[1] When Córdoba was reconquered by the Christians in 1236, the chroniclers viewed Ferdinand III's achievement as primarily a religious and military victory. Not much attention was paid to the natural assets which had been taken over. However, the First General Chronicle records that, on his death bed, the monarch himself adopted a more practical attitude towards his conquests. He is said to have told his son, the future Alfonso X, 'Son, you are rich in lands and in many good vassals -- more so than any other king in Christendom.' ⁽¹⁾ Before looking at the political entities which the Christians established in the kingdom of Córdoba, it is best to examine the geographical conditions which did so much to determine the options which were open to late medieval Cordobans and their rulers.

The city of Córdoba lies on the right bank of the 'Great River', the Guadalquivir, which is the axis of the natural region of western Andalusia. This region conforms to the triangular shape of the Guadalquivir delta, with mountain ranges to the north and to the south. The former kingdom, and the modem province, of Córdoba lie across the middle of the Guadalquivir's course. Emilio Cabrera has calculated the area of the former as 14,100 km², compared with the latter's 13,718 km² . The difference is explained by the transference of Chillón to the province of Ciudad Real and Pefñaflor to the province of Seville, while the lands beyond the Zújar, in the north-west, are now in the province of Badajoz. ⁽²⁾ The climate of the whole western Andalusian region is influenced by the Atlantic, but the inland areas, including the kingdom of Córdoba, receive a much lower rainfall than the parts nearer the coast. Also, summer and winter temperatures inland are more extreme than those on the coast and the spring is generally the most temperate season of the year. On average, rain fails in the Córdoba area on [2] between sixty and seventy days in the year, and, as a general rule, there is not enough rainfall in the region to counteract the high summer temperatures. This fact has clearly influenced the agriculture of western Andalusia, particularly as, in the medieval period, irrigation seems not to have been developed to the same extent as in, for example, the kingdom of Valencia, on Spain's east coast. The Córdoba region is not, however, a geographical unity. It may be divided into three areas, each of which assumed distinct economic, and even political, characteristics, in the late Middle Ages.

The mountain system which forms the natural boundary of Andalusia, to the north of the Guadalquivir, comes close to Córdoba in the shape of one of its lesser chains, the Sierra de Córdoba. The Cathedral is, at 107 metres, over 400 metres below the hill known as the Cerro de las Ermitas, five kilometres away. To the north of the Sierra de Córdoba lies the region known as the Pedroches.

The geographical characteristics of the Pedroches are more akin to those of La Mancha, to the north, than to those of the rest of Andalusia. The climate is dry, especially in the summer, and the prevailing winds come from the north and north-east. The entire plateau is at a height of about 600 metres, with peaks rising to nearly 1000 metres. The natural vegetation varies according to the height of the land. On the highest ground, known as monte alto , the main plant is the holm-oak, or ilex (encina), producing acorns in profusion. After this, the most common is the coscoja, which was used as a dye-stuff by the Romans and Arabs, and there are also some cork-oaks. The vegetation of the lower ground, the monte bajo, consists of strawberry-trees (madroño), rosemary, white heather and other mountain plants. Oleanders are to be found beside the streams. Thickets are scattered over the area and consist mainly of cistus (jara), surrounded by gorse, broom and lavender. There are also meadows, in which wild oats, white clover and lucern grow. The Arab name for the Pedroches was Fahs al-Bollut, or the plain of acorns (in Castilian, bellotas). The twelfth-century Arab writer Edrisi refers to holm-oaks as the main vegetation in the area and states that the inhabitants found the acorns particularly useful in years of scarcity. ⁽³⁾

Agriculture seems to have made little impression on the natural state of the Pedroches, either in the Middle Ages or in more recent times. Most of the area remains forested, in the form of monte alto alto or [3] thickets (chaparrales). Until the nineteenth century, the seven towns of the Pedroches, Villa Pedroche, Alcaracejos, Añora, Torremilano, Pozoblanco, Torrecampo and Villanueva de Córdoba, which were all subject to the jurisdiction of Córdoba, held their municipal lands in common. These consisted of dehesas, which in this area were generally fenced-in parts of the monte alto. Further to the north and west, in the region of Gahete and Hinojosa, Guijo, El Viso, Santa Eufemia and Chillón, the use of land was similar. The soil is generally sandy and does not encourage cultivation, which means that although subsistence crops of wheat, barley, beans and vines were grown, the predominant activity in the Pedroches was the rearing of livestock on the monte altos and in the dehesas. The most intensively cultivated lands were the ruedos, which immediately surrounded the centres of population. The best land might be cultivated every other year (año y vez), but most would only support crops every third or fourth year. Cultivation was generally by the method known as rozas, which involved broadcasting seed over a wide area and covering it by means of a ploughshare. The land was burnt in August, after harvesting, and left for the next sowing. The technique had a disastrous effect on the chaparrales which found themselves in the path of the flames, but the crops produced were apparently adequate.

However, the greatest scourge of crops in the Pedroches was not the rozas, although the damage they caused to the wood and fruit of the natural vegetation was unfortunate, but rather the depredations of livestock. All towns found it necessary to protect their cultivators with ordinances, forbidding flocks to enter vineyards, olive-groves, gardens and orchards (huertas) and other cultivated ground, but the extent of stock-breeding activity to the north of Córdoba made it particularly difficult to satisfy the conflicting interests of graziers and agriculturalists. The 1435 ordinances of Córdoba contain a long section, entitled La corta e quema (cutting and burning), which referred to the town council's duty to protect both the monte altos and the cultivated areas in the Sierra de Córdoba. The 1500 ordinances of Torremilano refer specifically to vines, which were apparently suffering from the incursion of all kinds of livestock. Owners were fond of bringing their flocks to the vineyards when the grapes were on the vines and feeding them to their dogs. All ordinances on this subject were phrased in a similar way, allowing cultivators to exact fines on the spot from offenders, according to a set scale of charges. In Torremilano, money fines were laid down, but Córdoba revised its own ordinances in 1478, specifying as a penalty [4] the confiscation of one-fifth of the flock concerned, the quinta de los ganados. In each case, magistrates and council officials were ordered to support cultivators in applying the law. ⁽⁴⁾

Further to the south, the valley of the Guadiato is more fertile, providing Belmez and Fuente Obejuna with pasture, vineyards and arable land. To the south-east, towards Espiel, the valley becomes narrower and more rocky, as it begins to cut through the Sierra. The extensive modern municipal territory of Espiel contained some olives and fruit-trees, but consisted largely of monte bajo, on rough, stony soil. This is even more true of Obejo, which is 700 metres up in the mountains, between the Cuzna and Guadalquivir valleys. In this area, cultivation has always been a problem because of the large area of barren rock, but there is some evidence of pasture, probably consisting of monte bajo.

