[58] There is little doubt that one of the main reasons for the Castilian Crown's anxiety to retain control over major towns, such as Córdoba, was the important contribution which they made to the royal finances. Without the taxation revenue which they produced, even the comparatively limited form of central government which existed in Castile in the late Middle Ages would have been impractical. The public finances of Córdoba in this period are therefore of interest for two main reasons. First, they illustrate the characteristics and the effectiveness of the royal taxation system and, secondly, they provide one of the best available indications of the distribution of wealth between public authorities and private individuals.
 

In order to survey the many different taxes which affected Córdoba, it is best to adopt the scheme used by Ladero in his important study of Castilian royal finances in the fifteenth century. ⁽¹⁾ This involves a division into direct and indirect taxation and, in addition, into ordinary and extraordinary revenues, although the latter distinction would not have been recognised by contemporaries. Two ordinary direct taxes were collected from the inhabitants of royal towns. One of these was the moneda forera, which had originally been an extraordinary aid, voted by the Cortes to the king 'in recognition of his royal lordship', as John II's cuaderno (book of instructions) for its collection described it. By the fifteenth century, it had become an ordinary tax of eight maravedís per head in Castile, Extremadura and the frontier regions and six maravedís in León, calculated in the old money, which was worth twice as much as the maravedí then current. It was collected every six years. The change in the status of this tax over the years indicates the problems encountered in distinguishing ordinary from [59] extraordinary taxes. The other ordinary direct tax collected in Córdoba was the tercias reales (royal thirds), which was one of a number of royal taxes in the fifteenth century which were of ecclesiastical origin. The tercias were in fact two-ninths of the church tithe on cereals, wine, livestock and other agricultural products. They had been conceded to the Castilian Crown by the popes in the thirteenth century, on a temporary basis, to further the conquest of Muslim territory, but, as with so many Castilian taxes, they became permanent (in 1340) and in the fifteenth century they were collected with the alcabala, or sales-tax. ⁽²⁾

Extraordinary direct taxation was important in the royal finances of the fifteenth century. It was voted to the king by the Cortes, as a survival of the vassal's aid and military service to his lord. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, no service (servicio) of this kind was voted by the Cortes between 1476 and 1500, but the money was raised instead by the juntasde Hermandad, following the same procedure. Each servicio was divided into the old-fashioned monedas and the later pedidos, but the principle on which these taxes were based was the same. ⁽³⁾

The two main categories of ordinary indirect taxation were taxes on trade and taxes on transport. The main tax on trade was the alcabala, a ten per cent tax on all sales and other transactions, which by the fifteenth century was paid entirely by the seller, although originally it was divided equally between him and the buyer. The main tax on transport, the almojarifazgo, was important in Andalusia, where it was partly in the hands of local councils. Compared with this, the other customs and transport duties, such as portazgo, rodas, barcaje and castellería, were of minor importance, but this could not be said of the tax on the movement of livestock, the servicio y montazgo, which is not to be confused with the servicios voted by the Cortes. This servicio was a head-tax on the movement of animals, which replaced all other customs duties on such traffic. The montazgo, which was collected with it, was a tax on the use of pasture under royal jurisdiction. The servicio began in 1270 and the montazgo came under complete royal control in 1343. ⁽⁴⁾ The equivalent indirect tax to the Cortes and Hermandad servicios was the sisa or imposición, which was a one or three per cent tax on sales, which might be imposed in case of need, in addition to the alcabala. The earliest surviving reference to sisas comes from the reign of Sancho IV (1284-95) and they were extensively applied to foodstuffs under Ferdinand and Isabella. ⁽⁵⁾

[60] The royal administration in the fifteenth century was still inadequate to supervise the collection of taxes. The kingdoms of Castile were divided for tax purposes into partidos, which generally followed diocesan boundaries, but were sometimes less extensive in areas of great economic activity. The diocese of Córdoba was accordingly divided into four partidos. The Seville diocese consisted of three partidos, with others covering Jerez, Ecija and the county of Niebla. The last also included the Aijarafe and Ribera, in the kingdom of Seville. In each partido, the Crown appointed a chief collector (recaudador mayor) to supervise the collection of royal revenues, which he might delegate to subordinates (recaudadores menores), who would receive the taxes in four monthly instalments from the local councils or other collecting agents.

Castilian subjects did not, generally speaking, pay their taxes directly to royal officials. Most of the king's revenues were farmed out to arrendadores, who paid him in advance a price that was fixed by auction and thereafter incurred all the risks and advantages. The weakness of the royal administration and the desirability of receiving the money in advance to meet required expenditure made this system both necessary and reasonably effective, from the Crown's point of view. The reserve price for each rent that was auctioned was fixed by the main royal financial agency, the contaduria mayor de hacienda, on the basis of information from previous tax-farmers. The conditions for the collection of rents were laid down in a separate cuaderno of instructions for each one. These cuadernos changed little after the reign of John II, though Henry IV and the Catholic Monarchs altered those for the collection of the alcabala and the almojarifazgo sevillano. Many rents were auctioned centrally, at the estrado de las rentas, which generally remained at Medina del Campo. Others were auctioned by the escribanos de las rentas, the tax-clerks in the different taxation areas. These officials were responsible for providing the contadores with information on the value of rents and also received one per cent of all those which they helped to auction.

When an auction was announced, bidders offered their bids until the remate de la su basta, that is, the sum acceptable to the royal financiers, was reached. After this first round, further bids (pujas) might be allowed under certain conditions, until the final round was arrived at and the rent was rematada de todo remate. The contadores encouraged bids by offering prometidos, that is, sums which the farmer might keep [61] for himself. The original arrendador had a right to the prometido and part of the bids that followed. By the time the final remate was reached, the prometidos were frequently shared between the first arrendador and a number of major or minor speculators who had become associated with him in bids for the rent. Rights to farm rents, obtained in auctions, were often transferred later to others. Once a rent was rematada, the farmer was obliged to provide financial guarantors within ten to twenty days. These guarantees could be other financial benefits which the farmer received from the Crown, in the form, for example, of raciones, quitaciones and other types of salary. Such payments would be retained by the Crown to offset its losses if the arrendador failed to meet his obligations.

When arrangements had been made for the pricing and guaranteeing of the rent, the farmer received a letter authorising him to organise its collection, which required an army of escribanos, guards, collectors (cogedores) and other minor officials. Certain categories of people were excluded from farming taxes. These included all clerics and officials of the royal administration, powerful subjects (personas poderosas), especially in their own areas, commanders of military orders in their own encomiendas and governors (alcaides) of fortresses. All tax-farmers received the full formal protection of the Crown against interference with their work and the towns where they collected taxes were obliged to lodge them at reasonable prices. In certain circumstances, a farmer could fine those who obstructed him, but legal disputes arising out of the collection of rents were generally resolved by the local magistrates. Occasionally, a special judge might be appointed by the Crown to hear such cases and the highest appeal was to the contadores mayores. An arrendador could only summon a party to law in that party's place of residence or in the chief town with jurisdiction over it.

An alternative system for the collection of royal revenues existed, which might appear more suitable from the Crown's point of view. This was the naming of individuals known as fieles by the local council to collect the king's revenues. However, fifteenth-century Castilian kings did not find this a satisfactory way of raising taxes, because, unlike the arrendador, the fiel had insufficient financial interest in collecting the money, so that when fieles were at work, the Crown received only a small proportion of what was due. The salary of three per cent of taxes collected, which the fieles received, did not fire their enthusiasm and so this system was only resorted to when there was a delay in the appointment of a tax-farmer or if a particular difficulty arose with [62] collection by the latter method. A farmer might claim his revenue for one or two years after the end of his farm and he was also entitled to ask for a discount (suspensiones) in cases where his rents had been legally or illegally taken by some over-mighty subject (persona poderosa).

From 1495 onwards, another method came to be used for the collection of royal rents. This was the system known as encabezamiento, which involved the collection of rents, particularly alcabalas and tercias, by local councils, instead of fieles or arrendadores. Town councils had been trying for many years to take over the collection of the king's taxes. In doing so, they were in fact attempting to return to the situation which had obtained in the fourteenth century, when the towns, which then retained considerable political vitality, had achieved a stronger position in bargaining with the Crown. The creation of closed councils in the towns had the effect of weakening this position and had resulted in the return of power over revenue collection to the Crown and its agents. By 1495, however, the arrendamiento system had run into difficulties, partly because of the expulsion of the Jews and the activities of the Inquisition, and the Catholic Monarchs were prepared to make agreements with the urban oligarchies for the latter to collect alcabalas and tercias, in return for an effective reduction in the burden of these taxes on local communities, caused by the fixing of levels of taxation for several years at a time and the scope given to the councils to decide how the overall total was to be raised. ⁽⁶⁾

In theory, servicios, as direct taxes, were calculated on the basis of the wealth of individual tax-payers (pecheros). Collection of the aids voted to the Crown by the Cortes was left to the local councils and the total sum demanded was divided into two categories, monedas and pedidos. The moneda was the longer-established of the two and was equal to eight maravedís in Castile, Extremadura and the frontier regions and six maravedís in León. Thus in 1476, a contribution (reparto) of twelve monedas was asked for and this amounted to ninety-six maravedís per head. In order to pay the tax, an individual had to have goods valued at a previously fixed amount, though his bed, ordinary clothes, weapons and a pair of plough-oxen, if he had one, were excluded from the calculation. For the 1476 servicio, it was laid down that pecheros with goods valued at sixty maravedís or less, by this method, should pay only two monedas and that the full twelve should apply to those with 220 mrs or more. Leaving aside the ease with which the rich might conceal their wealth or obtain total exemption from servicios, the fact that a global sum was demanded of the kingdom and [63] divided among the partidos meant that the tax could not in any case be collected on the basis of an assessment of individual wealth. Even in theory, the pedidos were not assessed like the monedas and, in practice, servicios in general were raised in whatever way the local councils found possible at the the time.

The municipalities showed little enthusiasm for collecting servicios, because they did not stand to gain from the revenue. Another problem was the high instance of exemptions, which the Cortes complained of, for example in 1442. ⁽⁷⁾ When monedas were collected, every place with more than thirty citizens resident within it (vecinos y moradores) had to appoint someone to compose a list (padrón) of tax-payers. This list had to be handed to the tax-collector within twelve days, so that he could collect the money and hand it over to the receiver of treasure within twenty days after that. When a tax-payer died, his widow and children continued to pay the tax, counting as one pechero. If his goods were divided after his death, more than one tax contribution (pecho) was formed. His orphan children became pecheros in their own right when they married. In 1451, it was established that land acquired between the granting of a servicio by the Cortes and the completion of the list of tax-payers was to count in the reckoning of wealth. However, the padrones were not revised for each servicio, but kept by the royal accountants (contadores mayores). Those produced in 1455-6 were used until 1476.
 

