1

accosted the shepherds at every crossroad and wayside castle demanding servicio y montazgo.'

All the old paraphernalia of long forgotten mediaeval feudal dues was brought out and used by 'the crown and its defenders' as a disguise for further exactions from the sheep owners. Chief among these devices were the juros de heredad, or annuities, with which the crown had in past centuries rewarded the services of loyal followers in the Moorish wars. A common form of such juros in the fourteenth century had been a privilege to levy a tax upon the sheep passing a certain point. The favorites of the impotent Henry were not long in resorting to this device as a means of rewarding their clamoring adherents. The henchmen of grandees and even of royal counsellors soon appeared along the cañadas, and confronted the Mesta members with juros which entitled the bearers to parts of the royal servicio y mentazgo.3

1 The best account of the juros is found in Brit. Mus., Harleian Mss. 3315, p. 56: a description of financial affairs of Spain, compiled by an officer of Philip II's exchequer in 1577. The juro de heredad is there described as "la renta que el Rey da cada año a una persona. Ay tres maneras de juros, como son juro al quitar juro por vida y juro perpetuo." The titles are of course derived from the different durations of the income. According to A Short Account of the Spanish Juros, a fifteen-page anonymous pamphlet printed in London in 1713, the name juro is due to the oath taken by the king to respect the titles of the recipients of such annuities.

* An example of this is found in the juro de heredad awarded to the town of Cáceres in 1303 by Ferdinánd IV," por servicios muchos y buenos que el concejo de Cáceres fizieron a los Reyes onde yo vengo y a mi." Ronda, a mediaeval tax to which sheep owners contributed heavily for the maintenance of the night watch around the town (see below, p. 428), was also extensively revived and falsely described as a royal impost. Ulloa, Privs. de Cáceres, p. 131.

› Arch. Osuna, Infantazgo Mss., caj. 1, leg. 11, no. 6 (1467); Arch. Mesta, Prov. i, 68 (1468). These annuities were promptly taken over and carefully regulated by the Catholic Kings as part of their extensive fiscal reforms, and soon developed into helpful revenues. During the sixteenth century the juros de heredad became, like their English counterpart, the benevolences, valuable sources of income to the autocracy.

An illustration of a juro granted in the shape of a share of the servicio y montazgo by Isabella in 1481 is found in Brit. Mus., 1321 k 1, no. I. The recipient, Gutierrez de Cárdenas, "treue de mi por merced de juro de heredad para si et para sus herederos et subcessores et para quien del 6 dellos ouiesse causa la renta del servicio y montazgo travesío de locos con ganados que inuernasen en todas dehesas del arcobispado de Toledo." On the history of the juro de heredad in the sixteenth century see Ansiaux, op. cit., pp. 534, 542; Piernas y Hurtado, op. cit., ii, p. 67; Altamira, iii, p. 261.

In vain the Mesta's attorneys at court and its lobbyists at the Cortes presented repeated protests against these incessant and all-pervading 'royal' taxes; but there was no one to hear who had the power or will to act. These were days of ignominious impotence for the monarchy, culminating in the final insult of the dethronement of Henry in effigy on the plains outside the walls of Ávila. At the Cortes of Santa Maria de Nieva in the fall of 1473, only a few months before his death, Henry tried to make belated amends for the profligacy of his reign. Full assent was given to the pleas of the deputies that all annuities, tax privileges," and exemptions granted since 1464 be cancelled; but as long as the monarchy continued as it had been, such enactments could only be futile formalities. It was not until the dawn of a new era with the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1474 that the long hoped for reform came.

1 Cortes, Cordova, 1455, pet. 27; Salamanca, 1465, pets. 16 ff.; Ocaña, 1469, pets. 14, 15, 19, 23; Santa Maria de Nieva, 1473, pet. 18; Quad. 1731, pt. 1, pp. 131 ff.

Altamira (ed. of 1909), i, pp. 605-615.

CHAPTER XIV

ROYAL SHEEP TAXES OF THE AUTOCRACY

Reforms of Ferdinand and Isabella. The crown and the fiscal rights of the Military Orders. Hapsburg exploitation of the pastoral industry. The Fuggers and the Mesta. Bankruptcy of the monarchy in the seventeenth century. Reforms of Charles III.

THE bankruptcy of the royal exchequer was one of the most perplexing of the many distressing legacies left by Henry IV for his youthful successors, Ferdinand and Isabella. As their policies grew more and more ambitious, as the war against Granada reached its climax and was followed immediately by the tremendous enterprises in the New World, the needs of the treasury became a cause of constant preoccupation. Revenues that had been dissipated had to be regained; economical administration had to be devised; all possible resources had to be tapped, and by no means the least of the potential incomes were the taxes derived from the migratory pastoral industry.