The asperity of the Sierra Morena gave the region to the north of Córdoba a very different character from the valley of the Guadalquivir. Towns to the north of this mountain wall have in the past had a tendency to look as much to the Campo de Calatrava and the north as to Córdoba, the mother town of the Pedroches. However, some of the valley towns have far more land in the mountains than in the plain, because of the Sierra's proximity to the river. Hornachuelos, for example, still has a vast territory, which consists, apart from some fertile land on the Bembezar and Guadalquivir, of a large area of holm-oaks, dehesas and monte bajo, as found further north. The same may be said of the neighbouring lands of Posadas and Almodóvar del Río, which consisted largely of monte alto alto and monte alto bajo. There was also arable cultivation, with some dehesas, and some vines, olive-groves, fruit-trees and gardens in the river valley. To the east of Córdoba, the picture in Adamuz, Villafranca and Montoro is similar. Although Montoro is on the left bank of the Guadalquivir, most of its land lies to the north and in the nineteenth century three-quarters of this was still monte bajo, including holm-oaks and pines. ⁽⁵⁾

As might be expected, the area immediately surrounding Córdoba is better documented in local archives than many of the more distant parts. Columbus's son, Hernando Colón, in his 'Itinerary' (Itinerario), states that he saw huertas around the city, in which oranges, lemons and other fruit were grown, and vineyards to the west and north. ⁽⁶⁾ It appears [6] from contemporary documents that a great many vines were grown on the south-facing slopes of the mountains to the north of Córdoba, particularly around Santa María de Trassierra. Vineyard properties generally also contained olive-groves and often a huerta. There would be presses for the olives and grapes and bodegas for storage. The intense cultivation of fruit and vegetables in the immediate vicinity of Córdoba was a survival of the rich agriculture which had supported the city in Muslim times. There were huertas on both banks of the river and also in the city itself, where they were frequently sold with houses. Just outside the walls were market-gardens, which supplied the population with a wide range of fruit and vegetables. ⁽⁷⁾

The Campiña, to the south of Córdoba, stretches as far as the Sierras of Lucena, Cabra, Rute and Priego. The countryside here is undulating and has a very different character from the Sierra and the north. As in the Pedroches, arable and pastoral use of most land alternated. Generally, grain was grown every third year, the land then remaining fallow for a year as barbechos, with a year of use as pasture to follow. According to Colón, the Campiña was primarily a grain-producing area by the early sixteenth century, though there were also important concentrations of vines and olives, especially around La Rambla and Santaella. There were huertas in the valley of the Guadajoz, near Castro del Río. Dehesas were not mentioned by Colón, but they clearly existed, both to provide grazing for plough-animals and for stockraising, in the territories of Guadalcázar, Santaella, Fernán Núñez, Montemayor, Castro and Monturque. The uniform character of agriculture in the Campiña was somewhat altered at its southern extreme, where the mountains begin to rise. As in the towns on the Guadalquivir, the type of cultivation varied from valley to mountain slope. On the flatter lands, for example in the valleys of the Guadajoz and Río de Cabra, vines and olive-trees could be grown, while the hills around Aguilar, Alcaudete, Baena and Cabra were partly barren and partly made up of dehesas. The southernmost extreme of Córdoba's influence, the area around Luque, Zuheros, Priego and Iznájar, is quite distinct from the Campiña. Some land in this area was cultivated with grain, olives or vines, but much of it is too rocky. Each town was provided with dehesas on the mountain slopes. The one fertile part of this southern fringe is the territory of Lucena, which includes some of [6] the Campiña and the valley of the Genil, with its orchards, arable land, olives and vines.
 

As Angus MacKay has recently suggested, there are two themes which help to explain much of the history of the medieval Iberian kingdoms. One of these is the Reconquest, which provided a unique spur to action and factor in social development from the moment of the Muslim invasion in 711 until the surrender of Granada in 1492. The other is the more subtle process whereby, during the superficially chaotic and meaningless fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Spanish kingdoms, and particularly the Crown of Castile, developed the institutions and the political and religious uniformity which were to provide the basis for Spanish imperial expansion in the sixteenth century. ⁽⁸⁾

The cataclysmic event which determined the future development of the whole structure of western Andalusian settlement, cultivation and social relations was the thirteenth-century Reconquest. In the case of Córdoba, this mighty happening took place more or less by accident. It seems that in 1236 some non-Muslim bandits, or almogávares, who lived in the Sierra to the north, made contact, as was often their practice, with the highly mixed population of the Ajarquía, the eastern walled division of the Muslim city of Córdoba, this time securing control of it. The religious and administrative quarter, the Medina, held out for some time, but the 'official' armies of Ferdinand III of Castile and León were called in almost as an afterthought. One consequence of the haphazard way in which the city fell was that many areas to the north, in fact the home of the almogávares, took a number of years longer to conquer. ⁽⁹⁾

The course of the conquest of the city of Córdoba and the process whereby it and its kingdom were first settled have been established satisfactorily by Julio González. ⁽¹⁰⁾ In the initial stages, the city was vacated by its existing population, but the surrounding countryside, particularly the Campiña, remained in Muslim hands. The actual conquistadores were on the whole more interested in going home to the north than in settling in Andalusia. Nonetheless, the word soon spread and Córdoba rapidly filled to overflowing, with the result that problems of housing and nourishment quickly arose. The need to expand into the countryside became imperative, but it took four years for the Christians to gain control over the Campiña. This was done largely by means of [7] pacts, which allowed all Muslims who wished to stay to retain their own law-officers, mosques and property, while the Christian settlers took over all fortifications and shared out the rents and lands of the fugitives. Very little Christian settlement in fact took place in the Campiña until the Muslim revolts of 1264 put an end to the pacts and the area to the south of Córdoba became the defensive frontier of Christendom against the Moors, known as the banda fronteriza or banda morisca. ⁽¹¹⁾

Study of the thirteenth-century settlement of the kingdom of Córdoba is hampered by the lack of the original document of repartimiento, whereby the Castilian Crown allocated the conquered lands to their new inhabitants. Nonetheless, an ecclesiastical tithe-book of 1364, the Libro de las Tablas, gives a fairly clear idea of what happened in the Campiña, though not in Córdoba itself, and the procedure of repartimiento can be described by analogy with that of Seville, which was conquered in 1248 and where full documentation survives. As in the earlier stages of the Reconquest, there was no doubt in contemporaries' minds that the absolute priority was colonisation. Land should not go to waste and the vanished or evicted Muslims should have no chance to return to it. In Córdoba, Ferdinand III set up a commission of partidores immediately, in 1236. Donations of lands and urban properties to individuals, such as members of the Court and royal family, began in 1237 and continued up to 1244. The Church was set up at the same time, with grants of newly conquered lands. Some people probably occupied the largely urban property which they had seized when the city was first captured in 1236, but most waited for the grants made by the royal partidores before moving in. ⁽¹²⁾

Clearly fundamental to any consideration of Cordoban society after the Reconquest is the size and nature of the area's population. The first problem is to discover what happened to its Muslim inhabitants. It is very difficult to say more than has already been stated, that the existing rural population largely remained until the failure of the revolt of 1264 and then emigrated, either to the kingdom of Granada or to North Africa. In the city itself, there is evidence that, after an initial expulsion, certain specialized artisans, particularly building-workers, were reimported to continue plying their trade. Nonetheless, it is clear that Christian settlement took place between 1236 and 1264 in an entirely, or almost entirely, vacant city and a largely vacant countryside, though the latter took until after 1264 to clear, if it ever was completely cleared, of Muslims. The cautionary phrase is needed because this question is still an open one. Clearly the fate of the rural population of [8] the Muslim kingdom of Córdoba is a matter of some importance, yet extraordinarily little is known about those who worked this land, as opposed to those who held it, in the late Middle Ages. Had there been a massive emigration, it would obviously have been to Granada and North Africa, but there is little or no information available at present about the arrival of exiles in these two areas. In the case of Granada, there is little hope of more coming to light on the spot, but private libraries in North Africa may eventually provide a solution to the problem. There is evidence that even in the nineteenth century some lands in the Campiña had still not been cultivated since the thirteenth century Reconquest, though they had been before. It is possible that at least some of the rural population, which was in any case a mixture of Celtic, Gothic, Berber and several other strains and had changed its religion more than once before to suit new conquerors, did in fact remain in the countryside. The absence of documentation makes it impossible to establish to what extent the rural population changed in composition and to what extent it declined as a result of the Christian conquest of Córdoba, though it is undeniable that both phenomena occurred.

