[347] The local pastoral Mestas of Spanish towns in the Late Middle Ages and the Siglo de Oro, far too long overshadowed by the understandable fascination of historians, economists and agrarian reformers with the Mesta Real and the role, malevolent or beneficent, played by that great national corporation in the transhumant sheep industry of Castile, have received little serious attention from scholars. ⁽¹⁾ Yet for many reasons, social, economic and institutional, this undue neglect requires to be redressed, for the municipal organizations of ganaderos, however lacking in the glamor and polemical excitement of the Honrado Concejo de la Mesta, constitute a significant element in the expanding agropecuarial society and economy of Castile between the 14th and 16th centuries.

This is notably true of Andalucía where, from at least the reign of Alfonso XI, Sevilla and other cities of the Guadalquivir Valley and its periphery develop municipal Mestas more numerous, structurally more sophisticated, and in all probability, economically and socially more important, than anywhere else in Castile or perhaps the entire Peninsula, Mestas furthermore which were the immediate prototypes of similar influential and likewise poorly comprehended municipal organizations in the Canaries and the Americas.

It is these Andalusian bodies that the present essay proposes to subject to an exploratory, inevitably partial and tentative examination. Definitive conclusions, [348] it can hardly be emphasized too strongly, will depend upon intensive search of the region's rich municipal archives along the lines so fruitfully pursued for Carmona by González Jiménez ⁽²⁾ ; yet much can be learned regarding the characteristic features of the Mestas and their problematics from materials presently available the Ordenanzas or Ordenamientos de Mesta of Baeza, Ubeda, Sevilla, Baena and Granada (all published except the first named); the general ordenanzas and actas capitulares of certain towns; the royal documentation, emanating from the Reyes Católicos and their Consejo Real, calendared in the volumes of the Registro General del Sello . ⁽³⁾ On this basis, after certain clarifications demanded by the confusion surrounding this subject, I propose to assemble the first catalogue to be drawn up of the region's towns which can be proved to have possessed, or as in the case of Córdoba, at least sought to possess, a Mesta of their own. Secondly, the institution's organization and functioning as an instrument of control over local pastoral affairs for crown and cabildo will be considered; and its relationship described with both the hired pastores outside its membership and their masters, the stockowning ganaderos, small and large. Special attention will have to be given, in the light of data from Córdoba, to the municipal Mesta's possible connection with the aristocratic movement of land enclosure for pastoral purposes in late medieval Andalucia; and I shall close by submitting a few reflections upon the light shed by the Mesta on the structure and mentality of the rapidly changing and expanding agropecuarialism of the Andalusian Siglo de Oro.

We commence with some cautions aimed at dispelling the frequent misconceptions on this subject. First, on the lexicographical side, it is to be noted that the almost exclusively Castilian vocable mesta first surfaces in the second half of the 13th and early 14th centuries in a small number of the municipal fueros and reales privilegios of the two Castiles, western Bajo Aragón (Albarracín), Andalucía and (probably) Murcia. Whether derived, as still implausibly maintained by Corominas and others, from Latin mixta ('mezcla'), because of its connection with the unscrambling of 'animales mezclados', or, far more convincingly, whether it is in fact the Arabic meshta (or meshta, mesta ), meaning, inter alia, winter quarters, and precisely the term applied by Berber nomads to their winter sheep assemblage, the term in Romance came to denote, as in the expression hacer mesta , the holding of regular convocations, commonly in the spring and fall, of a locality's ganaderos and pastores. ⁽⁴⁾ Since at such an assembly were elected the alcaldes de la Mesta [349] who throughout a year of office exercised judicial and executive authority to enforce the growing mass of regulatory legislation, this whole pastoral agency of the concejo also came to be styled the Mesta. (To distinguish the two meanings, I shall employ lower case for the former and capitalize the latter.) Despite Vicens Vives, Valdeavellano and others, there is small reason to believe that the Mesta Real evolved directly out of the individual Castilian municipal Mesta, or from towns with Mestas clustered along one of the later famous cañadas, ⁽⁵⁾ since few if any of the towns of long-range transhumancy in Alfonso X's Mesta Real (created not in 1273, as so often said, but some ten to twenty years previously) ⁽⁶⁾ possessed such a Mesta. Furthermore, not only in Andalucía but elsewhere, towns that do have Mestas are normally on terms of complete hostility towards the Mesta Real.

Contrary also to the common view that in medieval Iberian pastoralism the town or village Mesta was widespread and of remote antiquity, the fact is that for the two Castiles above the Sierra Morena no more than a painfully small list can be compiled: only Alcaraz, Uclés, Sepúlveda, Barco de Avila, Toledo and Madrid are known to me, with the last two falling very late in the 15th century.

So far as concerns Andalucía, where more Mestas occur than are now known for all the rest of Castile, no simplistic thesis of continuity with a supposed Moorish pastoral antecedent can be accepted or used to explain this plurality in numbers. The fact that as late as December 1492 the regnal capital of Córdoba still had no Mesta, while in 1494 the ganaderos of Ronda are found complaining of injuries suffered through the lack of such a protective body ⁽⁷⁾ , makes this certain. We can safely assume that the municipal Mesta reached the Guadalquivir Valley by way of New Castile, perhaps in the late 13th century, unquestionably by the first half of the 14th; but the genetic question can be subordinated here to a more pressing concern.

Because in the Castilian monarchy of the Later Middle Ages the creation, or at any rate the legitimization, of a municipal Mesta in public law, as invariably extra-foral, was regularly considered to require the formal approval of the king in a specific merced or confirmation, the historian confronts three fundamental questions affecting a given Andalusian town: 1) did it in fact possess a Mesta, or were its pastoral concerns handled, as in the majority of cases above the Sierra Morena, directly by the cabildo itself? 2) if a Mesta appears, when was it established and under what circumstances? 3) by what monarch was it authorized, and by which of his successors subsequently confirmed?

The following catalogue, designed to answer these questions, embraces those Mestas identifiable so far, classified according to the four reinos involved -- Sevilla, Córdoba, Jaén and Granada -- with (where possible) minimal historical and [350] bibliographical data regarding their origin and subsequent evolution to the 16th century. 

PRELIMINARY LIST OF THE MUNICIPAL MESTAS OF ANDALUCIA

Reino de Sevilla 

A. Sevilla. It is now generally assumed that this Mesta was conceded to the city and its Tierra by Alfonso X in 1266, but this view rests upon a manifest error of Ballesteros (which in turn misled Julio González) in assigning to Sevilla the real privilegio which on 22 October of that year the learned monarch actually granted to los pastores e vaquerizos of the Manchegan municipality of Alcaraz north of the Sierra Morenas. ⁽⁸⁾ In fact, we know of no royal act conceding a Mesta to the metropolis of the Guadalquivir. Nor is one ever cited in the Ordenanças de Sevilla, published in 1527, whether in this code's notably full chronological catalogue of royal charters, the Sumario de los priuilegios de Seuilla , or in its lengthy Ordenanças (or Ordenamiento ) de los alcaldes de la Mesta, which simply speaks of "los ordenamientos de mesta, que antiguamente fizieron el Cabildo y Regidores." ⁽⁹⁾

We can of course hypothesize early loss of a royal foundational act, even if such a solution looks somewhat improbable for this center of acute archival consciousness; but pending further investigation, all that is certain is that this greatest of the Andalusian, and indeed of all Spanish, Mestas attributed its own genesis to the initiative of the local cabildo. The first proof we have of royal acceptance manifestly post-dates the creation: the Ordenamiento bestowed upon Sevilla in 1339 by Alfonso XI, which by ordering the alcaldes de los pastores , when hearing cases outside the city in the Tierra, to act in conjunction with the alcalde of the villa or lugar involved, bears witness to an institution in esse. ⁽¹⁰⁾ There is also, for 1377, the pliego of municipal rentas quoted by Carande, which defines at some length the conditions under which the alcaldes de la Mesta were to permit vecinos-ganaderos of Sevilla, the Aljarafe, and certain towns outside the términos, to place their animals in the prized pasturelands of the Islas, Marismas, Veras and Aguijón. ⁽¹¹⁾

[351] Although for the rest of the Middle Ages Sevilla continued to receive privilegios and ordenanzas from the crown, some of which relate to pastoral matters, none mentioning the Mesta or documenting its confirmation by monarchs between Alfonso XI and Enrique IV is known to me. On the other hand, the already mentioned título of the Ordenanças of 1527, the Ordenanças (or Ordenamiento) de los alcaldes de la Mesta, reflect a process of institutional growth culminating under the RR. CC. when this statute was probably first put together on the basis of older materials and traditional practices. Close analysis might permit us to follow the evolution of the Sevillan Mesta from a primitive form; this cannot of course be attempted here, but the problem of dating demands a few words. The composition of the text surely antedates the recopilación of all the municipal Ordenanças which was commenced on 18 May 1515 by Juan de Silva y de Ribera and completed by him on 18 August 1519, ⁽¹²⁾ seven years before the royal license of 1526 approved the edition published the following year. The letter of the RR. CC. authorizing the recopilación , however, goes back to 1502; ⁽¹³⁾ and since in 1509 the cabildo of Tenerife in the Canary Islands, then in the process of organizing a Mesta for that insular municipality, issued certain regulations designated as temporary, pending arrival of the "ordenanzas de la Mesta de la Ciudad de Sevilla y su tierra," ⁽¹⁴⁾ the Sevillan text must have been in circulation some fifteen years before 1527, very likely before the death of Queen Isabel in 1504, to which it makes no reference. We can therefore assign this pastoral code to the time of the RR. CC. rather than that of Charles V.
 

