no blood would come out,” the iconoclastic tone
poses a problem. 38 Remarks of this kind sometimes ended in
a conviction, as happened to Cristobal Ballester, whose fate
we know from a court case of 1564. This caballero, born at
Ondara in the Marquisate of Denia, whose defense witnesses
94 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

included the Admiral of Aragon himself, had grown up

among his morisco vassals. He heaped up blasphemies: “Liver,
ass, God’s behind. ... I renounce God, have no faith in God,
do not believe in Him.” He sang songs in Arabic, attended
morisco weddings, did not denounce infidel moriscos and,
worst of all, himself did not go to confession or attend mass.
The sentence of the Inquisition is notable for its severity:
Ballester was ordered to abjure and to pay a heavy fine, and
was condemned to six years of labor in the galleys, commuted
for reasons of health to six years of unpaid service at Oran.
Clearly, he was regarded as a heretic.39
Ten years ago I believed that the profusion of blasphemies
did not imply any lack of faith, that it only showed an
individual revolt against fate. I based this opinion on the
mildness of inquisitorial sanctions against blasphemers.
Today I am no longer certain of this interpretation. The
frequency of blasphemies, it should be said, is quite impres¬
sive. The register of the tribunal of Toledo (one of the four¬
teen jurisdictions of the Inquisition), an incomplete register
at that, records 644 trials for blasphemy during the sixteenth
century alone, with 600 guilty verdicts. Blasphemy was pre¬
eminently a male offense: 596 men were involved and only 48
women. Obviously, many blasphemers were never brought
before the judges for lack of witnesses.
Some of these blasphemies are classic: “I have no faith in
God,” “I deny God,” “I do not believe in God.” Were they
simply expressions of transient bad humor, or of profound
belief? An exhaustive study of the interrogations of the ac¬
cused and of witnesses would be required before venturing a
reply. Sometimes the sacred object was completely denied: “I
deny the chrism” (that is, baptism); in other cases the offense
was one of grossness or obscenity: “Body of God, Head of
God, God’s arse.” Such cases were far from rare. In 1585
Andres Teminea, a carder from Valencia, went so far as to
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 95

display his virile member while he cast doubt on the virginity

of Mary. The Toledan weaver Lorenzo Bustamante said even
worse things in 1555; after expressing nostalgia for a
bachelor’s life, which allowed one to sleep with one whore
one day and another the next, he had declared: “If I could
have all the whores I wanted in Paradise, glad would I be to
go there, but would prefer to go to hell if I could have them
there.”40
We find the same indifference to or even scorn for sacred
things (and for the sacrament of marriage) in the cases of the
bigamists. Again, we have every reason to suppose that the
number of offenders was much greater than our sources indi¬
cate. For Toledo, the register cited above lists 108 cases in the
sixteenth century, with 100 condemnations, and 64 cases in
the seventeenth century; almost all the offenders were men.
But Ana Hermosa, alias Ana de Castro, alias Ana Diaz, who
had been married three times, also fell into the category of
blasphemers and deriders of sacred things: she blasphemed,
ate meat at Lent, possessed a magic stone . . . and kept the
Sabbath. Clearly she is a Judaizer.41 I may add that there
were always some bigamists among prison inmates.
What should we say of all those men who tried to persuade
women they had seduced that they did not sin, and had no
reason to confess their actions, all in order to continue the
liaison? When the seducer was a lawyer, a licentiate in canon
law, who for several years running dissuaded the servant girl
he had deflowered from confessing during Lent (thus making
her run the risk of dying in a state of mortal sin), should we
attribute his act to cynicism, or to lack of faith?42
The answer seems perfectly obvious in the following case,
reported by Townsend, on whose testimony I have so often
drawn. The year was 1786. All or almost all of Madrid’s high
society lived in a condition of permanent adultery. Prudence,
however, required confessing and taking communion at Eas-
96 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

ter in order to obtain absolution and the ticket, bearing no

name, issued by the attending priest. What should one do?
Why, buy one of the tickets that the Madrid prostitutes who
made the round of the parishes accumulated for the occasion.
Townsend, who was not given to jesting, assures us that he
had one of these tickets before him, and reproduces its text.43
The next case, dealing with derision of sacred things, is
most interesting because it took place in a small town,
Teruel, and involved persons of all conditions, but especially
important local people. The affair was finally hushed up,
partly because by 1753 the Inquisition had lost much of its
power, partly because the interval between the two inquiries,
whose procedural secrecy left much to be desired, gave the
concerned parties a month in which to agree on their stories,
and probably, too, because the scandal threatened to engulf
the whole town. Besides, a convenient scapegoat had been
found.
The notary Miguel Marco gave a party at his home to
which he invited many people of Teruel. It was a very curious
party which featured a parody of a ceremony held in honor by
the discalced Carmelites, called the ceremony of “the lost
child,” in reference to the New Testament story in which
Joseph and Mary lost the young Jesus, who remained in the
Temple of Jerusalem among the doctors. A farmer by the
name of Navarro was the celebrant: dressed as a subdeacon,
he conducted the procession of the guests down to Marco’s
cellar, pronounced an obscene sermon, urinated on his
neighbors in the manner of an aspersion of holy water, made
the sign of the cross below his belt, and repeatedly made
other gestures and uttered other words of parody. After this
the lights were extinguished and the notary invited the
women present to dance, fornicate, and urged his own
daughters to let themselves go; sharp cries were emitted by
the women. ... It seems that the affair was attended by a
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 97

large number of men and women, married and single, mer¬

chants and artisans, a captain, prebendaries of the Cathedral,
and even members of the Holy Office.
This was the account given by witnesses who appeared at
the first inquiry. One month later the statements had become
more vague and contradictory. Were there one or several par¬
ties? One “proper,” the other “improper”? But Navarro, who
either was naive or pretended to be, admitted the truth of
much of the charges made against him. He had been asked to
visit many homes, and had performed before many ecclesias¬
tics as well as lay persons, “to pass the time and make people
laugh.” The business cost him dear: two hundred lashes and
ten years in the African garrisons. There the matter rested.
The commission of inquiry continued to ponder about it, but
was not certain what to do next. The prosecutions were
halted. However, a text of later date leads me to think that
the business really took place. It is hard to conceive of such an
affair and such a conclusion two centuries earlier, in Teruel or
anywhere else in Spain. The postures of defiance had changed:
blasphemy had given way to sacrilege and caricature.44
There existed another and durable type of dissidence: black
magic. Some years ago Julio Caro Baroja took stock of this
question;45 I shall limit myself to its application to love
affairs, in a later chapter.

ANTICLERICALISM
Faith might advance and faith might retreat, but anti¬
clericalism has been a constant factor in Spanish history, one
that almost never weakened. It was very much alive at the
opening of the sixteenth century, as shown by the great popu¬
larity of Erasmus’s works, for they attained that popularity in
the face of the declared hostility of the monks whom Erasmus
satirized; his phrase, monachatus non est pietas (the monastic
state is not piety), embodied an entire program. In the same
98 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

period or a little later, distrust of the clergy was expressed in a

variety of ways: clergy, and especially prelates, were prohib¬
ited from belonging to parish brotherhoods; holders of
mayorazgos were forbidden to bequeath their property to a
church or monastery; and violence broke out against the
clergy whenever their evil manners (or other good pretexts)
seemed to justify it.
This ancient anticlericalism crystallized into proverbs. Let
us survey, in the company of Robert Jammes, who has written
on this topic, the Repertory of Proverbs of Gonzalo Carreas,
first published in 1627 and republished in 1924 by the Real
Academia Espanola. Almost 300 proverbs deal with the
clergy. The immense majority of these proverbs, expressing
peasant wisdom, reflect an unequivocal hostility toward the
clergy: “No monk is fit to be a friend, or unfit to be an
enemy. . . . Monks, friars, and sparrows are the worst of
birds.” The regular clergy are dangerous to the virtue of girls,
more dangerous still to that of married women, and must be
kept at a distance. “To live near the curate is a great folly.
Shun the priest and keep no dovecote, and you will have a
proper home.” Especially if you do not wish the priest to leave
a posterity: ‘A priest without children is a priest without
balls.” The curates are rich and lack for nothing: “Dominus
vobiscum never died from hunger. ... If you wish a good day,
comb your beard; a good month, kill a pig; a happy year, get
married; perpetual well-being, become a priest. . . . The
priest of la Magdalena breakfasts well and dines even better.”
The reputation of the monks was even worse. The proverbs
repeat the advice of distrust for them, denounce their cupid¬
ity, their profligacy: “The monk who collects alms for God,
collects for two. . . . The monk who observes his rule takes
from all and gives nothing. ... A monk who asks for bread
takes meat if it comes.” Nuns receive no better treatment.
They are viewed as babblers, selfish, intriguers, and even
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence 99

licentious: “The love of a nun, fire of tow, and a fart are all the
same thing.” Let me add that a much more recent work, the
Refranero general ideologico espahol of Luis Martinez Kleiser,
published in 1953, offers a similar picture, with 217 proverbs
concerning the religious orders, although the timid scholar
who produced this work thought fit to delete some proverbs
whose wording was too crude for his taste.46
In the eighteenth century anticlericalism won over large
social strata. Indeed, under the aspect of regalism it even
became official policy. In the time of Charles III the clergy
were excluded from the organs of government, the Inquisi¬
tion was humbled, the Jesuits were expelled. The Letters from
Spain of Joseph Blanco White, born and raised in Seville in a
fervently Catholic family of Irish origin, himself a seminarian
and priest, are above all—and the author admits it—an
anticlerical squib, all the more violent because he had been
unfrocked. But White tried to be fair, and in general we can
trust him; numerous anecdotes in his book show that his
views were shared by many, including members of the clergy.
When the Restoration and reign of Ferdinand VII had
ended, liberal opinion proposed and obtained the adoption of
numerous anticlerical measures, including disentailments
comparable to the French secularization of Church property;
popular hostility toward the clergy remained strong, and
George Borrow, crossing the Asturias, took pleasure in re¬
peating the story, most unedifying for the Franciscans’ repu¬
tation, which his guide, Martin de Ribadeo, told him and
which ends with this invocation:

May the Lord God preserve us from evil birds three,

From all friars, curates, and sparrows that be,
For the sparrows eat up all the corn that we sow,
The friars drink down all the wine that we grow,
Whilst the curates have all the fair damsels at their nod,
From these three curses preserve us, Lord God.47
IOO Catholic Faith and Dissidence

In the same period Theophile Gautier wrote: “In point of

license, the Spanish coplas or songs have nothing to learn
from the jests of Rabelais and Beroalde de Verville, and one
might think the Inquisition had never existed, to judge by
the way the old plays parody the ceremonies of the faith.”48
To be sure, anticlericalism is not synonymous with religious
indifference or atheism. After all, the success of Erasmus’s
works speaks as much or more in favor of the religious spirit
than against it. Charles III, who abased the Church, was
himself very devout. Theophile Gautier lucidly remarks: “It
is in the most Catholic countries that holy things, priests,
and friars are treated most lightly.” Robert Jammes is far from
claiming that the peasants who invented those hostile prov¬
erbs were unbelievers.
However, the general impoverishment of the faith, added
to the continuing current of anticlericalism, prepared the
ground for the patently irreligious demonstrations which
marked the beginning of the twentieth century. The proces¬
sion of the Corpus Christi was hissed at Valencia; a riot broke
out there during a procession of the Purisima; other riots took
place at Alicante during the procession of the Sacred Heart
and at Malaga during the processions of Holy Week; con¬
vents burned at Barcelona in 1909. Even in regions like
Biscay that remained strongly attached to Catholicism, inci¬
dents multiplied: a clash at Sestao, a suburb of Bilbao, be¬
tween the Good Friday procession and mourners at a civil
burial; disturbances and violence during the pilgrimage to
the Virgin of Begona; burning of the doors of the Jesuit
colegio at Bilbao.
During the “Bolshevik Triennium” (1918—1920), antireli¬
gious agitation revived, notably in Andalusia: Diaz del Moral
observes that villages where, at the beginning of the century,
hostility toward religion had been most pronounced, moved
 Catholic Faith and Dissidence IOI

toward an attitude of indifference, while many other villages

or hamlets declared war on Catholicism. At the House of the
People of Montilla, forms were distributed which workers
filled out and signed, assisted by witnesses, in order to estab¬
lish their non-Catholic status and thus avoid Church inter¬
vention in burials; the socialist press of Puente Genii,
Montilla, Aguilar, jubilantly published the names of infants
entered in civil registers without having been baptized. At
Almodovar del Campo during Holy Week, agricultural
workers organized antireligious manifestations.49 In 1931, on
the occasion of the proclamation of the Republic, churches
and convents were set on fire in Catalonia, Andalusia, in the
Levant, in Asturias; and they were burned again in 1934. In
1936, even before the beginning of the Movimiento, church
burnings resumed: about 160 before July. After July 18,
churches were closed to worship everywhere in the republican
zone, save in the Basque provinces; many others were burned
from the first day of the counter-revolution, especially in
Catalonia: ‘Altars, images, and cult objects were very fre¬
quently destroyed; bells, chalices, ostensories or candelabra
. . . were often melted down and used for military or industri¬
al ends.”50 A great many religious, nuns and priests, were
imprisoned, tortured, or shot, notably at Madrid, Barcelona,
and Albacete. At Lerida only two priests escaped the mas¬
sacre, “because it was known they had voted and supported
voting for the Popular Front.”
Accepted and lived since the Middle Ages like a summons
to a crusade, Spanish religion, despite the Catholic splendor
of the sixteenth century, has divided Spain as much as it
united it. In large measure it was for or against religion that
the “two Spains” of Ramon Menendez Pidal defined them¬
selves. “Larra lamented the death of half of Spain, and the
dead rose up to continue the mortal combat. A hundred years
102 Catholic Faith and Dissidence

later, when Azana proclaimed the death of Catholic Spain,

she arose and it was Republican Spain that perished. This was
the fatal destiny of the two sons of Oedipus, who would not
consent to rule together and so mortally wounded each
other.”51
 V. TOWER, WORK, AND WEALTH

THE PASSION FOR DOMESTIC SERVANTS

AND THE SEARCH FOR WORKERS
When the young Don Gaspar de Guzman, future count-duke
of Olivares and favorite of Philip IV, of whom Velasquez left
an admirable equestrian portrait, the perfect plastic expres¬
sion of pride, arrived at Salamanca to study at the university,
he brought with him, as the most natural thing in the world,
a governor, a preceptor, eight pages, three valets, four lack¬
eys, a chief cook, a barber, ten maid-servants, and some
grooms.
Rich and powerful Spaniards have always had a fancy for
domestic servants. Today, at San Sebastian, which each Au¬
gust becomes the capital of Spain, the little servant-maids
still go in troops behind their landaus on the beach of La
Concha, each wearing the unmistakable insignia of her pro¬
fession, an apron trimmed with lace. A survival, nothing
more. But the chronicles and travel accounts assign the great
lords of former times a multitude of lackeys, men carrying
torches before them in the dark streets, horse doctors, ser¬
vants to dance attendance on them. Swinburne, who visited
Valencia in 1775, observed that some wealthy families man-

io3
104 Power, Work, and Wealth

aged to spend their large incomes without putting them to

any profitable use: “Their chief expense lies in servants,
mules, and equipages.”1 Townsend, who stayed in Madrid in
1787, noted that the palace of the duke of Alba contained
400 bedrooms for the servants, and they barely sufficed! The
duke spent the equivalent of a thousand pounds sterling per
month on the wages of his domestics. The duke of Arcos had
300 servants in his palace in Madrid. The duke of Osuna
employed twenty-nine bookkeepers at Madrid; the duke of
Medinaceli, thirty.2
Statistics confirm these travel accounts: Floridablanca’s
census, contemporary with Townsend’s travels, sets the
number of domestic servants at 280,092, that is, 11.5 per¬
cent of the working population, estimated to be 2,496,938
out of a total population of 10,268,150 inhabitants. Domes¬
tics were therefore more numerous than artisans, who num¬
bered barely 271,000; they were one-fourth the number of
day laborers. A town like Alicante, with few nobles, had 630
domestic servants, 11.2 percent of its working population,
conforming to the national average.
This state of affairs, a characteristic of the waning
eighteenth century, was a legacy from the past: a passion for
domestic servants had been a feature of the two preceding
centuries as well. At the opening of the seventeenth century,
a notable physician of lucid intelligence, Martin Gonzalez de
Cellorigo, who worried about Spain’s incipient decline, de¬
plored the fact that his countrymen considered it a mark of
authority to have mucho acompanamiento, which may be
translated as “abundance of domestic servants.”
The shortage of domestics and workers in general was
made up by an influx of immigrant labor. “From the end of
the fifteenth century down to the first third of the eighteenth,
over a span of 150 years, Spain, especially its Catalan and
Valencian regions, was invaded by a multitude of immigrants
 Power, Work, and Wealth io5

from the other side of the Pyrenees. Frenchmen abounded on

the littoral and in the plain of Lerida, in the Montseny and
the Alberes, in the mountains of the Penedes, in the basin of
the Llobregat and on the lower Ebro. Frenchmen appear in
documents of every kind of that epoch.”3 Whole groups of
youths abandoned the villages of the French Midi to look for
work in the villages of Catalonia; I say “youths” advisedly, for
the majority were from seven to twenty years of age. For years
they would go back and forth as seasonal laborers before
settling down in Catalonia, marrying, and founding a family.
At Valencia the French colony was estimated to be 10,000
persons in 1548; it rose to 15,000 in 1600, and increased
again after the expulsion of the moriscos in the years 1609—
1610.
Recent studies show that the kingdom of Castile also had
an influx of French labor. At Madrid in 1665 Frenchmen
represented about 15 percent of the clientele of 240 Madrid
inns recorded in the census of that year; almost all were
humble workers (pedlars, water-carriers, knife-grinders,
etc.).4 In the same period Francisco Martinez de la Mata
observed that 120,000 foreigners, mostly Frenchmen, per¬
formed in Spain the tasks once done by the Moors and re¬
turned home enriched by their labor. In Andalusia, whose
decline began later, foreigners continued to play that role
until the end of the eighteenth century. At Montilla, near
Cordoba, in 1698 there were 118 Frenchmen in a population
of about 10,000; all were young workers, with 90 of the 118
under thirty; 81 worked in bakeries, 10 were coppersmiths,
and 14 others were still looking for work. A century later in
Osuna, another small Andalusian town with about 15,000
inhabitants, two-thirds of the foreigners were Frenchmen,
more than half of whom were single men; almost all were
humble laborers.5
The quest for labor for domestic service and other occupa-
io6 Power, Work, and Wealth

tions held in low regard introduced the novel problem of

slavery. Slaves, to be sure, could be found in this period at
Naples, Amsterdam, Nantes, and Bordeaux, but in Spain
alone did the phenomenon attain such large dimensions.

SLAVERY: SERVICE, PRESTIGE, PROFIT

It is difficult to estimate the number of slaves in modern
Spain. Antonio Dominguez Ortiz reckons that there were
around 100,000, or 1.25 percent of the population, at the
end of the sixteenth century. It is likely that their number
increased in the first third of the seventeenth century, then
reached a ceiling, and diminished in the second half of the
same century, becoming negligible in the course of the
eighteenth century. This hypothesis is based on both logical
reasoning and quantitative evidence.
First, the logic: the period 1570—1640 was the most favor¬
able period for an increase in the number of slaves in Spain,
because the two best sources of supply, the Moslem world and
black Africa, concurred to supply the Spanish market. The
victory of Lepanto (1571), followed by some successful raids,
and the War of Granada on the Peninsula’s own soil furnished
several thousand new Moslem slaves. Philip II’s assumption
of the Portuguese throne in 1580 led to an invasion of Spain
by Portuguese slave traders, who had a virtual monopoly of
the traffic at the time; Lisbon became the center of an impor¬
tant trade in African blacks to Seville, other Andalusian
towns, and beyond to Madrid. Other routes linked the Lis¬
bon slave market directly with Valladolid, Salamanca, and
Medina del Campo. On the other hand, after 1640, during
the long Portuguese war for independence and the period that
followed, Spain was closed to Portuguese suppliers, while the
expulsion of the Moors and the decline of Spain’s naval power
in the Mediterranean dried up the Moslem source of slaves.
 Power, Work, and Wealth 107

Austrian victories over the Turks in the 1680s only temporar¬

ily replenished the stock: two thousand Turks and Greeks
were then sold at Cadiz.
The available statistical data confirm this thesis. Seville
makes an excellent observation post. Albert N’Damba, using
baptismal registers (a logical tactic, since slaveowners were
careful to have their slaves baptized, if only provisionally),
was able to trace the arrival of adult slaves in two parishes of
Seville (including the most populous one, Santa Maria del
Sagrario). He found that importation of black slaves climaxed
about 1614—1615, then declined: out of 264 black adult
slaves, men and women, baptized in those two parishes be¬
tween 1600 and 1621, 221 were baptized before 1615: an
average of almost fourteen a year until 1615, barely more than
seven between 1616 and 1621. Berbers and Turks, on the
other hand, were more numerous from 1616 on.
For the rest, Claude Larquie’s curves of slave baptisms
between 1650 and 1700 in three Madrid parishes, including
both adults and children, are revealing. Despite some high-
points between 1680 and 1695, these three curves show an
irremediable decline. In all three parishes the peaks came in
1662—1663, then in 1675.
This tendency toward diminution is explained, we have
seen, by a decline in the supply, reflecting the less favorable
trend in warfare and a shift of the slave trade toward America.
Obviously, slavery could have renewed itself, since the child
of a slave mother was viewed as a slave. Albert N’Damba has
calculated that out of the 1,398 slaves baptized in his two test
parishes between 1600 and 1621, 649, or 46 percent, were
infants born into slavery. But the conditions for natural in¬
crease of slaves seem to have been much more favorable in
Seville and Andalusia than in Madrid, for example, due, as
we shall see, to differences in the slave regimen or way of life.
io8 Power, Work, and Wealth

At Madrid, by contrast with Seville, slavery had no vitality,

“slavery was merely a custom that survived,” and in the three
Madrid parishes he studied Claude Larquie never found as
many as twenty baptisms, even in the best years. Yet those
three parishes had 12,000 homes. The two Sevillian parishes
studied by Albert N’Damba, on the other hand, with less
than 3,500 homes, baptized an average of 66 slaves a year
between 1600 and 1621, with a maximum of 170 in 1614.
True, Madrid, although the capital, doubtless had fewer
slaves than Seville, but the Madrid slave contingent did not
renew itself as well as that of Seville. Other factors were “the
flight of slaves, the manumissions, and the royal policy of
making ever greater use of slaves in the state galleys and
impressing some for such service, which deprived slaveown¬
ers of all desire to renew their stock.”6 I might add that
Spain’s growing poverty made the import of this “luxury
product” more difficult.
Naturally, even when the institution was most flourishing
(1570—1640), slaves were very unevenly distributed over
Spanish territory. There seems to have been an almost com¬
plete absence of slaves in the Atlantic northwest and in
Catalonia. Contrary to a statement of Vincenta Cortes which
refers, it is true, to the period of the Catholic monarchs, I do
not believe that at Valencia “the institution was in its last
throes”: Inquisition trial records prove the presence of
numerous “Turkish” slaves in seigneurial houses at the begin¬
ning of the seventeenth century. Slaves were quite numerous
in the great towns of the Castilian plateau, first Valladolid
and Toledo, later Madrid. We can safely assert that there were
several hundred slaves in Valladolid when Philip III had his
court there (1601—1606), and that total must have been
reached by the middle of the sixteenth century, in the time of
Charles V. There were several hundred slaves in Madrid in the
 Power, Work, and Wealth 109

seventeenth century; the 347 slave baptisms found by Claude

Larquie in three parishes for the period 1650-1700 do not
permit a more precise estimate.
Even smaller Castilian towns had slaves at that period; at
Palencia, for example, parish registers record several baptisms
of black or Moorish slaves, men and women, between 1557
and 1663.
It was in Andalusia, however, that slaves were most
numerous; towns like Seville, Cordoba, Malaga, Granada,
and later Cadiz were centers of slavery, and the servile ele¬
ment represented a far from negligible proportion of the
entire population. The estimate of 14,670 slaves out of
439,362 inhabitants (or about 3 percent) in the archbishopric
of Seville in 1565 is probably too low, although it was after
1570 that the greatest increase came. The percentage of
baptized slaves in the population of the parishes of Santa
Maria del Sagrario and San Ildefonso in Seville between 1600
and 1621 was more than 9 percent; true, half of the baptisms
were of adults or grown children, but the birthrate was much
lower among slaves than for the rest of the population. Albert
N’Damba certainly does not exaggerate when, using extrapo¬
lations and cross-checkings, he suggests a figure of 6,000
slaves out of a population of about 120,000, or 5 percent, for
Seville in 1620. Elsewhere during the Reconquest, 10,000
Malaguehos were reduced to slavery, creating an important
stock; the same occurred in Granada. In those two towns,
consequently, the typical slave was white, whereas he was
black in Seville and in Cordoba where, for the reign of Philip
III, N’Damba found no less than 3,500 notarial acts dealing
with slaves!
These chronological and quantitative considerations are
necessary, but do not constitute the essential part of our study
of the problem. What interests us above all is the role of the
I IO Power, Work, and Wealth

slave in the Spanish society of his time, and the relations that
were established between Spaniards and slaves.
In order to assess the role of slaves, we may begin by
asking who were their masters. N’Damba has shown that
churchmen had a large place among the slaveowners at Seville
and Cordoba. At Seville the two archbishop-cardinals of the
beginning of the seventeenth century, Fernando Nino de
Guevara, first, and then Pedro de Castro y Quinones, both
owned at least one slave. The canons of the cathedral also held
slaves, as did parish priests and ordinary priests, like the
curate of Sagrario and his sacristan. Nuns even had female
slaves to serve them in their convents: “May 13, 1606, at
Santa Maria del Sagrario, the nuns of the monastery Madre de
Dios attended the baptism of their common slave Maria, an
adult of Berber origin. On April 5, 1614, at San Ildefonso,
there were baptized four women of black race: Ursula, Maria,
Margarita, Maria Magdalena, slaves of Dona Isabel de la
Plaza, Dona Maria de Belen, Dona Maria Arias, and Dona
Maria de San Martin, respectively, all being professed nuns of
San Leandro.”7 It is a pity that the same author’s quantitative
study of Cordoba is not yet finished.
In Old Castile far fewer churchmen held slaves, but some
did, like certain canons of Valladolid and even parish priests
like the bachiller Jeronimo de Naldo, curate of San Pedro,
who in 1570 bought a young mulatto of eleven or twelve
years of age, “neither a thief, nor a runaway, nor sick or
dirty.” At Palencia, Bishop Fernando Miguel de Prado in
1591 baptized an adult slave living with him, Antonio, “a
native of Fez.” Similarly, Canon Bias Zapata at mid-century
baptized Juan, “aged 20 and a native of Alexandria.” In
1574 the archdeacon of Cerrato also baptized a slave belong¬
ing to himself.
 Power, Work, and Wealth 111

These are isolated cases, however. Perhaps there had devel¬

oped a negative view of slavery within the Church that led to
the gradual disappearance of the institution. In this connec¬
tion, the statistics obtained by Claude Larquie at Madrid for
the period 1650—1700 are suggestive: of 347 slaves baptized
during this period, only five belonged to clergy, often to
chaplains of noble houses. It is very different from the An¬
dalusian situation. I believe that chronology as well as geog¬
raphy helps to explain the disparity.
The nobility owned slaves in greater numbers. At Madrid
they had a virtual monopoly: 87 percent of the slaves bap¬
tized in the three parishes cited above belonged to nobles,
and mostly to the high nobility: the dukes of Albuquerque,
Arcos, Bejar, Camina, Gandia, Lerma, Medinaceli, Medina
Sidonia; the counts of Fuenclara, Oropesa; the marquises of
Almazan, Astorga, Colares, Las Cuevas. In this they followed
the example of princes of the blood. During the stay of the
court at Valladolid in 1557 — 1558, a good dozen or so young
slaves, black and white, belonging to the princess of Castile
and Prince Carlos, were baptized. At that period or even
earlier, a duke of Osuna or a count of Benavente possessed
slaves. The great lords appeared to vie with each other in the
matter of holding slaves: at Madrid, the count of Oropesa had
eight baptized; the duke of Albuquerque, four, in 1673; the
marquis of Astorga, four, in 1678 and 1682.
The Sevillian parishes studied by N’Damba were not aris¬
tocratic residential quarters. But there is every reason to
think that in Seville too, the nobility dominated the market
for slaves, as was unquestionably the case in Cordoba. In
these two Andalusian metropolises the middle-level and
petty nobility also sought to own slaves. Rare was the vein-
ticuatro who did not own some: between 1600 and 1608,
I I2 Power, Work, and Wealth

Antonio de Arnejo, veinticuatro of Seville, had baptized ten of

his blacks! Originally he had three adult blacks who had
numerous children; discounting the likely deaths, Antonio
must have possessed fifteen slaves between those two dates. A
little earlier at Valladolid, and later at Cadiz, the same pat¬
tern of slaveholding appears among the regidores.
Royal officers of the army or the administration, them¬
selves often nobles, were not left behind: corregidores, adminis¬
trators of the Casa de Contratacion at Seville (the president,
treasurer, accountants, superintendent of customs), alcaldes
de Corte, letrados, obviously, for example, the president and
members of the Councils and Audiencias, majordomos, offi¬
cers of the army or the fleet, and even officials of minor rank
like alguaciles or bailiffs.
We are forced to conclude that at least four-fifths of the
slaves were owned by people who did not engage in produc¬
tive activities: aristocrats or petty nobles, churchmen, and
officials. The function of the slave, then, was to provide
domestic service and prestige, that is, to be “decorative.” In
the words of Claude Larquie: “Everyone must have a black in
his palace. . . . They [the slaves] inhabited palaces, homes,
and suites. They performed the daily chores, most menial
tasks, and played the role of submissive and affable confi¬
dants. Better than free domestics, they showed off, in the
manner of a sumptuous carriage or a magnificent tapestry, the
owner’s vainglorious wealth and luxury. . . . Yes, slaves were
above all a luxury.”8
“But they were not just that.” This was doubtless true.
Artisans and merchants probably asked more of their slaves
than to be symbols of prestige. To be sure, at Madrid, in the
second half of the seventeenth century, artisans and merchants
constituted only 10 percent of the slaveowners. At Seville,
however, during its boom, they must have been more numer-
 Power, Work, and Wealth 113

ous. Among the slaveowners identified by N’Damba appear

cloth merchants, traders in drugs, cloth shearers, dyers, sil¬
versmiths. From their slaves merchants and artisans obtained
either labor or, in those cases where they allowed their slaves
to work at some trade and earn a wage, a more or less
considerable portion of their earnings. This system, which
seems to have been highly developed at Cordoba and Malaga,
gave such slaves, called cortados, a relative freedom, since
they worked on their own account; for the owners they repre¬
sented a certain sum of capital, whose rate of return cannot
yet be calculated.
Slaves might also constitute a source of profit in the mea¬
sure that their children augmented the master’s capital, for
fructus sequitur ventrem: “Our sources show that female slaves
effectively contributed to the increase in the number of their
owners’ slaves. . . . They produced regularly, as needed, new
slaves through birth.” We note that 47 percent of the 1,398
slaves baptized at Sagrario and at San Ildefonso between 1600
and 1621 were slaves through birth in Seville, a fact that
confirms the statement of N’Damba, who gives specific
examples of fruitful slaves.
We should add that female slaves might also bring their
owners the wages of pleasure. N’Damba found in Cordoban
registers acts of sale of ten black women to the town house of
prostitution. It goes without saying that many other female
slaves shared the beds of their masters and thereby added to
their store of slaves.
On the whole, economic motives, though not absent, were
at least less important than others. For the rest, the slave was
a luxury article because he cost dear. I have written elsewhere
that their price (between 30 and 100 ducats in the sixteenth
century) seemed to me low; this is true, no doubt, with due
regard to the worth of a human life. But the social cost was
114
Power, Work, and Wealth

high: in 1570 or 1580 a journeyman had to work for a whole

year to earn 70 ducats. The seventeenth-century prices of 150
or 200 ducats are misleading, for by that time the ducat was
only a money of account, devalued by galloping inflation. We
must also distinguish between the prices paid for blacks,
generally preferred for their good character and docility, and
for white slaves, Berbers and Turks. But the statistical treat¬
ment of the prices of slaves has not yet evolved to the point
where we can draw conclusions.
What was the condition of the slave, what were the rela¬
tions between him and his master and free men in general?
These, it seems to me, are very important questions.
The slave, there can be no doubt, was considered a human
being, endowed with an immortal soul. That is why new
owners had them baptized as soon as they acquired them,
sometimes provisionally, in cases where they might already
have been baptized, or within a few days after birth, in the
case of the newborn. Often masters served as their slaves’
godfathers and godmothers, giving them their names; slaves
could also be godfathers or godmothers.
The marriages of slaves (a subject to which I shall return)
took place according to the canonical dispositions, with the
publication of three banns. Slaves were fully accepted as wit¬
nesses to marriages. Finally, masters assumed responsibility
for the expenses of a slave’s burial and a mass with the corpse
present, which was the rule at Seville and doubtless
elsewhere. Frequently they had other low masses or even sung
masses or, when the deceased was a young child regarded as
pure and certain of salvation, thanksgiving masses.
So far, so good. But acknowledgment of the slave as a
completely human being before God is one thing. The condi¬
tion of his daily life is another. The slave was deprived of
juridical responsibility and could not testify, except perhaps
 Power, Work, and Wealth ”5

those who were cortados. This fact already set him apart from
other men. For the rest, it is not easy to reply to our ques¬
tions.
For example, we know almost nothing about possible cor¬
poral punishments or mistreatment. Claude Larquie sketches
a pretty sombre picture of conditions in Madrid of the Dec-
adencia, but admits that “the slave was free from the hard and
cruel conditions which he had experienced in antiquity and in
the Middle Ages.” He adds, however:

The slave was always suspect to society as a whole. The color of

his skin, his customs, his accent, made him a pariah. He was
completely a marginal being who lacked structures, who was
totally uprooted. He was forbidden to use his language. . . .
These marginal beings had no family life. True, the Church had
proclaimed that the slave could contract marriage, even invito
domino (against the master’s will), but in practice the egotism of
the masters made such unions impossible. The marriage registers
are silent on this point. Marriages of slaves were extremely rare.
The decisive factor needed to make marriage possible was for both
slaves to be domestic servants of the same master, and this rarely
occurred. Even in such cases obstacles remained. Marriages did
not take place. Only concubinage and transitory unions were
possible and tolerated. For the majority of these men and women,
the only options were transient couplings or celibacy.

In effect, out of forty-four baptisms of slave children, Larquie

finds only one child born to a married couple. He adds that
the slave population, uprooted, cut off from its traditions,
“offered very little resistance to death.”
This sombre picture is correct in all essential respects.
N’Damba’s calculations show that the slave population was in
fact very fragile: in twenty-one years, in the two Sevillian
parishes studied by him, there were 900 deaths of slaves out
of a total of 3,631 deaths, or almost 25 percent, while slaves
116 Power, Work, and Wealth

figured in only a little more than 9 percent of the baptisms

and a little more than 3 percent of the marriages. Obviously,
we have no reason to depict the lives of the slaves as idyllic in
other places than Madrid.
Yet we have enough data to affirm that the lives of many
slaves were much more “human” in towns like Seville and
Cordoba in the seventeenth century than in Madrid. To begin
with, real possibilities for family life existed there: at Sagrario
and San Ildefonso between 1600 and 1621, Albert N’Damba
found no less than 230 marriages of slaves among 720
baptized adults, a very high proportion, especially since there
was a very clear sex balance in favor of females. Equally
remarkable, N’Damba notes several marriages between slaves
and free black men or women, on the one hand, and between
black men and white women, on the other, the inverse being
very rare. This leads N’Damba to write that “it appears that
even in the choice of spouses, slaves were not limited by racial
barriers.” The claim needs to be qualified, but not disre¬
garded. I may add that marriages between slaves of different
masters were relatively frequent. At Cordoba, where a similar
slave regimen prevailed, notarial registers even furnish exam¬
ples of masters who were anxious to purchase a slave’s child in
order not to separate mother and child.
We must not exaggerate the possibilities for such family
life. At Seville, only 74 out of 649 baptized slave children, or
11.4 percent, were legitimate. In the cases of the others, we
know only the mother: an unmarried slave.
There remains the all-important question of the possibility
of achieving freedom. I have turned up a number of acts of
manumission at Valladolid and Palencia, but the prospects for
manumission seem to have been better in Andalusia. We
shall have a better idea of the situation there when N’Damba
completes his exhaustive study of the notarial archives of
 Power, Work, and Wealth "7

Cordoba. Manumissions were frequently made by testament,

for services rendered over long years. But an important pro¬
portion, perhaps more than half, of the slaves who obtained
their freedom acquired it by purchase. However, it appears
that other slaves than cortados obtained their freedom by this
route. We need to know, therefore, how other slaves managed
to collect the money needed to purchase their freedom.
Slavery became extinct in the course of the eighteenth
century, in the first place, through failure to replenish the
stock; second, through the flight of slaves; and even more,
later on, through manumissions. Its passing was all the easier
because in Spain slavery never corresponded to a mode of
production. Spain’s adherence in 1817 to the ban on the slave
trade affected only America. A slow process of race mixture
served to dilute in the Spanish and especially the Andalusian
population the ethnic traits imported by Moors, Turks, and
blacks over a period of two centuries. American Indians were
mere curiosities; only some twenty or thirty appear in
N’Damba’s baptismal statistics; in fact, they were visible
only during the first few years after the Conquest.

ATTITUDES TOWARD WORK

This passion for domestic servants attests to the fact that
Spain was a rich country which, like the industrial Europe of
our own time, sought workers for its heavy and menial labor,
and which continued that search even after its wealth had
fled. It attests, too, to a mania for display, some of whose
other expressions we shall note in the next chapter. Finally, it
suggests a tendency on the part of Spaniards—one that may
have even preceded their wealth—to surround themselves
with people to “make things for them,” in the words of
Americo Castro. Very early, it seems, foreign travelers and
attentive Spaniards noted this people’s lack of interest in
118 Power, Work, and Wealth

manual labor and, more generally, their poor opinion of

labor. The humanist Fernando de la Torre remarked upon it
as early as 1455; Francesco Guicciardini—who wielded a
venomous pen, to be sure—wrote that Castilians, although
subtle and astute, were not distinguished in the mechanical
or liberal arts; all the artisans at the court, if we may believe
him, were foreigners. He obviously exaggerated when he
claimed that Castilians regarded commerce as shameful, for
at the time he wrote the merchants of Burgos were looked up
to in Flanders. But his claim that the country’s poverty
sprang not from the quality of its soil but from the dislike of
its inhabitants for labor has the support of Spanish witnesses.
Cellorigo, for example, wrote: “The thing that most hinders
our people from engaging in the legitimate activities so im¬
portant to the public weal is the great honor and authority
enjoyed by those who shun labor.”9
We find innumerable statements of this kind, in docu¬
ments of a statistical character as well as in subjective impres¬
sions. Take the great demographic and economic inquiry
ordered in 1561 by Philip II, who wished to have a better
knowledge of his realm. A count was made in each town and
village; this count gave, together with the name of each head
of family, his profession or function: At Valladolid, the pro¬
portion of heads of families who had a declared occupation
was 40 percent; at Burgos only 48 percent. Rare were towns,
like Segovia, then an important cloth-making city, where the
percentage exceeded 70 percent. Closer to our own time, we
have the testimony of Theophile Gautier who, unlike Guic¬
ciardini, loved and admired Spain: “Everyone is conscien¬
tiously busy doing nothing: gallantry, cigarettes, the making
of quatrains and octaves, and cards, above all, suffice to make
life pleasant. ... In general, Spaniards regard work as some¬
thing humiliating, unworthy of a free man.”10
 Power, Work, and Wealth “9

Was it a matter of laziness? Only superficial observers

thought so, and the English travelers of the age of En¬
lightenment did not make that mistake. In 1776 Henry
Swinburne, rightly stressing regional differences, wrote that
“the Catalonians appear to be the most active, stirring men,
the best calculated for business, travelling, and manufac¬
tories.” But Old Castilians “are laborious, . . . the Biscayners
are acute and diligent.” “The New Castilians are perhaps the
least industrious,” a charge of which Townsend acquitted the
Andalusians, although he found them to be “the great talkers
and rodomantodoes of Spain.” Yet Swinburne remarked that
“thousands of men in all parts of the realm are seen to pass
their whole day wrapped up in a cloak, standing in rows
against a wall, or dozing under a tree.” A contradiction? Not
at all. Swinburne offered an explanation that still holds for
many underdeveloped countries, the lack of any incentive for
activity: “The poor Spaniard does not work, unless urged by
irresistible want, because he perceives no advantage accrues
from activity. As his food and raiment are purchased at a
small expense, he spends no more time in labour than is
absolutely necessary.” And Swinburne found examples of con¬
trary behavior in Catalonia and elsewhere, in Alava, for
example, a region which moved him to enthusiasm: “I cannot
find words to express its wonderful fertility [he is speaking of
the plains of Alava], the crowds of villages in sight on all the
little eminences, the noble woods that stretch round the
cornlands, and the happy, busy looks of the crowd which we
met returning from the market; every cottage has its little
garden, neat and flourishing.” It was the same in Biscay: “The
little towns are full of good houses. . . . These manufactories
and undertakings diffuse opulence among the middle class of
» 11
men.
The testimony of Townsend, ten years later, confirmed that
I 20 Power, Work, and Wealth

of Swinburne, sometimes only by implication: writing about

towns where he found manufacturing activity, even if those
towns (such as Zamora and Guadalajara) were in regions that
were poor at that period, he made no mention of the
phenomenon of beggary, which he found shocking elsewhere.
But he greatly admired Catalonia, the activity of Mataro, “a
flourishing sea port,” the prosperity of a region where the
inhabitants worked “early and late,” where “the farms are so
many gardens.” Having just left Valladolid, half ruined, he
deplored the “torpid indolence” of the inhabitants of many
villages in New and Old Castile, but affirmed that the con¬
struction of the canal of Castile, then in progress, was reviv¬
ing numerous towns. This, he claimed, was already the case
at Medina de Rioseco, where “commerce is progressing and
manufacturers are beginning to flourish, especially those of
serge.” In Asturias he found a population that was active
because it was free: there was not a plot of ground that had
not been visited by the plow. The lowlands yielded maize,
the highlands wheat. On the contrary, the latifundia of An¬
dalusia and New Castile coincided with idle lands, underem¬
ployment, and banditry.
Cadiz at the time of Swinburne’s visit (1776): a haunt of
vice and banditry where the brigands lorded it in the streets.
Exit Swinburne. Ten years later Townsend found a proper,
civilized town where the laws were respected. A great hospice
or “general workhouse” had collected all the beggars—men,
women, and children—and put them to work or in school.
They numbered 834 in 1785. Availing himself of the consid¬
erable stock of tools possessed by the establishment, the gov¬
ernor had given work to many people who lived at home. The
secret was a change in government: the count of Xerena, who
wished to avoid bloodshed and allowed banditry to spread,
had been succeeded by the energetic and active O’Reilly.
 Power, Work, and Wealth I 2 I

Alicante was to be similarly transformed by Francisco

Pacheco.12
Was the supposed Spanish disdain for labor a rhetorical
figure of speech, a literary construct, or an adjustment to a
lack of opportunity for lucrative labor, with activity succeed¬
ing indolence when that situation changed?
Actually, certain forms of labor such as work on the land
were always considered honorable in Spain. The Alcalde de
Zalamea of Calderon de la Barca proclaimed the equality of
the honor of a peasant and that of a captain, even an hidalgo.
In the provinces of the northwest, where all the inhabitants of
certain villages regarded themselves as nobles, work on the
land never caused forfeit of nobility. The same was true of the
two Castiles; there, economic inquiries made in the sixteenth
century reveal, poor but proud hidalgos themselves led the
plow under the burning sun.
Public service, identified in Spain for centuries with the
royal service, the study of letters, and the sea (the road of
conquest and large-scale commerce), offered fields of action
which did not damage and sometimes even enhanced reputa¬
tion. Only the mechanical professions, which assumed the
continual use of one’s hands, and dealings in money inspired
scorn and sometimes even repulsion over the centuries: a
sculptor like Esteban Jordan, establishing a mayorazgo for his
daughter Magdalena, stipulated that it would lapse if she
married a man “of mechanical or base profession.’’13
For Spaniards of the Old Regime, labor, even if remunera¬
tive, was not an end in itself. Labor might be the necessary
condition for a decent life, but excess in work should be
avoided. We must dismiss the legend of interminable days of
labor, of years made up of identical days, all devoted to labor.
A large block of time was always reserved for diversion. At
the end of the eighteenth century, after Pope Benedict XIV
122 Power, Work, and Wealth

recommended a reduction in the number of public holidays,

the archbishop of Toledo reduced the number of holidays in
the diocese. After that reduction, there remained 94 feast
days (including Sundays), to which must be added the parish
feasts, the occasional corridas, the Mondays off demanded by
artisans, apprentices, and day laborers as free time. This
comes to 170 idle days in the year. But the workday itself was
short: rarely longer than six hours, according to Townsend,
who deplored the fact and declared that as a result Spain
could not meet international competition. Even the prosper¬
ous manufacturers of Barcelona did not have a very long
workday: it was seven hours in 1786.14 This was an ancient
reality of Spain: a seventeenth-century alcalde de corte de¬
plored the fact that construction workers and day laborers in
the country worked only seven hours in the winter, four in
the morning and three in the afternoon—and those seven
hours included time off for breakfast and a snack.15 Let me
add that Sunday was strictly observed as a day of rest. Court
proceedings testify to the vigilance of alguaciles in enforcing
respect for it, even against Caballeros if need be. The ruthless
nineteenth century still lay in the future.
The Spanish ideal, then, was in fact absence of work, the
contemplative life, “the merrymaking and promenading to
which all aspire that they might be well regarded,” and which
some enjoyed thanks to the income from titles and landed
estates. Work can mean deprivation of freedom, and the
Spaniard, whatever his political structures, was over his long
history essentially a free man. Theophile Gautier understood
this; he found the idea “very natural and reasonable . . ., that
God, wishing to punish man for his disobedience, could
think of no greater punishment to inflict upon him than that
he must earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.” And Gautier
added concerning the Spaniards: “Pleasures like ours, gained
 Power, Work, and Wealth 123

by dint of pain, fatigue, tension of spirit and application,

they think are bought at too dear a price.”
For the Spaniards, as for other Christian peoples, work was
definitely a curse, a condemnation. But the peoples of the
north, remolded by the Reformation, gradually discovered
that the complement of labor could be wealth and sought in
wealth effacement or oblivion of the curse. The Italians man¬
aged to evade the curse by their virtuosismo, their supreme
gifts as artists and their skill in commerce, which long al¬
lowed the Venetians and the Genoese to dominate the
Mediterranean, while Florentines and the Genoese, again,
became the masters of Europe in the area of high finance.
Nothing of this kind occurred in Spain.