How successful was the resettlement? In recent years, Andalusian historians have begun to question Vicens Vives' judgement on the attractiveness of the region to settlers in the thirteenth century, pointing to a crisis in the resettlement which began almost immediately. In fact, Ramón Carande long ago noticed that royal documents of Alfonso X begin as early as 1255 to refer to the departure, and hence the shortage, of settlers, in the case of Seville. ⁽¹³⁾ However, the main advocates of the view that the settlement of Andalusia was in large part a failure, at least in the initial stages, are Manuel González Jiménez and Antonio Collantes de Terán. It now appears that it was never very easy to attract settlers to Andalusia and that the efforts which were made received a severe setback in the Muslim uprisings of 1261-6. Grave economic difficulties were a feature of the whole of Castile from the middle to the end of the thirteenth century and were reflected in the unsuccessful price-control measures of the Cortes of Valladolid in 1258 and Jerez in 1268. A demographic decline in Castile at this time cannot be proved but is in any case not necessary to explain the unwillingness of settlers to move to Andalusia. The danger of Muslim attack and the difficulty of occupying assets which had only recently been vacated by an enemy population were no doubt powerful deterrents ⁽¹⁴⁾

The pattern of late medieval demographic trends in Andalusia is gradually emerging. Thanks to the difficulties of settlement in the mid- and late thirteenth century, the Andalusian population was in a weak position to face the general European demographic crisis in the first half of the fourteenth century. While not particularly affected by the famine of 1315-17, Castile, including Andalusia, suffered major famines and shortages in 1310, 1315 and particularly between 1343 and 1346. ⁽¹⁵⁾ No sound figures are available for the effect of the Black Death on Castile, though it was clearly great in many areas However, Andalusian patterns of population change, as reflected in deserted villages, have many interesting features. According to Manuel González's figures, which amplify those published by Cabrillana in 1965, the number of villages abandoned in the kingdom of Seville was thirty-eight in the thirteenth century, only eleven in the fourteenth, and thirty-three in the fifteenth and sixteenth. Unfortunately, Cabrillana's figures for the kingdom of Córdoba were compiled from eighteenth-century documents and cannot be dated to any particular century, though the total mentioned, for what it is worth, is thirty-two. If documentary evidence for deserted villages is poor, archaeological evidence is virtually unexplored. ⁽¹⁶⁾

It appears, however, that in Andalusia only limited settlement, with setbacks, took place in the thirteenth century, while losses in the fourteenth century were counteracted by a fairly sizable effort at resettlement. The evidence available so far is for the kingdom of Seville. Manuel González has discovered about twenty-five new settlements, mostly to the west of Seville, in the rich, olive-growing area known as the Aljarafe. However, it seems unlikely that this movement was caused by an increase in the overall population of the kingdom of Seville. It was probably the result of pressures on land-use and on the economic situation of landlords. Similar new settlements in the kingdom of Seville in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, a total of twenty-two cases, have been described by Antonio Collantes. ⁽¹⁷⁾ These later settlements, however, while also apparently taking their population from among the existing inhabitants of the region, do seem to have happened during a period of demographic advance in Andalusia, which began in the early fifteenth century and probably involved considerable immigration from the rest of the Peninsula, at least to the developing port of Seville. As far as the distribution of population is concerned, the figures [10] of Vicens Vives and his disciple, Sobrequés, have been reduced by recent research on the basis of padrones, or lists of urban tax-payers, in the case of Seville, where Collantes has found 2613 vecinos, or citizen heads of household, in 1384, 4893 in 1426-51, 6896 in 1483-9 and 9161 in 1533, totals which cannot approach Sobrequés' estimate of 75,000 inhabitants in the late fifteenth century. ⁽¹⁸⁾

The padrones for Córdoba do not survive, so that the only source for the population figures of the kingdom of Córdoba is the later fiscal census of 1530, which has been studied by Emilio Cabrera. ⁽¹⁹⁾ Using Cabrera's coefficient of 4.5 for the number in each household, although as he rightly points out the figure was probably higher, for example 5.0 or 5.5, in rural areas, the total of 33,417 vecinos recorded in the 1530 census would amount to approximately 150,000 people. The Córdoba evidence, although from a slightly later period, does confirm Ladero's suggestion that Sobrequés and others have tended to underestimate the importance of middle-sized and smaller centres of population. ⁽²⁰⁾ The city of Córdoba itself had 5845 vecinos in 1530. The next largest town, Baena, had 1467 and the other larger centres of population -- Bujalance, La Rambla, Fuente Obejuna, Pedroche, Priego, Montilla, Aguilar, Cabra and Lucena -- had between 1,100 and 1,500 vecinos, apart from the estimated figure of 2000 for Lucena, where no padrón was provided. ⁽²¹⁾ Whatever the inadequacies of the evidence, this Andalusian demographic pattern -- a resettlement crisis in the late thirteenth century, a small advance with setbacks in the fourteenth, and a fairly steady surge in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries -- makes an interesting comparison with the better-known trends in the rest of Europe, where the demographic crisis is generally placed in the fourteenth century and where the recovery is on the whole later than in this region.

The question of land-holding in Andulusia after the Reconquest inevitably involves a discussion of latifundia, which are often supposed to be a Roman feature which survived both the Muslim and the Christian conquests. If, however, the break-up of social structures at the Reconquest in the thirteenth century was in fact as complete as has been suggested up to now, it may be presumed that the development of latifundia was a consequence of the repartimiento of that period. For the structure of land-tenure as the partidores left it in the mid-thirteenth century, the González model, based mainly on Seville and to [11] a lesser extent on Jerez, Ecija, Carmona and Córdoba, is the only satisfactory one. As a general rule, all lands were in the hands of the king. When he disposed of them, not all conquistadores received grants and not all recipients of grants were conquistadores. González divides the grants of rural property into two main categories. The first, the donadíos, were grants made to those who were obliged, as king's vassals (vasallos del Rey) to aid him in the Reconquest. A donadío was effectively a special jurisdiction, whose possessor had complete freedom of disposal, though the larger grants carried the requirement that the holder should not absent himself without leaving a military substitute. The recipient was normally a nobleman. The second category, the heredamientos, were redistributed portions of donadíos, normally granted to settlers who were not the king's personal vassals, in return for certain obligations and services. The size of these two kinds of property varied, but the donadío was very much the larger and could consist of more than one alquería or farmstead. Thus González sees it as the precursor of the latifundium. Valuable property such as vineyards or fruit-orchards, which was available in smaller quantities, was normally only included in donadíos. ⁽²²⁾

