gentry.2 Cereal agriculture was steadily yielding to sheep-farming on these great estates. The wool boom which provided the basis for the fortunes of so many aristocratic houses had, at the same time, stimulated urban growth and foreign trade. Castilian towns and Cantabrian shipping benefited from the prosperity of the pastoral economy of late mediaeval Spain, which was linked by a complex commercial system to the textile industry of Flanders. The economic and demographic profile of Castile within the Union was thus from the outset an advantageous one: with a population calculated at between 5 and 7 million, and a buoyant overseas trade with Northern Europe, it was easily the dominant state in the peninsula. Politically, its constitution was curiously unsettled. Castile-Leon had been one of the first mediaeval kingdoms in Europe to develop an Estates system in the 13th century; while by the mid 15th century, the factual ascendancy of the nobility over the monarchy had for a time become far-reaching. But the grasping power of the late mediaeval aristocracy had not set in any juridical mould. The Cortes, in fact, remained an occasional and indefinite assembly: perhaps because of the migrant character of the Castilian kingdom as it shifted southwards and shuffled its social pattern in doing so, there had never developed a firm and fixed institutionalization of the Estates system. Thus both the convocation and composition of the Cortés was subject to the arbitrary decision of the monarchy, with the result that sessions were spasmodic, and no regular three-curia system emerged from them. On the one hand, the Cortes had no initiatory legislative powers; on the other, the nobility and clergy enjoyed fiscal immunity. The result was an Estates system in which only the towns had to pay the taxes voted by the Cortes, which otherwise fell virtually exclusively on the masses beneath it. The aristocracy thus had no direct economic stake in its representation within the Castilian Estates, which formed a comparatively weak and isolated institution. Aristocratic corporatism found separate expression in the rich and formidable military orders – Calatrava, Alcantara and Santiago – which had been created by the Crusades: but these by nature lacked the collective authority of a noble Estate proper.
The economic and political character of the Realm of Aragon3 was in sharp contrast to this. The high interior of Aragon itself harboured the most repressive seigneurial system in the Iberian peninsula; the local aristocracy was vested with a full range of feudal powers in the barren countryside, where serfdom still survived and a captive morisco peasantry toiled for its Christian landlords. Catalonia, on the other hand, had traditionally been the centre of a mercantile empire in the Mediterranean: Barcelona was the largest city in mediaeval Spain, and its urban patriciate the richest commercial class of the region. Catalan prosperity, however, had suffered grievously during the long feudal depression. The epidemics of the 14th century had struck the principality with especial violence, returning again and again after the Black Death itself to ravage the population, which fell by over a third between 1365 and 1497.4 Commercial bankruptcies had been compounded by aggressive Genoese competition in the Mediterranean, while smaller merchants and artisan guilds revolted against the patriciates in the towns. In the countryside the peasantry had risen to throw off the ‘evil customs’ and seize deserted lands in the remença rebellions of the 15th century. Finally, a civil war between the monarchy and nobility, pulling other social groups into its maelstrom, had further weakened the Catalan economy. Its overseas bases in Italy, however, remained intact. Valencia, the third province of the realm, was socially intermediate between Aragon and Catalonia. The nobility exploited morisco labour; a merchant community expanded during the 15th century, as financial dominance passed down the coast from Barcelona. The growth of Valencia, however, did not adequately compensate for the decline of Catalonia. The economic disparity between the two Realms of the Union created by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella can be seen from the fact that the population of the three provinces of Aragon together perhaps totalled only some 1 million inhabitants – compared with Castile’s 5–7 million. The political contrast between the two Kingdoms, on the other hand, was no less striking. For in the Realm of Aragon, there was to be found perhaps the most sophisticated and entrenched Estates structure anywhere in Europe. All three provinces of Catalonia, Valencia and Aragon had their own separate Cortes. Each had, in addition, special watchdog institutions of permanent judicial control and economic administration derived from the Cortes. The Catalan Diputadó – a standing committee of the Cortes – was the most effective exemplar of these. Each Cortes, moreover, had statutorily to be summoned at regular intervals, and was technically subject to a rule of unanimity – a device unique in Western Europe. The Aragonese Cortes itself had the further refinement of a four-curia system of magnates, gentry, clergy and burghers.5 In toto, this complex of mediaeval ‘liberties’ presented a singularly intractable prospect for the construction of a centralized Absolutism. The asymmetry of institutional orders in Castile and Aragon was, in fact, to shape the whole career of the Spanish monarchy henceforward.
For Ferdinand and Isabella, understandably, took the obvious course of concentrating on the establishment of an unshakeable royal power in Castile, where the conditions for it were most immediately propitious. Aragon presented far more formidable political obstacles to the construction of a centralized State, and much less profitable prospects for economic fiscalization. Castile had five or six times the population, and its greater wealth was not protected by any comparable constitutional barriers. A methodical programme for its administrative reorganization was thus set in train by the two monarchs. The military orders were decapitated and their vast lands and incomes annexed. Baronial castles were demolished, marcher lords ousted, and private wars banned. The municipal autonomy of the towns was broken by the planting of official corregidores to administer them; royal justice was reinforced and extended. Control of ecclesiastical benefices was captured for the State, detaching the local Church apparatus from the reach of the Papacy. The Cortes was progressively domesticated by the effective omission of the nobility and clergy from its assemblies after 1480; since the main purpose of summoning it was to raise taxes for military expenditure (on the Granadan and Italian wars, above all), from which the First and Second Estate were exempted, the latter had little reason to resist this restriction. Fiscal yields rose impressively: Castilian revenues increased from some 900,000 reales in 1474 to 26,000,000 in 1504.6 The Royal Council was reformed and grandee influence excluded from it; the new body was staffed by lawyer-bureaucrats or letrados, recruited from the smaller gentry. Professional secretaries worked directly under the sovereigns, dispatching ongoing business. The Castilian State machine, in other words, was rationalized and modernized. But the new monarchy never counterposed it to the aristocratic class as a whole. Top military and diplomatic positions were always reserved for magnates, who kept their great viceroyalties and governorships, while lesser nobles filled the ranks of the corregidores. Royal domains usurped since 1454 were recovered by the monarchy, but those appropriated earlier – the majority – were left in the hands of the nobility; new estates in Granada were added to its possessions, and the immobilization of rural property by the device of the mayorazgo was confirmed. Moreover, wide privileges were deliberately granted to the pastoral interests of the Mesta wool cartel in the countryside, dominated by Southern latifundists; while discriminatory measures against cereal farming eventually fixed retail prices for grain crops. In the towns, a constricting guild system was foisted on nascent urban industry, and religious persecution of the conversos led to an exodus of Jewish capital. All these policies were pursued with great energy and resolution in Castile.
In Aragon, on the other hand, no political programme of comparable scope was ever attempted. There, on the contrary, the most that Ferdinand could achieve was a social pacification, and restoration of the late mediaeval constitution. The remença peasants were finally granted remission of their dues with the Sentence of Guadelupe in 1486, and rural unrest subsided. Access to the Catalan Diputació was broadened by the introduction of a sortition system. Otherwise, Ferdinand’s rule unambiguously confirmed the separate identity of the Eastern realm: Catalan liberties were expressly acknowledged in their entirety by the Observança of 1481, and new safeguards against royal infractions of them actually added to the existing arsenal of local weapons against any form of monarchical centralization. Rarely resident within his native country, Ferdinand installed viceroys in all three provinces to exercise a delegated authority for him, and created a Council of Aragon, mostly based in Castile, to liaise with them. Aragon, in effect, was thus virtually left to its own devices; even the great
