of a key productive element in the peninsular economy.46 For the fertile region of Valencia, where moriscos had been a large minority, the expulsion was destabilizing in the short term.47
The case of the moriscos is notable (among other reasons) because the victims were of one ethnicity. Yet the Spanish crisis of the seventeenth century took a heavy toll on ordinary Spaniards across all ethnic lines. I have already alluded to the highly lethal and virtually incessant epidemics and wars of the 1600s; to the rapid growth of Madrid; to the fiscal exploitation of the peasantry and townsfolk by royal overlords; and finally, to the economic challenges that faced Castile, where a number of towns became bankrupt. It therefore goes without saying that the human cost of the Spanish crisis was enormous, not only in terms of lives lost, but in material and in psychological terms. A widespread perception of systemic crisis undoubtedly conditioned Spaniards’ attitudes toward their own society, including, of course, conversos and other disadvantaged groups.
Under what precise circumstances did residents of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre experience the country’s tribulations? How did ordinary men and women live in the century of the Spanish crisis? The present overview cannot answer these questions comprehensively. However, I will attempt to provide a limited answer by sketching a socioeconomic profile of two domains, already mentioned, in which converso merchants were especially active: (1) the Spanish metropolis, Madrid, which became the largest single commercial market in the Iberian Peninsula over the course of the late 1500s and the 1600s; (2) the vast network of Iberian trade routes that served the capital and other Spanish and Portuguese cities.
Madrid in the 1600s
Material scarcity and sheer physical discomfort pervaded daily life in the otherwise vibrant Madrid of the seventeenth century. The main reason for this was that the city lay on a dry and semibarren plain and did not have the advantage of a nearby, navigable river by which to receive supplies and dispose of waste matter. Another reason was that the roads that connected the capital to the rest of the country were of poor quality. They slowed the pace of commerce and occasionally aggravated shortages of food and vital commodities.48 Worse still, the cost of urban living was high for all of Madrid’s residents because of the enormous expense of transporting goods into the city on inadequate roads.
Compounding these problems was a demographic explosion that had begun in 1561, when Philip II made Madrid his permanent capital. From that year onward, the city grew at a dizzying pace. In the first half of the sixteenth century, Madrid had been a town of no more than 30,000 people. By 1650, the city had over 150,000 inhabitants.49 This expansion far surpassed the crown’s ability and willingness to create a viable urban infrastructure, much less control the effects of overcrowding.
Despite its considerable growth, the metropolitan economy evolved primarily in response to the needs and wants of the court, not those of the city’s ballooning population. As Richard Mackenney has caustically observed, the urban colossus existed only to serve a class of political residents: “A few people made coaches, [and] many more watched them roll by … [which highlighted] a curious [parallel] between the unproductive world of the elite and its parody, the unproductive world of the pícaros.”50
In global terms, early modern Madrid exported far less than it imported, and consumed much more than it produced.51 An artless apologist inadvertently highlighted this fact in 1658 when he wrote, “… [O]nly foreigners work on the goods used by the capital, and this very fact proves that all other nations labor for Madrid, the overlord of all other capitals since all of them work for her and she serves none.”52 In other words, the Habsburg capital, like the rest of the country’s major cities, was economically and politically formidable, yet grossly dependent on its external suppliers. The latter certainly included converso merchants. Consonant with the inward orientation of the greater urban economy, Madrid’s strongest industries did not cultivate foreign demand for their products and services. For example, the crafts of embroidery, gilding, and tailoring thrived only because they transformed imported materials into luxury goods for local courtiers, government officials, and aristocrats.53
Madrid’s evolution was semichaotic and largely unplanned, hence the city was a grim and uncomfortable place. A majority of its residents were of modest means and lived in squalor, while a significant minority of wealthy denizens lived in private pockets of great luxury. High officers of the church and the royal bureaucracy, influential courtiers, members of the upper nobility, foreign dignitaries, and a handful of affluent merchants comprised the urban elite. Members of this moneyed class were the only ones (besides the royal family) who could afford to own mansions with stone facades, expensive carriages, and protective cocoons consisting of guards and servants.
In terms of its physical appearance, seventeenth-century Madrid offered an array of contrasts between superpatriotic fantasies of Spanish power, wealth, and dignity on one hand, and the reality of economic distress and social disorder on the other. There was considerable irony, for instance, in the fact that the physiognomy of the so-called Capital of Two Worlds (the “Old” and the “New”) was the product of a relative negligence.54 As Madrid’s population expanded during the 1600s, the city’s avenues, alleys, and footpaths developed haphazardly, forming dark and confusing passages.55 With the exception of a few main concourses, all streets were unpaved and therefore extremely dusty or muddy depending on the season.56
Plain structures of gray brick and earth dominated the city’s drab landscape owing to the fact that limestone and other choice building materials were scarce. High municipal taxes all but prohibited the construction of second stories.57 Most city homes were therefore indecorously low. In addition, a majority of residential dwellings had small, paper-covered holes instead of paned windows because the price of glass was beyond the means of ordinary builders, not to mention the residents themselves.58 These tiny holes limited the penetration of dust, rain, and extreme temperatures into domestic spaces. Yet the holes also made for dim interiors and could seldom prevent the entry of an endemic stench—the smell of stagnant refuse. As many travelers to the Spanish capital observed, the total absence of a municipal system of waste disposal meant that most madrileños dumped their excrement and other trash in the open. Favorite dumping sites included portals, main thoroughfares, and street corners.59 In addition to fomenting disease, ubiquitous garbage gave the capital an unenviable reputation among foreigners as the filthiest city in Europe.60
If Madrid’s endemic filth indicated that the city had swelled to unmanageable proportions, periodic disasters provided conclusive proof that the city’s sheer size invited total chaos. Epidemic diseases gestated in the unsanitary conditions of the slums, causing many casualties. The fire of 1631 destroyed much of the city’s central promenade and marketplace, the Plaza Mayor. It also killed a dozen people and sparked three days of flagrant looting of the surviving property.61
The plunder could not have come as a surprise, for despite the city’s intense economic activity and sheer economic weight, poverty plagued virtually all areas of the capital. Indigence had become so deeply entrenched over the course of the seventeenth century that there existed an entire underclass of desperate madrileños, including beggars, street thieves, prostitutes, and all manner of transients—pilgrims, demobilized soldiers, and the like. A disdainful observer complained, “The streets of Madrid … are [always] crowded with vagabonds and loafers who while away the time playing cards, waiting for the soup kitchens of the monasteries to open or to get ready to ransack a house.”62 With similar contempt, a journalist grumbled in 1637 that no one in the capital was safe after sundown because of the large numbers of criminals who prowled the streets.63 A class of metropolitan pícaros, then, was not a mere figment of the literary imagination of social satirists; it was an all too real reminder of the harsh reality of the time.
The educated pamphleteers known as arbitristas were among the most eloquent observers of Madrid’s condition.64 Several of these polemicists perceived
