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CHARITY AND WELFARE:
HOSPITALS AND THE POOR IN MEDIEVAL CATALONIA
JAMES WILLIAM BRODMAN
[125] Medieval Catalan institutions of charity underwent a significant evolution between the emergence of small cathedral shelters and almoinas in the eleventh century and the establishment of general hospitals in the fifteenth century. Foundations grew in number, size, and complexity. They became more specialized in function, broader in purpose, and more discriminating in terms of the clientele they intended to serve. A desire to serve "Christ's poor," or to gain pardon for sin, did not disappear after 1300, but religious motivation became bound up with a myriad of other intentions that sprang from more temporal concerns. Loosely organized structures that grew out of the often pious intentions of twelfth-century founders gradually coalesced into institutions that had defined hierarchies and were governed by written ordinances and statutes, subject to the scrutiny of episcopal visitation and municipal auditors. In short, what began as an effort to provide the needy with the barest of essentials had evolved into something with the semblance of a welfare policy.
Historians who have surveyed this development in Iberia, as well as elsewhere in Europe, agree on the broad outlines of the evolution of medieval charity. Michel Mollat, in his influential study of medieval poverty, established the basic model wherein there were, he argued, four ages. The first, from the fifth to the eleventh century, was characterized by monastic hospitality; a second, extending to the early thirteenth century, brought the involvement of bishops, canons, religious orders, and confraternities, who attended to the poor as a spiritual and ritualistic obligation; the third, stretching to the onset of the great plague, saw a profusion of new institutions, attempts at their reform, and a growth in the numbers of the poor and of efforts to understand them as individuals; and a fourth period that ends circa 1500 develops a more cynical and discriminatory attitude toward [126] the poor, as the institutions of charity become overwhelmed by the needy. (1) For Iberia, Carmen López Alonso argues that these four periods can be conflated into only two, with the year 1200 being the general divide. Prior to the thirteenth century, the works of charity were organized by bishops, secular lords, and, in the twelfth century, by Cluniac and Cistercian monasteries. Afterward, there is a proliferation of urban hospitals, supported however inadequately by the bourgeoisie, which practiced increasing discrimination in the character and type of assistance rendered to the poor. (2)
This latter model, however, is more appropriate to Castile than to Catalonia, a region whose urban character places it closer to developments in France and Italy than to the interior of Iberia. In Catalonia, the first stirring of organized charity dates from the eleventh century, with the establishment of cathedral shelters in Barcelona and Urgell, and probably also in Girona and Vic. The movement accelerates in the twelfth century, but principally in towns such as Lleida, Tarragona, and Tortosa, which were newly conquered and occupied by the count of Barcelona. Of the principal urban centers, only Barcelona sees additional foundations in the twelfth century. The largest number of new hospitals date from the mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth century. A portion of these reflects Catalan territorial expansion into Majorca and Valencia, where royal and lay largesse and the advent of several religious orders played the crucial role in the establishment of a caritative infrastructure. But there was also significant development within Catalonia itself, which was experiencing a rapid increase in its population and fundamental changes in the structure of its rural society.(3) Lleida's capitular-controlled hospitals, for example, were joined by several under the aegis of various religious orders. The mendicant orders, whose growth in Catalonia was explosive, however, held few hospitals, and then only in smaller towns such as Olesa de Bonesvalls and Montblanc. Elsewhere, cathedral chapters continued to occupy a prominent position, with their establishment of almoinas in Barcelona and Girona and their assumption of control over each of the three new hospitals established in Barcelona. Gradually, municipal councils, still in their infancy, began to assume some responsibility as well, as seen by the establishment of new hospitals under their direction in Urgell, Girona, Reus, Cervera, and Tortosa. During the fourteenth century, the majority of new foundations was established after the onset of hard times in the mid-1330s and these were undoubtedly a response to wars, famine, and disease characteristic of this era. Most of these new hospitals operated under some sort of municipal governance. Conciliar control, furthermore, was extended over almoinas on Majorca [127] and in Vic, and over hospitals in Barcelona, Manresa, Cervera, Tarragona, and Valencia. Town councils also became involved in the regulation of prostitution and in the care of orphaned and abandoned children. After 1300, moreover, there were few new ecclesiastical initiatives in Catalonia and only a handful in Valencia. It is particularly significant that cathedral chapters, perhaps precisely because they already bore a heavy burden of administration, sought no new responsibilities and in fact began to shed them. One hospital, En Marcús in Barcelona, was surrendered to municipal control in 1339, and in 1401 the diocese agreed to merge several capitular and municipal hospitals into the new general hospital of Santa Creu. During the decades that followed, similar consolidations occurred in Lleida, Urgell, Tarragona, Montblanc, Majorca, and Valencia.
While the physical and institutional dimensions of the medieval hospital movement have gradually come into focus, the human and moral aspects are still subject to debate. The fundamental questions are these. To what degree did medieval assistance to the poor, as it evolved, remain religious in motivation, and to what degree was it a response to social conditions? Or, in slightly different terms, is there a major paradigmatic shift from religious to secular relief, or from charity to welfare? Ultimately, we must ask ourselves whether there is a fundamental difference between medieval and modern notions of charity and public assistance, whether a decisive change of direction occurred at some point during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or whether there is a remarkable continuity in Western society's attitude toward the poor.
These are difficult questions because the forces that originated, sustained, and changed the institutions of charity are themselves so multifaceted. At issue are factors of population, urbanization, legal and institutional structures, the economic cycle, spiritual values, and mentalité that affected and influenced each other in ways perhaps too subtle and complex for us to understand fully. Attempts to verbalize change, and to see therein consistent patterns of development, are hampered by ambiguities of language. Just as medieval definitions of poverty and the poor differ from the income-based standards of contemporary statistics, thirteenth or fourteenth-century understandings of religious and secular differ in important ways from late-twentieth-century usage. With all of these complications in mind, we can now apply the experience of the medieval Crown of Aragon, and in particular of Catalonia, to the discussion concerning the motivation and purposes of medieval poor relief.
In Catalonia, as elsewhere, most initiatives of an eleemosynary nature [128] had an ecclesiastical character, and even those that were laic in their origin were soon placed under some sort of ecclesiastical tutelage. Why was this so? For the most part, in the twelfth century the new institutions of charity were urban, and they were frequently founded by the bishop, the chapter, or individual canons. Catalonia, itself, was undergoing an economic and social transformation that laid the foundations for the principality's future success as a commerical power in the western Mediterranean, and that awakened older urban centers such as Barcelona and Girona. In addition, as a consequence of the wars against the Muslim south, new urban centers were added: Balaguer (1105), Tarragona (1118-30), Tortosa (1148), and Lleida (1149).(4) The expansion of old towns and the creation of new ones reflected a demographic upsurge, one of whose consequences was the emergence of a class of urban poor. Why were these taken as the particular responsibility of the cathedral chapter? While the antecedents of such episcopal and capitular alms can be traced to the earliest beginnings of Christianity, in the twelfth century this obligation to help the poor was given special urgency by the reforming ideas unleashed by the Gregorian reform movement.