Exemption from taxation was one of the main issues in Andalusian towns under the Catholic Monarchs, because while in Castile as a whole, certain social categories -- the upper nobility, hidalgos, knights (caballeros), squires (escuderos) and noble ladies (dueñas and doncellas) -- were automatically exempt, there was a theory that in Andalusia these exemptions did not apply. At the Cortes of 1451, it was stated that 'all pay taxes in common, "rich men" (ricos ornes) in the same way as knights (caballeros), hidalgos and any others, which has always been customarily done for the common good and defence of that land'. ⁽⁸⁾ The exemption of clergy in major orders, priests, deacons and subdeacons, does not seem to have caused dispute, but that of caballeros was only admitted in Andalusia after some argument. In practice, three types of caballero were recognised as exempt from monedas. The first, the caballero who kept a horse and weapons continuously and served the king personally in war, was exempt not only from monedas but also [64] from pedidos and other taxes, such as moneda forera, provided that he lived by the practice of arms and not by any 'low offices' and was ready to serve at any time until he reached the age of sixty. If they kept the weapons and horse, his widow and children could continue to claim these exemptions until the widow remarried and the children reached their majority. The second category of exemption was that of knights dubbed by the king in the field, who might follow a profession other than that of arms. In practice, the exemption of such knights from monedas was limited, so that this type of knighthood could not be used as a route for tax-payers who wanted to escape from their responsibilities. Any children they had before they were knighted continued to be pecheros, and the 1442 Cortes asked for the practice of granting such knighthoods by letter to be stopped. The Andalusian towns contained another type of knight, of whom much more will be heard later, known as the caballero de premia or caballero de alarde, who was exempt from monedas only. Caballeros de premia, as they were generally known in Córdoba, were ordinary citizens of any trade who reached a minimum wealth qualification and kept a horse and weapons for use by themselves or a substitute. ⁽⁹⁾

Those with individual tax exemptions, who were known either as exentos or excusados, only in fact escaped the monedas. The possessors of these exemptions included a wide range of royal servants, not only at Court but also in the royal towns. In Córdoba, the Monarchs in 1478 confirmed, at the request of the corregidor, Francisco de Valdés, the exemptions granted by past kings to the alcalde and inhabitants of two castles, the Alcázar Viejo (Old Castle) and the Castillo Viejo de la Judería (Old Castle of the Jewry). ⁽¹⁰⁾ It appears that there were twenty-eight tradesmen's offices in these castles, which carried exemption from monedas, although those who held them were not knights. When the stone-mason Rodrigo de Torres died in 1497, he was succeeded by the man he himself had designated. One of the conditions laid down by the town council before it ratified this proceeding was that the new officer should not be a caballero de premia. The Alcázar franchise was not apparently intended to benefit those who were already exempt from monedas. In 1515, there was some dispute over the privileges of the inhabitants of the Alcázar Viejo, and a document in which the beneficiaries empowered two proctors to represent them at law reveals that in that year there were thirty-seven heads of household in the castle, one of them a widow. They included stone-cutters, masons, weavers, gardeners, shepherds, fishermen, tenant-farmers (labradores), book-copyists, [65] a collier, a bird-catcher, a silk-mercer, a bonnet-maker and a surgeon. ⁽¹¹⁾

Various municipal officials obtained exemptions from servicios. It was assumed that alcaldes and regidores were exempt from all pechos, but concessions of this kind inevitably led to disputes over the status of the families and servants of beneficiaries. In 1496, Gonzalo Carrillo, veinticuatro of Córdoba, obtained confirmation of the exemption from servicios first granted by the Crown to his grandfather, which also applied to his children and servants. In the previous year, Doña Isabel de Tamayo, widow of the alcalde mayor Fernando de Narváez, had obtained a similar exemption. Jurados were generally exempt from all servicios, whether monedas or pedidos, though it was their responsibility to collect these taxes. However, it was laid down by the council that once an individual ceased to be a jurado, he should revert to the rank of pechero if this was his former status. Sons of jurados were not automatically entitled to exemptions and neither were alguaciles, even while in office, though escribanos probably were. ⁽¹²⁾

Like caballeros, hidalgos were exempt from all pechos, in return for their personal military service, either on horseback or, in some cases, on foot. In order to become a hidalgo, a man had to prove to the alcaldes de los fijosdalgo at the chancillería that he resided in the same place as his father and grandfather and that they had not been tax-payers. If he succeeded in doing so, he obtained a letter of execution (carta ejecutoria) for presentation to the local council, which, in the case of Córdoba, then ordered the jurados to remove his name from the tax-list of his parish. The exemption from servicios applied to his wife, even if she was the daughter of tax-payers, as long as she remained married to him and preserved the chastity of marriage. ⁽¹³⁾

Local councils were frequently called upon to decide whether certain individuals or groups should pay a particular servicio. Each demand from the Crown for money to be raised in this way led to a crop of disputes, in which councils tried to apply the general rules on exemption. For example, in 1495 Juan de Frías petitioned the council to exclude him from the tax-list on the grounds that he was a hidalgo. The criterion used by the council to decide the case was whether he had paid previous servicios or not. In the event, it was found that he had not, so that his exemption was allowed. Sometimes the Crown's authority was invoked, as when Commander Juan de Luna, veinticuatro, petitioned the Monarchs successfully on behalf of himself and the other knights of the military order of Santiago to order Córdoba council to [66] exclude them from the padrón. This ruling was apparently based on the fact that the activities of the knights of military orders came in the same category as the personal military service of hidalgos. ⁽¹⁴⁾

Another fruitful source of dispute was the status of those who claimed to be members of the households of regidores and other caballeros. If these claims were upheld by the council, the individuals concerned were deemed to have no independent legal existence, like wives and children of tax-payers, and were therefore not liable for servicios. This ruling was enforced by the town council in 1479, 1496 and 1501. Similar exemptions existed for those attached to monasteries and churches. This concession, which was confirmed by the Catholic Monarchs in 1478, paralleled that granted to the inhabitants of the royal alcázares, or castles, in towns such as Córdoba and Seville. In the case of the convent of St Clare, Córdoba, the local council controlled the fixed quota of exemptions on the foundation. Such an arrangement was probably typical. As with the franchises in the castles, beneficiaries had to be pecheros and not caballeros de premia. During the revolts in the kingdom of Granada in 1501, the council made the concession that the widows of those who died in action, whether caballeros or not, would be exempt from all servicios. It was apparently felt that they had already paid the ultimate war-service. Personal exemptions were also granted for various reasons. These sometimes emanated from the Crown, as when Isabel de León, a servant of the princess Isabella, received a grant from the king and queen for herself, her pharmacist husband and their children. In other cases they were granted by the local council. Córdoba council gave such exemptions to its town-criers, to a faithful lawyer in 1497 and to another individual for unspecified services to the town. ⁽¹⁵⁾

When the Crown abandoned the use of servicios after 1476, it obtained direct tax revenues instead from the Hermandad organisation, which was reconstituted in 1478. For the next twenty years, repartimientos (allocations of contributions) were made in Castilian towns for the upkeep of this force, but after 1482 they were effectively used for the Granada war. While the Andalusian towns provided militia as well, the other towns of the kingdom contributed to the war effort mainly through the Hermandad levies of cash, animals and men. It was admitted by the Crown that the Hermandad repartimientos were a substitute for the Cortes servicios and when Castilian military activity [67] spread outside the kingdom at the end of the fifteenth century, servicios reappeared. The similarity between the two levies is shown by the fact that the 1500 and 1502 servicios were collected using the same padrones as had been prepared for Hermandad repartimientos. As with monedas, there was a theoretical basis for calculating the contributions of each town, though for the Hermandad it was the size of population rather than individual wealth. The 1478 Hermandad laws stipulated that towns should maintain one jinete, a lightly armed horseman who rode with short stirrups in the Moorish style, for every hundred citizens and one man-at-arms for each 150. These terms applied to the basic annual contribution made by Castilian towns to the upkeep of the Hermandad. This money might be used for the Granada war, but it was not the same as the repartimientos raised specifically for that purpose, which were an additional burden on the towns. The basic Hermandad contribution was a subject for negotiation between the towns and the government, but repartimientos, like servicios, were specific sums requested by the Crown from individual towns. In Córdoba they were collected parish by parish, in the same way as servicios. The jurados and the parish escribano composed the tax-lists and each parish chose two representatives, one a caballero de premia and the other not, to hear complaints about the lists. Some attempt was made in the repartimientos to relate contributions to individual wealth, even if this was not done in the annual Hermandad contributions. In 1496, the council ordered that the caballeros de premia were to pay for the upkeep of two infantrymen (peones) each and that the contributions of poorer people were to be less. ⁽¹⁶⁾

Exemptions from Hermandad repartimientos were similar to those from servicios, but according to the 1478 laws, those classified as excusados were not exempt from this tax. Local councils had the same discretion in deciding who should pay repartimientos as they did with servicios, and in 1496 Córdoba council called in the privileges of the town's excusados, apparently with a view to exempting them from the repartimiento of that year. Exemptions applied in any case to regidores, jurados, hidalgos and other privilegiados with personal grants from the Crown or the local council, the escribanos who composed the tax-lists, the parish alguaciles if they resided in their parishes, and the squires and households (comensales) of caballeros. The conditions for the exemption of the last were defined in 1496 for the purposes of the Hermandad repartimientos, but they probably applied equally to the servicios. Exemptions for squires (escuderos) and comensales were granted [68] to those who received food, drink, straw and barley on a continuous basis from their lord and who owned no movable or immovable property. Those who owned flocks, land or buildings could not claim exemption. As with servicios, the basic criterion for deciding individual cases was whether the person concerned had paid the tax on previous occasions, but the jurados seem to have experienced difficulty in obtaining overall rulings from a council which was anxious to decide such matters on an ad hoc basis, a procedure which did not lend itself to consistency. When the jurados complained in the summer of 1496 about the lack of guidance, they only received, after some delay, an order to respect the exemptions of groups which were in any case fairly well-defined, such as regidores and hidalgos. ⁽¹⁷⁾
 

