and as a benefit for everyone, not a luxury for the privileged. For centuries, many Spaniards rejected the concept that simple fornication between two consenting unmarried adults was a moral wrong, despite Christian and later Catholic attempts to enforce chastity more and more through campaigns celebrating the Immaculate Conception.43 The common man logically questioned why the king would license brothels if there were something wrong with enjoying “no strings attached” sex.44 Even some women whose husbands frequented brothels seemed open minded about this activity, although many others argued that visiting whores justified financial reparations for the wife. Apparently, one late-medieval wife described her husband with great love and affection, noting that other than the fact that “era putanero mucho de mujeres [loosely translated: he was a real whorehound],” he was as good and pious as Saint Francis, and she would lay beside him for eternity in adjoining coffins.45
What was it like for a man to visit a legal brothel in medieval or early-modern Iberia? Different descriptions survive from male visitors, especially for the highly successful Valencian mancebía, giving the twenty-first–century reader the impression of a pleasurable outing, and the promise of an illusion or fantasy world of illicit sexual excitement operating under fully legal conditions with very strict rules.46 Most municipal brothels, including Valencia’s, operated on the edge or just outside of the central city. In Valencia, the brothel was a small walled quarter containing two to three hundred women, working out of rooms organized along three or four streets. Men entered the brothel via one entrance only, interacting with a guard. The guard would ask men to surrender their weapons and even promise to safely watch over their cash. Once inside the brothel, men observed and admired beautifully dressed, elegant women sitting under bright lanterns in front of their rooms, or they could enter taverns and inns. Spending time with the female residents had a fixed, standard cost.47 In Seville, by contrast, municipal officials rented out simple huts by the Guadalquivir River, and these clustered dwellings functioned as the brothel. The town took care to repair and maintain the buildings.48 Brothels forbade the entrance of non-Christians, so Islamic or Jewish men who snuck in with assumed false identities risked severe judicial consequences.49
How did women experience life in the legal brothels? We know very few specific details from the female point of view, beyond the regulations. Women who worked in brothels were supposed to be officially registered by giving their names, ages, parents, and places of origin to municipal authorities. Every brothel worker had an alias that she also provided in the registration process.50 The women had to be nonlocals and nonnoblewomen over the age of twenty. They paid fees to the brothel managers but received linens, clothing, and housing in return. Some historians view brothel work as a desperate recourse for poor women victimized by the countless natural and manmade disasters of their male-dominated era. However, in 1553, King Phillip II noted in frustration that many brothel women illegally left their places of work in the evenings to live in their “palaces,” where they met with male clients. Even worse, in Phillip’s view, they acted like honorable women.51
Through legalizing and regulating brothels, Iberian monarchs and municipal governments hoped to impose centralized control over the endemic violence in their society, an era of internal conflicts, independent warlords, and busy ports full of transient men. Monarchs such as Ferdinand and Isabella, along with their predecessors earlier in the fifteenth century, spent decades trying to tamp down the power of powerful grandees who dominated both cities and the countryside. These nobles gathered delinquents, ruffians, and rogues around them as their own personal bodyguards or entourages and encouraged them to foment urban disorder. The aristocratic strongmen, objecting to the monarchs’ efforts to centralize power and authority, also willingly protected these “evil doers” from nascent crown justice.52 Ruffians roamed the streets, provoking brawls with little fear of judicial retribution because “those in charge of prosecuting them were often the ones who gave protection to law breakers.”53 Monarchs and some royal justices viewed these men as vagabonds and “men who lived by evil arts” and equated them with ruffians, often banishing them from residing inside any given town.54 Ruffians faced severe penalties for managing women, according to a decree issued by Enrique IV in 1469, in continuation of the antipandering tone of the Siete Partidas.55 The crown and municipal authorities hoped that regulated brothels would decrease street fighting and even the grandees’ ability to foment general societal violence. For the purposes of controlling street-level violence, criminal vagabonds, and overweening aristocrats, one might assume that the crown also would want legal brothels in their American viceroyalties, but in fact this invasive, regulatory approach did not come to fruition in the New World.
TRANSACTIONAL SEX OUTSIDE THE BROTHEL—
CLANDESTINAS AND ALCAHUETAS
The opportunities for nonbrothel paid sex unfolded in the Spanish viceroyalties following centuries’ old peninsular patterns for clandestinas who sold sex outside of the licensed brothels. Back in Iberia, ruffians found many female collaborators despite regulated, legal brothels and the serious punishments for selling sex outside these approved institutions. These sexual entrepreneurs took advantage of location and opportunity. In and around brothels, taverns and inns prospered. These places employed female servants, jobs taken on by both brothel workers and clandestinas. Men, including the innkeepers themselves, illegally procured one or several female servants who might host clients in rooms for entire nights. A lesser number had female managers or worked for their own husbands. Since non-Christian men who entered the legal brothels risked extreme punishments, Jewish and Islamic or Morisco men offered clandestinas a booming business. Criminal records prove that clandestinas flourished alongside the brothel. In late-medieval Valencia, on average around 115 clandestinas faced prosecution annually, representing almost one-third of all local criminal trials. Street ruffians still caused public violence, but they also helped towns make a great deal of money in punitive fines.56 In some cases, cruel slurs captured in documents suggest that clandestinas were too old, dirty, sick, ugly, or all of the above, for working in the public brothel. Women perceived as too scandalous or loud had to leave the public brothel, which suggests that clandestinas lacked some of the characteristics perceived as sexually attractive to men.57 In fact, some clandestinas offered their potential clients the opposite end of the spectrum: discretion, secrecy, exclusivity, wealth, social prominence, and sophistication, outside of the common “sewer” of the brothel.58
Some clandestinas in Spain and the viceroyalties relied on bawds to arrange their liaisons. The literary figure of the alcahueta has a much more complex and even sympathetic history than the universally disrespected male ruffian. Law codes including the Siete Partidas codified harsh punishments for bawds, but many classics of Castilian literature humanized this figure. The title of their occupation derives from the Hispanic Arabic term alqawwád.59 From before the Christian reconquest of Spain, Islamic literary treatises acknowledged the essential role of the bawd in setting up illicit liaisons. This genre of literature explored the phenomenon of nonmarital affairs that required a mediator. In these tales, sexual encounters were in a sense love triangles or even squares. The fact that women socialized separately from men did not stand in the way, but affairs required a subtle mediator, a witty verbal interlocutor to bridge gender communication gaps. Stories depicted how both the bawd and the female lover cooperated to entrap a man and dupe a husband, showing off their intelligence and sophistication. To have the skills to move in men’s and women’s worlds, the bawd had to possess the wisdom of age. Some of these portrayals even imply that she redirected her own desires into organizing other people’s trysts.60 In the fourteenth century, Ruiz immortalized this Islamic literary tradition for Christian readers with the enduring bawdy character of Trotaconventos, a sly old woman who added more complexity to the non-Christian portrayals from early eras. In other medieval Christian writings, the bawd figure assumes a very maternal role, sometimes actually procuring her own daughters’ lovers. This terminology and personality characterization perhaps connects to the fact that brothel manageresses in medieval and early-modern Spain carried the official occupational title of “mother.”61 Sixteenth-century poetry also represents the bawd as an essential guide