The new spirituality of the late eleventh century resonated throughout the Church and produced a torrent of new religious movements. While they all partook to some degree of the model of the vita apostolica, there was a fundamental difference in the response of monks and secular clerics, or canons. The latter became more conscious of their responsibility toward others, and exhibited a concern for neighbors.(5) Efforts to reform the secular, or diocesan, clergy date from the pontificate of Innocent II (1030-1043) and the Lateran synod of 1059, and they gained momentum during the pontificate of Urban II (1088-99) who encouraged clergy to adopt a common life under the Rule of Saint Augustine. While the attempt met with only indifferent success, apart from the establishment of independent communities of canons (e.g., the Premonstratensians, Saint Victor of Paris), the effort had a lasting impact on how members of the clergy viewed themselves and their role in society. Increasingly important to them were preaching, teaching, and service.(6)
The attempt in Spain to impose a common life on cathedral chapters, likewise, was generally short-lived; the Catalan church particularly showed itself hostile to the Gregorian reforms.(7) Nonetheless, as we have seen in Chapters 2 and 3, both cathedral chapters and individual canons were especially active in establishing and maintaining houses of charity. In Urgell, Girona, and Barcelona, during the twelfth and most of the thirteenth centuries, the cathedral bore the principal responsibility for poor relief, in [129] terms of providing both food and shelter. Only in towns of recent conquest, like Lleida in the twelfth century and Valencia in the thirteenth, was the obligation more diffuse. On the frontier, the absence of a preexisting diocesan structure meant that more hospitals were operated by religious orders or else remained in the hands of their founding families. But even in the older centers the weak, corporate nature of the chapter meant that often the actual initiative for endowing hospitals and meals came from individual canons, such as Joan Colom in Barcelona or Gerald Zacosola in Lleida. In the dioceses of Urgell and Barcelona, the capitular obligation toward the poor assumed a ritualistic form, as seen in the custom of donating the bedding of deceased clergy to shelters for the poor.
While chapters did not begin to relinquish control over hospitals for which they were responsible until the early fifteenth century, a different dynamic is discernible by the middle of the thirteenth century, after which no new hospitaller foundation can be traced to a bishop or his chapter. One suspects that chapters, now immersed in their own institutional development and less influenced by reform impulses, were content to leave new foundations to others. While some of this would continue to have a private character, for example, the hospital established in 1338 at Vic by Ramon de Terrades or that of 1311 at Valencia by Bernat dez Clapers, much of the initiative now passed to corporate bodies of laypeople -- confraternities and municipal councils.
In Catalonia, municipal institutions predominated over confraternities, or craft associations, because of the power and attitude of the count-kings, who were suspicious of all unauthorized lay associations and formally prohibited the formation of confraternities. The thirteenth century, on the other hand, was the era during which municipal institutions began to emerge in Catalonia. (8) At the beginning of the century, towns were still under the authority of a royal magistrate, the veguer, but during the latter half of Jaume I's reign more complex municipal institutions were developed. Valencia (1245), Tarragona (1255), Tàrrega (1242), Montpellier (1246), Palma de Mallorca (1249), Barcelona (1249), Lleida (1264), Cervera (1267), Perpignan (1273), and Girona (1284) acquired the right to elect jurats who came to share authority within their towns with royal officials. In a series of privileges, for example, the wealthy burghers of Barcelona were permitted to select a council, first of two hundred, but fixed in 1274 at one hundred, and to place executive power in the hands of five councilors. King Pere II at a meeting of the Corts in 1283 extended similar privileges to all municipalities, and accepted new limits upon the powers of [130] royal veguers and batlles. What followed upon these privileges was the development of municipal governments and bureaucracies that began to take responsibility for several aspects of municipal life, among which was the care of the poor. (9)
Beginning in the thirteenth century, Catalan municipalities began to establish town hospitals and assume responsibility for other caritative institutions that had been founded by individual citizens. But the pattern is inconsistent. For example, a few towns such as Urgell (1247), Reus (circa 1250), and Tarragona (1362) appear to have directly established municipal hospitals. Much more typical, however, was the assumption of control over a preexisting institution. In some cases, this was due to the decision of the founding family to relinquish its authority to a permanent institution. So, as we have seen, Pere Desvilar in 1308 conferred control of his foundation upon Barcelona's Consell de Cent, and in the nearby towns of Granollers and Manresa the council assumed responsibility for the hospitals of Bertran de Seva and Pere Salvatge. By 1300, Girona's jurats were also responsible for the New Hospital that had been initially founded by a local confraternity. Insolvency could be an issue, as it was in the transfer of the Hospital of En Marcús from the bishop to the city of Barcelona in 1339. In Valencia, where most thirteenth-century hospitals were operated by religious orders, the municipal jurats were given charge of the hospitals of En Clapers and the Beguins in the early fourteenth century, the Hospital de la Reyna in 1379, and in 1409 established an asylum for the mentally disturbed. Yet towns like Montblanc and Vic had no municipally governed hospitals, and the council of Lleida only began to assume responsibility after the general consolidation of 1453.
Municipal councils were not the only corporate bodies to become active dispensers of charity in the period after 1250. In addition, numerous laic groups organized into confraternities and parish relief agencies. Confraternities, while noticeably weaker in Catalonia than in Castile, nevertheless, established hospitals in Girona, Lleida, and Montblanc, and in Valencia provided dowries to the poor.(10) Like the confraternity of poor cripples and the blind in Barcelona, they provided a myriad of services to their members and families, which included burial and various forms of assistance.(11) Of a similar nature are the parochial bacís and arcas de misericordia that were established between the late thirteenth and fifteenth centuries to assist the poor of the neighborhood with food, clothing, subsidies, and loans, and which gradually supplanted the clergy as the chief providers of local relief. Unlike municipal councils, which were forced to deal with the problem of [131]vagrants and immigrants, these agencies focused their efforts upon the pauperes verecundi, the deserving poor. Like municipal charity, however, this was conducted entirely by laypeople, by baciners who were selected by their fellow parishioners to collect and distribute communal alms.