Despite the importance to citizens of obtaining exemptions from direct taxation, for the sake of their social and financial well-being, much of the revenue required to pay servicios and Hermandad contributions came not from individual tax-payments but from impositions and loans. For example, almost as soon as the 1500 servicio had been voted by the Cortes, Córdoba council received permission to raise special indirect taxes to pay it. It was soon discovered that even these were insufficient and the council resorted to loans from wealthy citizens, from Genoese merchants and from those who had not served in the town's forces in the putting down of the Moorish revolts in the kingdom of Granada. Impositions, or sisas, were also permitted by the Crown for the payment of Hermandad levies in Córdoba. In 1496, the town's caballeros de prernia, perhaps influenced by the council's desire to tax them more heavily than their less wealthy fellow-citizens, put pressure on the council to apply a royal letter which permitted the use of impositions for this purpose. In this case sisas were not applied for the payment of the repartimiento because they were already being used to raise the annual levy. The failure to use sisas to raise the 1495 repartimiento did not deter the Crown from suggesting the same procedure for the 1496 special levy, and on this occasion the council's initial reluctance was overcome when it was realised that after several months less than half the required amount had been raised. An imposition was placed on meat and fish, and when this proved inadequate forced loans from the jurados were resorted to. This mixture of sisas and loans was again used to finance the Hermandad in Córdoba in 1497 and 1498. ⁽¹⁸⁾

[69] The value of the servicios and Hermandad repartimientos raised in Córdoba may be measured either in the standard money of account, the maravedí, or in terms of the gold and silver currency. The latter is more useful for measuring the value of these taxes in terms of purchasing power. The available figures for servicios show how different are the results obtained if totals are given in, for example, gold Aragonese forms rather than maravedís. The most useful indication of the relative lack of importance of direct taxation under Ferdinand and Isabella is the fact that, in terms of forms, the Crown was obtaining less revenue in servicios from Córdoba in 1506 than in 1504, the latter figure being in turn lower than that for 1502. This trend could hardly be termed satisfactory for the Crown. ⁽¹⁹⁾ The annual contribution of Córdoba to the Hermandad seems to have been 2,050,000 mrs or 7735 florins. This sum was required each year up to 1498 and is similar to that required for the 1500 servicio, though later servicios were considerably larger. ⁽²⁰⁾

An important feature of the Castilian taxation system under the Catholic Monarchs was the survival of a large number of archaic taxes in addition to those which actually produced the greater part of the royal revenue. In the case of direct taxation, the servicio was the successor of the moneda forera and of the cabeza del pecho of Jews and Moors, which was a poll-tax on these communities. The cabeza del pecho appears among the municipal revenues in 1452-3 but was not collected after the death of John II. The moneda forera did survive, however, having become virtually an ordinary tax, which was farmed out by partido. Exemption from this tax followed the pattern of the later monedas, included in the servicio, which in fact originated with this older tax. Córdoba found it necessary to defend the exemption of caballeros de premia and their widows and children. The totals in forms for the moneda forera in the diocese of Córdoba show a sharp fall in the value of the tax between 1440 and 1488, and while the 1494 figures were much improved, the total for that year was still less than half of that for 1440. ⁽²¹⁾

The most important indirect tax in Castile was the alcabala, which, with the tercias reales collected in cash rather than kind, amounted to eighty per cent of the royal revenues under Ferdinand and Isabella. ⁽²²⁾ It appears to have originated as a Muslim municipal tax, forming part of the customs tax, the almojarifazgo, in Córdoba and Ecija and consisting of five per cent on the sale of certain products. This was the [70] veintena (twentieth), which survived under that name in certain towns in the lordship of Arcos under the Catholic Monarchs. The alcabala is first referred to in surviving Castiliam documents in 1101 and recurs intermittently up to 1303, in a local rather than a national context. In the early fourteenth century, the tax seems to have been under Cortes influence, being granted to the king in the same way as the servicios, but when Alfonso XI was granted the Castilian alcabalas in 1342 for his Algeciras campaign, he began to develop them as part of his effort to improve the state of the royal finances. His two main aims were to turn Cortes servicios into a regular source of revenue and to make the alcabala general and, if possible, permanent. In both cases he was reasonably successful, but while the alcabala did become a regalian right, it was not inalienable in terms of Roman law, as an exclusive attribute of royal sovereignty. Exemptions from the alcabala were extremely rare and were not granted to social categories as such. Even hidalgos did not escape and while some towns, especially those on or near the frontier with the Moors, obtained exemptions from the alcabala on agricultural and pastoral products, Córdoba was not among them. The clergy attempted to claim exemption, but the Crown counteracted this by stipulating in the 1465 cuaderno for the collection of the rent that, in transactions between laymen and clerics, the layman should pay the tax even if he was the buyer, although by the fifteenth century it was normally paid by the seller. The 1484 cuaderno put clerics under civil jurisdiction in cases involving alcabalas, in an attempt to curb evasion, but in 1491 the clergy achieved exemption for themselves as individuals and for their institutions, in transactions which did not involve trading for gain (trato de mercadería). ⁽²³⁾

In 1342, the alcabala rate was five per cent, but the Catholic Monarchs fixed it permanently at ten percent. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that as late as the reign of Philip II, small villages often paid as little as three-and-a-half per cent, and it is probable that the rate of ten per cent was rarely reached in practice. ⁽²⁴⁾ The tax also applied to exchanges of goods (trueques) and the tax payable in such cases was determined by an ordinary citizen (hombre bueno), named by the magistrate or judge responsible for litigation arising out of the alcabala. The tax was collected by means of farms and each partido might be divided into sections of rent (miembros de renta). This leads to the impression from the surviving material that there were many alcabalas, but while it is often useful to talk in this way when attempting to describe the immensely complicated structure for the collection of the [71] tax in towns such as Córdoba, there was in fact only one alcabala, of which the taxes on different articles of consumption were parts. ⁽²⁵⁾

The procedure laid down in the royal cuadernos of 1429, 1462 and 1491 for the payment of the tax indicates the effort that was made to overcome the problems with which a fairly rudimentary governmental organisation was faced in trying to collect a sales-tax. The basic rule was that the alcabala was payable in the place of residence of the seller, though if an item was sold in one place and handed over to the buyer in another -- and even stored in a third -- the tax was generally paid where the article finally came to rest. If it could be proved that goods had been handed over at a place other than that of sale in order to avoid payment, those involved in the transaction were liable to a fine of four times the tax owed. When a farmer came to a tax-area to collect the alcabala, he had to announce his arrival and place of residence. Thereafter, sellers were supposed to notify their transactions to him within two days and pay the tax to the arrendador within three days after that, on pain of a fourfold fine. Buyers were also supposed to declare their purchases, but as the tax was not collected from them, they were not fined if they failed to do so. It was possible for a trader to make an agreement, known as an iguala or avenencia, with the farmer in advance, to pay him fixed sums at regular intervals. In these circumstances, the buyer was not obliged to make declarations to the tax-farmer. It was forbidden to move goods out of a town or village at night without the permission of the farmer, who had the power to station guards at the gates to make a compulsory examination of goods and register them. Within centres of population, the arrendador had the right to examine shop-keepers' books and to place guards at the salespoints of goods on which he collected tax. No goods might be moved from one town or village to another without licence from the arrendador. In transactions which involved a seller who was a citizen from outside the area, a cleric, a religious, a local council official or a powerful subject (hombre poderoso), the buyer had to report to the arrendador before the goods were handed over. If he knew that the seller had not paid the tax, he was obliged to keep the appropriate sum and pay it to the arrendador when required. ⁽²⁶⁾

Certain goods were exempt from alcabala according to the royal instructions. These included bread (but not grain), horses and mules, coins and precious metals, manuscripts and printed books, birds of prey, certain types of clothing, wood for the royal arsenal (atarazanas) of Seville, grain imported to Seville for sale by foreign merchants, captives [72] and booty from the Moors, when first sold, goods received by the treasurers of the Crusade tax (cruzada) and goods transferred in dowries or in the division of an inheritance among heirs, including money to make one share equal another. In various parts of Castile, including the diocese of Córdoba, wayside inns (ventas) which existed to serve travellers in remote areas were also exempt from the alcabala. To avoid abuse, those within half a league (2.79 km) of a centre of population were excluded from this privilege.

The alcabala of Córdoba and its tierra, together with the tercias, were divided into four parts, the granary (alhóndiga), the major rents (rentas mayores) and minor rents (rentas menores), and the rents of the tierra. Before arrendadores could begin to collect alcabalas in Córdoba, they had to present their royal letters to the council and swear to observe the privileges, uses and customs of the town. In 1475, these were that the farmers should put offenders in the council prison and no other, and that they would employ only the local magistrates and police. They were forbidden to take prisoners more than five leagues (27.85 km) from Córdoba, they had to observe the privileges of caballeros de premia and those dubbed by the king, they were not allowed to collect taxes on dowries unless these had been committed as guarantees (fianzas) for payments, they might not summon offenders to the royal Court in the first instance and they were not to make an execution or sentence in cases which had already been judged by other magistrates. ⁽²⁷⁾ When the farmers had sworn to observe these conditions, an announcement was made in the town that they would be available to receive offers from prospective farmers of the rents for individual products. By 1497, the further condition had been added to those of 1475, that the farmers were bound to observe custom in the collection of the tax on wine and farm it according to the conditions of past years. ⁽²⁸⁾

The possibility of introducing fieles to collect the alcabalas in place of the farmers gave the local council the opportunity to interfere in the gathering of indirect taxes. In 1496, after a complaint by the regidor Alfonso Carrillo, it was discovered that the arrendadores had failed to ensure that the lesser farmers of the alcabala were guaranteed financially, as they were required to do. The rent in question was the tax on fish, but the chief collector (recaudador mayor) admitted that there were others without guarantors. The alcalde mayor of Córdoba ordered an immediate investigation and it transpired that, in addition to the fish alcabala, the almojarifazgo on meat, which was counted as part of the alcabala, and the alcabalas of the butcheries and livestock, [73] were not guaranteed. Furthermore, contrary to the terms of the 1491 cuaderno, which the Crown had drawn to Córdoba council's attention in 1493, the farmer of the meat almojarifazgo was the recaudador mayor, Alfonso de Castro, himself. There was already a fiel appointed by the council to supervise the butcheries, alongside the farmers, but both were without guarantors. The council named cogedores to collect all these rents and fieles to supervise them. Two fish-merchants were put in charge of the meat rents, while the fish alcabala was entrusted to two other individuals, one of them a lawyer. In addition, the council ordered that, in order to avoid frauds in the farming and guaranteeing of rents, the recaudador was not to sign the document of arrendamiento until all the money had been collected. Although there was sometimes difficulty with the guaranteeing of rents in future years, the council did not again find it necessary to put in fieles. ⁽²⁹⁾