Nonetheless, Julio González's work on Seville and later research on Seville, Carmona and Córdoba has shown that, despite the size and significance of donadíos in the Reconquest settlement, there was always considerable room for small and medium-sized holdings. Indeed, the fourteenth-century resettlement in the kingdom of Seville seems to have helped to create a new group of small peasant cultivators, juridically free and with the usufruct (derecho útil) of the land concerned, without being subject to any form of contract involving short-term, or ground rent. ⁽²³⁾ Much of this settlement took place in the heavily commercialised olive- and vine-growing region of the Aljarafe. Developments here may not have been typical of the region as a whole, as the more general trend in the kingdom of Seville in the late Middle Ages, described by Collantes, is a gradual and fairly continuous concentration of land in the hands of a small number of great landowners. In other words, the latifundium was there from the start, in the form of the donadío, but it only gradually became the normal form of land-holding in western Andalusia in the period up to and beyond 1500. ⁽²⁴⁾ Thus while latifundia increasingly dominated the scene in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially with the development of the mayorazgo, or entail, as a means of keeping together the lands of noble families, smaller estates also flourished, though they were less frequent near the larger [12] centres of population. Nonetheless, in the early sixteenth century, forty one per cent of the vecinos of Carmona still owned some land, and small properties were particularly common in recently settled areas. The letting of land by major landowners, ecclesiastical or secular, for ground-rent (censos) was common, providing an opportunity for the small cultivator to retain considerable control over his land, including the right to dispose of it to designated heirs. Share-cropping (medianería or aparcería) and complantación, in which a peasant agreed to cultivate a lord's land within a certain period and thereafter shared the plot equally with the lord, were methods whereby landless peasants could become cultivators. ⁽²⁵⁾

These generalisations need to be tested in specific cases. Various examples from the region of Andalusia will be considered here, while the Córdoba evidence will be studied in greater detail in later chapters. Collantes describes the typical latifundium in the kingdom of Seville in the fifteenth century as a large property exploited as a unity -- a hacienda if used for olives and vines and a cortijo if used for cereals. The commercialised olive-growing haciendas tended to have more buildings and to remain under the lord's direct exploitation. Vines were normally cultivated on the same estates as olives and facilities for the pressing and storage of wine and oil were included in each property. Typical latifundia of the Seville aristocracy were of eight- or nine hundred fanegas (480-540 hectares) of arable and two-hundred or more aranzadas (73.4 hectares) of vines or olive-groves. Some enclosed pasture, or dehesa, was set aside for plough-oxen on predominantly arable estates. The labour-force was normally paid in cash and much of it was hired for particular seasonal tasks, such as ploughing and harvesting, on the basis of contracts which detailed conditions of work, the days and hours to be worked and the methods of payment. Contracts with gañanes, or workers on arable properties, specffied the area to be covered, in the case of ploughing. The olive-harvesters were known as cogedores and were often women, organised into squads under a cuadrillero. Whole families sometimes went harvesting and ages might range from fifteen (or even twelve) to sixty. Normally, they arrived in the Seville area during the octave either before or after All Saints' Day and any who left early had to be replaced at the expense of the defaulter. The teams of olive-harvesters generally came from Extremadura, to the north. Target quantities were set of olives to be picked and if these were not achieved the deficit generally had to be made up in the following year. ⁽²⁶⁾

[13] No figures for the relative numbers of latifundia and smaller estates are available for Seville. In Carmona, on the other hand, quite detailed information on rural property-ownership is provided by the tax-returns (padrones) of 1508-20. It has already been noted that over forty-one per cent of the vecinos of Carmona owned some olives or vines and the great majority of these were small properties. In the padrones of 1508-11, 293 owners of olive-groves had less than five aranzadas (1.84 hectares) each, while eighty-six had more. In the case of vineyards, the figures were 418 with less than five aranzadas and only fourteen with more. The picture with arable land is very different, however. According to notarial documents and padrones, most of the arable in the vega, the fertile area south of Carmona, was in the hands of ecciesiastics, convents, charitable institutions, officials of the royal government or noblemen. The majority of these came from outside Carmona and rented their lands to colonos (similar to Roman coloni) or share-croppers (aparceros) who were vecinos of Carmona. According to the padrones of 1508-11, nearly all the owners of arable who were citizens of Carmona were either town councillors or their relatives. However, they too had an 'absentee' attitude to their lands, generally cultivating them not directly but through share-croppers. Slightly later figures, from the 1535 padrón, give some idea of the predominance which had been achieved by outsiders as absentee landlords of the arable of Carmona. In that year, outsiders received 18,730 fanegas of wheat and barley as rent, while vecinos received only 7172 (1/2) fanegas. Thus over seventy per cent of cereal rents in Carmona in that year went to absentee outsiders. ⁽²⁷⁾

It will become clear later that land-holding in the neighbouring kingdom of Córdoba was similarly organised, but the reasons why this situation developed cannot be understood without reference to the political structure of western Andalusia as it developed after the Reconquest. The distribution of political power in the region between the Crown and local influences depended for the rest of the medieval period on the decisions taken in the early days by Ferdinand III and Alfonso X.

As a basic principle, the Crown rewarded those who had helped in the military campaigns, not only with lands, but also, in some cases, [14] with jurisdiction over towns and villages in the area. The remaining territory continued to be directly subject to the Crown. These royal lands were called realengo, while those granted to nobles or ecclesiastical corporations were known as señoríos. The legal and historical development of the concept of señorío in the Crown of Castile is of considerable importance and interest. It depended on the acceptance in all Castilian law-codes of the principle, in family law, that a father had the right to undisputed supremacy over his son. The Visigothic Fuero Juzgo, which became the charter (fuero) of the royal towns of Andalusia after the Reconquest, gave children no property rights while their parents were alive, though the parents had the right to punish them in the event of a 'great offence or great dishonour'. ⁽²⁸⁾ Alfonso X's Siete Partidas, which owed much to the laws of Justinian, justified the father's power and lordship (poder et señorío) over his son by reference to the superiority implicit in the original act of conception and to the debt which the son owed to his father because he would one day inherit his property. ⁽²⁹⁾ This principle was easily extended from the family to society as a whole. Since late Roman times, Spanish society had been divided, like that of most of western Europe, into two basic categories -- the nobles, who had wealth and power, and the peasants, who of right had little or none. Churches and monasteries, which owned extensive lands, were treated as seniores, or part of the nobility.

The manner in which Andalusia was reconquered ensured that the majority of the population would be dependent from the start on the small military group which carried out the essential military activity. When the Christian settlers arrived from the north in towns such as Córdoba and Seville, they found the land already allocated to various noblemen or to ecclesiastical corporations, such as cathedrals or military orders, particularly the Templars and the knights of Calatrava. Two kinds of señorío may be distinguished in late medieval Andalusia. One of these is the contemporary Castilian version of the well-known 'feudal' relationship between the lord and his vassal. As elsewhere, a man might become the vasallo of a señor in order to obtain military and legal protection, in return for his personal service. By the fifteenth century, vassals of this kind were generally rewarded by the payment of retainers, known as acostamientos, by their lords. It was possible for a subject to enter into this kind of arrangement with the king and some Andalusian nobles became vasallosdelRey, which meant that the king had the first call on their services in time of war and that they were more committed to him than his other subjects. Leading nobles also [15] had vasallos to whom they paid acostamientos and such links were an important part of politics in the region. ⁽³⁰⁾

The vast majority of Andalusians, including those who lived in areas of señorío, were not, however, vasallos in this sense. In the central Middle Ages, the southward movement of conquest and resettlement had produced the concept of 'territorial lordship', in which when land was granted to a lord by the king its inhabitants automatically became that lord's vassals, although they had no personal feudal ties with him. In the later period, territorial lordship was commonly replaced, at least in the south, by 'jurisdictional lordship', whereby the conditions under which the inhabitants held or worked their lands remained unaltered when a señorío was created. Instead, the lord simply replaced the Crown as the local authority in administration and justice. The lord might be granted a specific number of vasallos when he received his señorío, but these would only be a minority of its population, like the vasallos del Rey in realengo. In these circumstances, it is clear that those who worked the land in a señorío did not necessarily owe feudal services and dues to its lord, but whether they were legally 'free' or not, their status was extremely low. Roman law, enshrined in the Partidas, equated those who settled on the land, the pobladores, with serfs (siervos), though this applied to realengo as well as señorío.