The prevalence of these lay institutions -- municipal, confraternal, and parochial -- has led some to argue that an important shift of paradigm took place at the end of the thirteenth century. Before this, charity had been the responsibility of the Church; now it passed into the hands of merchants and tradesmen, and in the process had thereby become secular. For England, the studies of Patricia Cullum in York and Miri Rubin in Cambridge agree that after 1300 new foundations were the work of guilds, individual merchants or artisans, and municipalities; and Rubin believes that all hospitals had now moved into the secular sphere.(12) Philip Gavitt cites the will of 1407 in which Francesco Datini, the benefactor of Florence's Hospital of the Innocenti, gives this description for the charitable trust from which this and other benefactions were to be paid:
The Casa del Ceppo [or trust] and its aforementioned goods [are] to be private and not sacred, and in no way said to be ecclesiastical, but thought of secularly, for the love of God, to the aforementioned perpetual use of the poor, and to be subject neither to the church nor to clerics in any way. (13)
Carmen López Alonso sees this trend toward secularization applying to Iberia as a whole, arguing that the urbanization of hospitals in the fourteenth century made them secular institutions. Consequently, for society as a whole, the poor were cast less as a means to salvation than as objects, and this in turn created new and negative images of hospitals as "dung heaps," uncaring in their attitudes toward the poor. (14) Agustín Rubio Vela, on the other hand, in his study of Valencian hospitals sees this secularization in a more positive light. For him the bourgeoisie's assumption of responsibility for charity is a witness to its empowerment, to the dominant role that merchants and artisans had attained in commercial cities like Valencia. While he recognizes that hospitals continued to have the trappings of religion, for example, chapels, for him the essential element is that they had assumed a civil character in terms of their foundation and governance.(15)
Within Catalonia, late medieval authors such as Ramon Llull (d. 1315) and Francesc Eiximenis (d. 1409) depict charity as an enterprise of the urban wealthy. The former in his Llibre d'Evast e Blanquerna describes the couple Evast and Aloma as washing the hands and feet of thirty paupers, providing them with new clothing, operating a hospital to serve the sick, [132] and conferring alms in secret to the deserving poor. Evast, a man of fortune, feels the obligation to share a portion of his wealth with the poor.(16) Carme Batlle, whose study of charity in Barcelona and Urgell began with an examination of wills, emphasizes the broad support for the works of charity among Catalan laypeople, which spanned divisions of gender, profession, wealth, and social class. She, however, does not argue in favor of the secularization thesis. Instead, Batlle holds that the works of charity throughout the entire era remained the primary responsibility of the bishop, although gradually the burden would be shared in a cooperative spirit with the municipality, as exemplified by their dual responsibility for the Hospital of Santa Creu. The lay population, she argues, saw no fundamental distinction between hospitals operated by the Church and those by municipal officials; both types of institutions benefited equally from bequests in the wills.(17)
Evidence from Urgell and Girona, however, contradicts Batlle's conclusions about charity at Barcelona. While Batlle's own study of Urgell provides no exact statistics, the suggestion is that townspeople there favored the New Hospital of the town over the Old Hospital of the cathedral. Guilleré, furthermore, offers precise data that show that in the decade of the 1330s Girona's town hospital was remembered in 40 percent of wills, while the cathedral institution was favored in only 10 percent. (18) At Urgell, this discrimination might well be explained by the fact that shortly after the establishment of the New Hospital, the older institution itself changed and became a shelter for needy clergy. This, however, was not the case in Girona, where the capitular hospital was an ample structure that contained among its eleven rooms a dormitory for poor women and so was not exclusively a clerical hospice.(19) Thus, Girona might provide some evidence of a preference for municipally sponsored charity, but this must be set aside data from the town's Almoina del Pa, which though governed by the chapter remained an exceedingly popular charity in the wills of fourteenth-century Gironans. (20)
The argument that has engaged historians about the relative religious or secular character of charity is very much one of definition and grows out of a confusion of the words secular and laic. The evidence from Catalonia and elsewhere clearly shows increased participation by laymen, both as individuals and as organized groups (confraternities, consells), in the works of charity, particularly after the mid-thirteenth century. Steven Epstein, in his study of medieval Genoa, finds nothing remarkable in this. He argues that the initiative for establishing a network of charity naturally belonged to the Church because, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when material [133] conditions favored such a development, it had the personnel and ideology to accomplish the goal. Municipal institutions, on the other hand, were in their infancy, and town officials had other tasks to perform. The key question is whether the gradual shifting of responsibility from religious to laic leadership is merely a reflection of institutional developments and rivalries or a sign of a deeper shift away from a religious toward a social justification for poor relief. Views on the issue have been diverse. Miri Rubin, for example, while observing the same institutional shift in medieval Cambridge that Epstein has noted in Genoa, is skeptical that religion was ever the primary motive behind charity, even in the twelfth century. Bronislaw Geremek, on the other hand, in his study of the poor in late medieval Paris, believes that religion continued to justify charitable giving, although he allows that there was an evolution from the practice of an indiscriminate charity to one increasingly focused on the distinction between worthy and unworthy beggars.(21)
Various recent studies of Italian confraternities and their role as agents in the dispensing of charity agree that assistance to the poor retained a religious character well into the sixteenth century, even if individual authors disagree on the importance of the Church's participation. Brian Pullan's study of Scuole Grandi in Venice, for example, shows that laic confraternities assumed a principal responsibility for serving the deserving poor. Even when the task began to exceed their resources, the confraternities were not replaced by public agencies but instead were co-opted and subsidized by the Venetian state. James Banker studied the commune of San Sepolcro, and through the confraternity of San Bartolomeo demonstrates that charity was a cooperative effort between pious lay associations, the town, and the bishop, and that assistance for the poor was closely linked to ideas of merit, propitiation, and remembrance. While Italian confraternities in the fourteenth century established new hospitals and assumed responsibility for those once operated by the clergy, they did so within a religious context, as associations that were both laic and religious and that derived their institutional legitimacy not from episcopal approval but from their service to the poor of Christ. Likewise, Christopher Black in his analysis of sixteenth-century confraternities concludes that the alleviation of misery required the cooperative efforts of state officials, parish priests, monasteries, and confraternities. In reviewing the recent scholarship concerning Italian confraternities, Andrew Barnes argues that, if anything, these studies have undervalued the participation of the clergy, particularly as spiritual advisers, in these various laic associations, and he concludes with a warning [134] about the dangers of excluding the clergy from any assessment of lay Catholic behavior. (22)
These examinations of confraternities are paralleled by other analyses of early modern Italian and French hospitals. They also stress the complexity of motivation that operated within late medieval society. In her discussion of the "language of relief," Miri Rubin, who tends to dismiss the importance of religious impulses, argues that charity was not so much a direct response to the needs of the poor but a reaction to an elite's perception of its social obligations. Katherine Park, however, in demonstrating the medieval origins of the medical hospital, believes that fourteenth-century Florentines were moved by multiple impulses: a genuine concern for the needy, a fear of God's retribution, and a desire to protect the supply of industrial workers. Sandra Cavallo, whose work centers on early modern Turin, argues that conflicts within the social and political elite were an important motivating force behind poor relief but acknowledges that this aspect is just a piece in a larger jigsaw puzzle. Furthermore, she believes that the case for excluding religion as a motivating factor for charity has been adequately demonstrated only for post-Reformation England. Cissie Fairchilds, on the basis of her study of Aix-en-Provence, concludes that the desire "to buy salvation" was the principal motivating force behind charity in this region until the last decades of the eighteenth century. An emerging consensus seems to be that the older models that sought to differentiate between medieval and modern notions of relief by opposing the ideas of charity and welfare, care and cure, and religious and secular motivations no longer seem to accord with reality.(23)