HISTORICAL INTERPRETATIONS:
AMERICO CASTRO AND CLAUDIO SANCHEZ ALBORNOZ
Two great Spanish writers, authors of two admirable books,
Americo Castro and Claudio Sanchez Albornoz, both cited
the Reconquest in order to explain the solution which the
Spaniards found for the problem of work and wealth. The
solution was to continue to view work as a curse, to accept it
with dignity when it could not be avoided, and to seek
wealth by less ordinary ways, by ways through which the
virtu, the personal valor, the explosive “I” of the homo his-
panicus, or perhaps his good fortune, like the marvelous sign
of his destiny, could affirm itself. Certainly none could claim
that the Spaniards, from the time of their first conversion,
have respectfully bowed their heads before the curse of
Genesis.
But Americo Castro and Claudio Sanchez Albornoz diverge
and even clash as soon as they attempt to explain in detail the
historical process that has molded the Spaniards. For Americo
Castro, the productive activities capable of promoting wealth
I24 Power, Work, and Wealth

and development in return for persevering effort were early

condemned in the minds of Christian Spaniards because they
regarded them as the activities of the vanquished. Moslem
Spain had a brilliant civilization which shone with all the
refinements of the Orient; its cities, immense by the stan¬
dards of that time—think of Cordoba and its perhaps one
million inhabitants—were great emporiums of international
business, thriving seats of industrial production, centers of
avant-garde culture. The Spanish Moslems were masters of
the techniques of irrigation; in the south of this last headland
of Europe, they acclimated eastern plants (apricots, ar¬
tichokes, melons, and many others); they knew the art of
working leather and metals, constructed palaces whose stone
and stucco had the delicate lines of lace; cultivated bodily
hygiene (you can still see the Arab bathhouses in what was
once Moslem Spain, from Gerona to Merida); and they orga¬
nized an exchange economy based on a sound money. Chris¬
tian Spain was a barbarian country; its little towns were only
temples and fortresses, its sons were ignorant, knowing only
how to cultivate a few traditional plants by ancient methods
or to drive their flocks before them. The book of science was
closed to them, and theirs was a simple faith. Yet the
barbarians got the upper hand: from the beginning of the
thirteenth century their final victory was certain. They drove
the civilized Moslems southward and captured their cities one
by one, and the caliphs of Cordoba became figures in a wax
museum.
What of the Jews? They administered public finances,
assessed and collected taxes, and were at home in the myster¬
ies of trade and money; their lively intelligence made them
useful officials and diplomats, their curiosity about the secrets
of nature made them valued physicians. But they formed
small segregated communities and were forbidden to share in
the government of cities. They did not know how to make
 Power, Work, and Wealth
I25

war and sometimes betrayed their own people. In fine, their

wealth excited the jealousy of the much more numerous
Christians, who periodically attacked their houses and prop¬
erty. Their posture was always that of a vanquished people.
All this explains the title of Americo Castro’s book in its
original form: Spain in Its History: Christians, Moors, and
Jews. The two subject castes were very useful for the perfor¬
mance of necessary tasks, but did not possess values that
could be socialized. Since the production of wealth was the
work of the vanquished, it was not an index of essential
worth. The supreme values were faith and courage, the values
of the conquerors. The Hispano-Christian acquired the full¬
ness of his historical consciousness as a warrior and conqueror,
living as the master of “people who made things for him.”
Techniques and labor were booty, as rich as the precious
metals of the Indies would later become. The world of things
made by man and the riches yielded by the earth, he be¬
lieved, could be had through courage and a strenuous effort.
The Christian grew accustomed to losing contact with things
and the need for transforming them, for he was absorbed in
the conquest and peopling of vast territories and in the or¬
ganization of a state in perpetual growth, while he had at his
orders people who ensured his daily survival. Then came the
wealth of the Indies, permitting history to unfold in the same
direction, perpetuating Spain’s acquisition of things that she
herself could not create. Persons became “monoliths standing
in the desert of useful and tangible things,” all the more so
because Christian Spain arose in the most savage portions of
the Peninsula, savage because they were the least Romanized,
the most thinly settled. The Spaniard convinced himself that
reality was what he felt, believed, imagined. He filled the
world with heroic reverberations. Don Quixote was born and
grew.
Americo Castro placed all his talents at the service of his
I 26 Power, Work, and Wealth

vision. The philologist in him surveyed the illimitable spaces

of Spanish vocabulary, compiling several thousand words of
Arabic origin and stressing their particular function, for the
majority were technical words employed in construction, ag¬
riculture (especially irrigation agriculture), manufacturing,
the art of war. The literary critic marshalled his memories of
what he had read, cantares and coplas, Lope de Vega Quevedo,
Luis de Leon, Cervantes, to extract from their works the most
illuminating citations. The historian recalled many
significant episodes of the Spanish epic. This splendid effort
was not in vain. Undoubtedly we now understand better
what ancient habits gave rise to the Spanish passion for
domestics and the disdain for manual labor. The Spaniard
may well have been involuntarily influenced by reminiscences
of the Judaic faith, by the cherished hope of the Promised
Land. He became an unstable man, having no fixed point
save in himself, because he was a man charged with a mis¬
sion. I must add that my twenty years of study of Spanish
history make it impossible for me to be completely convinced
by Americo Castro’s brilliant synthesis.
The first edition of Castro’s work appeared in Buenos Aires
in 1948. Eight years later, in the same city, there was pub¬
lished a very large book by Claudio Sanchez Albornoz, who
had gone into exile in Argentina after the Spanish Civil War.
Its title was Spain: An Historical Enigma.
Sanchez Albornoz felt he had to reply to Castro’s book.
Castro’s conclusions weighed like a fatality on Spain’s future.
Definitively molded by centuries of contact with Moor and
Jew, the Spaniard, impervious to rationalism, would forever
preserve his aristocratic and religious prejudices, and Spanish
history could not escape its destiny; it was, in essence, “the
history of a religious belief and sensitivity, and of the gran¬
deur, misery, and follies that they engendered.”
 Power, Work, and Wealth I27

Sanchez Albornoz rejected this pessimistic diagnosis and

its implied predictions of misfortune. Castro’s thesis seemed
to him both simplistic and incorrect: the Islamic and Judaic
heritage was less decisive and burdensome than Castro be¬
lieved. The characteristic traits of the Christian Spaniard, of
his psychic, political, and economic life, had defined them¬
selves very early in history, in regions where there were few
Moors and Jews, and where the Christians, therefore, could
not depend on them or their techniques “to make things for
them.” Only toward the end of the eleventh century, after the
capture of Toledo in 1085, did the Christians become rulers
over numerous Moors and Jews. But the latter were estab¬
lished in a small part of the territory subject to the crown of
Castile; they were rare north of the valley of the Duero,
almost nonexistent in the Cantabrian mountains. Not until
even later, after the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212),
could the Christians be certain of their military superiority
over the Moslems and develop a consciousness that they were
conquerors.
Yet the whole course of Spanish history from the start of
the Reconquest to the seventeenth century proves that
Spaniards sought wealth, power, and honors by means that
generally ignored the ways of labor: Castilian society was
virtually free from the contagion of feudalism. ‘An island of
free men in feudal Europe,” it remained for centuries a fluid
society of open classes because the enduring struggle against
the Moors long kept open the possibility of a rapid rise in
class, together with the hope of booty: lands, flocks, arms,
jewels, the possibility of achieving position, for it was neces¬
sary to organize and administer the conquered lands. Each
victorious push of the Reconquest toward the south or east
enriched the crown, by virtue of its royal prerogative, with
immense lands deserted by the Moslems. Thus the king be-
128 Power, Work, and Wealth

came the chief and ever renewed source of favors and could
bridle the tendencies which, north of the Pyrenees, led to
feudalism. At the same time, thanks to the razzias (raids),
the Christians acquired a taste for jewels, precious metals,
fine cloth which they could secure without the aid of the
crown, plunder which they could carry away and place in
safety from the Moslem counteroffensives. Royal service and
war were thus the favored roads to fortune, and numerous
commoners rose by one or the other means to be Caballeros;
the caballero villano became a typical figure in Castile, the
purchase of a horse and arms the most lucrative possible
investment, and life in the dangerous zones of a moving
frontier the opportunity for rapid promotion of which men
dreamed. Thus physical stamina, willpower, loyalty, audac¬
ity, achieved a higher place in the scale of values than reason¬
ing power, common sense, or manual skill—and the Moor or
the Jew had nothing to do with it.
Later, during the whole of the great pause in the Recon¬
quest between the capture of Seville and the fall of the king¬
dom of Granada, the civil wars took up where the Reconquest
had left off; the chiefs of the two parties, wishing to acquire
soldiers and clients, distributed vast domains, creating a new
class of landed proprietors and making possible the
spectacular gains of such upstarts of power as Alvaro de Luna,
the Giron Pacheco brothers, Arias Davila, and the constable
Velasco, who all grew fabulously rich in a few years. Still
later, the American epic offered endless possibilities of the
same kind; there was no break in the continuity between
Reconquest and Conquest; 1492 ended the one and began the
other. It was always the same virtues that created power and
riches. On this level of explanation, Sanchez Albornoz agrees
with Castro: for the Hispano-Christian, peace was never as
productive as war.
 Power, Work, and Wealth i 29

But the thesis of Sanchez Albornoz does not end here, for
he wishes to take the measure of all Spanish history, and
history never stops. When circumstances became more favor¬
able to productive activities, the Castilians slowly converted
to the tasks of peace. During the sixteenth century and most
of the next century, perhaps even later, there existed a Castil¬
ian industry, first stimulated by the continual increase of
wool production, then by the demand of American colonists
ready to pay large prices for European products: Seville,
Medina del Campo, Burgos, became great commercial cen¬
ters and Castilian merchants traded on an equal footing with
foreigners.
Later, in the second half of the eighteenth century, there
arose a Spain governed by reason, where maritime commerce
freed from anachronistic impediments made large progress,
while manufacturing advanced feverishly: Barcelona and
Catalonia in general had their silk, cotton, and wool manu¬
factures, using the most modern English machines, to which
local artisans added improvements; at Madrid there was the
large tapestry factory of Santa Barbara, founded in 1720, and
a factory for making saltpeter; at Seville, the tobacco factories
employed 1,700 workers; manufactures arose in Biscay and
Guipuzcoa, and even in once depressed towns like Guadala¬
jara, Ocana, or Zamora there appeared factories making hats,
coarse cloth, serges, and niter.
Some recent historical research confirms this vision of
Spain. As early as 1516, a deputy to the Cortes from Madrid,
Rodrigo de Lujan, addressed to Cardinal Cisneros a remarka¬
ble memorial in which he showed the possibility of Spanish
industrialization through processing raw materials at home,
especially wool; in this memorial he also sketched a theory of
added value and of employment. The kingdoms, he ob¬
served, lacked only one thing: activity.16 Forty years later, a
i 30 Power, Work, and Wealth

memorial of Luis Ortiz elaborated a true mercantilist pro¬

gram. Some of the demands of the Comuneros, which have
been studied by Maravall and Perez, and the intensive re¬
search of Jean-Paul Le Flem in the principal cloth city,
Segovia, show that these programs rested on established
interests, on a developing industry and bourgeoisie. Again,
Jorge Nadal has shown that the movement of industrializa¬
tion at the end of the eighteenth century, considerable in
Catalonia and the northwest, had its projections in other
regions, at Malaga, for example, where arose a center of heavy
industry.17
Each time, however, an unforeseen historical conjuncture
of external origin stifled these potentials and caused the
Spaniards to return to their old models for achieving power
and success. First was the election of the Spanish king, al¬
ready heir to immense territories, as German emperor at the
very time that the Reformation was being launched. The
Spanish economy, left without defense against foreign compe¬
tition, was sacrificed to the grand imperial policy, to the long
vain effort to restore Christian unity, linked more or less
confusedly with Hapsburg dreams of hegemony. So strongly
did the rising national forces feel the threat that under the
leadership of Toledo they developed a violent campaign of
opposition to the election of Charles as emperor, a prelude to
the great crisis of the Comuneros.
Later, at the opening of the nineteenth century, after fifty
years of rapid progress, the Napoleonic invasion transformed
the friends and admirers of France, the afrancesados, into
collaborators, traitors to their country; it unleashed a very
premature movement of independence in Spanish Amer¬
ica—a movement whose catastrophic consequences are
glaringly evident today—stifled the economic revival, and
 Power, Work, and Wealth 131

produced a sick Spain where once again the only road to social
ascent was the conquest of power. In a country ruled by a
frivolous or infantile monarchy, pronunciamento and civil war
were the ultimate means of achieving a reputation rapidly,
and the army was the natural vehicle of the pronun ciamento-.
behold that melancholy nineteenth century during which
Spain was abased to the last place among European nations
and the Spaniards reduced to the level of picturesque survi¬
vals, survivals capable only of inspiring romantic emotions.
Thus the age-old relation between power and wealth deci¬
sively molded the Peninsular sensibility: in the course of
those centuries, Spaniards often sacrificed the interests of the
community to their appetite for power and preferred to see
Spain grovel in misery and chaos rather than renounce power.
To disguise their assaults on power, they often assumed the
hypocritical mask of a crusade. Since power was the surest
means of success in this world, the Spaniards grew accus¬
tomed to expecting everything from the State, regarded as
the magic-working State, the State-Providence. The Church
itself fell into a panic each time it feared it had lost the
protection of the State. Spanish individualism also served the
power of the State, because the Spaniards, in their unre¬
strained desire for equality, admitted only one supreme au¬
thority, that of the State. Already in Cervantes’s time, a
young man who wished to succeed in this world had only
three options: Iglesia, o Mar, o Casa Real. The Church, obvi¬
ously, because it was constantly associated with official enter¬
prises and had long been open to people of humble, origins;
the sea, with its perfume of adventure, road to the Indies and
large-scale commerce, whose prestige saved it from the
odium attached to banking, retailing, and manufacturing;
and the royal service, whose attractions require no comment.
132 Power, Work, and Wealth

Once the Reconquest had been completed, only the peasantry

remained on the margins of the complicated game of power
and wealth which it nourished with its labor.
Catalonia gave Sanchez Albornoz the opportunity to cite
an example to prove the rule. In Catalonia, annexed for a
time to the Carolingian Empire after a period of profound
Romanization, feudalism developed, creating hierarchic
structures based on law and custom. A bourgeoisie then ap¬
peared, gradually disintegrating the feudal structures and
creating conditions for access to honor and wealth through
work and production of consumer goods. Soon rid of the
problems of the Reconquest and of the guarding of a frontier,
the Catalans took no part in the American adventure. They
were, however, generally inclined to military enterprises: to¬
gether with the Aragonese, they conquered the islands of the
western Mediterranean, and as early as the Middle Ages had
been driven to seek their fortunes in commerce and as arti¬
sans. Thus developed an industrious, hard-working people
who, although their mental makeup was not very different
from the Castilians, were more open to the concepts of scien¬
tific inquiry.

POWER, PASSION, AND THE POOR

We are back to our seigneurial models. Perhaps we now
understand better why, down to the nineteenth century (and
perhaps down to our own day), the Spaniards were accus¬
tomed to expect everything, including wealth, from the gov¬
ernment, and why they had the passion for power. Alvaro de
Albornoz put it this way in the 1920s: the man the Spaniards
admire is one who governs, it little matters by what means.
They admire a man de rihones (with kidneys), such a man as
Espartero, Bravo, Murillo, or Narvaez, because he has glory
 Power, Work, and Wealth 133

and reputation and doesn’t go hungry. This process, exacer¬

bated by the dispute over the monarchy, reached its limits in
the nineteenth century: the parties no longer asked them¬
selves if they deserved power, they wished simply to acquire
it. Moreover, the loss of power was no longer an honorable
effect of the law; it had the sense of confiscation by force and
entailed prison or exile. Castelar might well despair whether
Spain could ever become a “State of law.”
But these were ancient strategies. Let us retrace our steps.
Speaking of the last part of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth, White affirmed that the influ¬
ence of the court was unlimited in Spain, and recalled that
during the reign of Charles IV the fountainhead of power and
honors was Queen Maria Luisa de Parma, whose lovers (who
included not only Godoy but a vapid fop like Mallo) could
rise in a few months to the highest rank. More generally,
“with the exception of three stalls in every cathedral, and in
some collegiate churches, that are obtained by literary com¬
petition,” it was impossible to attain a post of high rank and
income without recommendation from the court. White di¬
vided the claimants into four categories: “clergymen who
aspire to a prebend; lawyers, who wish to have a place on the
bench of judges in one of our numerous courts, both of Spain
and Spanish America; men of business, who desire to be
employed in the collection of revenue; and advocates, whose
views do not extend beyond aCorregimiento’.’18 Success in such
aspirations required winning the king’s favor, that is, the
favor of Godoy, Prince of the Peace, by any means available.
Now, the court of Charles IV was the culmination of a long
period of rule by validos or royal favorites, beginning with
the duke of Lerma, under Philip III, and exemplified by the
count-duke of Olivares, Luis de Haro, Nithard, and Albe-
134 Power, Work, and Wealth

roni, among others. The only interlude was the long reign of
Charles III, when competence and merit again became all-
important. But the long reign of the valido had so firmly
established the habit of arbitrariness that it had become the
norm.
Even when a favor was merited, as was often the case in
the sixteenth century, the powerful had to grant it, because
only they could enable man to leap all hurdles. In such a case,
social hierarchies meant little. The viceroy of Naples, Pedro
de Toledo, a remarkable man and a member of the great
family of the Alvarez of Toledo, wrote to Francisco de los
Cobos, secretary of Charles V and sprung from the petty
nobility, asking Cobos to nominate his son Luis as archbishop
of Santiago de Compostela: “Since we, both parents and chil¬
dren, enjoy no other protection and favor than your own, we
pray you for the favor of bringing this business to a happy
issue.”19 The Spanish grandee adopted a humble tone in ad¬
dressing a man whose origin was much less illustrious than
his own, a man transformed by royal favor and raised from
poverty to riches. At the time of his death (1547) the fortune
of Francisco de los Cobos amounted to at least 347,000
ducats. He built up this fortune in thirty years, and when he
died Cobos had an income of 53,000 ducats, which put him
on the level of the greatest lords of the time: the Condestable,
the count of Benavente, the duke of Escalona, the duke of
Alba, the duke of Medina Sidonia, and even the marquis del
Valle, that is, Hernando Cortes himself, the conqueror of
Mexico. Here, then, we have two great fortunes, one built by
service to the king, the other by conquest. Compare them
with the fortune of Simon Ruiz, the great merchant-banker
of Medina del Campo. A genius for business and fifty years of
effort in favorable circumstances brought him a fortune of
363,000 ducats, according to an inventory of 1597. Between
 Power, Work, and Wealth 135

1547 and 1597, however, the price index had at least dou¬
bled, which means that Simon Ruiz’s fortune was only half of
that of Cobos or Cortes. In addition, Ruiz’s annual income
was clearly inferior to theirs.20
Now, all this may seem to involve only the higher strata of
society, including the high clergy, for access to bishoprics,
cathedral chapters, or even good curacies ensured a comfort
that work of other kinds did not necessarily provide. But
these strategies had repercussions throughout the social
hierarchy, high and low, and even among the poor wretches
who patiently waited to receive their subsistence from the
holders of power and riches. And these attitudes perhaps
persisted to the end of the nineteenth century. Between rich
and poor there existed what might be called an objective
complicity: from the rich, the poor expected only the means
of subsistence, while the rich, by aiding the poor, their pub¬
lic, justified their wealth and merited the Kingdom of
Heaven. Save in such critical junctures as epidemics or
famines, and sometimes even then, an affective relationship
existed between rich and poor. As late as 1863 George Bor¬
row, whose critical posture toward Spain is unmistakable,
wrote: “I will say for the Spaniards, that in their social inter¬
course no people in the world exhibit a juster feeling of what
is due to the dignity of human nature, or better understand
the behavior which it behoves a man to adopt towards
his fellow-beings. I have said that it is one of the few coun¬
tries in Europe where poverty is not treated with con¬
tempt. ... In Spain the very beggar does not feel himself a
degraded being, for he kisses no one’s feet, and knows not
what it is to be cuffed or spitten upon.”21
Borrow contrasted the situation in Spain with that in other
European countries. We know, in fact, that in the sixteenth
century there arose in Europe a “modern” attitude toward the
136 Power, Work, and Wealth

poor which proposed a determined struggle against mendi¬

cancy and sometimes resorted to the extreme solution of
locking beggars up. In northern Europe, where the regula¬
tion of Ypres (1527) seems to have set the pattern, for it was
imitated by other towns of the Netherlands and many Ger¬
man towns (Augsburg, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and so on),
this was accompanied by a tendency to laicize public assis¬
tance; separated from the Church, public assistance became
the concern of the bourgeoisie, who rationalized it, seeking
either to eliminate the poor or transform them into a work
force. In England, the long series of Poor Laws (laws regard¬
ing the poor and certainly against the poor) had the same
tendency from Elizabeth’s time. When the burden on the
parishes became too heavy, these laws sought to make the
compulsory labor of able-bodied poor in workhouses a source
of revenue. But the evolution of attitudes in Catholic coun¬
tries was not very different; Jean-Pierre Gutton recently
demonstrated this with the case of Lyon. Even Italy did not
escape this tendency; Bronislaw Geremek has shown that
from the end of the Middle Ages several Italian towns devel¬
oped public assistance policies designed first to limit mendi¬
cancy and later to lock up paupers. Venice adopted the same
policy after 1520 and, after 1530, “repression of mendicants
assumed organized forms, becoming systematic and violent.”
At Rome itself, Pope Pius IV “began a thoroughgoing strug¬
gle against mendicancy;” and after 1580 Sixtus V opted in
favor of confining mendicants. But the solution proved
ineffective and transient.22

THE RICH, THE CHURCH, AND PAUPERISM

Down to the nineteenth century Spain in general presented a
very different attitude toward pauperism; even during the
Enlightenment, when certain towns sought to rationalize
 Power, Work, and Wealth
l37

their public assistance by consolidating hospices and imi¬

tated England by turning their hospices into workhouses,
these establishments displayed much greater benevolence
toward the poor: Barcelona and Cadiz prove this assertion.
Not that the burden of supporting the poor was lighter
here than elsewhere. All the available data suggest the con¬
trary. The counts of households in the epoch of Philip II
revealed that the number of poor people in the population
fluctuated around 10 percent, and this took account only of
the sedentary poor, to whom one must add the large floating
mass of vagabonds and beggars. Thus, if the census of 1561
shows 634 poor heads of families out of 6,644 in Valladolid
(9.54 percent), and 647 out of 4,409 in Segovia (15.74 per¬
cent), these towns in reality supported several thousand
paupers. Moreover, during the crisis of 1575—1577 the
curates of Valladolid estimated the number of poor heads of
families at 2,500. Towns like Salamanca, Burgos, and
Medina del Campo presented similar percentages, and we
shall see that pauperism was even more extensive in the towns
of Extremadura.
Frequently these paupers were aged people, women, and
especially widows: at Medina del Campo in 1561, 83 percent
of heads of poor families were women, widows in their major¬
ity, and at Segovia the percentages were 60 percent women,
and 56.7 percent widows. Everywhere widows represented
one of the most important groups among the poor. The
distribution of paupers among the different parishes, and
even within the same parish, was very uneven; as a result
there arose true wards of the destitute. Thus the sedentary
poor formed only 3 percent of the population of the parish
San Benito el Viejo, but 38.6 percent of that of La Mag¬
dalena, where they were especially concentrated in the out¬
skirts. At Segovia, in some parishes the poor represented less
138 Power, Work, and Wealth

than 10 or even 5 percent of the population, while in San

Martin the percentage rose to 24.2 percent and in San
Clemente to 35.8 percent. We must reject, therefore, the
idyllic image of the poor living in humble cottages beside
palaces whose lords came daily to relieve their poverty with
paternal charity. Wealth and poverty did not dwell side by
side. But the poor performed a social and religious function
by affording the rich an opportunity to perform good works.
The percentages of paupers given above coincided with an
epoch of relative prosperity. By contrast, the seventeenth
century, especially after 1620, was an epoch of impoverish¬
ment, and the proportion of paupers inevitably rose. It re¬
mained large in the eighteenth century, and English travelers
like Swinburne and Townsend found thousands of beggars in
the towns, especially in episcopal towns: Leon, Oviedo, Val-
/

ladolid, Avila, Salamanca, Cordoba, Seville, Malaga,

Granada. In 1803—1804, years of drought, a little town like
Ciudad Rodrigo had 800 paupers; Saragossa supported 1,055
persons; Salamanca fed 2,000 out of its 18,000 to 19,000
inhabitants, and provided cheap bread to 8,000 people in
straitened circumstances.23 In normal years, several thousand
poor people were fed daily in important towns like Granada,
Cordoba, and Seville, and several hundreds in small towns
like Oviedo.
The wealth of the sixteenth century had multiplied the
number of charitable foundations created by great lords, mer¬
chants, letrados, and prelates. These foundations sometimes
were devoted to preventive welfare (for example, the endow¬
ment of poor orphans), but also addressed themselves to im¬
mediate problems: the care and education of foundlings; the
distribution of bread, soup, and other alms to the needy. The
parishes, confraternities (some of which maintained hospi¬
tals), and religious orders administered these foundations. In
 Power; Work, and Wealth 139

the sixteenth and in the first half of the seventeenth century,

however, many hidalgos still personally participated in public
assistance, caring for the sick poor in hospitals, for example.
Only during epidemics did fear dictate repressive conduct
toward the poor: expulsion of foreigners and the immurement
of the sick in hospitals outside the walls were customary
measures. This was done during the great epidemic of
1597—1599 at Santander, Bilbao, Segovia, Valladolid, Toledo,
and Pamplona. The mendicant who lived in the streets in¬
spired fear because, according to the belief of the times, the
disease was transmitted “by the corruption of the air.” In fact,
at this time a great migration of poor people took place
toward the Meseta from the Atlantic northwest, Galicia,
Asturias, and Biscay. Even in such circumstances, however,
there were some expressions of a sense of solidarity with the
poor. Public authorities tried to feed the poor, all the more
because they believed that famine favored the spread of the
epidemic. At Bilbao on September 10, 1598, the municipal¬
ity decided to levy a tax proportional to one’s wealth, “for on
such occasions the rich should and can be obliged to aid the
needy.”24
At other times Spaniards continued to display solicitude
for the poor, who were regarded as models to be emulated on
the eve of death. Although the regulation of Ypres was im¬
itated by some Spanish towns (Salamanca and Zamora, and
Valladolid to some degree), opposition to such a regulation as
Vives had proposed to eliminate indigence remained very
strong and was partly successful. Monks like Domingo de
Soto and Lorenzo de Villavicencio even believed that such
regulation of the poor came close to being heresy. Soto, for
example, argued that “to subject the poor to an ordered
administration in return for relieving their needs is to dispar¬
age personal freedom.” In his view, it was not licit to censor
140 Power, Work, and Wealth

the life and habits of the poor or to limit their right and
freedom to move about as they pleased. Other religious, like
the Benedictine Juan de Robles, were of contrary opinion:
poverty was not a choice but a sad and painful state. The
State, in its turn, intervened from the end of the sixteenth
century because it believed that the growth of pauperism
threatened the demographic equilibrium and health of the
population. Some arbitristas of the seventeenth century, such
as Pedro de Valencia and Gonzalez de Cellorigo, went so far as
to advise compulsory labor. In no other part of Western
Europe, however, did the bourgeois conception of poverty
make less headway.25 Even when misery spread throughout
Castile, even in the age of Enlightenment, the medieval
conception maintained its hold: the eighteenth-century
bishops embodied this spirit when, at best accepting the
intervention of the civil power, they insisted they must con¬
tinue to perform their charitable mission so long as there
were poor people.
The impoverishment of the seventeenth century had in fact
reduced the number of laity capable of supporting the chari¬
table foundations or creating new ones. But the clergy—at
least the great orders and the prelates—had escaped this
impoverishment, and the bishop’s residence became the
channel through which the work of charity often flowed.
Now, the Tridentine injunction with regard to residence was
generally well observed by Spanish bishops: “The Spanish
dioceses were rarely without their pastors. If some bishops
were absent from their dioceses, these were the most impor¬
tant ones, because their titulars, being persons of high rank,
had other functions which made their presence impossible.
Such was the case with the prelates of Toledo and Seville.”26
This was as true in the eighteenth as in the seventeenth
century. With revenues of more than 200,000 ducats (To-
 Power, Work, and Wealth H1

ledo), more than 100,000 (Seville), or more than 50,000

(Santiago, Saragossa, Granada, Valencia), Spanish bishops
could expend large sums on charity, except, perhaps, in
Galicia or Catalonia, where their revenues were much
smaller. They were not found wanting in the performance of
their duties: Simon Bauzo, bishop of Mallorca, twice sold his
silver plate to relieve the famines of 1613 and 1617—1618; at
Seville in 1679 Cardinal Ambrosio Spinola daily distributed
14,000 loaves; the patriarch of Valencia, Ribera, spent
756,000 escudos on alms during the forty-two years of his
prelacy. In the eighteenth century Bourgoing, Laborde, and
Townsend all observed the same largesse. Townsend paid
tribute to these manifestations of charity, but repeatedly de¬
plored their effect, that is, the proliferation of beggars in
rags: “What incitement can we find here to industry? For,
who will dig a well when he may draw water from the
fountain? Is he hungry? The monasteries will feed him. Is he
sick? An hospital stands open to receive him. Has he chil¬
dren? He need not labor to support them; they are well
provided for without his care. Is he too lazy to go in search of
food? He need only retire to the hospicio.” And he concluded:
“Dry up the fountains, and each man will immediately begin
to dig a well.”27
Townsend’s words are a patriotic homage to the spirit of
enterprise that was transforming his native isle. But
Spaniards were made of other stuff: the bishop of Cordoba fed
perhaps as many as 7,000 persons on some days, and distrib¬
uted an average of thirty fanegas of wheat a day,28 equal to
about 1,500 kilos of bread. At Seville the archbishop and
twenty convents daily distributed food. At Granada the arch¬
bishop provided for the rearing of 440 orphans, and his daily
distribution of bread aided 5,000 persons (including 3,024
women) on one occasion, and 4,000 on another. Why should
142 Power, Work, and Wealth

one work? The paupers of the hospice of Cadiz were better fed
and lodged than the humble day laborers who worked freely
in the city, and they enjoyed ninety-two days of vacation a
year! Instead of striving for wealth, the poor were content to
receive their subsistence from the powerful.

AN ILLUSTRATION: EXTREMADURA
Extremadura is the poorest of the Spanish regions. It was so
in the past and it remains so today. In Extremadura, in the
northern part of the province of Caceres are found the Hurdes,
Luis Bunuel’s “Land without bread,” one of the most desolate
districts of Europe, condemned by centuries of isolation to
biological shipwreck. The two provinces that compose Ex¬
tremadura, Badajoz and Caceres, rank last among Spain’s
provinces in the per capita income of its inhabitants. So
conscious was the Franco government of this poverty that it
concentrated its first great effort to improve land by irrigation
in this region: this was the plan of Badajoz, using the waters
of the Guadiana River; after twenty years of application, its
results remain inadequate if not negligible.
This poverty is of ancient date. Exiled to the ends of
Europe, backed up against the Portuguese mountains that
shut off the western sea, on the margins of the great routes,
Extremadura has never been able to count on commerce and
industry to compensate for the deficiencies of its soil.
Whereas Catalonia sought its fortune in the Mediterranean,
and the Castiles had great commercial towns like Burgos,
Medina del Campo, and Seville, busy textile centers like
Segovia and Cuenca, and great silk factories like those in
Toledo, Extremadura had nothing but the most traditional
kinds of agriculture and cattle raising—except, perhaps, for
the raising of pigs. And the transhumant sheep industry even
had disastrous consequences, for the powerful members of the
Mesta, insisting on their privileges, their rights of passage
 Power, Work, and Wealth H3

and pasture, further reduced the small portion of land left to

the peasants, a portion already limited by the domains of the
order of Alcantara. The sixteenth-century censuses ordered by
Philip II measure this poverty. The percentage of poor people
here exceeded that found everywhere else. At Trujillo in
1557, 859 out of 1,912 heads of family, or 44.9 percent of the
total, were poor, and they included several hidalgos, four
cahalleros, and six donas, wives of Caballeros. Poverty afflicted
numerous artisans, shopkeepers, and even educated men: two
bachilleres, a licenciado, an attorney. At Caceres in the same
year, the percentage of poor people was smaller, 25.7 percent
(382 households out of 1,481), but still considerable, and it
greatly increased in the second half of the sixteenth century,
reaching a figure of 42 percent (698 households out of 1,662)
in 1597. What is more, in this region the great landowners
very early occupied the communal lands de facto or de jure,
and restricted the cultivable area in the interests of sheeprais¬
ing, the foundation of their wealth. In the eighteenth century
the corregidores of the towns of Extremadura singled out this
phenomenon as the major cause of the grave crisis that af¬
flicted the region. On top of this, Extremadura was fright¬
fully ravaged during the Portuguese war for independence
(1640—1660), and A. Dominguez Ortiz counted some score
of villages that were completely depopulated or ruined dur¬
ing this period. Indeed, the government had to exempt many
villages of Extremadura from paying alcabalas (sales taxes) for
several successive years.29 A land of poor, miserable folk who
had no hope that work could improve their condition, Ex¬
tremadura was an exaggeration of Spain.
We understand now why from the outset this region
supplied an important part of the migration to America.
Although Extremadura held a very small proportion of the
Spanish population in the first half of the sixteenth century
(probably less than 5 percent), Richard Konetzke estimates
*44 Power, Work, and Wealth

that the extremehos composed 14.7 percent of the emigrants in

the period 1509-1538.30 What is even more remarkable, the
majority of the conquistadors, the great discoverers of distant
lands and unknown oceans, the predatory, indestructible ad¬
venturers of genius who made the Spanish Empire, came
from Extremadura: Hernando Cortes, the conqueror of
Mexico, was from Medellin; Francisco Pizarro, the man who
seized the Inca Empire with two hundred comrades, came
from Trujillo, like the other Pizarros, like that Garcia de
Paredes who played a leading role in the discovery and con¬
quest of New Granada, like Orellana who, in a small boat
that he himself constructed, first made the improbable de¬
scent of the Napo River and then of the Amazon to its mouth.
Nunez de Balboa, who discovered the Pacific after an epic
crossing of Central America, was born at Jerez de los Cabal¬
leros, a little town lost in the mountains of the southwest;
Pedro de Valdivia, who vainly tried to break the resistance of
the most indomitable of Indian peoples, the Araucanians,
came from Villanueva de la Serena. These are all towns or
localities in Extremadura. Work could do nothing for these
men; plunder had to be the source of their wealth.
One must go to Trujillo, where Alfred Hitchcock should
have made his film, The Birds. There is no other town in
Europe, perhaps, that is so densely peopled by birds: storks
who reign over the plaza mayor, crows on the Moorish castle,
pigeons, and various kinds of sparrows. And the speech of
birds is the most common speech in Trujillo. But it is also a
town of stone, and here stone celebrates the power of laymen.
The poverty of the region did not allow the construction of
those superb cathedrals whose mass crushes the multitude of
surrounding houses below. Besides, Trujillo had no im¬
portance before the Spanish Conquest. On the heights of the
town, at the western end of the hill, is a nameless square,
 Power, Work, and Wealth *45

with disjointed paving stones, that is fragrant with the scents

of the nearby countryside. From this square issues a street
that climbs still higher. Here, between two walls, behind the
bramble and the scutch-grass, is a stone arch on which is
carved a coat of arms, a bear under a pine tree, holding a slate
between its paws; it is all that remains of the probable birth¬
place of Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru. This ruin
may stand for the famished youth of a humble bastard, the
fruit of an hidalgo's fleeting amour with a servant girl.31
Now look at the plaza mayor. For the people of Trujillo it is
the rendezvous of victory. Over it presides Pizarro, to whom
the town owes its fame. Abused by many historians, reduced
to the level of a ruffianly soldier, this ruthless man was also a
founder of towns who was obsessed with the future; beyond
his tragic end, that future became this bronze statue that rises
on the square; it became the palace—a masterpiece of the
Renaissance about to turn into the Baroque—of the mar¬
quises of the Conquest, the heirs of Pizarro’s epic feat, that
also rises there; it became those blazoned houses around the
square, old hidalgo dwellings, with their luxurious portals
and fluted columns; it became the palace of the dukes of San
Carlos, with its monumental facade in which are wedded the
balance and the energy of triumphant Classicism.
Here, amid the vestiges of the past, we find the primary
passion of the Conquistadors, who included so many ex-
tremehos. It was a passion for wealth, wealth which they could
not hope to acquire by labor. Certainly there was a touch of
madness to their projects. But poverty makes the best mili¬
tants and fasting inspires visions. In the quest for El Dorado,
in the assaults of a few hundred men on mighty empires, in
the dream of founding a new Christianity on the ruins of the
Indian religions, there was always a visionary element.
 VI. FESTIVALS, DIVERSIONS,
AND FINERY

WEALTH WAS THE GOAL, wealth rapidly acquired by other

means than labor, by force of arms, official favor,
gambling—it did not matter how—and meant to be spent
rapidly rather than for the creation of more wealth. The
guiding formula of Western societies on the eve of the indus¬
trial revolution—work, profit, capitalist accumulation,
investment—does not apply to Spain, or at least not to the
country as a whole even if, as Pierre Vilar argues, it can be
applied to Catalonia. We must replace it with another for¬
mula: power, wealth, consumption. To be sure, this applies
to the behavior of the upper classes, but their way of life has
such a power of suggestion and seduction that it exerts con¬
siderable influence on that of the “working” class, which,
willy-nilly, does exist in Spain. In that case the formula reads:
work, wages, consumption. Thus, whatever their social ori¬
gin, a great number of Spaniards agree in preferring the
immediate enjoyment of acquired wealth over projects that
require saving and investment. This immediate enjoyment
may be described as “existential” because it is displayed as
well as experienced in certain favored situations: festivals and
diversions. To generalize, we might say that the Spaniards

146
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery
H7

conduct themselves as if they clung to what Kierkegaard

would have called the aesthetic stage of life.
Today’s spectacles are the same, or almost the same, as
those of long ago.
At Valencia in the month of March, people carry through
town the falias, monuments of wood, cardboard, and wax
that may weigh a ton or more. Each falla is the property of a
ward and the fruit of several months of work and a year of
saving; it is also the creation of the artist chosen by the ward
committee. For three days the fallas delight the crowds that
throng the streets. Then in a single night all are burned. The
night takes on the color of flames, the sky becomes a fairy¬
land, an extravagance of sparks, preparatory to the last con¬
flagration, the last and greatest fireworks.
In three days, the ward committees of a city as populous as
Seattle spend the money patiently amassed during a year on
intangible, immaterial, fugitive creations: music and fire. A
people capable of transforming a year’s toil into the frenzy of
an instant, of carrying their taste for show and sound to the
point of absurdity, of joyfully watching their money ascend as
flame into the sky, is a people that knows the meaning of
festival, that was born for festival.
The fallas are a living interpretation of Carnival, whose
significance for the Spain of the Old Regime and its annual
rhythm I have already stressed. But Valencia is only one
among many towns. At Seville in April, at Cordoba in May,
at Granada in June, at Pamplona in July, the money gathered
during a year is consumed in several days’ festivities. There is
not a town or village, however poor, that does not have one or
more festivals that make life more exciting, vibrant. Some of
these festivals have so little in common with the others that
their fame has gone round the world, and people come from
the ends of the earth to see them. These visitors soon come to
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

understand that these festivals were not created for them and
owe them nothing; they are pleasures invented by a
people—Pamplona, Seville—for itself.
Here are two specifically Spanish festivals, profoundly un¬
like, although both add beauty to the bullfight. The San
Fermines (festivals of San Fermin of Pamplona) are an explo¬
sion; there is no other word for it, declares Hemingway. True:
it is the annual explosion, at noon on July 6, of a vitality
contained for three hundred and fifty days, channelled into
labor in an austere, rugged province dominated by small
peasant landholders, serious, hard-working, attached to
tradition, once Carlism’s shock-troops and yesterday Franco’s
best soldiers. For six days, however, work is forgotten, money
and moderation lose all meaning. What are the San Fermines?
A virile festival in which men play all the premier roles: in
the morning, men race in front of the bulls as they are
released and driven through the streets into the arena (the
encierro);1 all day long, men’s orchestras pass through the
streets, followed by men dancers who interpret athletic, es¬
sentially male dances; there are games of Basque pelota played
by men, processions of pehas (groups of friends) before and
after the corrida, marches of toreros. And only men get drunk
in public. Only at night, at the time of the popular dances,
do women return to the foreground. Nowadays foreign
women try to join in the men’s merrymaking; they remain
foreigners and only contribute to the bastardization of the
festival.
It is a Bacchic festival, for wine is present at all moments
to gladden and revive, to relieve the tedium of bad corridas
and celebrate the good ones. It is also a festival of endurance,
for sleep is banned, the gastric functions are exasperated, the
dancing goes on forever. It is a popular festival, too, for the
street, the great theater of the spectacle, is open to all, all the
men can take part in the encierro. The encierro is also the
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery
H9

symbol or summary of the festival: an intense affair that takes

all of two minutes, composed of an enormous clamor that
ascends Santo Domingo Street, swells in Estafeta Street, is
first apprehended by the crowded arena as an indistinct sound
and then as a long cry that the crowd takes up in its turn as
the running boys approach the entrance to the track and the
short menacing gallop of the bulls is heard—with some sec¬
onds of panic when a bull separates itself from the group.
At Seville in the spring, in that aristocratic festival which
celebrates the cult of elegance and beauty, woman returns to
the forefront and again assumes the role of “enchanted idol”
that she played in the golden age of Spain. The Andalusian
dresses, with their multiple flounces and dazzling colors, are
displayed in the backs of open carriages. Through the flowery
alleys of Maria Luisa Park, dark-skinned cavaliers bear on the
rumps on their horses ravishing, haughty girls who know
how to make a smile seem a favor. In the casetas (booths) of
the fair, the dances are not male dances; they make the girls’
dresses open and reveal their white thighs. These are not
dances of the north, expressions of athletes or virtuosi that
speak of strength, calm, skill. The Andalusian dances affirm
sexuality, relate the adventures of desire, its hopes and disillu-
sionments. A belly is offered, refused. Touchings, intertwin-
ings, embraces, rejections. . . .
But the Sevillian festival is also the self-admiring display of
a vanishing old society; and intelligent travelers will salute its
last brilliance with nostalgic pleasure. This particular way of
mounting a horse, of arching one’s back, of turning a skirt,
this particular way of viewing the world, are the last glow of
a privileged way of life that was born centuries ago after the
Reconquest in the great domains of the Andalusian coun¬
tryside, land of horses and bulls, of ancient fortunes built on
oil and wine.
But Pamplona and Seville are only the most famous names.
'5° Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

There are many other festivals. Festivals on the style of Pam¬

plona’s are held at Tudela de Navarra on July 25; at Vitoria at
the beginning of September; at Logrono at the end of Sep¬
tember. At Alicante on the night of the feast of Saint John, as
was done at Valencia three months earlier, they burn bogueras
that resemble j.alias; this night of madness closes the festival.
Between April 22 and 24, the little Levant city of Alcoy,
where the moriscos formed half the population before the
expulsion of 1609, commemorates with a strange festival
confrontations between Moors and Christians that are more
than seven centuries old. At Almeria in August, the girls
wish to be admired just like the Sevillanas, and display their
flounced dresses in open carriages that slowly go up and down
the promenade after the corrida. At Tordesillas, where Joan
the Mad once lived, at the end of September they stage a
bullfight with the bull of the vega] standing firm, the men
await the onslaught of the beast with long lances and finish it
off with these weapons. A savage, barbarous rite, no doubt,
but one that cannot leave one unmoved. Finally, the religious
feasts—which make atheists smile out of pity and scandalize
good foreign Christians because, as always in this country,
they mingle the sacred and the profane in indefinable
proportions—reveal to reflective observers, together with the
movement, color, the sound of today’s life, the works of art,
costumes, and forms of piety of long ago.
These things remain, and they count for much because, as
Julio Caro Baroja suggests, “forms of ritual that have an
aesthetic value resist the erosion of time.”2 Such is the case
with the bullfight, precisely because at the end of the
eighteenth century it was ritualized. The same may happen
with soccer if it chooses to accent its aspect of a spectacle as
much as the game itself. Puritanism, the bourgeois emphasis
on work and output, must weigh heavily upon us; otherwise
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery l5l

why do so many sociologists—Marxists included—regard

these different forms of festival as alienation? Why have so
many historians completely neglected festival and the light it
casts on our past? This is a need that comes down through the
ages, the need for a collective communion. I may add that in
the Spain with which this book deals, the Spain of yesteryear
and of not so long ago, festival held a place in the distribu¬
tion of time that was hardly inferior to that of work. Tomor¬
row, perhaps, quantitative history will learn to measure the
time of festival as it measures prices, wages, the number of
workers, and the hours of labor. For eight years I have been
calling the attention of historians to the explicative value of
leisure activities, more useful than labor in plumbing the
secrets of some old societies. Now, it seems, other historians
have begun to discover these virgin lands of research, even “at
the risk of losing their way.”3

THE PERMANENCE OF FESTIVAL

“Everything was an excuse for a festival,” writes Marcellin
Defourneaux apropos of Spain of the golden age.4 True, and
the statement holds for a very long period, four centuries or
more. “The ordinary years pluck from the string of days the
long-awaited pearls of the festivals sanctified by Cathol¬
icism.”5 The people celebrated with great brilliance the three
Easters (Christmas, Resurrection, Pentecost), the feasts of
Saint John, Saint James the Major, the national patron saint,
the Nativity of the Virgin (September 8), and her Assump¬
tion (August 15). Moreover, every year many towns com¬
memorated with a festival the end of a particularly deadly
epidemic or calamity. The “vow of the five plagues,” pro¬
nounced on September 17, 1599 at the end of an epidemic at
Pamplona, gave rise to such an annual festival. At Santander
a similar vow “to the glorious Saint Matthew” was renewed
I52 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

each year for the same reason. At Valladolid annual festivals

recalled the vow made to Saint Matthew after the great fire of
1561. In this respect, to be sure, only the fact that their
celebrations continued much later distinguished the Spanish
cities from other Western towns. We observe other recurrent
phenomena: at Seville in 1801, during an epidemic of yellow
fever, at the demand of the people the clergy blessed the town
from the summit of the Giralda with the Lignum crucis
(fragment of the true cross), believed to have vanquished the
most terrible plague epidemic of all, that of 1649.
The two events most anxiously awaited everywhere, how¬
ever, were Holy Week and the Corpus Christi. I have already
noted that Holy Week was the occasion for an explosion of
spectacles.6 The celebration of Corpus Christi required a very
long preparation. At Valladolid in the sixteenth century, as
early as January the municipal council designated the com¬
missioners charged with organizing the affair, and several
months in advance these commissioners recruited one or more
representantes de comedia charged with staging the autos sac-
ramentales, needed to give luster to the festival and eagerly
awaited by the multitude. An enormous procession grouped
behind the clergy and the notables the multitude of persons
delegated by each of the city’s households. Writing in 1843,
Theophile Gautier admits that the procession of Corpus
Christi had lost much of its ancient splendor, due to the
suppression of the convents and the religious brotherhoods,
but adds that “the ceremony does not lack solemnity,” and
what was more, “the perpetual handling of fans that open,
close, palpitate, and beat their wings like butterflies seeking
to alight. . . , the picturesque mixture of Gallegos, Pasiegos,
manolas, and water vendors, all this forms a spectacle of
charming animation and gaiety. . . . Then come the banners
of the parishes, the clergy, the reliquaries of silver and under a
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery
*53

dais of cloth of gold, the Corpus Dei in a sun of diamonds of

unbearable brilliance.”7
The religious calendar, however, was not the only source of
festivals. Equally important was the dynastic or political
calendar. Clearly, it differed from the religious calendar, for it
introduced diversity into an immutable, repetitive order. It
was the State, or the sovereign’s goodwill, or the luck of
battles, that regulated the political calendar: princely be¬
trothals and marriages; the births of royal children; even the
monarch’s death, because that brought the accession of a new
ruler; beginning with Charles V, “joyous entries” of kings
into their good towns, in imitation of the Netherlands; visits
or sojourns of the ruling monarch or his heirs; military
victories, so numerous in the sixteenth century, a time of
glory for the Spanish army, but rarer thereafter; assemblies of
the Cortes in the towns selected for that purpose—a very
great event for little towns of the kingdom of Aragon like
Monzon or Tarazona—all of these provided occasions for fes¬
tivals.
Take Valladolid in the sixteenth century. In 1502 Philip
the Fair stayed there with his wife Juana. In 1506, a second
sojourn of the princely couple and a session of the Cortes. In
1508, another session of the Cortes. From November 1517 to
March 1518, 124 days of residence of King Charles, with a
round of festivities following his “joyous entry.” Charles re¬
turned for five days in 1519, then for a year in 1522—1523:
the reading of a pardon for the revolt of the Comuneros and the
meeting of the Cortes produced new collective rejoicings. The
king passed fifty-five days in the town in 1524. In 1525 the
victory of Pavia was the occasion for celebration; in 1527 it
was the birth of the future Philip II; although delayed by
news of the sack of Rome, great festivals celebrated the happy
event, and the Cortes were again summoned in the town. In
!54 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

1530 Valladolid celebrated the crowning of the emperor by

the Pope at Bologna and in 1536 the victory and capture of
Tunis; in 1537 the king returned and there was another ses¬
sion of the Cortes. In December 1538, on the occasion of his
daughter’s betrothal Los Cobos, the king’s secretary, de¬
lighted the town with bullfights, javelin jousting, and tour¬
neys. In 1542 and again in 1544 Charles and the Cortes
returned to Valladolid. In 1547 it was the victory of
Miilhberg. In 1556 and 1557 we have the accession of Philip
II, followed by the victory of Saint-Quentin; two meetings of
the Cortes, in 1555 and 1558, bracket these great events. In
1559 there were great autos-da-fe, viewed as festivals, indeed
as the most spectacular and imposing of festivals; then more
autos-da-fe in 1561. In 1565 there was a visit by the queen. In
1571 news of the great naval victory of Lepanto caused ex¬
traordinary rejoicing. In 1572 new victories of Don Juan of
Austria in the Netherlands, coupled with the birth of a
prince, launched new celebrations. In 1580, rejoicing over
the solution of the issue of the Portuguese succession in favor
of Philip II; in 1592, over the king’s stopover in the town
during his journey to Aragon; in 1594, over the transfer of
the relics of Saint Benedict; in 1596 and 1597, over the
elevation of the town to the rank of city and of the abbey to a
bishopric; in 1598, over the accession of Philip III; in 1601,
over the announcement of the court’s return. . . . And I have
said nothing of many marriages and births, lesser victories,
other autos-da-fe. . . .
In the seventeenth century the validos (royal favorites),
especially the duke of Lerma and the count-duke of Olivares,
multiplied festivities with the obvious intent of exciting ad¬
miration. Olivares, if we may believe one of his foes, spent all
his time inventing balls, masquerades, and farces. In 1623
the arrival in Madrid of Prince Charles, the future Charles I of
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery
l55

England, with a view to his marriage to a Spanish infanta,

launched six months of continuous, splendid festivities. In
1637 the election of Ferdinand III, Philip IV’s cousin, as
German emperor occasioned such brilliant festivities that
they cost the enormous sum of 300,000 ducats. It was a way
of letting Cardinal Richelieu know “that Spain still had
money enough to teach his king a lesson.” Along with these
events, the autos-da-fe continued: there were thirty of them
under Philip IV, eight of which were held at Seville.8
Most of these festivals had a national dimension. We must
take note of the innumerable other festivals that had only a
local or even social character. When Cobos celebrated the
marriage of his daughter on February 6, 1541, with Prince
Philip (aged fourteen) standing as godfather, it was a gala
affair for Madrid, then a quiet little town, with a great
festival in the evening, a concert, dances, and farces. The
organizer of the event was none other than Hernando Cor¬
tes, the conqueror of Mexico.9 On infinitely lower social
levels, the beginning of the year was a time for little parties,
called “dances of candil (candle) and perejil (parsley),” infor¬
mal affairs which brought together a number of families for
all kinds of games and dancing. During these dances the
doors of the house were open and anyone could enter without
having to introduce himself.
Such was the taste for festivities that they arose spontane¬
ously, on the slightest pretext. White gives an example from
the little town of Olvera in the Andalusian mountains; each
evening the parents of the young men whose genealogical tree
he had come to examine to obtain proof of his “purity of
blood” gave a ball in their honor, and numerous couples came
to dance seguidillas, accompanied by singers and guitars.
Finally, in the countryside, as was observed in the begin¬
ning of this book, the rhythms of nature gave rise to a
i56 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

procession of festivals. From the festival of the plow in upper

Maragateria (Astorga region), which began on the last day of
the year and ended on January 1, to the festivities celebrating
the new wine of the autumn, there was an unbroken succes¬
sion of ceremonies with precise rituals; many have preserved
their most salient traits down to the present.

