[ix] To use a religious category to define the limits of a study of a city and its region is, perhaps, to widen the scope of enquiry beyond the conventional. The notion of undertaking the detailed investigation of a small geographical area as a way of approaching the problems of a whole society is well enough established. The technique has the attractions of an easily understood theme and, generally, a manageable amount of source material. These advantages may be counteracted by the danger that the region in question will have too many peculiar characteristics to be of general interest. It might appear that in the case of Spain this danger is especially acute, indeed that it applies to the whole country. Responsibility for the fact that the Iberian Peninsula is still largely excluded from the normal scope of European historical studies must be shared by the Spaniards themselves. Since the Muslim invasion in 711, which turned the country into an Islamic colony, Spain has been uncertain of the relationship between its role in European Christendom and its place, over so many centuries, in the Muslim world. While it might be possible to conclude that such problems of identity make Spanish history unique and hence of limited general interest, the intention here is to adopt a more positive approach, and the society of late medieval Córdoba provides an excellent opportunity to do so.

The period of the city's history which will be studied is that which saw Spain's sudden rise to prominence as first a European and then a world power. When Isabella came to the throne of Castile in 1474, Córdoba had been in Christian hands for over two hundred years. It contained small Muslim and Jewish communities, but it was primarily a Christian city, of the second rank in contemporary Iberian terms, dominated by a military aristocracy and living mainly from the disposal of surplus agricultural production. Other cities, notably Seville, were more dynamic in the late fifteenth century, but Córdoba is [x] probably representative of the inland towns of the Peninsula. The city's government was in the hands of a council consisting of nobles. Córdoba was represented in the Cortes, the Castilian parliament, as the capital of the kingdom (reino) of Córdoba, which was, after the thirteenth-century Reconquest, a purely notional territorial unit, but still survived in one of the titles of the rulers of Castile.

It has not proved possible to give a full account of the life of Córdoba's citizens in the period around 1500. Most of the sources are either administrative or legal in character. A great deal is known about the day-to-day operations of the city council and its official relations with the royal government, but much interesting detail may have been excluded from the town clerk's minutes, and legislation and administrative regulations, two types of document which are not clearly differentiated, indicate more of what was intended to happen than what actually did. At the local level, there are notable gaps in the evidence. No records survive of the court cases heard by the city's magistrates. The only municipal accounts extant are those of 1452-3 (