Turning to Catalonia and the realms of Aragon, the image that emerges is of just such a mosaic of lay and clerical participation, religious and secular purposes. Because, as Carme Batlle has pointed out, religious orders and other organized communities of hospitallers played only a minor role in the administration of assistance in Catalonia, there never was a clear-cut boundary between clerical and lay spheres of activity. (24) On the one hand, the rectors of ecclesiastically governed hospitals in Barcelona and Girona for the most part were priests, often because duties of a sacerdotal nature were associated with these posts. But Clement V's bull of 1311, Quia contingit, by declaring that the office of hospital administrator was not to be considered as an ecclesiastical benefice, fully sanctioned the appointment of lay men and women as rectors of ecclesiastically governed hospitals. As we have seen, this permitted Bishop Ponç de Gualba of Barcelona in 1326 to separate the office of administrator from that of chaplain for the city's leper hospital and [135] appoint a layperson to the former position.(25) Similarly, municipal hospitals most often had lay administrators, but there were exceptional cases like the appointment of a priest as rector of the newly established municipal hospital at Tarragona in 1370. Furthermore, examples (from Barcelona, Lleida, Urgell, and elsewhere) of the merger and then joint operation of capitular and municipal hospitals indicate a degree of cooperation between diocesan and town officials.(26)
Traditionally medicine, an increasingly important part of the late medieval hospital, has been thought to be one area that clearly separated laymen from the clergy, because various decretals of the thirteenth century forbade the study and/or practice of medicine to various categories of the clergy. Reexamination of the sources, however, indicates that in fact nothing prevented the diocesan clergy from either the study or practice of medicine at the start of the fourteenth century, and even the restrictions on monks and canons were not absolute. Within the Crown of Aragon, Michael McVaugh has identified nine clerics who practiced medicine within the half century prior to 1335. While none of these can be tied directly to any of the hospitals under study, it indicates that medical practice was not regarded as incompatible with clerical status and thus evidence for the secularization of hospitals. (27)
The analysis of the internal operation of all Catalan hospitals, including those under private or secular governance, reveals an overlay of religious observance and intent. As Agustín Rubio Vela admits, despite his insistence on the secularist thesis, fourteenth and fifteenth-century establishments maintained chaplains and chapels and exhibited "a curious worldly-spiritual duality."(28) For example, our examination of both hospices and foundling homes has revealed that such institutions provided not only nurture and care but also the sacraments of the Church-- baptism for the newborn, confession, and anointing for the terminally sick or old. Indeed, the sacred received a certain priority over the temporal. Those finding children were always first supposed to detect evidence of baptism, and at Barcelona's Hospital of Santa Creu inmates were visited by a priest before they saw a physician. Hospitals were also responsible for the burial of dead inmates, a duty that involved not only the provision of a shroud and place of interment but also in some instances commemorative masses. Yet another example would be municipal shelters for prostitutes, like les Egipciaques in Barcelona, where women were not only taken off the streets but subjected to a regimen of sermons and religious devotions.(29)
Despite the continued interplay of the sacred and profane, it is [136] indisputable that the influence and importance of municipal institutions and lay elites in the distribution of charity from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century expanded. While the maturation of urban institutions and the increased demands placed on charity by the plagues, disorder, and economic hardships of the late Middle Ages help us to understand the forces that impelled greater municipal participation, do these same forces also signal a change in how society viewed the ends of charity? George Rosen, for example, has argued that hospitals were initially religious in purpose and throughout the medieval era retained the legal status of religious places, even when administered by municipalities. Yet, by the end of the Middle Ages, they had also become social instruments, with a secular agenda to ameliorate suffering, diminish poverty, eradicate begging, and maintain public order. (30)
One of the arguments made by those who distinguish between religious and secular assistance is that the former, because it is concerned principally with the effects on the benefactor, is indiscriminate in character and does not consider the merit or need of the recipient. Secular relief, on the other hand, is highly selective in nature since its primary purpose is to encourage industry, repress idleness, and provide help only to the genuinely deserving. (31) Such a distinction is fundamental to any understanding of Catalan charity. The deserving poor, the pauperes verecundi, appear in the sources as a category from the early thirteenth century and were the particular focus of parochial charity. Fourteenth-century legislation, furthermore, in cities such as Barcelona and Valencia discouraged begging, especially by outsiders, and hospitals made attempts to distinguish between those in genuine need and mere vagrants.(32) The question at issue here is whether the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor is evidence of a fundamental shift in motivation and intent from religious to secular. For several reasons, this does not seem to be so. The distinction, first of all, was fundamental in the writings of medieval canonists and was the largest topic of discussion under the heading of charitable giving. Among these canonists is the Catalan Dominican, Ramon de Penyafort, who compiled the decretals of Pope Gregory IX. Citing texts from Saint Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, Ramon argues that charity should be indiscriminate only when "you have enough for all." When resources are insufficient, on the other hand, he argued that preference should first be given to family and friends. The Glossa ordinaria explained that "if we do not have enough for all, then we should give rather to the good than to the evil, to a relative rather than a stranger." (33) Fourteenth-century Catalan sources also allowed for some discrimination in assisting poor people. Saint Vicent Ferrer, for [137] example, in his sermon for the feast of Saint Lawrence argued that, among the observances that must be kept by all Christians, was the obligation to "bank treasure with the poor," and elsewhere he lists charity as one of the ten ways of obtaining grace. Yet the Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis argued that it was not desirable for cities to support beggars; even the handicapped, he says, can find honorable work. Charity, he believed, should be systematic but discriminating.(34) Thus, the restrictions on begging and vagabondage that we have noted in municipal legislation reflect attitudes common among both the clergy and the laity and thus indicate no fundamental rift between these two groups in their attitude toward the poor.
There is, however, a significant change in how assistance to the poor was to be financed. Charity in the twelfth century was entirely voluntary, supported in large measure through endowments conveyed by an affluent elite. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there is greater participation by the lower orders, both in the form of small pious bequests as well as in the offerings collected in poor boxes put out by representatives of parochial bacís, religious orders and other charitable organizations. The statutes of Barcelona's Hospital of Santa Creu testify to continued importance of legacies, endowments, alms, and other gifts into the fifteenth century.(35) Yet, in the later Middle Ages, evidence begins to mount that voluntary offerings had become insufficient to sustain the work of existing charities.