B. Aracena, Alcantarilla, Cazalla: Comarcal Mestas of Sevilla. Ord. Sevilla applies the term repartimiento to the system under which certain more heavily pastoralized subdivisions of the municipal Tierra had what we may call comarcal or district Mestas of their own subject to that of the capital. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Only vecinos-ganaderos residing in a carefully defined belt immediately surrounding Sevilla met for their semi-annual gatherings in the Prado de Santa Justa, on the northwestern side of the city near the Puerta del Sol. Elsewhere three other Mesta zones were delimited in terms of the villas and lugares composing them: (1) the Mesta of Aracena, for those located to the northwest all the way up into the Sierra around Fregenal; (2) the Mesta of Alcantarilla, deep in the Campiña below Sevilla on the leftbank of the Guadalquivir opposite the Marismas, to which came vecinos of the general area Utrera-Lebrija-Villamartín; and (3) the Mesta of Cazalla, for places well to the northeast high in the Sierra near the municipal boundary. ⁽¹⁶⁾

All three comarcal Mestas were bound by the Ordenamiento of the capital, and held their semi-annual assemblies in the same seasons of the year according to a cycle of fortnightly intervals that allowed the alcaldes de la Mesta of Sevilla, accompanied by their escribano, to preside over each of them in turn. Elsewhere in Andalucía only the Ordenanzas of the Mesta of Granada contemplate such a system of [352] comarcal bodies, although there the basis of organization is urban, not rural. ⁽¹⁷⁾ It can be found, however, as introduced from Sevilla, in Tenerife and, in all probability, México (and perhaps other towns of New Spain). ⁽¹⁸⁾
 

C. Jerez de la Frontera. In all probability Jerez possessed a Mesta from the 14th century but the first notices I have yet found come from the composite list of concejo officials put together by Sancho de Sopranis from the Libros Capitulares for 1459 and 1466, in the reign of Enrique IV. ⁽¹⁹⁾ These show that by the commencement of the 15th century, as probably long before, the municipal offices included an alcaldia de la Mesta , an alcaldia de la montaracía, and an escribania de la Mesta y de la montaracía. No Ordenamiento de Mesta seems to have been discovered for Jerez de la Frontera; nor do the entries of R. G. S. for the town between 1475 and 1494, although they report quarrels over livestock between Jerez and Ronda, make any mention of the Mesta. ⁽²⁰⁾
 

D. Carmona. The organization of the Mesta of this town some 35 kms. east of Sevilla is fully described in the pastoral statute rubricked Titulo de los alcaldes de Mesta which is included in the Libra de las Ordenanzas still preserved in the Archivo Municipal and in 1972 published by González Jiménez. ⁽²¹⁾ The Libro was compiled in 1511 by the bachiller Juan Gutiérrez de Sotomayor but on the basis of a previous redaction also dating from the reign of the RR. CC.; ⁽²²⁾ and the Título de los alcaldes de Mesta makes no specific reference to any first authorization of the town's pastoral body by a monarch, although its third section instructs the local alguazil o portero to execute any decision of the alcalde de Mesta in cases relating to lost stock "como mandamiento de juez de sus altezas, pues él se probee por provisiones reales que la villa tiene." ⁽²³⁾ We possess however from the reign of Juan II a real carta of 12 December 1430, addressed to Carmona from Medina del Campo and validated by the secretary Pedro Alfonso, which concedes to the town the right (facultad) to name jueces de mesta within its términos. ⁽²⁴⁾ This act may well constitute the oldest royal recognition of the local Mesta; certainly the pastoral provisions of the Título of 1511, although undoubtedly long antedating this late codification, do not seem to display visible signs of greater antiquity than the first half of the 15th century.

Carmona's Archive Municipal also contains still another survival of the highest interest from the great age of the Andalusian Mesta, in the form of at least one Libro de Mesta , i. e., the escribano's own official record of the proceedings of the mestas held at the town during the years 1514-1517. ⁽²⁵⁾   This is the only such [353] extant volume yet reported. How valuable it would be to have it in print as a forerunner of the brand books, stock books and minute books of innumerable pastoral associations of modern times on both sides of the Atlantic!
 

E. Ecija. The existence by 1478 of a Mesta in this town of the extreme eastern zone of the Sevillan reino is made a strong possibility by a requerimiento issued by the Consejo Real on 11 December of that year. This orders payment to the arrendadores de la sisa e imposicion de Ecija of sums owed them by "Gonzalo Garcia y consortes, pastores, vecinos de Viniegra, hermanos del concejo de la Mesta." ⁽²⁶⁾ These words might be taken to indicate a Mesta at Viniegra but this small lugar, located within the Tierra of Ecija, is unlikely to have had its own Mesta; at most one of comarcal character might be suspected. On the whole however it seems much more likely that the reference here is to a Mesta of Ecija, the convocation (concejo) of which was attended by the delinquent pastores-vecinos-hermanos of Viniegra.

REINO DE CORDOBA

A. Baena. The Mesta of this flourishing town to the southeast of Córdoba was in existence before 1415, the earliest date recorded in the mass of regulations relating to it that the escribano Anton de Pareja in the 16th century put together under the rubric Mestas, when compiling his grand collection of Baena's Ordenanzas from the Libros of capitular acts. ⁽²⁷⁾ This is the first instance in our list of a Mesta existing in a town of señorío, since in 1415 Baena belonged to Enrique III's marshal Diego Fernández de Córdoba and long continued in the hands of his linaje. But it was originally a royal town, did not begin to be alienated until the reigns of Juan I and Enrique III, and was not definitely lost to realengo until 1401. ⁽²⁸⁾ The probability is therefore very strong that the municipal Mesta of Baena should be traced back into the 14th century, very possibly, like those of Sevilla, Baeza and Ubeda, to the days of Alfonso XI; and that it managed to survive the vicissitudes that placed the municipality under aristocratic control.

By 1415 however Baena's Mesta had fallen on evil days and was ripe for overhaul. The cabildo, meeting on 17 June en el portal de la plaza , complained bitterly that failure to hold mestas duly announced in advance had seriously injured the local ganaderos, and proceeded to promulgate a new ordenanza which commanded the alcaldes de la Mesta to summon two duly proclaimed assemblies each year at which all ganados agenos were to be surrendered and restored to their owners; fixed the penalties to be imposed for infringement of pastoral legislation: and dealt with various other matters of similar moment. ⁽²⁹⁾ Since in the year 1415 the marshal Diego Fernandez de Córdoba is known to have been actively repeopling the town of Doña Mencia just to the south of Baena, ⁽³⁰⁾ and since it was his pastor [354] mayor Gil Ruiz who with one Juan García Moreno had galvanized the cabildo into putting out its reformist ordenanza, ⁽³¹⁾ we can probably conclude that the reorganization of the Mesta at Baena was part of a program of renewal and fomento the señor mariscal was promoting throughout his domains.

Certainly this Mesta continued to operate down through this century and well into the next, for Antón de Pareja found in the municipal Libros a mass of pastoral ordenanzas for the years 1509-1535. ⁽³²⁾ These allow us to see how closely an Andalusian cabildo might supervise its Mesta under the RR. CC. and Charles V and seek to bring it into line with the changes and requirements of the region's pastoral industry in this era of its prosperity.
 

B. Belalcázar and Hinojosa. On 25 April 1542, D. Francisco de Zúñiga y Guzmán Sotomayor, third duke of Béjar, granted a municipal Mesta jointly to these two neighboring towns of his Cordobese señorío and also approved its submitted Ordenanças. These regulations, discovered at Belalcázar by Prof. Emilio Cabrera Muñoz of the University of Córdoba (who plans their publication) are of distinct historical and institutional interest; and I am indebted to him for kindly supplying me with a copy of the text and thus making possible the addition to the catalogue above of this Andalusian Mesta of authentic seigneurial authorization.
 

C. Córdoba . Surprisingly enough, given the location of this historic Andalusian capital in the heart of the pastoral countryside of the lower Guadalquivir Valley, only one explicit testimony to a Cordobese Mesta has yet turned up. This takes the form of an abridged asiento , calendared in R. G. S. under the date 14 December 1492, concerning the establishment at Córdoba of a mesta de ganados. ⁽³³⁾ The proposal had reached the Consejo Real as the result of a petition submitted by certain caballeros y señores de premia of the city who were suffering from the 'robos, hurtos, y fraudes' committed by pastores and other persons against them. We shall investigate below the complex circumstances under which the Consejo Real took a favorable attitude towards this project (Section III), and there perceive how even if this Mesta was never actually brought into being -- a point on which our ignorance is now total -- the case of Córdoba is of the highest interest for discerning how an Andalusian municipal Mesta might become a storm center of conflicting social and economic forces in the age of the RR. CC.

REINO DE JAEN

A. Baeza. This Mesta, one of the oldest known for the Guadalquivir Valley, is of particular interest because Baeza was by far the more important of the only two Andalusian towns known to have been conceded the Fuero of Cuenca. ⁽³⁴⁾ [355] That Baeza, half a century after receiving this prized municipal code from Alfonso X in 1273, found it necessary to obtain the right to a Mesta from Alfonso XI, should dispel any notion that the pastoral institutions delineated in Fuero of Cuenca automatically included any such body. Valuable information concerning the history and character of the Baezan Mesta is preserved in an abridged version of the royal foundation act to be found in a scribal notice of its confirmation by Charles V on 6 April 1552. From this entry, contained in a Registro, now at Paris, of confirmations of privilegios by the Emperor and Philip II, ⁽³⁵⁾ we learn that Alfonso XI, in a privilegio rodado of 13 January 1331 addressed to "los omes buenos e pastores del ayuntamiento de la mesta de Baeca y su termino," accorded his royal approval to the Hordinamiento (de Mesta ) submitted by these to him. The provisions of this ordinance, which were included in the Alfonsine text, are summarized in the Registro's abridgement: they relate to the choice of two alcaldes, semi-annual mestas of the ganaderos before and after the summer drive of their animals to the Sierra (de Segura), and various rights of pasturage and exemption from grazing fees. The Registro version also supplies names and dates for five subsequent monarchs who confirmed the Alfonsine act: Enrique III (2-XII-1393), Juan II (27-IX 1411 and again on 6-IX-1420 when the king visited Baeza), Enrique IV (19-IX-1456), and of course Charles V (6-IV-1552). No significance need be attached to the absence from this series of the names of the RR. CC. Documents in the Registro General del Sello for the years 1491-2 show that either directly or through their Consejo Real Fernando and Isabel extended firm support to Baeza's dueños de ganados and their ayuntamiento de la Mesta against the efforts of Quesada, Baza, Huéscar, Castril and other towns of the Adelantamiento de Cazorla to prevent the passage of, or at least heavily tax, the Baezan flocks and herds as they moved to and from their customary summer feeding grounds in the Sierra de Segura. ⁽³⁶⁾ After 1492 this controversy disappears from the R. G. S. calendars, but it may be suspected that a renewal of it in the 16th century lies back of the confirmation obtained from Charles V in 1552. We have here, in any case, an Andalusian Mesta that flourished through two centuries and can be connected especially with the protection of livestock annually moving along cañadas far outside the bounds of the municipal Tierra.
 

B. Ubeda. This Mesta first receives documentary attestation on 2 January 1376, in the reign of Enrique II. On that date thirteen members of the cabildo promulgated an ordenamiento de Mesta, the text of which Klein discovered in the Granadan holdings of the archive of the Mesta Real. ⁽³⁷⁾ This valuable text presents the cabildo as highly sensitive to the charge that in extending such a bien y merced to the vecinos they were usurping a royal prerogative, for their statute commences by declaring that it is solely designed to effect the restoration of an earlier Mesta [356] at Ubeda based upon unas cartas (sc. reales ) e hordenamientos which had been destroyed during the occupation of the city by the Moors. This doubtless refers to the city's sack in November 1367 by the Granadan army which had devastated Jaén the preceding September and in the spring of 1368 besieged Córdoba, ⁽³⁸⁾ so that roughly a decade had passed before the town undertook to revive its original Mesta. As to the antiquity of the latter we have no clue; given Pedro I's lack of interest in such matters, it seems likely that the original authorization for an Ubedan Mesta stemmed from Alfonso XI. probably sometime between 1330 and 1350.