However, if Roman law strengthened the power of the lord over his jurisdictional vassals, its primary purpose in Castile was to establish the supremacy of the royal prerogative. One of the main features of medieval Castilian legislation was the perpetual conflict between laws which strengthened the royal government and those which conceded extensive powers to lords. Roman law was a two-edged weapon in the hands of the king, because while it guaranteed his sovereignty over the kingdom, this very fact allowed him effectively to give away large parts of his inheritance in señorío to nobles, while at the same time protesting that he was preserving his kingdom in entail (mayorazgo) for his heirs. The Cortes, representing the nobility, the Church and burgesses, tried on many occasions, notably in 1442, to limit grants of señorío to cases of 'great and urgent necessity', but the royal jurists countered their laws with others, such as the regalist Ordenamiento of Alcalá in 1348, which reaffirmed the statement in the Partidas that the king was free to grant any centre of population or castle to an ecclesiastical corporation or private individual, as long as he reserved the right to make peace and war in the territory concerned and provided that its inhabitants had the right of appeal to his supreme courts. ⁽³¹⁾

[16] The powers which a lord was granted when he received a señorío were always precisely defined in the document concerned. Under the Trastámaras, grants were made in accordance with the king's claim to absolute sovereignty over the whole kingdom. The Partidas asserted that the monarch's title was of divine origin and gave him the mission of administering justice throughout the realm and of commanding its armies. Because the title was hereditary, the kingdom partook of the character of private property. However, the old laws, which preceded the Partidas, still limited his power. The sovereign could change fueros if it was in the interest of the kingdom to do so, but this did not alter the fact that he had to swear, after receiving the allegiance of the procuradores of the Cortes, to observe the older versions. ⁽³²⁾ The royal claim to 'civil and criminal jurisdiction in all the cities and towns of his kingdoms and lordships' meant that a lord could never consider himself entirely free, within his señorío, of the royal law and its officers. The Crown insisted that just as nobles had right of access to the king's supreme tribunal, the royal council (concejo real), so should the inhabitants of señoríos, though their cases were to be heard in the first instance by the local magistrates, the alcaldes de su fuero, appointed by the lord according to the provisions of the local charter. ⁽³³⁾ The Crown reserved to itself, however, the hearing in the first instance of certain types of case, as an attribute of royal sovereignty. These were murder, rape, the breaking of treaties, the burning of houses, damage to highways, treason (traición), treachery (aleve), challenges or threats (rieptos) and cases involving widows, orphans and people in extreme poverty (personas miserables). The Partidas had included the forgery of money and the royal seal in this list of offences, but they were omitted by Montalvo, perhaps in error. ⁽³⁴⁾

The standard formula by which the Crown granted a jurisdictional lordship to a nobleman in the later Middle Ages referred to 'civil and criminal, high and low jurisdiction, mero y mixto imperio'. The Latin phrase came from Roman law, in which imperium merum was the complete power of a magistrate to settle criminal cases, called 'justice of blood' in Castilian, according to the sixteenth-century commentator Gregorio López. Imperium mixtum was the equivalent jurisdiction in civil cases. Apart from seignorial vassals' right of appeal to the royal tribunals, there was another limitation on the mero y mixto imperio which the lord received with the grant of a jurisdictional lordship. This was the right of royal officials to enter the señorío at any time, without the lord's permission, and administer justice in the king's name, [17] if the Crown had any reason to believe that there was an inadequacy (mengua) in the justice given by the lord or his agents. This could be done even without a previous complaint by a litigant to the Crown. A lord was also forbidden to give sanctuary to those fleeing from royal justice, though the enforcement of this law, like so many others, depended on the strength of the Crown's resolution at any given moment. ⁽³⁵⁾ The Crown could grant señoríos without jurisdiction, but this became increasingly rare in the fifteenth century.

The delegation of administrative powers by the Crown to señores was authorised by the Partidas. The most important of these powers was the right to appoint magistrates and other officials in the same way as the king or the local community named them in royal towns. A typical fifteenth-century case was the grant to Don Diego López Pacheco, second marquis of Villena, of the señorío of Serón and Tijola (Almería) by the Catholic Monarchs, after the conquest of Granada, with the power to name the magistrates (justicia), the escribanos, or notaries, and the constables (alguaciles) of the two towns. ⁽³⁶⁾

It was also possible for lords to obtain some share of taxation revenue in their señoríos which would otherwise have gone to the Crown. As in the case of jurisdiction, the Cortes fought to prevent this alienation of part of the royal patrimony. It was agreed that certain regalian rights, including some tributos and the coining of money, could not be alienated, but the Cortes admitted that the king could in other cases give the benefit of his rents to a private individual or delegate the power of collection to a lord. The difference between these concessions and an outright alienation was not in practice very great. ⁽³⁷⁾ The Cortes' claim to control such grants was based on the law which forbade their proclamation without that assembly's consent. ⁽³⁸⁾ However, just as the Cortes failed to stop the grant of señoríos, so it also proved incapable of preventing the transfer of royal revenues, with complete legality, to private individuals. The conditions of such alienations were complex and reflected the chaotic state of the royal finances in the fifteenth century. In the case of some taxes, both the revenues and the power of collection remained with the Crown, while in other cases the lord was given power to collect on behalf of the Crown, and in others again, the revenue itself was granted to the lord as well. As an additional complication, it was also possible for a lord to obtain the revenue of a tax without a royal grant, by 'prescriptive right'. The concept of immemorial possession was received into Castile in its Roman law form. It was defined as one hundred years of 'quiet and peaceful possession [18] without any contradiction'. In this way an individual could obtain a normal attribute of the sovereign, such as the power to collect a tax or even the possession of a whole señorío. ⁽³⁹⁾

When the Crown divided the reconquered lands of the kingdoms of Seville and Córdoba into realengo and señorío, it retained control of the main towns, notably Córdoba, Ecija, Carmona, Seville and Jerez de la Frontera. Each of these was given extensive lands, which, in the cases of Seville and Córdoba, contained other lesser towns and villages which were made subject to the new city councils. These outlying areas were known as the tierra or término of the town concerned. That of Seville was by far the largest. It originally stretched for about 240 km, both from north to south and from east to west, and it contained about 135 towns and villages. The majority of these had been lost by the end of the fifteenth century, but sixty still remained subject to Seville council. In the case of Córdoba, the delineation of the alfoz, or tierra, began at the order of Ferdinand III on l0 March 1241, concentrating on the southern boundary, which was still a frontier zone and to remain so for a considerable period. The precise positions of the seven boundary marks (mojones) which were then established cannot be discovered, but they spread from the Córdoba -- Andújar road in a rough semi-circle to a point west of the Guadajoz. The area covered was approximately half of the modern province and all of it was subject to Córdoba's fuero as realengo. ⁽⁴⁰⁾