The recaudadores mayores of the alcabala normally came from outside the area, but in some cases they built up connections with certain partidos over a number of years. Gonzalo de Monzón and Alonso de Castro, the latter a citizen of Segovia, were entrusted with the alcabalas of Córdoba from 1495 until 1500. Occupations of tax-farmers in this period included the sale of silk, cloth and spices. It was not a question of one farmer for each product, but rather of major farms being shared, while several of the lesser commodities were often allocated to one person. ⁽³⁰⁾

The method of collection varied according to the nature of the product. The taxation of grain was ensured by limiting sale to certain points. In towns with a central granary (alhóndiga), including Córdoba, grain might not be sold elsewhere and the 1491 cuaderno required all towns without an alhóndiga to build one. Various measures were taken by the Crown to make the job of the tax-collector easier. The sale of grain on the roads or in the fields was forbidden, so that it had to be brought into the town. In each large town, entry was restricted to three gates, while in towns without walls certain streets were designated for this purpose. In Córdoba in 1495, the arrendador was collecting the tax when the grain came through the gates and not at the point of sale. To counteract this and oblige its own citizens, the council was returning much of the payment to the citizens on the pretext that the grain was for consumption by the owner and his household and not for resale. To simplify the situation, the arrendador, Alonso de Jaén, agreed to collect the alcabala only at the alhóndiga and, if necessary, obtain a declaration from an escribano, witnessed by a private citizen, to the [74] effect that a transaction had taken place. This declaration would then be deposited with the local magistrates to forestall council interference. ⁽³¹⁾

The sale of meat was controlled in a very similar way. The cuadernos permitted arrendadores to weigh meat on their own balances in the town butcheries (carnicerías), so as to calculate the value of the tax payable and check that butchers gave an adequate account of the livestock and meat which they bought or owned. Butchers in Córdoba and Seville were required by the 1462 cuaderno to register the flocks which they owned. All butchers had to pay the alcabala on the animals which they cut up. If these belonged to the council or to private citizens, it was up to the parties concerned to ensure that the butchers were not out of pocket. There were three butcheries in Córdoba, in the parishes of St Mary, St Andrew and St Saviour. ⁽³²⁾

The alcabala on products which involved a large number of traders required other arrangements for collection. The 1429 and 1462 cuadernos, for example, laid down that all those involved in the cloth trade -- merchants (mercaderes or traperos), old-clothes sellers (al jabi bes) and shop-keepers (tenderos) -- had to register and seal all the gold or woollen cloth which passed through their hands. An attempt was made to limit the points at which cloth might be sold in towns. The silk-exchange (alcaicería) was to be used if the town possessed one, as Córdoba did. The 1429 cuaderno authorised the sale of cloth, additionally, in the Calle de la Feria, during the two annual fairs, at the beginning of Lent (Carnestolendas) and in May. A royal provision of 1510 stipulated that the weavers and fullers of Córdoba should register their cloth for the purpose of paying the alcabala. ⁽³³⁾

In several other cases, traders took advantage of a system, permitted in the cuadernos, of making individual agreements with the arrendador for the payment of the alcabala on the products used in their trade. Such agreements were normally made for one year, during which the trader would make two tax-payments, based on an estimate of his turnover. These agreements were made before public escribanos and many of them survive. The tax on a particular product might involve several different trades. For example, the alcabala on animal hides (corambre) included tanners, boot-makers (borceguineros), shoe-makers, strap- or harness-makers (zapateros de correa) and wine-skin makers. The iron alcabala covered blacksmiths, wool-carders, locksmiths, tankard-makers and coppersmiths. The tax on linen and wool was also collected by this method. Payment was generally agreed in maravedís, but occasionally in gold ducats or silver reales. Some traders paying the [75] hides alcabala also gave a sample of their craft to the arrendador, such as a pair of boots or shoes. ⁽³⁴⁾

The tax on some products was collected at the town gates. One of these was wine, which had to be imported through one of three specified gates so that the arrendador or his agents could register it and collect the tax later on this basis. Wine for domestic consumption was by definition excluded from the reckoning for what was in fact a sales-tax. The arrendador was permitted by the cuadernos to enter bodegas at any time and examine their contents, and also to supervise the vessels that were used for storing and selling wine. Those who wished to retail wine had to give notice of the fact to the arrendador so that he might supervise the sale. There is evidence that the farm of the wine alcabala was sub-let to local inhabitants for the collection in the tierra, for example in the vine-growing area around Santa María de Trassierra. ⁽³⁵⁾

The escribanos were a vital part of the collection of the alcabala on property-sales and transactions, excluding those concerned with dowries and inheritance. They had to show their records of transactions to the arrendador on demand so that the tax might be collected, though this royal disposition of 1461 did not appear in the cuadernos. ⁽³⁶⁾

As soon as the encabezamiento system was introduced for the collection of alcabalas and tercias, in 1495, it was adopted in the partidos of Córdoba. Ladero has evidence of its use in this area in 1498, 1499 and 1503 (the last in the tierra), and local evidence indicates the existence of such arrangements in 1497 (in the tierra only) and from 1500 until at least 1511. Encabezamientos seem, in fact, to have become the normal method of collecting the alcabala and tercias after 1500. ⁽³⁷⁾ It appears that in the early days the town was reluctant to adopt the new system. In 1499, no less a person than Diego de Muela, a royal accountant (contador mayor), came to Córdoba to discuss with the council the merits of the encabezamiento,

and speak of the advantage that comes from it to the city and how [the city] receives great benefit from it and how in this Their Highnesses show [the city] great favour in it, and he gave many reasons for it all. ⁽³⁸⁾

all those persons and traders may give, for each of the above mentioned rents, the prices which they paid for them individually (por menudo), either in encabezamiento or arrendamiento, in the past year of 1501, for this present year and for the five following years, without any increase being made in them for all these six years, and all the officials and traders in each office [trade] have to oblige themselves on their own behalf for the total of each of... their rents and offices and not on behalf of any other, and this obligation and disclosure (averiguación) of price has to be done before the lord corregidor of this city and certain veinticuatros and jurados deputed for it, with the said treasurer. So that all of the abovementioned who wish to benefit from this grant shall find the said gentlemen, the corregidor and deputies and treasurer, in the council-house on each of the  days following, from three hours after midday onwards, until with God's help this business is completed. ⁽³⁹⁾

The encabezamiento, because it took no account of the rise or fall of prices and variations in the ability of citizens to pay tax at the agreed level, might work to the disadvantage either of the Crown or of the towns. Each side was concerned that it should not lose by committing itself to a global sum for several years in advance. The royal point of view appears in an undated Simancas document of the early sixteenth century.
 

It will be a very good thing to collect the rents by encabezamiento, but it must be with such moderation that the encabezamiento is not made either perpetual or for a long period, because the king would lose all the growth [77] and increase which there might be in the rents; therefore to put the increase in doubt would be an unreasonable thing, as through the increase in the population, expenses and outlay grow, from which it follows that trade and commerce must grow and as a consequence the duties of the alcabala must increase and grow also. ⁽⁴⁰⁾
 

Towns, on the other hand, sometimes found that they were unable to meet the demands to which they had committed themselves. In 1496 and 1497, there were riots and protests in Castro del Río and Fuente Obejuna over the limited encabezamiento then in force. Attempts by towns in Córdoba's tierra to by-pass the town in negotiating with the Crown over their tax assessments caused considerable friction, though the Crown did eventually allow Castro to negotiate in this way with the royal accountants. ⁽⁴¹⁾ Córdoba itself also complained to the Crown about the assessment of the meat rent in the 1502 encabezamiento, but nothing was done and the arrangement was continued indefinitely on royal initiative. ⁽⁴²⁾
 

The tercias reales, although a direct tax, were collected with the alcabala and came within the same arrangements, including encabezamientos. According to the earliest cuaderno for their collection, that of 1412, the connection with the remainder of the ecclesiastical tithe was retained and disputes in a particular place were heard by churchmen, but they had to resolve them in accordance with criteria laid down by the Crown. According to John II's 1433 cuaderno, each local council had to appoint an official to make a list (padrón) of contributors, which had to be signed by the parish priest. The goods concerned had to be kept at the disposal of the tax-farmer from the beginning of the tax-year, at Ascensiontide, until the following April. If they were claimed within this period, but the tax-payer could not produce them, the farmer might collect the equivalent amount in cash, based on the highest price of the season for wine, grain and livestock. The rate of tercia, which applied only to these agricultural products, was one fanega per cahiz (one-twelfth) of grain, one head in ten of livestock and one cántara or arroba in twelve of wine, though in the last case the rate was actually one-sixth for red wine and one-eighth for white. The farmer was liable for any losses after the goods had been collected. He endeavoured to avoid these by putting the goods in store, but he had to pay rent for the warehouses and to pay guards. The inevitable disputes over the lists of [78] contributions normally went before ecclesiastical judges, though the farmer could ask the Crown for a pesquisidor. ⁽⁴³⁾
 

By far the most important tax on the movement of goods in Andalusia was the almojarifazgo, which was basically a royal rent, though, in both Seville and Córdoba, that part of it which was collected in the tierra had been granted to the local council, which collected it for its own use. The almojarifazgo of the city of Córdoba, known as the almojarifazgo castellano, was collected in the same farms as the alcabala and the tercias of the area. It also included what was known as the 'old alcabala' (alcabala vieja), which was a five per cent levy on the price of pack animals (acemilas), payable by the buyer. ⁽⁴⁴⁾

The older taxes on the movement of goods which survived in the fifteenth century, the portazgo, roda, barcaje, castillería, and so on, had by this time become part of the municipal rather than the royal finances in Córdoba, as in many other royal and seignorial towns. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ Rodas and barcajes appear in the municipal accounts, but citizens of Córdoba were exempt from portazgo within its boundaries. The portazgo was, however, collected from the citizens of other towns who travelled in the area. Its accounts were included with those of the almojarifazgo. ⁽⁴⁶⁾