During the fourteenth century, with the onset of hard times, municipal councils in both Barcelona and Valencia began to pay direct subsidies to individual hospitals. The first instance, just six years after the first of the bad years, was that of En Marcús in Barcelona, which was ceded in 1339 by its insolvent administrators to the Consell de Cent. Valencia's Hospital of Sant Guillem, operated by the Trinitarian Order, suffered as a consequence of the War of the Two Pedros (1356-69). Beginning in 1361, it received a series of cash gifts from the municipality to repair its damaged structure and to compensate for patrimonial income lost as a consequence of damage to its rural, agricultural lands. Another Valencian institution, the Hospital de la Reyna suffered economic shortfalls beginning with the famine of 1333. During the plague of 1375, the consell paid out thirty pounds so that the hospital could afford to bury its dead. Ultimately, in 1383, the hospital became the property of the city, which then had to make payments on its debt and provide funds for its day-to-day operation. In 1380, a third institution, the leprosarium of Sant Llàtzer, petitioned the Valencian council for fifty pounds to relieve a deficit brought on by high prices.(36) In Barcelona, hard times forced the merger of several institutions in 1401 to form [138] the Hospital of Santa Creu, which became the joint responsibility of the chapter and municipal council. While neither bishop nor town accepted any direct obligation to finance the new hospital, which in theory would be supported by its consolidated endowments, the Consell de Cent, following the bank failures and currency devaluations of 1406, was forced in 1407 to extend a line of credit to Santa Creu. For the rest of the century, until 1482, the municipality guaranteed to make available sufficient monies, up to two or three thousand florins, to compensate for unexpected shortfalls in revenue.(37) The story is much the same in small cities like Urgell where the unrest of the mid-fifteenth century not only forced the consolidation of hospitals but also compelled the surviving institution to turn to the municipal consuls for operating subsidies.(38)
Municipal contributions were a sign that income from endowments had been adversely affected by Catalonia's deteriorating economy. In 1362, for example, during the War of the Two Pedros, tenants of the Hospital of En Clapers in Valencia petitioned the city council for a reduction in their rents, under threat of abandoning their holdings altogether. In 1409, furthermore, the trustee, or procurator menor, charged with collecting income from the censales owed to the almoina of Lleida received only 68 percent of what was due.(39) This phenomenon is a reflection of the long and profound decline that set in, particularly within Catalonia, between 1333 and 1500. First there were years of famine in the 1330s, followed by the Unionist revolt in the 1340s. The Black Death struck in 1348, 1362, 1374-75, 1380, 1383-84, and 1395. The War of the Two Pedros lasted from 1356 to 1369. In 1381, 1383, and 1406, Barcelona suffered a series of bank failures, which caused a rise in unemployment and a serious devaluation of the currency. All of these calamities, which led to a decline in Catalonia's population of as much as 38.5 percent between 1330 and 1381, had a depressing effect on rents. The currency devaluations caused censales, or bonds, to lose between 22.8 and 28 percent in value.(40)
Charitable institutions were particularly vulnerable to declines such as these in land rents (censos) and bonds (censales) because the preponderance of their revenues came from these sources. In 1306, Barcelona's Hospital of En Colom received only 10 percent of its income from alms and sales of its produce; the remainder came from investments. Between 1374 and 1397, En Clapers in Valencia derived 95 percent of its revenue from censos, rights of lordship, and bonds; alms amounted to a mere 3.5 percent. Studies of two parochial alms funds in Barcelona reveal a similar pattern. The bací of Santa Maria del Pi, between 1434 and 1454, gained 83.8 percent of its income from investments, 7.2 percent from legacies and donations, and [139] only 9 percent from direct collections. The statistics from the richer and more aristocratic parish of Santa Maria del Mar in 1421 suggest that the entire income came from investments, 72.6 percent from censales and 27.3 percent from censos. The situation for Sant Llàtzer's in Barcelona was somewhat different; here 55 percent of revenue came from offerings of different sorts, but still 45 percent of income was derived either from rents or the sale of agricultural produce. (41)
The relative insignificance of monies collected from the general community broaches the broader question of the depth of society's commitment to works of relief. Was this an endeavor supported by a broad spectrum of the population, or was it, as Sandra Cavallo has argued in the case of early modern Turin, an affair of the elite that had as much to do with power and status as assistance to the poor? Carme Batlle, on the basis of her extensive analysis of Barcelonan wills, believes that the charitable impulse was shared by all social classes and that giving was practiced by all but the destitute themselves. Yet the amount dedicated to charity in the thirteenth-century wills that Batlle studies was relatively small, typically a few sous and only in exceptional cases amounting to more than a hundred sous.(42) The scattered statements that survive of hospitaller income, furthermore, demonstrate that only a minor portion of annual budgets was derived either from legacies such as these or from alms. The preponderance of revenue came from censos and censales. While no one has studied these in any detail, the initial impression is that patrimonies derived in large measure from the endowments conferred by an institution's founder, the founding family, and then by subsequent benefactors, both large and small. While administrators typically capitalized even small gifts and alms into censos and censales, no one has yet determined what proportion of the subsequent endowment derived from the gifts of the rich or from the smaller offerings of those with modest means.(43)
Another issue that touches on the question of societal attitudes toward the poor is the varying degrees of support allotted to the working poor and the so-called "deserving" poor vis-à-vis migrants and outsiders. John Henderson, in his study of Florentine charity, argues that the deserving poor were principally the concern of charitable confraternities, which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had broad support within the community and close connections to the governing elite. More peripheral to the communal consciousness were the hospitals, which in large measure seem to have served rural workers and foreigners, who had migrated into the city looking for work, or else servants and freed slaves who were generally excluded from confraternal charity. These institutions survived on their endowments and [140] received municipal subventions only when they were strapped for cash. In the main, he believes that Florentines preferred to assist, above all, working families with children.(44)
In Barcelona, unlike Florence where various confraternities devoted themselves to this work, the deserving poor were the particular concern of parish charity, which, as we have seen, became an organized vehicle for charitable assistance at the beginning of the fourteenth century. It is noteworthy that even during the difficult decades of the fifteenth century, when the city was suffering through a period of profound economic crisis and decline, the bacís of Santa Maria del Pi and Santa Maria del Mar were able to maintain their income and consequently their support for the needy of the parish. (45) A similar bias toward relatives and friends has been detected in the policies of almoinas in towns such as Barcelona, Lleida, and Urgell, and in hospitals like Barcelona's Pere Desvilar, where many places were subject to rights of presentment and nomination. Only the town of Girona seems to have made a genuine effort to distribute bread to all or most of the needy, but even here surely the preponderance of those fed were permanent residents of the town.