The Ordenamiento of 1376, or as the cabildo styles it, carta de licencia e abtoridad , addresses itself to all ganaderos of Ubeda and the lugares of its términos who owned 50 or more head, and contains numerous provisions, described as "segund uso e costumbre que aviades en los tienpos pasados," on the election of alcaldes, semi-annual convocations, handling of ganados mestennos , marks and brands, obligations of pastores, etc. Three years later this code received formal validation from the oidores of the Chancillería of Valladolid (25-XII-1379), and on 15 December 1393, at the Cortes of Madrid, Enrique III added his confirmation. ⁽³⁹⁾

Nothing more is heard of this Mesta until the time of the RR. CC., when documents of the Registro General del Sello depict it in vigorous action to protect the town's seasonal drives of transhumant stock into two widely separated parts of Alta Andalucía. One of these lay to the east, towards the Sierra de Segura, where (as in Baeza's case) Baza, Huéscar, Castril and other places in the Adelantamiento de Cazorla were closing the cañadas to the ganaderos of Ubeda. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ But this Mesta was active also to the south, in the area of the Sierra de Huelma, one of the then newly annexed districts of the Frontera de Granada. ⁽⁴¹⁾ In this region -- we may conjecture -- the rights of access granted 'al concejo de la Mesta y a los dueños de ganado' of Ubeda can probably be connected with the fact that in the second half of the 15th century the celebrated head of the city's linaje of La Cueva, D. Beltrán de la Cueva, when valido of Enrique IV, had acquired the recently conquered Moorish town and castle of Huelma through his marriage in 1462 to D. ^a Maria de Mendoza, the daughter of the marques of Santillana. ⁽⁴²⁾

Here again we have the record of a Mesta of the 14th century continuing to flourish under the RR. CC. and exhibiting its value for safeguarding access to, and free use of, the vital extra-municipal pastures. The impression made by all of this of an exceptionally strong and well organized Mesta gains further corroboration from the fact that the Ordenanças of Granada of 1520 explicitly adopt Ord. Ubeda. [357] at one point, perhaps employing for this purpose an earlier copy of the very text of 1533 that Klein found among the Granadan papers of the Mesta Real. ⁽⁴³⁾
 

C. Jaén . The painfully limited data on the pastoral system of this regnal capital do not antedate 5 September 1491, when we commence to encounter letters of the Consejo Real directed to, or containing mention of, an organization of ganaderos at Jaén variously described as 'el priastre y cofrades de las Mestas de Jaén,' 'los cofrades de Santo Domingo,' 'la cofradía de Santo Domingo de los pastores de Jaén,' 'la cofradia de Santo Domingo que es de los pastores y dueños de ganado de la misma (ciudad).' ⁽⁴⁴⁾ This is striking testimony to the fact that at Jaen the municipal Mesta took the unusual constitutional form of a religious gild or confraternity, headed by a single president, the strangely entitled priastre. How long before 1491 this body can have existed we cannot determine; but its religious structuring, unique official of alcalde rank, and certain indications from its involvement in the aristocratic enclosure movement aiming at the conversion of municipal dehesas into privately owned pastures, all incline me to suspect a date in the 15th rather than the 14th century, probably not too long before the reign of the RR. CC.

REINO DE GRANADA

A. Granada. In 1520 the ganaderos of the then as yet unconfirmed Mesta of this city put together for royal consideration the series of short Ordenanças which Klein published (although only in part) from the archive of the Mesta Real. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ Cabildo approval of the project is evident all through the text; but the revealing words "la dicha mesta que agora nuebamente se suplica a Su Majestad que aya en esta cibdad e reyno de Granada" -- which are united with a fervent plea that throughout the reino all Mestas associated with that of the capital be exempted from any judicial and financial subordination to the Mesta Real -- point to an earlier blocking of a Granadan Mesta by the Honrado Concejo, very likely in the last years of the Rey Católico. Whether this new appeal to Charles V enjoyed any greater success may be doubted; certainly the official collection of the city's Ordenanzas, published in 1552, although treating pastoral questions in various places, does not mention, as we might expect, any local Mesta. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Search of the municipal and other pertinent archives however can alone determine the validity of this assumption.

Two further points of considerable interest must be noted. Chronologically, this is the latest attempt known to install an Andalusian municipal Mesta; it postdates that of Tenerife (1509) by a decade and precedes by only another decade the first Mesta at México (1529). As at Sevilla, the Ordenanças are explicitly [358] intended to serve ganaderos not only of the capital but of outlying districts, only here many more subordinate Mestas than the three rural satellites of the Sevillan repartimiento are envisaged, centered about smaller communities, without being allowed their own alcaldes: "Yten que todos los otros lugares de la tierra e juresdicion desta cibdad, donde no puede concertar a la dicha mesta porque son alejos della, señalaren esta cibdad de los lugares donde se venian a juntar para que alli hagan tanbien sus mestas." ⁽⁴⁷⁾ It is specified further that all such Mestas were to conform to the Ordenanças of the capital. Perhaps we should see in this proposal to permit a whole network of additional Mestas a further reason for royal reluctance to endorse the Granadan Ordenanças , with their seeming infringement upon the jealously guarded royal prerogative to concede Mestas. 

Incomplete, surely, as is this muster roll of barely a dozen Andalusian municipal Mestas, a certain geographical and chronological pattern emerges from it that can usefully serve as the point of departure for further investigations: a decided concentration of Mestas (Granada excepted) in towns of the campiñas and sierras closest to the Guadalquivir River; the preeminence, however obscure the precise origins, of two periods of particular strength and royal interest -- the reign of Alfonso XI, and the epoch of the RR. CC. and Charles V. No less important, it can now be realized, is the fact that for half of the Mestas concerned we have substantial materials available for reconstructing their internal organization and external relations: the four relatively extensive Ordenamientos de Mesta of Ubeda, Baena, Sevilla and Granada; a fifth, from Baeza, in much abridged form; and the royal documentation of the Registro General del Sello at Simancas. Thorough exploitation of these sources and others yet to be discovered promises to be a lengthy process. Meanwhile, I propose here to use them as a means of gaining light upon two closely related questions: the structure of the Andalusian Mesta viewed as an instrument of administrative control over the pastoral industry by ganaderos, cabildo and crown; and the Mesta's role in the late medieval drive of the Andalusian local aristocracies to achieve dominance over large-scale ganaderia in the epoch of its greatest expansion.

The municipal Mestas of Andalucía can be said normally to have owed their existence to favorable action of a cabildo responding to the solicitation of, or acting in collaboration with, the local dueños de ganados, an action subject to royal confirmation in the form of a merced which the Mesta found it advantageous to have approved by succeeding monarchs. The real privilegio to this effect, however, can address itself not only to the cabildo but directly to the hombres buenos y pastores de la Mesta , and it was common practice to incorporate into its text the primitive Ordenamiento submitted by the ganaderos with their petition. ⁽⁴⁸⁾

[359] From this procedure the Mesta emerged as a recognized corporate entity possessing executive, judicial, and to some degree legislative, powers which it might exercise through its general assembly of ganaderos and pastores -- the ayuntamiento, or concejo, de la Mesta , and its designated officers: one, two, or more alcaldes de la Mesta ; and the escribano, who might be either an escribano del concejo or a true escribano de la Mesta. The Mesta was subject to legislation supplementing the Ordenamiento, which the cabildo continued to promulgate, and the latter body, if it did not actually select them, always regarded the alcaldes de la Mesta as municipal officials under its superior authority, and where necessary enforced compliance with the terms of the Ordenamiento . Yet as a public corporation in its own right the Mesta directly addresses petitions to the king, the Consejo Real, and royal officials such as corregidores, and appears as a party to pleitos in the royal courts. It also exercises authority over all the términos and Tierra of the town; this might be extended to tierras and villas de señorío enclaved within the municipal jurisdicción and to neighboring concejos and their vecinos; and it covered the transhumant drives of stock to distant pastures well beyond the town limits. ⁽⁴⁹⁾

General assemblies of the Mesta, i. e., the mestas proper, usually met twice a year, in the fall and spring, to conform to the age-old schedule of the round-up ( rodeo ) of stock for counting, culling, branding and cutting, and to collect strayed stock (ganado ageno) for delivery to the alcaldes de la Mesta. The actual dates vary from town to town according to local tradition. Attendance was compulsory but not necessarily exacted of all individuals associated with the pastoral industry. Ubeda exempts owners of less than 50 reses; Ord. Baena demands that only those having ganado ageno in their flocks or herds appear. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ Later statutes are more rigorous: Carmona expects all rabadanes and mayorales , or alternatively, their senores, to come to each of her trimestral mestas; while Sevilla insists that all señores (or amos) de hatos, and all their chief herdsmen, the rabadanes and conocedores , appear at each semi-annual ayuntamiento. ⁽⁵¹⁾

Each Mesta had at its head one, or more commonly, two alcaldes de la Mesta, who held office for one year, except at Granada where the tenure was for two. ⁽⁵²⁾ The methods of selecting these principally judicial officials vary considerably. At Ubeda and Baeza, the ganaderos themselves chose two omes buenos de entre vosotros ; at Baena, a villa de señorío , the cabildo (or more likely, the señor) controlled the choice of alcaldes. ⁽⁵³⁾ Carmona's one alcalde was named by the villa, i. e., the cabildo; while at Granada the assembled ganaderos were to nominate four owners of hatos not already holding office, and from these the cabildo chose two for a biennial term. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ Sevilla, in contrast, named its two alcaldes through a relatively democratic but complex procedure: each spring, on the Saturday before Quasimodo, the then serving alcaldes convoked a special electoral meeting of ganaderos, held in the Hospital de los Criadores, on the calle de Arrayán in the collación of [360] Omnium Sanctorum, at which attendance was by exception optional. One of these alcaldes had to be chosen from among the criadores of ganado mayor, the other from those of ganado menor (an interesting insight into the degree to which specialization had affected the flourishing Sevillan pastoral industry ca. 1500); and of the two, one was also required to be an hermano of the Hospital. ⁽⁵⁵⁾

Once elected, the alcaldes publicly announced the time and place of the general meetings, and were responsible for enforcing attendance at these, presiding over the sessions, receiving lost or strayed stock (ganado ageno , mostrenco, mesteño ) turned in under oath by ganaderos and pastores, and acting as judges to settle disputes and punish infractions of the Ordenamiento , by imposing statutory fines of which they retained one third in lieu of salary. ⁽⁵⁶⁾ At all other times during the year the alcaldes daily performed many of these same functions as the always accessible standing representatives of the Mesta, holding, for a fixed period until claimed, the stray ganado ageno in the corral del concejo (or de los alcaldes or de la Mesta ), ⁽⁵⁷⁾ and maintaining a permanent tribunal (what Ord. Sevilla calls su audiencia y juzgado ) at which were heard pleitos and the numerous cases involving theft of stock, failure to brand or mark animals as required, fraudulent alteration of hierros and señales , and any other violations of the Mesta's code. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ In some towns, Carmona for example, they had also to visit the pasturage grounds in person so as to discover and punish offenders. Where two alcaldes existed, they normally acted jointly, but under certain conditions each could act alone; and at least at Sevilla disagreement between them was resolved by a carefully selected third person. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ Since a Mesta had no police of its own, decisions and fines of the alcaldes had presumably to be enforced by the alguaciles or other officers of the cabildo.