The servicio and montazgo were collected in the late fifteenth century on the basis of a cuaderno from before 1438, in the case of the former, while the latter was collected by use and custom. The servicio was raised in accordance with a fixed scale of charges, while the montazgo rate varied from region to region. In Córdoba, it was two head per thousand. A document to record the receipt of tax and to register flocks entering or leaving dehesas (grazing-grounds) or traversing passes cost six maravedís. Those who kept their flocks within the area of which they were citizens, or who returned home with them each night, were not liable to tax. Animals which were kept in fenced pasture 'to breed and fatten' were put into a category known as ganado merchaniego, for which there were special charges, unless they were bought by a butcher for these purposes, in which case they continued to be considered as ganado cabañil. The distinction between these two kinds of flock did not apply to pigs. Generally speaking, all flocks moving about the kingdom were under royal protection and no other lord could usurp the servicio. Transhumant flocks which crossed the passes (puertos) were under the control of the council of the Mesta and had to follow [79] fixed routes, going through passes at which the taxes were paid. The servicio was paid on all the animals in the flock and the montazgo was, for convenience, paid at the same time, for the use of pasture on the flock's journey from north of the puertos to the grazing-grounds of Extramadura, and during its time there. Flocks which returned north by a different route from that by which they had entered the grazing areas were liable to confiscation as descaminados (diverted). ⁽⁴⁷⁾

There was a third category of flock known as ganado travesío, which stayed within one region and did not migrate from north to south. The diocese of Córdoba was a recognised area for such grazing. All flocks of this type, going to pastures outside their own término, had to be counted first before an escribano público, and their owners had to obtain the licence of the tax-farmer or the local justices before leaving. The tax was paid on departure from the pasture and all flocks which were outside their own area on June 24 were counted, and paid the tax wherever they were on that day. Despite the problems involved in collecting the montazgo, this was one of the most efficiently collected of the Castilian rents in the late fifteenth century, because it was in the interest of the Crown, the tax-farmers and the Mesta to ensure that the money came in. However, it produced no more than two per cent of the royal revenues and Córdoba, like many other royal and seignorial towns, made strenuous efforts to avoid its citizens' having to pay. Sancho IV had given Córdoba a privilege in 1288, whereby the town might use the revenue from the montazgo for the repair of its walls and castles, but in the late fifteenth century the government made various attempts to collect the tax directly in Córdoba's tierra. The town opposed these attempts in the audiencia and in 1502, the farmer of the alcabala, Juan de Lorca, found that his collector, Alonso Pérez de Castro, was obstructed by Córdoba's council and its officials when he tried to collect the montazgo in its tierra. ⁽⁴⁸⁾

The tax burden which rested on Córdoba and its tierra in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries can be calculated with a fair degree of accuracy as a result of Ladero's researches and the use of some additional local material. It is not possible to produce detailed figures for the level of royal taxation in a particular town in a particular year, because statistics for this purpose, using the same criteria for all taxes, [80] are not available. However, the figures which do exist give an adequate general indication of the level at which the town was taxed by the Crown, if it is borne in mind that in Castile as a whole, in the fifteenth century, alcabalas and tercias provided eighty per cent of royal revenues, customs-dues (in Andalusia, the almojarifazgo) produced ten to twelve per cent and the servicio and montazgo two per cent. These percentages do not, however, include direct taxation in the form of Cortes servicios or Hermandad repartimientos. ⁽⁴⁹⁾

Approximate figures are offered for the value of royal taxation in Córdoba in various years between 1430 and 1502. The totals are given in Aragonese forms, in an attempt to indicate their real value, at least in monetary terms. They cover the partidos of Córdoba and its tierra, and consist of the known figures for the alcabala, tercias reales and almojarifazgo castellano, with ten per cent added to cover the minor royal taxes for which no detailed figures are available. Servicios and Hermandad repartimientos have been excluded from the reckoning, as have tercias reales collected in kind rather than cash. In 1430, a year chosen as typical of John II's reign, Córdoba paid the Crown the equivalent of 44,000 forms in tax. In 1465, the form value of royal taxation, at the beginning of the civil war in Castile under Henry IV, was 48,000. The figure in 1480, the year of the Cortes of Toledo, was very little different, at 48,500. Despite Ferdinand and Isabella's efforts to improve the efficiency of the machinery for tax-collection, the yield from Córdoba and its tierra had in fact fallen in real terms, by 1490, to 39,000 forms. There was an improvement, to 42,400 forms, by 1494, but by 1502 the results of the new policies, including the introduction of the encabezamiento on a regular basis, had become visible, and the tax-yield increased to 60,600 florins. The reason for the fall in revenue from these taxes between 1480 and 1490 was the effect of the Granada war, which seems to have reduced indirect tax-yield in Córdoba and district. For the years 1478-98, the total of 1735 forms for the annual Hermandad contributions should be added to the figures already given. After the servicio was restored, in 1500, the Hermandad levies disappeared from the reckoning.
 

Royal town councils, such as that of Córdoba, had certain financial resources which they could call their own. All taxation revenue from the town naturally belonged to the Crown, but the local council was made [81] responsible for collecting some of it and was permitted to use part of the result as public funds. It would clearly be anachronistic to divide the wealth and productive capacity of the Castilian economy in this period into 'public' and 'private' sectors, but nonetheless, a comparison between the resources of the Córdoba town council and those of some leading magnates in the region does provide an indication of the political, as well as the economic, strength of the two groups. Unfortunately for any attempt to study public finance in Córdoba and district, the only complete set of municipal accounts which survive from this period are those from Midsummer 1452 to Midsummer 1453, which are to be found in a legal document of the early sixteenth century. Partial accounts for 1478-9 survive in the actas capitulares. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ This information, with other scattered material, indicates the maim types of financial resource which were left at the disposal of the local council. These were ordinary taxes of various kinds, income from publicly owned lands and buildings, the fines imposed by municipal magistrates, exceptional levies on foodstuffs and other major commodities (sisas) and extraordinary direct taxation (repartimientos).

The most lucrative municipal tax in the Córdoba accounts for 1452-3 and 1478-9 was the almojarifazgo. This was a tax of Muslim origin, which consisted of duties on goods entering or leaving a centre of population. In the fifteenth century, it survived in the south of Spain and had, in many cases, been alienated by the Crown to local councils or secular lords. The almojarifazgocastellano in Córdoba, however, remained in royal hands. ⁽⁵¹⁾ It covered all goods entering the diocese of Córdoba for trading purposes, but citizens of Córdoba itself did not have to pay the tax within the city's jurisdiction. ⁽⁵²⁾ According to the cuaderno for 1455-61, all goods had to enter or leave Córdoba by one of four gates -- La Puente, Sevilla, El Rincón and Plasencia. At these points and in the custom-house, the farmers of the almojarifazgo, who were known as almojarifes, kept guards and collectors. Only migrant flocks were exempt from the tax and they were subject to other duties. The almojarifazgo castellano also covered river traffic between Córdoba and Seville. Goods might only be loaded or unloaded at the Córdoba jetties (muelles) if the almojarifes or their officials were present, or if an inventory of the goods had been made for tax purposes. However, although the main almojarifazgo in Córdoba itself was still in royal hands, the tax collected in the tierra was allowed to the local council. Thus, whereas the annual yield for Córdoba in 1448-50 was 7527 forms, the income recorded in the municipal accounts for 1452-3 was [82] only 817 florins. Nonetheless, in the domestic budget of Córdoba council, this was an important quantity. ⁽⁵³⁾

The actas capitulares contain references to the collection of the almojarifazgo in the tierra. The council enforced the set charges, imprisoned defaulters in the town gaol, assisted the farmers when they met difficulties in outlying areas, such as La Rambla, and, in 1493, instructed its lawyers to investigate the collection of the tax on fish in Santaella, at the request of the local almojarife. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ In terms of gold, the value of the rent in the 1478-9 accounts was much lower than it had been in 1452-3, because in the intervening period the equivalents in maravedís of gold and silver coins had risen sharply. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ However, Córdoba's income from the almojarifazgo in its tierra probably fell in this period by the same proportion as the part of the tax which remained in royal hands. The decline was part of a general trend affecting Castilian public finances.

Another tax on the movement of goods and also flocks which appears in Córdoba's accounts for 1452-3 is the roda. This was one of a group of taxes on internal trade which included the portazgo, barcaje, castilleria and others. ⁽⁵⁶⁾It appears to have assumed some importance in the Córdoba area because it affected sheep-rearing. In some documents, the roda is referred to in the same context as the portazgo and taxes on the use of passes (pasaje).

According to the 1452-3 accounts, a tax was collected to pay for a watch (velas) to be kept on the Guadalquivir above and below Córdoba, on the agricultural land to the south of the city, and in the Pedroche, with a separate arrangement for Fuente Obejuna. The method of collection is not known, but it appears that the tax was of diminishing importance, as the yield seems to have fallen from 144 florins in 1452-3 to a mere 166 florins in 1479. By this time, only one farmer of the rent is mentioned, whereas in the earlier accounts it was apparently collected in five parts. In July 1503, the actas state that the rent would no longer be collected, as the velas had ceased. The last farmer of the rent was probably Fernando Ruiz de Guadalupe, in 1503, as in September of that year a royal letter was received, forbidding the rent for velas in Córdoba and its tierra. ⁽⁵⁷⁾

Although it is not mentioned in the 1452-3 accounts, the 1435 ordinances state that Córdoba council farmed as a rent the almotacenazgo, a traditional Andalusiam office, inherited originally from the Muslims, which involved the supervision of the city's markets, including weights and measures. The rent was collected in the form of duties for [83] the use of the royal units of measure (peso del Rey) by non-citizens, fines for using false measures and for selling adulterated food, and duties on the import of various commodities by non-citizens. The duty payable by traders for the checking of their measures by municipal officials was also included in the almotacenazgo. ⁽⁵⁸⁾

Fines imposed by local magistrates were also a source of income for the town. These were not, however, paid directly into public funds, because the council did not employ the kind of bureaucracy which would be needed to collect them. Instead, it took the easier and cheaper route of farming the fines like taxes, thus assuring itself of a steady income without having to maintain am expensive municipal establishment. Two categories of fine appear in the 1452-3 accounts. There were the penas de ordenanzas, which were penalties for infringing the local ordinances, and the penas de corredores, which covered trading offences committed by brokers, especially those who dealt in livestock (corredores de bestias). Other material in Córdoba indicates the existence of further types of penalty, which were also farmed. These involved usurers, the playing of games, such as cards and darts, which were forbidden by the Crown, the illegal export of horses from Córdoba's jurisdiction, the illegal import of wine to the district and irregularities in the conduct of the butcheries. ⁽⁵⁹⁾