FUNCTIONS OF THE FESTIVAL

It is clear from the above that the festival performed multiple
functions, functions that were indispensable to social har¬
mony. Governmental leaders and social elites were perfectly
aware of that fact. In 1674 Valenzuela, the new favorite of the
unfortunate Charles II, announced his program, “Pan, toros, y
trabajo,” which can be freely translated as “Bread, festivals,
jobs.”10 Sprung from the people, Valenzuela knew very well
that he could be master of Madrid if he fed the people and
satisfied their passions. In 1588, certain Caballeros of Val¬
ladolid, including the count of Osormo, “wished to divert
the town” by organizing a masquerade on horseback. The
next year the municipal council of the same town decided to
hold a bullfight on Tuesday, September 28, “to give pleasure
to the people.” Such action became even more necessary in a
time of public calamity. In September 1580 two regidores of
Valladolid obtained the council’s permission for Juan Ganasa,
the director of a troupe of players, to play fifteen days longer
for the health of the people, “that they may take pleasure in
it, for all are sad and sick.”11 Clearly, the nobility and the
municipal councils believed that their political and social
mission included the obligation to offer amusement to the
multitude.
Quite early, in the second half of the sixteenth century and
in the course of the seventeenth, there arose an almost daily
source of diversion, the theatre, with the opening at Val¬
ladolid and Madrid in 1558 and 1568, respectively, of the
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery
157

rodeos de comedias, where, in spite of opposition, plays were

staged every day except during Lent. The theatre declined in
the eighteenth century as a result of the growing passion for
bullfights, despite efforts to prohibit them (under Charles IV
in 1785 and again in 1805, save in Madrid and Seville). To be
sure, the corrida did not become a daily event but in Madrid
from the nineteenth century the Monday consecrated as the
dia de toros was a general holiday, which of course did not
exclude the holding of bullfights on other occasions.
The festival also had the function of honoring an
individual—the king, a foreign prince, an ambassador, a
visitor of mark, or an unknown traveler—and the form that
this function assumed varied with the time and place. Par¬
ticipation in a tourney, a banquet, or a ball honored the
participants or guests: Henry Swinburne, crossing La Mancha
in 1776, received an impromptu but very courteous invita¬
tion to a country outing where the people briskly danced
seguidillas.12 The festival became a source of prestige, en¬
abling lords or Caballeros to display their splendor, strength,
or equestrian skills; it also presented courtiers with an oppor¬
tunity to show off their wealth.
The festival of religious inspiration exalted Catholic dog¬
mas and lent itself, first, to the propaganda of the Counter-
Reformation, and, later, to the struggle against the spirit of
the Enlightenment. I have already noted how effectively the
feast of Corpus Christi was used to defend the Real Presence;
I may add that Holy Week splendidly illustrated the mystery
of the Incarnation and the Redemption. But the religious
celebration also performed important con juratory, expiatory,
or propitiatory functions with regard to public calamities,
functions capable of satisfying the collective conscience.
Finally, rural festivals almost always had the very clear
motive of protecting the community. Consider, for example,
the festival of the plow in the villages of the upper Mara-
158 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

gateria, as described by Julio Caro Baroja. At the begin¬

ning of the year, after mass, pairs of shepherds dressed in the
fleece of sheep attach themselves to plows which are guided
by other shepherds dressed as women. To the sound of a song
or an orchestra, they trace a long furrow in the ground
(usually in the snow). On the village square the shepherds
(here called compaheros, elsewhere zamarracos) recall the prin¬
cipal events of the past year and the faults of the women of
the village, faults symbolized by the distribution of different
parts of the body of a dead ass: a chatterbox receives the
tongue; a shameless one, the tail. . . . The order of the ritual
may be reversed, but the meaning is clear. The aim is to
ensure the fertility of the soil, of the sheep and goats, but also
to remind the women of their duties. For among the
maragatos women have a primordial role: it is they who man¬
age their households during the long absences of their hus¬
bands, itinerant pedlars who travel all the roads of Spain.13

A NATIONAL FESTIVAL: THE BULLFIGHT

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, foreign
travelers were almost unanimous in remarking the great
fondness of the Spaniards for festivals and amusements.
Clearly, it was not this fact that made the Spain of the Old
Regime unique, but rather the intensity and variety of its
expression. None will deny that the bullfight is a specifically
Spanish sport.
Speaking of the golden age, Marcellin Defourneaux ob¬
serves that “the passion for the bullfight was universal,” and
recalls that the papal interdict of 1575, forbidding clergy to
attend bullfights, at least on religious feast days, had to be
revoked.14 In fact, corridas accompanied every kind of festi¬
val: religious, courtly, university (students at Salamanca and
Valladolid had to organize a bullfight to celebrate the award-
ing of their doctoral degrees). But this passion was much
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery 159

older than the golden age, for the Code of the Partidas (thirteenth
century) refers to it, and it persisted for long centuries during
which the art of bullfighting was being transformed.
At Valladolid, for example, throughout the sixteenth cen¬
tury, with the possible exception of the year 1577, not a
single celebration of Saint John or Saint James took place
without a bullfight. Even in 1504, a year of misery when it
was necessary to sacrifice the customary games of Corpus
Christi, the celebration of the feast of Saint John was accom¬
panied by corridas, with the running of six bulls which two
regidores offered to obtain at their own expense. Indeed, there
appeared a tendency to increase the number of bulls that were
fought: only eight to ten at the two festivals held in 1502 and
1503 or 1506, but nineteen in 1559, and fourteen in 1593.
August 15 and September 8 were often (but not regularly)
dias de toros and, it goes without saying, every special event
presented an opportunity to satisfy this deeply rooted pas-
sion. °
In Valladolid the corridas most often took place in the
plaza mayor, which was closed off by peasant carts, as is still
done today in the majority of villages which lack permanent
arenas; but they were also held in the square of Santa Maria or
in that of la Cancilleria; beginning in 1562, after the great
fire, they were held in the Puerta del Campo. Contrary to
what one might think, these corridas had a popular character
and the bulls were fought by men on foot; this, at least, is the
most likely hypothesis, since foreign travelers of the period
(who were almost all courtiers) do not describe the corridas or
give the names of the participants, although they dwell at
length on such knightly entertainments as tourneys and jave¬
lin jousting. Moreover, we know of contracts for the hire of
mozos (lads) who must “close” with the bulls, and there are
texts that note the death of “several persons,” people of no
consequence whom the informant (for example, the Dutch-
i6o Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

man Henry Cock) does not think it necessary to name.16 In

the same period numerous villages were the scene of encierros,
in which boys raced ahead of the wild bulls, released to run
down the main street of the village between palisades which
protected the crowds. It was a dangerous game: the parish
register of Tudela de Duero informs us that in 1564 four
persons were killed “by the horns of bulls.”17
By the beginning of the next century, however, the bull¬
fight appeared to be changing, becoming transformed into a
knightly entertainment. In the opening years of the seven¬
teenth century the young Caballeros of Cordoba took pleasure
in releasing a bull in the city streets and pursuing it on
horseback; they performed many acts of gallantry designed to
impress the women who looked on from their windows.18
When the court was installed at Madrid, the plaza mayor
became the scene of the most famous corridas, in which the
game played was that of the rejbn (a wooden spear with a steel
point), an equestrian sport that involved planting as many
rejones as possible in the morrillo (protuberance of the bull’s
neck), almost always leaving to the peones the difficult task of
finishing off the animal.19 The corrida was very deadly at this
period, and almost never ended without some victims. But it
was highly regarded by the monarchs and the nobility; there
were 107 royal corridas at Madrid in the seventeenth century,
although the court did not return to the city until 1606.20
After 1715 the corrida lost, together with royal favor, the
prestige it had enjoyed among the nobility. The new dynasty,
of French origin, had little taste for this diversion, which it
considered barbarous. The nobility more and more neglected
the bullfight, which once again became a pedestrian,
plebeian sport. At mid-century there even arose the terrible
game of the tertulia, in which a group of men were hired to
await unarmed the assault of a bull who could choose his
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery 161

victim.21 In Andalusia, however, certain toreros on foot, in

particular Pedro Romero, were perfecting a new fighting
technique from which would evolve the contemporary art of
bullfighting; the matador employed a cape and sword, and
was assisted by picadores and banderilleros. This entirely new
style soon conquered Andalusia: Ronda, Cordoba, Malaga,
Seville, then Madrid, where Charles III seems to have taken
much more interest in the spectacle than did his predecessors.
In 1776 at Cordoba, Swinburne attended a corrida in which,
if he may be believed, the Caballeros played no role because
the animals were not noble enough to be fought with the
lance; but his account is too vague to allow us to draw solid
conclusions. The description of Townsend, who in 1786 at
Madrid watched a corrida in which Costillares took part, was
already much more precise, and the Englishman expressed his
liking for the sport. White depicts a spectacle that is almost
“modern”: when he describes a corrida of Pepe Hillo’s at
Seville, he clearly distinguishes between the cape and the
muleta (a red flag used by bullfighters). Finally, the accounts
of Theophile Gautier, who saw corridas at Madrid and Malaga
in 1843, present a bullfight whose rules are definitively estab¬
lished.22
The success of the new style explains the corrida’s return to
popularity at court, at least in the reign of Charles III; Ma¬
drid in the eighteenth century was the scene of eighty-seven
royal corridas, little fewer than in the seventeenth century.
Caballeros again participated in the sport, and the count of
Miranda from Cordoba, a grandee of Spain, did not scorn
setting foot on the ground in order to kill a bull with his own
hands.
For the extraordinary corridas organized in September
1789, to celebrate taking an oath of loyalty to the young
prince of Asturias, 133 bulls from the best stock farms had
\6i Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

been purchased. Each caballero was assisted by two men on

foot, including the most celebrated toreros of the day, the men
who created the modern bullfight: Pedro Romero, Joaquin
Rodriguez (“Costillares”), and Jose Delgado (“Pepe Hillo ).
On the first day sixteen bulls were slain.23
The beasts that were fought at this period were
monumental. Townsend claims that their horns were of ter¬
rifying size: sometimes a spread of five feet from point to
point! No wonder that thirteen horses were killed at the
corrida of June 18, 1786, which he attended. At Madrid
during one corrida, Theophile Gautier saw fourteen horses
killed, five by the same bull.24
Foreign and Spanish observers alike were impressed by the
extraordinary popularity of the corrida, especially at Madrid
and in Andalusia. Townsend wrote: “The fondness of the
Spaniards for this diversion is scarcely to be conceived. Men,
women, and children, rich and poor, all give preference to it
beyond all other public spectacles.”25 White, a true Sevillian,
observed: “Bullfighting is considered by many of our young
men of fashion a high and becoming accomplishment; and
mimicking the scenes of the amphitheatre forms the chief
amusement among boys of all ranks in Andalusia.” Already
“the whole population of [the ward of] San Bernardo are
adepts in this art,”26 a comment which shows how venerable
is the tradition there, since many of the great contemporary
toreros come from that ward. During the night preceding a
corrida, few of the people of the popular classes slept at home;
from midnight on they took their places in the street to
await, at dawn, the arrival of the beasts, who came directly
from their pasturages. On the occasion of corridas, the Maes-
tranza (preserved in its ancient state down to our time) was
almost always filled to overflowing. Seville, then, already had
its permanent arena. On the day of the bullfight at Seville, all
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery i63

business, public and private, came to a halt. Fifty years later,

Theophile Gautier observed the same thing at Madrid: “No
one at work, the whole city is buzzing. . . . Alcala Street is
crowded with people on foot, horsemen, and carriages.” The
Manolas, Madrid girls of little virtue, pawned their mattres¬
ses in order to be able to ride to the corrida in an open
carriage. Indeed, Gautier saw many women at the arenas.
Long before Gautier, Bourgoing had been amazed by the
almost universal enthusiasm for the sport. The death of Pepe
Hillo, killed in the square of Madrid on May 11, 1801, was
mourned as that of a national figure. There, then, is a passion
that has endured over a period of four centuries, even if its
ritual and modes of expression have been profoundly
modified. I must add one important qualification, however:
this passion has hardly touched northwest Spain, Catalonia,
and the Balearic Islands.27

FROM FESTIVAL TO DIVERSIONS:

DANCE, GAMBLING, AND THE TERTULIA
Festival is an explosion. It cannot claim to occupy all the
time that is left over from work, sleep, love, and works of
faith and charity. Dance, to be sure, can be an element of
festival, but it may also be a diversion without any other aim
than to enliven an evening party or a day of leisure. In Spain
the taste for dancing, maintained intact, unaltered, spans the
ages. And, in contrast to the bullfight, its popularity em¬
braces the whole country.
What is very remarkable is the invariable association,
down to the nineteenth century, of religious celebration and
the dance: the procession of Corpus Christi, for example, was
accompanied at Valladolid by groups of dancers and kettle
drummers. In the seventeenth century, in Madrid and almost
all other Spanish towns, it was followed by masked dancers
164 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

and combined with profane or even lascivious dances such as

the chacona, something that the Jesuit Mariana greatly de¬
plored. At Seville in the eighteenth century, the procession
was accompanied by three groups of dancers: the Valencians
in regional costumes, who performed very lively figures in
which agility and control were most important; then a group
of “swords,” dressed in military uniforms dating from the
sixteenth century, which suggests the age of the rite; and,
finally, a group of young dancers (the seisas, or bursars of the
cathedral), supported by an orchestra, danced right inside the
cathedral. Various religious ceremonies, such as the transfer
of relics, also provided occasion for dancing.
In the majority of cases, however, the dance was a simple
diversion, enjoyed despite the efforts of preachers and even
theologians to repress this pernicious passion. Both tradition
and the tastes of the urban magistrates went counter to these
efforts. Town councils invited surrounding villages to send
groups to present their most typical dances in order to divert
the population or to honor a guest of quality—a prince, an
ambassador, or the king himself. Under these conditions
there were innumerable occasions for the performance of
dances: Henry Swinburne noted that every village resounded
with music, songs, and guitars; and he saw seguidillas danced
in the villages of La Mancha.28 This dance greatly attracted
Bourgoing, but other dances were also performed:
malaguenas, rondehas, fandangos, boleros, and in Castile and
Aragon, jot as, in Catalonia, sardanas. At Teruel in 1753, at
the parties that families organized for themselves and their
friends, the dances performed included seguidillas, jotas (the
Aragonese dance par excellence), minuets, excusados.29 At
Aranjuez Townsend saw a performance of the bolero and the
fandango, which he considered too lascivious, but enjoyable
when done by dancers who avoided vulgarity. At Aviles, in
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery i65

Asturias, he noted that on the occasion of a ball given by

some notables of the province, peasants and domestic servants
were admitted into the hall where people danced minuets,
cotillions, and fandangos. He attributed this circumstance to
“the simplicity of the province.” We know, however, that this
was not an isolated case: even in the palaces, when women
were more numerous than men, domestic servants and farm
workers were invited to come in and joined in the dancing
without embarrassment, quite naturally. Dancing temporar¬
ily abolished social differences.
These reports are from the end of the eighteenth century.
We could multiply them with the aid of citations from
Laborde and Joseph Blanco White. But travel accounts of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, literary sources, and the
pamphlets of religious against the dance show that over a
period of four hundred years nothing changed except prefer¬
ence for particular dance figures. The Portuguese Tome
Pinheiro da Vega, strolling on the banks of the Pisuerga or
over the shady meadow of the Magdalena at Valladolid at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, found song and dance
everywhere: viols and guitars made boys and girls spin and
turn on every grassy knoll. Throughout the country, espe¬
cially in the north, village weddings were the occasion for
interminable balls. It was the same on the night of the feast
of Saint John, which for centuries intimately linked dancing
and the quest for love; there arose spontaneously groups of
men and women dancers who invited passersby to join in
dances which lasted until early morning. This passion has
continued down to our own time.
Gambling was another diversion. The taste for cards is
very old, and gave rise to one of the oldest monopolies of the
Spanish State. For a long time, however, the production of
playing cards was inadequate, for they were regularly im-
166 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

ported from France, and from time to time some clandestine

manufacturing establishment was unearthed. Later, the
monopoly led to the creation of royal factories for making
playing cards at Madrid and Malaga. Gambling went on
everywhere, and everyone played for money according to his
means. Beggars, imprisoned for blasphemy by the Valencia
Inquisition, played at dice or cards with such ardor that they
came to blows.30 In the prison of Leon (1573), there were no
less than eighteen prisoners condemned to the galleys for the
offense of playing at dice; one could certainly measure the
extent of the evil by studying the replies to the inquiry
ordered by Philip II (1572) in all the cities of Castile, with
the aim of obtaining statistical information on the galley-
slaves.31 Every Spanish prison, moreover, held professional
gamblers taken red-handed in some rascality. In the great
cities of Valladolid, Madrid, Toledo, Valencia, and Seville
regular gangs were organized: tahures, fulleros, dobles, muni-
dores, who used every possible stratagem to exploit this pas¬
sion for play. We find shills, card sharks, sleight-of-hand
artists. The Novelas eje7nplares of Cervantes, notably Rinconete
y Cortadillo, admit us into the innermost recesses of the
Sevillian brotherhoods of professional gamblers.
Prohibitions and precautions against gambling were re¬
newed century after century, apparently without much suc¬
cess. A widow of modest means, Catalina Rodrigo, left her
son a vineyard of about twenty hectares, but in order to
secure this little patrimony he had to renounce gambling—
cards, dice, or other play for money; at most, by way of
exception, he could risk a trifle, eight maravedis, on festival
days.32 On a much higher social scale, the rich merchant
Pero Hernandez de Portillo, affirming that many mayorazgos
were lost through gambling, forbade the heir to the
mayorazgo he had just founded to lose more than ten ducats a
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery 167

day at play. An instructive limit, for ten ducats was a great

deal, equal to what a common laborer could earn at that time
by six months of work!33
Gambling did its destructive work in all circles, including
the Church, as the example of Don Luis de Gongora proves:
“This passion for play must have contributed markedly to
Don Luis’s ruin; the satires attributed to Quevedo frequently
refer to this passion; but we need not rely on the testimony of
his enemies to be convinced that throughout his life Don Luis
was an impenitent gambler: Chacon’s notes frequently attest
that Gongora played with his friends of Cordoba, and his
poetry contains an infinite number of allusions and metaphors
which reveal that cards formed part of his daily life.”34 We
may add that King Philip IV, doubtless encouraged by Oli¬
vares, was passionately addicted to cards. It appears that the
gambling virus grew even more, if that is possible, toward
the end of the eighteenth century. When Charles III became
king of Spain, he issued numerous ordinances against playing
for money. However, he brought with him many Neapolitans
who introduced new games, in particular that of betting. The
number of clandestine gaming houses multiplied. The crea¬
tion of the Royal Lottery (1763) proposed to exploit this love
of play, diverting to the royal coffers a part of the profits that
it yielded to private persons. At this period, in effect, play
enjoyed universal popularity, notably in high society. At
Oviedo (1786) the intendant’s home had two rooms for ter-
tulias\ the one assigned to conversation was deserted; the
other, reserved for cards and a lottery game, was crowded. At
Cordoba, again, Swinburne noted that the local nobility
played at cards. At Madrid, Moldenhauer, a guest of the
Countess of Benavente, described her house as a temple of
play; the lackeys played cards in the antechambers, while the
countess’s salon was a veritable casino, where the two bankers
168 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

were a ruined merchant and a secretary of the Inquisition who

was also the countess’s confessor! Thus, despite all prohibi¬
tions, betting and games for money flourished: banca, brelan,
lansquenet (.sacanete), carlita, baceta, flor, fifteen, thirty-one,
forty. All new games were swiftly adopted in Spain: a census
taken in Madrid in 1831 already listed eighty halls for playing
billiards.35
To be sure, playing for money sometimes gave way to more
innocent social games: blindman’s bluff (gallina ciega), made
famous by Goya’s cartoon; the soldier’s game, consisting of
questions and replies which must not use the words “yes, no,
black, white”; the desprop'ositos, in which the players, ar¬
ranged in a circle, murmured into each other’s ear the most
extraordinary words they could think of, after which, from
left to right, the players asked each other questions in a loud,
clear voice, each having to reply with the word which was
confided to him. One could cite many other games. None
found favor with moralists, who thought them pretexts for
gallant whispers or shameless touchings. Their success is yet
another expression of Spanish sociability.
This sociability invented a daily gathering to finish off the
day, the tertulia. The word, it seems, appeared at the begin¬
ning of the eighteenth century, but the reality it designated
existed earlier. Several persons accused by the Inquisition
were charged with making heterodox statements at the
lumbre, that is, around the evening fire where relatives and
friends were gathered.36 In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries the tertulia became a custom throughout the coun¬
try among all classes; in little towns and villages the site of
the tertulia, at least during the summer, was the street, as at
Carcagente in the huerta of Valencia where in the 1720s the
evening chatter was raised to the height of an institution.37
The tertulia was an open gathering, simple and informal.
Describing those of Cadiz in the eighteenth century, Blanco
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery 169

White observes: “Some of the tertulias, or evening parties,

which a simple introduction to the lady of the house entitles
one to attend, are very lively and agreeable. No stiffness of
etiquette prevails; you may drop in when you like and leave
the room when it suits you.” Theophile Gautier says the same
about Granada: “We used to go to a tertulia every evening, to
one or another house, from eight till midnight. ... As you
enter you greet the mistress of the house. . . . These obliga¬
tions satisfied, you go into a corner of the patio to join the
group you like best.” Cards, social games, singing with
guitar or piano accompaniment, dancing, gallantry, and con¬
versation were the customary ingredients of the tertulia.
True, many foreigners found the conversation flat and unin¬
teresting, very different from the discussions of Enlighten¬
ment intellectuals. There were exceptions. The tertulias of
Campomanes stood out by reason of the host’s brilliant and
varied conversation. The soirees of the Cordoban nobility
found favor with Swinburne. Here some thirty families met
each evening in a different house, chosen by rotation; agree¬
able refreshments were served; and there was cheerful, natural
conversation and some card playing.38 There were tertulias of
caballeros, burghers, students, officers, artisans, and priests.
Labor, therefore, had difficulty retaining the time that
remained at its disposal. Such was the seductive power of
festival and diversions that they pressed a continual offensive
against the time assigned to labor: the whole object seemed
to be to rescue as many days as possible from labor, and to
limit the length of the workday so that time was left for
recreation. In this respect the attitude of artisans, jour¬
neymen, and day laborers displayed a remarkable consistency
over time, giving rise to the same recurrent complaints: in
the mid-sixteenth century at Valladolid, men complained of
the effort of day laborers to work less and earn more; an
alcalde de Corte of Madrid, who remained anonymous,
170 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

affirmed that during the winter the workers and day laborers
of the capital worked four hours in the morning and three
hours in the afternoon, less the time taken for breakfast and
lunch; he concluded that they did very little work.39 A cen¬
tury later, we find the same statement: the artisans of Madrid
and Toledo work barely six hours a day. It was enough to
scandalize an Englishman devoted to hard work and produc¬
tion.40 Under these conditions, short-term wage increases
were practically useless. The mass of the population preferred
to work less and enjoy themselves.

FINERY
The Fleming Laurent Vital remarked in 1517 upon the taste
for finery of Spanish women who, he also claimed, made
themselves up heavily. If they could, they wore many jewels,
but the men were not behind in covering themselves with
gold and precious stones. Laurent Vital saw Castilian lords
wearing gold rings set with diamonds or pearls, and above all
large, lovely gold chains; some, he claimed, might be worth
6,000 ducats—a fortune! A century later (1605), the French¬
man Barthelemy Joly was surprised by “the ostentation of
this nation, completely given to external things and outward
show.”41 Indeed, in the nineteenth century the costumbrista
writer Larra, discovering in a pawn shop treasures pro¬
visionally abandoned by a multitude of debtors, and observ¬
ing the procession of borrowers, all anxious to appear to be
what they were not at some ball or rendezvous, despaired:
“How can men live in this way? But what is to be done if the
artisan must appear to be an artist, the artist a public officer,
the public officer a titled noble, the titled noble a grandee of
Spain, and the grandee a prince? How can one stand to live if
he appears to be less than his neighbor?”42
I have shown elsewhere that Valladolid society of the six¬
teenth century delighted in practicing the art of appearances,
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery 171

of using every kind of sign to demonstrate status. The display

of finery and jewels, to begin with: gold bracelets and
necklaces of gold, silver, coral, crystal, garnet, jet; rings set
with precious stones (cornelians, agates, emeralds, rubies,
sapphires); agnus deis and rosaries of gold and crystal;
cameos, reliquaries, medallions, chains large and small.
Next, great attention to dress, with stress on fine materials,
striking colors, and continuous renovation of styles, espe¬
cially of feminine fashions leading from the basquine with a
hoopskirt, which flowered in the years 1540—1550, to the
farthingale, a very costly garment of damask, silk, velvet, or
fustian which came into vogue between 1575 and 1580. Such
was the ostentation in this field that in 1585 the wedding
dress for the daughter of a simple lawyer marrying a
goldsmith amounted to 100 ducats, or the wage of an un¬
skilled worker for two years!43 The signs of status included
costly furniture in walnut, and silver plate from Talavera,
Germany, Italy, Bohemia; the possession of a male or female
slave, an outward sign of wealth rather than productive man¬
power; the horse and its equipment; and the carriage, toward
the end of the century. Two foreign travelers, the Frenchman
Barthelemy Joly and the Portuguese Tome Pinheiro da Vega,
who visited Philip Ill’s court in Valladolid at the dawn of the
seventeenth century, recalled the promenading ladies in car¬
riages drawn by four or six horses. The coming of the court
only added to the number of carriages, already considerable at
the end of the sixteenth century; the letrados, in particular
members of the Cancilleria, often possessed one or even two
carriages.
I have tried to show that artisans, even peasants, imitated
this model according to their means. This was particularly
true of dress and jewels, that is, those things that could be
displayed before the greatest number of people.44 The wife or
daughter of a shoemaker, a dressmaker, a tailor, a locksmith,
I?2 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

a tripe dealer, for example, must display their jewelry: gold

or pearl necklaces, gold rings set with pearls, gold earrings or
medals. Spaniards would long retain the taste for showing off
to others their fine clothing, especially their regional cos¬
tumes. In 1843, Theophile Gautier admired the spectacle: “It
is at Jaen that I saw the greatest number of national and
picturesque costumes. The men generally wore blue velvet
breeches ornamented with silver filigree buttons; Ronda gar¬
ters adorned with inlets, aglets, and arabesques of darker
leather—the most stylish way of wearing them is to button
the top and bottom buttons only, so as to show the leg—
broad yellow or red silk sashes, an embroidered brown cloth
jacket, blue or brown cloak and a broad-brimmed pointed hat
with velvet and silk tufts complete the costume.”45
Here are other examples. Henri Lapeyre describes the
home of Simon Ruiz, the great merchant banker of Medina
del Campo, at the end of the sixteenth century:

The furnishings were quite sumptuous. According to the usage of

the time, chests, gilded or covered with leather, were an impor¬
tant part of the furnishings, and the beddings in blue or green
cloth or crimson damask among the principal luxuries. As one
would expect of the house of a man who had relations with all
Europe, its furnishings reflected a cosmopolitan good taste. An¬
dalusia supplied its guadamecis (embossed leathers), the Orient its
carpets, Flanders its tapestries, Germany its writing desks. Un¬
doubtedly the most original pieces of furniture came from the
Portuguese Indies, a gilded bed and a sculptured and gilded
table. . . . There was an abundance of household linen, cloth from
Holland and Rouen, tablecloths and napkins from Germany. The
silver included all kinds of pieces: dishes, plates, cups, forks,
spoons, saltshakers, flagons, candlesticks, and a great plate with
the arms of Simon Ruiz. The glassware amounted to 362 pieces;
the everyday table service was of corresponding size .... The
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery !73

stables held only a mule and two horses. They drew the carriage,
lined with Cordoba leather and furnished with seats in green
oilcloth and curtains of blue and yellow damask.

Simon Ruiz’s two successive wives seem to have possessed

large wardrobes. According to the inventory of 1571, that of
Doha Maria de Montalvo, the first wife, included “an abun¬
dance of velvet, satin, and taffeta dresses, including a large
number of basquines. The colors ranged from white to black,
passing through all the tints, brown, yellow, crimson, and so
on. It comes as no surprise that Doha Maria loved jewels. She
possessed several rings, a necklace of 262 pearls, a gilded
silver chain with 236 links, a gold girdle ornamented with
emeralds, rubies, and pearls.”
The wardrobe of Doha Mariana, Simon Ruiz’s second wife,
was not so rich, perhaps, but the silk farthingale, the gloves
perfumed with amber, and the mantillas from the Indies
suggest its novelty.46
Turning from Old Castile, I offer an Andalusian example,
that of Cordoba at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
The veinticuatro Antonio Fernandez de Cordoba, knight of the
order of Calatrava, died in 1605, leaving a mass of debts.
Now, he possessed a magnificent silver service: several dozen
plates, cups of all sizes, sugar bowls, saltshakers, pepper-
shakers, decanters, pots and glasses, heavy candlesticks, and a
great number of jewels. True, many of these pieces were
pawned to different persons. The canon Don Diego de Cor¬
doba y Mendoza was also well provided with silver plate, and
the prebendary of the cathedral, Don Pedro Maldonado
Guzman, was still better off; a single one of his pieces, a tray,
may have been worth up to 20 ducats, which suggests that it
weighed about 700 grams. Profusion reigned in the house¬
hold of a widow of a licenciado, Isabel de Montemayor, whose
furniture and wardrobe suggests a luxurious style of life: the
*74 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

tables, the cot, the writing desk, the chests, the chairs, the
sideboard, are walnut. We find three tarimas47 with copper
brasiers and many other objects of the same metal, flat
candlesticks, mortars, and cauldrons. We also find a pewter
table service, plate from Talavera and Genoa, numerous small
art objects, statuettes, curios. A harp and a hurdy-gurdy. In
the wardrobe, a taffeta farthingale, doublets, skirts, damask
and satin dresses, shirts of fine cloth. The household linen
included dozens of German napkins, bed sheets from Rouen,
and some remnants of cloth from Holland and Rouen. One
could also cite the inventory of furniture and the wardrobe of
the ruined veinticuatro, who possessed, in addition to thirty
guadamecis, tapestries bearing coats of arms, Flemish paint¬
ings, and some choice furniture: a cedar chest, a mirror with
a mother-of-pearl frame, and German writing desks. All the
members of this upper-class world also possessed horses, car¬
riages, and often slaves.48 The well-to-do families of Cordoba
long preserved a taste for this kind of luxurious and ostenta¬
tious life. It made a strong impression on Henry Swinburne in
1776: “I was surprised to see an elegance I little expected to
find in a town in the interior of Spain. Very elegant English
and French carriages, smart liveries, and excellent horses.
The nobility of this region lives in a manner not to be found
elsewhere in this kingdom.”49
We know less about the situation in Cordoba than in
Valladolid; we cannot tell whether the popular classes, insofar
as their means permitted, followed the example of the Cabal¬
leros and the canons of the cathedral. We do not know, there¬
fore, whether at Cordoba or elsewhere there existed counter¬
parts of a modest tailor like Gaspar Hernandez, who was not
a landowner or rentier, yet decorated his house with large
guadamecis and figured carpets, who appreciated silver plate
and collected jewels, including numerous rings, coral rosaries
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery !75

with fifty-six gold beads, crosses of pearl or set with pearls,

earrings of crystal and gold, silver crosses, and so on; or of
Juliana de la Valduana, wife of the shoemaker Diego de
Aguero, who owned valuable silver plate and whose jewelry
included gold and pearl necklaces, eight golden rings set
with pearls, gold medals and rosaries; or of the daughter of
the tripe dealer Nicolas Paz; or of the lacemaker Hernando de
la Duena; or of the pastry-cook Pero Perez. . . ,50
What is certain is that Spain’s growing impoverishment
placed a heavy stamp on its way of life after the middle of the
seventeenth century. Spanish means no longer corresponded
to the scale of Spanish wants and tastes. The American histo¬
rian Charles Kany affirms that after 1750 even the wealthiest
Madrid homes did not match in splendor the dwellings of
rich Frenchmen. The rooms were spacious but simply fur¬
nished; the whitewashed walls displayed only painted panels
with the classic decoration of pious images. However, there
were also altars to the Virgin or little retablos. The armchairs
were upholstered in leather. In the homes of some very rich
people there appeared cabinets of ebony and Chinese writing
tables incrusted with ivory. French influence was reflected in
the taste for more intimate apartments, with more numerous
pieces of furniture, and English porcelain replaced that of
Talavera, in decline after 1750. Tapestries from the royal
factory created in 1720 were substituted for those of Flanders,
but all these marks of luxury had become exceptions.01
In this period, a small town notable cut a modest figure
beside the well-to-do artisans of the sixteenth century. Take
Salvador Albelda, from the rich little town of Carcagente in
the heart of the huerta of Valencia, in 1727, a dealer in silks,
owner of hectares of good regadio (irrigated land), and a famil¬
iar of the Holy Office: he has beds of pine and pearwood,
three chests, of which only one is walnut, six stools and, a
176 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery

mark of luxury, six chairs in Muscovy calfskin leather. Al-

belda, it is true, is well supplied with household linen, in¬
cluding items that point to a new style, like the Indian
coverlet, and his forks and knives are tasteful, but his silver
plate is extremely scanty: a saltshaker, a perfume brazier, plus
two candlesticks.2 The influence of the premiums assigned
to silver in relation to copper money, a constant feature of the
eighteenth century, very likely led to the monetization of the
silver plate of the golden age.
As one might expect, from its first appearance the carriage
became an indispensable mark of wealth and prestige, and an
owner proudly showed off his possession. At Valladolid its
use was widespread in the circle of letrados from the 1580s:
the licentiate Antonio Vaca owned two carriages in 1582, a
large one with two wheels and a small one drawn by a mule.
The licentiate Diego Nuno de Valencia had a carriage with
two horses in 1594. Doha Luisa Enriquez, widow of Francisco
de Fonseca, already had a large covered carriage with four
wheels. We noted above that Simon Ruiz had a coach lined
with Cordoba leather. A promenade became a spectacle of¬
fered to the multitude and a source of pleasure to the prom-
enaders; in 1601—1606 at Valladolid, Barthelemy Joly and
Tome Pinheiro da Vega saw the elegant ladies of Philip Ill’s
court promenading in coaches drawn by four to six horses. It
was the same at Cordoba during the years 1602-1620: canons
and veinticuatros had well-equipped carriages, covered in win¬
ter and furnished with curtains, open in summer.53 The court
at Madrid had a cult of the carriage and of promenading in
carriages. A census at Madrid in 1684 showed 1,001 owners
of carriages; among them they owned 1,120 vehicles.
What is festival if not the exaltation of the moment? The
long reign of festival and diversion in Spain suggests a stub¬
born and often successful resistance to the bourgeois values
 Festivals, Diversions, and Finery x77

and virtues that the festival defied. For festival is simultane¬

ously the absence of work, defiance of the spirit of saving and
foresight, and a paroxysm of consumption. Besides, since it is
a coming together of people, it offers splendid opportunities
for display. These are attitudes and modes of behavior that the
nascent industrial society was determined to destroy. One of
the profound but certainly unconscious reasons for Spain’s
attachment to Catholicism may have been the protection and
favor that Catholicism accorded to the festival. That favor
and protection the festival returned with interest.
 VII. dALL THE FORMS OF I£>VE

The ATTITUDES of Spaniards with regard to the passion of

love and their behavior in and out of wedlock are not easy to
define. There is no lack of documents, but the message is con¬
tradictory. One thing is certain: questions of love and, more
concretely, questions of sex interested Spaniards in the high¬
est degree, and this was true from the sixteenth century on.
Literature reveals a spectacular contradiction. Consider the
testimony of three great dramatists of the golden age: Tirso
de Molina, Lope de Vega, and Calderon de la Barca. For
Tirso, a notorious misogynist (he had, after all, the experi¬
ence of the confessional), feminine virtue was pure legend; all
the women in his plays are coquettes, hypocrites, faithless,
and ultimately adulteresses. The plays of Lope de Vega are
rich in deceptions and sexual violence of every kind; Lope
himself had almost as many amorous adventures as Philip IV,
and he was no king. Yet in the same period almost all the
plays of Calderon de la Barca are based on the theme of honor,
and a woman’s virtue or conjugal fidelity often constitutes the
original motivation for an affair of honor. A mere suspicion
may lead to murder; from the Alcalde de Zalamea to El Medico
de su honra and La Locura por la honra, questions of this kind
dominate the plots. If adultery was such a common thing,

178
 All the Forms of Love 179

how can we explain such great concern with honor, and the
identification of honor with virginity or fidelity? We also
have the problem of explaining away some Calderonian
items. In Navarre, Gracia de Arguignano, wife of Juan de
Iturgoyen, was condemned to death as an adulteress in 1530
after being accused by her own parents. She was beheaded
0degollada) according to the laws of the kingdom of Navarre.
Later, when it was proven that she had not sinned, she was
rehabilitated, with the whole family taking part in the act of
rehabilitation. One hundred years later, on April 18, 1637,
the Noticias de Madrid reported: “On Holy Thursday, Miguel
Perez de las Navas, royal notary, having waited for the day
and the moment when his wife had been to confession and
taken Holy Communion, appointed himself her executioner
and, begging her pardon, strangled her in her own home,
merely because of flimsy suspicions of her adultery.” Marcellin
Defourneaux asks the same question that I pose: ‘Are we then
to believe that, between the sixteenth and seventeenth cen¬
turies, there was a profound change in the condition and
behavior of women? Can we challenge the testimony of the
‘theatre of honor’ which showed women and girls so virtuous
and irreproachable that even an involuntary fault, or the
merest breath of scandal, merited death?”1 The two events
cited above, a century apart, indicate no change, but they do
not resolve the contradiction between Tirso de Molina or
Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca.
Writing many years later, White suggested another con¬
tradiction. He advised foreigners who wished to mingle with
the people of Seville or Madrid (in the wards of Triana or San
Bernardo, Lavapies or Maravillas), during the festival of Car¬
nival, not to appear interested in the women, lest they pro¬
voke a quarrel. Mesonero Romanos, speaking of the people of
Madrid, whom he regarded as rude and libertine, said almost
180 All the Forms of Love

the same thing soon afterward (1833). Yet White—and the

same is true of Swinburne, Townsend, Gautier—also
affirmed that jealousy was unknown to Spanish husbands,
and Gautier even declared that Spanish wives enjoyed more
liberty than the French. This apparent contradiction had so¬
cial origins: “The old Spanish jealousy can still be found
among the lower classes; although Spaniards no longer draw
their swords to settle their amorous rivalries, among
plebeians the knife frequently settles such disputes.”2 This
explanation does not resolve the problem I posed above, but
it has the value of suggesting that there is no formula valid
for all cases, that one must distinguish between the attitudes
and behavior of different times, places, and classes.

A QUESTION OF GENERAL INTEREST

The fact remains that questions of love interested the whole
population in the highest degree. Documents of very differ¬
ent characters prove this. The Inquisition series is of special
value because it evokes the atmosphere and tone of the discus¬
sions and conversations among the common people; it shows
them often preoccupied with problems of love and sex.
Here are some ordinary folk of Toledo and the surrounding
countryside in the second half of the sixteenth century and
the beginning of the seventeenth century. Alonso Diaz, a day
laborer from the village of El Carpio, is digging up vines
with his fellow workers; Alonso Cabello, a peasant of Hazana,
is returning from Toledo with two other peasants, Eugenio
Maroto and Diego de Huerta; Agustin Carnicero, who lives
in Morata, is having a discussion with some men in a butch-
ershop; Diego Diez, a peasant from Santa Olalla who is sev¬
enty years old, is also chatting in the village butchershop;
two shepherds from Palar are talking with some women and a
marriageable girl on the village square; some young artisans
from Toledo and neighboring villages, aged fifteen to twenty,
 All the Forms of Love 181

are lounging in Zocodover Square or other streets of the

town; Lorenzo de Bustamante, a weaver of velvets, is passing
the evening with an old comrade, Diego de la Costa; Diego el
Bobo, a porter of Toledo, is having a discussion with a col¬
league; the treasurer of Talavera de Reina, Lorenzo Diaz, is
seated of an evening by the fireside with neighbors of both
sexes; Pedro Diaz, a peasant of Aunon, is also sitting by the
evening fire together with his wife, his brother-in-law, his
sister-in-law, and a young man; the baker of Vargas is playing
at bowls with some comrades and the conversation is going at
a great rate. What can all these people be talking about that
will some day make them fair game for the Inquisition?
They are talking about love with a boldness, a freedom,
that takes them beyond the bounds of decency. The young
artisans tell of going to the mancebia (whorehouse), or ask a
comrade for half a real so they can go there, or brag of their
good fortune. The peasants returning from Toledo have a
similar conversation and discover that, married or single,
they have all visited there. The people gathered of an eve¬
ning, waiting their turn to buy in the shops, stretched out on
the grass or engaged in play, dispute whether fornication with
a prostitute is a sin, and if so, what kind of sin. Or they
discuss the great sin of having intercourse with a nun, a
married woman, or a virgin. Or, again, they wistfully recall
the exploits of their bachelor days. There is always one who
insists that fornication with a prostitute or a single woman of
bad character is not a sin or, at least, that it is not a sin if one
is not married, or if he pays for the act, or if the act is not
performed seven times! Clearly, these were not platonic con¬
cerns. To be sure, one of the speakers, seized with remorse,
went to denounce himself to the Holy Office, but the in¬
genuous offender may have already been denounced by a
charitable comrade eager to discharge his conscience.3
We turn now to the Madrid salons, one, then two cen-
182 All the Forms of Love

turies later. The period and the surroundings are different.

But if we may believe Madame d’Aulnoye, Townsend, and
the American historian Charles Kany, gallantry remained the
principal activity at social gatherings. Thus the tertulia be¬
came “the perdition of body and soul.” If there was little
attendance at the theatre, and little love of knowledge or
reading of books, the cause was that “men spend all their
leisure time with women who have little interest in such
things.” It was the same at the court of Charles IV and Godoy,
which was nothing more than a Court of Love without
troubadours. Love-making, then, was the principal activity.
It remains to consider how the game of love was played.

MARRIAGE AND LOVE

What was the relation between love and marriage in Spain of
the Old Regime? This is a difficult question to which there is
no perfect answer.
The Spanish conception and practice of marriage then
hardly differed at all from what they were in the rest of
Western Europe. Marriage was above all an act constituting
the family, which existed for the function of procreation and
the preservation and transmission of patrimonies, however
small they might be. As such, marriage was almost always
preceeded by the drawing up of a contract, even among the
humble folk; of fifteen marriages celebrated in the Castilian
village of Villanubla in 1594 and 1598, we have twelve
notarized contracts that involve peasant men and women,
more than half of whom were poor. The contracts carefully
note each spouse’s contribution, the wife’s dowry and the
man’s “prenuptial earnest money,” which, in theory at least,
should represent a tenth of his property. The various items of
the wife’s trousseau are minutely described and appraised: so
many ells of cloth of such-and-such a quality, use, and value.
 All the Forms of Love 183

The point was that the wife had a juridical personality equal
to that of the husband, and if the wife died her dowry re¬
turned to her family.
Not only in high social circles but also among merchants
and well-to-do artisans and peasants, marriage was preceded
by tough financial bargaining in which physical beauty and
sentiment played a very small role; the failure of these negoti¬
ations might lead to the collapse of the marriage project. The
contract between Francisco de los Cobos and the count of
Rivadavia, whose fifteen-year-old daughter, Maria de Men¬
doza, he married when he was forty-five, required several
months of difficult negotiations to complete and was later
revised. Very precise clauses dealt with Maria’s dowry, 10,000
ducats, and the “prenuptial earnest money” paid by Fran¬
cisco, nearly 2,000 ducats. The later marriage of Cobos’s
daughter with the duke of Sesa, and that of Cobos’s son, gave
rise to equally difficult negotiations.4 We may assume the
same was true of noble marriages in general, as proven by the
collective experience of the Quintano lineage, and the re¬
quirement of a large dowry led many girls to enter a convent
or kept them in an unwanted single state. Cellorigo deplores
the fact: “They [men] want wives who will support them so
that they may be idle and gallivant about; gold and silver
weigh more with them than virtue.”5
The story is the same when we turn from the court to the
counting-house. When the great merchant of Medina del
Campo, Simon Ruiz, married Dona Maria de Montalvo in
1561, he was content with a dowry of 3,000 ducats (at a time
when his fortune already exceeded 35,000 ducats), because
this marriage enabled him to enter one of the noblest lineages
of Old Castile. Widowed in 1571, he married Dona Mariana
de Paz in 1574, and described this marriage in his corre¬
spondence as a “business.”6
184 All the Forms of Love

Even among people of more modest condition, material

concerns took precedence over affective or aesthetic consid¬
erations. In the valleys of the Pyrenees, from Navarre to
Andorra and down to Catalonia, we find the same bitter
disputes, but here the dowry was the soil, with the resulting
sacrifice of younger sons, compelled to emigrate or accept the
dependent status of a hired man. However, since a rigorous
primogeniture prevailed in most parts of the Pyrenees
(French as well as Spanish), and since it was not customary for
an heir to marry an heiress, a younger son or daughter had an
opportunity to marry an heir or an heiress. This was the
situation in upper Aragon, eastern Ribagorza, Pallars. In
Aragon a specialist, the casamentero, who was generally a
notary, had the vocation of preparing these matrimonial com¬
binations and even, if possible, of arranging double mar¬
riages: brother and sister with sister and brother. This design
was facilitated by the clear tendency toward endogamy, for
young people did not like to marry girls and lads who were
not from their villages; this was as true of Navarre (the valleys
of Roncal and Tena) as of Catalonia. To be sure, premarital
flirtation was not unknown in these regions, and many festi¬
vals or romenas had an explicit matrimonial function. In the
region of Pallars, for example, the festival at Sort, celebrated
on the Sunday called “of the marxants" in November, was the
marriage festival par excellence. But the spirit of bargaining
was still present at these festivals; the lads of Vallferrera
would crudely say that they were going to Tirvia on the feast
day of Saint Anthony “to buy a wife.”7
The example of the Pyrenees suggests a tendency toward
geographic endogamy. An almost identical situation existed
in the villages of Old Castile at the end of the sixteenth
century; a study I made of two villages near Valladolid,
Villabanez between 1570 and 1600, and Geria between 1580
 All the Forms of Love 185

and 1600, showed that among the partners of 378 marriages

there were only 22 who were not natives of those villages, 17
lads and 5 girls, all of whom came from neighboring villages.
At Geria, all 112 marriages were with girls from the same
locality. The percentage of exogenous spouses was 5 percent
at Villabanez, 8 percent at Geria. A smaller sample from a
neighboring village, Villanubla, in 1394-1598, gives similar
results. Out of twelve marriages for which the origins of the
spouses are known, only three were “foreigners” to the vil¬
lage; the most distant place of origin was Castrodeza, three
leagues away.
In these villages, whose total population oscillated be¬
tween 500 inhabitants at Geria and 1,000 in Villabanez,
differences in wealth placed difficulties in the way of some
alliances and the number of available partners in a given age
group was very small, a condition which Peter Laslett has
found in rural England in the same period. As a result,
geographic endogamy was accompanied by true endogamy,
and we are not surprised to find that a Castilian notary,
Melchor de la Serna, devoted himself full time at this period
to obtaining Papal dispensations of kinship.8
These facts suggest an arranged type of marriage in which
love played little part. We must not exaggerate, however. We
find, for example, that endogamy was much less prevalent in
the towns. There is every reason to suppose that this was also
true of great cities which opened upon a larger world—
Seville, Toledo, Madrid, Valladolid, Valencia—and of cities
whose functions placed them in frequent contact with for¬
eigners: Burgos, Medina del Campo, Salamanca, Segovia,
Granada. We know from the example of Palencia, a
medium-sized city of Old Castile, that this was even true of
urban centers that were not so cosmopolitan: of the 610 mar¬
riages celebrated between 1632 and 1664 in the town cathe-
186 All the Forms of Love

dral, 264 joined spouses both of whom were natives of the

town, 238 a palentino and a “foreign” man or woman, and
108 united persons both of whom were born outside the
town. Thus of the 1,220 spouses, 454, or about 37.2 per¬
cent, were strangers to Palencia.9
In the peripheric regions, the situation seems to have been
quite different from that in the interior. In Catalonia in the
second half of the sixteenth and a good part of the seven¬
teenth century, an important migratory current from France,
essentially male, multiplied the number of French husbands
in Catalan parishes. Between 1576 and 1625 in six Catalan
parishes, urban and rural, the percentage oscillated between
9.1 percent (Cassa) and 23.1 percent (San Justo of Barcelona).
True, later it declined considerably, for between 1626 and
1700 it fell to 2 or 3 percent in the same six parishes: a
minimum of . 8 percent for Creixell and a maximum of 7.3
percent at San Justo of Barcelona.10
In Galicia in the eighteenth century, in the completely
rural jurisdiction of Xallas, exogamy dominated: of a total of
766 marriages contracted between 1680 and 1815 in the few
villages of the jurisdiction where calculation was possible,
66.4 percent were between spouses who came from different
parishes, the percentage reaching the figure of 75.3 percent
in a parish with the predestined name of Entrecruces.11 Thus
the peripheric Spains and towns offered greater freedom of
choice with respect to marriage.
It remains true, however, that even in the towns marriages
united lads and girls with the same social background. The
120 marriage contracts made between 1533 and 1599 that I
examined in Valladolid confirm this fact. 30 contracts joined
children of peasants or market gardeners; 51 others involved
children of artisans; 25 of these marriages united children of
artisans in the same trade, and 20 others children of artisans
 All the Forms of Love 187

in closely related professions. Only 6 marriages joined

spouses of different social origins. 12 contracts referred to the
marriages of sons and daughters of letrados. At the bottom of
the social ladder, the valuable statistics obtained by Albert
N’Damba in Seville show that an overwhelming majority of
the 230 slave marriages contracted between 1600 and 1621 in
the two parishes of Santa Maria (199) and San Ildefonso (31)
were between slaves, which causes no surprise. However,
there are some cases of a male slave marrying a free woman,
and the reverse.
We have then a considerable body of evidence that does not
argue in favor of an association between love and marriage,
but does not prove, after all, that such a connection did not
exist. It is a different story in the case of noblemen who
sought to repair their ancestral fortunes through marriage
with rich commoners; Pierre Ponsor provides, among other
examples, that of Don Juan de Villavicencio who, thanks to
an alliance with the daughter of the Cadiz merchant Nicolas
Ruffo, successively acquired the title of count of Cahete, the
seigneury of Las Cabezas, and finally the viceroyalty of
Lima.12
Nevertheless, the influence of Christian humanism tended
to rehabilitate marriage in certain circles. A profound influ¬
ence was exerted in Spain by Erasmus, the principal artisan of
that rehabilitation, with his In Praise of Marriage (1518), his
Colloquies (1523), and his Christian Marriage (1526). Erasmus
exalted the moral value of Christian marriage, but also
praised physical love. The Valencian humanist Luis Vives
followed Erasmus’s example by publishing his Institution of
the Christian Wife, in which he assigned a large value to
conjugal life.13
Signs of a link between love and marriage are not com¬
pletely lacking. But, as Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt
188 All the Forms of Love

remark concerning a similar inquiry in rural England, “Hap¬

piness does not flaunt itself,” and under the circumstances we
are compelled to work with indirect or unintentional signs
that obviously cannot be quantified. We must look for un¬
usual ways of saying things, ways that may be revealing; as
when the regidor of Segovia, Pero Gomez de Porras, prepar¬
ing his testament, assigns certain legacies to Doha Elvira de
Mencharaz, “my dear and beloved wife.”14 Again, the Val¬
ladolid sculptor Esteban Jordan establishes a mayorazgo for his
daughter Magdalena “because of the great love that I bore for
her mother.”10 Two peasants, each marrying a widow, refer in
their contracts to the “great love” they feel for their partners.
In 1561 the young market gardener Juan Guetro, marrying
the daughter of a peasant, Maria de Trigueros, repeatedly
mentions in the contract his happiness over the marriage and
his love for Maria: “Because of the happiness I receive from
this marriage . . . the said Maria de Trigueros, whom I love
. . . and on account of the great love and desire I have for her.”
Even if we interpret the repetition of these phrases as a pre¬
caution on the part of the notary and the parents, the young
pair having agreed to dispense with a dowry, the mere fact
that the marriage took place under these conditions argues in
favor of love as the motive.16 Again, one of the clauses of a
document dealing with a dowry, drafted by Juan Melendez
Valdes for his marriage with Maria Andrea de Cova, refers to
the “mutual and tender love that unites them,” an unusual
formula. But the year, it should be noted, is 1795.
We also find daughters disinherited by their parents for
having married against their will. Pero Hernandez de
Portillo, the rich merchant of Valladolid, anticipated that his
granddaughters might marry against the will of the mayoraz-
go's holder, their brother; in any such case the dowry would
be cut, but only in half, remaining substantial: 4,000
ducats.17
 All the Forms of Love 189

It remains to ask how much respect was shown for the

sacrament of marriage (although such respect does not prove
love, merely fidelity). Some historians, basing their claims on
extremely low illegitimacy rates (like those for France of the
Old Regime), claim that it was very great. The argument
certainly cannot be dismissed out of hand. Some years ago,
however, J. L. Flandrin expressed doubts on this point, argu¬
ing that contraception, however practiced, was much better
known than has been believed. Flandrin’s arguments, based
on analysis of handbooks of penance, guides for confessors,
sermons, and theological tracts, have a certain force; they
suggest that the practice of interrupted coitus was relatively
widespread. If we assume this to be the case, the illegitimacy
rate becomes much less meaningful than it has been believed
to be.
What, then, was the situation in Spain concerning respect
for the marriage vows? In the present state of our knowledge,
only an exhaustive study of the Inquisition series, “Improper
words and actions,” will enable us to answer this question.
My own very rapid soundings indicate the importance of
sexual relations outside wedlock (especially between un¬
married persons), but reveal only one case of interrupted
coitus, and that at a late date—1761. Joseph Alonso Blaz-
quez, charged with having gotten with child his brother-in-
law’s servant, Isabel Martin Vidales, accused himself of
onanism in order to deny paternity.18 More ample studies are
needed before we can attempt to draw firm conclusions.
The fragmentary data on illegitimacy at our disposal sug¬
gest rates slightly higher than those for France of the Old
Regime. At Valladolid between 1592 and 1597, 310 out of
7,086 baptized children (in fourteen of the sixteen parishes)
were certainly illegitimate. This percentage, 4.6 percent, is
not negligible. In the same period, however, there were also
baptized 688 foundlings, of whom a certain number impos-
190 All the Forms of Love

sible to determine doubtless were illegitimate. Thus the per¬

centage of illegitimates may have been as high as 10 percent.
The rate of illegitimacy clearly seems to have risen in
Valladolid in the course of the seventeenth century and then
in the eighteenth century. An historian of the city, Teofanes
Egido, has in effect shown that the number of foundlings
increased until 1625 and then again after 1680; from that
date the proportion of abandoned infants oscillated about 20
percent of the total number of baptisms (25 percent in
1705-1709; 19 percent in 1787). Egido has also demon¬
strated convincingly that almost all these abandoned children
were illegitimate. This quantitative study tends to confirm
the testimony of literature and travelers’ accounts, suggesting
that from the seventeenth century onward conjugal morality
declined.19
Valladolid, however, was a great cosmopolitan city filled
with foreigners, the home of many priests and religious who
fathered a goodly number of natural children, and one should
not generalize from this case. In the countryside about Val¬
ladolid the situation was already different: at Simancas,
Cigales, and Mucientes we find a few cases of illegitimate
children, and the parents of these children are unknown. But
we find no illegitimate children in other neighboring villages
like Castronuevo, Laguna, and Villanubla. On the other
hand, premarital conceptions were not lacking; at Villabanez,
still in the Valladolid region, 16 of the 229 first marriages
between 1570 and 1600, or seven percent, were followed by
birth less than eight months after the wedding, and some¬
times much sooner, which clearly implies more frequent in¬
fractions of the Church laws.
Some recent studies enable us to compare these figures
with those obtained for the Galician countryside in the
eighteenth century. They suggest that analogous conditions,
beginning as early as 1684, prevailed during the whole
 All the Forms of Love I9I

eighteenth century in the jurisdiction of Xallas, in the inte¬

rior of the province of La Coruna. B. Barreiro Mallon found
only 1.75 percent of births to be illegitimate, rising after
1780 to 2.4 percent, still a low figure. In maritime Galicia,
at Dena, a parish of the Rias Bajas, the 125 illegitimate
children baptized between 1720 and 1809 represented only
6.8 percent of the total, a slightly larger number. But Dena
had fewer premarital conceptions than Xallas, barely four
percent, by contrast with Xallas’ 8.4 percent.20 We may note
that in the Xallas region the parish with the highest illegiti¬
macy rate was Marcello— where hidalgos were most numer¬
ous. But the rate was still low, only 3.2 percent.
These instances of quantified behavior are still exceptions,
and we must not hasten to draw conclusions. They certainly
recommend methodical doubt with regard to the qualitative
evidence which suggests widespread sexual freedom before or
after marriage. But illegitimacy is only one element of
analysis, and it would be just as unwise to assume a general
respect for the Sixth Commandment.