The sessions of the first Cortes summoned by the young sovereigns, namely those which met at Valladolid and Madrigal in 1475 and 1476, were therefore confronted with exacting tasks. Before any constructive legislation could be undertaken there had to be a thorough clearing away of the accumulation of exemptions, juros, and the many other devices by which the income of the crown had been squandered. The servicio y montazgo was among the first of the once royal incomes to be taken up in this reform campaign. It was decreed that not more than one such servicio was to be collected from any sheep owner in a given year; and that one was to be collected only by the crown or its authorized agents and lessees.1 Armed with this mandate, and with the assurance of its enforcement by all the powers of the newly united monarchy, the Mesta's attorneys and the royal

1 Arch. Mesta, Prov. i, 5, 7 (1476 ff.): records of suits brought under this decree.

bailiffs proceeded to wipe out the dozens of privately owned puertos reales, or 'royal' toll gates, along the cañadas.

Other events soon stimulated this work. In October, 1474, Pacheco, the grasping Master of Santiago, and therefore owner of the sheep servicio, died and was succeeded in the grand mastership by Rodrigo Manrique, whose death in November, 1476, put an early end to his tenure. This brought to the newly crowned sovereigns a rare opportunity, which the sagacious queen immediately recognized. Promptly upon receipt of the news at Valladolid, she mounted her horse and hurried through three stormy days and nights to Uclés, nearly forty leagues away, where the Order was to chose its new grand master.1 Appearing in person before that astonished body, she spoke briefly of the prestige of the organization, with frequent pointed allusions to its many incomes, several of which, including the Castilian servicio y montazgo, had once pertained to the crown. The mastership and its fiscal prerogatives, she said, were highly important to, and in fact were doubtless the legal property of the monarchy. Therefore, with calm audacity, she suggested the advisability of electing to the mastership either her lord, the king, or his staunch friend and councillor, Alfonso de Cárdenas, a knight of the Order and candidate for the honor. The chapter demurred, at first, at this "most uncommon procedure . . . but they were much afraid and all finally agreed to obey her commands." She was indeed of a very different sort from her impotent brother, the late unlamented Henry.

During the following year the king served as administrator of the affairs of the Order.2 Ferdinand was far too shrewd to overlook such an opportunity, and the Order soon saw many of its lucrative incomes, including the Castilian sheep tax, unostentatiously turned back to the royal exchequer whence they had originally been taken. The Catholic Kings thus regained possession of the whole of the servicio y montazgo. In November,

1 Pérez del Pulgar, Crónica de los Reyes Católicos, pp. 117-118. Bullarium Equestris Ordinis S. Jacobi (Madrid, 1719), p. 401.

'It will be recalled (see above, p. 263) that a small fraction of the servicio had been retained by the crown, namely that collected from sheep migrating to Murcia. In 1477 this share was entered on the royal accounts with certain diezmos, or im

1477, Cárdenas was installed as master, a post which he held until his death in July, 1493. The honor was then formally conferred upon King Ferdinand, who had indeed been substantially in control of the affairs of the Order ever since his determined queen had made her historic 'suggestion' before the assembled knights at Uclés in the winter of 1476. Thenceforth the servicio y montazgo was once more in fact a derecho real, a royal tax.

With characteristic efficiency, the new sovereigns promptly ordered a report upon the size of the Mesta flocks, in order to estimate the returns from this new income. It was found that in 1477 the officers at the thirteen royal toll gates counted 2,694,032 migratory sheep,' on which the servicio y montazgo payments amounted to nearly 13,500 sheep or their money equivalent. Instructions were immediately issued to cut down the number of puertos, or toll houses, in order to save administrative costs, and to punish the fraudulent collectors of servicio y montazgo 'whose deceptions caused great rises in the price of wool and meat and brought no return to the royal treasury.' With the preliminary preparations well under way, the sovereigns were able to go before the Cortes of Toledo in 1480 with a programme for more drastic reform.

This historic assemblage, whose record in local fiscal affairs has already been reviewed, was summoned primarily to set the finances of the Castilian monarchy upon a sound basis. Grants of funds in the form of juros which had been alienated from the royal treasury were ordered restored to the crown, which thus port and export taxes, and the total amounted to 105,000 maravedis. Skilful management and strict administration had raised the item by 1482 to over five times that amount. Clemencin, Elógio de la Reina Doña Isabel (in Memorias de la R. A. H. vi, Madrid, 1821), pp. 157, 160.

1 Arch. Simancas, Libros del Servicio y Montazgo, no. 879; also in Acad. Hist., Mss. Varios Documentos, E-128, fol. 143. This was partly reprinted in Censo de Población en el Siglo XVI (Madrid, 1829), p. 108. Seven of the thirteen puertos reported more than 250,000 sheep apiece: Venta del Cojo, 329,272; Villaharta, 315,013; Torre de Esteban Ambran, 311,846; Socuéllamos, 298,891; Montalbán, 290,521; Derrama Castañas, 269,412; and Abadía, 255,061. See Map, P. 19.

* Arch. Mesta, Prov. i, 5, 1478; Arch. Ayunt. Cuenca, leg. 5, no. 29.

* Arch. Mesta, C-10, Cuenca, 1478.

• See above, p. 311.