According to the notarial records, the penas de ordenanzas were rented to a single farmer for the city and the tierra, on an annual basis. He then sub-let the rent in the tierra to citizens of the individual towns. This system seems to have been followed, at least, in 1477, 1487, 1496, 1497, 1501 and 1512. However, 1512 was the last occasion on which the rent was farmed in this way. A surviving contract between the farmer, Francisco de Montilla, and a citizen of Montoro defines the penalties concerned as those for breaking the city's ordinances on the removal of bark from trees (perhaps cork-oaks) for export, and on the export of hides. In June 1513, the council voted that the rent should not be farmed in 1513-14 and on 11 September 1514, Pedro Fernández de Estrada presented a royal letter which forbade such a procedure in the case of this rent. In several of the contracts for penas de ordenanzas, the penalties for playing the prohibited games such as cards and darts were included in the same farm, though in others, before 1496, they seem to have been separate. ⁽⁶⁰⁾

The remaining types of penalty seem to have been farmed in the same way, but the isolated contracts which survive do not permit an assessment of the value of these rents as a whole to the municipal [84] finances. While the prices paid by the farmers were inevitably arbitrary, they were offered on the basis of an anticipated yield, agreed between the farmer and the regular offender, like any other tax. As a help in the making of predictions, there were fixed fines for some offences. For example, the fine for each offence of importing Castilian wine to Córdoba without a council licence was 6000 mrs, reduced to 3000 mrs in 1496. The fine was divided, in accordance with normal contemporary practice, into three equal parts, one of which went to the accuser, one to the judge and one to council funds. ⁽⁶¹⁾

Certain other minor rents contributed to the income of Córdoba council. One of these was the rent of the water-carriers (aguadores) and another the meaja, an obsolete coin worth half a maravedí, which was payable on each piece of cloth imported to Córdoba by non-citizens. The latter was not raised after 1502. Two taxes on the Moorish inhabitants of Córdoba were also included in the municipal income. One of these was the poll-tax (cabeza del pecho de los Moros) and the other was a duty on the meat sold to the Moorish community. The method used for collecting these taxes is not known, but it is probable that they were farmed, like the other municipal rents.

Apart from taxation, Córdoba council's main regular source of income was the letting of publicly owned land and buildings. By no means all the land in public ownership was let. The Crown automatically held uncultivated high ground (montes reales) for the use of all citizens and also, with the town council as its agent, kept lower uncultivated lands (baldíos) as public grazing for citizens' flocks. These lands might not be rented by private individuals. However, the council did gain considerable revenue from letting some of the pastures which it owned to individual tenants. These pastures were known as dehesas, because they were 'defended', or fenced in, and only the flocks of the owner or his tenant might use their grazing. In 1452-3, the council let seven such enclosures and the half-share which it owned in another. They produced, according to the accounts, more than a fifth of the council's income for the year. Later material shows that Córdoba owned at least seven other enclosures, which were not normally let to private citizens. The town's possession of these lands was by no means undisturbed. In 1489, the council gained from the audiencia of Valladolid a carta ejecutoria giving it possession of the dehesa of Navas del Moro. In 1517, it attempted to regain the dehesa of Trassierra, which had been seized by a local jurado. Almost all the references to publicly owned enclosures in local material concern measures taken by [85] the council to defend its possessions or prevent the misuse of the lands. As an exceptional measure to raise money to send messengers to Court, the council let the dehesa of Navas del Moro in 1493, first to some citizens of Córdoba and then to a citizen of Villafranca. In 1500, the dehesa of Dos Hermanos was let to a private citizen, after having been restored to Córdoba in the previous year. Also in 1499, the town was allowed by the Crown to make a new enclosure near Las Casillas, out of lands which had been recently restored to public ownership. ⁽⁶²⁾

While dehesas provided most of Córdoba's income from land, there is some evidence from 1495 that the council also gained some revenue in the form of corn paid as rent for the use of public arable land. Such payments were known as terrazgos. In January of that year, the royal council ordered Córdoba, by letter, to permit its citizens to sow with corn up to fifty fanegas (about thirty-two hectares) of land which had recently been restored to the town's possession in Carchena. The town's procurador, or representative, was duly despatched to the place in question to discover how much land was in fact available for this purpose and in July he sent a deputy to collect the terrazgos. ⁽⁶³⁾

Córdoba council also gained some income from buildings which it owned, both in the city and in the tierra. All these properties were let in return for more or less permanent quit-rents (censos), bringing in no more than one hundred maravedís a year, in most cases. The buildings concerned were bread-ovens in Córdoba and in various towns of the tierra, and combined houses and shops in Córdoba. Six of these were used as pharmacies. These publicly owned shops, known as alcaicerías, were a Muslim legacy and, as will become clear later, were partly devoted to the sale of textiles. The town's income from buildings was, however, tiny in comparison with the rent obtained from letting dehesas. ⁽⁶⁴⁾

It is clearly important to attempt to provide figures for the municipal income and expenditure of Córdoba in this period. Those available are unfortunately no more than fragmentary. In 1452-3, the council's income was 2674 florins, but its expenditure was 3009 florins, giving a deficit of 335 florins. There is no record of income and expenditure in subsequent years until 1500-1, when a surplus of 797 florins is recorded. This seems to have been exceptional for the period as, in 1503-4, income amounted to 3435 florins and expenditure to 3360 florins, giving a surplus of 75 florins. In 1506-7, there was a surplus of 311 florins, after which no such figures are recorded. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ It would be interesting to know how the large increase in income between 1479 (2244 florins) and 1503-4 (3435 forms) was achieved. Details of how revenue [86] was raised in this period are not available, but a document of 1470 indicates clearly how the council was accustomed to tackle the problem of increasing its income. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ The method used was to place impositions on everything 'which is generally bought and sold, except on bread'. The impositions were farmed under the supervision of a commission of the council, consisting of four veinticuatros and two jurados, and covered butcheries, livestock, fish, wine, cloth, clothing, fruit and hides, in both the city and the countryside, and oil and property transactions in the tierra alone.

The detailed instructions laid down for collection indicate the similarity between the impositions, or sisas, and the alcabala. The tax was collected by the seller's giving less of the product for the original price. Thus a wine-seller would give seven azumbres for the price of an arroba, which was equivalent to a tax of twelve-and-a-half per cent. It was the seller's responsibility to pay the tax and this was done each Friday, when importers of goods through the town gates handed over a tax of five per cent to the tax-farmer. In this way, the imposition affected goods at two stages, import and sale. With fish, for example, whether fresh or salted, there was an import duty of six per cent in the city and five per cent in the tierra, and, in addition, as with meat, the value of three ounces per pound sold was paid to the farmer. As with the alcabala and the almojarifazgo, the farmer was entitled to place guards at the gates to ensure that the duty was paid. An effort was made to ensure that the unloading and sale of goods was supervised by the tax-farmer and his men. The most elaborate of the council's instructions were devoted to the prevention of abuses in the import and sale of wine. The quantity counted as a load for tax purposes was twelve arrobas for a pack-mule (acemila) and eight for an ass, and it was forbidden to pile more wine-skins on to an animal in order to reduce the number of loads on which tax would be charged. The restrictions on import by night or by forbidden gates applied to the imposition as well as the alcabala. The five per cent duty applied to nearly all commodities, although the conditions for taxing cloth were much more complicated. The escribano of the commission for collecting the imposition received one per cent of the money collected and it appears that this was the practice with the other municipal rents as well. Impositions of this kind were raised whenever towns could not meet their commitments in any other way. Like the Crown, local councils preferred indirect to direct taxation as a way of raising large amounts of revenue, though repartimientos were sometimes made in the tierra.

[87] Inevitably, much of the money which the council collected in taxes and rents was spent on the salaries of municipal officials. Of these, the most prominent was naturally the corregidor, who under Ferdinand and Isabella received 500 mrs a day, though there was a shortlived reduction to 400 mrs in the 1490s. The normal figure brought his salary to 687 florins per annum and made it much the largest item in the municipal pay-roll. In addition, the corregidor received one hundred mrs a day as governor (teniente) of the fortress of the Calahorra. Compared with this sum, the amount paid to veinticuatros, jurados and other officials was insignificant. By Ferdinand and Isabella's reign, each veinticuatro in Córdoba received a salary of 3000 mrs, with an addition of 1000 mrs per annum, which were described as castellanías. These were in fact another form of salary, as very few veinticuatros had duties concerned with fortresses and those who did received separate payment. The burden of regidores' salaries clearly reached its heaviest in about 1480 and them decreased as the number of these officials fell by more than half. Between 1495 and 1514, a number of minutes refer to the council's reluctance to pay salaries to absentee veinticuatros. This attitude was completely justified by legislation, but the Crown insisted on making exceptions. The offenders were generally distinguished citizens, such as the count of Palma, the alcaide de los donceles, the 'Great Captain' and the lord of El Carpio. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ Jurados received no supplement to their salary, but this rose from 3000 mrs per annum in 1479 to 4000 mrs in 1510. ⁽⁶⁸⁾

All other municipal officials received a salary from the council, except for magistrates and constables who were nominated by the corregidor. Locally elected alcaldes, on the other hand, did receive salaries from the council. The 1452-3 accounts show how much the council saved if it did not have to pay a corregidor. In that year, the municipal pay-roll came to 898 florins, but this included only twenty-six regidores and no corregidor. In view of the known size of the council in the late fifteenth century, it is possible to estimate that more than 2600 florins a year were spent on salaries in those years. Of this, about 700 forms went to the corregidor, half being contributed by the town and half by the tierra. Salaries and expenses paid by the council to lawyers and to messengers sent to Court or elsewhere on public business have not been included in this reckoning, though both were regular items of expenditure in the municipal budget. Legal costs, if any, are not included in the 1452-3 accounts, but the actas capitulares show that expenditure on lawyers and trials in the audiencia between 1493 and 1515 amounted [88] to about a hundred or two hundred florins per annum, depending on the number of cases in which the town was engaged. In addition, between 1491 and 1499 and in 1513-15, the town had to pay 250 mrs a day in salary to a judge of boundaries. This amounted to 344 florins per annum.