THE PROBLEM OF PROSTITUTION

Prostitution, from one point of view, may be regarded

as the protector of the marriage institution. It was in this
light, it seems, that the societies of the Old Regime regard¬
ed it.
Prostitution, viewed as a necessary evil inspiring neither
high regard nor furious condemnation, appears to have been
highly developed in Spain. The house of prostitution, some¬
times very carefully regulated, appears in every large town
whose history we study. When Antoine de Lalaing, a great
Flemish nobleman who accompanied Philip the Fair to Spain,
stopped at Valencia in 1501, he was so strongly impressed by
the “admirable bordello” of the town that he left a vivid
description of it.
192 All the Forms of Love

After dining, the two chevaliers, conducted by some chevaliers of

the city, went to visit the quarter of the prostitutes; it is as large
as a village and enclosed on all sides by a wall which has a single
door. At the door, an official takes the visitors’ arms and cautions
them that if they wish to leave their money it will be returned to
them at the exit, without fear of loss; however, if they did not
wish to deposit it and it was stolen from them during the night,
the guardian would not be responsible. The quarter has three or
four streets lined with small houses, and in each are some girls
richly dressed in velvet and silk; in all, there are two or three
hundred women. Their houses are attractively furnished and pro¬
vided with fine linen. The fee is four dineros, equal to a Flemish
gros, of which the treasury takes a tenth (as it does in all other
transactions), and more they cannot ask for the night. There also
are taverns and inns. . . . The women sit on the threshold, each
with a fine lantern above her head so that she might be better
seen. There are two physicians, appointed and paid by the town,
who visit the women weekly to find those who are ill with the pox
or some other secret disease and remove them from this place. . . .
I have noted all these things because I never heard of such a vile
place that was so well regulated.21

One century later Barthelemy Joly also celebrated Valencia’s

red-light district: “In Valencia there is a famous place where
the women devote themselves to the public pleasure. They
have such places throughout Spain, but it is more pleasant
here. The women have a whole quarter to themselves where
they can carry on this kind of life with complete freedom.”22
This example illustrates how prostitution was viewed; as
an institution to be well organized and regulated, but re¬
stricted to its own ghetto. In theory, at least, prostitutes had
to live in a special quarter. In 1572 and again in 1575 Philip
II tried to regulate the profession even more strictly. The
girls, who must not be recruited among married women or
virgin girls, were placed under the authority of a “father” or a
 All the Forms of Love
J93

mother.” Every eight days they were to be visited by a

physician; they were to wear a special dress; the wearing of
arms in their houses was forbidden. The exercise of the trade
during Holy Week was banned and each year during Lent the
prostitutes must attend a sermon which urged them to repent
and enter a refuge. However, at Valladolid in 1604, Pinheiro
da Vega, who attended a sermon on the classic theme of Mary
Magdalene, also heard the terrible threats hurled by the
pimps against the girls who were moved to repentance.23
We know little of these women. No Spanish courtesan
attained the fame of her Roman or Venetian sisters, the pres¬
tige of Imperia or Tullia of Brescia, and it seems that no
Spanish painter ever thought of choosing, like Raphael, a
prostitute’s face as a model for the Madonna. In Spain the
“respectable courtesan” did not exist.
It seems that these houses had no lack of business. We
learn from the Inquisition series of Toledo that the mancebia
of that town was much talked of; it also appears to have been
much frequented. Many of our delinquents recall it, like
those peasants of Hazana, who, chatting on the way home to
their village, discover that both have visited the place. Young
journeymen and apprentices frequently speak of it and look
forward to visiting it. The fee, half a real in the second half of
the sixteenth century, was far from prohibitive, for it
amounted to one quarter of a day’s wages for a laborer. The
widespread belief that payment for intercourse purged the
sin, at least in the case of single men, must have facilitated
attendance. Despite all the Inquisition’s proclamations and
punishments, the idea persisted to the end of the eighteenth
24
century.
From the sixteenth century on, however, in many towns,
many prostitutes did not reside in the public houses, while
others went out to solicit clients. At Valladolid where, ac-
*94 All the Forms of Love

cording to Henry Cock (1591), the prostitutes were very

numerous, a certain Catalina Sanchez, called the Valencian,
was prosecuted by the brotherhood that managed the public
house because she maintained an illegal competing establish¬
ment in the Ronda de Santiesteban. Again and again it be¬
came necessary to deal rigorously with prostitutes who boldly
solicited in the streets, taverns, and inns.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, administra¬
tion and supervision of the public houses decayed to the point
where the prostitutes were under no restraint and invaded the
towns. At Madrid, numerous sumptuary laws vainly tried to
limit their ostentation, to ban, for example, the low-necked
dresses which served as their advertising posters. At Seville,
they were not content to remain in their domain, the enclo¬
sure of the Laguan where they resided, each in her own little
house. At Malaga, Cadiz, and Alicante, prostitutes reigned
over the night.
Many of these women no longer lived in a “house.” They
solicited on their own account on street corners, or even had
houses of their own, playing the parts of decent, respectable
women in student towns like Salamanca, sometimes with a
duena and a bodyguard, the better to deceive the simple and
subject them to blackmail; thus they operated at home. Some
employed a bit of sorcery to win the affection and gifts of
men. An Inquisition trial, for example, introduces us to the
Madames Chaves, mother and daughter, who came from the
Montana but were installed at Toledo. The husband and
father had left for the Indies and was never heard from again.
Claudia and Maria de Chaves engaged in magic practices,
purchased alma at the apothecary’s, baptized it in baptismal
founts, and crushed and mixed it with a mysterious powder,
making philters with which to gain men’s love. They seem to
have been successful, for in 1651 “all the single men of the
 All the Forms of Love x95

place are their friends and very devoted to them” (muy gratos y
por suyos). They had a servant and appeared to be well off.25
Henry Cock, writing in 1591, declared that visiting the
puteria publica was so habitual in Spain that many people
began their visit to a city there! As part of the struggle
against the growth of prostitution, toward the end of the
sixteenth century refuges for repentant prostitutes began to
appear in growing numbers. At Madrid, the first such estab¬
lishment, founded in 1587, was enlarged in 1623. Placed in
the charge of the nuns of Saint Magdalene, it sheltered former
prostitutes, who could leave it only to become nuns or to
marry.26 The house of Saint Nicholas of Bari was founded in
1691; that of the Arrepentidas in 1711. The women who en¬
tered these houses could leave them at will. Houses of the
same kind existed at Cadiz, Seville, Valladolid, Granada,
Barcelona, and elsewhere. They played an important role; the
house at Barcelona, for example, sheltered 113 women in
1786.2' But prostitution did not decrease on that account,
save in some towns where the governor took energetic mea¬
sures, as happened at Alicante under the rule of Francisco
Pacheco, after 1785. I should add that we lack information
about the many individual situations in which prostitution
played some role. For every case like that of Miguel Cervera
de las Cuevas, a pimp prosecuted by the Inquisition because
he blasphemed horribly when his girl fled from him, there
must have been many other cases which are unknown to us,
for this type of procurer must have been far from rare.28

LOVE OUT OF WEDLOCK

Marriage and prostitution, legal or not, certainly could not

satisfy the sexual appetites of all individuals. This line of
inquiry also raises difficulties.
We have already encountered the fact of illegitimate
196 All the Forms of Love

births. From the sixteenth century on, the extramarital rela¬

tions that preceded those births were not regarded as so
shameful that they must be concealed at all costs; in the
parish of San Miguel de Valladolid, which was not a poor
parish, fifty-two children born of unmarried parents whose
names appear on the registers were baptized between 1592
and 1597; they could have been children of Caballeros and
girls of hidalgo stock. On September 28, 1596, a son of Don
Pedro de Figueroa and Dona Isabel de Escobar, both single,
was baptized at San Miguel. On February 19, 1593, Maria,
daughter of the licentiate Alonso Rodriguez de Ravizes and
Dona Beatriz de Acuna, both unmarried, was baptized in the
cathedral.29
But the study of illegitimacy, as we have seen, is only one
among several possible approaches to the goal of our inquiry.
The births noted above suggest the possibility, but not the
certainty, of concubinage. However, Inquisition documents
swarm with notations indicating that sexual relations out of
wedlock were not a privilege of the nobility. In the sixteenth
century, these notations seem to concern unmarried persons
above all; concubinage certainly was quite prevalent at that
period. Beginning in the seventeenth century, however, adul¬
tery seems to have become much more frequent and marriage
appears to have been often mocked.
But our evidence consists largely of impressions. Certainly
the sixteenth century court proceedings treat much more
often of concubinage than of adultery. Ana Diaz, wife of a
potter of Talavera, lived in concubinage for a long time before
her marriage; we have no guarantee that after marriage she
became a faithful wife.30 Pantaleon de Casanova, of the vil¬
lage of Los Sauces, lived in concubinage with a morisca, and
no longer went to confession because he did not want to leave
her.31 Alonso Chamorro, a lawyer residing in Truxeque in the
kingdom of Toledo, lived in concubinage with a relative,
 All the Forms of Love 197

Maria de la Cena; then with his servant girl whom he had

seduced; he had similar relations with another woman whose
daughter he also tried to seduce, and he came close to gaining
his end, for the mother intervened when the couple were
already in bed.32 The merino mayor (magistrate) of Valladolid,
Don Alonso Nuno de Castro, made similar use of his servant
girl. In the same town, the bachelor Arenillas de Reynosa,
procurator of the Inquisition, lived publicly in concubinage,
and sometimes kept two women at the same time.33 These
and many other cases (for I could extend this enumeration for
several pages) concern the sixteenth century. We note that
concubinage was often linked to ancillary amours. The pro¬
ceedings of university student trials provide many other
examples of this kind; seduced servant girls must have been
legion. Again, slavery was often accompanied by sexual rela¬
tions between the master and his female slave. Therefore we
may affirm that sexual relations out of wedlock often took
place in the framework of a woman’s dependent relationship
to a man.
From the sixteenth century, to be sure, concubinage could
be complicated by adultery. Maria de Argiles, an Aragonese,
wife of a certain Miguel Galan, left her husband to follow a
peasant named Antonio Rothe to Valencia; she lived in con¬
cubinage (amancebanda) with him before she married him in
1567, believing (so she claimed) that her husband was
dead.34 Juan Garcia, a student of theology, already an or¬
dained priest, secuded the wife of a peasant of Valdespino and
took her with him to Vigo. Anton Sanchez, a peasant of
Castronuevo, near Valladolid, committed adultery with
Maria Cabeza, a neighbor’s wife; this business, taking place
in a small village, created a scandal.35 If we may believe
Pinheiro da Vega (1604), however, some Castilian husbands
already were willing to play the role of a complacent cuckold
and accepted money in return for allowing their wives to live
198 All the Forms of Love

in concubinage with certain canons. In this way had Lazarillo

de Tormes managed to lead a comfortable life some thirty or
forty years earlier.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries situations of
this kind, combining seduction, adultery, concubinage, and
the complacent acquiescence of husbands or parents, became
ever more common, and churchmen figured in them ever
more frequently. Thanks to the proceedings of an Inquisition
trial, we know the goings-on in a rich town of the Valencian
huerta, Carcagente, in the years 1725—1727. To exaggerate a
little, it seems that in Carcagente everyone slept with every¬
one else. Salvador Albelda, a local notable, a silk merchant
and a familiar of the Inquisition, a married man and head of
a family, had a long liaison with the gypsy Agueda Vicente,
after which he became the lover of a certain Teresa Gibert;
then he deflowered Teresa’s eldest daughter and, after the
girl’s death, took up with the second daughter, whom he also
deflowered. Pedro Talens, another notable, a former regidor
and syndic of the community, had also been the gypsy’s lover;
the widow Antonia Llanes accorded her favors to the royal
commissary, Joseph Miralles, reporter of the Audiencia of
Valencia, who “often visits her bedroom.” Another witness in
the trial, Vicenta Canut, was mistress of one of the accused,
Francisco Alminana. The gypsy Agueda Vicente let Pedro
Talens and Francisco Alminana know that for a sum she could
arrange for them to spend the night with a twenty-year-old
gypsy, Rosa Escudero, who was still a “maid.” The “maid”
apparently set no great value on her virginity, for she made
advances to Alminana, openly reproaching “such a gallant
man for having an affair with an old woman.” Talens did not
conceal his preference for gypsy girls, while insisting that he
did not want to sleep with prostitutes or his servant girls.
Talens and Alminana were both obsessed by thoughts of Rosa
Escudero, whom they planned to rape.36 At Carcagente, in
 All the Forms of Love I99

short, sexuality appeared to run riot. We have no reason to

suppose that the case of Carcagente was an exception, espe¬
cially since it agrees with the testimony of travel accounts and
literary sources. Now let us turn to the clergy, beginning
with some truly picaresque situations.
In the 1750s a widower, Josef Alonso Blazquez, who lived
with his brother-in-law, Josef Duran, a commissary of the
Holy Office, slept with Duran’s servant girl. When she be¬
came pregnant and Blazquez was pressured to marry her, he
did not hesitate to accuse his brother-in-law.37 The curate of
Moral de Calatrava, Don Vicente Camacho, shared the bed of
his neighbors’ daughter, Juana Genara, in their house and
with the blessing of the mother who, from the kitchen where
she attended to her household tasks, urged her daughter on
with resounding cries of‘Anda Juanilla!” (go to it, Juanilla!).
When the affair was revealed by the denunciation of another
neighbor who was able to follow the operations as they un¬
folded, thanks to a hole he had made in the wall, the mother
openly admitted that she favored the liaison because Don
Vicente “is rich.”38
The scene described above dates from 1790. For a century
before, a wave of trials of solicitantes—confessors who seduced
their penitents, seeking to persuade them that what they did
was no sin—had washed over the tribunals. The ecclesiastical
courts were also full of documents testifying to the carnal
frailties of curates. The situation was considered normal at
this period. The bishops alone were exempted as being free
from common vice. Henry Swinburne declared that no other
country had such shameless love affairs or presented such an
aspect of unseemly debauchery. Townsend was of the same
QQ
opinion.
However, the statistics I cited above should put us on
guard against excessive generalization about sexual license in
the eighteenth century. Townsend doubtless exaggerates
2 00 All the Forms of Love

when he writes, during a stay in Cartagena: “Want of fidelity

to matrimonial vows is equally prevalent at Cartagena, as in
other provinces of Spain.” He was excessively influenced by
the example of the Madrid society among which he lived and
by the manners of a good part of the nobility and the
bourgeoisie. He himself noted that not all the women of
Granada had been corrupted by the manners of the time, that
the old simplicity and purity of manners remained un¬
changed in Asturias; the girls did not make up or powder
their faces and only used a simple ribbon to tie their hair.40
In his observations on high society, however, Townsend
merely echoes the testimony of such seventeenth-century ob¬
servers as Bertaut and Brunelor or such an eighteenth-century
traveler as Swinburne, who preceded him in Spain by ten
years. Antoine de Brunei coarsely wrote in 1665: “There is
not a man who does not keep his lady or have an affair with
some whore.” As early as the sixteenth century, the satirical
and doubtless exaggerated couplets of two “provincials” (a
prudent cover!) had violently flayed the manners of high
Valladolid society: The count of Benavente (a grandee of
Spain!) was called a cuckold and pimp; Doha Maria de San¬
doval never denied her favors to anyone; the duke of Al¬
buquerque, another grandee, was but “a new-born duke,
found on a dung-heap, who had won his duchy by fornica-
• ”41
tion. 1
Accordingly, when Townsend declares that the women of
Madrid and other places found most of their lovers among the
military and the canons of cathedrals, concluding therefrom
that ecclesiastical celibacy was a principal cause of marital
infidelity because the clergy, unable to escape the laws of
human nature, themselves incited to sin and set bad examples
for all, we must not take his testimony lightly despite his
anti-Papist prejudices. To be sure, the clergy were not re¬
sponsible for the turpitude of the court of Godoy and Charles
 All the Forms of Love 201

IV, to which, White wrote, “beauties flock from every prov¬

ince for the chance of being noticed by the favourite.”42 But
the court of Philip IV, where the count-duke of Olivares
himself looked after the replenishment of the royal harem,
had nothing to learn from that of Charles IV.
Thus the court, the clergy, and the ruling classes were far
from being strict in the matter of sexual morality. It would be
strange if the mass of the population were not susceptible to
such examples and incitements. We have seen that the rec¬
ords of Inquisition trials sometimes give us a glimpse of the
behavior of these classes, even if we cannot quantify it. Let us
return to the affair of Teruel in 1753, already cited in a
previous chapter, an affair all the more interesting because it
concerns a little town (7,000 inhabitants at the time) on the
margin of the great movements of the age. It can be stated
with virtual certainty that persons “of all classes and all con¬
ditions” sometimes gathered of an evening, especially on
Twelfth Night or during Carnival, in the cellar of one or
another family. Present were lawyers, military, merchants,
artisans, at least one peasant, and numerous ecclesiastics.
Perhaps the words attributed to the notary of Miguel Marco,
one of the organizers of these assemblies, when he gave the
signal for the start of the merrymaking: “Come, my children,
let us go down to the cellar to dance and fuck,” are a calumny.
But a cross-checking of the testimony compels the conclusion
that these gatherings often ended in this way. Because they
wanted to avoid finding themselves in this situation, some
women refused to attend these festivities; Navarro’s obscene
sermon and equally obscene gestures set the stage for what
came after. Failure to observe procedural secrecy, the long
delay between the two inquiries, the large number of persons
involved and the prominence of some, caused the affair to be
suppressed. There is no doubt, however, that at least some of
the things reported actually took place.43
202 All the Forms of Love

It seems quite clear that the rates of illegitimacy and pre¬

marital conceptions, interesting though they may be, will
not suffice to define sexual morality and conduct. They leave
out many elements, such as those suggested, for example, by
the manuals for confessors, which merit an exhaustive study.
One is abortion; it was probably very rare, but we know some
specific efforts to produce abortion as early as the sixteenth
century; thus at Valladolid, Luis Daza de Seco, having gotten
with child Doha Francisca de Vega, whom he saw nightly by
scaling the walls of her house, sent her some potions and
other medicines to produce abortion.44 It must be admitted,
however, that we know very little in this field.
For the rest, it would be an error to suppose that public
opinion strongly condemned sins of the flesh. I do not believe
at all in that horror for the flesh that the Catholic, Mediterra¬
nean countries are supposed to have felt over the ages. Horror
of the body is a northern product, a product of Puritanism
and Jansenism, which did not gain disciples in the southern
lands until after 1850. To repeat the contrary is to state the
tritest of cliches. We know that theologians deplored the
complacent attitude of Spaniards toward sexual license. The
archbishop of Toledo, Bartolome de Carranza, declared that
syphilis, which according to him had been sent by God to
chastize the wicked, provoked neither fear nor repulsion:
“Matters have come to such a pass that a man who is touched
by this leprosy loses neither honor nor authority; to have it or
have had it is regarded as a thing proper to a courtier, and
there is not a man of the palace or court who will not do all
that is necessary to have it.”45
Marriage was no doubt generally respected as an institu¬
tion and as a sacrament, despite the cases of bigamy cited in a
previous chapter. It is rare in the sixteenth century to find
professed scorn for marriage and its vows. Few women could
 All the Forms of Love 203

have dared to express themselves in the manner of Ana Diaz,

the young and sharp wife of the potter Juan de Valladolid,
who lived at Talavera de la Reina. Jesting with her friends,
she poked fun at the wife of Juan Diaz, a peasant of the
vicinity, who quarreled with her husband because he visited
her (Ana) frequently. She was an old woman, and should have
married an old man! It was normal for Juan Diaz to look for a
young woman, for “like attracts like.” It was good, not bad,
for a man to have a woman “friend.”46
In the eighteenth century, however, topics of this kind
formed the subject matter of conversations in the salons, not
of court cases. The reader may know the anecdote told about
Cartagena at the end of the eighteenth century. For a jest, a
married man bet that he could sow panic throughout the
town that evening without the slightest effort. He obtained
this result very simply by returning home earlier than the
customary time, being careful, however, to give his wife’s
lover time to decamp. The chain reactions were so numerous
that he won his bet!47
It would certainly be an error to conclude that passion was
dead. The writs of pardon in the notarial registers of the
Valladolid archives for the sixteenth and seventeenth cen¬
turies merit intensive exploitation, for they provide abundant
information about quarrels and their motives, among which
love figures prominently; several youths were slain simply
because they disregarded a jealous lover’s warning not to
speak to a girl. During the affair at Carcagente in 1727,
Agueda Vicente’s jealousy probably precipitated Salvador Al-
belda’s decision to have her assassinated.
In the same period, and later, a faithless wife of the upper
classes languished when her lover was absent and locked
herself up in her bedroom, refusing to appear in public.
There was a transfer of jealousy and the sufferings of love in
2 04 All the Forms of Love

favor of the absent lover or mistress. It was not at all a ques¬

tion of “sexual freedom” as we understand the term today.
And since passion remained, it invoked the aid of sorcery
for its misfortunes. Julio Caro Baroja has shown that the
principal if not sole function of the “urban” sorceresses re¬
vealed by studies based on trial proceedings from Cuenca and
Toledo was erotic. Black magic was used to bring back a
faithless lover or mistress, or to eliminate a rival, even if it
meant causing illness or death. To this end the sorceress, like
the Celestina of the famous romance of that name, employed
a veritable laboratory where she manufactured aphrodisiacs,
love philters, and evil spells.48 The real or pretended activity
of these sorceresses assumed various forms. One was invoca¬
tion of demons, but without harmful spells: this was the case
of a sorceress who in 1536 aided Francisca Diaz, a woman of
Toledo who wanted to wed a man whom she loved and by
whom she had had a child. On the magician’s advice, she
walked the streets of Toledo by night, reciting a formula
which repeated the invocation of demons. Later, fearing a
denunciation, or seized by remorse, and having gained her
end, she denounced herself to the Holy Office. The penalty
was mild; Francisca was found guilty of having sought from
the demon things that belonged to God alone, but she was
repentant and had done nothing to the detriment of a third
party.
More serious was the invocation of demons with the use of
evil spells; such evil spells were imputed in 1557 to Catalina
de Doyague, a married woman who resided at Cebreros. She
claimed to have the power to cause sickness and death, to
summon fifty devils and make them do her will; she used
formulas and suspicious brews. A good number of witnesses,
all women, claimed that she had made them ill. Catalina
defended herself by insisting that she employed only incense
 All the Forms of Love 205

and herbs, but admitted that she used this magic formula to
bring back an inconstant lover:

Damsel Star,
Carry a sign
to my friend so-and-so,
and do not let him drink or sleep
or repose or enjoy another woman
that is born or yet to be born,
but let him come back to look for me,
let him return to see me.
Isaac, bind him to me; Abraham, bring him to me;
Jacob, deliver him to me.50
Much later, a charge of using evil spells was brought
against a Toledan seamstress, also married, Maria Diaz del
Valle, who proposed to deserted women that they avenge
themselves on their faithless lovers; she was accused of hav¬
ing an explicit pact with the demon.51 Agueda Vicente, the
victim of the previously cited affair at Carcagente, had three
times before been in trouble with the Inquisition, charged
with being a love sorceress or a procurer.52 In Seville at the
end of the eighteenth century, a certain Juliana Lopez, acting
in tandem with a false beggar, Ignacio Rodriguez, had im¬
mense success in peddling a love philter which attracted
clients from afar, some of high rank, including some great
ladies of Madrid. The affair caused a great scandal, and ended
in a trial by the Inquisition and an auto-da-fe. But the time
of burnings at the stake was over or almost over; the guilty
parties were merely consigned to prison.53 Even members of
the clergy were enticed by beatas whose paradisiac or tragic
visions sometimes lured priests and religious into the “do¬
main of their charms” and involved them in very human love
affairs. This seems to have happened in an obscure affair that
would be interesting to clear up, that of the beatas of Al-
206 All the Forms of Love

magro in the years 1617-1619.54 It was certainly what hap¬

pened in Seville about 1780, a tragic affair that ended in 1782
with the execution of a beata who had corrupted several
priests.55 These two episodes could not be isolated cases. In
this field of research, however, almost everything remains to
be done.
Finally, we must consider certain perversions, beginning
with rape. In another work, dealing with Valladolid, I have
given some examples of individual or collective rapes, some¬
times accompanied or followed by murders.56 I can offer
nothing more in this area. Little is known of the less danger¬
ous perversion of exhibitionism. The records of Inquisition
trials reveal a certain number of individuals who suffered
from this mania. Some blasphemers who questioned the
virginity of Mary found it necessary to emphasize their affir¬
mation by displaying the virile member. The peasant
Navarro, at Teruel, multiplied phallic symbols (dagger, har¬
quebus) in an obscene sermon, indicated the length of his
virile member by crossing one arm over the other, and added
deeds to words by letting down his trousers before all the
onlookers.57 The most curious example of all is that of Pedro
Talens at Carcagente. Talens had the custom of showing his
sexual parts to the women of the town and trying to persuade
them to touch them. Now, Talens was no ordinary hoodlum
but a notable of Carcagente who held the responsible offices
of regidor and syndic of the town. His conduct was certainly
regarded as abnormal, for he was relieved of his posts and
witnesses reported his acts at his trial. But the affair could not
have caused a great scandal, for no sanctions were taken
against Talens, although the facts were well and widely
known.58
All this argues for a relatively complacent attitude with
regard to sins of the flesh. Our knowledge of the long-
 All the Forms of Love 207

neglected nineteenth century in Spain is still too imperfect

for us to know when this attitude began to change. I can only
hazard the hypothesis that the change came quite late in the
century, after 1830, in any case, to judge by the tone of the
works of such costumbristas as Mesonero Romanos and Larra;
and I am inclined to think that the change in the posture
and manners of the Spanish clergy was decisive in this re¬
spect.
SODOMY
Quite early, it seems, the Spanish people reacted against the
severity of the medieval laws and the later laws of Toro,
which reflected the influence of Ferdinand and Isabella, with
regard to adultery. There also developed a certain indulgence
with regard to sins of a heterosexual character between un¬
married persons. The Inquisition, it should be noted, only
prosecuted persons who denied the reality of such sins; it
adopted not a moral but a doctrinal position in this area.
This was not the case with homosexuality. From the be¬
ginning to the end of the period under consideration, reproof
was almost universal and repression was strict. It was “the
detestable, shameful, and unnatural crime”—the phrase
dates from 1625—which made the heir to a mayorazgo un¬
worthy and therefore led to the loss of his rights. The same
offense gave rise to intensive inquiries by the Inquisition.
Despite repression, sodomites were not rare. Abundant
documentation from Valencia enables us to classify the cases.
We note that almost all sodomites were single men, and that
many were foreigners, prisoners, and friars. However, our
sources, completely manuscript, do not reveal a single case
of feminine homosexuality. My research in this field is far
from being exhaustive, for it was limited to the Valencian
series. However, I shall attempt a provisional typology of the
sodomites.
208 All the Forms of Love

There were slaves, often Turks or moriscos, like one Hassan

Danadolia (that is, from Anatolia), coachman of a Valencian
caballero, who in the 1620’s organized parties with adoles¬
cents, mostly other slaves, whom he brought together for the
purposes of eating, drinking, and gambling, and whom he
enticed with money. Alternation of partners was the rule.
Hassan clearly preferred young men of good looks and re¬
joiced unashamedly at his good fortune.59 In the same cate¬
gory may be included the free moriscos, who were quite
numerous among the homosexuals prosecuted at Valladolid.
There were vagabonds who preferred to sodomize children,
with or without their consent, like that Joseph Simo who
attacked a child of fourteen on the road to Peniscola and who
was not a novice in this business; or like Francisco Marti
Moyano, a colossus of thirty-five who begged up and down
the roads in the company of a young black whom he
sodomized everywhere, in town and in the country, under the
olive trees and under the carob trees. Francisco had had many
other adventures of this kind. He confided to the young black
that he loved him greatly, though he was black, but would
prefer a white man or a girl.60
There were the sailors and soldiers. The case of Pedro
Antonio Santandreu, a native of Palma in Majorca, initiated
by a Frenchman at Marseilles at the age of sixteen, who
confessed his offense with sincere repentance, then began
again and from “passive” turned into “active,” is a classic one.
More illuminating, however, is that of Nicolas Mont, a
Neapolitan soldier stationed at Valencia, because he estab¬
lished an entire organization. With the aid of other soldiers
and a group of children, Mont perfected a system which
envisaged the making of proposals and responses. In theory,
at least, the soldiers paid, and it was a refusal to pay because
of dissatisfaction with the performance, mixed with dreadful
 All the Forms of Love 209

oaths, that brought the affair to light. The rendezvous took

place in the latrines.61
There was the numerically important category of young
people and adolescents, artisans and peasants. In the case of
adolescents, there was always an initiator like that apprentice
of sixteen who, at San Felice, near Jativa, had several children
(two of fourteen, one of twelve, and one of ten) come into his
bedroom, undress, and “touch” each other. Then at a second
meeting, he had them lie on their stomachs and penetrated
them one after the other without ejaculating, after which he
invited them to follow his example. The case of Don Jesualdo
Felices, who resided at Mediana, was much more serious,
because this forty-eight-year-old Caballero “debauched” a large
number of children during the years 1741—1749, including a
child of seven who was so innocent that he took the Caballero s
penis for a finger. Don Jesualdo took advantage of his prestige
and social position, and each time paid a silver real, which
his victims used to recruit other children, thus replenishing
his clientele. He even employed procurers. The caballero first
had himself masturbated by the children, then invited them
to observe his prowess with other adolescents.62
All or almost all these affairs had certain common charac¬
teristics: a very important one was the participation of chil¬
dren, either with their consent, sometimes—as the tes¬
timony proves—without knowledge of what was involved, or
through coercion and force. Promise of payment in money,
though not invariable, was frequent. Until 1610 many New
Christians were implicated in these affairs, but the frequency
of trials does not seem to have declined at all after the expul¬
sion of the moriscos. One must say, for the rest, that whatever
one may think of homosexuality, reading the records of these
trials is a sickening experience. The cruel realism of the
Inquisitorial proceedings does not spare the reader any of the
2 10 All the Forms of Love

medical reports: the victims of Mont, Simo, Marti Moyano,

and Guisot, children of eleven to fourteen, are shown to have
been seriously handicapped for the rest of their lives, with the
anus torn, the sphincter muscle destroyed. Yet gradually the
severity of the repression decreased; instead of the death pen¬
alty, frequent if not universal in the sixteenth century, lashing
and public shaming, followed by some years of exile, became
the common penalties; in the most serious cases, like that of
Don Jesualdo de Felices, the penalty was ten years of service
in the African garrisons.
It remains for me to speak of the clergy; the cases known to
us from the sixteenth century are quite ordinary, involving a
curate or a religious acting alone with a child or a young
man. The punishment was always severe; after an effort at
suicide, Fray Miguel de Morales, a Trinitarian of the convent
of San Bernardo de Alcira, had to appear in an auto-da-fe, was
expelled from the order, and was turned over to the secular
arm.
But the two affairs that exploded one after the other to¬
ward the end of the seventeenth century and gave rise to two
great trials, in 1685 and 1687, are quite a different matter:
they simultaneously reveal a strange clash of two powerful
personalities and throw a merciless light on the Mercederians
of Valencia. The two principal accused parties were Fray
Manuel Arbustante, doctor of theology, regent of the convent
de la Merced at Valencia (1685), and Fray Juan Velasco Rison,
provincial of the order at Valencia (1687). The accusers obvi¬
ously were friars, in particular Fray Pedro de Aparicio, com¬
mander of the convent of La Merced, whose arguments were
impressive and who blamed himself for not having cracked
down earlier. This implied that he knew what went on well
before the opening of the trial. Equally vigorous was Arbus-
tante’s defense.
 All the Forms of Love 2 I I

Fray Manuel is revealed as a friar who has lost his faith; he

does not say or hear mass every day; it appears that he had
never confessed during the five years of his stay in the con¬
vent. He does not hesitate to say mass immediately after
having lascivious contacts with novices in the sacristy, after he
had already donned the alb. What is most remarkable is the
fascination that he exercises over the novices, a fascination
that explains his success as seducer; at least eight had yielded
to his advances, and perhaps all save three of the religious of
the convent. “The boys say that he must have bewitched
them, for they doted and swarmed about him like dragon¬
flies; then he seemed like an angel to them, whereas now he
appears to be a demon.” A letter from the general of the order
confirms that Fray Manuel had caused scandal in the convents
in which he previously resided—Orihuela, Jativa, Sar¬
dinia—with activities of the same kind. But the man was so
intelligent, his dialectic so subtle, his defense so able, that he
escaped the worst: the penalty was one year of seclusion, two
years of exile from the kingdom of Valencia; that was all.
However, the case of Fray Manuel had repercussions. The
trial of 1687 brought accusations against the provincial him¬
self. He had seduced at least four novices, and in order to
avoid detection had compelled them to confess their sins to
him rather than to another priest. The affair led to a total
reorganization of the Valencian order and the dispatch of the
novices to other houses.03

BESTIALITY
Bestiality hardly presented a problem, and we need not deal
with it at length. It does not seem to have been widespread.
All the individuals surprised committing an act of bestial¬
ity were solitaries and uprooted individuals. In the kingdom
of Valencia in the seventeenth century, half the cases involved
2 I2 All the Forms of Love

Frenchman, such as Jean Martel, servant to a widow, and

Francis Robert, a sailor from Marseilles, both caught in the
act of having intercourse with a she-ass. They also included
slaves, white and black, and sometimes a forester or a
shepherd. The animal partners most often were she-asses or
mares, bitches, and even turkeys. The details are sometimes
very7 precise; this is the case with Juan Nabarro, a Navarrese
shepherd seized by peasants while having intercourse with a
bitch. A witness confounded the peasant by showing him
hairs of the bitch which had remained in the opening of his
breeches. The reactions of witnesses generally were violent; if
the event took place in the country, they roused the village,
seized the unhappy individual, bound him hand and foot,
and heaped him with insults before turning him over to the
nearest commissary of the Holy Office.64
Bestiality, however, might have had a magic meaning. In
some Pyreneean valleys the belief has survived down to our
own times that a venereal disease can be cured by having
relations with a virgin girl or with animals.65 The persistence
of such beliefs is not surprising when we learn that acts of a
similar nature are said to have been observed in a Parisian
hospital in the 1940s.66
We see that, leaving aside a few unfortunates with regard
to whom it is hardly possible to speak of love, it is difficult to
arrive at firm conclusions. I greatly fear—perhaps I hope—
that quantitative history has no chance of success in this field.
 VIII. ‘3-flONOR AND VIOLENCE

HONOR AS A NATIONAL PASSION: ITS NATURE

If there was one passion capable of defining the conduct of the
Spanish people, it was the passion of honor. Rarely have such
diverse sources been in such perfect accord as on this point.
This passion has a long history. As early as the thirteenth
century, the Castilian Code of the Partidas carefully defined
honor as “the reputation a man has acquired by virtue of his
rank, his high deeds, or his valor.” We already have here both
meanings of honor, that of honor as a motivation for personal
action as well as that pertaining to social position—the more
so because the Partidas stressed that insults, especially if
offered in public, dishonor a man.1 Writing in the fifteenth
century, the poet Jorge Manrique ranks honor above life since
he marks out three states of existence for every human being:
temporal life, which ends with the death of the body; the life
of the reputation, longer and more glorious than physical life;
and, finally, eternal life.
Foreigners early recognized that this passion of honor was a
national trait, specific to the Spaniards. About 1420 the con-
dottiere Braccio da Montone replied to a Spaniard who re¬
proached the Italians for their military weakness: “You con¬
sider it more honorable to let the enemy cut you to pieces
than to save yourselves and revenge yourselves another day.”

21 3
214 Honor and Violence

Somewhat later (1513), the Florentine Francesco Guicciardini

affirmed: “The men of this nation value honor so greatly that
most will choose death rather than tarnish it.” Twelve years
later, the Venetian Gaspar Contarini made a similar observa¬
tion: “They greatly cherish honor.” Frenchmen of that period
expressed similar opinions. An anonymous chronicler of the
Italian wars, having observed the soldiers of Gonzalo de Cor¬
doba, wrote: “These crazy Spaniards have more regard for a
bit of honor than for a thousand lives; they do not know how
to relax and enjoy life.”2
It is easy to show that this exaltation of honor endured
down to the end of the nineteenth century and even through
the Civil War. The drama of the Golden Age is the only
national drama that assigns to honor an essential, indeed the
primary, place. The titles of the plays speak for themselves:
El Medico de su honra, La Victoria por la bonra, La Locura por la
honra, are so many plays by Calderon de la Barca. But there
are many other dramas of honor: the Alcade de Zalamea,
again by Calderon, and some of Lope de Vega’s finest crea¬
tions, such as his Peribanez and Fuenteovejuna. In these plays
honor is as imporant as life and, like life, it may be defended
by killing; the law itself allows it. To be sure, the theatre
cannot claim to be the faithful expression of reality. We shall
see, however, that in fact it only exaggerates or transcends
reality.
In 1727, the “special instruction” of Ambroise Daubenton
to his son, who was about to leave for Spain on royal business,
specified: “My son knows the Spaniards well enough to know
that in general they are men of honor and probity, very exact
in keeping their word.”3 Half a century later, both the En¬
glishman Swinburne and the Frenchman Bourgoing stressed
the importance of pundonor as the driving force of men’s
attitudes and actions; in the nineteenth century the En-
 Honor and Violence 2I5

glishman Borrow, relating how Quesada single-handedly

quieted a Madrid riot, and the Frenchman Theophile
Gautier, who journeyed through Spain at almost the same
time (1842—1843), tell the same story. An historian of the
Civil War writes: “These men not only do not know how to
protect themselves; they do not want protection. The head of
the anarchist column finds his pundonor in marching exposed
to fire at the head of his men. That is how Ascaso was killed,
that is how Mora is going to die.”4
What, then, is honor? I have already suggested the answer.
To begin with, it is a particular form of pride, with the result
that foreign writers have sometimes confused the two. This
special form of pride demanded the transcendence of the
individual at the cost of one’s life, if necessary. This means
that the display of honor is almost always public; it requires
witnesses. It is by virtue of its public character that honor
becomes a socialized value based on reputation and transcends
the individual. Accordingly, a man or a woman can lose his or
her honor without having acted dishonorably. Marcellin De-
fourneaux justly observes: “No one, however, is entirely mas¬
ter of his honor, and the theatre of the golden age, like the
code of the Partidas four centuries earlier, never ceases to
recall that it is in the power of others to tarnish it.”13 In this
sense, it can become a fatality. According to Theophile
Gautier, el pundonor, a sort of “chivalric religion with its own
jurisprudence, its subtleties, and its refinements, is much
superior to the fatality of antiquity, whose blind blows fall at
random on the guilty and the innocent alike. . . . The Castil¬
ian pundonor is always perfectly logical and in agreement
with itself. Besides, it is no more than the exaggeration of all
the human virtues, pushed to the last degree of sensibility.”6
I must say that I cannot agree with Gautier. In fact, at
least in certain cases, honor takes on the character of a fate
216 Honor and Violence

that strikes at the innocent and brings misfortune. Here is an

example that I shall have occasion to cite again, for it is very
illuminating. In 1607 in Cordoba, the caballero Francisco de
Aguayo, whose violent behavior verged on the pathological,
attacked the modest, respectable family of a carter. Using fine
promises, he tried to seduce the youngest daughter, Maria de
Aguilera, who was only fifteen and a “maid.” Failing in this,
he tried to buy her from the mother. Another check, in the
name of honor. Then Aguayo turned to the husband and told
him that his wife and daughter were whores, and that he
could prove it. At first Aguilera would not believe him, and
replied that his wife and daughter were virtuous; however,
confronted with the Caballero's claims (lies, according to all
the witnesses), he finally let himself be convinced, sold all his
goods, and fled in despair to Seville. He returned, but
Aguayo’s words had made such an impression on him that
there was no more peace in his home. The grandfather, Juan
de Mesa, who was already ill, died of grief. The other daugh¬
ter, married and pregnant, gave birth to a stillborn child.
Thus an entire family suffered ruin through the malice of an
arrogant caballero whose word a modest carter did not dare to
doubt.7
This story is instructive: for a man, honor is defined by his
reputation, which he must defend at the risk of his life; if he
cannot, all is lost. The honor of a girl resides in her virginity,
that of a married woman in her fidelity. The above episode
confirms the testimony of the Spanish drama.
Where the Frenchman speaks of a “good family,” the
Spaniard speaks of an “honorable family,” and harsh sentences
are meted out to the authors of calumnious verses that im¬
pugn the honor of persons of good repute {en prejuicio de sus
honras). The assault on honor, we saw above, may be nothing
 Honor and Violence 2i?

more than lies presented with an air of authority. A mere

rumor, spread in a neighborhood, sufficed to threaten the
honor of people of quite humble status: the parishioners of
San Andres in Valladolid declared in 1557 that they would
have to move elsewhere if the project to establish a house of
prostitution in their parish were to be carried out, for it could
stain the honor of their wives and daughters. We note, in this
connection, that when an artisan or peasant pledged in his
marriage contract to pay over prenuptial earnest money to his
fiancee, he did so “in honor of her virginity.’’8
Clearly, the interpretations of Menendez Pelayo and Una¬
muno, who view the passion of honor as nothing more than
a sickly egotism, the expression of an exaggerated fear of
public opinion, will not wash; if not false, they are at least
inadequate. Menendez Pidal was much closer to the truth, for
he saw that the individual was regarded as the depository and
guardian of values essential to the collective life; thus, con¬
fronted with a problem of honor, he became the interpreter of
forces that transcended him.

HONOR: PRIVILEGE OR UNIVERSAL POSSESSION?

Was honor something to which only nobility could lay claim,
the privilege of an order? Or was it a passion that all could
experience, a passion capable of “reinforcing the moral unity
of an historical community”? The question remains open.
I believe that a definitive reply to this question must
await a systematic examination of certain categories of docu¬
ments: marriage contracts, testaments, acts of foundation of
mayorazgos, writs of pardon, legal proceedings (notably those
of the Inquisition), replies to official inquiries, political man¬
ifestos. More specifically, it requires a collation of the vocabu¬
lary of honor (honor, honra, honradamente, honrado, honroso),
2 I8 Honor and Violence

the identities of individuals, and the situations or circum¬

stances in which these individuals and terms appear.
However, I do not shun the debate or hesitate to offer a
provisional reply. Clearly, honor was a sentiment of chivalric
or aristocratic origin, and Claudio Sanchez Albornoz confirms
the correctness of this view, which is hardly disputed, when
he finds the source of honor in the process of the Reconquest.
The problem, I repeat, is that of ascertaining whether the
ideal of honor was the exclusive possession of the nobility or
was more widely held. Not long ago I wrote, in this connec¬
tion, of the “contagion of honor.” The arguments I offered
then seem even stronger to me now.
To be sure, the knights-commanders of Calatrava and the
captains of the royal army, being hidalgos, ridicule the peas¬
ants of Fuenteovejuna (Lope de Vega) or Zalamea (Calderon)
when they lay claim to honor. Thereby these nobles make
plain their conviction that honor is a private preserve of their
class. But the denouements of these two plays, both featuring
royal intervention, favor the peasant claims, and Lope de
Vega was perfectly consistent with himself when he affirmed,
in The Art of Writing Flays in Our Time, that “problems of
honor are the best because honor moves every class of people.”
Those who persist in regarding honor as a class trait do not
deny these examples, but they have a ready answer: the al¬
calde of Zalamea and the leaders of the riot of Fuenteovejuna
are rich peasants, local cocks of the walk; if they seek to put
themselves on a par with the nobles by claiming one of their
privileges, the reason is that they are rich.
The argument certainly is not without value. Some fifteen
years ago Noel Salomon noted the coincidence between the
wealth of certain peasants of New Castile and their claims to
honor; such, about 1575, were the “Callodros y Gallegos,
labradores, gente muy honrada.” And Salomon adds: “In point
 Honor and Violence 219

of fact, landed wealth—or at least the economic base repre¬

sented by the possession of a good piece of land—conferred
on the peasant the feeling that he was somebody in society.”9
Let me add some evidence in support of this thesis. There
is no doubt that wealth tended to reinforce the claim to honor
because, generally speaking, notably in the case of peasants,
wealth augments reputation. Thus, in the inquiry of 1586 in
regard to La Bureba, a little region in the province of Burgos,
only one farmer merits the notation time posada honrada (he
possesses a respectable house). He happens to be the richest
farmer. Of the other fairly wealthy farmers it is said tiene
posada honesta (he possesses an honest house). The distinction
is revealing.10 Similarly, the mayorazgo founded by Alonso de
Verdesoto, who, we are told, has hitherto led an exemplary
life, will allow the young man to marry “more honorably.”
One of the conditions imposed on the heir to the mayorazgo of
Pero Hernandez de Portillo is that he marry his sister Doha
Maria “very honorably.” Again, when the Valladolid sculptor
Esteban Jordan established a mayorazgo for his daughter
Magdalena, he clearly specified in the contract that it was
intended to allow her “to live nobly and tranquilly . . . and to
defend her honor.”11 In her study of Cordoba society at the
beginning of the seventeenth century, Elizabeth Ventax ob¬
serves the association of the words principal y honrado or
caballero y honrado. The term principal almost always implies
wealth. If Pedro Fernandez de Baeza, a peasant’s son, is hon¬
rado, it may be because he is also principal, that is, wealthy.
On the other hand, when poor people lay claim to honor—
and we shall see that they do—that honor is founded on
virtue, but it is also very fragile, as shown by the case of the
carter’s family, cited above.12
So much is clear. But if wealth augments a family’s ca¬
pacity to conserve and defend its honor—and this is indubi-
220 Honor and Violence

table—it is not necessary for a claim to honor or an honorable

reputation. Let me try to prove my point.
All the several hundreds of marriage contracts that I have
examined, many of which relate to artisans or farmers who are
not rich and may even be poor, refer to the honor of the
fiancee {por honra de su virginidad) and in the majority of cases
to the honor of her parents or her lineage (por ser doncella y por
la honra de sus padres). Almost all the testaments provide in
detail for funeral honors (honras) which must be rendered to
the deceased whatever his condition. For these two categories
of documents we may provisionally accept the hypothesis that
references to honor occur in 90 percent of the cases.
What is more, we find affirmations that certain individuals
or families are poor but honorable. The Cordoban episode
mentioned above is worth citing again. After being rebuffed
by Maria de Aguilar, Don Francisco de Aguayo tried to per¬
suade her mother, Leonor de Rodriguez, to give him her
daughter, “a virgin, fifteen years of age,” so that he might
have “carnal relations with her.” He added: “If you accept, I
shall dress her very well, for it is a pity that so pretty a girl
should go about so poorly clad.” To which Leonor replied:
“Go to the devil and speak no more to me of such tricks, for
although poor I have great regard for my honor and that of
my daughter.” And in her deposition she explained: ‘Al¬
though this witness is poor, she values her honor and that of
her daughter above all that that man could offer her.” The
father confirms her statement: “My wife and daughters are
honorable and are held to be such.” Such, indeed was their
reputation, for another witness, whom Aguayo wanted to
swear that Leonor and her daughter were whores, fled to
avoid being forced by the insufferable Caballero to “swear to
something that is not true.” Several “honorable” persons vain¬
ly intervened in an effort to dissuade Aguayo from bringing
 Honor and Violence 22 i

misfortune on this family, for he well knew that this woman

was “honorable.”13 Three centuries later Angel Ganivet pre¬
sents a similar situation in his Idearium espahol, in which he
cites the case of Agustin Tinoco, found in a hospital bed in
Antwerp: Tinoco had left his home after discovering his mari¬
tal misfortune because, “although poor, he was an honorable
man.”
Illegitimacy or the wrong color of skin did not ipso facto
produce the loss of honor. The natural daughter of a notary is
honorable “because she is a maid.” The Black Chronicle of Fray
Pedro de Leon, which relates details of the executions that
took place at Seville between 1578 and 1616, reports the case
of a black,“a very courageous and honest man with numerous
white friends who did not scorn his company, because he was
courageous and enjoyed the reputation of being an honorable
man (hombre honrado)'.' Urged on by his friends, the black
demanded satisfaction from a man who had insulted his white
mistress because she had a black lover. The result was a fight
with knives in which the black was killed. His murderer was
executed.14
Even bandits might lay claim to honor, which they iden¬
tified with being true to one’s pledged word. During the
curious affair of Carcagente in 1723, the hired killer Andres
Montaner appears to have murdered the gypsy Agueda
Vicente for an important person, Salvador Albelda, not for
money but because he (Montaner) felt obligated to Albelda.
Certain bandits that Theophile Gautier met on the highway
between Granada and Malaga, discovering that they had in¬
tercepted a convoy whose leader paid taxes to them,
exclaimed: ‘Ah! Pardon us, Senor Lanza, we did not recognize
you; we are honest people and would never commit such a
disgraceful thing; we are too honorable to take so much as a
cigar from you.”15
222 Honor and Violence

Given these attitudes, it is no wonder that honor was

regarded as a national patrimony and that the word was used
routinely in the language of politics. I have examined the
manifestos of the revolutionary juntas of 1868, many of
which have been published by Valeriano Bozal.16 The results
are impressive: the manifesto of the revolutionary junta of
Madrid, addressed to the inhabitants of the capital on Janu¬
ary 1,1867; that of the same junta, directed to the nation on
September 29, 1867; the text of the military pronunciamento
of the bay of Cadiz of September 17, 1868, written by
Brigadier Juan Topete; the proclamation of Prim on Sep¬
tember 18; the manifesto of the junta formed at Cadiz on
September 19; those of the juntas of Malaga, Madrid, the
Balearic Islands, Barcelona; the manifesto of the provisional
government following the end of the revolution on October
25, 1868; and that in which the junta of Barcelona an¬
nounced its dissolution on October 27: all these documents
justify the revolution, among other motives, by the need of
the Spanish people to defend and purify its honor, com¬
promised by a scandalous government. True, the proclama¬
tions of the juntas of Santander, Saragossa, Valencia, and
Extremadura slight the theme of honor, but they are very
short. On the other hand, the texts of some of these docu¬
ments testify to a high regard for honor. The Cadiz manifesto
of September 19, one of the most important, speaking of the
dishonor resulting from the sale of titles of nobility, declared:
“We want to live a life of honor and liberty,” and ended with
the cry: “Long live Spain with honor!” The text of the junta of
Madrid, two days later, multiplied references to honor in
thirty lines: “Homage to the valiant sailors who have de¬
fended and honored their country . . . , to our brilliant sol¬
diers, as liberal as they are honorable; the people of Madrid
curse the filthy, dishonorable yoke that oppresses us. . . . You
 Honor and Violence 223

will show that you are as liberal and honorable as you ever
were.” The junta of the Balearic Islands demanded that peo¬
ple respond to no other appeal than that of honor, and so on.