Hardly less vital than the alcaldes to the effective operation of the Mesta was the escribano, the only other principal member of the managerial directorate which Ord. Ubeda denominates el cabildo de la Mesta . ⁽⁶⁰⁾ He was either, as often, an escribano del cabildo, assigned to this post by the municipal regime, or, as at Sevilla, an escribano de la Mesta whom the alcaldes de la Mesta could replace at will for neglect of his responsibilities. Required to be present at all mestas, and the daily hearing of pleitos by the alcaldes, the escribano had as his principal function the maintenance of the legally valid record of all that occurred on these occasions, or on any others where business of the Mesta was transacted. He inscribed such matters in what came to be known as the Libro de Mesta , a register which doubtless had its genesis earlier, but assumes a far more decisive importance in the administration of the expanding industry of the late 15th and 16th centuries, as the prescriptions regarding it in the Ordenamientos of Baena, Carmona and Sevilla make certain.

[361] The evolution of the Libro de Mesta at Baena is particularly interesting. In 1509 the escribano was ordered to keep a special Libro, to be deposited in the arca with the Libros de Ordenanzas of the concejo, in which -- and in no other tome -- were to be set down all ganados , bestias and other cosas handled at each mesta; the names and testimony of all persons filing charges before the alcaldes of stolen or concealed stock; and the accepted high bids (remates) on unclaimed animals ( mostrencos, mesteños ) sold at public auction. ⁽⁶¹⁾ In 1535 the town's gouernador, representing its señor, the Count of Cabra, issued fresh instructions, made necessary by the failure to maintain such a libro a razón; these specified that the alcaldes de la Mesta provide the escribano with a libro de papel for the recording of 1) the times at which each mesta was 'made'; 2) all ganados, reses and cosas reported to each mesta as lost, along with the señales and yerros , and the names of persons bringing in or having possession of such missing stock; and information on all other lost animals, according to their calidad , and the day, month and year of their recovery. ⁽⁶²⁾

The surviving Libra de Mesta from Carmona for 1514-17 has been mentioned above; this volume even registered the attendance of ganaderos and pastores from various towns outside the términos of Carmona. ⁽⁶³⁾ At Sevilla the Libro de Mesta assumed its most sophisticated form. Here the Ordenamiento , in addition to having the escribano collect the usual information as to reses surrendered or reported missing, directs that his Libro must also record the obligatory declaration by each ganadero regarding the composition of his rebaño, hato or cabaña, a declaration that the señor de ganados might make at any one of the four Sevillan mestas geographically most convenient for him; if at any time this combination of animals was disassembled, he was to report the fact to the escribano for recording in the Libra. We are moving here beyond a mere dossier of strayed or stolen stock into some kind of control over all animals currently in the owner's possession. Ord. Sevilla also orders that a copy (traslado) be made of the escribano's Libro for the daily use of the alcaldes, particularly so that they could consult it when travelling in the Tierra to carry out their required inspections of pastes and hatos. ⁽⁶⁴⁾

With the new prominence of the Libro de Mesta is closely associated an emphatic reinforcement of the whole traditional system of earcrops ( señales, marcas )and brands (hierros) used to denote ownership of animals. Down to the later 15^th century, although municipal ganaderos frequently marked their reses, this practice tended to be optional or quite loosely enforced, and identification could be left to the memory of rabadan or conocedor. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ By the time of the RR. CC. and Charles V, however, conditions in Andalusian pastoralism had drastically changed, as a consequence of the escalating numbers of sheep, cattle, horses and other stock; the [362] ever larger rebaños and hatos that had to be pastured in close proximity in municipal or privately held dehesas, prados, tierras and the more remote sierran grazing grounds; and the increased value of livestock; were all patently producing a high incidence of thefts, concealments, and fraudulent change or marks of identification (transseñalamiento ). It was therefore imperative that only one señal and hierro be allowed each ganadero, and that these, along with the customary data on animals strayed or stolen, be made a matter of public record in the Libro de Mesta , which thus was in the process of becoming a veritable brand book. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ This stipulation not only gave dueños de ganados greater protection for their own stock but also served to restrain them from unjust claims to those of their fellows, the source of so many turbulent mestas and of hotly contested pleitos before the alcaldes. Lastly, through numerous, carefully detailed provisions included in the Ordenamiento, the Mestas, brandishing threats of heavy fines, became rigorous prosecutors of thefts, concealments and transseñalamientos, whether committed by ganderos, rabadanes, pastores or ladrones and others. ⁽⁶⁷⁾

Convocations of criadores and pastores, alcaldes, escribanos, Libros , the cryptography of señales and hierros -- in these we have the essential mechanism by which the Andalusian Mesta organized, directed, controlled and, where necessary, penalized the activities of the vecinos-ganaderos of a city and its Tierra. It did so of course within the limits set by the two external authorities to which it was subordinate, the royal power and the municipal government.

The king's interventions in local pastoral affairs, especially legitimized by the concejo's status as de realengo, and the fact that the Mesta's existence depended upon royal charter or confirmation, seem usually to have originated far less by his own initiative than as a result of the appeals and petitions from the localities reaching him, the Consejo Real or the local royal officials. Royal interest in the subject manifestly fluctuated; the reigns of strong sovereigns like Alfonso XI and the RR. CC. represent peaks of intervention and encouragement; weaker rulers largely confined themselves to confirmations of past privilegios. Alfonso XI's known efforts to promote pastoral expansion thoughout his kingdom, and his importance for the Mestas of Sevilla, Baeza and Ubeda, make it evident that in this quarter as elsewhere study of this major reign is long overdue. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ Under the RR. CC. the connections between the Andalusian Mestas and the crown were frequent. The documentation of the Registro General del Sello preserves numerous exchanges of petitions, letters, executorias , and the like on pastoral issues; in these the Mestas repeatedly appear as principals, although at other times it is the cabildo that is the local protagonist. As yet I have found little to clarify how far the RR. CC. or other rulers favored the penetration of the Mesta Real into Andalucia at the expense of the municipal Mestas. That this threat was a source of acute concern to the localities comes out strongly in the earnest plea of Granada to Charles V in 1520, that its proposed Mesta "no sea suxeta a la mesta rreal, ni les puedan pedir [363] ni apremiar ni llamar para nynguna cosa tocante a la dicha mesta real." ⁽⁶⁹⁾ Here again there is much to learn from the archives.

As for the cabildo, its strong, superior hand of control over a town's Mesta is abundantly documented in the numerous ordenanzas, including at Sevilla, Baeza, Ubeda and Granada the Ordenamiento de Mesta itself. The regidores and jurados legislated on every facet of the Mesta's operations. As we have said, in most cases (although not at Sevilla), the alcaldes de la Mesta were elected by the cabildo, and there are several texts which give significant emphasis to exacting from them an oath of obedience to capitular authority such as other town magistrates swore. ⁽⁷⁰⁾ The care taken to impose an escribano del cabildo (again excepting Sevilla) as an external check upon the alcaldes and the conduct of Mesta affairs, and as the recorder and guardian of the proprietary and judicial data of the Libro de Mesta, is no less suggestive of the Mesta's dependence upon the municipal regime. The alcaldes of the Mesta, indeed, for all their sweeping executive and judicial powers over the pastoral industry, were held strictly to account by the cabildo which penalized them heavily, under a fixed schedule of fines, for absenteeism, neglect of duties, or malfeasance of any kind. Judicially speaking, they were in fact judges of first instance whose decisions could be, and it would appear often were, taken on appeal to the higher jurisdiction of the town's alcaldes mayores or to the cabildo itself.

All this is plain enough. What demands more searching scrutiny, in the context of the strong cabildo control of pastoral regulation, is the question: what social and economic interests were paramount in the town councils, and how far did these view the Mesta as a means of promoting, protecting, or restraining the towns' orientation towards pastoral as against agricultural growth? In two cases which have been mentioned earlier, those of Córdoba in 1492 and of Ronda in 1494, our brief notices unmistakably imply firm opposition on the part of the two cabildos concerned to the very establishment of a Mesta. ⁽⁷¹⁾ It is not hard to understand, in view of the competition for available land in the epoch of sharply rising agropecuarial production in the Andalucia of the 15th and early 16th centuries, that proprietors of tierras de pan, viñas and olivares might well show themselves implacably hostile towards any marked expansion of ganadería, and that this outlook might determine the policies of a cabildo. There is moreover every reason to believe that the pastoralists themselves were sharply divided between a relatively small group of greater criadores, chiefly members of the local aristocraties, and the many more small and medium-sized operators; and once again such tensions would have found their debating ground in the deliberations of the cabildo.

To understand more fully, therefore, the position of the Andalusian Mestas under the cabildos, it is necessary first to determine what social and economic interests were associated with the Mesta's membership, and secondly, to consider whether our findings explain the motives and objectives of the concejos towards their local pastoral organizations.

[364]

Where the pastores are concerned, the Mesta saw itself as the guardian of their work agreements, prescriber of their duties, chastiser of their delinquencies, and censor, even, of their social mores when these might adversely affect the welfare of the flocks and herds. There is accordingly rich material in the ordenamientos and capitular actas illustrating many aspects of the life and labor of these men and boys drawn from the lower strata of contemporary Andalusian rural society.