Payments to messengers sent on council business also varied from year to year, ranging from about seventy florins in 1479 to 436 florins in 1496, though the normal level of expenditure was around ninety florins per annum. As a Cortes town, Córdoba had from time to time to find salaries for its two representatives to that assembly. The expense was only sporadic but could be considerable. In the early sixteenth century, the proctors were paid about a ducat a day (350 mrs in 1506 and 375 mrs in 1515). They always returned to Córdoba with royal letters ordering the council to reimburse them, but they often received an advance payment to help with expenses. ⁽⁶⁹⁾

Part of the municipal income was placed in a special fund for public works, known as the propios de los labores. This was used for the upkeep of fountains, roads and bridges in Córdoba and its tierra. The fund was entrusted to the veinticuatro Egas Venegas, and an escribano was delegated to assist him. The precise source of the money for this fund is not known, as the taxes set aside in the early stages after the Reconquest for use on fortifications cannot have been important by the late fifteenth century. ⁽⁷⁰⁾ The sums involved were quite considerable. In 1479, 550 forms were spent on fortifications and in 1497, 765 forms were devoted to the repair of bridges in the tierra. The council put such work out to tender and then paid the wages of the craftsmen and labourers and for the materials used. In the early years of the sixteenth century, the public works fund was in a healthy state. A surplus of 721 forms was held by Egas Venegas from the year 1502-3, and in 1503-4 a further 690 florins were obtained. The surplus for 1503-4 was 599 florins and in 1504-5, the year before Venegas' death, another 847 florins were raised. The works fund was not the only source of money for these purposes. In 1499, for example, the road from Córdoba to Trassierra was in need of repair and all owners of property adjoining it were required to contribute to the work or pay a fine of 5000 mrs. The principle of demanding contributions from those most likely to benefit from the project was also used to help finance the largest scheme undertaken in this period by Córdoba council. This was the construction of a new bridge across the Guadalquivir at Montoro. In 1498, a plan was approved by the council for the building of the bridge in [89] four years, at a cost of 2906 florins. As this sum was nearly equal to the council's entire income for the year and as this income was already committed to expenses such as salaries and litigation, it was inevitable that money would be required from elsewhere. A fixed sum was to be obtained from the public works fund for each of the four years, but this was expected to produce only a quarter of the money required. The almojarifazgo of the tierra was to be used on this project, despite the other calls on the municipal revenues, and the penalties for the illegal export of flocks from the Pedroche area were to be used in a similar way. However, it was thought that nearly half the money would come from property-owners on Córdoba's lands in the area, that is, the inhabitants of Bujaiamce, Pedro Abad, Aldea del Río and Montoro itself. Hopes were expressed by the proponents of the scheme that contributions might also be obtained from neighbouring landowners outside Córdoba's jurisdiction, such as the bishop and Cathedral chapter, Don Alonso de Aguilar, who held the lordship of Cañete, and the lord of El Carpio and Morente, but the council very wisely put no cash value on such help. In the event, the scheme quickly ran into difficulties and the bridge, although it was eventually constructed, was a drain on the town's resources for many years, but the 1498 plan does indicate fairly clearly the way in which large public projects were tackled in royal towns at the end of the fifteenth century. ⁽⁷¹⁾

While Córdoba council's financial position in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella was by no means entirely gloomy, a glance at the figures for approximate annual income from royal and municipal rents is enough to show the small scale of the funds at the local council's disposal. The clearest sign of the weakness of public finance, both royal and municipal, was the ever-growing dependence on temporary taxes raised on basic products, particularly foodstuffs. The use of these impositions was made necessary by the fact that no satisfactory way had been found, either by the Crown or by local councils, of tapping the resources of the wealthiest citizens. The main flaw of the Castilian taxation system, along with many others, in the late Middle Ages, was that the most powerful subjects, who were often also the most wealthy, instead of making a larger contribution than their fellows to the king's income, made no direct contribution at all. In addition, there was in practice no way of relating the contributions of those who did pay taxes to their wealth.
 

[90] Efforts to assess the wealth of seignorial families in the Córdoba area have only been made fairly recently. So far, there are two full studies of Cordoban noble houses. These are the works by Cabrera on the county of Belalcázar and its lords, the Sotomayor, and Quintanilla on the house of Aguilar and Priego. Information on other families still has to be sought in fragmentary notarial records, which so often fail to describe property in entail (mayorazgo), generally the most important of a noble family's possessions. ⁽⁷²⁾ In view of the lack of such records for the Córdoba area, it is necessary to use the published accounts of the lordships of the dukes of Medina Sidonia in the early sixteenth century. ⁽⁷³⁾ The most significant feature of these accounts, which concern territories covering most of the modern province of Huelva and much of that of Seville, is the colossal size of the income which they record. In 1509, 1510, and 1511, this came to over ten million maravedís, or 37735 forms, a figure comparable with the amount gained by the Crown from the alcabalas of the diocese of Córdoba and the equivalent of about four per cent of the entire royal income from the kingdom. According to these accounts, the main sources of the dukes' income were, in order of importance, customs duties (particularly the almojarifazgo), rent from dehesas in ducal ownership, which were mainly used as pasture, the rent of the butcheries of the towns of the señorío and the rent of public offices in these towns. The ducal administration was virtually a mirror-image of the regime in towns such as Córdoba and the dukes were almost completely successful in replacing the Crown in the lives of the inhabitants of their lordships. However, their control did not generally take the form of specifically seignorial tributes, such as the costs of the lord's administration of justice, or of the use of his balances to weigh provisions. In 1509, these sources produced only 25,000 out of over ten million maravedís, and that in only one or two towns. The largest cash contribution to the income of the duke in that year was revenue from royal taxes which had been diverted into the ducal coffers.

Ideally, annual income is not the only guide to the value of an estate, but it is impossible to discover the capital value, either of the dukes of Medina Sidonia's estates or of any other, except for the possessions of the leading family of the area, the house of Aguilar, which seems to have had wealth virtually on a par with that of the second family of Andalusia, the Ponce de León, if not of the dukes of Medina Sidomia themselves. Don Alonso de Aguilar's will, dated 1498, contains no [91] valuation of the Aguilar mayorazgo, which contained the bulk of the family's holdings, but it states that Don Alonso's wife, Doña Catalina Pacheco, brought a dowry worth 22,000 forms and that a total of 56,000 forms was paid by this couple for the three daughters. Even without the mayorazgo, the Aguilar goods were valued in 1498 at 10,000 florins. There is, however, a fuller valuation from the end of the period. When, in 1518, Doña Catalina Fernández de Córdoba, daughter of the first marquis of Priego, married Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa, she took with her the whole mayorazgo of the house of Aguilar as her dowry. The properties and rents in question were valued at 670,924 forms (eighteen million maravedís). Unfortunately, there are no surviving accounts to provide further details. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ The main rivals of the house of Aguilar, the counts of Cabra, possessed in Baena the largest and most valuable town in the kingdom of Córdoba, outside the capital itself. An indication of the town's economic vitality is the assessment of its alcabala at 6037 florins in the farm of 1493-5, according to a document of 1497. This figure is comparable with the duke of Medina Sidonia's income from the alcabala of his whole señorío in 1509-11. ⁽⁷⁵⁾

Apart from the house of Aguilar, the best-documented lordship which has so far been surveyed is the county of Belalcázar. ⁽⁷⁶⁾ The information in question is to be found in the Osuna section of the Archivo Histórico Nacional, and mainly in an inventory of the goods left at his death in 1464 by the second lord of Gahete (known as Belalcázar after 1466), Don Alonso de Sotomayor. This does not give the family's income from rents or the relative values of its different possessions, but it does show the main sources of the Sotomayor's wealth.

The most important properties which came to the family with the lordship of Gahete and Hinojosa, though not without violent resistance from their previous owner, Córdoba council, were the dehesas of Madroñiz, north of Gahete, Madroñicejo, which adjoined it, El Hinojoso and Torrecatalina, west and north of Hinojosa, and six other smaller properties between Hinojosa and Gahete. In addition, the Sotomayor had, by 1464, purchased another dehesa in the same area, from two citizens of Córdoba. Dehesas were large areas of enclosed land which were generally used partly as pasture and partly as arable land. Thus they produced cash income for their owners in return for the letting of grazing and also grain, in the form of terrazgos as rent for the use of arable, assessed at so many fanegas per yugada of land. Cash income from the largest dehesa, Madroñiz, seems to have been about 1000 florins per annum in the mid-fifteenth century, while one of the [92] smaller properties, El Cachiporro, yielded 50 florins in 1458, and four others together raised 4500 florins. The letting of these lands for arable use seems normally to have produced a terrazgo of two fanegas of wheat or barley per yugada. In addition to the properties in the Córdoba area, the Sotomayor possessed many dehesas in the viscounty of La Puebla de Alcocer, in Extremadura, which gave a cash income from the letting of pasture of 3678 forms in 1454-5. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ Unfortunately, as the surviving documents give no information about stock-breeding, which is known to have been am important family interest, it is impossible accurately to assess the Sotomayor's wealth, either in cash or in goods.

This brief survey of the wealth of a few leading noble families should indicate the relative weakness of public, as opposed to private, finance. The injustice of this state of affairs was manifest to contemporaries, including the town councils themselves. However, it was only when a cash crisis of some magnitude occurred that a body such as the regimiento of Córdoba would discuss the distribution and taxation of wealth in society as a whole. Even when such discussions did take place, as when Córdoba council, in 1496, considered the possibility of relating direct tax contributions more closely to the wealth of individual citizens, they always stopped short of an attack on the real cause of the trouble, which was the concentration of wealth and influence in few hands. As the veinticuatros owed their own position to their success in a society organised in this way, this limitation was inevitable. Exemption from taxation continued to be regarded as the natural accompaniment to financial and social success, and all attempts to put information on private wealth in the hands of local authorities were steadfastly resisted. In these conditions, public finance inevitably remained weak in comparison with private wealth. All measures to remedy the situation failed because of the underlying assumptions about the nature of society which limited their scope. The fact was that rich men were prepared to contribute to the cost of those activities which were the public concern of the local community, but they refused to do so on a regular, or compulsory, basis by means of taxation. Instead, they offered loans or gifts when they felt so inclined and thus retained the fullest possible control over the disposal of their own wealth. The economic, political and social effects of this approach on Córdoba and its surrounding district will gradually become clear.

1. Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, La hacienda real de Castilla en el siglo XV (La Laguna, 1973).

2. Ladero, La hacienda real, pp. 220-1, 89.

3. Ibid., pp. 199, 201.

4. Ibid., pp. 152-3.

5. María del Carmen Carlé, 'Mercaderes en Castilla, 1252-1512', Cuadernos de Historia de España (Buenos Aires), xxi-xxii (1954), 214.

6. Ladero, La hacienda real, pp. 21-32.

7. Cortes, iii, 441-3.

8. Cortes, iii, 629-30.

9. Ladero, La hacienda real, pp. 199-211.

10. RGS 20.8.1478.

11. AMC Actas 17.7.1497, 13.9.1497, 11.8.1505. APC Of. 1 vol. 1 fols. 460-3.

12. Ladero, La hacienda real, p. 214. AMC Actas 18.1.1496, 13.11.1495. AMC Sec. 19 Ser. 4 Actas i, fol. 76v. AMC Actas 23.2.1502, 30.10.1495, 3.7.1500.