Discrimination in favor of the deserving poor by episcopal and municipal hospitals, on the other hand, is more difficult to detect because these institutions had a greater obligation toward outsiders -- abandoned or orphaned children, pilgrims and other travelers, the old and terminally ill. Yet, when care would imply a long-term commitment, as at the leprosarium of Sant Llàtzer in Barcelona, clear preference was given to local lepers, and at the end of the fifteenth century the Consell de Cent decided not to construct a new and larger leprosarium precisely because it would only encourage the immigration of outsiders into the city. Evidence from Girona, furthermore, shows at least some effort to exclude from shelter and care vagrants who made a habit of public charity.(46) Yet, on the other hand, Barcelona was willing to erect, during the difficult decades of the fifteenth century, a monumental gothic structure for the Hospital of Santa Creu that was financed at least in part by public subscription. This is of some significance because the patient population at Santa Creu, unlike Valencia's En Clapers, for example, contained a substantial proportion of foreigners.(47) Furthermore, both establishments accepted foundlings and orphans irrespective of their origins. Thus, the line delineating charity to neighbors and to foreigners is not always easy to draw.
Whatever kindness was extended to outsiders, however, seems to have been limited to Christians. While Jews and Muslims might have mingled with Catalan or Valencian Christians in the course of their daily business, [141] they formed self-contained communities separated from Christian society by real, if invisible, boundaries of religion, culture, and history. David Nirenberg, in his discussion of the Holy Week violence perpetrated by Christians against Jews, has underscored how important it was for the dominant group to remember and reinforce these social boundaries. Jews, like the Christian prostitutes of Barcelona and Valencia, were segregated and kept physically confined during the culminating days of Holy Week. Their exclusion from the community, however, ran year round when it came to matters of solidarity and assistance. Thus Jews and Muslims alike articulated their own institutions of charity that paralleled those of their Christian neighbors. The only known application of Christian assistance to Jews or Muslims involved their orphaned and abandoned children, but these young ones were always baptized and raised as Christians .(48)
Among Christians, Catalan communities in the fourteenth century began to discourage begging and the immigration of those likely to become beggars and thieves. Barcelona's Consell de Cent in 1322, for example, permitted nonresidents to beg within the city for only a day and attempted to restrict the time and locale of such activities.(49) In Valencia, in 1338 and 1339, a public wardship for orphans was created, lest these children, most of whom were the offspring of migrants, would become beggars, drunkards, or thieves; youths who evaded such supervision were to be expelled from the city.(50) Téresa-María Vinyoles argues that the undeserving poor ( pobres captaires), by reason of their dress or social status (slaves, serfs, Jews, Muslims, prostitutes, pimps, bastards, the blind, the deaf, foreigners) were simply more visible than the deserving poor, who lived intermingled among their more fortunate neighbors, and were thus more likely to generate suspicion and ill-feeling in the minds of urban residents. At best, such poor became public spectacles, as gray-robed pallbearers who conveyed the bodies of wealthy citizens to the cemetery, at times performing macabre dances in the streets. But most often they were associated with crime and violence simply because those areas of the city where they congregated were more likely locales for these phenomena than residential neighborhoods. (51) Furthermore, the term customarily applied to foundlings in Valencia, bort or bastard, was scarcely more endearing in the fourteenth century than it is today.(52) The sense is that whatever public assistance was provided to such marginalized groups sprang more from an enlightened selfishness -- whether the desire for spiritual reward or more pragmatically the maintenance of public order -- than from any sense of affection or concern for their welfare.
As a consequence, some distinction can be made between the types of [142] relief rendered to the vergonyants and captaires . The former were eligible for a broad array of assistance: distributions of food, clothing and money subsidies, assistance with dowries, admission to leprosaria, shelters, and hospitals, and care for dependent children. With the exception of lepers, most of the aid was of a temporary, emergency nature that assisted families and individuals to survive an economic downturn, the death of a parent or spouse, an injury or illness, or to face an extraordinary expense like a dowry. The intent went beyond mere benevolence; it sought to preserve individuals in their status as functioning members of the community. Those without roots in the neighborhood, however, received far less. They were not eligible for parochial largesse, and the limited places available at cathedral almoinas seem to have been reserved for more deserving souls. At most, the rootless were eligible for funereal and other "extraordinary" handouts of food and clothing. The restrictions noted against begging, in fact, suggest that mendicancy was their principal means of support. It was not until 1584, for example, that Barcelona established a shelter specifically for beggars and even this does not seem to have functioned very successfully. (53) The municipality, however, would care for the abandoned children of the marginalized, perhaps out of a sense of moral and religious decency, possibly because uncertainty over their origin would make discrimination difficult, and certainly to give those children who survived the chance to become productive members of the community. Hospitals, given the numbers of transients within their population, also provided a measure of care, an honorable place to die, and the promise of a decent burial for those lacking the support of a family. But, given the growing emphasis on medical care in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the modest populations of patients, and a seeming decline in mortality rates among inmates, the very desperate must not have had ready access even to this level of assistance.
To return to the question that began this discussion, these observations suggest that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw no major paradigmatic shift in intent from religious to secular purposes. The evidence from Catalonia provides yet additional confirmation that the old distinction between Catholic and Protestant charity is not a useful or accurate tool for the analysis of late medieval and early modern relief. While Catalan charity did not absolutely exclude anyone from assistance, it did show a marked preference for friends, neighbors, and those perceived as deserving. These attitudes of the fifteenth century, as expressed by Francesc Eiximenis, appear little different from the sentiments of twelfth and thirteenth-century canonists, including those of the distinguished Catalan Dominican Ramon de Penyafort. Thus, it is difficult to argue that late medieval society [143] hardened in its attitude toward the poor. The evolution was less one of attitude than of actual service. Assistance in the fifteenth century was more specialized and directed than it was in the twelfth century. The later period saw in Valencia a hospital specifically for the mentally ill; Santa Creu in Barcelona provided a complete regimen of medical care, in addition to the bed, board, and religious solace of its thirteenth-century predecessors. Foundling homes in Barcelona and Valencia not only cared for infants but articulated a program for their nurture that led children through apprenticeships toward their reinsertion as full members of the community. Almoinas in Barcelona and Lleida in the fifteenth century began to substitute cash payments for actual meals, marking their evolution from soup kitchen to relief agency. Throughout Catalonia, older foundations were consolidated into larger municipal or general hospitals, often with expanded and specialized facilities. In short, as Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones have argued, the line between traditional and modern ideas of assistance, between charity and welfare, care and cure, private versus public assistance, is not only difficult to draw but also lacks any clear chronological demarcation.(54)
Support for these programs of assistance rested on the traditional resources
and endowments, which derived from collections, gifts, and wills that were
given for conventional, religious motives. As Cissie Fairchilds has shown
in her studies of Aix-en-Provence, or Linda Martz for Toledo and Maureen
Flynn for Zamora, religious motivation remained an important underpinning
of charitable activity beyond the medieval into the early modern period.
(55)
Beginning in the fourteenth century, in addition to private, religiously
inspired benefaction, municipal governments also began to direct certain
centers of relief and to subsidize others. But, as we have seen, this led
not to the establishment of rival and competing institutions, but instead
to a high degree of cooperation and coordination between religious and secular
agencies. Religious foundations such as Valencia's Hospital de la Reyna
or Barcelona's En Marcús could look to the city for financial aid.