The pastores qua pastores were subjects of, not true members of, the Mesta as were the dueños, although rabadanes and conocedores were regularly required to attend all mestas for the purpose of delivering ganado ageno to the alcaldes and reporting their own missing reses. ⁽⁷²⁾ Pastores of all levels were under the jurisdiction of the alcaldes, before whom accusations of any kind could be brought by their amos, other ganaderos, or fellow pastores. It was these officials of the Mesta who enforced the terms of the required labor contract (hucia, fucia ) between pastor and amo, which specified the term of hire (tiempo de servicio), ordinarily a year, commencing on St John's Day; and who punished those guilty of a formidable inventory of delicts -- neglect of duties through absenteeism, malice, or carelessness; failure to observe the detailed prescriptions laid down for the safety of the hatos; thefts; losses of animals from carelessness, disease or attacks by wolves, and failure to deliver the hide or fleece to the amo in each such case; concealment within the hato of stolen or strayed animals, or those of persons having no right or access to the municipal pastures; and inaccuracies in the required accounting (cuenta) of the numbers and increase of hato or rebaño. ⁽⁷³⁾

Pay (soldada) might be in the form of money, at times calculated according to a monthly rate, or consist of a previously agreed upon percentage of calves, lambs or foals. At Baena in 1550 pastores received 17 reales a month, their assistant zagales 10, if over 15 years of age, 8 if under, and the amo provided a capa and food. Where compensation was in head of stock, the reses soldariegas or racionegas, these were grazed along with those of the dueno, so popular a practice that at [365] Baena as early as 1466 we hear of the local ganaderos complaining that flocks of sheep owned by pastores were running between 100 and 400 and seriously cutting into available grass and water. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ This cabildo set limits of 40 such sheep for a manadero (full pastor), 20 for a zagal. Sevilla used the same figure of 40 for each 400 sheep in the flock; conocedores and rabadanes were permitted 15 cows, pastores 10. In each case, a maximum of four men to an hato is stipulated.

The rabadanes and conocedores receive extensive treatment in the Ordenamientos since inevitably much was expected of them in their complete responsibility to absent proprietors. ⁽⁷⁵⁾ Their mastery of their craft in the management of the cuadrillas of pastores and of the large hatos or rebaños -- Sevilla at least for pasturage rights in the Islas or Marismas defined an hato as running up to 500 sheep or 500 cows tended by, respectively, two or four pastores -- and their familiarity with their own quadrupeds and with the marks and brands of all other dueños in the region, stands out prominently in all our texts. These men were indeed the vital linchpins of the industry in a socio-economic ambiente fluid enough to allow the more ambitious among them to rise to ganadero status.

Some unusually interesting passages of the Ordenamientos relate to the human problems arising among men living for long periods away from home and family, far out on the Andalusian plain or in the high sierras, whose daily lives revolved about the uninspiring task of enabling their four-footed charges to fill their stomachs in peace and security. From such monotonous isolation and from disputes over forage and the unavoidable mingling of flocks and herds in close proximity must have sprung the bloody quarrels which the Ordenamientos and actas de cabildo seek to curb by strictly forbidding possession of all but the most indispensable implements (armas ). Ord. Sevilla, citing the many deaths and injuries due to carrying of weapons by pastores, limits vaqueros and conocedores to one knife (puñal pastoril ) and one pointed herding pole (garrocha); yeguarizos and pastores of ganado menor, to one puñal pastoril and. if desired, one crook ( cayado); and imposes heavy penalties for violations. In 1520 the cabildo of Baena issued similar injunctions to reduce "muertes de hombres y quistiones". ⁽⁷⁶⁾ Such Mestas as Sevilla also attempted to halt gambling, this time citing the many injuries suffered by the ganados due to the juegos of pastores and ganaderos; vaqueros, yeguarizos and all other pastores de ganado were prohibited from playing at dados or naypes or other juegos anywhere in Sevilla and its Tierra under threat of fines and public flogging. ⁽⁷⁷⁾

Another regular source of unrest was the presence of women -- mujeres mundarias or públicas , mujeres del partido, malas mugeres -- often plying their trade in association with outlaws (rufianes). These ladies, by remaining among the hatos two or three weeks at a time, stirred up quistiones and ruidos, with consequent deaths and injuries. The Mesta therefore fixed a limit of a day and a night for their stay in any one hato, forbidding rabadanes to extend this term, and providing further that if any such women were found to be in the company of rufianes, both they [366] and their panderers were to be stripped naked and given 100 lashes in public. ⁽⁷⁸⁾ How successful all these measures were in promoting greater tranquillity among the bored and disputatious denizens of the sheep and cattle camps of the Andalusian plain we can only speculate.

Whereas the pastores came from the humbler classes of late medieval Andalusian society, it is obvious from the Ordenamientos that their amos represented a much broader spectrum of the municipal population, both urban and rural, extending from modest proprietors of relatively limited numbers of cattle, sheep and horses to men of substantial wealth, many of them members of the local aristocracy, who placed their señal and hierro upon hundreds, and even thousands, of animals and conducted their management through their employees, the rabadanes and pastores. Inevitably our sources are much less helpful on the character and mores of these in part absentee dueños de ganados, and until we have more studies of individual Andalusian town societies and their socio-economic structuring, like that which González Jiménez has undertaken for Carmona (although without the also needed compilation of family histories), ⁽⁷⁹⁾ our knowledge of the local personalities and group interests involved can only be superficial.

If, on the other hand, we pose the central question of the strata of municipal society to which the associates of an Andalusian Mesta belonged, and ask whether the pastoral organization should be viewed as representing the interests of all the town's vecinos-ganaderos, or, like most municipal agencies of the time, as completely dominated by the aristocratic lords of the local linajes to their narrow advantage, some immediate progress is possible. In this direction Córdoba, which down to the end of the year 1492 had no Mesta, assumes special prominence, because the repeated interventions of the Reyes, Consejo Real and the local royal juez de términos in the city's bitter controversy over enclosure of municipal pastures produced a plethora of crown documents now duly registered in the volumes of the R.G. S.

A few words on the general context and significance of such an internal municipal controversy, parallels to which have now been studied at Badajoz, Salamanca and Toledo, ⁽⁸⁰⁾ but not yet for Córdoba, will make this plain. As is well known, the weak monarchy and accompanying turbulent aristocratic factionalism of 15th century Castile caused many towns to lose large portions of their dehesas, baldios and other public lands, which passed into the hands of the nobles either through outright usurpation or by reason of the abundant mercedes poured out by Juan II, Enrique IV and other rulers seeking to insure the loyalty of powerful clans. From the time of their accession the RR. CC. strongly supported the towns in their efforts to recover these lost commons, as the celebrated Ley 82 of the Cortes of Toledo [367] (1480) and other legislative acts, royal letters, and judicial hearings bear witness. ⁽⁸¹⁾

For Córdoba the entries in the R. G. S. are of exceptional value in this connection because they show that this major concejo was not only deeply engaged in just such a campaign to regain possession of older lost pasturelands but was no less vigorously seeking to halt a process of widespread annexation to the great cortijos of the Tierra of other lands that fall into two distinct categories: (i) municipal dehesas illegally occupied by nobles, showing that even under the RR. CC. these tracts continued to suffer from aristocratic depredations; and (ii) properties purchased by nobles from private owners for conversion to the same pastoral ends. It is only in the context of this double process of aristocratic dehesamiento or acotamiento that the attempted establishment of a Cordobese Mesta in 1492 can be explained.

Our key text is the unique notice of such a Mesta, as proposed, found in the abridged asiento of 19 December 1492, in which the Consejo Real not only indicates its approval but declares that its action followed solicitation by Córdoba's 'caballeros y señores de premia'. ⁽⁸²⁾ This disclosure that the plan for the Mesta originated with solely the aristocratic members of the vecindad at once links the scheme to the Cordobese cabildo's attacks in these years upon the dehesamientos by the local linajes. At this point we do not need to go back of the spring of 1491, when there appears in the regnal capital a royal juez de términos, Sancho Sánchez de Montiel, plainly a letrado of great energy and ability, whose name recurs during the next several years in numerous pleitos involving Cordobese dehesas and tierras. To him in May the city addressed a petition for the restoration of términos, prados and other cosas taken from it by both its own vecinos and regidores (clear proof that the exalted veinticuatro-regidor group was a target), and vecinos and caballeros from localities bordering on the Tierra. ⁽⁸³⁾   In the course of this same year the foremost Cordobese magnate, Diego Fernández de Córdoba, who held at court the exalted position of alcaide de los donceles, was subjected to what must have been a deeply humiliating trial before a royal juez de residencia at which he was condemned and stripped of his key municipal office, the alcaldía de las dehesas , probably at the very time he was being forced by the cabildo to defend in the courts his title to the dehesa of Carchena and livestock, lands and cortijos at Espejo and Castro del Rio, to the southwest of the capital in the fertile valley of the Guadamoz. ⁽⁸⁵⁾

[368] In 1492 the campaign against the city's veinticuatros and caballeros de cuantia moved forward, again with consistent crown support. On 12 March the Consejo Real banned all stationing of livestock in the city's dehesas comunes by caballeros and propietarios de ganados. ⁽⁸⁶⁾ On 5 April it authorized the alcalde mayor Pedro de Mercado to levy a tax (repartimiento ) upon all dueños de ganados using these commons, and to apply these funds to offsetting expenses incurred in the city's pleitos against the caballeros who had illegally occupied these pastures. ⁽⁸⁷⁾ A month later, on 4 May, there came a veritable act of proscription, from the Reyes themselves; this prohibited all further purchases of lands for annexation to their estates by a dozen named Cordobese magnates and regidores, among them Diego Fernández de Córdoba, count of Cabra; Alonso Fernández de Córdoba, señor of Aguilar; Gonzalo Mejía, señor of Santa Eufemia (high in the Sierra near Pozo Blanco); the already sorely tried Diego Fernández de Córdoba, alcaide de los donceles; Diego López de Haro, count of Belalcázar, and his wife, Beatriz de Sotomayor; Francisco de Córdoba, señor of Guadalcazar; Alonso de Córdoba, senor of Zueros; and the veinticuatros Antonio de Córdoba and Gonzalo de León. ⁽⁸⁸⁾ The prominence of the de Córdoba clan in this list leaps to the eye; but it should be observed that this edict extended the same prohibition generally to all other caballeros of the town and its Tierra.

Several months of seeming tranquillity follow this stormy spring, but by autumn the royal thunder rolled once again, this time in the shape of a remarkable real pragmática published at Córdoba on 22 October 1492, at the same time that a former resident of the city was piloting a small fleet through the unknown islands of the Bahamas. The text of this document is yet to be discovered, but from repeated references to it in subsequent notices of the R. G. S. its three principal provisions can be reconstructed. ⁽⁸⁹⁾ The first, commanding all owners of dehesas within the limits of Córdoba to present to the Consejo Real the reales privilegios empowering them to enclose (adhesar ) such lands, and the third, guaranteeing to all vecinos full right of entry into dehesas or cortijos for purposes of hunting, gathering asparagus or other plants, or fishing in their waters, were in line with Ley 82 of Toledo, and typical of royal determination everywhere to restore lost lands and rights to the municipalities. The second provision of this royal pronouncement, however, goes beyond these precedents by ordering that one half of the grassland of all the cortijos of the Cordobese Campiña was henceforth to be treated as baldíos, available as common pasture to all the vecinos. This radical measure, a new high point in the war of the RR. CC. against the land enclosures of the nobility, must have been greeted with joy by the majority of Córdoba's ganaderos, since it made available to them great stretches of pastureland hitherto completely closed to their flocks and herds. As for the caballeros and señores de ganados, their outraged reaction can be traced for several years to come in the series of pleitos they pressed in the courts, including that of Dr. Montiel, in defense of their privileges.