THE METAMORPHOSES OF HONOR

The persistence of honor as a national passion, as a powerful
motivating force, does not at all mean that its nature and
effects remained the same over the centuries. Defined during
the Reconquest, honor first appeared as a positive value. It
was the basic spring of an individual and collective heroism
whose daily practice was necessary for the survival of Chris¬
tian civilization, inferior on the technical level to Moslem
civilization. At the end of the fifteenth century and during a
good part of the following century, it remained a source of
exploits, even though these exploits served enterprises of less
urgent character, like the Italian wars and the conquest of
America, which contemporary public opinion in general re¬
garded with favor. Honor could also have the meaning of
responsibility: after the revolt of the Comuneros, the Admiral of
Castile wrote to Charles V recalling his past services and
requesting a post with precise responsibilities: “I have no
other ambition than honor.”17 For the rest, honor remained a
guide to moral life; for example, it demanded loyalty toward
the sovereign and respect for one’s given word. An infamous
act entailed the loss of honor; this is shown by the clauses of
acts founding mayorazgos.
But honor was already becoming the hostage of reputation.
Its social significance surpassed its individual significance,
and it was therefore condemned to follow the evolution of
Spanish society. As that society shriveled, ossified, codified its
prohibitions, the conception of honor changed together with
the society; it became constraining, wholly dependent on
public opinion. Mateo Aleman, the author of Guzman de
224 Honor and Violence

Alfarache, documents this when he has his hero say: “What a

burden is this burden of honor. . . . How difficult it is to
acquire and preserve; how easy to lose merely on account of
the common opinion.”18
We have seen that at the end of the sixteenth century a
black skin was not incompatible with the reputation of being
an honorable man, and the cited example is a good one. Yet
in the same period Jewish or Moorish origin already was an
indelible stain that forbade any claim to honor. The time of
inquiries into “purity of blood”—a specific, exclusively His¬
panic phenomenon which had developed over three cen¬
turies—had arrived. Originally, it seems, its motive was
entirely religious: it was born and throve in Andalusia, where
a bitter opposition arose between Old Christians and con¬
verted Jews, who controlled a large part of the commerce and
many of the guilds of Seville. Religious distrust moved sev¬
eral communities to exclude conversos from their midst and, as
a means of barring their entry, to issue the first statutes of
“purity of blood.” This was done by the colegio of San
Bartolome of Salamanca (where the statute dated from the
beginning of the fifteenth century) and by certain military
confraternities of Ubeda, Baeza, Jaen, Alcaraz, whose statutes
might go back to the fourteenth or even the thirteenth cen¬
tury, and whose aristocratic character was strongly marked.
Such statutes became more numerous in the fifteenth century,
and they caused such a great scandal that Pope Nicolas V, in a
bull of 1449, forbade on pain of excommunication that any
wrong in words or deed be done to “the converts to our holy
Catholic faith,” or their removal from civil or ecclesiastical
dignities and charges. In fact, at that period no cathedral
chapter required “purity of blood,” and the Catholic
Sovereigns assigned important posts to conversos. However,
the statute of the colegio of San Bartolome was followed in
 Honor and Violence 225

1488 by a similar statute at the colegio of Santa Cruz at

Valladolid and by the colegio of Siguenza at a time when the
majority of the colegiales were religious.
In the course of the sixteenth century, numerous com¬
munities and private foundations established restrictions on
admission—confraternities, guilds, municipal councils (such
as those of Toledo, Cuidad Real, Vitoria)—and clauses re¬
quiring “purity of blood” even appeared in mayorazgos. Even
more serious, the meaning of these statutes was transformed.
The first ones limited the requirement of proof of purity to
four generations; later the expression “New Christian” lost its
original meaning (referring to the recent character of conver¬
sion) and came to designate every person whose forebears,
however remote, had been Jews or Moors. This mutation
reveals a passage from the religious to the social motive: the
reputation of being of impure lineage sufficed to brand indi¬
viduals and entire families with permanent dishonor and thus
to assign them to a marginal social position.
The great turning point was the statute of the cathedral of
Toledo in 1547. True, as early as 1530 the cathedral of Cor¬
doba had promulgated a statute which completely excluded
conversos from its chapter. But the church of Toledo was the
premier church of the country and its archbishop was the
Primate of Spain. The example of Toledo therefore had an
extraordinary significance. The great inspirer of the statute
was the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo, Juan Martinez Siliceo
(whose true name was Guijeno); of very humble origins, he
had clashed with certain canons, often of Jewish descent, who
came from rich families. The sharp conflict between the dean
of the chapter, Don Pedro de Castilla, himself of Jewish
blood, and the cardinal-archbishop ended in the framing of
the statutes of purity of blood for the cathedral (July 1547).
They were approved by the majority of the chapter despite
226 Honor and Violence

the opposition of the dean and eight canons. Siliceo shrewdly

hastened to gain Papal approval of the statute, which caused a
sensation in Spain and all Europe. Its approval by Charles V
caused Toledo’s example to be soon imitated by numerous
other cathedrals: Jaen, Seville, Badajoz, Leon, Oviedo, Va¬
lencia, and doubtless Santiago de Compostela, among others.
However, these cathedrals remained a minority, and efforts to
introduce the statutes into other important cathedrals like
those of Burgos, Salamanca, and Zamora failed. The last
chapter to adopt a statute of purity of blood was that of Tuy
in Galicia near the Portuguese frontier, which did so in the
1620s because numerous rich Jews had come into Galicia and
sought to enter the high clergy.
The most celebrated religious orders appeared even more
severe than the cathedral chapters in regard to the conversos: as
early as i486, the Jeronymites framed a statute excluding the
conversos in the sequel to a scandalous affair; the Dominicans
were more hesitant and instead of a general rule followed by
the order as a whole there were individual statutes for certain
✓

convents like those of St. Thomas of Avila, St. Paul of Cor¬

doba, and St. Paul of Seville, and for certain regions like
Aragon. In 1525 the Franciscans obtained from Clement VII
a brief forbidding the admission of conversos, but it was not
strictly applied. The Society of Jesus, for its part, long re¬
sisted the pressure of public opinion, but in 1593 it agreed to
refuse admission to New Christians.
We observe that the exclusion of conversos met with resis¬
tance in the Church. On the other hand, without encounter¬
ing obstacles the practice spread to all the noble organiza¬
tions, military orders, confraternities, and lineages, and even
to professional organizations like the guilds and charitable
foundations (hospitals). For a long time the statutes had ne¬
glected the descendants of Moslems (moriscos) because, being
 Honor and Violence 227

almost all humble peasants and artisans, they did not aspire to
charges or dignities. But this socio-religious exclusivism be¬
came ever more rigorous, and by the end of the sixteenth
century the moriscos began to be specifically designated in the
statutes. In 1525, for example, the statutes of the colegio of
San Gregorio de Valladolid applied only to the descendants of
Jews; the revision of 1576 modified article 5 of the chapter’s
constitution to exclude explicitly the descendants of Moors.
Thus the latter were also rejected by honorable society.
Suggestive in this respect is one of the characters of the
picaresque novel Marcos de Obregon. He is the captain of a
Turkish galleon, a renegade morisco from Valencia; he explains
that he left Spain not for religious reasons but because he
found intolerable “the offenses that he daily received from
people who were his inferiors,” and because the statutes of
purity of blood barred him from the charge and dignity of a
magistrate and other offices of “superior honors.” Indeed, after
the expulsion of the moriscos, several Spanish writers attrib¬
uted the failure of Spanish policy toward the moriscos to its
failure to accord honra to this minority. Fray Fernando de
Navarrete, for example, says: “I am persuaded that if, before
the moriscos were reduced to a despair which inspired in them
such evil thoughts, some way had been found to admit them
to certain honors, instead of branding them with the mark of
infamy, they might have entered the temple of virtue through
the gate of honor. ”19
But the effect of these statutes was precisely to exclude the
conversos and the moriscos from the high spheres of political,
religious, and economic life, to deny them access to honor¬
able charges and dignities, and to brand them with the mark
of infamy. The vocabulary of the time offers irrefutable evi¬
dence of the prevailing attitude toward them; all the texts of
the inquiries treat the conversos and moriscos as “sons of an evil

i
228 Honor and Violence

race.” Their ignoble status was even identified with sexual

dishonor: thus Juan de Barrionuevo, a familiar of the Holy
Office of Cordoba, called Don Ponce de Molina y Cabrera,
veinticuatro of Baeza, “a Jew, son of conversos, son of a
whore”—a charge which cost Barrionuevo five years of
exile.20
For many rich families accustomed to holding power, one
of whose ancestors had been a Jew, this situation was disas¬
trous; it signified both ruin and ignominy. To avoid being
declassed, some did not hesitate to resort to linajudos, forgers
who devoted themselves to the manufacture of immaculate
lineages for hundreds or thousands of Spaniards. Simultane¬
ously, the cascade of denunciations unleashed a mass of litiga¬
tions and investigations which fill the archives of the Inquisi¬
tion. Some documents reveal true individual and collective
dramas, the rise of deadly family feuds; this is illustrated by
an affair in Jaen which spanned the sixteenth century. A
family of lawyers, the Herreras, refuted the charges brought
against it and obtained the condemnation of its accusers, the
Quesadas and the Sanchez, one being sentenced to death,
others sent into exile. In 1597, however, the Herreras in their
turn came to ruin for having fabricated documents to prove
the purity of their blood; yet another denunciation brought
the facts to light.21
Every candidacy for entrance into a university college, a
prestigious brotherhood, a great religious order, a cathedral
chapter, the office of regidor or notary, immediately produced
an inquiry into the purity of the candidate’s blood. In the
words of Antonio Dominguez Ortiz: ‘Around 1600 the roads
of Spain were furrowed by commissioners in search of infor¬
mation, local archives were frequently consulted to the same
end, and persons of very advanced age were called upon to
prove the strength of their memories and their knowledge of
family relationships.”
 Honor and Violence 229

Consider the consequences for a family’s reputation of an

inquiry whose issue was unfavorable. Although the responses
of witnesses were secret, the procedure was accompanied by
inevitable publicity. When a community received an applica¬
tion for entry to an office, it named a commissioner to gather
information, with the expense being borne by the candidate
(save in the case of some great colegios), and if the inquiry was
prolonged it could prove ruinous for the family concerned.
The commissioner traveled to the locality from which the
candidate came and “received” the proofs of purity of blood:
written proofs obtained through the examination of parish
registers, testaments, censuses, and the like; and oral proofs,
obtained through the questioning of persons who had known
the candidate’s forebears. He could question whomever he
pleased. If the declarations were all favorable (as was most
frequently the case), the inquiry was limited to the candi¬
date’s four grandparents. In the contrary case, it went back to
much more remote forebears. The secret character of the
interrogations, designed to ensure candor on the part of
witnesses, also permitted persons moved by jealousy or the
desire for revenge to make malicious statements that could
enduringly tarnish a family’s honor.
The union of Portugal and Spain in 1508 under Philip II,
which lasted until the revolt of 1640, was followed by the
emigration into Spain of numerous Portuguese conversos, caus¬
ing a resurgence of inquiries into purity of blood and of the
activity of the Inquisition. Thenceforth the accusation of
being a marram became a grave offense to honor,22 an offense
that could only be washed out with blood, especially after the
fall of the count-duke of Olivares, who had practiced a policy
of tolerance toward the conversos in order to gain the financial
support of the rich marrams. Consequently the seventeenth
century was the golden age of those inquiries which
transformed Spain into a society of castes. Despite the disap-
230 Honor and Violence

proval of Rome and the repugnance of the sovereigns (Philip

IV, for example, tried by the Pragmatic of 1623 to limit the
proliferation of statutes), the prejudice against “impure
blood” was so firmly rooted in customs that the church of
Toledo and the great colleges of Salamanca, in particular,
displayed the greatest reluctance to apply the new law and,
down to the middle of the eighteenth century, the number of
communities subject to such statutes continued to increase:
one had to prove the purity of his lineage in order to be a
lawyer, a notary, or even a teacher of grammar. However,
opposition to the statutes grew among enlightened Spaniards
(Floridablanca, for example), and in many cases the inquiry
became pure routine. Not until much later, however, in
1835, were the inquiries into purity of blood suppressed.
And the conversos of Majorca, the chuetas, continued to be
ostracized and scorned down to the beginning of the present
9Q
century.
Simultaneously, pundonor began to place under interdict
certain kinds of labor, the “mechanical” activities in general.
The act cited above, by which the sculptor Esteban Jordan
established a mdyorazgo for his daughter Magdalena, forbade
her to wed a man of “base and mechanical trade” on pain of
the act’s lapse. The enlightened Gonzalez de Cellorigo
lamented that chivalric honor had gone astray by rejecting
labor, and sought to prove that the practice of agriculture or
commerce had never entailed the loss of honor. Despite the
efforts of Cellorigo and other arbitristas, the prejudice against
labor grew stronger throughout the seventeenth century and
continued down to the nineteenth century. It was this dis¬
torted pundonor that made Larra’s protagonist in El Casarse
pronto y mal refuse every offer of employment.
Similarly, honor could lead to such absurd conduct as total
disregard for one’s safety. If during the great epidemic of
 Honor and Violence 231

1599 some caballeros risked their lives to look after the needs
of the sick in the hospitals, other caballeros who themselves
fell ill refused to go to the hospital to be treated by specialists
in the plague for fear of “falling from their rank.” Or, again,
when under Charles III the marquis de Roda, wishing to
democratize the upper bureaucracy, ordered that young men
of modest backgrounds be admitted into the great university
colleges of Salamanca, many families refused to send their
sons to the reformed colleges, believing that such promis¬
cuity would dishonor them.24
To be sure, some traits of honor, such as its association
with a married woman’s fidelity or a girl’s virginity, remained
unchanged. Here the honor of the whole family—and this
was as true of the king as of the peasant—was involved. But,
depending on the situation, this point of view could lead to
high drama (as in the cases reported in Chapter VII) or to
farce. White tells this anecdote to illustrate the passivity of
the pitiful Charles IV. The king, whose wife, Maria Luisa de
Parma, had cuckolded him a thousand times, complacently
remarked: “We crowned heads, however, have this chief ad¬
vantage above the others, that our honor, as they call it, is
safe; for suppose that queens were as much bent on mischief
as some of their sex, where could they find kings and em¬
perors to flirt with? Eh?”25 At the court of Philip IV, who was
an insatiable woman-chaser, etiquette required that a girl
“known” by the king must not be touched by any other man
and must enter a nunnery. We understand now why a certain
young woman, pursued by the king, barricaded herself in a
room and cried out to Philip: “No, sire, I do not want to
enter a nunnery.”
In fact, from the seventeenth century, honor in its most
typical aspects became a negative value. It no longer bore any
relation to Christian morality or to the most common natural
232 Honor and Violence

morality, although occasionally an individual tried to link

morality to honor. To save himself from being killed by
Francisco de Aguayo, an unlucky man, whom the irascible
caballero had stabbed with a dagger for no reason, seized his
arm and cried out: “How can an honorable man do such
wrong to anyone?” Don Francisco said nothing, but did not
strike again.26 More and more, however, honor was defined
as a code independent of all morality, a code to which social
prejudice and pride or even vanity was the only key. It is
because of this prejudice and pride of caste that the captain
who has raped the daughter of the alcalde of Zalamea in
Calderon’s play refuses to marry her. A literary fiction?
Perhaps. But here we have, appearing before the Inquisition
of Toledo in 1761, a certain Joseph Alonso Blazquez, who is
neither a captain nor a caballero. This widower lived in the
home of his brother-in-law, curate of La Puebla Nueva, and
passed his days fornicating with the servant girl. When the
girl became pregnant, Blazquez refused to marry her because
he felt it “threatened him with the loss of his goods and, what
was worse, with the loss of his honor.”27
Honor must be defended even at the cost of another per¬
son’s life, and it matters little if that person is blameless.
Again I call on the testimony of Joseph Blanco White, who
tells the following strange anecdote about an event that took
place in 1808, during the War of Independence. White and a
friend had escaped from Madrid and were bound for Seville to
join the patriots. Traveling through an Extremadura that was
up in arms, in the village of Almaraz they faced a menacing
crowd. ‘“We wish, sir, to kill somebody,’ said the spokesman
of the insurgents. ‘Someone has been killed at Trujillo; one or
two others at Badajoz, another at Merida, and we will not be
behind our neighbors. Sir, we will kill a traitor.’”28
Such a distorted sense of honor inevitably inspired caustic,
bitter jibes by enlightened observers. We understand better
 Honor and Violence
233

now the admirable costumbrista article of Mariano Jose de

Larra, Empehos y desempenos (Pawns and Redemption of Pawns).
The whole article is based on a caricatural conception of
pundonor: the absurd hero of the story justifies all his con¬
temptible acts—acts that compel him to turn for help to
his uncle—by concern for his honor. The uncle (Larra), bails
the young man out of his difficulties, but never ceases to rail
at him and to expose by his choice of words (“for your honor,”
“what an honorable courtier”) the falseness of the situations
and the phony character of a sentiment that is based on mere
vanity. In other articles Larra returned to the same idea, the
paradox of situations that bring honor to a certain class of
people, though they ought to dishonor them. This, for
example, is the theme of La Sociedad.29

HONOR AS A SOURCE OF VIOLENCE

For centuries Spain was a land of chronic violence. Con¬
tained, indeed successfully repressed, in the age of the Catho¬
lic Sovereigns, then by Charles V and Philip II by judicial
institutions of high quality, it surged up again from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth century. I am not suggesting
that the Hispanic conception of honor was responsible for all
or even for the majority of the acts of violence of this period,
but it certainly encouraged them.
Writs of pardon and certain types of court proceedings
show that, logically enough, one of the causes of brawls was
insults (palabras de enojo). Such an attack on honor, which
could be very serious if it impugned the lineage of the injured
party (Jewish or morisco) or the honor of his mother, called
for signal vengeance and might cause deaths. Proof of this is
the lists of prisoners and galley-slaves, the chronicles of
executions, the cases of “honorable men” who became mur¬
derers as a result of brawls or because they killed their wives;
in the latter cases, we may suspect the motive of vengeance
234 Honor and Violence

for besmirched honor.30 For the rest, the dossiers of various

trials held before the Inquisition because the protagonists
were familiars of the Holy Office show that in Andalusia
there existed an almost permanent state of violence that had a
certain sportive character; young Caballeros were the combat¬
ants and pundonor provided both the pretext and the justifica¬
tion. A provocation, attested to by witnesses, required the
offended party to respond on pain of losing his reputation,
but the affair often turned out badly. The trial of Francisco de
Aguayo at Cordoba in 1608, following the death of Gongora’s
nephew, Francisco de Saavedra; that of Don Luis Quero, re-
gidor of Andujar, who murdered another Caballero of the
town, a son of the alcalde, in 1614; and that of the Caballero
Ortega, who had in 1618 killed Juan de Cazorla, regidor of
Ubeda, gente principal y muy honrada y de muy honradas deudas
(a prominent, very honorable man, with very honorable kin¬
folk), are in this tragic vein. In the last case, the quarrel
degenerated into a frightful crime, for the victim was pur¬
sued and finished off with dagger blows in the Cobos chapel
at Ubeda during the solemn mass, the feast day of the Trans¬
figuration, under the eyes of the horrified faithful who were
spattered with his blood. The aggressive instinct, the taste
for violence, once unleashed, knew no restraint, and farewell
then to chivalric honor. We find an astounding indulgence
shown toward murderers; protected by powerful men and
even by the civil authorities, they got off with a few years of
exile. To be sure, in such cases it is always difficult to estab¬
lish the chain of events and assign responsibility. The accused
regularly claimed that they acted in legitimate self-defense,
and in the course of the trial the dead man was always
portrayed as having provoked the quarrel.31
Generally, however, honor was satisfied when the offended
party accepted the challenge and a duel caused some shedding
 Honor and Violence 235

of blood, no matter how slight. Moreover, wishing to avoid

the tragic consequences of these continual confrontations,
families concluded pacts of amity between young Caballeros
according to a chivalric ritual. This, however, did not always
suffice, for in the first of the cases cited above precisely such a
pact had been concluded five years before among the victim,
Francisco de Saavedra, his murderer Francisco de Aguayo,
and two other young men.

REJECTION OF HONOR
I have shown, I believe, that the ideal of honor, having be¬
come the common ideal of all classes, achieved an extraor¬
dinary diffusion. This does not mean, however, that this ideal
of seigneurial origin was unanimously accepted, that it was
not combatted, more or less explicitly rejected, and even
ridiculed.
Archival documents and literature introduce us to a per¬
sonage whose real or fictitious existence is a standing chal¬
lenge to the model of honor: the picaro. Judicial documents
reveal a multitude of swindlers, ruffians, pimps, complacent
cuckolds, thieves, and hired killers—a multitude of plcaros,
in brief—whose whole life is an exhibition of “anti-honor.”
Thanks to the picaresque novel, literature for once illumi¬
nates historical research, provides it with instructive hypoth¬
eses. The subtle analyses of Maurice Molho show that the
picaro is, after a fashion, the reverse of the hidalgo.32 Honor is
beyond his reach because of his ignoble birth, and the hero of
the picaresque novel makes no bones about it: “His lineage is
composed of thieves, swindlers, Jews, and prostitutes.” These
origins comdemn the picaro to live by expedients that are
always linked to money: beggar, porter, valet, or in the best
of cases a financier and therefore a swindler, the picaro en¬
gages in contemptible activities because, unlike the tiller of
236 Honor and Violence

the soil, he secures his means of subsistence at the expense of

his neighbor. However, we must not be taken in by this
initial aspect of the plcaro. Is the plcaro, like the hidalgo, only
in a different way, “the exponent of a mentality inimical to
commercialism”? Is he not rather a “bourgeois manque”?
The meaning of this hypothesis is clear. From this point of
view the picaresque novel joins the arbitristas in their critique
of Spanish society. Just as the latter openly condemned the
negative implications of honor, at least in its distorted forms
(which were the most widely accepted forms from the end of
the sixteenth century), just as they denounced it as a major
obstacle to work and production, as one of the causes of the
impoverishment of the country, so the plcaro appears as the
victim of a fate that dooms him to abasement because Spanish
society refuses to regard as honorable the bourgeois ways
adopted by other European lands. Simultaneously the plcaro
saps the noble edifice of honor and casts suspicion on its
motives. For Lazarillo de Tormes, honor is but “a thirst for
vainglory and a lie,” “a priesthood without virtue.” For Guz¬
man de Alfarache it is “a mask under which one may steal and
lie, and a useless burden to boot.”
This message was not understood. A distorted ideal of
honor long sterilized Spanish energies. It remained for Joa¬
quin Costa to proclaim in the nineteenth century the need to
lock up with a double lock the sepulcher of the Cid. But by
then it was already too late. When the Spanish bourgeoisie
finally awoke, bourgeois values themselves were being ques¬
tioned.
 IX. TO DIE WELL

A CONTEMPORARY WRITER asserted some years ago: “For

two centuries a multitude of bigots, bores, and cock-eyed
academicians have represented Spain as dedicated to the cult
of death.”1 This irritated him, for to him Spain stood above
all for joy and a carefree spirit.
Admittedly, he had a point. But it would be absurd to
deny that Spaniards over the centuries have been preoccupied
with the thought of death. For Hemingway this was a mark
of good sense, for death is the most certain of certainties, and
this interest in death is only love of life carried to its most
logical conclusion. Unamuno has expressed it perfectly: “To
forget death is to forget life itself.”
We could muster a great number of facts in support of this
thesis of the Spaniard’s complacent attitude toward death.
They include the taste for spectacles based on death, the
bullfight first of all, and formerly the autos-da-fe, and the
large place assigned to death in Spanish art.
Some Spanish painters of the first rank, beginning with
Juan de Ribera, were above all great interpreters of death.
This Valencian artist was fond of depicting scenes of martyr¬
dom, but despite their picturesque monstrosities they do not
constitute his best work. He attained his greatest heights

237
238 To Die Well

when he painted “the immobility of death, the desolating

beauty of young bodies whose life has just left them.” Among
his masterpieces I would cite the Dead Sebastians of the
museums of Valencia and Bilbao and the Dead Christs of the
National Gallery (Washington) and of Naples. Zurbaran
gives a more abstract and metaphysical version of this im¬
mobility of death: Exposition of the Body of St. Bonaventure, the
Christ of the Prado, meditations on skulls, and so forth. The
Sevillian painter Valdes Leal, on the contrary, carries realism
to extremes (cadavers, decomposed flesh), and his canvases
have almost the odor of decay. Need I recall the blood that
bathes the dead man in Goya’s Tres de Mayo and the hundreds
of executions that fill the etchings in his The Disasters of Wart
As for the sculptors of the golden age and their successors
in the eighteenth century, despite their insipidity (witness
Salzillo in Murcia), they produced crucifixions, descents from
the cross, and entombments by the hundreds. Commissioned
works, to be sure, but they suggest public interest in the
spectacle of death and above all in the death of Christ. When
they are the works of artists of “Old Christian” stock—
Alonso Berruguete, Alonso Cano, Juan Montanes, Gregorio
Fernandez—the accumulation of details in polychrome en¬
hances the appearance of death: the livid color of the flesh,
eyes thrown back, contorted heads, open wounds, coagulated
blood. Christ’s body may be twisted by suffering in a work by
Berruguete or Juan de Juni (the National Museum of
Sculpture in Valladolid), and in the Metropolitan Museum a
pietd of Carreho de Miranda presents a Christ streaming with
blood.
Today the Spanish cinema periodically displays an interest
in death, and Spanish literature has always done so; the
drama of the golden age abounds in violent deaths. Quevedo
has a clear predilection for eschatology; closer to our own
time, no author is more symptomatic of this than Miguel de
 To Die Well 239

Unamuno; a survey of his works reveals that death intervenes

in almost all his novels (Peace in War, Abel Sanchez, Aunt
Tula, Two Mothers, St. Emanuel the Good Martyr, Love and
Pedagogy, etc.). The Mirror of Death is a collection of novellas
that is a veritable gallery of the dead.2 Death also pervades
the dramas of Garcia Lorca, his Wedding of Blood, for exam¬
ple, and contemporary novelists are preoccupied with the
same theme: The Jarama of Sanchez Ferlosio; Five Hours with
Mario by Delibes; the Sleight of Hand and Mourning in
Paradise of Goytisolo, among others. We recall that “Viva la
muerte” (Long live death) was both the slogan of the anar¬
chists and the cry of Francoist general Millan Astray.
To be sure, many of these facts prove nothing. The bull¬
fight is much more the exaltation of life than a festival of
death. The bull, symbol of death, enters the arena to be
sacrificed and the bullfighter’s victory is a victory of life. All
historians know that the crowds of ancient times loved the
spectacle of death. There were as many spectators at the
executions in the Place de Greve in Paris, around the stakes at
which witches were burned in England, or at the burning of
Savonarola, as at the autos-da-fe—and we sometimes forget
that the autos-da-fe were also long religious ceremonies that
were not invariably followed by the death of condemned
persons. More disturbing, more specific to Spain, is the cry of
“Long live death,” but it never involved the entire Spanish
people.

DEATH AS THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

Some years ago the writer Miguel Delibes took me to Cor-
tiguera. It is an abandoned village in the north of Old Cas¬
tile, reached over several kilometers of impossible road, very
impressive because for several hundred meters this narrow,
rough, rutted road dominates a gorge hollowed out by the
Ebro. Cortiguera has lovely old houses of gilt stone, once
240 To Die Well

glorious, marked by escutcheons that testify to an ancient

nobility. Miguel led me to the belfry of the church, half in
ruins; there he showed me a large coffin, a box in which for
centuries the dead of the village, one after the other, were
placed to be taken to the place of burial. On the coffin, in
large letters, was inscribed: Aqui se acaba el gozo de los injustos
(Here ends the pleasure of the unjust). Death pitilessly read¬
justs the scale of values, reduces to chaff the inequalities and
iniquities of the world.
Let us consider more carefully the paintings of Valdes Leal.
I should note in passing that this artist, born in 1630, was a
horrified witness to the great plague in Seville, which in
1649, according to careful studies, carried away 60,000
people out of a population of 150,000—a sight that could
mark a man for the rest of his life, especially an artist of such
great sensibility. Here is a canvas entitled Two Cadavers: the
two bodies decomposing in their respective coffins are those
of a great lord and a bishop; they are not obscure or humble
wretches, yet this putrefied flesh is all that remains of these
powerful personages. Here is another canvas whose title
speaks for itself: Death Surrounded by Emblems of Human Van¬
ity. These paintings have the same meaning as the coffin in
the little village of Cortiguera, the same meaning as those
plain words of Sancho Panza: “When we leave the world and
are put underground, the prince travels as strait a road as the
common laborer and the Pope’s body takes up no more space
than that of the sacristan, though one be a grander person
than the other; for when we enter the grave we squeeze and
compress ourselves to make ourselves smaller, or rather we are
squeezed, compressed, and made smaller, however much we
may dislike it, and so goodnight until we meet again. . . .”
For a realistic people, the immense majority of whom had for
centuries suffered great inequalities of condition, the thought
of death, which could not be escaped, which in an instant
 To Die Well 241

abolished those differences, had an obvious attraction. Death

assumed the form of sarcasm and revenge upon the powerful,
the rich, the unjust.
It is in the moment of death that death takes on its full
meaning. Now wealth and power become useless tinsel. In
his manner of dying a man reveals his innermost value, his
deepest nature, his courage, the respect that he owes to him¬
self, his mastery of himself. In this moment of truth he takes
the place that belongs to him by right among other men:
whence the return to popular favor of Rodrigo Calderon,
whose way of facing death, we saw, served his reputation
better than all his previous life. Hence the importance of the
last words of Unamuno’s Phaedra: “She knew how to die.”
But we would distort the truth if we saw the Spanish
interest in death as a mere expression of social frustration and
the desire to reorder human values. There remains an ex¬
traordinary curiosity because the Spaniards, concerned with
essentials, scornful of nonessentials, experience death as an
anguishing mystery: the skulls of Zurbaran, like that of
Hamlet, are a theme of meditation, of metaphysical question¬
ing, rather than a source of macabre enjoyment. All of Un¬
amuno’s work, cited above, is a query concerning the nature
of death, and what comes after it. “The thought that I must
die and the enigma of what comes after is the palpitation of
my conscience.”3 Hemingway’s explanation of the attraction
of the corrida for the Castilian peasantry may well be applied
to the crowds that gathered to watch the great autos-da-fe:
“They think a great deal about death and when they have a
religion they have one which believes that life is much shorter
than death. Having this feeling, they take an intelligent
interest in death and when they can see it being given,
avoided, refused, and accepted in the afternoon for a nominal
price of admission they pay their money and go to the bull-
ring.”4 And now Garda Lorca: “In all countries death is the
242 To Die Well

end. It arrives and the curtain falls. Not so in Spain. In

Spain, on the contrary, the curtain only rises at that moment,
and in many Spanish poems there is a ramp of flowers of
saltpeter over which lean a people who contemplate death.
It is not a question of a pathological propensity for the
funereal; the reasons for the concern with death are of a
higher order. Indeed, the permanent consciousness of the
certainty of death gives a greater value to life and each mo¬
ment of happiness is experienced as if it might be the last
one; vivir bien becomes the logical preface to monr bien.
We understand better now the function of the great
autos-da-fe and the extraordinary interest they aroused. I cite
here the essential portions of an account that I published
some years ago of the autos-da-fe of May 21 and October 8,
1559, in Valladolid:
These ceremonies set in motion immense crowds whose size
corresponded to the importance of the occasion. May 21, 1559: It
was rumored that Doctor Cazalla, the Licentiate Herrezuelo, and
persons of high rank would appear in the procession of the con¬
demned; for the people, and above all for the humble classes, this
was a primary source of attraction. The omnipotence of the In¬
quisition, which struck down the great of this world and did not
halt at the gates of the palace, was made dazzlingly clear to their
eyes. The fascination of the event can only be understood if one
considers the identity of the victims. Among those consigned to
the stake were Doctor Cazalla and his brother Francisco de
Vivero, himself a priest, his sister, and his mother, appearing in
effigy because she had already died; Cristobal de Ocampo, Cabal¬
lero and almoner of the grand prior of San Juan de Zamora; the
licentiates Herrezuelo and Perez de Herrera; Dona Catalina de
Ortega, wife of the commander Loaysa; the silversmith Juan Gar¬
cia, whose wife, it seems, had denounced him; other priests and
other women. Among the “reconciled,” condemned, however, to
perpetual imprisonment and confiscation of their goods, were
Don Pedro de Sarmiento, son of the Marquis de Poza; Don Luis de
 To Die Well 243

Rojas, his nephew and heir to the marquisate; Don Juan de Ulloa,
caballero and commander of Santiago, ... all members of the
orders, the Church, and the nobility, but whose privileges had
lapsed. From their former condition, high above the multitude,
they had been abased, degraded, shamed, and reduced to a condi¬
tion far below that of the multitude. . . .
During the night of May 20—21, two thousand persons kept
vigil in the plaza mayor to assure themselves of good places. Men
paid twelve, thirteen, and sometimes even twenty reales apiece for
access to a balcony or a window overlooking the plaza.5 Begin¬
ning at one in the morning, masses were celebrated; the sound of
prayer ran through the crowd. At dawn, at five o’clock, the
auto-da-fe began. Prince Don Carlos was seen taking his place on
a high stand erected in front of the city hall; around him sat his
aunt, Dona Juana of Portugal, and great lords, the admiral of
Castile, the marquis of Denia, the marquis of Astorga . . . some
ladies, and more than 850 monks belonging to all the religious
orders.
Silence prevailed while the prince took oath on the Bible to
assist and serve the Holy Office in all ways and to pursue heresy.
After the oath, the assembled multitude listened for one hour to
the voice of one of the most eloquent and vehement speakers of
the time, the Dominican Melchior Cano.
Then came the long, terrible reading of the sentences: fifteen
persons were consigned to the stake, fifteen others were reconciled
with the church. The people observed with emotion the reactions
of the condemned. Agustin de Cazalla was especially demonstra¬
tive. He knelt before the princes and asked that he be allowed to
confess his great sins. Led back to his place, he perceived his sister
Beatrice and asked for mercy for her, the mother of thirteen
children. He was ordered to be silent. Then, holding a cross in
his hands, he thanked God for permitting him to confess his sins
and save his soul. Many people wept and prayed God to pardon
Cazalla and receive him into His glory.
By contrast, the licentiate Herrezuelo remained impassive and
received all exhortations with stony disdain. All the accounts
 To Die Well
2 44

agree with regard to the conduct of Cazalla and Herrezuelo. They

diverge with respect to that of the other priests. . . .
It was now four in the afternoon. The auto-da-fe was over, but
now the most terrible moment of the day, the execution, began.
The fifteen condemned were hoisted onto mules and . . . the
sinister procession proceeded by way of Santiago Street to the
Puerta del Campo, where fifteen stakes had been erected. Ahead
went a public crier, proclaiming the justice of the king. Agustin
de Cazalla addressed the people massed along the route, adjured
them to be obedient to the Roman Church, to shun heretical
doctrines; the others remained silent.
The condemned were finally lifted to the stakes and Cazalla
continued to proclaim his repentence, exhorted his companions to
return to the faith of Christ which he had caused them to abandon
by his lies. Fourteen of the condemned, those who had repented,
were strangled before being burned. Only the resolute licentiate
Herrezuelo was burned alive.
The drama was repeated on October 8, and from midnight on
the plaza mayor was full. Some new elements attracted the mul¬
titude, and in the first place the presence of King Philip, absent
from the auto-da-fe of May 21. Among the condemned was a
representative of the high nobility, a son of the marquis de Poza,
Fray Domingo de Rojas, taken at Pamplona while trying to flee to
France; a Caballero of Verona, Don Carlos de Seso, said to be
related to the royal family, who had to be carried because he was
paralyzed; youth and beauty were represented by Donas Mag¬
dalena de Reynoso and Maria de Miranda, nuns of the convent of
Santa Maria de Belen, both twenty years of age. . . . This time
two men, Don Carlos de Seso and Juan Sanchez, Doctor Cazalla’s
servant, displayed an extraordinary courage while being burned
alive.6

To be sure, although almost all Spaniards aspired to die

well, the majority feared death, and many could not over¬
come that fear. Fray de Leon, who attended persons con¬
demned to death in Seville from 1578 to 1616 in order to help
 To Die Well 245

them “die well” and during that period observed the behavior
of 309 condemned people, wrote that the agitation of their
last moments deprived the unfortunates of their reason and
left them as if dazed, so that some who were pardoned at the
last moment could not remember what they had done or said
in that state.7 We must also note that during the great
plagues some individuals, face to face with death, lost their
sense of responsibility and even their dignity; at Santander,
where a severe epidemic broke out in November 1596, the
alcalde mayor and his family had withdrawn to a remote
village by December 28, and they abandoned the town com¬
pletely in May 1597. Physicians and surgeons themselves
sometimes fled; at Bilbao in 1598 the junta of physicians
proceeded to draw by lot the names of those who should care
for the sick, and one of the men so chosen refused to serve. At
Bilbao again, in September 1599, a scandal arose because
curates of the parishes would not administer the sacraments
to victims of the plague in the hospital, who therefore died
without spiritual succor. Needless to say, rich men without a
sense of responsibility, and even the poor when they could,
took to flight. Fear of death, then, obviously existed; it
inspired panic and often caused men to forget the demands of
Christian charity with regard to the poor, beggars, and other
individuals who might be “infected.”8

BEFORE GOD AND MAN

Having made these points, I should add that “to die well”
must be understood as a complex behavior that informs both
the relation between man and God and that of the individual
with his fellows. Unquestionably the Spaniard, even one who
had strayed, displayed a great concern to die reconciled with
God. Fray de Leon’s mission, cited above, reflects the desire
of the Church to help hardened or occasional criminals to die
well. Fray de Leon observes that the great majority of con-
246 To Die Well

demned men in fact died with feelings of real contrition, at

least if the execution was carried out, as was customary,
within three days following notification of the sentence; in
other cases the emotional climate created by the terrible sen¬
tence could not be maintained and men lost their fervor and
returned to their errors.9 Marcellin Defourneaux has assem¬
bled, for Madrid in the seventeenth century, a number of
items taken from newsletters (avisos and noticias) telling of
brawls that ended in one or another of the combatants calling
loudly for confession.10 I could cite many other examples like
the following concerning the death of a Cordoban caballero,
Juan de Rivera, in 1603. A witness deposes: “This witness
heard a voice near the postern de la Leche which said: ‘Confes¬
sion!’ And at that moment a priest of the cathedral went by
and Avila said to him: ‘For the love of God, go over there and
confess that man, for he asks for confession.’”11
It goes without saying that violent deaths were not the
most typical kind. In the cases of those who had time to
think of their approaching end, testamentary dispositions
clearly show their desire to merit the divine mercy, reflected
in charitable bequests, the pardon of injuries, the manumis¬
sion of slaves, and the forgiveness of debts. We recall too,
that testaments provided both for an escort of poor people to
facilitate the deceased’s entry into the Kingdom of Heaven
and for appeals for his salvation through frequent repetition
of the sacrifice of the mass.
But anxiety for a death conforming to the instructions of
the Church was sometimes obliterated by the wish to impress
other men. Fray de Leon found among his condemned some
strong-minded individuals who affected indifference and dis¬
dain in the moment of death and even some valentones
(braggarts) who went to their ends mocking death.12 Some,
it is true, joined devotion to stoicism, like the slave
 To Die Well 247

Geronimo, who suffered without flinching first the amputa¬

tion of a hand and then his death, merely saying, “Let this be
for the love of God.”13 For the rest, noble pundonor, which
demanded a reply to every challenge or provocation, implied
acceptance of the risk of death. As an analyst of the case of
Francisco de Aguayo observes: “The provocative attitude of
Don Francisco de Aguayo with regard to the police and every
other person capable of resisting him reflects a taste for run¬
ning risks, for putting his life on the line over and over
again.”14 This taste was widespread among young men of
noble lineage in such Andalusian towns as Cordoba, Jaen,
Baeza, Ubeda, and Andujar, who routinely carried swords
and daggers and frequently used those arms. It is likely that
this mentality and this practice tended to diminish over a
long period the value set on human life; that value must have
been very small indeed among all social classes, considering
how indulgent was the law in cases of bloodshed as long as
they did not involve peculiarly vicious crimes. The writs of
pardon allow us to conclude that the blood money paid for
murder, at least for the murder of an individual of humble
background, was a small amount. In Old Castile and in
Seville justice seems to have been more severe, but in upper
Andalusia and in the kingdom of Valencia the courts were
lenient in passing judgment on murderers. As a result, hired
assassins proliferated; witnesses testified that Andres
Montaner, the probable assassin of Agueda Vicente, the
gypsy of Carcagente, “was accustomed to perform similar acts
for money or for pleasure.”15
Let me conclude with a curious affair that reveals the small
regard that men had for the lives of others and probably for
their own. It concerns two hired killers, both married and
heads of families, both farmers, natives of the Valencia re¬
gion, who were approached in 1566 by a familiar of the Holy
248 To Die Well

Office, the notary Pablo Manyas, a resident of Candiel, who

offered them good pay for killing a man. The two peasants
accepted without the slightest interest in the identity of the
victim, after which they learned that the man to be killed was
mosen (Master) Luis Juan Estanya, a caballero of Valencia. The
two killers did not hurry to complete the job, for they had
not yet received a cent, and Manyas, having first promised
them one hundred Valencian pounds, now promised them
only fifty. Soon they learned that he no longer wanted Estanya
killed, but a certain Pedro Marin instead. However, no
money had yet been paid. In fine, the two ruffians, seeing
that Manyas did not pay them and hearing soon after that
Estanya was a “good man” (hombre de bien), decided to warn
him. Their explanation has its own flavor: “Because Pablo
Manyas is a bad man who wants everyone killed, but pays not
in money but in words.” They frankly admitted that they
would have killed Estanya had they been paid, “for they were
in dire need.” The depositions and testimony sound perfectly
natural. Here we see a notary, a familiar of the Holy Office,
unhesitatingly hiring two married peasants to kill a man; and
they accept the job without a second thought, as if it were the
most ordinary thing in the world.16
Thus the contemplation of death encouraged the absence of
respect for life by developing a sort of exemption from risk.
In this area, nothing had changed at the opening of the
nineteenth century. But this by no means excluded joy of life;
to this day Spain remains a country with one of the lowest
suicide rates in the world.
 (oqclusiorL

IN THE SECOND HALF of the sixteenth century the Castilian

Alejo de Vanegas, in his Agonta del trdnsito de la muerte,
defined the specific sins of the Spaniards as follows:

The first consists in spending inordinately on attire, much

more than one’s income or fortune will ordinarily allow; this
commonly leads to swindles and litigations in the city courts; as a
result the wealth that should serve to maintain a household passes
to the courts.
Second vice: Spain is the only country where toil is considered a
disgrace; this explains that multitude of loafers and women of evil
life, not to speak of other vices which accompany idleness and
form its impressive cortege. ... If those people did not consider
work a disgrace, the country could retain the money that now is
exported to pay for the products of the activity of other nations
and we would be spared the many sins that idleness commonly
engenders.
Third vice: the mania for ancestors. This vice seems to be
common to all nations, but only in Spain does a man think
himself dishonored because he has no ancestors. . . .
Fourth vice: the Spaniards are ignorant and scorn knowl¬
edge. . . .
These are the four vices, the four temptations to which the
demon subjects the Spanish Christians, in addition to others
which are common to all men.

Unknowingly, Alejo de Vanegas had defined the mental

attitudes which largely contributed to the absence of the
industrial revolution in Spain: a tendency toward overcon¬
sumption, social prejudice based on birth without stain,
scorn for productive activity and for science which alone
makes possible the mastery of nature. Here the critique of the

2 49
250 Conclusion

moralist reinforces that of the economist. But the moralist is

indifferent to the color of the days, to the joy and movement
of life. Spain of the Old Order lived only for the present and,
save in the age of enlightened despotism and excepting some
districts in the north, had no interest in reform, took no
thought for the future.
This book amply illustrates the first three Spanish “vices”
of Alejo de Vanegas. There remains the fourth “vice,” doubt¬
less the only important one, because ignorance and scorn
for knowledge may largely explain the divergent evolution
of Spain and western Europe, beginning in the seventeenth
century.
If we consider the situation in the middle of the nineteenth
century, it is certain that Spain was distinguished from west¬
ern Europe by its cultural backwardness. George Borrow
noticed it during his Iberian wanderings: the average
Spaniard was ignorant, “the demand for books of every kind
is pitifully small in Spain.” Passing through Salamanca, the
Englishman noted: “A melancholy town is Salamanca; the
days of its collegiate glory are long since past by, nevermore
to return. ... Its halls are now almost silent, and grass is
growing in its courts, which were once daily thronged with
at least eight thousand students; a number to which, at the
present day, the entire population of the city does not
amount.”1 Down to the middle of the nineteenth century,
various reformist governments seemed to neglect completely
the tasks of education, despite statements of their good inten¬
tions.
However, in the age of Enlightenment many thinkers had
already taken note of this cultural backwardness and had
called for an ambitious program of education. The Bene¬
dictine friar Feijoo had declared war on “verbalist instruction,
hollow formulas, formal dialectic, exercises in memorization”
 Conclusion 251

(Robert Ricard). He proposed to substitute the school of

science and experience. Later, the Asturian Jovellanos saw
ignorance and laziness as the sources of all the evils from
which Spain suffered and elaborated a plan for reforming
education that would substitute the “Castilian” humanities
for the Greco-Latin humanities, that would develop knowl¬
edge of the living languages, the natural and exact sciences,
and the science of political economy.
If we go back two centuries the landscape changes. In the
reign of Philip II certain universities—at least the “major”
universities of Alcala, Valladolid, and Salamanca—were in a
flourishing state, and their schools of law, medicine, and the
humanities were as notable as any in Europe; Seville had a
school of navigation of the first rank. Even more significant,
the library collections reveal a close link to the evolution of
European thought in fields ranging from the Greek and Latin
authors to history and scientific research.
It was in the period 1600—1750 that the divorce—a di¬
vorce for which the rigors of the Inquisition had probably
prepared the way—took place. But the process was not a
simple one. Certainly Spain never knew the equivalent of that
“educational revolution” whose importance Lawrence Stone
has shown for England where, about 1640, at least one-third
of all adults knew how to read and write. But England was an
exception in Europe and itself later suffered a regression.
Moreover, the taste for letters remained very strong in Spain
in that period; according to Cervantes, literary culture was an
important means of social ascent, and between 1580 and 1660
literature had its greatest flowering. Even if the masses
lagged behind, there was nothing here that differentiated
Spain from the rest of Europe. Even the Inquisition, it seems,
does not adequately explain the Spanish case: in the golden
age it did not stifle creativity, although it may have oriented
252 Conclusion

it toward modes of expression that were aesthetic and

spectacular rather than rational. In the eighteenth century the
slowness of the Inquisitorial activity rendered it ineffective:
the Persian Letters of Montesquieu were not condemned until
1787, fifty years after they entered Spain! Between 1747 and
1807, about 500 French books were condemned, half of them
after 1789, but these condemnations were quite ineffective
because the forbidden books continued to be smuggled in,
especially through Cadiz, and even enjoyed some additional
publicity. This was the case with Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV,
Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, the Encyclopedic, and the
works of Rousseau. The Benedictine Feijoo, who hardly left
his Asturian cell, knew perfectly the works of Fontenelle and
Bayle. Indeed, Marcellin Defourneaux has written: “No, the
Inquisition did not close Spain off to European culture; the
whole history of Spain in the eighteenth century proves the
contrary. But it gave some Spaniards the feeling that they
were shut up in an intellectual prison through whose bars
they could catch a glimpse of liberty.”2
Only new research can provide a soundly based answer to
this question. It is especially important to determine the
educational levels of the various social classes. An exhaustive
study of the Inquisition series, “Blasphemies and Improper
Words and Deeds” would doubtless provide the answer, be¬
cause the Inquisition put the following questions to the ac¬
cused: Did they know the prayers of the Catholic religion
(Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo), the Ten Commandments?
Did they know how to read and write? Did they own books?
Now, the nature of the offenses was such that the offenders
perfectly represented the population as a whole. Inventories
of the libraries of some key towns for the period 1650—1840
could indicate the degree of diffusion of modern science
among the educated classes; the study of the regulations of
 Conclusion 253

manufacturing establishments and hospices and of municipal

ordinances could give an answer to the important question of
the length of the working day between 1650 and 1840—
important because it indicates the advance or lack of advance
of a bourgeois mentality. Finally, study of the censorship of
books and newspapers could clarify the ideological struggle
and basic policy of the years 1775-1808, during which the
liberal government sought (it is uncertain with what success)
to break the resistance of a sector of public opinion. Did
Spaniards continue to affirm and believe rather than to rea¬
son, doubt, and experiment? If the answer is yes, why?
Whatever the answer, the traits defined by Alejo de Van-
egas in the sixteenth century composed an enduring mental
structure which in time crystallized and operated as a con¬
straining element. On the other hand, the way men lived their
faith and followed the ways of love never ceased to change,
creating styles and attitudes that explain the contradictory
judgments of foreigners before the spectacle of a Spain that,
after having inspired fear, admiration, or hatred, first aston¬
ished Europe, and, in our own time, entertained her.
-
 c/Ippei\di^: Docuir(er\ts

THE INSTITUTION OF THE MAYORAZGO AND

ITS MOTIVATIONS
Extract from the act of foundation of the mayorazgo of
Magdalena Jordan, by her father
Esteban Jordan, sculptor (Valladolid, October 2, 1598)

Let all know who see this public writ of amelioration (mejora) of
the third and fifth in the form of a mayorazgo that I, Esteban
Jordan, sculptor and servant of the king our lord, an inhabitant
(vecino) of this city of Valladolid, residing in the ward of La Puerta
del Campo, extramuros, say that by my last marriage with Maria
de Zarate, my wife, we had and procreated a legitimate daughter,
Doha Magdalena Jordan del Melgar, who presently is a maid of
twenty-one, a little more or less, emancipated by me; and because
of the great love that I had for her mother, on account of her
modesty and virtue, and because of the good companionship that
the said Magdalena gave me during my widowership, I have
much affection and goodwill for her; in proof whereof, in order to
reward her in some way for the trouble I have caused her, to
preserve my memory, and enable her to live nobly and tranquilly,
take care of her needs, and defend her honor:
Using therefore the power which the laws and pragmatics of
this realm concede to the father to better the state of any of his
children or grandchildren with the third and the fifth of the rest
of his property. ... I determine in accord with her to better her
state with the third and the fifth of my property . . . with the
conditions, clauses, burdens, and limitations that are stipulated
here; all of which have been accepted by the said Magdalena
Jordan, my daughter. . . .
[The conditions include]
Item, that this mayorazgo of my goods and revenues cannot be
inherited by any friar or religious, were she even my daughter

255
256 Appendix: Documents

Magdalena, nor any priest ... or other ecclesiastical person, con¬

fraternity, monastery, or university.
Item, that my daughter and her successors shall marry only
Old Christian men without stain, who have enjoyed and enjoy the
reputation of such, who have not been prosecuted or punished by
the Holy Inquisition, and who have not practiced base or mechan¬
ical occupations; and if they should practice such trades, let them
lose their rights to the succession and let the mayorazgo pass to
him who can claim it in case of her death. . . .
A.H.P.V, Legajo 768, Folio 2132

A CASE OF SCANDALOUS BEHAVIOR

Pantale'on de Casanova, in the village of Los Sauces (1581)

On July 10, 1581, there appeared before the lord inquisitor-visitor
one Juan Bravo, whose oath was taken according to the forms of
law and who promised to tell the truth. He is 26 years old, a little
more or less, and among other things he declared:
That he had heard his brother, Lucas Bravo, being told that
nobody at Los Sauces had ever seen Pantaleon de Casanova, stew¬
ard at Los Sauces, confess himself or take communion. . . .
At La Palma, on the 22 of the month of August of 1581, in the
presence of the inquisitor-visitor, the licentiate Juan Lorenzo,
there voluntarily appeared a man who said his name was Juan
Velasquez, inhabitant of Los Sauces, aged 40 . . . who, having
been sworn according to the forms of law . . . declared for the
discharge of his conscience that during the space of about ten
years that he lived at Los Sauces, he had never seen Pantaleon de
Casanova, factor at Los Sauces, confess himself or take commu¬
nion, either at Lent or during the joyous feast days; this was a
public and notorious fact among all the inhabitants of Los Sauces,
and caused great scandal and murmurs among them. Moreover,
this declarant has strong suspicions with regard to the said Panta¬
leon, because, when hearing mass, he looks elsewhere, does not
strike his breast as other Christians do, and hears mass with very
 Appendix: Documents 257

little devotion. Moreover, he keeps a morisca in his house, and it is

publicly notorious among the inhabitants of Los Sauces that he
lives in concubinage with her. Moreover, he is an enemy of the
good and saintly brotherhoods and is an enemy of the poor, for no
one has ever seen him give alms. Moreover, he says that being
suspicious of the said Pantaleon, he asked Francisco Rodriguez
Lorenzo, curate of Los Sauces, if he did not confess or give com¬
munion to the said Pantaleon at the times prescribed by the
Church, and the curate replied that he had never confessed him.
And he asked other curates if they had confessed him and they
said no, and he had asked at La Palma, Santo Domingo, and San
Francisco. . . .