Municipal authorities, for their part, recognized the legitimatizing value
of religion in the control of undesirable elements of the population, such
as beggars and prostitutes. What the dual nature of assistance seems to
show is that, however limited was the concept and practice of charity in
late medieval Catalonia, voluntary contributions were not sufficient to sustain
any but purely neighborhood and parochial institutions. Hospitals and other
types of charity required for their survival an infusion of public funds.
Notes for Chapter Seven
1. See Mollat, Poor in the Middle Ages, chapters 3, 6, 8, 12.
2. See López Alsonso, Pobreza en la España medieval , 479-84.
3. Barcelona's population, for example, is estimated to have grown from 25,000 to 40,000 between 1213 and 1349; Perpignan had a population of some 13,000, Lleida 12,000. Towns in the range of 6,000 included Tortosa, Tarragona, Girona, and Puigcerdà; between 2,000 and 6,000 were Cervera, Montblanc, Vilafranca del Penedès, Manresa, Berga, and Valls. Towns like Urgell and Vic perhaps had a thousand residents. Michael Mollat argues that the explosion of hospital construction in the thirteenth century was set off by a subsistence crisis at the end of the twelfth century that precipitated an exodus from countryside to town and the development of widespread vagabondage. In Catalonia, the agricultural regime is generally described as being prosperous, but the years after 1190 saw an institutionalization of serfdom which may have had some of the same effect. See Michel Mollat, "Hospitalité et assistance au début du XIIIe siècle," in Poverty in the Middle Ages, ed. David Flood (Paderborn, 1975), 37, 40-5; Batlle, L'expansió baixmedieval, 90-91, 119-23; Paul Freedman, The Origins of Peasant Servitude in Medieval Catalonia (Cambridge, 1991), 89-118.
4. Josep M.Salrach, El procés de feudalització (segles III-XII), vol. 2 of Història de Catalunya, ed. Pierre Vilar (Barcelona, 1987), 421-26, 433-38; Charles-E. Dufourcq and Jean Gautier-Dalché, Historia económica y social de la España cristiana en la edad media, trans. Federico Revilla (Barcelona, 1983), 120-23; Paul Freedman, The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in Medieval Catalonia (New Brunswick, N.J., 1983), 80-81.
5. Caroline Walker Bynum, Docere Verbo et Exemplo: An Aspect of Twelfth-Century Spirituality (Missoula, Mont., 1979), 195-97.
6. For a discussion, see Jean Becquet, "Chanoines réguliers et érémitisme clérical," Revue d'ascétique et de mystique 48 (1972): 361-70; Toubert, "La vie commune," 11-26; Bynum, Jesus as Mother , 9-12; Bynum, Docere verbo, 4-5.
7. In the Kingdom of León, for example, only two, albeit the poorest, of twelve chapters accepted the Rule of Saint Augustine. See R. A. Fletcher, The Episcopate in the Kingdom of León in the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1978), 144-45. In Saragossa, the chapter, newly created in 1119, abandoned the common life in 1139. See María Rosa Gutiérrez Iglesias, La mensa capitular de la iglesia de San Salvador de Zaragoza en el pontificado de Hugo de Mataplana (Saragossa, 1980), 18. At Vic, despite its foundation as a reformed chapter in 816 and later efforts to enact the Rule of Saint Augustine, canons led essentially private lives (Freedman, Diocese of Vic, 41-42). Bishop Bernat de Berga (1172-88) of Barcelona led efforts to keep reforming monks out of the principality (Bensch, Barcelona, 54-55).
8. Stephen Bensch argues that municipal institutions developed later in Catalonia than in Italy because the Catalan patriciate, for the most part, was only formed after the economic revival of the 1140s and had not coalesced into a self-confident group when the count-kings reasserted their power in the city in the later twelfth century (Barcelona, 82-4; 192-93).
9. Early municipal legislation in Barcelona, for example, dealt with the regulation of inns, meat and poultry prices, and the quality of craft production. For an overview of municipal development, see Batlle, Expansió baixmedieval , 78-82; Guilleré, Girona al segle XIV, 1:152ff; Bensch, Barcelona, 314-17.
10. In fifteenth-century Valladolid, for example, two of the three largest hospitals were operated by confraternities (Rucquoi, "Hospitalisation et charité à Valladolid," 400).
11. André Vauchez argues that confraternities flourished especially during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when practically every parish had at least one, and it would not be uncommon even for rural villages to have several. They were institutions of social integration, with most containing mixed memberships of men and women, young and old. In terms of function, most also demonstrated multiple purposes: simple religious devotions, mutual association, and works of internal and external charity. Some, like the Laudesi in Italy or Franciscan tertiaries, emphasized devotion; others works of piety. See André Vauchez, "Conclusion," in Le mouvement confraternel au Moyen Âge: France, Italie, Suisse (Rome, 1987), 398-402.
12. Cullum, "Hospitals," 317; Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge, 1987), 146-47.
13. Gavitt, Charity and Children, 47.
14. López Alonso, Pobreza en la España medieval, 453, 472-74.
15. Rubio Vela, Pobreza, enfermedad y asistencia, 34, 40-44.
16. Llull, Blanquerna, 81-95.
17. Batlle, L'expansió baixmedieval, 429-37.
18. Batlle, Urgell medieval, 126-27; Guilleré, "Charité à Gérone," 1:197-99.
19. Batlle Prats, "Inventari dels Bens," 59.
20. Guilleré has shown that some 78 percent of rural wills and 35 percent of urban ones left a legacy for the elemosina panis ("La peste noire à Gérone," 132).
21. Epstein, Wills and Wealth, 169-70; Rubin, "Imagining Medieval Hospitals," 21; Geremek, Margins of Society, 190 ff.
22. Barnes critiques James R. Banker, Death in the Community: Memorialization and Confraternities in an Italian Commune in the Late Middle Ages (Athens, Ga., 1988); Christopher Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989); and less directly Brian Pullan, Renaissance Venice. See Barnes, "Poor Relief and Brotherhood," 603-11. See also Black, Italian Confraternities, 4-12, 176-78.
23. Rubin, "Imagining Medieval Hospitals," 16-17; Park, "Healing the Poor," 28; Sandra Cavallo, "The Motivations of Benefactors: An Overview of Approaches to the Study of Charity," in Medicine and Charity before the Welfare State, ed. Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones (London, 1991), 46, 59-60; Barry and Jones, introduction to Medicine and Charity, 1-2. Brian Tierney, in surveying the development of canonist theory and its implementation between the twelfth and early seventeenth century, argues that in England there was "a single developing tradition without any sudden break or reversal of policy" ( Medieval Poor Law, 132). Cissie C. Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence, 1640-1789 (Baltimore, 1976), 55, 160.