[369] It seems impossible to doubt that an intimate connection exists between this momentous real pragmática -- which subsequent notices cite as the pragmática (or premática ) sobre cortijos or sobre cortijos y dehesas -- promulgated in Córdoba on 22 October 1492. and the asiento on the Mesta issued two months later, on 19 December, by the Consejo Real at the petition of the 'caballeros y señores de premia'. Since in this matter the Consejo can hardly have reversed all its own previous policy or that of the sovereigns, we can reasonably deduce that the approval of a Mesta for Córdoba was a move intended to soften the devastating blow of the pragmatica by assuring the hard-pressed caballeros an authorized mechanism for protection, even against their own cabildo of their legitimate rights. It may be objected that we are told the motive alleged by the petition's proponents is the need to protect their flocks and herds against thefts by pastores and other persons, and no doubt this was an objective; but in the midst of the far more serious confrontation with crown and cabildo over dehesas. this can hardly have been more than a secondary factor.

This whole involved, as yet only imperfectly known, episode in the pastoral history of Córdoba displays the issues and antagonistic forces that might surround the control and operation of a municipal Mesta. Since it seems fairly certain that in the past it was the cabildo that blocked the establishment of a Mesta. so that in 1492 the caballeros acted on their own to obtain the asiento, we can discern at Córdoba the spectacle of cabildo and caballeria at odds over installing a pastoral organization promising to be of primary service to the latter. But does this allow us to conclude that all the municipal Mestas of Andalucia, at least by the end of the 15th century, were aristocratic monopolies and unrepresentative of the interests of the non-noble medium-sized and small criadores? or is the Cordobese case atypical?

For deciding this vital point the Ordenamientos de Mesta usefully supplement the relatively few R. G. S. entries relating to pastoral matters in towns other than Córdoba. From both these sources it is evident that the alcaldía de Mesta was normally held by a caballero. This can be assumed for Jaen with its priastre of the presumably aristocratic Cofradia de Santo Domingo; ⁽⁹⁰⁾ and the same is true of Sevilla where one of the two alcaldes de la Mesta had to be an hermano of the Hospital de los Criadores. ⁽⁹¹⁾ Indeed we learn that the Nuevas Ordenanzas given the latter city in 1490 required that the alcaldes de dehesas, alcaldes de Mestas and alcaldes de cañadas were all to be caballeros de premia. ⁽⁹²⁾

Yet it is by no means certain that even at Sevilla aristocratic monopoly of the high pastoral offices resulted in gross distortion of the Mesta's equitable administration in the interest of all the vecinos-ganaderos, however humble. As we have noted above, the true control over the pastoral life of the community lay with the cabildo, and under the RR. CC. there are many signs that the regidores and jurados are keenly aware of the agricultural, pastoral, industrial and commercial interests of the growing bourgeois elements of the population. There are some highly suggestive passages to this effect in Ord. Sevilla. Criadores when attending the spring meeting to elect alcaldes de la Mesta are commanded to vote "sin aceptar para ello [370] ruego ni mando de cauallero ni de otra persona alguna." ⁽⁹³⁾ The alcaldes themselves, and their escribano, when hearing pleitos and causas, are forbidden under stiff penalty to receive into their juzgado "escriptos de abogados sino solamente las relaciones de las partes, o de sus procuradores en su ausencia," a measure rationalized on the grounds that otherwise justice would be too long delayed, but which in practice must have given the lesser ganaderos equality before their court with those affluent enough to hire lawyers. ⁽⁹⁴⁾

But what comes closest to the enclosure issue so fiercely contested at Córdoba, and at the same time proves how differently the Sevillan Mesta conceived its role, is the very last section of Ord. Sevilla , a passage that bears the stamp of having been attached only quite recently, perhaps not long before 1500, to the text of this great statute. Here solemn warning is given the alcaldes de la Mesta to show themselves ever alert against algunas personas poderosas who seek to close, plant or occupy "las cañadas y veredas, y tierras y dehessas, y aguas y pastes en toda la tierra y terminos de Seuilla." As has been their obligation de tiempo inmemorial, they are to report to the cabildo por mandado de la dicha ciudad all cases of such encroachments "porque los terminos realengos sean mejor conseruados." ⁽⁹⁵⁾ The invocation of the law of realengo implicit in these last words is especially noteworthy after the reference to the cabildo. It shows us that at Sevilla, as at Carmona, Baena, Ubeda and, we may surmise, in most towns of this category, the non-noble vecinos considered that their effective defense against the omnipresent danger of aristocratic usurpation and acotamiento of the pasturelands lay in the formidable triple alliance of Mesta, cabildo and crown.

This conflict within the Andalusian municipalities between greater and lesser criadores, and the socio-economic tensions to which it bears witness, call for study in depth to determine the precise conditions under which in each town the local Mesta operated with reference to the local nobility and the cabildo. Yet beyond this vital question, we must perceive what the Ordenamientos de Mesta and other sources impress upon us. First, that the doctrine of noble domination of late medieval Castilian ganadería defended by Suárez Fernández, Sobrequés, Vicens Vives and other historians on the basis of a one-sided concentration upon the transhumant sector, ⁽⁹⁶⁾ must be revised. In Andalucía at least the non-noble, smaller ganaderos maintained an extremely strong position in the estant industry, in large part because they possessed the protective, roughly democratic, mechanism of the Mesta. And, secondly, that the institutional maturity and greatest administrative effectiveness of the Andalusian Mestas occur in the broad context of the expansion of the region's agropecuarial economy ca. 1500. It is with certain observations on this latter phenomenon that the present inquiry will be concluded.

[371]

Despite certain superficial similarities to the typical medieval gild or gremio (e. g., monopoly in its field, fixing of wages), the Mesta -- except conceivably at Jaén or as projected for Córdoba -- was no narrowly exclusivistic fraternity. Operating under royal charter of confirmation, embracing all but the pettiest of the town's ganaderos, imposing no restraints upon its non-egalitarian membership as to numbers of reses, standards or prices (except as the first of these involved limitation of available space within the public pasture lands), it was not a gild, but the authentic public agency of the cabildo for the conduct of the community's pastoral life. A uniquely Spanish construct, it constitutes a notable expression of the same innovative genius that created the concejo itself -- that Hispanic capacity, so ubiquitous in the Siglo de Oro, to develop institutional forms on the basis of law for the organized pursuit of vital human activities. No student of the Ordenamientos de Mesta can fail to discern behind their complex prescriptions the minds of men of extraordinary pastoral expertise. These stockmen-legislators perfected, chiefly at Sevilla but also elsewhere in the region, a system of large-scale ganadería which marks a historic highpoint in the evolution of pastoralism and has left an abiding Andalusian impress upon the ranching systems of the Americas and indeed of the world.

This is patent enough in the case of the Canaries where, as we have said, the cabildo of Tenerife in 1509 explicitly adopted for regulating its flourishing pastoral industry the Ordenamiento de Mesta of Sevilla, with its provision for comarcal Mestas. It has been denied recognition in the American case because of the sorry confusion created by Miranda, Dusenberry and others who interpret the Mestas of New Spain as offshoots of the Mesta Real. ⁽⁹⁷⁾ In fact, the great Mesta of México, its counterparts at Puebla, Oaxaca, Michoacán and elsewhere in the 16th century, and at Queretaro, Tlaxcala, Vera Cruz and Guanajuato in the 17th, are beyond all doubt New World adaptations of the Sevillan and perhaps other Andalusian municipal Mestas. What needs to be explained is why the same phenomenon fails to appear outside New Spain (except possibly in Española); why from Caracas to Bogotá, from Lima to Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires, pastoral regulation remains directly under cabildo control and local Mestas are nowhere to be found.

The Andalusian Mesta attained its preeminence at the opening of the Siglo de Oro in conjunction with a marked expansion of the pastoral industry in the region as a whole but especially in the municipalities, where nobles, bourgeois and petty criadores possessing entrepreneurial skills and an undeniable commercial mentality sought to satisfy the demands of a strong external market for hides, skins, wool, meat, cheese and other products, and for saddle and draught animals. The area's multiplying numbers of cattle, sheep, horses, goats, swine and other stock at this time cannot yet be statistically analyzed, but the fact itself is obvious from the [371] central concerns of the Ordenamientos : the fixing of the maximum sizes of hatos allowed to graze the baldios; the quarrels arising from proximity of flocks and herds when grazing or in the folds ( majadas ) at night; the meticulous rules on marking and branding, thefts and frauds, and restoration of stray stock; the recording techniques of the Libro de Mesta. All these are indices of the rising pressure of numbers. The same deduction can be drawn from the many references to compensation for crop damages payable to the proprietors of viñas, olivares and tierras de pan and of course from the conflict between caballeros cuantiosos and other municipal ganaderos over the dehesas.

Of the several factors that link the Mesta to this decisive expansion of late medieval Andalusian stockraising three merit brief consideration. One, internal to the industry, is the noticeable trend in Baja Andalucía by ca. 1500 towards large-scale raising of cows, in contrast with the predominance above the Sierra Morena (except in parts of Extremadura) of classical Castilian sheepraising -- a shift foreshadowing the similar pattern that emerges in the New World from the early 16th century on. This is not to be measured in absolute terms; in most Andalusian municipalities sheep continued more numerous, and among bovines many were draught oxen, not beef cattle. What limited statistics we have show that in Jerez de la Frontera, where in 1491 the cabildo ordered a census of livestock to be made, there were 17,841 cows, 1,662 yeguas, 28,592 sheep; at Carmona for the years 1508-11 the padrones record 5,070 cows, 1,155 horses and asses, 18.634 sheep. ⁽⁹⁸⁾ That in heavily pastoral Jerez sheep were only twice as numerous as cows, and even at Carmona only four times as many, points in fact to a heavy emphasis upon cattle raising rare above the Sierra Morena. For Sevilla no comparable figures are yet known, but the consistent preference given vacas over all other ganados in Ord. Sevilla, the primary attention devoted to their dueños, rabadanes and conocedores, and the requirement that one of the two alcaldes de la Mesta had always to be a criador of ganado mayor, indicate a probably even higher ratio than at Jerez in favor of these animals.