A.H.N., Inquisicion, Legajo 69, Folio 25

THE QUEST FOR RELIGIOUS UNITY:

THE CHRISTIAN EDUCATION OF THE MORISCOS

Synod and capitulation of the cathedral of Granada (1541)

The peoples should be instructed in our holy Catholic faith. Now,

since the greater part of our archbishopric and province is peopled
by persons newly converted to our holy Catholic faith from the
Mohammedan sect, and some from Judaism, and since the faith is
the foundation of every spiritual edifice, without which we cannot
please Our Lord God, in order that these new converts may be
taught and instructed, we ordain and determine th; t in all the
churches of our archbishopric, collegiate and parish, every Sunday
of the year and at the time of the obligatory feasts, the curate or
celebrant of the great mass, after the offering, shall teach the
people the Ave Maria, the Pater Noster, the Credo, the Salve
Regina, and how to cross themselves; he shall also teach them the
articles of the faith, the Ten Commandments, the charitable
works, the mortal sins, and the general confession. Each feast day
or Sunday let him teach a little of this in Spanish, slowly and
clearly, and let the celebrant of the following feast day or Sunday
take up where the other left off until all has been completed, in
conformity with Christian doctrine and the instructions that were
ordained during the congregation that was held in this city in the
258 Appendix: Documents

presence of His Majesty in 1526. These instructions contain all

that the new converts should know, the things they should know
and do as good Christians, as well as the things they must shun
because they are errors and orders of Mohammed and his Koran,
offices and ceremonies or customs of the Jews and Moors. We
ordain that all the curates and beneficiaries of the churches of
our archbishopric observe this Christian doctrine against
Mohammed.
Moreover, we ordain that all present and future curates who are
sufficiently learned or capable thereof and have charge of parishes
of Old Christians, each in his church, shall proclaim the holy
Evangel or the epistle of the life of a saint, to their parishioners on
Sundays so as to lead them along the road of salvation and keep
them from offending our Lord . . . and returning to their homes
without spiritual sustenance. In the communities and parishes of
New Christians, in addition to teaching doctrine every Sunday
and obligatory feast day, let the curates in the morning, after¬
noon, or after vespers, cause to come before them in the church
children who are less than fifteen and more than six years old to
teach them doctrine, and let them be tested on what they know
until they are instructed in these matters. Moreover, every
Wednesday and Friday let the curates cause to come before them
in the church, at the hour of the great mass, all married women
and widows of the parish and publicly teach them doctrine, but
not retain them so long that they neglect their household tasks;
and let all girls more than eight years old come every Saturday to
the mass of Our Lady and be taught Christian doctrine on that
morning. . . . We order all sacristans who ordinarily teach chil¬
dren to dismiss in the morning, before mass, the older children
who must go to work in the fields or at other tasks and the
younger boys and girls after mass; and when a girl or woman
knows all the doctrine, or at least the Ave Maria, the Pater
Noster, the Credo, and the Salve Regina, let the curate give her a
document certifying that she no longer needs to attend the
sessions of doctrine. . . . And in order that none fail to attend the
 Appendix: Documents 259

said sessions of doctrine, let the curates maintain registers and

lists to keep attendance, recording those who are absent.
. . . And because it is our wish to instruct all the Christians in
our holy Catholic faith, especially those who are commended to
our care, by all possible means, in addition to what was said
above we ordain that in each church of our archbishopric there
shall be a panel to which will be affixed the Christian doctrine in
summary form, and let there be there the Ave Maria, the Pater
Noster, the Credo, the Salve Regina, the articles of faith, the
Commandments of God, the works of charity, the obligatory feast
days, and fast days, and the other things that every faithful
Christian should know, and let this panel be hung in every church
in a place where all can clearly see and read it. We also order all
teachers, both ecclesiastical and lay, who teach children to read,
to teach them above all through their primers which contain these
instructions, and after completing each day’s lesson, morning and
afternoon, they should make them cross themselves and recite the
Christian doctrine so that they learn their letters and the Catholic
faith and good customs at the same time.
Extract from the Capitulations ordered by D. Gaspar de Avalos
during the holding of the synod. Taken from Maria J. Paquero,
Gaspar de Avalos, Archbishop of Granada
and Cardinal of the Church, Vol. II

THE FEASTDAY OF CORPUS CHRISTI AND ITS ORNAMENT:

THE CUSTODIAL
Extract from the contract for the making of a custodial by Juan de Arfe,
silversmith of Salamanca, for the Cathedral of Valladolid
(September 13, 1587)

Let all who see this writing know that I, Juan de Arfe, sil¬
versmith, inhabitant (vecino) of this city of Salamanca, parish of
Santa Maria, acknowledge that I give full powers ... to Giusepe
of Madrid, silversmith, inhabitant of Valladolid, to conclude for
me and in my name a contract with the prior and the canons of
the holy church of the said city of Valladolid, whereby I shall
260 Appendix: Documents

make for the said church a silver custodial of a size and in a

manner conforming to the design and model which shall be given
to me, and the said prior and canons accepted the price and the
conditions and clauses and declaration which were decided
upon. ... At Seville, September 11, of the year 1587.
[There follows the contract, which includes the following con¬
ditions:]
The said custodial shall not weigh more than 210 marks, with
payment for the silver and the work to be at the rate of 16 ducats a
mark, for the architecture and for the decoration, and if the said
custodial weighs more than the said 210 marks, payment will be
made according to the weight of the silver only, with no account
taken of the work. . . .
Item, with the condition that the stories represented on the
first pedestal shall be carved in more than mezzo-relievo that they
may be seen and enjoyed from afar, and the stories will be those
assigned by the chapter or its delegates; and the same shall be
done with the stories of the bas-relief of the second member. And
in the angles of these pedestals shall appear the saints to be
designated, carved in more than mezzo-relievo . . . and all shall
be done with great perfection, so that the work stands out and can
be enjoyed from afar, according to the indications of the design.
And the upper part shall be finished with angels, towers, and the
other figures in the form of pyramids that have been marked on
the design. . . .
Item, with the condition that it shall be completed with great
perfection one month before the day of Corpus Christi of the year
1590.
Item, that by All Saints’ Day of this present year of 1587, the
said Juan de Arfe will be in this town and will live here until he
has finished the said custodial.
Item, that all the figures, both in round bosse and in relief will
be made by the hand of the said Juan de Arfe. . . .
A.H.P.V., Legajo 485, Folio 570
 Appendix: Documents 261

CONCERN FOR PURITY OF BLOOD

Protestation of the purity of the lineage of the Martins
(September 25, 1632)

Don Antonio Martin y Sierra, sacristan of the Cathedral of Teruel

and commissary of the Holy Office of this district. I declare that
one day in the month of June of the present year of 1632 there
came to the place of Torrelacarcel, a dependency of the commu¬
nity of Teruel and of its district, a collegian (whose name I have
forgotten) of the colegio of Santa Cruz de Valladolid to receive
information on the purity of lineage of Doctor Gaspar Bueno y
Martin, second cousin of this declarant who, like the said Doctor
Gaspar Bueno, has a fourth part of his origins in this place
through his grandparents on the side of the Martins; and there
now resides in this place Antonio Martin y Adrian, uncle of this
declarant and cousin-german of his father. The said collegian
having taken information publicly from numerous witnesses . . .,
Baltasar Hernandez and Esperanza Hernandez, brother and sister,
declared that the said Doctor Gaspar Bueno and Antonio Martin,
uncle and cousin of this suppliant, were Jews and of evil race. Not
only on this occasion, but before and after the taking of this
testimony they said the same thing before numerous persons, to
the scandal of many who hold the Martins to be of pure origin,
without any stain. When these witnesses were warned that they
were wrong, because the purity of the said origin had been proven
on numerous occasions, and they did very ill to give such false
testimony, they replied that the other witnesses had been sub¬
orned, especially in the case of the testimony taken from this
suppliant.
Now, since the honor of the said persons and their good name
and reputation depend on me, it behooves me to seek vengeance
for the injury done the said Don Gaspar Bueno and Antonio
Martin before Your Holiness’ tribunal for, my blood being pure
from the stain of any evil race, as has often been verified, this
insolence injures not only the said persons but the ministers who
262 Appendix: Documents

have carried out the inquiries and to witnesses who deposed be¬
fore them. Since this offense merits punishment and chastisement
... I declare that I lodge a complaint against the said Balthasar
and Esperanza Hernandez, brother and sister, and denounce them
before Your Holiness and before this holy tribunal and accuse
them of criminal conduct, and in order to establish this fact I
plead that I be ordered to take information from witnesses. . . .
Moreover, I ask and plead that the said Balthasar Hernandez and
Esperanza Hernandez be taken and conducted to the prisons of
the Holy Office and that they be required to make confession and
give replies under oath. . . .

A.H.N., Inquisition, Legajo 520, Folio 4

N.B. Balthasar and Esperanza Hernandez were in fact found

guilty following an investigation on appeal.

A LOVE MATCH?
Extract from the marriage contract of Juan Guetro, market gardener,
and Maria de Trigueros (October 10, 1561)

Let all who see this public writ of marriage and earnest money
know that by God’s grace and will marriage vows have been
exchanged between the following parties: I, Juan Guetro, market
gardener, an inhabitant of this noble town of Valladolid; and
Maria de Trigueros, daughter of Maria Martin and her husband
Tome del Moral, who is present, and of her first husband Fran¬
cisco de Trigueros, inhabitant of this town, in order that I, the
said Juan Guetro, and Maria de Trigueros may espouse each other
by the said vows that make the true marriage and thereafter marry
as the Holy Mother Church ordains. . . . And I, the said Juan
Guetro, being happy that my instances and prayers have been
answered and I am given for wife the said Maria de Trigueros,
whom I love, do consent and hold for good that I receive neither
goods nor dowry in addition to her person, and neither you, the
said Maria Martin, nor you, the said Tome del Moral, are obli¬
gated to give her a dowry or goods on account of the legitimate
portion that comes to her from the said Francisco de Trigueros, or
 Appendix: Documents 263

in any other manner, save what she and you wish to give. And
this I leave to your free will and that of the said Maria Martin,
and engage myself and the said Maria de Trigueros not to ask for
anything during the life of the said Maria Martin. . . . And if it
should happen that the said Maria Martin and you, the said Tome
del Moral, should of your own free will wish to give some goods
and dowry, though not obligated thereto, I engage to receive
them as dowry goods of the said Maria de Trigueros. ... I also say
that in honor of the marriage and the said Maria de Trigueros and
her parents and relations, and because she is a maid and on
account of my great love and goodwill for her, I promise to send
her as prenuptial earnest money 10,000 maravedis which I ac¬
knowledge to be the tenth part of my goods and property ... in
the form of a house which I possess, situated in the ward of San
Pedro of the said town, on the highway of Cabezon . . . and
because the contractant cannot write, I, the said notary, attest to
this and sign at his request. . . .
A.H.P.V., Legajo 57, Folio 1393

SEVILLE AND BULLFIGHTING AT THE

END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

You should be told, however, that Seville is acknowledged, on all

hands, to have carried these fights to perfection. To her school of
bullfighting that art owes all its refinements. Bullfighting is
considered by many of our young men of fashion a high and
becoming accomplishment; and mimicking the scenes of the am¬
phitheatre forms the chief amusement among boys of all ranks in
Andalusia. . . .
Our young country gentlemen have another substitute for the
regular bullfights, much more approaching to reality. About the
beginning of summer, the great breeders of black cattle—
generally men of rank and fortune—send an invitation to their
neighbors to be present at the trial of the yearlings, in order to
select those that are to be reserved for the amphitheatre. The
greatest festivity prevails at these meetings. A temporary scaffold-
264 Appendix: Documents

ing is raised round the walls of a very large court, for the accom¬
modation of the ladies. The gentlemen attend on horseback,
dressed in short loose jackets of silk, chintz, or dimity, the sleeves
of which are not sewed to the body, but laced with broad ribbons
of a suitable color, swelling not ungracefully round the top of the
shoulders. . . .
Two droves of lean cattle are brought every week to a large
slaughterhouse (el matadero) which stands between one of the city
gates and the suburb of San Bernardo. To walk in that neighbor¬
hood when the cattle approach is dangerous; for, notwithstanding
the emaciated condition of the animals, and though many are
oxen and cows, a crowd is sure to collect on the plain, and by the
waving of their cloaks, and a sharp whistling which they make
through their fingers, they generally succeed in dispersing the
drove, in order to single out the fiercest for their amusement.
Nothing but the Spanish cloak is used on these occasions. . . .
This sport is exceedingly lively; and when practiced by profi¬
cients, seldom attended by danger. It is called capeo. The whole
population of San Bernardo, men, women, and children, are
adepts in this art. Within the walls of the slaughterhouse, how¬
ever, is the place where the bullfighters by profession are allowed
to improve themselves. A member of the town corporation pre¬
sides, and admits, gratis, his friends; among whom, not¬
withstanding the filth natural to such places, ladies do not dis¬
dain to appear. The matadero is so well known as a school for
bullfighting, that it bears the apt appellation of the College. . . .
A bull-day (Dia de Toros), as it is emphatically called at Seville,
stops all public and private business. On the preceding afternoon,
the amphitheatre is thrown open to all sorts of people indiscrimi¬
nately. Bands playing military music enliven the bustling scene.
The seats are occupied by such as wish to see the promenade on
the arena, round which the ladies parade in their carriages, while
every man seems to take pleasure in moving on the same spot
where the fierce combat is to take place within a few hours. The
spirits of the company are, in fact, pitched up by anticipation to
the gay, noisy, and bold tempo of the future sport. . . .
 Appendix: Documents 265

Few among the lower classes return to their beds on the eve of a
bull-day. Starting at midnight, they pour down the streets lead¬
ing to the amphitheatre, in the most riotous and offensive man¬
ner, to be present at the encierro—shutting-in of the bulls—
which being performed at the break of day, is allowed to be seen
without paying for seats. These animals are conducted from their
native fields to a large plain in the neighborhood of Seville, from
whence eighteen, the number exhibited daily during the feasts,
are led to the amphitheatre on the appointed day, that long
confinement may not break down their fierceness.
Joseph Blanco White, Letters from
Spain, pp. 135—44.

DISPARAGEMENT OF MARRIAGE AND

DEFENSE OF FORNICATION
Various Declarations:

1. Lorenzo Bustamante, weaver of velvets, inhabitant of Toledo,

to a friend, Diego de la Costa (1555):
“It’s a bad rule that God has given married folks, and I swear to
God that whoever persuaded me to marry played me a bad trick
. . ., for I would be much better off to have one whore one day and
another the next. ... If I could have all the whores I wanted in
Paradise, glad would I be to go there, but would prefer to go to
hell if I could have them there.”
A.H.N., Legajo 69, Folio 18

2. Confession of Alonso Cabello, inhabitant of Hazana (1575):

“In the city of Toledo, August 13, 1575, there appeared before
the licentiate Alonso Serrano, inquisitor and vicar general of all
the archbishopric of Toledo, and before me the notary public . . .
Alonso Cabello, an inhabitant of Hazana. He denounced himself,
saying that last Thursday, the 11th of the said month of August,
while he was going from this city to his village with Eugenio
Maroto and Diego de Huerta, inhabitants of the said place, Diego
de Huerta said to him that he had gone to a house of prostitution
266 Appendix: Documents

(;mancebia) and had had intercourse with one of those women; and
when the declarant said that he had also gone there, Maroto
replied: ‘Why do you go there, being a married man? Do you not
know it is a sin?’ And the declarant, from ignorance, not consid¬
ering or understanding what he said, replied: ‘But if one pays, it
is no sin. . . And now he asks and supplicates the Lord God to
pardon him and the reverent vicar general to be merciful in
giving sentence. . . .”
A.H.N., Legajo 69, Folio 21
3. Testimony of Francisco Garcia Borrero with regard to
Lorenzo Diaz, treasurer of Talavera de la Reina (1611):
“One evening, seated at the fire, this declarant heard Lorenzo
Diaz, who spoke of indecent, dirty things having to do with
women, say that it was not as great a sin to have intercourse with
a single woman of evil life as with married women; and that one
did not commit a mortal sin with a single woman of evil life if
one copulated with her less than seven times.”
A.H.N., Inquisition, Legajo 70, Folio 8

A GLORIOUS MALADY: SYPHILIS

Extract from the “Christian Catechism” (1358)

I have indicated the ways in which God formerly chastised men

for their sins of lust. Let me say that men have learned little from
the old and the new punishments that God sent for those sins.
God chastises and cares for our sins like a father and like a
physician who loves his patient. When ordinary remedies fail to
cure an illness, the good physician seeks new and extraordinary
remedies. But if the strength of the malady is greater than the
virtue of his medicines, no remedy remains but to complain of the
patient. God wished to cure men of this sin and tried all the
ordinary punishments and even some extraordinary ones, like
those which he used at Sodom and Gomorrah and in the times of
Noah; but all have proved useless, for the world is still given to
the same sin, and in some places the evil has even grown worse.
 Appendix: Documents 267

In our time God has found a new, unheard-of remedy to

chastise our lust; it is a new sort of leprosy that is called the
buboes or the “French sickness” or “Italian leprosy,” I know not
why, for it is very common among all the nations of the world.
With this leprosy God now punishes indecent men. It is a malady
that perpetually torments sinners. Together with sickness of the
body it wounds them in their honor, for one who was sent this
punishment was regarded as infamous; and medicines availed
nothing during his whole life; and it was stinking and extremely
contagious; and such it still is in some of its varieties, for it is said
that they are numerous. God Our Lord wished to heal the world
with this punishment and make men chaste and moderate in their
carnal appetites. But even this severe medicine did not suffice to
teach chastity and moderation to the vicious; instead they sought
some poor remedies against this leprosy and have laughed at and
mocked the justice of God.
Matters have reached the point where a man loses neither honor
nor authority by getting this leprosy. Rather is it fashionable and
proper for a courtier to have had it, and not a man at court but
must exert himself to get it. Really, this is carrying sin to ex¬
tremes, when neither the sin nor its punishment is feared or
regarded. That is why God, like a physician who has exhausted
all his remedies, declares through the prophet Isaiah: “How can I
punish you more than I have, since your sickness grows despite all
my remedies? I see none who can receive medicine or remedy;
nothing remains for me but, like a physician and your father who
loves you, to lament your perdition, for your malady and your sin
are more powerful than all your medicines.”
Critical edition of J. J. Tellechea, Madrid, 1972,
Vol. II, pp. 90-91

LOVE AND RESORT TO MAGIC

A Trial for Sorcery at Toledo (1536)

We the inquisitors against heretical perversity and apostasy in

this very noble city and archbishopric of Toledo, commissioned
268 Appendix: Documents

and deputized by the apostolic authority, having jointly with the

vicar and ordinary judge examined the criminal suit against Fran-
cisca Diaz, wife of Alonso de Arenas, hatter, inhabitant (vecino) of
this city, in which she is accused by the venerable bachiller Diego
Ortiz de Angulo, prosecutor of the Holy Office, who declares the
above-said Francisca Diaz heretical, perjured, excommunicated,
and a protector of heretics . . . because she has committed many
acts of sorcery and invocations of demons to the great offense of
God Our Lord and His Holy Mother Church, to the scandal of the
Catholic people and the Christian religion; and in particular,
because the said Francisca Diaz sought out a person whom she
believed to be a sorceress and prayed her to work some sorcery in
order that a man whom she greatly loved and by whom she had
had a son should marry her. And the sorceress ordered her to go
between 10 and 11 o’clock at night to the threshold of her house,
and say: “Devils of the oven, bring him around; devils of the
marketplace, bring him to me dancing; devil of the butcher shop,
bring him to me.”
. . .And the above-said Francisca Diaz often invoked demons
as instructed by the sorceress, believing and holding for certain,
like a heretic and idolatrous infidel, that the devil would ac¬
complish what she had asked, attributing to the devil works and
power of God. . . . Moreover, the said Francisca Diaz, like a pro¬
tector and defender of heretics, sought to hinder the work of the
Holy Office of the Inquisition. When a certain person who had
been advised to inform the Holy Office of the Inquisition of what
she (Francisca Diaz) had done against the faith wished to do this,
she (Francisca Diaz) advised him to do nothing of the kind,
telling him to beware the devil and not go to the Inquisition; she
also visited another person and told her that if she were sum¬
moned to the Inquisition in regard to this affair, she must not
diverge in her testimony from what another person had said . . .
for even if she perjured herself, it would suffice to place a blanca
[copper coin] in the poor-box of a church and say an Ave Maria to
be absolved; and she did many other things that merited severe
punishment. That is why the said prosecutor asked us to proceed
 Appendix: Documents 269

against the said Francisca Diaz as a heretic, an apostate from our

holy Catholic faith who sought to hinder the work of the Holy
Office, and a sorceress who invoked demons. . . .
Now, having seen that the said Francisca Diaz has declared and
confessed to us that she said and did all the things and acts of
sorcery of which she is accused, but that she had no intention of
believing in the devil or his works, as appears in detail in the said
confession, and that she asked us to be merciful with her when we
impose a penance for her offenses ... , we determine that we
could, if we wished, complying with the rigor of the law, punish
her severely for having invoked demons, but since the said Fran¬
cisca Diaz appeared before us of her own free will to confess her
faults, when no testimony had yet been presented against her in
this Holy Office, and she seems to have confessed her faults
clearly and openly and has asked us for penance . . ., we condemn
her to appear in the present auto-da-fe as a penitent, a wax candle
between her hands, so that after the reading of our sentence she
may abjure the crime of heresy of which she is accused; and we
admonish her to shun these things henceforth and cease to com¬
mit these acts . . . and we order her to perform the other acts of
penance that we impose on her....
(Sentence of January 12, 1536. The penance required the reci¬
tation of the rosary “as devoutly as possible,” every day for one
month.)
A.H.N., Toledo, Series XXXX

A WRIT OF PARDON AND THE COST OF A LIFE

Writ of Pardon of Juana Hernandez, wife of Francisco Puertas,
farmer, in favor of Joan de Carrion, farmer (June 22, 1559)

In the very noble town of Valladolid, June 22 of the year of the

Lord 1559, before the very noble lord, Licentiate Tapia de las
Heras, lieutenant of the resident judge in this town of Valladolid
and under his jurisdiction . . ., in the presence of myself, Antonio
de Cigales, His Majesty’s notary and inhabitant of the said town,
there appeared Juana Hernandez, wife of Francisco Puertas,
270 Appendix: Documents

farmer, inhabitant of the said town; and she says that some three
years ago, more or less, the said Francisco Puertas, her husband,
went from this town on certain business and never appeared
again, and that subsequently Joan de Carrion, inhabitant of the
said town, being angry with Francisca Hernandez, mother of the
said Juana Hernandez, stabbed the said Francisca Hernandez sev¬
eral times with a dagger, of which she died; and now she and her
sisters, who are Maria Hernandez and Francisca Hernandez, agree
to pardon this death on condition that Joan de Carrion give them,
to cover the costs and expenses of the proceeding, sixty ducats for
her use and profit and those of her sisters.
(There follow the hearing of witnesses and the writ obliging
Joan de Carrion and the guarantor (fiador) to pay the sixty ducats
in two installments: thirty immediately and the thirty others by
Saint Mary’s day of August 1560.)
 A BRIEF

Cl\tonology
OF SPANISH HISTORY, 1469-1833

1469 Marriage of the Catholic Sovereigns, Ferdinand of

Aragon and Isabella of Castile
1481 Creation of the Supreme Council of the Inquisition
1492 Capture of Granada and completion of the Recon¬
quest
Expulsion of the Jews from Spain
Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus
1516 Death of Ferdinand of Aragon and accession of
Charles I of Spain, who became Charles V in 1519
1519—1522 Conquest of Mexico by Cortes
Magellan’s voyage around the world
Revolt of the Comuneros and the Gemiantas
1532—1533 Conquest of Peru by Pizarro and Almagro
1534 Founding of the Society of Jesus by Ignatius de
Loyola, who in 1526 had published his Ejercicios Es-
pirtuales
1545 Opening of the Council of Trent
Discovery of the mines of Potosi in upper Peru (pres¬
ent Bolivia)
1547 Statute of the Cathedral of Toledo on the purity of
blood
1554 Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, masterpiece of the
picaresque novel
1556 Abdication of Charles V and accession of Philip II
1556—1567 Beginning of the revolt of the Netherlands against
Spain
1557 Spanish victory over the French troops at Saint-
Quentin

27l
272 Chronology

1559-1561 Great autos-da-fe at Valladolid and Seville

1562-1635 Life of Lope de Vega
1563 End of the Council of Trent
Beginning of the construction of the Escorial
1568 Founding of the order of the barefoot Carmelites by
St. Juan de la Cruz
1571 Victory of Lepanto over the Turks in the eastern
Mediterranean
1586 Burial of the Count of Orgaz by El Greco
1597-1600 Great epidemic of plague in Spain
1598 Death of Philip II and accession of Philip III
1599 Guzman de Alfarache by Mateo Aleman
1600-1681 Life of Calderon de la Barca
1605 The first part of Don Quijote by Cervantes
1609-1614 Expulsion of the moriscos
1621 Death of Philip III and accession of Philip IV
The Count of Olivares becomes the royal favorite
1624 Los Borrachos or The Triumph of Bacchus by Velazquez
1643 and
1648 Defeats at Rocrois and Lens at the hands of French
armies
1647 Las Lanzas or The Surrender of Breda by Velazquez
1648-1653 Terrible epidemic of plague in Spain
1656 Los Meninos by Velazquez
1659 Peace of the Pyrenees between Spain and France
1665 Death of Philip IV and accession of Charles II
1700 Death of Charles II
Beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession
1701 Accession of Philip V
1714 Return of peace to Spain
1746 Death of Philip V and accession of Ferdinand VI
1756 The Census of La Ensenada
1759 Death of Ferdinand VI and accession of Charles III
1766 Expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain
1780 Goya enters the Academy of Painting
 Chronology 273

1788 Death of Charles III and accession of Charles IV

1808 Forced abdication of Charles IV and Ferdinand VII at
Bayonne and beginning of the war against France
Joseph Bonaparte becomes king of Spain
1812 Meeting of the Cortes of Cadiz and drafting of a lib¬
eral Constitution
1814 Restoration in Spain
Ferdinand VII returns to Madrid
Dos de mayo by Goya
1820 Liberal revolution unleashed by the uprising of Cadiz
1824 Triumph of the independence movements in Latin
America
1833 Death of Ferdinand VII and accession of Isabella II
The Carlist Revolt
The liberal ministers complete the destruction of the
Old Order
.

■
 Qlossary

Alcalde Successors to the former Moslem Kadis (the term comes

from the Arabic al-qadi, the judge), alcaldes combined ju¬
dicial and municipal functions. In the towns they played
the role of mayors, justices of the peace, and superinten¬
dents of police. Large towns also had ward alcaldes. Other
kinds of alcaldes had specialized functions: alcaldes de Corte
received appeals, alcaldes del crimen tried criminal cases, al¬
caldes de hidalgos judged nobles, and the alcaldes of the Santa
Hermandad (Holy Brotherhood)—a rural militia or police
force established by Ferdinand and Isabella to maintain
public order—were its local heads. See Chapter I, note 11.
Arbitrista A maker of projects of political, social, and economic
reform; a writer who specialized in this field.
Audiencia A judicial and administrative body having some re¬
semblance to the French Parliaments of the Old Regime. In
colonial Spanish America, the Audiencias became the prin¬
cipal administrative organs.
Auto A religious dramatic composition, presented on the great
feast days. Appearing first in the thirteenth century, the
genre reached its climax in the sixteenth century. The autos
may be compared to the mystery plays of the French Middle
Ages. Autos sacramentales: autos in honor of the Eucharist.
Auto-da-fe “Judgment of matters of the Faith”: a ceremony in the
course of which the sentences handed down by the Inquisi¬
tion were solemnly proclaimed.
Ayuntamiento Municipal council.
Bachiller Holder of the first degree from a Spanish university.
Colegio 1. A semi-autonomous community of scholars within a
Spanish university, typically endowed by its founder with
scholarships and with statutes which regulated the subjects
to be studied, dress, and discipline, and the selection of
students for scholarships.

275
276 Glossary

2. A secondary school, especially one maintained by the

Jesuits, that stressed the study of Latin and classical au¬
thors.
Comuneros, revolt of the Rising of the communes of Castile against
the regent Adrian of Utrecht, in 1520—1521. After some
successes the Comuneros, abandoned by the nobility, were
defeated. Their chief, Juan de Padilla, captured in April
1521, was beheaded.
Conversos Jewish converts to the Catholic faith.
Corregidor Principal magistrate in an important town, where he
represented the king and presided over the municipal coun¬
cil. He combined administrative and judicial functions. See
Chapter III, note 3.
Cortes Periodic assemblies of representatives of the clergy, the
nobility, and certain towns of a Spanish kingdom. They
acknowledged the new sovereign (thereby legitimizing him
in case of dispute), received his oath of loyalty to the laws of
the realm, granted him subsidies, examined royal requests,
presented grievances. In Castile, the meetings of the Cortes
and their composition depended on the king; in Aragon,
the king had to summon them once or twice a year and the
members held their seats by right. The role of the Cortes
declined considerably in the seventeenth century. Since the
Napoleonic epoch the name Cortes has been given to the
various legislative assemblies and parliaments held in Spain.
Costumhrista A writer who specializes in portraits of manners
(from costumhre, custom).
Faenas The various phases of a torero's work.
Huerta Irrigated plain used for market gardening.
Mancebia House of prostitution.
Maravedi A Spanish copper coin of the value of $.007 in U.S.
pre-1934 gold dollars.
Mayorazgo An institution designed to prevent the dispersion of a
family’s property by making it indivisible, inalienable, and
hereditary in a certain line of descendants: an entailed estate.
 Glossary 277

Mesta Association of raisers of transhumant sheep. Growing out

of local associations, the Mesta of Castile, recognized by
Alfonso the Wise in 1273, became extremely powerful in
the sixteenth century. To the Mesta belonged the sheeprais-
ers of Leon, Castile, and Extremadura. The herds passed the
spring in the mountains of Leon, descending in the winter
into the plains of Extremadura. In passing from the winter
to summer pastures they used sheepwalks (cahadas), which
it was forbidden to cultivate. Among other rights, the
graziers had obtained the right of pasturing their herds in
communal lands, with a prohibition against clearing and
enclosing such lands. The Mesta possessed its own council,
administrators, and officers. Its privileges were definitively
abolished in 1836.
Partidas (Las Siete) Code of laws and customs compiled under the
direction of Alfonso the Wise by the juriconsults Jacome
Ruiz, Francisco Martinez Roldan, and others. It owes its
name to the fact that it was composed of seven parts: reli¬
gion; the king, the State, and the subjects; justice; mar¬
riage; contracts; testaments; offenses and penalties.
Reconquest (in Spanish Reconquista) The long struggle which led to
the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula by the Christians
from the Moslems. Extending over several centuries,
marked by advances and retreats, it was principally the
work of the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Its salient
episodes were the conquest of Valencia by El Cid (1094), the
victory of Las Navas de Tolosa (1212), and finally the capture
of Granada (1492).
Regidor The office of regidor in Castile was equivalent to that of a
municipal councillor or magistrate.
Tertulia An evening party or social gathering.
Veinticuatro (“Twenty-four”) Municipal councillor in Andalusia.
'
 9S(ptes

PREFACE
1. Cited in Americo Castro, The Structure of Spanish History, Princeton,
N.J., 1954, 17.
2. Cited in Manuel Fernandez Alvarez, Economia, Sociedad, y corona:
ensayos hist'oricos sobre el siglo XVI, Madrid, 1963, 64.
3. Gracian and Quevedo are cited in Fernando Diaz-Plaja, The
Spaniard and the Seven Deadly Sins, tr. by J. I. Palmer, New York,
1967, 11, 72.
4. Jose Cadalso, Cartas marruecas, Madrid, 1963, 65—66, 71—72, 103.
5. Francesco Guicciardini, “Relazione di Spagna,” in Opere, ed. by
Vittorio di Caprariis, Milan, 1961, 29—31.

CHAPTER I
1. These lines are largely based on A. Lafront, Encyclopedic de la cor¬
rida, Paris, 1950, and C. Popelin, La Tauromachie, Paris, 1970.
2. See pp. 23—24 for a discussion of the term hidalgo.
3. The Order of Our Lady of Mercy (Mercedarians), was founded in
1218 by St. Peter Nolasco and St. Raimond de Penafort. It was
especially dedicated to the ransom of Christian captives of the
Moors.
4. British Museum, Ms Egerton 357, PS/5633.
5. Francisco Lopez de Gomara (1510—1560) was secretary to Hernan
Cortes and author of Historia de las Indias, published in 1553.
6. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid au siecle d’Or, Paris and The Hague,
1967, 569-73.
7. Hayward Keniston, Francisco de los Cobos, Secretary of the Emperor
Charles V, Pittsburgh, 1959, 453 pp.
8. Infanzones were nobles having a limited seigneurial power by heredi¬
tary right.
9. See Glossary, under Regidor.
10. An alcalde ordinario had functions resembling those of a mayor,
with the difference that generally there were two alcades ordinarios
in a village.
279
280 Notes to Pages 21—41

CHAPTER II
1. See J. Garcia Mercadal, Viajes de extranjeros por Espaha y Portugal,
Madrid, 1952, I, 1422.
2. A.H.N. (Archivo Hist'orico Nacional), Inquisici'on, leg. 1842, fol. 2
(1608).
3. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 561, fol. 1 (1685).
4. A.H.N., Inquisici’on, leg. 519, fol. 13 (1753).
5. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 382—83.
6. March Bloch and Robert Mandrou, among others, have called atten¬
tion to the interest of these problems, but perhaps did not assign
them all the importance they merit. See Bloch, ha Societ'e fe'odale,
Paris, 1949, I, 118—20, and Mandrou, Introduction a la France mo-
derne, Paris, 1961, 92—97.
7. A.H.N., Inquisici’on, leg. 560, fol. 1 (1625), and leg. 569, fol. 25
(1581).
8. Julio Caro Baroja, El Carnaval, Madrid, 1965, 398 pp.
9- Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, London, 1822, 260—327.
10. See, for example, Baudilio Barreiro Mallon, La Jurisdiction de Xallas
a lo largo del siglo XVIII. Poblaci'on, sociedady economla, Universidad
de Santiago, 1973, 693 pp.
11. See the Glossary
12. The “bull of the Crusade,” granted by the Pope to the Spanish king
during the Reconquest, was sold to individuals. In principle, its
proceeds were destined to finance the struggle against the Moslems.
13. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, London, 1791, 3 vols.
See II, 288 ff.
14. Ibid., 404 ff.
15. Ibid., I, 106.
16. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 285.
17. Pasos were scenes of the Passion represented by sculptured figures
which were displayed in procession, sometimes carried in men’s
arms and sometimes mounted in carriages.
18. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 480.
19- Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, I, 112—15.
20. Ibid., 110-11.
21. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 227.
22. A board, one of whose sides was set with pieces of flint, that was
pulled about the threshing floor in order to separate the grain from
the chaff.
 Notes to Pages 41-58 281

23. See Glossary, under Mesta.

24. Bartolome Bennassar, Recherches sur les grandes epidemies dans le Nord
de I’Espagne d la fin du XVIe siecle, Paris, 1969-
25. Jorge Nadal, La Poblaci'on espahola, Barcelona, 1966, 105—43.
26. Baudilio Barreiro Mallon, La Jurisdicci'on de Xallas.
27. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, I, 122—23.
28. A.H.N., Inquisici'on; see, for example, leg. 70, fol. 8 and 12.
29. Hayward Keniston, Francisco de los Cohos, 92—93 and 342.
30. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, London, 1971,851
pp. This book shows to what degree the Reformation transformed
the order of time and the meaning of the days.

CHAPTER III

1. See Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, I, 102.

2. The Obradeiro (work of gold) is the name given to the sumptuous
baroque facade which was added to the great Romanesque cathedral
of Compostela in the eighteenth century. Behind the facade, in the
interior, is the famous Portico de la Gloria.
3. The corregidor, who appeared in Castile in the middle of the four¬
teenth century, was the royal representative in important towns. He
controlled and presided over the municipal council; he was also the
judge of the first or second instance.
4. Based on the unpublished works of Julien Montemayor, “Les Vallees
de la ‘Montagne’ centrale a la fin du XVIe siecle,” Toulouse, 1972,
typewritten copy; J. Soulie and D. Lascaux, “Oviedo et Tineo dans
la deuxieme moitie du XVIe siecle,” Toulouse, 1972, typewritten
copy; and the fine article of J. M. Perez Garcia, “Intento de recon-
struccion demografica en una zona del litoral de las Rias Bajas,” in
Compostellanum 16, Jan.—Dec. 1971.
5. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 429—30.
6. Thus the original mayorazgo of the Quintanos, a lineage of Burgos,
was transmitted without alienation for ten generations, from 1449
to the suppression of the institution in the nineteenth century. Cf.
Bartolome Bennassar, “Etre noble en Espagne,” I, 103.
7. Based on Jean-Paul Le Flem, “Las Cuentas de la Mesta,” in Moneda y
Cr'edito, June 1972.
8. Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain in the Years 1775 and 1776,
London, 1787, I, 315.
282 Notes to Pages 39—73

9. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 182—83.

10. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, II, 129-
11. Francis Brumont, “La Bureba a 1’epoque de Philippe II,” Toulouse,
1974, typewritten thesis. I should mention here the important work
of Eugenio Larruga y Bonete, Memorias politicas y. econ'omicas, Ma¬
drid, 1778—1800, 4 vols.
12. Pierre Vilar, La Catalogue dans I’Espagne moderne, Vol. II, Paris,
1962.
13. Francis Brumont, “La Bureba.” The above-cited book by Jorge
Nadal, La Pohlaci'on espanola, shows the existence of food crises down
to the end of the nineteenth century.
14. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, I, 170, 192, 215, 296—
97, 375; II, 86, 97, 340, etc., and especially the plates; III, 356 ff.
15. Julien Montemayor, “Les Vallees de la ‘Montagne.’ ”
16. Baudilio Barreiro Mallon, La Jurisdicci'on de Xallas, 345—63.
17. Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, Paris, 1964, 303.
18. Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain, I, xiii—xvii.
19. Pierre Ponsot, ‘Au contact de deux mondes: une chronique
gaditane,” in Melanges en I’honneur de Fernand Braudel, I, 475.
20. See, among others, Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, I,
221-22, 357; II, 260-64, 279, 282-83; III, 47-52, etc.; Henry
Swinburne, Travels through Spain, I, 328-29, etc.; George Borrow,
The Bible in Spain, London, 1906, 236-37, 244; Theophile
Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 218—36.

CHAPTER IV

1. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 380-82.

2. Veinticuatro (“twenty-four”): a municipal councillor in Andalusia.
3. Bartolome Bennassar, "Consommation, investissements, mouve-
ments de capitaux en Castille aux XVIe et XVIIe siecles,” in Hom-
mage a Ernest Labrousse, 150.
4. Archivo General de Simancas: Diversos de Castilla, leg. 37, fol. 39.
5. See George Demerson, Don Juan Melendez Valdes et son temps, Paris,
1962, 10 and 12.

6. A.H.N., Inquisition, leg. 69, fol. 25. See in Appendix the docu¬
ment concerning the scandal caused by the conduct of Pantaleon de
Casanova.

7. Albert N’Damba, “Les Esclaves a Seville a lepoque de Philippe III,”

Toulouse, 1969, typewritten copy.
 Notes to Pages 73-88 283

8. A.H.N., Inquisition, leg. 69, fol. 32 and leg. 68, fol. 18. See in
Appendix the case of Lorenzo Bustamante.
9. Louis Cardaillac, “La Polemique antichretienne des morisques,”
Montpellier, 1973, typewritten thesis. This remarkable work il¬
luminates the continuous, sometimes subterranean controversy be¬
tween moriscos and Christians.
10. Agustin Redondo, “Luther et l’Espagne de 1520 a 1536,” in
Melanges de la Casa Velasquez, Seville, 1965.
11. See above, Chapter II. The importance of this feast explains the
large sums spent by the great cathedrals in order to possess a superb
custodial. See in Appendix the contract of Juan de Arfe for the
custodial of the cathedral of Valladolid.
12. Beata: a woman who lives the life of a religious in the world.
13. Bartolome Bennassar, Recherches sur les grandes epidemies. Another
instance is the similar conduct of the clergy of Murcia under the
direction of its bishop in 1648—1649.
14. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 390.
15. Bartolome Bennassar, “Consommation,” 150.
16. See, for example, Description de I’Espagne by Jean Lhermite and
Henry Cock, Paris, S.E.V.P.E.N.
17. Alvaro de Albornoz, El Temperamento espahol; la democracia y la liber-
tad, Barcelona, 1921, 119 ff-
18. See pp. 225 ff. and Documents, p. 261.
19. Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie quotidienne en Espagne au siecle d'Or,
1.45.
20. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 399, and “Etre noble en Espagne,”
100-101.
21. Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie quotidienne, 122—23.
22. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 400.
23. A.H.N., Inquisition, leg. 560, fol. 16 and leg. 561, fol. 2. These
affairs are discussed briefly infra, Chapter VII.
24. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 25; Joseph Townsend, A
Journey through Spain, I, 283-
25. Charles Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 1750-1800, Berkeley,
1932.
26. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 12; Joseph Townsend, A
Journey through Spain, I, 336.
27. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 13-
28. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, I, 153—54.
284 Notes to Pages 88—97

29. Based on the article by Francisco Aguilar Pinol, ‘Asociaciones

piadosas madrilenas en el siglo XVIII,” in Anales del Instituto de
Estudios Madrilehos, VII, Madrid, 1972. The author’s intent is to
show that faith had not declined at all at Madrid in the eighteenth
century. In my opinion, it shows rather how greatly the quality of
that faith had declined.
30. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, frequent notations.
Townsend asked the bishop of Oviedo if his charities were not
excessive. The prelate replied that doubtless it was the duty of the
magistrates to cleanse the streets of beggars; his duty was to give aid
to all who asked for it: II, 9-
31. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 441—42.
32. George Borrow, The Bible in Spain, 144.
33. Ibid., 208.
34. Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 282.
35. George Borrow, The Bible in Spain, 189-
36. Louis Cardaillac, “La Polemique antichretienne.”
37. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 69, fol. 19—35.
38. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 519, fol. 5. Coll was only fifteen years old;
he was let off with a reprimand.
39. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 519, fol. 2. Antonio del Portal, who had
not confessed for four years, was suspected of heresy; this butcher of
Valencia was condemned to abjure de levi during an auto-da-fe and
to pass four months of penitance in a convent. This and the preced¬
ing examples are studied by Marie-Genevieve Lefranc, “Blasphemes
et blasphemateurs dans le royaume de Valence aux XVIe et XVIIe
siecles,” Toulouse, 1974, typewritten copy.
40. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 519, fol. 7 and 15: the case of Teminea is
also studied by M. G. Lefranc. For Bustamente, see leg. 69, fol. 18.
Blasphemies referring to parts of the body assigned to God were
frequent. Hence Charles V’s Pragmatic of 1525, severely forbidding
swearing “by any of the very holy members of Our Lord.”
41. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 518, fol. 11
42. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 69, fol. 34.
43. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, II, 149- “I administer
communion in the parish of St. Martin of Madrid, in the year
1785.”
44. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 519, fol. 13. See the study of Nicole Blanc
 Notes to Pages 97—118 285

and Marie-Claude Lopez, “Moeurs et religion a Teruel au XVIIIe

siecle,” Toulouse, 1974, typewritten copy.
45. Julio Caro Baroja, Les Sorcieres et leur morale, Paris, 1972.
46. Robert Jammes, PAnticlericalisme des proverbes espagnols.
47. George Borrow, The Bible in Spain, 304. Ribadeo’s story told of a
pass with a very evil reputation because it was supposedly haunted
by the duendes (spirits) of two Franciscans who had died there after
fighting over who had collected more money.
48. Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne. To be sure, Gautier also wrote
of Spain in the 1840s: “The Peninsula is in the grip of Voltairian and
liberal ideas about feudalism, the Inquisition, fanaticism; the
Spaniards believe that to destroy convents is the height of civiliza¬
tion” (p. 214).
49. Juan Diaz del Moral, Histona de las agitaciones campesinas andaluzas,
Madrid, 1967.
50. Pierre Broue and Emile Temime, La Revolution et la Guerre d’Es-
pagne, Paris, 1961.
51. Ramon Menendez Pidal, Los Espanoles en la historia, Buenos Aires,
1959, 158-229.

CHAPTER V
1. Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain, I, 150.
2. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, II, 155 ff.
3. Jorge Nadal, La Poblaci'on espanola, 81.
4. Janine Fayard and Claude Larquie, “Hotels madrilenes et de¬
mographic urbaine,” in Melanges de la Casa Velasquez, Vol. IV, 1968,
229-258.
5. Pierre Ponsot, “Des immigrants frangais en Andalousie,” in Melanges
de la Casa Velasquez, Vol. V, 1969, 332—341.
6. Claude Larquie, “Les Esclaves a Madrid a l’epoque de la decadence
(1650—1700),” in Revue historique, September 1970, 55.
7. Albert N'Damba, “Les Esclaves a Seville,” 91-92.
8. Claude Larquie, “Les Esclaves a Madrid,” 67.
9. Martin Gonzalez de Cellorigo, Memorial de la politica necesaria y util
restauraci'on de Espaha, Valladolid, 1600.
10. Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 286-87. The percentages of
active population given for Burgos, Medina del Campo, and Val-
286 Notes to Pages 119—148

ladolid come from Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid et ses campagnes

au XVIe siecle, Paris, 1967, 116.
11. Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain, II, 275 ff.
12. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, III, 183—84.
13. Archivo Historico Provincial de Valladolid, leg. 768, fol. 2132. See the
Appendix.
14. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, I, 144.
15. Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, ‘Aspectos del vivir madrileno durante el
reinado de Carlos II,” in Anales del Instituto de Estudios Madrilenos,
VII, Madrid, 1971.
16. The text is cited by Joseph Perez, LEspagne au XVIe siecle, Paris,
164-68.
17. Jorge Nadal, “Industrializacion y desindustrializacion del sureste
espanol,” in Moneda y Credito, March 1972.
18. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 362.
19- Hayward Keniston, Francisco de Los Cohos, 350.
20. Ibid., 315 ff. On the fortune of Simon Ruiz, see Henri Lapeyre, Une
Famille de marchands: les Ruiz de Medina, Paris, 1955.
21. George Borrow, The Bible in Spain, 185.
22. Bronislaw Geremek, in Melanges en I’honneur de Fernand Braudel, I,
205-17.
23. J--L. Peset and Jose A. de Carvalhao, Hambre y enfermedad en
Salamanca, Asclepio, 1972.
24. Bartolome Bennassar, Recherches sur les grandes epidemies, 54.
25. J.-A. Maravall, Estado moderno y mentalidad social, Madrid, 1972, II,
238-49.
26. Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, La Sociedad espanola en el siglo XVII,
Madrid, 1963, II, 30.
27. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, II, 8.
28. The fanega is equivalent to 55.5 liters.
29. Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, La Sociedad espanola, I.
30. America latina, Mexico, 1971, Vol. II: Richard Konetzke, La Epoca
colonial, 6l.
31 • That, at least, is the thesis of Siegfried Hubert in Pizarre et ses freres,
Paris, 1964.

CHAPTER VI
1. The release of bulls in the streets of a town in order to drive them
into the bullring.
 Notes to Pages 150—162 287

2. Julio Caro Baroja, El Carnaval, 286-87.

3. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 211. See also the chapter “La
Fete,” in collaborative work Faire de I’histoire, Paris, 1974. This
chapter is in Vol. Ill, entitled, “Nouveaux objects.” In the case of the
festival, however, are we not dealing rather with a rediscovery? See,
for example, the remarks of Robert Mandrou, Introduction a la
France moderne, 187.
4. Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie quotidienne, 148.
5. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 479-
6. See Chapter IV, “Catholic Faith and Dissidence,” p. 69-
7. Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 213—14. The Gallegos are
Galicians; The Pasiegos, inhabitants of the Valley of Pas in the
province of Santander; the manolas, lower-class women of Madrid,
reputed to be bold or forward.
8. Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie quotidienne, 145.
9. Hayward Keniston, Francisco de los Cobos, 232.
10. Cited by Gabriel Maura y Gamazo, Carlos II y su corte, Madrid,
1911, II, 207.
11. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 473 and 487.
12. Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain, II, 95.
13. Julio Caro Baroja, El Carnaval, 229 ff.
14. Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie quotidienne, 153.
15. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 480—83.
16. Ibid. Also see Henry Cock, La Jornada de Tarazona, Madrid, 1879.
17. Ibid.
18. A circumstance revealed by an Inquisition trial. A.H.N., Inquisi-
ci'on, leg. 1842, fol. 2. See Elisabeth Ventax, “Crime et societe dans
l’Espagne du XVIIe siecle: proces d’un familier de 1’Inquisition de
Cordoue,” Toulouse, 1974, typewritten thesis.
19- Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie quotidienne, 154.
20. Charles Kany, Life and Manners, 101 ff.
21. Ibid.
22. See the already cited works of Henry Swinburne, Joseph,Townsend,
Joseph Blanco White, and Theophile Gautier. The most interesting
by far is that of Joseph Blanco White, who devotes the whole of his
fourth letter to the bullfight and the Sevillian bullfighting milieu.
23. Charles Kany, Life and Manners, 101 ff.
24. Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 111.
25. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, I, 342.
288 Notes to Pages 162—172

26. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 134-35.