Almost at once, however, the alienation of land began and, as a result of this process, the territory which remained subject to Córdoba in the early years of the Catholic Monarchs was only a small proportion of that granted by Ferdinand HI in 1241. While the castles of Almodóvar del Río, Chillón, Obejo and Santa Eufemia and the towns, castles and lands, including silver-mines, of Gahete (from 1466 Belalcázar) and Pedroche were given to Córdoba in 1242, other territory was given to the military order of Calatrava, which had played a prominent part in the Reconquest. In the later thirteenth century, Córdoba made several gains. In 1264 it received Posadas (del Rey), which was constituted a town (villa) at the same time, and in the following year Santaella was added. Sancho IV incorporated Baena, Luque and Zuheros into Córdoba's término in 1293. ⁽⁴¹⁾ Nonetheless, the practice of alienating towns from the royal jurisdiction, having become established in the early days, caused a gradual decline in the number of towns included in the tierra. The process was not absolutely irreversible. In 1258, for example, Alfonso X restored to Córdoba the town of Cabra, which had [19] been granted by Ferdinand III to his uncle, Don Rodrigo Alfonso de León, adelantado de la frontera (governor of the frontier). ⁽⁴²⁾ However, there was a pronounced general trend towards the dismemberment of the royal patrimony. In the long run, Cabra was no exception. For some time it was in the hands of the order of Calatrava, then, in 1342, it was returned to Córdoba by Alfonso XI. The Trastámaras alienated it yet again and in 1439 it was given by John II to Diego Fernández de Córdoba, third lord of Baena.

The will of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, first lord of Aguilar in the house of Córdoba, dated 15 December 1379, indicates the extent of the losses that Córdoba had already sustained by then. The former royal possessions which were included in the family estates were the villas of Aguilar and Priego and the lugares (lesser places) of Castillo Anzur, Montilla and Cañete. ⁽⁴³⁾ In addition, Villafranca was given to the order of Calatrava in 1377, Baena was alienated by Henry II in 1386 and Zuheros by John II. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ During the fourteenth century, Santa Eufemia was lost as well. However, it was in the fifteenth century that Córdoba experienced its greatest difficulties in preserving its término. Despite his promise, at the Cortes of Valladolid in 1442, to keep the royal patrimony intact, John II granted two of Córdoba's subject towns, Gahete and Hinojosa, to the master of the military order of Alcßntara, Don Gutierre de Sotomayor. Henry IV gave Fuente Obejuna and Belmez to the master of Calatrava, Don Pedro Girón. Both succeeded in making these grants into personal possessions, which could be inherited by their families. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

Córdoba council had previously caused the king to abandon an attempt to grant Fuente Obejuna and Belmez to Don Gutierre de Sotomayor and in 1465 it was able, as a result of the exigencies of the civil war in Castile, to persuade Henry to revoke the grant to Don Pedro Girón, but in 1468, Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, comendador mayor (chief commander) of Calatrava, seized the two towns while Córdoba was distracted by internal disturbances. In April 1476, Fuente Obejuna returned to Córdoba's jurisdiction after a revolt in which the comendador mayor was murdered. It remained in Córdoba's hands until 1557, when it was sold by the Crown to Don Leopoldo de Austria, bishop of Córdoba. However, the order of Calatrava did not give up without a fight and Córdoba's possession was contested in a series of legal actions in secular and ecclesiastical courts which ended in a compromise, arrived at by the two parties on 6 October 1513, whereby Fuente Obejuna remained subject to Córdoba, but the order received [20] compensation of 30,000 ducats, to be paid half by the Crown, which was by this time administering the goods of the order of Calatrava in any case, and half by Córdoba itself. ⁽⁴⁶⁾

Despite these losses, Córdoba retained control over many places during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. The royal possessions may be divided into three main areas, the valley of the Guadalquivir, the Sierra and the north, and the Campiña. In the river valley, Córdoba had jurisdiction over Hornachuelos, Pefiaflor, Posadas, Almodóvar del Río, Alcolea, Pedro Abad, Adamuz, Montoro and Aldea (now Villa) del Río. North of the valley, the remaining royal possessions were Santa María de Trassierra, Obejo, Fuente Obejuna, Alcaracejos, Pozoblanco, Torremilano (now, with the seignorial quarter, Torrefranca, known as Dos Torres), Añora, Pedroche (then known as Villa Pedroche), Villanueva de Córdoba (known as the lugar of Enzina until 1499) and Torrecampo. South of the Guadalquivir, Córdoba's tierra included Bujalance, Castro del Río, Castro Viejo (now a depopulated site near Bujalance), Villar, La Rambla and Santaella.

Some of the señoríos in late medieval Andalusia were in the possession of the Castilian military orders -- Santiago, Calatrava, Alcántara and St John -- which had large holdings elsewhere in the kingdom. However, western Andalusia was not a great source of strength to the orders, in comparison with areas which had been conquered earlier, such as Calatrava's territory in La Mancha and Santiago's empire on the Portuguese frontier to the north of Seville. Apart from Fuente Obejuna, which was lost in 1476, and Belmez, the only major possessions of the order of Calatrava in the kingdom of Córdoba were its commandery at Córdoba itself, including arable lands, and another at Villafranca de Córdoba, after 1377. The other orders, Santiago, Alcántara and St John, had no possessions at all in the kingdom of Córdoba. ⁽⁴⁷⁾

Another possible beneficiary of alienations from the royal patrimony was the Church, but, like the military orders, the dioceses of Seville and Córdoba were not generously treated by the Crown, in terms of señoríos, indeed the bishops of Córdoba had no major possessions at all. The town of Lucena had been lost in the late fourteenth century and in the 1490s bishop Iñigo Manrique sold the fortress of Toledillo to Don Luis Portocarrero, lord of Palma. In 1497, the Crown tried to make Portocarrero hand the castle back to the Church, but apparently without success. ⁽⁴⁸⁾

It is clear that royal grants of Andalusian señoríos mainly benefited the secular nobility. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ The leading noble family in the kingdom of [21] Córdoba, in both social and economic terms, was the house of Fernández de Córdoba, which arrived from Galicia with the conquering armies in 1236. By the late fifteenth century, it had fragmented into a series of separate lines, but two of the senior ones had attained a position in the upper nobility of the Crown of Castile as a whole. The more powerful of these was the original line, known by the fifteenth century as the house of Aguilar, which had acquired a group of señoríos to the south of Córdoba, consisting of Cañete de las Torres, Aguilar, Priego, Monturque, Castillo Anzur, La Puente de Don Gonzalo (now Puente Genil), Montilla, Santa Cruz, Duernas and Carcabuey, the last three being obtained by purchase or exchange. The other line of the Fernández de Córdoba which may be included in the highest category is the house of Baena, which was the third branch of the family to become a separate lineage, acquiring the señorío of Baena from Henry II in 1386. By Ferdinand and Isabella's reign, it had also obtained permission to populate Doña Menda, from John II in 1420, and had received the señoríos of Rute, Zambra, Iznájar as a viscounty and Cabra as a county. These possessions, significantly, formed a broad, continuous band, running from north to south across the southern end of the modern province of Córdoba.