The Andalusian production of wool for local textile use or export may be left to the economic historians to investigate, in the earnest hope that their long-standing obsession with the Mesta Real and the transhumant sheep industry will not much longer prevent due recognition of the important estant staple, particularly below the Sierra Morena. The new prominence given the cow, however, and the impact of this upon the municipal Mestas, is a more complex question, one which appears to be in part closely related to an increased availability of cheap beef as a protein supplement to the monotonous cereal diet of the Andalusian masses. ⁽⁹⁹⁾ The many descriptions of the lavish feasts given nobles and townspeople found in that [373] fascinating narrative of late medieval Andalusian life, the chronicle of the Condestable Don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo by Pedro de Escavias, alcaide de Andújar, imply that lamb, mutton, kid and goat were the choice aristocratic meats; beef was what commoners ate. ⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ Hamilton's indices for meat prices in Andalucía in the 16th century, even though they do not commence until after 1550, are revealing in this respect: they show mutton in 1551 at 20.2 mvds., in 1592 at 57.5; kid in 1551 at 117.1 mvds., in 1592 at 306; veal, affected by the royal prohibition of the slaughtering of calves, stood in 1551 at 20.3 mvds., in 1592 at 43.1. ⁽¹⁰¹⁾ Beef enters the cycle in 1551 at 15.1 mvds., to reach 37.3 by 1592 -- decidedly the cheapest meat throughout this second half of the century. ⁽¹⁰²⁾

Whether anything comparable to a rise in socio-political influence of a class of affluent butchers occurred in Andalucía, as it demonstrably did in France, would be a useful theme for investigation. Certainly the detailed prescriptions found in the Ordenanzas of Sevilla, Carmona and other towns on the purchase and sale of meat by butchers in the carnicerías. and, from the ganaderos' standpoint, in the Ordenamientos de Mesta also, show the Mesta was closely involved in the commercial retailing of beef and mutton. This trade must have depended upon large numbers of carcasses of bovines slaughtered primarily for their valuable hides, a source which would provide the carnicerias with meat at a much lower price than that commanded by the flesh of lambs, sheep, kids or goats.

As for the relation of the leather industry to our Mestas, this cannot be understood apart from the increasing substitution, in Sevilla and neighboring industrial towns ca. 1500, of the tougher, cheaper, more utilitarian cowhide for the lighter, more artistically decorated, but also more expensive, sheep and goat leathers (cordobanes , guadamecíes) of the older Moorish technological tradition. It is this change in material and fashion that helps explain the many injunctions of the Ordenamientos regarding cueros vacunos; and the need to import even into Sevilla cowhides from North Africa, Ireland, England and, increasingly, the Indies. ⁽¹⁰³⁾ Some sense of the size, vigor and complexity of the Andalusian leather manufactories is conveyed by the títulos of the Sevillan Ordenanças with their countless regulations for the operations of cortidores , çurradores , borzeguineros, zapateros and correeros; and the whole phenomenon can be connected also with the popularity throughout contemporary Europe of "Spanish," i. e. Andalusian, leather.

To conclude. I have tried in these pages to sketch something of the scope and interest of this neglected sector of three centuries of Andalusian life. Needless to say, other aspects than the administrative and social merit investigation -- on the linguistic side, the interesting andalucismos in the Ordenamientos stemming from the pastoral world, upon which Alvar's magnificent contemporary work only [374] marginally touches; ⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ on the economic side, the whole complex evolution, quantitatively reconstructed, and the conflicts of municipal with seigneurial ganadería and that of the Mesta Real; on the social side, the dress, gear, herding techniques, way of life, of the pastores; and many more. However tentative the foregoing survey may be, it will have accomplished its purpose if it creates awareness of the importance of the municipal Mesta in Andalusian history, and inspires a broad search of the local archives for the further documentation that will carry the subject well beyond this exploratory essay.

1. In the classic treatise of Julius KLEIN, The Mesta: A Study in Spanish Economic History, 1273-1836 (Cambridge, Mass., 1920), to be cited here; Castilian translation: La Mesta. Estudio de la historia economica española, 1273-1836 (Madrid, 1936), there is a sketch of the subject, pp. 9-12. with a useful but now quite incomplete list of municipal Mestas (at p. 11, note 1). KLEIN also published for the first time the Andalusian Ordenamientos de Mesta of Ubeda (1376) and (in part) Granada (1520) (Appendices A and B, pp. 361-7). See also the and ,marks in Jaime VICENS VIVES, Manual de historia economica de España (Barcelona, 1959), pp. 232-3; Luis GARCIA DE VALDEAVELLANO, Curso de historia de las institutions españolas (Madrid, 1968), p. 265.

2. Manuel GONZALEZ JIMENEZ, El consejo de Carmona a fines de la Edad Media (1464-1523) (Sevilla, 1973).

3. Archivo General de Simancas, Registro General del Sello , cited henceforth as R. G. S., by volume document number; single quotation marks around extracts will designate summary of the redactor, not text of an original.

4. Juan COROMINAS, Diccionario crítico-elimológico de la lengua castellana (Madrid, 1954), III, 358-359; idem, Breve diccionario elimológico de la lengua castellana (Madrid, 1961), p. 385; Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española , 19th ed. (Madrid. 1970), p. 871; Vicente GARCIA DE DIEGO, Diccionario etimológico e hispano (Madrid, 1955), p. 374. The fantastic conjecture of COVARRUBIAS (mesta: amistad) still finds shelter in Fabián ESTAPE RODRIGUEZ, "Honrado Concejo de la Mesta", Diccionario de historia de España, 2d. rev. ed., II (Madrid, 1968), pp. 399-400. My Islamicist colleague, Professor Richard B. BARNETT, who has kindly assisted me in this connection, also notes two forms of mistah, a flat place used for threshing wheat, or drying wheat or dates, but these seem less likely. Cf. also, KLEIN, p. 10 at note 4. On the appearance in the fueros of the 13th century of the Castilian word mesta and its early fossilized, relatively insignificant, Leonese counterpart otero , and the frequent failure to distinguish both of these from esculca and rafala, the terms which were employed in the widely used Fuero de Cuenca and other municipal codes not for an association of ganaderos but for the escort of armed guards accompanying transhumant municipal herds outside the términos, see my "El castellano, hombre de llanura. La explotación ganadera en el área fronteriza de La Mancha y Extremadura durante la Edad Media," Homenaje a Jaime Vicens Vives , I (Barcelona, 1965), pp. 200-218, especially pp.213-214.

5. VICENS VIVES, op. cit.. pp. 232-3; VALDEAVELLANO, op. cit., pp. 265-6.

6. BISHKO, op. cit ., pp. 214-17.

7. R. G. S., IX, 3564; XI, 232.

8. Cf. Antonio de BALLESTEROS, "Itinerario de Alfonso X, rey de Castilla," Bol. R. Acad. Hist., CIX (1936), 424-5 (also published separately with different pagination); under the date 17 October 1266, where the reference to publication of the text by Tomás GONZALEZ, Colección de Privilegios, t. VI (Madrid, 1833), p. 142, proves that what BALLESTEROS really had in mind was the real privilegio given on this day to Alcaraz. Apparently he realized the mistake, since his Alfonso X el Sabio (Madrid, 1963), p. 1089, does not calendar any such diploma for 1266; but from this initial error the mythical act found its way into Julio GONZALEZ. Repartimiento de Sevilla (Madrid, 1951), I, 452; II, 347; and into general circulation.

9. Ordenanças de Sevilla (Sevilla, 1527); I shall cite the 2d ed. (Sevilla, 1632) which retains the same pagination but modernizes the orthography. See, for the Sumario, pp. 130r-132v; for the Ordenamiento de Mesta, pp. 115v-123v (misnumbered 124v). The reference to "Cabildo y Regidores" occurs in the prefatory paragraph, p. 115v. In the terminology of our period ordenança(s) and ordenamiento are used interchangeably according to no visible rule; to avoid confusion I shall use Ordenamiento for the specific statute of a Mesta, abbrievating this as pertinent to Ord. Sevilla , Ord. Carmona, etc.

10. Ordenanças , p. 123v (incorrectly 124v), terminal paragraph, citing Ley xlviii of the Alfonsine quaderno de ordenamiento of 9 August 1339.

11. Quoted by Ramón CARANDE, Sevilla, fortaleza y mercado , 2d. ed., (Sevilla, 1972), pp. 159-160; also, Anuario de historia del derecho español , II (1925), 363.

12. Ordenanças de Sevilla, page following title page, recto.

13.  Ibid., title page, verso, and following page, recto.

14.  Acuerdos del Cabildo de Tenerife, II, 1508-1513 (Fontes rerum Canariarum, V), ed. Elías SERRA RAFOLS and Leopoldo de la ROSA (La Laguna de Tenerife, 1952), p. 43 (núm. 71).

15.  Ord. Sevilla , p. 117r, paragraph 5.

16.  Ibid., pp. 116v-117. 

17. See, infra , under Mesta of Granada.

18.  Cf. William H. DUSENBERRY, The Mexican Mesta (Urbana, Illinois, 1963), pp. 57-8.

19.  Hipólito SANCHO DE SOPRANIS. Historia social de Jerez de la Frontera al fin de la Edad Media, I (Jerez de la Frontera, 1959), p. 15.

20.  R. G. S., VIII, 2894-5, 2634, 2811.

21.  Ordenanzas del Concejo de Carmona, ed. Manuel GONZALEZ JIMENEZ (Sevilla, 1972), pp. 27-32. Many other titulos also relate to the pastoral sector.

22.  GONZALEZ JIMENEZ, Ordenanzas de Carmona, pp. 3-6.

23.  Ordenanzas de Carmona , p. 28: iii. cómo a de conoçer el alcalde y executor .

24.  Arch. Mun., Leg. 26, as calendared in Colección diplomática de Carmona, ed. José HERNANDEZ DIAZ, Antonio SANCHO CORBACHO and Francisco COLLANTES DE TERAN (Sevilla, 1941), p. 52.

25. See GONZALEZ JIMENEZ, M., El Concejo de Carmona, pp. 10, 182-3.

26.  R.G.S..II. 1501.

27.  Antiguas ordenanzas de Baena, ed. Francisco VALVERDE PERALES (Córdoba, 1907). On PAREJA. cf. pp. (3)-(4); on the Mestas section, pp. 127 136; other related materials are scattered throughout the work.