27. See the authors cited above. The popularity of the bullfight in
Barcelona is explained by the influx of numerous immigrants from
other Spanish regions into the Catalan capital.
28. Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain, II, 95.
29. See Nicole Blanc and Marie-Claude Lopez, Moeurs et religion a Teruel.
The documentation comes from A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 519, fob
13.
30. Genevieve Lefranc, “Blasphemes et blasphemateurs.” Documentation
from A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg, 519, fol. 7.
31. See Valentina Fernandez Vargas, “Noticia sobre la situacion penal de
Leon en 1572—1573,” in Anuario del derecho espahol, 1968. The
pertinent series is in the Archivo General de Simancas, Diversos de
Castilla, leg. 28.
32. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 550.
33. Ibid., 551.
34. Based on Robert Jammes, Etudes sur l’oeuvre poetique de Don Luis de
Gongora y Argote, Bordeaux, 1967, 24.
35. See Charles Kany, Life and Manners, 283—86 and Ramon de Meson-
ero Romanos, Manual de Madrid, Madrid, 1833, 44 ff.
36. See for example, A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 69, fob 18; leg. 60, fob 3
and 8.
37. Elizabeth Balancy, “L’Affaire de Carcagente (1727 — 1728),”
Toulouse, 1974, typewritten copy. Documentation from A.H.N.,
Inquisici'on, leg. 520, fob 1.
38. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 45; Joseph Townsend, A
Journey through Spain, II, 137; Henry Swinburne, Travels through
Spain, II, 55—56.
39- Based on an anonymous manuscript utilized by Antonio Domin¬
guez Ortiz in ‘Aspectos del vivir madrileno durante el reinado de
Carlos II.”
40. Distressed by this state of affairs, Townsend concluded that Spain
could not meet foreign competition.
41. Cited by Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 471.
42. Mariano Jose de Larra, “Empenos y desempenos,” in Art'iculos de
costumbre. Moreton, 45—53. Costumbrista: a writer or journalist who
specializes in the portrayal of manners.
43. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 465.
44. Ibid. 453-71.
45. Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 237.
 Notes to Pages 173—187 289

46. Henri Lapeyre, Une Famille de marchands, 77-79-

47. The tarima is a sort of low wooden stand, generally octagonal or
hexagonal in form, hollowed out in the center so as to hold a
brazier. Seats were customarily placed around the tarima in the
winter in preparation for a tertulia.
48. Bartolome Bennassar, “Consommation,” 139-55.
49. Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain, II, 55-56.
50. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 457 and 460.
51. Charles Kany, Life and Manners, 154—55.
52. Elizabeth Balancy, LAffaire de Carcagente.
53- Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 466; idem, “Consommation,”
149-

CHAPTER VII
1. I discovered the case of Garcia de Arguinano in the Archivo General
de Simancas, Diversos de Castilla, C. 37, fol. 62. The case of Miguel
Perez de las Navas is cited by Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie
quotidienne, 166—69-
2. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 268. See also the Manual
de Madrid of Ramon de Mesonero Romanos.
3. All the examples are drawn from the A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 69,
fol. 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 30; leg. 69, fol. 28, 35; leg. 70, fol. 4, 5,
8, 9, 10, 12, 13. In this last case, not reported in my text, Diego
Duran, a fourteen-year-old page to the canon of Talavera, Rodrigo
de Madrigal, affirmed that fornication with a prostitute was no sin
if she were paid. This took place in 1586. Note that all these cases
are drawn from the Toledan series alone; I could easily produce a list
ten times longer.
4. Hayward Keniston, Francisco de los Cohos, 75—76, 217, 232.
5. Martin Gonzalez de Cellorigo, Memorial, 18.
6. Henri Lapeyre, Une Famille de marchands, IS—16.
7. See in Pyrenees de la montagne a I'homme, Toulouse, 1974, a collabora¬
tive work, Chapter VI, by Bartolome Bennassar, 224.
8. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 425, 542.
9. Guillermo Herrero Martinez de Azcoitia, La Poblacion palentina en el
siglo XVII.
10. Jorge Nadal, La Poblacion espanola, 85.
11. Baudilio Barreiro Mallon, La Jurisdiccion deXallas, 173—74.
12. Pierre Ponsot, “Des immigrants frangais en Andalousie,” 483.
290 Notes to Pages 187—197

13. On this subject, see Jean Delumeau, La Civilisation de I’Europe de la

Renaissance, Paris, 1967, 442.
14. Based on A.G.S., Diversos de Castilla, C. 35, fol. 37.
15. A.H.P.V, (Archivo Historico, province of Valladolid), leg. 768, fol.
2132 ff. See the text of the mayorazgo founded be Esteban Jordan in
the Appendix.
16. A.H.P.V., leg. 57, fol. 1395. See the contract of the marriage of
Juan Guetro and Maria de Trigueros in the Appendix.
17. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 541—42.
18. A.H.N., Inquisicion, leg. 70, fol. 14. The inquisitors, however,
would not accept this defense, claiming that conception did take
place as a result of dilation of the Fallopian tubes!
19. Teofanes Egido, “La Cofradia de San Jose,” in EstudiosJosefinos, 1973,
23, 30-31.
20. Baudilio Barreiro Mallon, La Jurisdicci'on deXallas, 175—76, 199;
J. M. Perez Garcia, “Intento de reconstruccion demografica,” 276.
21. Antoine de Lalaing, Collection des voyages des souverains des Pays-Bas,
Brussels, 1874—1882, 4 vols.
22. Barthelemy Joly, “Voyages en Espagne, 1603—1604,” in Revue His-
panique XX (1909), 460—618.
23. Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie quotidienne, 258—59; Tome Pinheiro
da Vega, Fastiginia (trans. N. A. Cortes), Valladolid, 1916, 77 ff.
24. I refer the reader to the examples whose sources are given in note 3
of this chapter.
25. A.H.N., Inquisicion, leg. 85, fol. 2.
26. Ramon de Mesoneros Romanos, Manual de Madrid.
27. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, I, 126 ff.
28. A.H.N., Inquisicion, leg. 519, fol. 4. Miguel Cervera exploited this
woman for at least six months. This did not keep him from confess¬
ing and taking communion every year at Easter. 7rata a ganar: he
sent her out to “work.”
29- Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 543.
30. We will again meet Ana Diaz, a very interesting nonconformist.
31. A.H.N., Inquisicion, leg. 69, fol. 25. Pantaleon’s fate is tragic
because he seems to display a certain moral rigor; he does not play
false with his sin.
32. A.H.N., Inquisicion, leg. 69, fol. 34. By contrast with the preced¬
ing case, Chamorro’s conduct is truly picaresque. To seduce his
sexual partners he mocked sacred things and serenely uttered the
 Notes to Pages 197-205 291

most flagrant untruths. He also practiced “imperfect sodomy” with

a certain number of women with whom he also had relations
“through the natural part.”
33. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 544—43.
34. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 518, fol. 10. A routine defense of men and
women prosecuted for bigamy was the claim that they believed
their spouses were dead.
35. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 543.
36. Elizabeth Balancy, LAffaire de Carcagente.
37. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 70, fol. 14.
38. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 69, fol. 23. Don Vicente Camacho was
perfectly aware that he had sinned and acknowledged it each time.
Immediately after consummating the carnal act he threw himself on
his knees and gave himself up to prayer. When his sexual partner
and her mother expressed surprise at his conduct, he explained that
a priest, having sinned, must immediately seek God’s pardon, for
otherwise he could not continue to say mass.
39- Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain, II, 218—19; Joseph
Townsend, A Journey through Spain, III, 144.
40. Ibid., II, 45-46.
41. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 544.
42. Joseph Blanco White, Letters From Spain, 364—65.
43. Nicole Blanc and Marie-Claude Lopez, “Moeurs et religion a
Teruel.”
44. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 546.
45. Bartolome Carranza, Catecismo cristiano [1558], ed. J. I.
Tellechea, Madrid, 1972, II, 90—91- See the Appendix for a longer
extract from this text, including the citation.
46. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 70, fol. 3. This is the Ana Diaz referred to
above (see note 30); she seems to have had a complicated love life.
47. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, III, 144 ff.
48. Julio Caro Baroja, Les Sorcieres et leur monde, 118—19-
49. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 85, fol. 5. See the Appendix for an extract
from this routine trial.
50. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 85, fol. 9- Catalina de Doyague was con¬
demned to perpetual exile from the town of Cebreros. For the rest,
her case proves the Inquisition’s distrust of charges of witchcraft and
its relative leniency with sorceresses, already noted by Julio Caro
Baroja.
292 Notes to Pages 205—209

51. A.H.N., Inquisition, leg. 85, fol. 7. The affair took place in 1702.
52. Elizabeth Balancy, L Affaire de Carcagente.
53. Joseph Townsend relates this affair in A Journey through Spain, II,
321 ff.
54. There is a voluminous dossier on this affair in A.H.N., Inquisition,
leg. 85, fol. 10. The rector of the colegio of the Society of Jesus at
Almagro, who was the confessor of these beatas, had to be removed
because he was the friend of several mujertillas. He also had a liaison
with one of these beatas, Doha Marina de Sanabria, a married
woman, who claimed to possess divine revelations with regard to
the salvation or damnation of the dead.
55. Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, II, 320.
56. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 546: ‘Among the prisoners of
1570, several had done violence to a woman (stupro y fuerza). At least
four were in this category: Hernandez Muxica, who killed his mis¬
tress while trying to violate her, then threw her into a well, and
Pedro Marcos de Villanubla, Francisco de Manzanares, and Lopez
Diaz, who jointly tried to rape Francisca de Bilbao. Other cases
were disputed; it was unclear whether the girls in question had been
violated or had consented.”
57. Nicole Banc and Marie-Claude Lopez, “Moeurs et religion a Teruel.”
58. Elizabeth Balancy, UAffaire de Carcagente.
59- A.H.N., Inquitision, leg. 560, fol. 1. Hassan’s principal partners
were: Pedro Juan de Vega, a silk worker, seventeen years old; Jusepe
Carra, son of a barber, seventeen; Joanico, son of a silk worker,
sixteen; Diego Beli, another slave. The first witness acknowledged
“having known carnally through the rear” the said Hassan five times
in three days. During these episodes two others did the same. There
were certainly other participants.
60. A.H.N., Inquisition, leg. 560, fol. 9; leg. 561, fol. 4.
61. A.H.N., Inquisition, leg. 561, fol. 3, and leg. 560, fol. 11. Mont
first had himself masturbated by a child. Despite the poor condition
of one of his victims, Mont was only condemned to six years of
exile, three of which, however, were to be passed in African garri¬
sons.
62. See A.H.N., Inquisition, leg. 560, fol. 3. The affair took place in
1769. The case of Don Jesualdo Felices is in item 7 of the same
legajo 560. It is a large dossier containing thirteen pieces of tes¬
timony. The children were from eleven to fifteen years old, save the
 Notes to Pages 211—219 293

one previously mentioned, who was only seven. The charge stresses
the responsibility of the Caballero, who used his “birth” to seduce
the children. His propositions were sometimes rebuffed. Among
proceedings instituted against persons of high birth, we note the
trial in 1575 of Don Pedro Guy Garceran, legitimate son of the
duke of Gandia, viceroy of Oran, and last grandmaster of the order
of Montesa.
63- The two proceedings in question are in A.H.N., Inquisition, leg.
560, fol. 16 (that of 1687) and leg. 561, fol. 2 (that of 1685). This
last proceeding forms a very large dossier. Fray Manuel denied
everything and counterattacked violently; his defense alone forms a
memorial of twenty-five folios in very close writing. There were
thirty-three witnesses.
64. The offenses of bestiality before the tribunal of Valencia are found
in A.H.N., Inquisition, leg. 518. I have examined items 1 to 9. All
the episodes took place between 1573 and 1640.
65. See E. Allison Peers, The Pyrenees, French and Spanish, London,
1932, chap. VI.
66. That, at least, is the claim made by Albert Paraz in Le Gala des
vaches, Paris, 1974.

CHAPTER VIII
1. Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie quotidienne, 32.
2. Braccio de Montone, cited by Ramon Menendez Pidal, Los Espaholes
en la historia, 49. The anonymous chronicle is cited on the same
page.
3. Didier Ozanam, “Elnstruction particuliere d’Ambroise Daubenton
a son fils partant pour l’Espagne,” in Melanges en I’honneur de Fernand
Braudel, I, 442.
4. Pierre Broue and Emile Temime, La Revolution et la Guerre d’Es-
pagne, 154.
5. Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie quotidienne, 34.
6. Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 333.
7. Elisabeth Ventax, 102—06. A story of this kind clearly suggests that
honor was not the exclusive privilege of a caste.
8. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 536.
9. Noel Salomon, La Campagne de Nouvelle-Castille a la fin du XVF
siecle, Paris, 1964, 277. In the sequel to his Recherches sur le theme
294
Notes to Pages 219—232

paysan dans la “comedia’,’ au temps de Lope de Vega, 1965, the author

discovered in archival documents rich peasants resembling the per¬
sonages of the comedia.
10. Francis Brumont, “La Bureba”.
11. See the Appendix for an important extract from the act founding
this mayorazgo.
12. Elisabeth Ventax, 108.
13. Ibid., 102-06.
14. This curious account was published by Antonio Dominguez Ortiz,
Crisis y decadencia de la Espaha de los Austrias, Madrid, 1965, 60.
15. Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne, 300—01.
16. Valeriano Bozal Fernandez, Juntas revolucionarias; manifiestos y pro-
clamas de 1868, Madrid, 1968.
17. Cited by Joseph Perez, La Revolution des “Comunidades” de Castille
1520—1521, Bordeaux, 1970.
18. Enrique Moreno Baez, Lecci'on y sentido del Guzman de Alfaracbe,
Madrid, 1948, 139-40.
19- On this subject see Louis Cardaillac, “La Polemique antichr'etienne.”
20. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 1842, expediente 1.
21. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 1841, expedientes 3 and 4.
22. The marrams were Jews who had pretended conversion to Christi¬
anity to avoid exile or confiscation of goods. They continued to
practice their religion secretly and, if discovered, risked being
burned at the stake as relapsed heretics. Many were rich, and they
played an important role in Spain’s economic life.
23. On all these problems, consult Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, La Clase
social de los conversos en Castilla en la edad moderna, Madrid, 1955 and
A. Sicroff, Les Controverses de purete du sang en Espagne du XVe au
XVUle siecle, Paris, 1970.
24. See the document in the Appendix dealing with the mayorazgo of
Esteban Jordan; see also Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 540.
Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 106—07.
25. Ibid., 274.
26. Elisabeth Ventax, 102—06.
27. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 70, fol. 14. Blazquez emerges as a con¬
summate actor who tried in every possible way to get out of his
scrape; it is most unlikely that he was concerned about the loss of
his honor. But the mere fact that he used this argument is
significant.
 Notes to Pages 232—252 295

28. Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, 431.

29. Mariano Jose de Larra, ‘Articulos de costumbre,” 38, 44, 124.
30. The Black Chronicle of Fray de Leon, used by Antonio Dominguez
Ortiz, Crisis y decadencia, is full of examples of this kind: in 1582,
the case of Francisco de Castilla, an “honorable man,” who killed
another man during a brawl at Altozano and took refuge in a
neighboring church (pp. 45—46).
31. I may mention, in addition to the trials on which the above-cited
work of Elisabeth Ventax is based, the proceedings in A.H.N.,
Inquisici'on, leg. 1842, fol. 1, 2; leg. 1847, fol. 2; etc.
32. See especially Maurice Molho’s article on the picaresque novel in
Encyclopedia universalis, XIII, 33.

CHAPTER IX
1. Christian Dedet, La Fuite en Espagne, Paris, 1965.
2. Alain Guy, Miguel de Unamuno, Paris, 1964.
3. Cited by Alain Guy in Miguel de Unamuno.
4. Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, New York, 1953, 266.
5. At this epoch the real was a silver coin worth 34 maravedis (unit of
account) and weighing 3.48 g. A day’s wages for a common laborer
then was about two reales, for an artisan, three reales.
6. Bartolome Bennassar, Valladolid, 488—91.
7. Based on Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, Crisis y decadencia, 39—40.
8. Bartolome Bennassar, Recherches sur les grandes epidemies, 44—60.
9. Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, Crisis y decadencia, 39-
10. Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie quotidienne, 30.
11. Elisabeth Ventax, 115.
12. Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, Crisis y decadencia, 39-
13. Tbid., 53
14. Elisabeth Ventax, op. cit., 114—15.
15. Elizabeth Balancy, LAffaire de Carcagente.
16. A.H.N., Inquisici'on, leg. 520, fol. 11.

CONCLUSION
1. George Borrow, The Bible in Spain, 173, 183 -
2. Marcellin Defourneaux, Llnquisition espagnole et les livres fran^ais au
XVllle siecle, Paris, 1963, 166.
 ‘Bibliogtaptiy

This bibliography is designed to assist readers who wish to deep¬

en their knowledge and understanding of the themes treated in
this book. It seems unnecessary, therefore, to list the titles of
typewritten works that I have used—sometimes extensively—
and cited in footnotes. Only printed works are included here.
I have grouped these works in two categories. One lists books
that are primarily documents—travel accounts and essays, for
example—the other lists recent historical studies.

I. PRINTED SOURCES

I recommend especially:
Jose Garcia Mercadal, Viajes de extrajeros por Espaha y Portugal,
Madrid, Aguilar, 2 vols., 1952. The first volume contains jour¬
neys made before the end of the sixteenth century. However, the
complete texts are not always included, and the texts are not the
originals but Spanish translations. Flemings and Venetians pre¬
dominate, followed by Frenchmen.
Joseph Townsend, A Journey through Spain, London, 3 vols.,
1791. A fundamental work, superior, in my opinion, to Arthur
Young’s book concerning France.
Henry Swinburne, Travels through Spain in the Years 1773 and
1776, London, 3 vols., 1787. Interesting, but suffers by compari¬
son with Townsend’s account.
Joseph Blanco White, Letters from Spain, London, 1822. Essen¬
tial for an understanding of Spanish anticlericalism of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
George Borrow, The Bible in Spain, London, 1906. An exciting,
original book.
Theophile Gautier, Voyage en Espagne. The most recent edition
is that of Rene Juillard, Paris, 1964.
298 Bibliography

Among literary works, I would stress the importance of the

costumbristas: see especially Jose Maria de Larra, “Empenos y de-
sempenos,” in Artlculos de Costumbres, published in many editions.
Ramon de Mesonero Romanos, Manual de Madrid, Madrid
1833.
Obviously, the reading or rereading of the works of Cervantes,
Quevedo, Aleman, Lope de Vega, and Calderon de la Barca is
indispensable.

II. HISTORICAL WORKS

I have used some of my earlier works, especially:

Valladolid au siecle d’Or, Paris and La Haye, Mouton, 1967
(essentially the third part of this book).
Recherches sur les grandes epidemies dans le Nord de I’Espagne a la fin
du XVIs siecle, S.E.V.P.E.N., Paris, 1969-
“Etre noble en Espagne,” in Melanges en I’honneur de Fernand
Braudel, Toulouse, Privat, 1973, vol. I, pp. 95—106.
“Consommation, investissements, mouvements de capitaux en
Castille, aux XVIe et XVIIe siecles,” in Hommage a Ernest La-
brousse, pp. 139—55.
I call attention to the value of two works of general character,
the first of which I have cited several times in this book:
Marcellin Defourneaux, La Vie quotidienne dans I’Espagne du
siecle d’Or, Paris, Hachette, 1966. A thoroughly documented yet
highly readable work.
Joseph Perez, LEspagne du XVIe siecle, A. Colin, Coll. U2, has
special value because it presents a large number of unpublished
texts in French translation.
Among works of synthesis, special mention must be made of
those of Antonio Dominguez Ortiz:
La Sociedadespanola en elsiglo XVII (2 volumes, both essential),
Madrid, C.S.I.C., 1963 and 1970.
La Sociedad espanola en el siglo XVIII (less substantial than the
preceding work), 1955 and 1963.
 Bibliography 2 99

I add a recent little book by Antonio Dominguez Ortiz which

brings together several original articles:
Crisis y decadencia de la Espaha de los Austrias, Madrid, Ariel,
1965.
A few other works:
Julio Caro Baroja, El Carnaval, Madrid, Taurus, 1965. An

enthralling, stimulating book.

The same author’s Les Sorcieres et leur monde, Paris, Gallimard,
1972.
Hayward Keniston, Francisco de los Cobos: Secretary of the Emperor
Carlos V, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1959. A monograph of
much greater scope than the title suggests.
Henri Lapeyre, Une Famille de marchands: les Ruiz de Medina,
Paris, A. Colin, 1955 (the life of the great merchants in the
Golden Age).
Charles Kany, Life and Manners in Madrid, 1750—1800, Berke¬
ley, University of California Press, 1932. An old but still useful
book.
 It\de\,

Abadia, pass of, 57 Albelda, Salvador, 175—176, 198, 203,

Abel Sanches (Unamuno), 239 221
Abortion, 202 Alberes, 105
Accounting, 18—19 Alberoni, Giulio, 133—134
Acera de Recoletos (Valladolid), 52 Alberti, Rafael, 7
Acuna, Beatriz de, 196 Albornoz, Alvaro de, 80—81, 92, 132
Acuna, Diego de, 22 Albornoz, Claudio Sanchez, xiii, 16,
Acuna, Maria de, 196 123, 126—132 passim, 218
Adolescent, 208—211 Albruqueiro, 63
Adultery, 10, 11, 39, 95-96, 178-180, Albuquerque, duke of. 111, 200
181, 189, 196-200 passim, 202- Alcala, university of, 75, 77, 251
203, 207, 220, 221, 231 Alcalde, 25, 112, 122, 169-170, 218,
Advent, 31 232, 234, 245, 279«10
Adventure: and commerce, 131; and Alcalde de Zalamea (Calderon de la
honor, 6—15 passim, 125, 223, 247; Barca), 121, 178, 214, 218, 232
love of 23; as means to wealth, 123, Alcantara, order of, 2, 25, 143
128, 134; poverty and, 144; of travel, Alcarez, 224
64—67 passim Alcarez, Pedro de, 76
Africans: homosexuality among, 208; Alcohol, 33-34, 44, 148, 208
and honor, 221, 224; as slaves, 106, Alcoy, 150
109, 110, 114, 117 Alcudia, duke of, 10
Age of Louis XIV (Voltaire), 252 Aleman, Mateo de, ix, 223—224
Agonia del trdnsito de la muerte (Alejo de Al-faquis, 75
Vanegas), 76, 249 Alfonso XIII, 92
Agriculture: attitude toward, 119—121; Algiers, 11
changelessness of 59—64; festivals of Alguacete, 122
155-156, 157-158; and honor, 230; Alhama, 65, 66
and hunting, 58; methods of, Alicante, 42, 50-51, 61, 100, 104, 121,
53—55, 62, 63, 124, 142; and sheep¬ 150, 194-195
raising, 57-58; vocabulary of, 126; Almagro, 13, 205—206
yields of, 61—62, 63, 119, 120 Almagro, Diego de, 13—15, 16
Aguayo, Francisco de, 43, 216, 220, Almazan, marquis of, 111
232, 234, 235, 247 Almeria, 150
Aguero, Diego de, 175 Alminana, Francisco, 198
Aguilar, 101 Almodovar del Campo, 101
Aguilar, Antonio Garcia de, 92 Almonacid de la Sierra, 93
Aguilar, Maria de, 220 Alms, see Charity
Aguilera, Maria de, 216 Altas Torres, 13
Aigues-Mortes, 20 Amazon River, 144
Alava, 24, 53, 54, 119 America, 7, 8, 14, 81
Alba, 47 American Indian, 117
Alba, duke of, 56, 104, 134 Amsterdam, 106
Albacete, 101 Anarchism, 3

301
302 Index

Ancestor, See Honor; Mayorazgo; Nobil¬ Arrepentidas, house of, 195

ity Arrogance, 6—17 passim. See also Honor
Andalusia: agriculture in, 41, 60; bull¬ Art: Baroque, 77; death portrayed in,
fight in, 161, 162; festival in, 149, 237-238, 240; festival, 147, 150;
155; forests of, 54; growth of, 2; im¬ honor and, 121; Italian, 123; memo¬
migrants in, 105; hunting in, rial, 145; portraits, 103; privately
58—59; labor in, 45, 119, 120; land owned, 174; religious, 38, 39,
tenure in, 56, 57; leather of, 172; 73-74, 93, 175, 280«17
ostentation in, 173—174; politics in, Artisan, 112-113, 118, 121, 122, 124,
3, 53; public buildings in, 48; “pur¬ 143, 169, 170, 171-172, 174-176,
ity of blood” in, 224; religion in, 77, 186-187, 201, 209, 217, 220, 227
100-101; slaves in, 106, 107, 109, Art of Writing Plays in Our Time, The
111—112, 116—117; travel in, 67; vio¬ (Lope de Vega), 218
lence in, 65, 234, 247; yellow fever Astorga, 111, 156, 243
in, 42 Astray, Millan, 239
Andorra, 184 Asturias: agriculture in, 61, 63 , 64;
Andujar, 65, 234, 247 antireligious demonstration in, 101;
Angeles, Fray Bartolome de los, 80 dance in, 165; hunting in, 59; labor
Animal-man relationship, stability of, 5 in, 120; literature in, 252; migration
Anticlericalism. See Controversy, from, 139; nobility in, 53; popula¬
theological tion of, 48, 55; sex in, 200
Antwerp, 11, 221 Asturias, prince of, 161
Aparicio, Pedro de, 210 ‘Asturias de Santillana,” 55
Aragon: agriculture in, 62; Court at, Atacama, 14
154; dance in, 164; festival in, 153; Audacity. See Adventure
marriage in, 184; military of, 132; Audiencia, 80, 112, 198
moriscos in, 75, 83, 93; politics in, 2, Aulnoy, Marie Catherine Le Jumel de
12; public buildings of, 47; “purity of Berneville, baronne d’, 172
blood” in, 226; religion in, 76, 79, Aunon, 181
93—94; sex in, 197; violence in, 65 Aunt Tula (Unamuno), 239
Aranda, count of, 22
Austerity, 31, 33, 34-35, 42, 91
Aranjuez, 58, 86, 164 Austria, 107
Araucanians, 144
Auto-da-fe, 82, 83, 154, 205, 210,
Arbustante, Manuel, 210—211
237, 239, 241, 242-244
Architecture, significance of, 52—53 Auto sacramental, 152
Arcos, duke of, 22, 104, 111 Ave Maria, 73, 252
Arevalo, 47, 65
Avila, 47, 49, 59, 76, 138
Arfe, Juan de, 29
Avila, Teresa de, 39, 80, 85
Argentinita, La (Encarna Lopez), 7 Aviles, 164—165
Argiles, Maria de, 197
Ayala brothers, 8
Arguignano, Gracia de, 179
Ayunamiento, 52
Arias, Maria, 110
Azana, Manuel, 102
Arkwright, Sir Richard, 50
Armada, 11
Badajoz, 142, 226, 232
Arms, 64-67, passim Badajoz, bishop of, 19, 84
Amejo, Antonio de, 112 Baeza, 226, 247
Arosa, 63
Baeza, Pedro Fernandez de, 219
 Index 3°3

Baja California, 14 Bioro, 63

Balboa, Nunez de, 144 Birth, festival for, 153, 154
Balearic Islands, 59, 163, 222, 223 Birthrate, 40, 109, 113
Ballester, Cristobal, 93—94 Biscay, 9, 100, 119, 129, 139
Banderillo. See Bullfight Black Chronicle (Pedro de Leon), 221
Bandit. See Brigand; Robbers Blasphemy, 44, 72, 73, 93, 94-95,
Bank, 79- See also Commerce 96-97, 166, 195, 206, 284«40,
Baptism: blasphemy concerning, 94; of 290^32-291^32
foundling, 189-190; ignored, 101; of Blazquez, Joseph Alonso, 189, 199, 232
illegitimate, 191, 196; and magic, Blindman’s bluff, 168
194; of morisco, 93; of slave, 72, 73, Blood, in art, 73—74
107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, Boasting, as Spanish trait, x, xi
116, 117 Bobo, Diego el, 181
Barbary pirate, 11 Boethius, 76
Barcelona: agriculture in, 61, 62; charity Bohemia, 171
in, 137; Court at, 20; flagellation in, Bolero, 164
44; growth of, 50; honor in, 222; “Bolshevik Triennium,” 100—101
labor in, 122; manufacturing in, 129; Bordeaux, 106
prostitution in, 195; religion in, 36, Bordello. See Prostitution
38—39, 79, 88, 100, 101; revolt in, Borrow, George: on charity, 135; on
9; and travel, 65, 66; yellow fever in, education, 250; on honor, 215; on
42 landscape, 53; on religion, 91, 92,
Barrera, Vicente, 8 99; on robbers, 66—67
Barrionuevo, Juan de, 228 Bourbon dynasty, x, 10
Basque region, 3, 54, 55 Bourgoing, Francois, 53, 141, 163, 164,
Bauzo, Simon, 141 214
Bayle, Pierre, 252 Bozal, Valeriano, 222
Bayonne, 10 Braudel, Fernand, 12
Beata, 205-206, 292»54 Bravo, Juan, 132—133
Bejar, duke of, 111 Brigand, 120-121, 128, 221
Belen, Maria de, 110 Brotherhood: and anticlericalism, 98;
Benavente, 47 and caste system, 82—83; and charity,
Benavente, count of, 19—20, 111, 134, 77—79, 138; flagellant, 72; guild as,
200 70; and prostitution, 71; and “purity
Benavente, countess of, 167—168 of blood,” 228; and superstition, 85;
Benedict Xiy 121-122 suppression of, 152
Benedictine order, 79, 84, 140, 251, Brotherhood de la Concepcion y de la
252 Consolacion, 71
Berbers, 107, 114 Brotherhood of St. Joseph, 78
Benjamin, Jose, 7 Brumont, Francis, 60, 61
Berruguete, Alonso, 238 Brunei, Antoine de, 54, 200
Bertaut, Jean, 200 Brussells, 22
Bestiality, 211—212 Budino, 63
Bienvenida, Manolo, 8 Bullfight: as career, 6—8; and death,
Bigamy, 95, 291^34. See also Adultery 237, 239, 241; described, 159-161;
Bilbao, 100, 139, 238, 245 and festival, 122, 148—149, 150, 154,
Billiards, 168 161—162; history of, 159—162; role
3°4 Index

of, 156, 157, 158, 162-163; and wild Camina, duke of, 111
bull, 59 Campomanes, 60, 169
Bunuel, Luis, 142 Campos, 24
Bureba, 60, 61, 219 Cancilleria, 171
Burgos: agriculture in, 61; architecture Candiel, 248
of, 52; charity in, 78; commerce in, Canete, count of, 187
118, 129, 142; festival in, 33, 35, 36; Cano, Alonso, 238
honor in, 219; labor in, 118; marriage Cano, Melchior, 80, 243
in, 185; nobility in, xii, 24—25; Cantabria, 3, 41, 55, 62, 127
parish geography of, 49; pauperism Cantavieja, 93
in, 137; plague in, 42; and “purity of Canut, Vicenta, 198
blood,” 226 Capitulations of Granada, 93
Burgos, cathedral of, 84 Carcagente, 168, 175—176, 198, 199,
Burial, 220. See also Mass, for dead 203, 205, 206, 221, 247
“Burial of the Sardine,” 34 Cardona, duke of, 56
Bustamente, Lorezo de, 73, 95, 181 Cards, playing, 118, 165—168, 169
Career: achieved through industry,
Caballero, 24, 43, 53, 77, 93-94, 122, 18—22 passim; at Court, 9, 10, 11,
128, 143, 156, 157, 160, 161, 162, 12, 18-19, 25, 121, 127-128, 131;
169, 174, 196, 208, 209, 216, 219, early success in, 6—16 passim; educa¬
220, 231, 232, 234, 235, 242, 243, tion as, 25, 121; in finance, 134—135;
244, 246, 248 in politics, 8—9, See also Adventure;
Cabello, Alonso, 180 Military
Cabeza, Marla, 197 Carlist wars, 8—9, 66
Cabezas, Las, Seigneur of, 187 Carlos, Prince, 111, 243
Caceres, 49, 51, 142, 143 Carmelite order, 96
Cadalso, Jose, x Carnal, Don, 31, 33—34
Cadiz, 9; charity in, 120, 137, 142; Carnaval, El (Caro Baroja), 30
Cortes of, 2; flagellation in, 44; Carnicero, Agustfn, 180
growth of, 50; honor in, 222; mar¬ Carnival, 31-34, 147, 179, 201
riage in, 187; prostitution in, 194, Caro Baroja, Julio: on festival, 35, 158;
195; religion in, 36, 86, 91; slaves in, on magic, 97, 204; on ritual, 150; on
107, 109, 112; smuggling in, 252; time, 30
tertulia in, 168—169 Carolingian Empire, 132
Cadiz, Bay of, 86 Carpio, El, 180
Calahorra, 36 Carranza, Archbishop Bartolome de,
Calatrava, order of, 2—3, 25, 84-85, 202
173, 218 Carrasco, Alonso, 71
Calderon, Rodrigo, 11—12, 16, 241 Carreas, Gonzalo, 98—99
Calderon, de la Barca, Pedro, 85, 121, Carriage, horse-drawn, 171, 173, 174,
178, 179, 214, 218 176
Calendar: festival, 149—156 passim; re¬ Cartagena, 200, 203
ligious, 29—30; secular, 26; stability Cartas marruecas (Cadalso), x
of, 5 Casa de Contratacion, 112
Camacho, Vicente, 199 Casa de Corregimiento, 52
Camargo, valley of, 55, 63 Casamentero, 184
Camena, lord of, 21 Casanova, Pantaleon de, 30, 72, 196
 Index 3°5

Casar de Talamanca, 32 feudalism in, 132; immigrants in,

Casarse pronto y mal, El (Larra) 230 104—105; labor in, 119, 120; land¬
Casas, Bartolome de las, 80 scape of 54; land tenure in, 56, 57;
Cassa, parish of, 186 marriage in, 184, 186; military in,
Caste. See Honor; “purity of blood” 132; politics in, 53; religion in, 31,
Castellanos, 67 75, 76, 88, 101, 141; roads in, 64;
Castellar, Manuel Sanchez de, 28, 133 slaves in, 108
Castile: commerce in, 120, 129, 142; Catechism for the Instruction of Newly
diversions, 32, 59, 164 166; immi¬ Converted Moors (Juan de Ribera), 74
grants in, 105; jewelry in, 170; labor Catholic Church. See Church
in, 118; marriage in, 182; politics in, Cazalla, Agustin de, 242—244
2, 20, 21, 23, 53; poverty in, 140; Cazalla, Beatrice de, 243
religion in, 31, 37, 76, 79, 127; Cazorla, Juan de, 234
sheepraising in, 57; slaves in, 108- Celestina, 204
109; violence in, 65; wealth in, 128 Cellorigo, Martin Gonzalez de, 104,
Castile, Admiral of, 223, 243 118, 140, 183, 230
Castile, constable of 23, 25 Cena, Maria de la, 196—197
Castile, princess of 111 Census: 15th-century, 143; 1557, 76;
Castile, New: agriculture in, 60, 62; 1561, 76, 118, 137; 1587, 76; of
honor in, 218; hunting in, 59; labor Madrid (1684), 176; 1787, 48, 49,
in, 119, 120, 121; land tenure in, 57; 51, 104; of Madrid (1831), 168
and magic, 87; public buildings in, Cerrato, archdeacon of 110
47; religion in, 76; travel in, 67; vio¬ Cervantes, Miguel de, 10—11, 16, 125,
lence in, 65 126, 131, 166, 240, 251-252
Castile, Old: agriculture in, 60; attitude Chacon, Alonso, 74, 167
toward death in, 239—240; hunting Chacona, 164
in, 59; labor in, 119, 120, 121; land Chamorro, Alonso, 196—197
tenure in, 57; marriage in, 183, 184, Character, Spanish, described, 249—
185—186; ostentation in, 172—173; ^ 250, 253
public buildings in, 47; religion in, Charity: attitude toward, 32, 135—136,
76; slaves in, 110; violence in, 65, 284»30; effects of, 120; and fear of
247 death, 245; and honor, 226, 231; or¬
Castilian Code, 213 ganized, 52, 89—90, 98, 136—142
Castilla, Pedro de, 225—226 passim; proverbs concerning, 98; tes¬
Castro, Alonso Nuno, 197 tamentary, 246
Castro, Americo, xiii, 92, 117, 123—128 Charles I of England, 154—155
passim Charles II, 156
Castro, Ana de, 95 Charles III, 56, 58, 59, 86, 99, 100,
Castrodeza, 185 134, 161, 167, 231
Castrogeriz, 33 Charles IV, 10, 58, 133, 157, 182,
Castronuevo, 190, 197 200-201, 231
Castro y Quinones, Pedro de, 110 Charles V, 18, 20, 22, 45, 54, 58, 65,
Catalonia: agriculture in, 41, 60, 62, 78, 82, 108, 130, 134, 153, 154,
63, 64; attitude toward wealth in, 223, 226, 233
146; bandits in, 65; bullfight in, 163; Charles of Ghent, 19
charity in, 141; commerce in, 3, 50, Chavez, Claudia de, 194—195
129, 130, 142; diversions in, 40, 164; Chavez, Maria de, 194—195
306 Index

Child: and charity, 11—IS, 138, 141; of Cistercian order, 84

converso, 93; death of, 42; foundling, Ciudad Rodrigo, 138
189—191; and homosexuality, 208, Civil War, 90, 126, 215
209—210, 211; illegitimate, 189— Civil War (England), 57
191, 195—196; as laborer, 105; of Clavijo, 35, 81
priest, 98; and religion, 39, 12, see Clement VII, 226
also Baptism; and sex 292»6l, Clergy: and anticlericalism, 97—102; in
292»62—293»62; as slave, 72, 107, auto-da-fe, 242-244; character of,
110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116 89—92; homosexuality among, 207,
Children of the Christian Doctrine, 77 210—211; and magic, 205—206; no¬
Cholera, 42—43 bility as, 83—84; ostentation of, 173,
Christ (Zurbaran), 238 174, 176; in plague, 245; and “purity
Christian Marriage (Erasmus), 187 of blood," 224—228; and sacrilege,
Christmas, 87, 151 96-97; and sex, 190, 198, 199, 200,
Chueta, 230 201, 207
Church: and bullfight, 158—159; as Climaces, John, 76
career, 8, 11, 16, 24, 84, 131; con¬ Clock, public, 27, 28
struction of, 49, 51; convent as salon, Cobos, Diego de los, 18
84—85; and caste, 82—83; charity of, Cobos, Francisco de los, 18—23, 45,
78, 89, 137, 138, 140-142; and 134, 135, 154, 155, 183
Court, 12, 13, 80, 99, 133; crusading Cock, Henry, 27, 159-160, 194, 195
spirit of, 81; and dance, 163—164; Coimbra, battle of, 81
and death, 245—246; decline of Colares, marquis of, 111
vitality in, 82—92 passim; disentail- Colegio, ix, 11, 25, 47, 48, 75, 77, 79,
ments of, 57, 99; dogma concerning, 100, 103, 224, 225, 229, 231, 250,
74; and education, 252; and gambl¬ 251
ing, 167—168; and illegitimacy, 190; Coll, Agustin, 93
Index of, 82, 252; and marriage, 187; Colloquies (Erasmus), 187
number of, 47—48; power of, 3, Colmena, castle of, 21
78—79, 133; and prostitution, 71, Colonization, economic, 3
195; and “purity of blood,” 224—230 Columbia University, 7
passim; as refuge for nobility, 83—84; Commerce: attitude toward, x, xi, 118,
sex scandal in, 28, 85; significance of, 119; as career, 121, 131, 134—135;
52; 16th-century, 36; and slavery, Catalan, 132; and honor, 230; insur¬
110—111, 114—115; and state, 24, ance company, 88; Italian, 123; and
82—83, 131; suppression of, 3; survi¬ “purity of blood,” 224; rise of, 55,
val of questioned, 91; and tertulia; 120, 124, 129—130; and urban
169; vitality of, 79—80; and war, 90; growth, 50
wealth of, 51, 56, 57, 140-141. See Communion, 95—96
also Auto-da-fe; Clergy; Controversy, Compiegne, 10
theological; Procession; Religion Compostela, 63
Church of the Magdalene (Valladolid), Compostela, archbishop of, 90
37 Compostela, cathedral of, 281«2
Cigales, 61, 190 Comuneros, 19, 22, 23, 130, 153, 223
Cinema, 238 Concha, La, 103
Cisneros, Cardinal Francisco Jimenez Concubine, 30, 196-198, 200, 232. See
de, 19, 80, 129 also Adultery; Fornication
 Index 3°7

Condestable, 134 Correo real, 65, 67

Confesionarios, 66 Cortados, 113, 115, 117
Confession, 94, 95, 196, 199, 211, 246Cortes, 2, 56, 129, 153-154
Conquest, Spanish, 14 Cortes, Hernando, 14, 134, 135, 144,
Conquistador, antecedents of, 23 155
Conseller, 53 Cortes, Vincenta, 108
Conservation de nwnarquias (Fernandez Cortiguera, 239—240
de Navarrete), 84 Coruna, La, 67, 191
Consolations (Boethius), 76 Costa, Diego de la, 181
Contarini, Gaspar, 214 Costa, Joaquin, 236
Continuity, effects of Spanish, 26 “Costillares,” 161, 162
Contraception, 189 Costume. See Finery, clothing; Finery,
Contract, marriage, 182—183, 186— jewelry
187, 188 217, 220 Cotillion, 165
Controversy, theological, 73, 74—77, Council of Finances (Castile), 20
81-82, 83, 92, 180-182. See also Council of Trent, 77
Blasphemy; Morisco Counter-Reformation, 157
Convent. See Church; Clergy Court: and bullfight, 158, 160, 161; as
Conversation. See Controversy, the¬ career, 9, 10, 11, 12, 18-19, 25, 121,
ological; Tertulia 127-128, 131; and Church, 12, 13,
Converso, 224-226, 227, 229, 230 80, 99, 133; and festival, 153-155;
Coplas. See Music, song and gambling, 167—168; and honor,
Coquimbo, 14 231; Jews at, 124; marriage at, 183;
Cordoba: bullfight in, 160, 161; charity monopoly held by, 165—166; ostenta¬
in, 79, 141; colegio of, 79; festival in, tion of, 171, 176; power of, 130—131,
147; gambling in, 167; honor in, 133-134; sex at, 182, 200-201; slav¬
216, 219, 220, 234-235; immi¬ ery at, 111
grants around, 105; leather of, 173, Cova, Maria Andrea de, 188
176; moriscos in, 124; ostentation in, Covarrubias, Antonio Alonso de, 33
173—174, 176; parish geography of, Credo, 73, 252
49; poor in, 138; population of, 124; Creixall, parish of, 186
public buildings in, 48; and “purity Criminal, 245—246. See also Brigand;
of blood,” 228; religion in, 71, 92; Inquisition
slavery in, 109, 110, 111, 113, 116— Crusade, 90, 92, 131
117; tertulia in, 169; travel to, 65; Crusading spirit, 81
violence in, 28, 43, 246, 247 Cruz, Isabel de la, 76
Cordoba, Antonio Fernandez de, 71, Cruz, Juan de la, 16, 80
173 Cuchillares, 59
Cordoba, bishop of, 89, 141 Cuckold. See Adultery
Cordoba, cathedral of, 83 Cuenca, 57, 142, 204
Cordoba, Gonzalo de, 21, 214 Cuenca, cathedral of, 84
Cordoba Monzalve, Francisca de, 71, 79 Cuevas, marquis de las, 111
Cordoba y Mendoza, Diego de, 173 Cuevas, Miguel Cervera de las, 195
Corpus Christi, 41, 76, 152—153, 157, Cults: Marian, 76-77, 85, 88, 89; pro¬
159, 163-164 liferation of, 88
Corregidor, 52, 78, 112, 143, 281«3 Cuzco, 14
Corregimiento, 133 Cynicism, ix
308 Index

Danadolia, Hassan, 29—30, 208, Desert, 54, 65

292«59 Diaz, Alonso, 180
Dance: Flamenco, 7; as honor, 157, 164, Diaz, Ana, 95, 196, 203
165; festival, 148, 149, 154, 155, Diaz, Bernal, 81
163—164; informal, 155; local, 164— Diaz, Francisca, 204
165; ostentation in, 170; at tertulia, Diaz, Francisco, 87—88
169 Diaz, Juan, 203
“Dance of candil y perejil,” 155 Diaz, Lorenzo, 181
Daroca, 47, 62, 65 Diaz, Pedro, 181
Danger. See Adventure; Death; Honor Dice, game of, 166
Danger of travel, 64—67 Diez, Diego, 180
Daubenton, Ambroise, 214 Disaster, public, and festival, 151—152,
Davila, Arias, 128 156, 157
Dead Christ (Juan de Ribera), 238 Disasters of War, The (Goya), 238
Dead Sebastian (Juan de Ribera), 238 Disentailment, 3, 56, 9L 99
Death: and bullfight, 159—161, 163, Dishonesty, as Spanish trait, ix
237, 239; conception of, 239—242; Display. See Ostentation
during crusade, 13; by execution, Dogma, 73—77 passim. See also Reli¬
245—246; fear of, 244—245; and gion
honor, ix, x, xi, 6—8, 9, 11, 12, 15, Dominican order, 36, 74, 76—77, 85,
16, 178, 179, 180, 213-214, 215, 226, 243
216, 221, 230-231, 232, 233-235; Don Quixote (Cervantes), 16, 125, 240
by martyrdom, 80, 101, 237; mur¬ Dowry, 83, 84, 182-184, 188
der, 206, 221, 247—248; mystery of, Doyague, Catalina de, 204—205,
241—242; preoccupation with, 291»50
237—239; and “purity of blood,” 228, Dress. See Finery, clothing
229; of religious dissidents, 82; and Duena, Hernando de la, 175
sex, 178, 179, 180, 203, 206, 221, Duero River, 127
292»56; of slave, 114, 115—116; Duran, Josef, 199
through sorcery, 204; suicide, 210, Durro, 34
248; symbolized, 34; and travel, 64,
65—67. See also Plague Easter, 39, 87, 95-96, 151
Death Surrounded by Emblems of Human Ebro River, 105, 239
Vanity (Valdes Leal), 240 Ecija, 48, 49, 53, 65, 79
Decadence, x, xi Economy, xi, xii, 2-3. See also Labor;
Decadencia, 115 Poverty; Wealth
Decree of 1834, 2 Education: and antireligious demonstra¬
Defourneaux, Marcellin: on brother¬ tion, 100; apprenticeship, 7, 18; and
hoods, 77; on bullfight, 158; on cul¬ bullfight, 158; as career, 25, 121; and
ture, 252; on death, 246; on festival, caste system, 82-83; Christian vs.
151; on honor, 215; on sex, 179 Moslem, 124; donations for, 79; fel¬
Delgado, Jose (“Pepe Hillo”), 161, 162, lowships for, 77; and fornication,
163 197; of hidalgo, 25; history of
Delibes, Miguel, 239 Spanish, 249-253; and honor, 231;
Demography. See Population lack of, ix, 21, 182, 249; levels of,
Dena, 55, 191 252-253; and Luther, 75; medical,
Denia, Marquisate of, 93, 243 6; military, 8; morisco, 75, 93;
 Index 3°9

number of colleges, 47, see also Col- Exposition of the Body of St. Bonaventure
egio; and prostitution, 194; and “pur¬ (Zurbaran), 238
ity of blood,” 228, 230; religious, 8, Extremadura: conquistadors from, 144;
73, 91; and tertulia, 169; university, honor in, 232; junta of, 222; labor
11 in, 45; land tenure in, 57; nobility
Egido, Teofanes, 190 in, 24, 25; palaces of, 51; poor in,
Empehos y desempenos (Larra), 232 137, 142—143; religion in, 76
Emphyteusis, 60
Employment. See Career; Labor Fair, 40, 41, 44
Encierro, 148-149, 160 Falla, 147, 150
Encubierto, El, 92 Family, x, 23, 25—26. See also Honor;
Encylopedie (Montesquieu), 252 Mayorazgo; Nobility; “Purity of
Endogamy, 24, 184—186 blood”
England, 9, 50, 56-57, 72, 88, 136, Famine, 70, 135, 141
137, 175, 188, 251 Fandango, 164, 165
Enlightenment, 90—91, 119, 136—137, Farnese, Ottavio, 20
157, 169, 251 Fasting, 87, 88
Enriquez, Luisa, 176 Fatalism, ix
Ensalmadores, 87 Febvre, Lucien, 52
Ensenada, Zenon de Somodevilla, mar¬ Feijoo, Friar, 251, 252
ques de la, 60, 61 Felices, Jesualdo de, 209, 210
Enterocolitis, 42 Ferdinand, xi, 2, 19, 74, 91, 99, 155,
Entrecruces, 186 207
Epidemic: cholera, 42-43; feast com¬ Ferlosio, Sanchez, 239
memorating, 151—152; response to, Fernandez, Gregorio, 73, 238
70, 135, 139, yellow fever, 42, 152; Festival: autumn, 43; and bullfight,'
of 1596, 245; of 1597-1599, 139, 158—159, 161—162; Carnival,
230-231; of 1648, 90. See also 31—34, 147, 179, 201; and disaster,
Plague 151—152, 156, 157; as diversionary
Erasmus, Desiderius, 76, 82, 97, 100, tactic, 15(s\falla, 147, 150; as honor,
187 157; vs. labor, 169; matrimonial, 21,
Eroticism, in flagellation, 39 184; Moslem, 93; number of, 122; “of
Escalona, duke of, 134 the plow,” 156, 157—158; political,
Escobar, Isable de, 196 21, 153—155; as protection, 157—
Escorial, 55, 58 158; purpose of, 150—151; religious,
Escudero, Rosa, 198 28, 29, 31, 36, 37, 40, 41, 76, 150,
Espartero, Baldomero, 8—9, 16, 17, 151-153, 157, 158, 159, 163-165,
132-133 184, 234; San Fermines, 148; signifi¬
Espinosa, Gabriel de, 13 cance of, 176—177; summer, 43; vari¬
Esplritu Santo, convent of (Jerez), 85 ety of, 147-149, 150
Espolon, 52 Feudalism, 127, 128, 132
Estanya, Luis Juan, 248 Field, open, 53—54, 57
Estrada, Antonio de, 89 Figueroa, Pedro de, 196
Excommunication, 22, 45, 224 Finance: attitude toward, 121, 123, 131,
Excusado, 164 235; as career, 134—135; Jewish, 124;
Exhibitionism, 206 Moslem, 124
Exogamy, 185—186 Finery: clothing, 171—173; for dance,
310 Index

164; festival, 149, 150, 158; jewelry, macy in, 190-191; marriage in, 31,
170—175 passim; literature on, 170— 34, 186; migration from, 55, 139;
172; of prostitutes, 192, 193; as vice, prosperity of, 51; “purity of blood” in,
xi, 249 226; religion in, 75, 90; robbers in,
Fishing, 59 66; salmon in, 59
Fitou, 20 Gallantry, 40, 118, 165, 168, 184
Five Hours with Mario (Delibes), 239 Gallo, El (Rafael Gomez), 6—7, 33
Flagellation, 38, 39, 44 Gambling, 44, 165-168, 169, 209
Flanders, 19, 20, 24, 118, 172, 174, 175 Game, religion as a, 81
Flandrin, J. L., 189 Games: billards, 168; bowls, 181; cards,
Flirtation. See Dance; Gallantry 118, 165-168, 169; dice, 166; flirta¬
Florentines, 123 tion, 40, 165, 168, 184; gambling,
Floridablanca, count of, 21—22, 230 44, 165-168, 169, 209; lottery, 167;
Floridablanca, census of (1787), 48, 49, significance of Carnival, 33; social,
51, 104 31, 45, 155, 168, 169
Fonseca, Francisco de, 176 Gaming house, 167—168
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 252 Gamonal, 33
Food: austerity in, xi; and blasphemy, Ganasa, Juan, 156
95; during Carnival, 31—32, 33, 34; Gandia, duke of, 111
cost of, 119; and illness, 42; party, Ganivet, Angel, 221
169; religious customs concerning, Gaona, Rodolfo, 7
33, 34—35, 44, 74; shortage of, 70, Garcia, Juan, 197, 242
135, 141 Garcia Lorca, Federico, 7, 8, 48, 61,
Forest, 53, 54, 119 239, 241-242
Fornication, 73, 75, 93, 95-97, 113, Garza, Lorenzo, 8
115, 116, 145, 181, 189-191, 195— Gattinara, Chancellor, 21, 45
196, 199-201, 204-207, 216, 220, Gautier Theophile: on bullfight, 161,
232 162, 163; on festival, 152—153; on
Foundling, 189—191 honor, 215, 221; on labor, 118,
Fraga, 54 122—123; on landscape, 53, 64; on
France, 3, 57, 72, 80, 82, 88, 90, 99, ostentation, 172; on religion, 91,
105, 130, 166, 175, 186, 189 100; on sexual jealousy, 180; on ter-
Franciscan order, 38, 76-77, 99, 226, tulia, 169; on travel, 64, 67
285«47 Genera, Juana, 199
Franco government, 142 Genoa, 123, 174
Freedom: attitude toward, 122; manu¬ Geography, natural, 53—55
mission of slavery, 108, 116—117, 246 Geremek, Bronislaw, 136
Frias, duke of, 25 Geria, 184-185
Fuenclara, count of, 111 Germany, 51, 136, 171, 172, 174
Fuente del Maestre, 25 Gerona, 49, 124
Fuenteovejuana (Lope de Vega), 214, 218 Geronimo, 246—247
Furnishings, 171-176 passim, 192 Gibert, Teresa, 198
Fuster, Joan, 92 Gijon, 50
Gil, Fray, 90
Galan, Miguel, 197 Giron Pacheco brothers, 128
Galicia: agriculture in, 41, 63; charity Gluttony, 33—34. See also Food
in, 141; gastronomy of, 33; illegiti¬ Godoy, Manuel, 9-10, 16, 17, 133,
 Index 311