24. Elsewhere, however, where care was the responsibility of organized religious communities, secularized hospitals tended to remain religious houses, served by sisters living under a rule (Rosen, "Historical Sociology," 10).
25. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, 86; Pérez Santamaría, "San Lázaro," 1:86-87, 90.
26. See above, Chapter 3, note 64. There is the further example of the consell of Valencia joining with the bishop to conduct a joint visitation and inspection of each of the city's hospitals in 1341. Muncipalities, in principle, seemed to have resisted the appointment of clerical administrators, lest their rights of supervision be diminished, as demonstrated by the failure of the Jeronymite friar Joan de Conca to succeed his brother as hospitaller of Valencia's Hospital de la Reyna. See Rubio Vela, Pobreza, enfermedad y asistencia, 59-61, 168.
27. McVaugh acknowledges that medicine in fact became a secular profession in the fourteenth century, but argues that the reasons were purely practical and related to the growing esteem in which the profession was held; see his Medicine before the Plague, 72-75.
28. Rubio Vela, Pobreza, enfermedad y asistencia, 40.
29. See above, Chapter 6, note 59; Ordinaciones de Santa Creu, xiii. Late fourteenth-century records of Barcelona's Sant Macià, for example, cite cases of the hospital collecting money to provide for the dead, not only for shrouds but for masses. See above, Chapter 5, note 96; Roca, Sant Macià, 8. See above, Chapter 6, note 23.
30. Rosen, "Historical Sociology," 9-10, 18.
31. For a discussion of this position, see Tierney, Medieval Poor Law , 47-49. Older histories saw this as a fundamental distinction in the sixteenth century between Catholic and Protestant approaches to social welfare. While more recent works have effectively disputed the notion that Catholic charity was not discriminating, authors such as J.-P. Gutton have attempted to argue that Catholic Spain practiced indiscriminate charity well into the Hapsburg era. See Pullan, Renaissance Venice, 11-12, 197-99; Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Hapsburg Spain: The Example of Toledo (Cambridge, 1983), 1-3.
32. See above, Chapter 1, note 12, Chapter 2, notes 63-68, and Chapter 4, note 94.
33. The arguments of Penyafort and the Glossa ordinaria are echoed in an English treatise which distinguishes between those who are honestus and inhonestus. See Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, 60, 150 n 43.
34. Peter Rycraft, "The Late Medieval Catalan Death-bed," in God and Man in Medieval Spain: Essays in Honour of J. R. L. Highfield, ed. Derek W. Lomax and David Mackenzie (Warminster, 1989), 123, 127. The fifteenth-century archbishop of Florence, Antoninus, argued that it was more of a sin to assist a scoundrel than it was a means to achieve grace (Henderson, Piety and Charity, 357-58). Eiximenis felt that blind people could make things with their hands; lame folks could carry burdens on the shoulders; and those without feet could teach, write, or sell (Martín, "La pobreza y los pobres," 594).
35. Ordinacions, xvii, xxiv-vi, xlii.
36. Gallent Marco, "Hospital de la Reyna," 79; Rubio Vela, Pobreza, enfermedad y asistencia, 52, 72-3, 186-87. See also Webster, Els Menorets , 94-96.
37. Danon, Visió històrica, 61, 63.
38. Batlle, Urgell medieval, 149-50.
39. Rubio Vela, Pobreza, enfermedad y asistencia, 73; Bertrán, "Almoina de la Seu de Lleida," 352-53.
40. During the fourteenth century, the municipal council of Venice encouraged hospitals in that city to move their investments from property into government bonds in order to avoid the high costs of property management. Like Barcelona, however, the collapse of the bond market in the next century revealed the strategy to be faulty. See Brian Pullan, "Houses in Service of the Poor in the Venetian Republic," in Poverty and Charity, 10: 4. Rubio Vela, Pobreza, enfermedad y asistencia, 68-69; Claramunt, "Los ingresos," 375; and Freedman, Peasant Servitude, 161-63.
41. Pifarré, "Dos visitas," 2:88-89; Rubio Vela, Pobreza, enfermedad y asistencia, 92-93; Claramunt, "Los ingresos," 1:388; Aramayona, "Santa María del Mar," 2:188; see also above, Chapter 5, note 20. This is in sharp contrast to charitable confraternities. For example, the Orsanmichele of Florence in 1329 received 57 percent of its income from money offerings and another 27 percent from the sale of candles at its devotions, but even this institution came increasingly to rely on investment income after wills of 1348, the year of the plague, swelled its endowment (Henderson, Piety and Charity, 200, 208-9, 233).
42. At Urgell, for example, she argues that the typical legacy to the municipal hospital in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries ranged up to thirty sous, or else consisted of the decedent's bed and bed linen. Batlle, Urgell medieval, 133; Batlle, L'expansió baixmedieval , 429; Batlle and Casas, "Caritat privada," see the charts following 1:182.
43. On the capitalization of alms and legacies, see examples in Batlle, Urgell medieval, 135-37; Lorente, "Plato de los Pobres," 2:165.
44. For example, at the hospitals of Santa Maria Nuova and San Matteo only 32 percent and 27 percent of recorded deaths are those of Florentines. At the foundling hospital of the Innocenti, only 34 percent of the children were born in Florence. As many as a fifth of all hospital inmates belonged to the servant class. Henderson notes that, although the hospitals were the richest institutions in the city, they nonetheless were in debt and, like their compeers elsewhere in Europe, suffered an economic crisis in the fifteenth century. Henderson, Piety and Charity, 376-78, 393, 399-400, 407, 422.
45. Claramunt, "Los ingresos," 1:384, 388; Aramoyona, "Santa María del Mar," 2:186.
46. Pérez Santamaría, "San Lázaro," 1:88-89; Batlle Prats, "Inventari dels Bens," 78-79.
47. In 1401, King Martí and Queen Maria donated fifteen thousand sous to the construction fund; there must also have been an active campaign to raise money from others to judge by a papal indulgence granted in 1403 to contributors to the building fund; a privilege of 1433 suggests that collectors were dispatched to churches in the region for the purpose of collecting monies (Danon, Visió històrica, 25, 78, 157-58).
48. Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 200 ff., 150.
49. Mutgé, Ciudad de Barcelona, 317; Vinyoles, Vida quotidiana , 119.
50. Rubio Vela, "Infancia y marginación," 129-30.
51. An example from 1391 of a funeral of a Barcelonan merchant had twelve poor folk acting as pallbearers, with four fools acting as acolytes (Vinyoles, "Violència marginal," 158-69).
52. Rubio Vela, "La asistencia hospitalaria infantil," 166.
53. Martz, Poverty and Welfare, 74-75.
54. See their introduction to Medicine and Charity, 2.
55. Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence, 160; Martz, Poverty and Welfare, 7-44; Flynn, Sacred Charity, 141-45. Similarly, Brian Pullan's study of charity in early modern Venice affirms the importance of religious motivations (Renaissance Venice, 631).