13. Montalvo 4-2-6.

14. AMC Actas 13.11.1495, RGS 7.11.1477.

15. AMC Actas 22.5.1479, 21.3.1496, 19.1.1501. D. Pérez, Pragmáticas, fol. 146. Juan Ramírez, Pragmáticas de los Reyes Católicos (Alcalá de Henares, 1503), no. 199(5). AMC Actas 17.9.1501, 24.5.1501, 4.9.1500, 29.5.1500, 6.2.1497, 16.7.1505.

16. Ladero, La hacienda real, pp. 214-17. Archivo Municipal de Jerez, Vitrina 5 fols. 1-13 AMC Actas 7.9.1495 5.2.1496.

17. AMC Actas 9.3.1496, 12.9.1496, 18.9.1495, 21.3.1496, 15.6.1496, 16.3.1496, 29.7.1496, 5.8.1496.

18. AMC Actas 24.4.1500, 22.5.1500, 19.6.1500, 14.8.1500, 15.2.1496, 19.2.1496, 22.2.1496, 16.3.1496, 2.5.1496, 13.5.1496, 8.7.1496, 18.7.1496, 14.9.1496, 7.12.1496, 27.10.1497, 3.1.1498.

19. Values of servicios in Córdoba.
 

Córdoba	maravedís	Aragonese florins
1500	2,600,000	9,811
1502	6,106,652	23,043
1504	5,988,952	22,599
1506	5,000,000	18,867

(AMC Actas 30.3.1500. RAH Colección Salazar y Castro M-98 fols. 69-71v. AMC Sec. 18 Ser. 7 No. 2)

Total servicios for the Crown of Castile:
 

Year	maravedís	Aragonese florins
1476	162,000,000	675,000
1502	100,000,000	377,358
1504	102,656,000	387,381

(Ladero, La hacienda real, p. 214. RAH Salazar M-98 fols. 69-71v.)

20. AMC Actas 16.3.1479, 29.8.1495, 1.7.1496. Ladero, La hacienda real, p. 216.

21. For the 1452-3 municipal revenues see Table 2. Ladero, La hacienda real, p. 219. AMC Actas 8.4.1496, 14.8.1500.

Totals for the moneda forera in the diocese of Córdoba
 

Year	maravedís	florins
1440	239,536	4,606
1446	239,526	4,606
1458	215,066	2,150
1464	240,000	2,400
1482	240,000	905
1488	255,000	962
1494	421,346	1,589

(Ladero, La hacienda real, p. 221.)

22. Ladero, La hacienda real, p. 61.

23. Salvador de Moxó, La alcabala: sobre sus orígines, concepto y naturaleza (Madrid, 1963), pp. 15-30, 46-7.

24. Modesto Ulloa, La hacienda real de Castilla en el reinado de Felipe II (Rome, 1963), pp. 114-15.

25. Ladero, La hacienda real, pp. 65-7. Moxó, La alcabala, p. 39. The term hombre bueno could mean a townsman, or a lesser noble or ecclesiastic at Court, but already, in certain fueros, it applied to men who assisted the alcaldes in justice or administration, a meaning which appears to cover the present case. See Evelyn S. Procter, Curia and Cortes in León and Castile, 1072-1295 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 144-5, 161-2.

26. Ladero, La hacienda real, pp. 67-9.

27. APC Of. 18 vol. 6 sec. 7 fol. 6.

28. AMC Actas 4.1.1497.

29. AMC Actas 14.11.1496, 28.11.1496, 2.12.1496, 17.9.1493, 16.12.1496, 7.4 1497.

30. AMC Actas 6.5.1495, 30.12.1495, 4.1.1497, 30.5.1498, 27.11.1499.

31. Ladero, La hacienda real, pp. 70-1. AMC Actas 4.1.1497, 11.9.1495.

32. Ladero, La hacienda real, p. 71. AMC Actas 7.9.1502, 8.5.1504.

33. Ladero, La hacienda real, p. 70. AMC Sec. 18 Ser. 3 No. 7 (copy).

34. Agreements for the alcabala on hides (1491,, 1498, 1500): APO Of. 14 vol. 24 sec. 3 fols. 18v-29, Of. 14 vol. 24 sec. 6 fol. 11v, Of. 14 vol. 5 sec. 19 fol. 42, Of. 18 vol. 7 fols. 81-2, 83-4, 96-102; iron alcabala (1486, 1491, 1500): APC Of. 18 vol. 1 fols. 432, 438, 446v, 454, 497v, Of. 14 vol 24 sec. 9 fol. 23, Of. 18 vol. 7 fols. 184-5v, 188v, 191, 196, 205-6, 210V, 212; linen and wool alcabala (1500): APC Of. 18 vol. 7 fols. 136-9.

35. Sub-letting took place, for example, in 1484, 1490 and 1497: APC Of. 14 vol. 17 sec. 9 fol. 31, Of. 18 vol. 3 fol. 705v, Of. 14 vol. 31 sec. 10 fol. 14.

36. Ladero, La hacienda real, pp. 69-70.

37. AMC Actas 9.1.1497, 15.1.1500, 11.10.1501, 14.1.1502, 1.4.1502, 26.3.1505. AMC Sec. 18 Ser. 3 No. 9.

38. AMC Actas 27.1 1.1499.

39. AMC Actas 14.1.1502, 1.4.1502.

40. AGS Patronato Real leg. 3 fol. '45, quoted in Joseph Pérez, La révolution des 'comunidades' de Castille, 1520-1521 (Bordeaux, 1970), p. 140.

41. AMC Actas 18.1.1497, 9.8.1497, 7.3.1510.

42. AMC Actas 13.1.1503, 8.3.1503.

43. Ladero, La hacienda real, pp. 89-92.

44. Ladero, 'Almojarifazgo sevillano y comercio exterior de Andalucía en el siglo XV', Anuario de Historia Económica y Social, ii (1969), 72.

45. See Table 2.

46. AMC Sec. 1 Ser. 2 No. 36, copy, 24.2.1494, of John II's privilege of exemption from portazgo and almojarifazgo; AMC Sec. Ser. 2 No. 40, royal confirmation, 24.3.1491, of Córdoba's fueros on this subject. AMC Actas 30.12.1495.

47. The charges for the servicio, according to the 1438 cuaderno, were as follows: Bulls, young bulls (novillos), sows and calves separated from their mothers: 3 head per thousand and 18 mrs for guarda (probably towards the cost of collection). Pigs: 1 head per thousand and x dinero (1/l0 maravedí) per head. Sheep and goats: 5 head per thousand and 3 mrs for guarda.
Ganado merchaniego: 7 dineros per head for cattle, 2 dineros for sheep and goats. (Ladero, La hacienda real, pp. 152-66.)

48. AMC Sec. Ser. 2 No. u (Sancho IV, 29.11.1288). AMC Actas 28.1.1495, 1.3.1497, 18.1.1499 30.12.1502.

49. For servicio figures see note 19, pp. 210-11. For moneda forera, see note 21, p. 211. For alcabalas, tercias, almojarifazgo and servicio and montazgo, see Table 3. For the proportions of revenue provided by different taxes, see Ladero, La hacienda real, p. 41.

50. AMC Actas 1479, fol. 63. See also Table 2.

51. Ladero, 'Almojarifazgo', pp. 71-2.

52. AMC Sec. 1 Ser. 2 No. 34 (privilege of John II, 5.6.1451, in copy of 24.2.1494).

53. Ladero, 'Almojarifazgo', p. 72.

54. AMC Actas 1.10.1479, 12.9.1498, 13.2.1493.

55. See Appendix 2.

56. Carié, 'Mercaderes', p. 212.

57. AMC Actas 28.9.1479, 10.7.1503, 26.5.1503, 15.9.1503.

58. González Jiménez, 'Ordenanzas', pp. 196-201.

59. AMC Actas 20.3.1503. AMC Sec. 13 Ser. 10 No. 4, fol. 5.

60. APO Of. 14 vol. 10 sec. 3 fol. 35, Of. 18 vol. 1 fol. 729v, Of. 14 vol. 30 sec. 23 fol. 17, Of. 14 vol. 31 sec. II fol. 30, Of. 18 vol. 8 fol. 425, Of. vol. 1 fols. 34v-35. AMC Actas 22.6.1513, 11.9.1514. APC Of. 14 vol. 4 sec. 8 fol. 2v, Of. 18 vol. 1 fol. 145v, Of. 18 vol. 5 fol. 1133, Of. 25 vol. 2 fol. 99v.

61. AMC Actas 2.3.1490, 18.7.1496.

62. AMC Sec. 12 Ser. 21 No. 5. AMC Actas 11.1.1493. AMC Sec. 12 Ser. 67 No. 27. AMC Actas 13.1.1500, 1.2.1499.

63. AMC Actas 2.1.1495, 8.7.1495.

64. AMC Actas 7.5.1498.

65. AMC Sec. 12 Ser. 4 No. 14, fols. 342-6v and 352-7. AMC Sec. 14 Ser. 1 No. 3. AMC Actas 1479 fol. 63, 30.8.1501, 3.2.1505 and 8.11.1507.

66. AMC Sec. 14 Ser. 1 No. 3.

67. Montalvo 7-2-19. AMC Actas 15.5.1495, 13.7.1495.

68. AMC Actas 6.4.1479, 25.9.1510, 8.9.1512.

69. AMC Actas 4.9.1506, 4.5.1515.

70. Alfonso X, on 18 March 1254, granted Córdoba council a tax of 500 mrs on Moorish inhabitants, and Sancho IV, on 29 November 1288, gave the council the montazgo for this purpose (AMC Sec. 1 Ser. 2 Nos. 2 and 8).

71. AMC Actas 1479 fol. 63, 9.7.1497, 3.2.1505, 18.5.1506, 14.1.1499, 4.5.1498.

72. Cabrera is at present working on the lordships of the alcaides de los donceles in Chillón, Lucena and Espejo.

73. Emma Solano Ruiz, 'La hacienda de las casas de Medina Sidonia y Arcos en la Andalucía del siglo XV', Archivo Hispalense, clxviii (1972), 85-176.

74. AMC Sec. 19 Ser. 20 No. 23. Quintanilla, Nobleza, pp. 247, 267.

75. APC Of. 14 vol. 31 sec. 10 fols. 11-14.

76. Cabrera, 'La fortuna de una familia noble castellana, a través de un inventario de mediados del siglo XV', HID, ii (1975), 9-42.

77. Cabrera, 'La fortuna', pp. 19-23.