Beneath the level of the upper nobility, which had more than regional importance, there was a middle category of noble families with señoríos. Two of these were branches of the Fernández de Córdoba. The first to break away from the house of Aguilar acquired in the late fourteenth century a señorío which consisted of Lucena and Espejo in the south and Chillón, on the northernmost fringe of Córdoba's influence. This family was known in the fifteenth century by the title of alcaide de los donceles (governor of the royal pages) which the head of the house had acquired in the 1370s. The possessions of the fourth branch of the Fernández de Córdoba --Montemayor and Alcaudete -- were less scattered, but still did not form a complete 'empire', like those of Baena and, to a lesser extent, Aguilar. There were however two medium-sized señoríos in the north which were complete blocks of territory. In addition to their numerous possessions in the modern province of Badajoz, the Sotomayor had a band of territory which stretched south from Belalcázar to Espiel. Adjoining this was the señorío of the Mexia, which covered the north-eastern corner of the modern province of Córdoba and contained Santa Eufemia, El Viso, El Guijo and, from 1487, the castle of Madroñiz, on the border between the lands of Belalcázar and Santa Eufemia. The Méndez de Sotomayor, [22] who were an old-established Córdoba family, quite separate from the Sotomayor of Belalcázar, had a señorío in the valley of the Guadalquivir, consisting of El Carpio and Morente. Also in the river valley was the señorío of the Portocarrero, which was based on Palma del Río and included Fuente del Alamo and La Puebla de los Infantes.

There were also seven minor señoríos, each consisting of one small town or village, to the south of Córdoba. Five of these belonged to descendants of the Fernández de Córdoba, one of them legitimate, the others not. The legitimate line was the house of Guadalcázar, and the others held the lordship of Belmonte , a now-depopulated place near Bujalance, Zuheros, Fuencubierta and the cortijo (farmstead) of El Fontanar. The other minor señoríos belonged to two families which had arrived in Córdoba with the reconquering armies. The Venegas received Luque from Henry II in 1374 while the De los Ríos received Fernán Núñez at the same time. A minor branch of the De los Ríos owned Las Ascalonias in the fifteenth century. At the bottom of the scale, however, it is sometimes difficult to decide which families should be included in the category of señores, because the difference between a village and a large farm is not always easy to distinguish at this distance.

The role of the Crown in assembling the estates of the nobility in the kingdom of Córdoba was clearly crucial. Of the forty-three señoríos which the nobility of the kingdom of Córdoba had obtained by 1474 (not all of them actually within that kingdom), twenty-seven were royal grants, the rest being acquired by purchase, marriage, exchange, or other means. In addition, a number of places in the second category had previously been granted by the Crown to other families. This fact is important, because it shows how power became concentrated in fewer hands in the late Middle Ages. Between 1369, when Henry II seized the throne, and the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1474, the transfer of existing señoríos from another family to one of those mentioned above accounted for the great majority of the royal grants made in the period. Jurisdiction went with nearly all grants after 1300 and even if an earlier grant had not included it, this was generally remedied later.

The relative generosity of the various Castilian kings between Sancho IV and Henry IV is of some interest. The most enthusiastic grantors of señoríos were Henry II and John II with seven and Henry IV with five. The next highest number was Alfonso XI's total of three, with Sancho IV, John I and Henry III making one grant each. It is also noticeable that nearly all the leading families in the Cordoban [23] nobility in the late fifteenth century had first come to the region under Ferdinand III or Alfonso X. The only exceptions were the Portocarrero, who married into the Genoese Bocanegra family, which had gained its señorío in the mid-fourteenth century, the Mexía, who married into an old Córdoba family, the Carrillo, during John II's reign, and the Sotomayor. The Sotomayor empire, to the north of Córdoba, was developed by Don Gutierre de Sotomayor, who succeeded his uncle as master of the order of Alcántara in 1432. Gutierre carried out a series of complicated political manoeuvres during the civil wars of John II's reign, but in return for a momentary show of loyalty to the king at a time when Córdoba council was supporting his dissident son, he was rewarded in 1445 with the lordship of two of Córdoba's towns, Hinojosa and Gahete, the latter becoming a county under the name of Belalcázar in 1466. Between 1445 and the end of John II's reign, he received sixteen more señoríos, including Villaharta and Espiel in Córdoba's territory, but an attempt to give him Fuente Obejuna and Belmez in 1450 was thwarted by Córdoba council's resistance. Nonetheless, Gutierre was able to leave a fine inheritance to his son Alfonso.

The shortage of new arrivals in the Cordoban aristocracy between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries was matched by a distinct lack of departures. Families such as the De los Ríos and Venegas, who were among the conquistadores of Córdoba, obtained señoríos comparatively late and failed to expand their holdings, so that an early arrival in the area was no guarantee of a place in the first rank after 1400, but on the other hand there was no family which lost this rank once it had been gained. The reasons for this remarkable stability will be discussed later, but it is now time to examine the internal structure of government in the royal town of Córdoba.

1. Primera crónica general de España que mandó componer Alfonso el Sabio, ed. R. Menéndez Pidal (Madrid, 1955), ii, 772, as translated by Angus MacKay.

2. Emilio Cabrera Muñoz, 'Tierras realengas y tierras de señorío a fines de la Edad Media. Distribución geográfica y niveles de población', Actas del Primer Congreco de Historia de Andalucía (1976) (Córdoba, 1978), Andalucía Medieval, i, 296-7.

3. Juan Ocaña Torrejón, Historia de la villa de Pedroche y su comarca (Córdoba, 1962), pp. 12-16, 33-4, 36. Edrisi, Description de l'Afrique et de l'Espagne, ed. R. Dozy and M. J. de Goeje (repr. Leiden, 1968), pp. 263-5.

4. Manuel González Jiménez, 'Ordenanzas del concejo de Córdoba (1435)', HID, ii (1975), 67-97. Torremilano ordinances in AMC Sec. 13 Ser. 10 No. 5, especially fols. 7-8. Córdoba's 1478 ordinances in AMC Sec. 13 Ser. 10 No. 2 (eighteenth-century authenticated copy).

5. Pascual Madoz, Diccionario geográfico -- estadístico -- histórico de España y sus posesiones de ultramar (16 vols., Madrid, 1848-50), from which much of the information in this section is taken.

6. The original manuscript of Colón's Itinerario is in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville (MS BB 148-27). It was edited by Antonio Blázquez, appearing in parts in the Boletín de la Real Sociedad Geográfica between 1904 and 1908, and in a three-volume edition published in Madrid in ~ A map of land-use in Andalusia, based on Colón's findings, was published by Michel Drain and Pierre Ponsot in their article, 'Les paysages agraires de L'Andalousie occidentale an début du XVIe siécle', MCV, ii (1966), 73-85.

7. Jerónimo, Descriptio Cordubae, ed. with Castilian translation by Manuel Nieto Cumplido (Córdoba, 1973), pp. 63-4.

8. Angus MacKay, Spain in the Middle Ages; from frontier to empire (London, 1977), p. 5.

9. Emilio Cabrera Muñoz, El condado de Belalcázar (1444-1516). Aportación al estudio del régimen señorial en la baja Edad Media (Córdoba, 1977), pp. 52-4.