182, 200 Guzman de Alfarache (Mateo de Ale¬

Golden Fleece, order of, 9, 20 man), ix, 223—224, 236
Gomara, Francisco Lopez de, 15, 279«5
Gomez, Fernando, 6 Haro, Luis de, 133
Gomez, Jose, 6 Hazana, 180, 193
Gomez, Lola, 6, 7 Health, public, 140, 156. See also
Gomez, Rafael, 6, 7, 33 Epidemic; Physician; Plague
Gongora, Luis de, 28, 85, 167, 234 Hemingway, Ernest, 148, 237, 241
Gonzalez, Gil, 80 Hendaye, 64
Government. See Court; Politics; Regidor Heresy, 41, 92. See also Auto-da-fe; Con¬
Goya, Francisco de, 34, 238 troversy, theological
Goytisolo, Juan, 239 Hermitage, 48
Grecian, Baltasar, x Hermosa, Ana, 95
Gradas (Seville), 52 Hernandez, Gaspar, 174
Granada: agriculture in, 61, 63; charity Heroism, See Adventure; Honor
in, 45, 141; Cobos in, 19; fall of, 128; Herrera, Perez de, 242
festival in, 147; honor in, 221; hunt¬ Herrera lineage, 228
ing near, 58; marriage in, 185; Herrezuelo, Licentiate, 242—244
moriscos in, 74; parish geography of, Heterodoxy. See Controversy, theological
49; poor in, 138; prostitution in, 195; Hewitt, Margaret, 187—188
public buildings in, 48; sex in, 200; Hidalgo, x, xi, xii, 9, 14, 23—24, 53,
slavery in, 109 78, 121, 139, 143, 145, 191, 196,
Granada, bishop of, 89, 141 218, 235, 236
Granada, Capitulations of, 93 Hierarchy, social, 24, 52. See also
Granada, War of, 106 Honor; Nobility; Poverty
Granja de San Ildefonso, 58, 59 Hillo, Pepe, 161, 162, 163
Granville, George Leveson-Gower, Hispaniola, 80
Count, 20, 45 Hita, Archpriest of, 39
Greater Antilles, 2 Hoguera, 150
Greco, El, 74 Holland, 88, 172, 174
Greeks, 107 Holy Office. See Inquisition
Guadalajara, 32, 76, 120, 129 Holy Week, 34, 35, 36-39, 45, 46,
Guadalquivir river valley, 60 87, 100, 101, 152, 157, 193
Guadalupe, monastery of, 57 Homosexuality, 207—211 passim,
Guadiana River, 142 292»59, 292k61
Guetro, Juan, 188 Honor: and agriculture, 121; and ances¬
Guevara, Fernando Nino, 110 try, 249, 250; in bullfight, 160, 162,
Guicciardini, Francesco, xi, 118, 214 163; of Church, 78-79, 89-90; in
“Guides to sinners,” 70 death, 247; as defect, ix-x, xi; de¬
Guijeho, Juan, 225—226 fined, 6—15 passim, 121, 125, 213,
Guilds, 70, 85, 224, 225, 226 215—217; false, x, 231—233; in festi¬
Guilhou, 3 val, 157; history of concept, 213—
Guipuzcoa, 129 215, 223-233; and labor, 118, 132;
Guns, 64—67 passim and occupation, 117—123 passim,
Gutton, Jean-Pierre, 136 132; vs. ptcaro, 235—236; sexual,
Guzman, Gaspar de, 103 178—180, see also Adultery; social
Guzman, Pedro Maldonado, 173 consequences of, x; sources of, 6—7,
3I2 Index

133—136, 217—222; symbols of, 112, Irrigation. See Agriculture, methods of

170—176; vicissitudes of, 7, 9, 11, Isabella of Spain, 2, 9, 18, 207
12—15; vocabulary of, 217 Islam. See Moris co
Hospice, 77-78, 120, 138-139, 141, Italy, 25, 77, 92, 123, 136, 171, 213
142, 226. See also Charity Itineraire descript if de I’Espagne (Comte
Hospital: alms distribution at, 52; con¬ de Laborde), 89
struction of, 49; and honor, 231; Iturgoyen, Juan de, 179
number of, 47—48; and plague, 245;
and prostitution, 71; tithes of, 63 Jaen: military in, 224; ostentation in,
Houses, number of, 47 172; parish geography of, 49; “purity
House of the People (Montilla), 101 of blood” in, 224, 228; violence in,
Huerta, Diego de, 180 247
Huguenots, 57 Jaen, cathedral of, 226
Hunt, royal, 58—59 James, Saint, 81
Hurdes, 142 Jammes, Robert, 98—99, 100
Jansenism, 82, 202
Idearium espanol (Angel Ganivet), 221 Jarama, The (Sanchez Ferlosio), 239
Igualada, 62 Jativa, 209, 211
Illegitimacy, 189-190, 195-196, 221 Jealousy, 203-204, 221, 229, 233-234
Illness, summer, 41—42 Jerez de los Caballeros, 25, 85, 144
“Illuminism,” 76 Jeronymites, 226
Immigration, 104—105, 139 Jesuit order, 22, 74, 79, 99, 100, 164,
Impatience for success, 6—16 passim 226
Inca Indians, 15, 144 Jewelry, 170—175 passim
Index Librorum Probibitorum, 82, 252 Jews, 73, 81, 82, 92, 93, 95, 124-125,
Indies, 173 126, 127, 224, 225, 227, 228, 233,
Indolence, ix, 34, 119, l4l—142, 249 235, 294«22
Industrial revolution, xii, 250 Joan the Mad, 150
Industriousness, x, i, 6—23 passim, Joly, Barthelemy: on agriculture, 54; on
25-26, 55, 93, 119-120, 129-130, birds, 59; on ostentation, 170, 171,
132 176; on prostitution, 192; on reli¬
Infanzones, 279»8 gion, 37, 79
Inn, 64, 65, 105, 192, 194 Jordan, Esteban, 121, 188, 219, 230
In Praise of Marriage (Erasmus), 187 Jordan, Magdalena, 121, 188, 219, 230
Inquisition, 2, 28, 43, 44, 45, 12—16 Joselito (Jose Gomez), 6
passim, 82, 83, 85, 87—88, 93, 94, Jota, 164
96-97, 99, 100, 108, 166, 168, 175, Jovellanos, Gaspar Welchor de, 251
180, 181, 189, 193, 194, 195, 197, Juan of Austria, Don, 154
198, 199, 201, 204-212 passim, 217, Juana of Portugal, 243
228, 229, 232, 234, 242-244, Juana of Spain, 153
247-248, 251, 252 Judaism. See Jews
Institution of the Christian Wife (Luis Judas, 35—36
Vives), 187 Juni, Juan de, 238
Integration: of sacred and profane, 1—2; Junta, 222
of work and leisure, 2
Intolerance, religious, 82—83- See also Kany, Charles, 175, 182
Inquisition; Morisco Kleiser, Luis Martinez, 99
 Index 313

Konetzke, Richard, 143—144 230 passim; slaves and, 114—115; on

Koran, 74, 93 violence, 234, 247. See also Cortes;
Mayorazgo; Testament, last
Labor: attitude toward, ix-xi, 18—23 Law, Madoz, 3
passim, 117—132 passim, 169—170, Law, Mendizabal (1837), 2, 3
230, 249, 250; and dance, 165; and Law of Disentailment (1829), 3
festival, 148; holidays from, 122; Law of Senortos, 2
hours of, 29, 44^5, 122, 169-170; Laziness. See Indolence
immigrants and, 104-105; migration Leal, Valdes, 238, 240
and, 55; number of workers, 104; Lease, dated by religious calendar, 29
pauper, 78, 119, 120, 136; and religi¬ Le Flem, Jean-Paul, 130
ous instruction, 73; seasonal, 31, 34, Lent, 30, 34-39, 95
41, 43; slave and, 113; wages for, 41, Lent, Doha, 33
167, 169—170; and wealth, 117 Leon: forest of, 54; gambling in, 166;
Laborde, Comte de, 53, 89, 91, 141, parish geography of, 49; poor in, 138;
165 population of, 47; “purity of blood”
Laguna, 190 in, 226; religion in, 91; sheep in, 57;
Lalang, Antoine de, 53, 54, 55, 191 trout in, 59
Land: acquisition of, 3, 18, 127, 128, Leon, bishop of, 89
184; Church-owned, 9, 79, see also Leon, cathedral of, 84
Disentailments; communal, 143; as Leon, Fray de, 244—246
dowry, 184; exploitation of, 64; and Leon, Luis de, 16, 80, 126
honor, 219; idle, 53, 57—58, 60, Leon, Pedro de, 221
120; labor on, 119—121, see also Ag¬ Leon, Pedro Cieza de, 81
riculture; and law, 3, 60, 143; love Lepanto, battle of, 11, 106, 154
for, 17; and sheepherding, 142—143; Lerida, 34, 101, 105
and social class, 3,8; tenure, 60. See Lerma, duke of, 12, 111, 133, 154
also Church; Mayorazgo Letters from Spain (Joseph Blanco
Land-man relationship, stability of, 5 White), 30, 99
Landscape, changelessness of, 53—59 Levant, the, 48, 63, 101, 150
Lapeyre, Henri, 172 Lima, viceregent of, 187
Larquie, Claude, 107—109, 111, 112, Linajudo, 228
115 Lisbon, 106
Larra, Jose Maria de, 101, 170, 207, Literature: of anticlericalism, 97—100
230, 233 passim; attitude toward, 118, 250,
Larruga, Eugenio, 60, 61 251—252; on bullfight, 161; on char¬
Laslett, Peter, 185 ity, 135—136, 141; on Church, 31,
Latifundism, 57, 58, 120 85, 89; condemned (Index), 82, 252;
Lavapies, ward of, 179 on dance, 164—165; on death, 238—
Law: attitude toward, ix, 120; concern¬ 239, 240, 241, 242; English, 4; on
ing adultery, 207; feebleness of, 133; gambling, 166—167; on honor,
and hierarchy, 132; and honor, 217, 214-215, 216, 218, 230, 231, 232,
234; and land, 3, 60, 143; concern¬ 233; Italian, xi; jealousy, 180; on
ing marriage, 182—183, 185; con¬ labor, 118—123 passim; on marriage,
cerning poor, 136, 139—140; concern¬ 187, 190; morisco, 74, 75, 93; con¬
ing prostitution, 192—195 passim; cerning moriscos, 74; on ostentation,
concerning “purity of blood,” 224— 170—171; picaro in, 235—236; on
3*4 Index

prostitution, 191—193, 195; on "pur¬ 129, 166; marriage in, 185; ostenta¬
ity of blood,” 227; Reformation, 75, tion in, 176; plague in, 42; prom¬
76; on Santiago, 81; on servants, enade in, 52; prostitution in, 96,

103-104; on sex, 178-180, 199, 194, 195; public buildings in, 47;
200—201, 207; on sin, 70. See also religion in, 35, 86, 88, 101; servants
Caro Baroja; Cervantes; Gautier; in, 104; sex in, 179—180, 181—182,
Swinburne; Townsend; Vega, Lope 200; slavery in, 106, 107, 108—109,

de; White 111, 112, 115, 116; theatre in, 34,

Littoral, 61 156—157; time in, 28; travel to, 64,

Llanes, Antonia, 198 65, 232; trout in, 59; urban growth

Llanto (Garcia Lorca), 8 of, 49—50; violence in, 246

Llobregat, 105 Madrigal, 13

Locura por la honra, La (Calderon de la Maestranza, 162

Barca), 178, 214 Magdalena (Valladolid), 52, 137, 165

Logrono, 8, 9, 150 Magic, 87-88, 91, 95, 97, 194, 204-

Lopez, Encarna, 7 205

Lopez, Julcara, 205 Majorca, 208, 230

Lottery, 167 Malaga: agriculture in, 61; bullfight in,

Louis XVI of France, 10 161; charity in, 45; flagellation in,

Louis Philippe, 10 44; growth of, 50—51; honor in, 221,

Love, 7, 10, 11, 13, 22-23, 40, 44, 85, 222; manufacturing in, 130, 166;

185, 187—188. See also Gallantry; poor in, 138; prostitution in, 194;

Marriage religion in, 77, 100; slavery in, 109,

Love and Pedagogy (Unamuno), 239 113

Loyola, Ignatius, 80, 85 Malaga, bishop of, 89

Luchana, count of, 9 Malaguena, 109, 164

Ludolf of Saxe, 76 Maldonado, Alonso de, 80

Lugo, 66—67 Malespina, Cornelia, 22—23

Lujan, Rodrigo, 129 Mallon, B. Barreiro, 191

Luque, Hernando de, 14 Mallorca, 63, 141

Luna, Alvaro de, 128 Malta, order of, 25
Luther, Martin, 75, 76 Mancha, La, 63, 65, 67, 157, 164
Lutheranism, 82 Manchester, 50
Lyon, 136 Mandrou, Robert, 52
Manrique, Jorge, 213
Madoz, 91 “Manuals for confessors,” 70
Madoz Law, 3 Manufacturing, 50, 118, 119, 120, 122,
Madre de Dios, convent of, 110 124, 126, 129-130, 131, 165-166,
Madrid: bullfight in, 157, 160, 161, 253
162, 163; charity in, 78; dance in, Manumission of slavery, 108, 116—117,
163—164; education at, 25; festival 246
at, 32, 34, 40, 154—155; furnishings Manyas, Pablo, 248
in, 175; gambling in, 166, 167, 168; Manzanares, 65
government of, 156; honor in, 17, Maragaterfa, 156, 158
215, 222; hunting near, 58; immi¬ Maravillas, ward of, 179
grants in, 105; labor in, 169—170; Marcello, parish of, 191
magic in, 205; manufacturing in, Marco, Miguel, 29, 96, 201
 Index 3J5

Marcos de Obregon, 227 Medina del Campo: agriculture in,

Maria Luisa de Parma, 10, 133, 231 60; commerce in, 129, 134, 142;
Maria Santlsima del Pilar, association marriage in, 183, 185; ostentation
of, 88 in, 172; parish geography of, 49;
Marin, Pedro, 248 pauperism in, 137; slavery in, 106
Marian cult, 76—77, 85, 88, 89 Medina de Pomar, 25
Margarita of Spain, 12 Medina de Rioseco, 120
Margarita de Parma, 20 Medina Sidonia, duke of, 111, 134
Market, 41, 44, 119 Mejias, Ignacio Sanchez, 6—8
Maroto, Eugenio, 180 Mencharez, Elvira de, 188
Marrano, 229—230, 294*22 Mendicant orders, 48, 82, 90
Marriage: attitude toward, 98, 189— Mendizabal, 91
191, 202-203; bigamy, 95, 291*34; Mendizabal Law (1837), 2, 3
contract, 182-183, 186-187, 188, Mendoza, Maria de, 183
217, 220; and dance, 165; endogamy, Mendoza y Pimentel, Maria, 19
24, 184-185; exogamy, 185-186; Mercado, Tomas, 80
factors in, 31, 34, 40, 46, 183—188 Merced, convent de la, 210
passim; festival for, 153, 154, 155; Mercedarian order, 11, 28, 85, 210—
function of, 182; and honor, 216, 211, 279*3
230; interracial, 116, 187; love in, Merchant, 112-113, 138, 168, 172,
40, 187—188; mixed religious, 74; 176, 183
morisco, 94; and nobility, 7, 8, 12, 17, Merida, 124, 232
19, 20, 21, 24; and prostitution, 191, Mesa, Juan de, 216
192; of slaves, 73, 114, 115, 116, 187; Meseta, 54, 55, 60, 61, 139
and sex, 73; wedding costume, 171. Mesta, 3, 41, 57-58, 142-143
See also Adultery Metropolitan Museum, 238
Marseilles, 208, 212 Mexico, 6—7, 81, 144
Martel, Jean, 212 Migration: due to poverty, 143—144;
Martin, Alonso, 71 during epidemic, 139; and mar¬
Mass: attendance at, 88, 92; in auto-da- riage, 186; seasonal, 55; of sheep, 57
fe, 243; for dead, 71-72, 114, 246; Migueletes, 67
disregarded, 94; dogma concerning, Military: and art, 17; as career, xi, 8—9,
74; parodied, 93; and sex, 211 11, 24-25, 127, 128, 132; and
Masturbation, 209 dance, 164; effect of Spanish charac¬
Mata, Francisco Martinez de la, 105 ter, xi, 130—131; festival for, 153,
Matador. See Bullfight 154; homosexuality among, 208—
Mataro, 50, 61, 120 209; and honor, 124, 125, 222, 232;
Maundy Thursday, 36—37 Jewish, 124—125; orders, 2—3, 81,
Mayorazgo, 3, 9, 21, 25, 56, 78, 83, 84—85; and “purity of blood,” 224,
98, 121, 166, 188, 207, 217, 219, 226; and slavery, 106—107, 112; vo¬
223, 225, 230, 281*6 cabulary of, 126
May queen, 40 Minorca, 35
Medellin, 144 Minuet, 164, 165
Mediana, 209 Miralles, Joseph, 198
Medico de su honra, El (Calderon de la Miranda, Carreno de, 238
Barca), 178, 214 Miranda, count of, 161
Medinaceli, duke of, 56, 104, 111 Miranda, Maria de, 244
316 Index

Mirror of Death, The (Unamuno), 239 174; religious, 31, 38, 39, 163, 164,
Mistress. See Concubine 165; song, 38, 40, 100, 126; at ter-
Molho, Maurice, 235 tulia, 169
Molina, Tirso, 85, 178, 179 Muslim. See Morisco
Monino, count of, 21—22 Musquiz, Rafael de, 90
Mont, Nicolas, 208—209, 210 Muy Santo Sacramento, association of, 88
Montalvo, Marfa de, 173, 183
Montaner, Andres, 221, 247 Nabarro, Juan, 212
Montanes, Juan, 73, 238 Nadal, Jorge, 130
Montemayor, Isabel de, 173—174 Naldo, Jeronimo, 110
Montepulciano, Giovanni di, 20 Name, given, and Marian cult, 89
Montesa, 3 Nantes, 106
Montesinos, Antonio de, 80 Naples, 20, 106, 134, 238
Montesquieu, Charles de, 252 Napo River, 144
Montilla, 101, 105 Napoleon, 10, 130
Montone, Braccio da, 213 Narvaez, Ramon Maria de, duque de
Montseny, 105 Valencia, 132—133
Monzon, 153 National Gallery (Washington, D.C.),
Monzalve, Beatriz de, 79 238
Moor. See Morisco National Museum of Sculpture (Val¬
Mora, Jose, 215 ladolid), 238
Monal, Diaz del, 92, 100-101 Nativity of the Virgin, 151
Moral de Calatrava, 199 Navagero, Andres, 54
Morales, Miguel de, 210 Navarra, 212
Morality, sexual, 7, 10, 11, 13, 17, 33. Navarre, 35, 75, 179, 184
See also Adultery; Fornication; Sex Navarrette, Fernandez de, 84
Morata, 180 Navarrete, Fernando de, 227
Morelia, duke of, 9 Navarro, Farmer, 96—97, 206
Morisco, 33, 54, 73, 74-75, 76, 80-83 Navas, Miguel Perez de las, 179
passim, 92-94, 105, 106, 109, 117, Navas de Tolosa, Las, 81, 127
124, 126, 127, 150, 196, 208, 209, N'Damba, Albert, 107-109, 110, 113,
223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 233 115-117, 187
Morocco, 13 Netherlands, 12, 153, 154
Moslem. See Morisco New Laws of 1542, 80
Mota, Ruiz de la, 19 Nice, 20
Motril, 63 Nicolas V, 224
Mourning in Paradise (Goytisolo), 239 Nobility: and agriculture, 121; architec¬
Movimiento, 101 ture of, 52—53; aspiration to, x,
Moyano, Francisco Marti, 208, 210 6—15 passim, 17; in auto-da-fe,
Mucientes, 190 242—244; and bullfight, 158, 160—
Mulhberg, battle of, 154 162; charity of, 79, 138-139; as
Murcia, 22, 48, 64, 238 clergy, 83—84; and dance, 165; and
Murica, bishop of, 90 festival, 153—155, 156; and gam¬
Murillo, 132-133 bling, 167-168; gypsy as, 7; honor
Muscovy, 176 of, 217, 218, 222; impoverished, 18;
Music: fesitval, 147, 148, 149, 154, infanzones, 279»8; marriage of, 183,
155, 158, 163, 164; instruments, 187; and mayorazgo, 56; ostentation
 Index 3 T7

of, 170-171, 173, 174, 176; and Oropesa, count of 111

power, 128—131 passim, 134—135; Ortega, Catalina de, 242
and “purity of blood,” 226, 227, 229; Ortega, Domingo, 8, 234
servants of, 103—104; and sex, 180, Ortiz, Antonio Dominguez, 106, 143,
196, 200, 203-204, 292«62, 228
293 «62; and slavery, 108, 111—112; Ortiz, Luis de, ix, 130
survival of 25—26; tertulia of 169; Osormo, count of 156
and violence, 247. See also Caballero; Ostentation: architectural, 48, 51,
Hidalgo; Honor 52—53; in auto-da-fe, 82; of festival,
Notary of Teruel, 29 147—150, 157; in personal pos¬
Noticias de M.adrid, 179 sessions, 170—176; of prostitutes,
Novellara, countess of 22 192, 194; religious, 83, 86, 90, 101;
Novelas ejmplaras (Cervantes), 166 servant as, 103—104; significance of
Nuestra Senora de la Almudera, associa¬ 176—177; slave as, 112; taste for, 128;
tion of 88 as vice, x, xi, 249, 250
Nuestra Senora de Bel'en, association of Osuna, 54, 65, 105
88 Osuna, duke of 56, 104, 111
Nuestra Senora de la Concepcion, associa¬ Our Lady of Montserrat Sanctuary, 76
tion of 88 Our Lady of Pilar Sanctuary, 76
Nuestra Senora de la Esperanza, associa¬ Oviedo: charity in, 45; fair in, 44; festi¬
tion of 88 val at, 32; gambling at, 167; parish
Nuestra Senora de la Leche y Buen Parto, geography of 49; poor in, 138; pub¬
association of 88 lic buildings in, 48; “purity of blood”
Nuestra Senora de la Purifcaci'on, associ¬ in, 226
ation of 88 Oviedo, bishop of 89
Nuestra Senora del Refugio, association
of 88 Pacheco, Francisco, 121
Nuestra Senora de la Soledad, association Pacheco Marfa, 20
of, 88 Paganism, symbolized in Carnival, 33
Nuestra Senora de las Tres Necesidades, Palar, 180
88 Palencia, 42, 109, 110, 116, 185-186
Palencia, bishop of 89
Obradeiro, 51, 281»1 Palillos, band of 67
Obscenity, 29 , 94 , 201 Pallars, 184
Ocampo, Cristobal de, 242 Palma, 42, 208
Ocana, 48, 49, 67, 129 Palm Sunday, 39—40
Ocana, count of 12 Pampeluna, 78
Olivares, count-duke of 32, 103, 133, Pamplona, 139, 147, 148, 149, 151, 244
154, 167, 201, 229 “Pan, toros, y trabajol’ 156
Olvera, 58, 66, 155 Pardo, the, 58
Ondara, 93 Paredes, Garcia, 144
Oran, 94 Parilla, La, 65
Ordinance of 1887, 86 Paris, 10, 239
Orellana, Francisco de, 144 Parlement, 80
Orense, bishop of 90 Parma, 10
Orense, cathedral of 84 Partidas, Code of the, 159
Orihuela, 211 Part Idas, 213, 215
3j8 Index

Passion, 6—15 passim, 30—43 passim, Plaza mayor, 51—52, 144, 145, 159,
85, 125—126. See also Adventure; 160, 243
Honor; Love Politics: career in, 8—9; Church in, 90;
Pater Noster, 73, 252 hidalgo in, 25; honor in, 8—9, 222,
Paul III, 20 224; opposition expressed through
Pavia, battle of, 153 Carnival, 32; plaza mayor and,
Paz, Mariana de, 183 51—52; and “purity of blood,” 224,
Paz, Nicolas, 175 226—227, 228, 229- See also Court
Peace in War (Unamuno), 239 Pomar de Valdiva, 42
Pelayo, Menendez, 92, 217 Pomp. See Ostentation
Pelota, 148 Ponsor, Pierre, 187
Penagos, valley of, 55 Popular Front, 101
Penance, 87, 88, 189 Population: density of, 55; of Madrid,
Penedes, 105 49—50; and pauperism, 140; urban,
Peniscola, 208 46—47
Pereire, 3 Porras, Pero Gomez de, 71, 188
Perez, Joseph, 23 Portillo, Pero Hernandez de, 71, 72,
Perez, Pero, 175 166-167, 188, 219
Peribahez (Lope de Vega), 214 Portillo, Maria de, 219
Persian Letters (Montesquieu), 252 Portugal, 11, 13, 106, 143, 229
Peru, 14, 81, 144, 145 Portuguese Indies, 172
Pessimism, Spanish national, ix Posuerga-Duero, 54
Phaedra (Unamuno), 241 Poverty: and adventure, 144—145; at¬
Philip II, 13, 20, 21, 49, 65, 82, 106, titude toward, 32, 45, 37, 120,
118, 137, 143, 153, 154, 166, 192, 135—136; clerical, 89, 140; distribu¬
229, 233, 244, 251 tion of, 137—138; dowry and, 77;
Philip III, 12, 58, 108, 109, 133, 154, gambling and, 166—167; and honor,
171, 176 218, 219, 220-221; and labor, 119—
Philip IV, 32, 58, 83, 103, 153, 155, 121; and marriage, 182—184; and
167, 178, 191, 201, 230, 231 mass, 72; national, xi, 118, 175; of
Physician, 6, 85, 87, 124, 192, 193, nobility, 83; and pauperism, 89, 138;
231, 242, 245, 251 in plague, 245; relationship with
Picaro, 235—236 wealthy, 135—136, 139—140; sex and,
Pidal, Ramon Menedez, 101, 217 198—199, 201; and slave trade, 108;
Pielagos, valley of, 63 urban, 51, 52. See also Charity; Hos¬
Pinchbeck, Ivy, 187—188 pice
Pisuerga River, 165 Poor Laws, 136
Pisguerga valley, 63 Power: and architecture, 52; of Church,
Pitiega, 92 78—79; of Court, 133—134; and
Pius IV, 136 death, 241; vs. labor, 118; means to,
Pius XI, 92 127, 128, 130; servants as symbol of,
Pizarro, Francisco, 14, 144, 145 103; as supreme value, 131, 132—133
Pizarro, Hernando, 15 Poza, marquis of, 25, 242—243, 244
Plague, 42, 50-51, 70, 78, 90, 151— Poza de la Sal, 33
152, 231, 240, 245 Prado, Fernando Miguel de, 110
Plasencia, 76 Prado (Madrid), 52, 238
Plaza, Isabel de la, 110 Pragmatic of 1623, 230
 Index 3T9

Prayer, 73, 75, 86-87, 91, 93, 252 Quevedo, Francisco Gomez de, x, 85,
Prestige. See Honor; Power 167, 238
Priego, count of, 76 Quintano lineage, xii, 24—26, 83—84,
Prim, 222 183, 281«6
Prilate of Spain, 225 “Quixotic” ideal, 6—17 passim
Primogeniture, 184
Procession: for auto-da-fe, 242, 244; of Ramadan, 74
Corpus Christi, 41, 100, 152—153, Rape, 206, 232
163—164; pilgrimage, 100; religious, Raphael, 193
36, 37-39, 41, 77, 86, 100, Ravizes, Alonso Rodriguez de, 196
152—153, 163—164, 280^17; as re¬ Reconquest, 109, 123, 127, 128, 132,
sponse to disaster, 70; of San Fer- 218, 223
mines, 148—149 Redondo, Agustin, 75
Procurer. See Prostitution Reformation, 45, 57, 72, 73, 75, 76,
Prohibition; against bullfighting, 157, 81-82, 123, 130
158; against Carnival excesses, 33; Refranero general ideol'ogico espanol (Luis
dietary, 34—35, 74, 95; against Martinez Kleiser), 99
gambling, 166, 167, 168; and honor, Regidor, 18, 19, 25, 53, 71, 112, 157,
223; increase in, 82; against moriscos, 159, 188, 198, 206, 228, 234
74, 75; concerning prostitution, Religion: and adventure, 145; anti¬
192—193, 194, 195; concerning “pur¬ clericalism, xii, 69—70; authenticity
ity of blood,” 224—230 passim; con¬ of 78; change in, 69; and charity,
cerning Sunday, 43, 122 77—78; in daily life, 70; and death,
Promenade, 51, 52, 122, 176. See also 241, 245—246, 247; demonstrations
Flirtation against, 100; as divisive factor, 101—
Prostitution, 37, 71, 93, 95, 96, 113, 102; concern with dogma, 73;
163, 181, 191-195, 198, 200, 208, heterogeneity of 73; honor as, 215;
209, 216, 217, 220, 249 impoverishment of, 80—81, 100; and
Protestants, 41, 82, 202 labor, 122; morisco, 74—75; and na¬
Proverbs, 98—99 tional policy, 45; and “purity of
Public Service, attitude toward, 121 blood,” 224—230 passim; retreat, 45;
Puebla Nueva, La, 232 in rich/poor relationship, 135—136;
Puente Genii, 101 and sexual questions, 181—182; and
Puerta del Campo, 13, 52, 159, 244 slavery, 72—73, 114—115; as supreme
Puerto de Santa Maria, 86 value, 125, 126; and violence, 90. See
Pundonor. See Honor also Church; Clergy; Controversy,
Purisima Concepcion de la Virgen Maria, theological; Festival, religious
88 Remon, Cristobal, 71
Puritanism, 82, 202 Repertory of Proverbs (Gonzalo Carreas),
“Purity of blood,” 82-83, 224-230, 98-99
235 Restoration, 79
Pyrenees, valley of 40, 87, 104—105, Resurrection. See Easter
128, 184, 212 Reynosa, Arenillas de, 197
Pyrenees, Treaty of the, 46 Reynoso, Magdalena de, 244
Rias Bajas, 55, 191
Quero, Luis, 234 Ribadavia, count of, 19
Quesada lineage, 215, 228 Ribadeo, Martin de, 99
320 Index

Ribagorza, 184 Communion; Marriage; Mass, for

Ribera, Jose, 73 dead; Penance
Ribera, Juan de, 74, 237 “Sacred batallion,” 8
Ribera (bishop of Valencia), 141 Sacrilege, 96—97
Ricard, Robert, 251 Sagrario, 110, 113, 116
Richelieu, Cardinal, 155 Saint, cult of, 76
Rinconete y Cortadillo (Cervantes), 166 Saint, feast of. See Festival, religious
Rioja, 35 Saint, patron, 81
Risk. See Adventure St. Benedict, monastery of, 79
Rison, Juan Velasco, 210, 211 St. Emanuel the Good Martyr (Un¬
Rites, last, 86 amuno), 239
Rivadavia, count of, 183 St. Magdalene, convent of, 195
Rivera, Juan de, 246 St. Nicholas of Bari, 195
Robbers, 64—67 passim St. Paul of Cordoba, convent of, 226
Robert, Francis, 212 St. Paul of Seville, convent of, 226
Robles, Juan de, 140 St. Peter Martyr, monastery of (Toledo),
Roda, marquis of, 231 79
Rodrigo, Catalina, 166 Saint Philip Veri, monastery of, 44
Rodriguez, Ignacio, 205 Saint-Quentin, battle of, 154
Rodriguez, Joaquin (“Costillares”), St. Thomas of Avila, convent of, 226
161-162 Salamanca: agriculture in, 62; bullfight
Rodriguez, Leonor de, 220 in, 158; marriage in, 185; parish ge¬
Rojas, Domingo de, 244 ography of, 49; poor in, 137, 138,
Rojas, Luis de, 242—243 139; prostitution in, 194; “purity of
Romanos, Mesonero, 179—180 blood” in, 224, 226, 230; religion
Rome, 10, 153 in, 75; slaves in, 106; violence in, 66;
Romero, Pedro, 59, 161, 162 wealth of, 51
Roncal, valley of, 184 Salamanca, cathedral of, 48
Roncanos, Mesonero, 207 Salamanca, university of, ix, 25, 75, 77,
Ronda, 161 103, 231, 250, 251
Rondeha, 164 Salas de Bureba, 25
Rothe, Antonio, 197 Salomon, Noel, 62, 218—219
Rothschild, 3 Saludadores, 87
Rouen, 172, 174 Salve Regina, 73
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 252 Salzillo, Francisco (sculptor), 238
Roussillon, 46 Sanchez Albornoz, Claudio. See Albor-
Royal Lottery, 167 noz, Claudio Sanchez
Ruffo, Nicolas, 187 Sanchez, Anton, 197
Ruiz, Mariana, 173 Sanchez, Catalina, 194
Ruiz, Simon, 134-135, 172-173, 176, Sanchez, Juan, 244
183 Sanchez lineage, 228
San Andres, parish of, 217
Saavedra, Francisco de, 234, 235 San Bartolome, 224
Sabiote, lord of, 21 San Benito el Viejo, parish of, 137
Sacraments: attitude toward, 72—73; San Bernardo, ward of, 162, 179
dogma concerning, 74; extreme unc¬ San Bernardo de Alcira, convent of, 210
tion, 245. See also Baptism; Clergy; San Carlos, duke of, 145
 Index 321

San Clemente, 138 Santisimo Cristo del San Gin'es, associa¬

Sandoval, Marla de, 200 tion of, 88
San Felice, 209 Santo Domingo, 80
San Fermln of Pamplona, 148 Santo Domingo, Bemaldo de, 80
San Francisco, monastery of (Valladolid), Santo Domingo de la Calzada, cathedral
36 of, 84
San Gregorio de Valladolid, 227 Saragossa, 54, 65, 138, 141, 222
San Ildefonso, parish of (Seville), 109, Sardana, 164
110, 113, 116, 187 Sardinia, 211
San Isidro Labrador, association of, 88 Sarmiento, Maria de, 21
San Juan de Dios, monastery of Sarmiento, Pedro de, 242, 244
(Granada), 91 Sa Savio Corema, 35
San Juan de Zamora, 242 Sauces, Los, 30, 72, 196
San Justo of Barcelona, parish of, 186 Sauvage, Jean le, 19
San Martin, Maria de, 110 Savonarola, 239
San Martin, 138 Scapegoat, 32, 70
San Miguel de Valladolid, parish of, 196 Science: attitude toward, xii, 124, 134,
San Pablo, monastery of (Valladolid), 249, 250; death of, 82; diffusion of,
36, 38 251, 253- See also Education
San Pedro, parish of, 110 Sebastian of Portugal, 13
San Quirce de Valladolid, convent of, 84 Seco, Luis Doza de, 202
San Salvador, chapel of, 21, 22 Segovia: agriculture in, 60; charity in,
San Sebastian, 103 78; corregidor of, 78; festival in, 35;
Santa Barbara (Madrid), tapestry of, 129 game in, 58, 59; labor in, 118;
Santa Cruz, colegio of, 225 manufacturing in, 130, 142; marriage
Santa Hermandad, 65 in, 185, 188; mass in, 71; parish ge¬
Santa Maria, Juan de, 12 ography of, 49; plague in, 42; poor
Santa Maria, parish of, 187 of, 137—138, 139; sheepherding in,
Santa Maria de Beien, convent of, 244 57; travel to, 65
Santa Maria del Sagrario, parish of Segovia, bishop of, 78, 90
(Seville), 107, 109 Segovia, cathedral of, 48
Santander: agriculture in, 64; festival at, Seguidillas, 155, 157, 164
151—152; junta of, 222; nobility in, Self-analysis, Spanish passion for, ix-x
53; plague in, 70, 245; poor in, 139; Senses, five, preferences among, 52
salmon in, 59 Sepuveda, 78
Santandreu, Pedro Antonio, 208 Sermon: in auto-da-fe, 243; concerning
Santa Olalla, 180 contraception, 189; Lenten, 36;
Santiago, order of, 2, 12, 19, 25, 81, militant, 80; mock, 34, 96, 201,
84-85, 243 206; on prostitution, 193
Santiago de Compostela: charity in, 141; Serna, Melchor de la, 185
clerical wealth of, 51, 79; parish ge¬ Serna, Victoriano de la, 8
ography of, 49; “purity of blood” in, Servant: in auto-da-fe, 244; and bestial¬
226; robbers around, 67 ity, 212; as concubine, 95, 197, 198,
Santiago de Compostela, archbishop of, 199, 232; in convent, 84; and dance,
134, 141 165; number of, 103—104; slave as,
Santiago de Compostela, cathedral of, 112, 115; as symbol of wealth, 117
84 Sesa, duke of, 21, 183
 322 Index

Seso, Carlos de, 244 Sixtus V, 136

Sestao, 100 Slave: and bestiality , 212; as concubine,
Seville: agriculture around, 62; art in, 197; condition of, 114—117; death of,
238; bullfight in, 157, 161, 162—163; 246—247; extinction of slavery, 117;
capture of, 128; Cervantes in, 11; freedom for, 108, 116—117, 246;
charity in, 140-141, 161; clergy of homosexuality among, 208; as la¬
90; clock in, 28; commerce in, 129, borer, 105—106, 113; marriage of,
142; dance in, 164; death in, 244— 187; number of, 106—109; and osten¬
245; festival in, 30, 31, 32-33, 147, tation, 111—112, 171; owner of,
148-149, 150, 152, 155; gambling 110—113; price of, 113—114; and reli¬
in, 166; growth of 2; honor in, 216, gion, 72—73; and testamentary pro¬
221; Inquisition in, 83; Jews in, 224; visions, 78, 246
magic in, 205, 206; marriage in, Sleight of Hand (Goytisolo), 239
185, 187; parish geography of 49; Smugglers, 66
plague in, 240; poor in, 138; proces¬ Socialism, 3, 101
sion in, 41; promenade in, 52; pros¬ Sociedad, ha (Larra), 233
titution in, 194, 195; public build¬ Sociedad General de Credito (Guilhou), 3
ings in, 48; “purity of blood” in, 226; Sociedad General de Credito Mobiliario
religion in, 36-37, 79, 82, 83; Espahol (Pereire), 3
school of navigation in, 251; slavery Society of Jesus, 22, 74, 79, 99, 100,
in, 106—116passim; violence in, 179, 164, 226
247 Sodomy, 28, 29-30, 85, 207-211
Seville, bishop of, 89, 140-141 passim, 291^32, 292«59
Seville, cathedral of, 48, l4l Soldier’s game, 168
Sex: attitude toward, 178—182, 187, Soledad, La, procession of, 38
202-203, 206-207, 211-212; Solicitantes, 85, 199
among clergy, 85, 98, 99; homosexu¬ Sorcery. See Magic
ality, 207-211 passim, 292«59, Soria, 57, 59
292«6l; and honor, 231, 232, Sort, 184
233-234; in marriage, 187; perver¬ Soto, Domingo de, 80, 139
sions, 206, 211-212;and “purity of Soto de Roma, 58
blood, 228; rape, 206; and slaves, Spain: An Historical Enigma (Albor-
113; symbolized, 33; violence and, noz), 126
292«56. See also Adultery; Con¬ Spain in Its History: Christians, Moors,
cubine; Fornication; Sodomy and Jews (Americo Castro), 125
Sheepraising, 57-58, 142-143 Spinola, Ambrosio, 141
Sierra Morena, 65 Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), 252
Sierra Nevada, 65 Spiritual Ladder (St. John Climaus), 76
Siete Iglesias, 12 Stability, of life, 5, 67—68
Sigiienza, colegio of, 225 State. See Court
Siliceo, Juan Martinez, 225-226 Stone, Lawrence, 251
Silva, Jose Gentil da, 60 Student. See Education
Simancas, 190 Sueca, duke of 10
Simancas, battle of, 81 Suicide, 210, 248
Simo, Joseph, 208, 210 Sunday, observation of 43—44
Sin, 70—71. See also Prohibition; Reli¬ Superstition, 80-81, 85-89
gion Swinburne, Henry: on bullfight, 161; on
 Index 323

dance, 157, 164; on gambling, 167; 232; hunting near, 58; Inquisition
on honor, 214; on labor, 119—120; on in, 87—88, 94; labor in, 170; leader¬
landscape, 53; on ostentation, 174; ship of, 130; magic in, 204, 205;
on poor, 138; on servants, 103—104; manufacturing in, 142; marriage in,
on sex, 180, 199, 200; on tertulia, 185; mores of, 93; parish geography
169; travels of, 64—65, 66 of, 49; poor in, 139; prostitution in,
Syphilis, 202 193, 194—195; public buildings in,
47; “purity of blood” in, 225—226,
Tafalla de Navarra, 36 230; religion in, 30, 76, 79; revolt
Tagus River, 63 of, 20; seigneurial ideal in, 17; sex in,
Talavera, 171, 174, 175, 196 73, 95, 180-181, 196-197; slaves in,
Talavera de la Reina, 181, 203 108; tribunal of, 94
Talens, Pedro, 198, 206 Toledo, archbishop of, 122, 140—141,
Taquiyya, 93 202, 225
Tarazona, 153 Toledo, cathedral of, 83, 225—226
Tax: poor, 139; sales, 143 Toledo, Luis de, 134
Tembleque, 87 Toldeo, Pedro de, 134
Teminea, Andres, 94—95 Topete, Juan, 222
Tena, valley of 184 Tordesillas, 150
Terceira Islands, 11 Torero. See Bullfight
Tertulia, 45, 160—161, 167, 168—169, Tormes, Lazarillo de, 236
182 Toro, laws of, 207
Teruel, 29, 96-97, 164, 201, 206 Torre, Fernando de la, ix, 118
Testament, last: charity in, 77, 78, 246; Torre Esteban, pass of, 57
and clergy, 98; and debt, 71, 78; dis¬ Towns: evidence of, 47—51 passim; mi¬
inheriting, 188; and honor, 217, 220; gration to, 55. See also individual
manumission by, 117; and mass, towns by name
71—72; and "purity of blood”, 229; Townsend, Joseph: on adultery, 95—96;
wife in, 188 on agriculture, 53, 61, 62; on bull
Theatre, 34, 86, 152, 154, 155, 156- fight, 161, 162; on charity, 89, 141,
157, 182, 214 284»30; on dance, 164; on hunting,
Theft, as Spanish trait, ix, x 59; on labor, 119—120, 122; on land¬
Theology. See Religion scape, 54; on manufacturing, 50; on
Thirty Years’ War, 57 poor, 138; on religion, 35, 36,
Tierra de Campos, 60, 62 38—39, 44, 85, 88; on servants, 104;
Time, Spanish concept of, 5, 27—30 on sex, 95-96, 180, 182, 199-200;
Time-distance relationship, 5 travels of, 4, 66
Tineo, 55, 61 Toxicosis, 42
Tinoco, Agustin, 221 Transportation and roads, 64—65
Tirvia, 184 Tres de Maya (Goya), 238
Tithe, ecclesiastical, 2, 9, 79 Triana, ward of, 179
Titian, 21 Trial. See Inquisition
Titulo, 24, 25 Trial, mock, 33—34, 35—36
Toledo: agriculture in, 61, 62, 63; Tridentine injunction, 140
bigamy in, 95; blasphemy in, 95; Trigueros, Maria de, 188
capture of, 127; charity in, 78, 140— Trinitarian order, 210
141; gambling in, 166; honor in, Trujillo, 51, 76, 143, 144-145, 232
324 Index

Truxeque, 196 Valladolid: abortion in, 202; agriculture

Tudela de Duero, 160 in, 60, 63; art in, 238; auto-da-fe in,
Tudela de Navarra, 150 242-244; bullfight in, 158-160;
Tunis, 20, 154 Cervantes in, 11; charity in, 77, 78;
Turin, 20 clergy in, 29, 71, 79, 83; corregidor
Turks, 107, 114, 117, 208, 227 of, 78; Court at, 153—154, 171; dance
Tuy, 226 in, 163, 165; described, 27; festival
Twelfth Night, 201 at, 152, 153-154, 156; fair in, 44;
Two Cadavers (Valdes Leal), 240 forests near, 54; gambling in, 166;
Two Mothers (Unamuno), 239 game in, 58, 59; homosexuality in,
208; honor in, 217, 219; illegitimacy
Ubeda, 18, 19, 21, 224, 234, 247 in, 189-190; labor in, 118, 120, 169;
Ulloa, Juan de, 243 marriage in, 185, 188; mayorazgo in,
Unamuno, Miguel de, 217, 237, 56; ostentation in, 13, 170—171,
238-239, 241 174—175, 176; palace in, 21; parish
Urban construction, 47—51 geography of, 49; plague in, 42; poor
Urban geography, 51—52 in, 137, 138, 139; promenade in, 52;
Urban life, stability of, 48—50, 51 prostitution in, 71, 193—194, 195;
Urueha, Hernando de, 71 public buildings in, 47; “purity of
blood” in, 225; rape in, 206; religion
Vaca, Antonio, 176 in, 36, 37, 71, 79, 82; seigneurial
Valdepenas, 67 ideal in, 17—18; sex in, 197, 200,
Valdes, Juan Melendez, 72, 188 203; slavery in, 106, 108, 110, 111,
Valdespino, 197 112, 116; storks near, 59; theatre in,
Valdiva, Pedro de, 144 34, 156—157; travel through, 65
Valduana, Juliana de la, 175 Valladolid, cathedral of, 48^19
Valencia: agriculture in, 54, 61, 64; art Valladolid, university of, 11, 25, 75,
in, 237—238; bestiality in, 211—212; 251
charity in, 141; dance in, 164; disease Valladolid, Juan de, 203
in, 42, 43; festival in, 147, 150; Valle, Maria Diaz del, 205
gambling in, 166; homosexuality in, Vallferrera, 184
207—209, 210—211; immigrants in, Vandelvira, Andres de, 21
104—105; junta of, 222; landscape of, Vanegas, Alejo de, 33, 76, 249-250,
54; marriage in, 185; and moriscos, 253
54, 83; parish geography of, 49; Vargas, 181
prostitution in, 191-192; public Vargas, Ines de, 12
buildings in, 48; “purity of blood” in, Vega, Francisca de, 202
226, 227; religion in, 28, 30, 74, Vega, Lopede, 10-11, 17, 85, 126, 178,
75, 80, 85, 92, 94—95, 100; security 179, 214, 218
around, 66; servants in, 103—104; sex Vega, Tome Pinheiro da, 37, 165, 171,
in, 28, 30, 197, 198-199, 211-212; 176, 193, 197-198
slavery in, 108; tertulia in, 168; vio¬ Veinticuatro, 53, 71, 111, 112, 173, 174,
lence in, 247—248; wealth of, 176, 282«2
175-176 Velasco, Constable, 128
Valencia, Diego Nuno de, 176 Velasquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y,
Valencia, Pedro de, 140 103
Validos, 133-134, 154 Velez-Malaga, 65, 66
 Index 325

Venereal disease, 202, 212 ture, 60; attitude toward, 6—15

Venice, 123, 136 passim, 123—132 passim, 146—147,
Ventax, Elizabeth, 219 169—170; and charity, 49, 135—
Verdesoto, Alonso de, 219 136; of Church, 51, 52, 56, 78, 79,
Vergara, prince of, 9 83, 98, 140—141; and Court, 133—
Verona, 244 135; and death, 241; and festival,
Vicente, Agueda, 198, 203, 205, 147—150, 152, 157; and fornica¬
221, 247 tion, 198—199; and gambling,
Victoria, duke de la, 9 166—167; and honor, 122, 218—
Victoria por la honra, La (Calderon de 220; Jewish, 124-125; and labor,
la Barca), 214 20—21, 117—120; and marriage,
Vidales, Isabel Martin, 189 182—184, 185, 187; and ostenta¬
Vilar, Pierre, 146 tion, 103—104, 170—177; of prosti¬
Villabanez, 184—185, 190 tutes, 194—195; and sin, 93; and
Villacastin, 65 slaves, 112, 113; vice concerning,
Villaharta, pass of, 57 249, 250; ways of acquiring,
Villalon, Fernando, 7 20-21, 113, 123-125, 133-135,
Villanubla, 42, 182, 185, 190 144-145, 187
Villanueva de Odra, 36 Wedding of Blood (Garcia Lorca), 239
Villanueva de la Serena, 144 White, Joseph Blanco: “almanac” of,
Villavicencio, Juan de, 187 30; on anticlericalism, 99; on bull¬
Villavicencio, Lorenzo de, 139 fight, 161, 162; on Court, 133,
Violence: and death, 246, 247—248; 201; on dance, 165; on festival,
during Carnival, 32—33; in 155; on forests, 54; on honor, 231,
homosexuality, 208, 209—210; and 232; on hunting, 58-59; on reli¬
honor, 216, 232, 233-235, 247; gion, 36—37, 77, 86, 90; on sex,
and labor, 120; and religion, 179, 180, 201; on tertulia, 168—
43-44, 90, 100-101; sexual, 178, 169; travels of, 66
179, 180, 203, 292^56; as Spanish Will. See Testament, last
trait, ix. See also Death Work. See Labor
Virgin of Begoha, 100 Writ of pardon, 44, 203, 217, 233,
Virgin of Guadalupe sanctuary, 76 247
Virgin of Montserrat, 88
Vita Christi (Ludolf of Saxe), 76 Xallas, 43, 63, 186, 191
Vital, Laurent, 78, 170 Xavier, Francis, 16, 80, 85
Vitoria, 150 Xerena, count of, 120
Vivero, Francisco de, 242
Vives, Luis, 187 Yellow fever, 42, 152
Vocabulary: of agriculture, 126; of Ypres, 136, 139
honor, 217; of military, 126
Voltaire, 252 Zafra, Hernando de, 18
“Vow of the five plagues,” 151 Zamora: manufacturing in, 120, 129;
poor in, 139; and “purity of blood,”
Waldensian groups, 82 226
War. See Military Zamora, bishop of, 22
War of Independence, 66, 90, 232 Zamora, cathedral of, 84
Wealth: achieved through adventure, Zapata, Bias, 110
8—15 passim, 144—145; and agricul¬ Zurbaran, Francisco de, 238, 241
 Designer: William Snyder
Compositor: Lehman Graphics
Printer: Publishers Press
Binder: Mountain States Bindery
Text: VIP Garamond # 3
Display: VIP Goudy Bold, Photo Typositor Devinne Ornamented
Paper: Westland Natural Vellum
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DP 48 .64913 89046
Bfinnassar? Bartolome.
The Spanish character

Central Bible College Library

Springfield, Missouri