10. Julio González, Repartimiento de Sevilla (2 vols., Madrid, 1951).

11. Ibid., i, 42-6, 53.

12. Ibid., i, 20-1, 47-51. The Libro de las Tablas is in ACC, MS 125, fols. 4v-7v and its contents are summarised in A. García y García, F. Cantelar Rodríguez and M. Nieto Cumplido, Catálogo de los manuscritos e incunables de la catedral de Córdoba (Salamanca, 1976), pp. 220-1. Part of it was published by M. Muñoz Vázquez in 'Notas sobre el repartimiento de tierras que hizo el rey don Fernando III en Córdoba y su término', Boletín de la Real Academia de Córdoba, no. 71 (1954), pp. 251-70.

13. Ramón Carande, Sevilla, fortaleza y mercado. Las tierras, las gentes y la administración de la ciudad en el siglo XIV (Seville, 1975), p. 24.

14. Manuel González Jiménez, La repoblación de la zona de Sevilla en el siglo XIV. Estudio y documentos (Seville, 1975), pp. 10-12, 22-5.

15. J. A. García de Cortázar, Historia de España Alfaguara, vol. ii: La época medieval (Madrid, 1973), 382.

16. Antonio Ubieto Arteta, 'Cronología del desarrollo de la Peste Negra en la península ibérica', Cuadernos de Historia anexos a Hispania, v (Madrid, 1975), 63. González Jiménez, Repoblación, pp. 31-40. N. Cabrillana, 'Villages désertés en Espagne', in Villages desértés et histoire économique, XIe-XVIIIe siécle (Paris, 1965), p. 480.

17. González Jiménez, Repoblación, pp. 41-2. Antonio Collantes de Terán, 'Nuevas poblaciones del siglo XV en el reino de Sevilla', Cuadernos de Historia anexos a Hispania, vii (Madrid, 1977), 288.

18. González Jiménez, 'Aspectos de la economía rural andaluza del siglo XV', in Huelva en la Andalucía del siglo XV (Huelva, 1976), p. 18. Sobrequés in J. Vicens Vives (ed.), Historia social y económica de España y América, ii (Barcelona, 1957), 52. Antonio Collantes de Terán, Sevilla en la baja Edad Media. La ciudad y los hombres (Seville, 1977), pp. 156, 163.

19. Cabrera, 'Tierras realengas', pp. 295-308.

20. Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, 'La población de Andalucía en el siglo XV. Notas provisionales', Anuario de Historia Económica y Social, ii (1969), 483.

21. Cabrera, 'Tierras realengas', pp. 298-9.

22. González, Repartimiento de Sevilla, i, 236-93.

23. González Jiménez, 'Aspectos', p. 26, and Repoblación, p. 78.

24. Collantes, 'Le latifundium sévillan aux XIVe et XVe siéc1es. Ebauche d'une problématique', MCV, xii (1976), 101-25.

25. González Jiménez, 'Aspectos', pp. 26-31.

26. Collantes, 'Le latifundium sévillan', pp. 115-23.

27. González Jiménez, El concejo de Carmona a fines de la Edad Media (1464-1523) (Seville, 1973), pp. 96-7, 99-102, 123-5. A fanega here equals 55.5 litres.

28. Fuero Juzgo, bk 4 title 5 law I, in Los códigos españoles concordados y anotados (12 vols., Madrid, 1847-51), i.

29. Partidas, 4-17 and 4-18. In accordance with convention, the edition cited here is that of the Real Academia de la Historia (3 vols., Madrid, 1807). The Códigos españoles reproduce in preference (vols. ii-v) the text and glosses of Gregorio López de Tovar, which were declared by Charles V in 1555 to be the sole version with legal force.

30. The best description of the different types of nobility and vassalage in late medieval Castile is that provided by Marie-Claude Gerbet in La noblesse dans le royaume de Castille. Etude sur ses structures sociales en Estrémadure de 1454 á 1516 (Paris, 1970), pp. 105-42.

31. Montalvo 5-9-2, 3. Partidas 5-4-9. Ordenamiento of Alcalá 27-2.

32. Partidas 2-1, preamble and law 8.

33. Montalvo 3-16-5, 2-4-7, 2-1-3.

34. Montalvo 3-2-4. Partidas 3-3-5, repeated in Montalvo 3-2-14. Montalvo 3-1-1.

35. Alfonso María Guilarte, El régimen señorial en el siglo XVI (Madrid, 1962), pp. 117, 121, 233-7. Partidas 4-25-2. See also Gregorio López's gloss of Partidas 5-4-9 in Códigos españoles, iii, on Montalvo 8-17-1 and 4.

36. Partidas 3-4-2. Guilarte, El régimen señorial, p. 281.

37. Montalvo 5-9-2. Guilarte, El régimen señorial, p. 155.

38. Montalvo 2-11-7.

39. Guilarte, El régimen señorial, pp. 185-6. Partidas 3-29-16.

40. Miguel Angel Orti Belmonte, 'El fuero de Córdoba y las clases sociales en la ciudad. Mudéjares y judiós en la Edad Media', Boletín de la Real Academia de Córdoba, yr 25 (1954), 7-94.

41. AMC Sec. , Ser. 2 Nos. 5 and 14.

42. AMC Sec. I Ser. 2 No. 3.

43. ACC Caj. S. No. 27.

44. Rafael Ramírez de Arellano, Historia de Córdoba desde su fundación hasta la muerte de Isabel la Católica (4 vols., Ciudad Real, 1915-17), iv, 135.

45. Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla [hereafter Cortes] (Madrid, 1861-1903), iii. 393-401. For an account of the Sotomayor señorío see Cabrera, El condado de Belalcázar.

46. The documentation of the legal cases involving Fuente Obejuna is to be found in AMC Sec. 2 Ser. 30 and ACC Caj. O. The 1513 compromise is in AMC Sec. 2 Ser. 30 No. 15 and the í557 sale agreement is reproduced in Guilarte, El régimen señorial, App. 28. Rafael Ramírez de Arellano's interpretation of the role of Córdoba council in the 1476 revolt, in 'Rebelión de Fuente Obejuna contra el comendador mayor de Calatrava', Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia, xxxix (1901), 446-512, is being revised, with fuller documentation, by Emilio Cabrera and others. A preliminary report is to be found in Actas del Primer Congreso de Historia de Andalucía (1976), Andalucía Medieval, ii, 113-22, under the title, 'La sublevación de Fuenteovejuna contemplada en su V centenario'.

47. Ladero, 'Algunos datos para la historia económica de las órdenes militares de Santiago y Calatrava en el siglo XV', Hispania, xxx (1970), 655, and Andalucía en el siglo XV. Estudios de historia política (Madrid, 1973), pp. 37, 64-6.

48. Ladero, Andalucía, pp. 37, 47. RGS 1497 fols. 307 (21 Feb.) and 41 (10 Aug.).

49. The remainder of this chapter owes much to Ladero, Andalucía, pp. 1-56. For comparative purposes it is best to consult Gerbet, La noblesse, which refers mainly to the neighbouring region of Extremadura. For the Sotomayor, a fuller account may be found in Cabrera, El condado de Belalcázar. For the house of Aguilar, see Concepción Quintanilla Raso, Nobleza y señoríos en el reino de Córdoba. La casa de Aguilar (siglos XIV y XV) (Córdoba, 1979).