28.  M. A. LADERO QUESADA, Andalucía en el siglo XV (Madrid, 1973), pp. 48-51.

29.  Ordenanzas de Baena , pp. 127-8.

30.  LADERO QUESADA, op. cit.. p. 49.

31.  Ordenanzas de Baena , p. 128.

32.  Ibid., pp. 130-136.

33.  R. G. S., IX, 3653. I have found no mention of a Mesta in such texts in the Colección Salazar y Castro (Madrid, R. Academia de la Historia) as the extensive reales privilegios on ganados and pastos issued to Córdoba by Juan I in 1386 (M-35, n.^o 50) and Enrique III in 1401 (M-35, n.^o 27); or in the Ordenanzas para el govierno de la justicia de la ciudad de Cordova given by Fernando el Católico in 1483 and preserved in this same Colección; as yet I have been unable to consult, for the 16th century, vols. M-36, 37.

34.  Jean ROUDIL, El Fuero de Baeza (La Haya, 1962), pp. 17-26, and map between pp. 42-43; Alberto GARCIA ULECIA, Los factores de diferenciación entre las personas en los fueros dela extremadura castellano-aragonesa (Sevilla, 1975), pp. 19-20, and map following p. 24; pp. 424-431.

35.  Alfred MOREL-FATIO, Catalogue des manuscrits espagnols de la Biblioteque Nationale (Paris, 1881), MS n.^o 66, at p. 21, col. 1. I have seen the full text of this Caroline confirmation, Registro, fols. 11r-11v.

36.  R. G. S., VIII, 1849, 2155, 3440, 3477; IX, 124. No reference to the Baezan Mesta or its Ordenamiento has been found in Las ordenanzas desta muy noble y leal, y antigua ciudad de Baeça , authorized under Charles V but not published before the reign on Philip II. This code's allusion to the Concejo de la Mesta in tit. IX, cap. 9 (pp. 11-11v) and tit. X, cap. 5 (p. 13v) denotes beyond question the Mesta Real.

37.  The Mesta, pp. 361-3, from Arch. Mesta, G-l, Granada, 1533.

38.  Ibid., p. 361, paragraph 2; Miguel Angel LADERO QUESADA, Granada. Historia de un país islamico (1232-1571) (Madrid, 1969), p. 97. In the years around 1376, when Ubeda was pressing its interminable pleito with the archbishops of Toledo over possession of the town of Quesada, a matter not finally settled until 1384, the concejo used a comparable argument in claiming part of the términos of Cazorla for grazing and other purposes on the grounds that "antes que la ganasen los moros," i. e., some time between 1282 and 1311. this land had in fact belonged to Quesada. Cf. Juan Francisco RIVERA, "El Adelantamiento de Cazorla durante la Edad Media," Hispania, VIII (1948), 87-90.

39.  KLEIN, p. 363

40.  R.G.S., VIII, 1849.

41.  R. G. S., XI, 290. Huelma. not 'Huelva,' as incorrectly transliterated by the editors.

42.  LADERO QUESADA, Andalucia en el siglo XV, pp. 61-3.

43.  KLEIN, p. 367, paragraph 4.

44.  R. G. S., VIII. 2429, 2888, 2434; X, 2638. The study by Jose RODRIGUEZ MOLINA. "La Mesta de Jaén y sus conflictos con los agricultores (1278- 1359)." Cuadernos de estudios medievales , I (Granada. 1973), 67-81, does not in fact relate at all to the city's municipal Mesta but explicates certain documents bearing on the creation in 1359 by an alcalde entregador of the Mesta Real of a dehesa at Canalcjas, a place in the término of Baeza under the señorio of the bishop of Jaén.

45.  KLEIN, The Mesta , Appendix B, pp. 364-7, from Arch. Mesta. G 1, Granada. 1533.

46.  Ordenanzas que los muy ilustres, y muy magnijicos señores de Granada mandaron gvardar (Granada. 1552; reprinted, 1670), pp. 16r-v, 24r-v, 27v-29r, 75r-79r, etc.

47.  KLEIN, p. 367, paragraph 1, where the sense demands alejos, not anexos. Ord. Granada , unlike Ord. Sevilla , presents no itinerary of visitations by alcaldes to satellite Mestas; but since it summoned to the capital for the purpose of nominating these officers "todos los dichos senores de ganado desta cibdad e sus villas e aldeas," a somewhat similar system was foreseen.

48.  Cf. Ord. Baeza (note 34, supra). The following references to Ordenamientos de mesta are intended to be illustrative, but in no sense exhaustive.

49.  Ord. Sevilla , p. 118, paragraph 1; R. G. S. , VIII, 272, 1849, 2155, 3440, 3477; IX, 124, 3635; XI, 290.

50.  Ord. Ubeda, ed. KLEIN, p. 361, paragraph 3; Ord. Baena, ed. VALVERDE PERALES, p. 128.

51.  Ord. Carmona, ed. GONZALEZ JIMENEZ, p. 27; Ord. Sevilla, pp. 116v, paragraph 3; 117r, paragraphs 4-6.

52.  KLEIN, p. 364, paragraph 1.

53.  Ord. Ubeda, p. 361, paragraph 3; Ord. Baena , p. 128, passes over the election of the alcaldes.

54.  Ord. Carmona, p. 27; Ord. Granada, p. 364, paragraph 1.

55.  Ord. Sevilla , p. 115v, paragraph 2.

56.  These are the subjects occupying more space than any others in our four long Ordenamientos de Mesta.

57.  Ord. Carmona, p. 27, and p. 28, títulos ii, iiii. At seigneurial Baena the alcaldes had no corral but turned stray stock over to the pastores of the señor mariscal by whom, if unclaimed after due time, they were kept: Ord. Baena , p. 128.

58.  Ord. Sevilla , p. 116r, paragraph 3; 117v, paragraph 4.

59.  The tie-breaker had to be a criador of the class of ganado in dispute: Ord. Sevilla, p. 116, paragraph 1.

60.  P. 363, paragraph 2.

61.  Ord. Baena, p. 130.

62.  Ibid., pp. 135-6. Cf. Ord. Ubeda, p. 361, paragraph 1: "para hazer mesta de los ganados."

63.  GONZALEZ JIMENEZ, Concejo de Carmona, p. 183, note 275.

64.  Ord. Sevilla , p. 117, paragraph 2.

65.  The origin of the andalucismo conocedor, which comes to mean 'mayoral de las vacadas o toradas' (R. Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española , s. v.) is perhaps suggested by Ord. Ubeda, p. 362, paragraph 1, which speaks of the "sennor o rabadan que conociere algun ganado en las dichas mestas e diciese que es suyo o de su cabanna." The Andalusian system of señales and hierros has not yet been given close study, but on its transferred form in the Canary Islands, see Jose PEREZ VIDAL, "La ganaderia canaria: notas históricoetnográficas," Bol. de Estudios Atlánticos , IX (1963), 237-286, at pp. 275-279.

66.  For regulations on marking and branding, cf. the stages of sophistication charted by Ord. Ubeda , p. 362, paragraphs 1-2; Ord. Baena, pp. 132-3; Ord. Carmona , p. 29, títulos v, vii, ix; Ord. Sevilla, 119v, paragraphs 3-5, and passim . On the right of pastores to their own brands: Ord. Sevilla, p. 118v, paragraph 4.

67.  Ord. Baena, p. 133, paragraph 2; Ord. Carmona , títulos ii, v; Ord. Sevilla , p. 118, paragraphs 4-5; 119v- 120v; Ord. Granada, pp. 366-7.

68.  Cf. KLEIN, The Mesta . pp. 186-192.

69.  Ibid., p. 367, paragraph 4.

70.  Ord. Sevilla , p. 115v, paragraph 2; Ord. Granada , p. 364, paragraph 1.

71.  R. G. S., IX, 3563; XI, 232.

72.  Ord. Carmona , p. 27; Ord. Sevilla, p. 117v, paragraphs 1, 5; Ord. Granada , p. 365, paragraph 4.

73.  On the pastores, see in general Ord. Ubeda, pp. 365, paragraphs 4-5; 366-7; Ord. Baena , pp. 133-4, 574-82; Ord. Carmona, títulos xv-xxiii; Ord. Sevilla, pp. 118-120; Ord. Granada, p. 366.

74.  Ord. Baena, pp. 576-81, 640; Ord. Sevilla , p. 29r. paragraph 3.

75.  Of the many relevant prescriptions in all the Ordenamientos , cf. particularly Ordenamiento de Sevilla, pp. 122-124(123).

76.  Ord. Baena, pp. 247-51; Ord. Sevilla, p. 121v, paragraph 6.

77.  Ord. Sevilla , p. 119v. paragraph 1.

78.  Ord. Sevilla , p. 124 (123)v, paragraph 1; Ord. Granada, p. 367, paragraph 2.

79.  Concejo de Carmona , pp. 37-86.

80.  See Esteban RODRIGUEZ AMAYA, "La tierra en Badajoz desde 1230 a 1500," Rev. de Estudios Extremeños , VII (1951), 395-497; Nicolas CABRILLANA, "Salamanca en el siglo XV: nobles y campesinos," Cuadernos de Historia, III (1969), 255 95; Jean-Pierre MOLENANT. "Tolède et ses finages au temps des Rois Catholiques: contribution à l'histoire sociale et économique de la cité avant la révolte des Comunidades," Mélanges Casa de Velázquez , VIII (1972). 327-77. The character of the municipal lands, but not the struggle for their control, is described by David E. VASSBERG, "The Tierras Baldías: Community Property and Public Lands in 16th Century Castile," Agricultural History, XLVIII(1974), 383-401.

81.  Cf. VICENS VIVES, Manual de historia económica de España, p. 275; RODRIGUEZ AMAYA, pp. 448-51; MOLENAT, pp. 332-4.

82.  R. G. S., IX, 3563, where the text, as calendared, reads: 'Asiento resumido de una comisión sobre establecer Mesta de ganados en Córdoba, a causa de los robos, hurtos, y fraudes que corhetieron los pastores y otras personas. A petición de los sobredichos caballeros y señores de premia de dicha ciudad.' 'Sobredichos caballeros,' because of the reference in the preceding entry (3562) "Sobre el meter del vino castellano en Córdoba."

83. R. G. S., VIII, 1507. It is perhaps to this same first half of the year 1491 that we should assign the promulgation by Córdoba of the apparently new municipal ordenanza which limited the proportion of privately held lands capable of legal enclosure, while requiring that the remainder be left available as baldías for common grazing purposes. At any rate, this ordenanza antedates 7 February 1492, when it is cited in the course of the sentencia delivered by the Consejo Real in a pleito between Fernand Mejía, vecino of Córdoba, and the concejo of Hornachuelos (térm. Córdoba) 'sobre ciertas dehesas y heredamientos.' The text of this sentencia was also included in the Consejo's subsequent confirmation of its decision on 4 June 1492 ( R. G. S., IX, 2152).

84.  R. G. S., IX, 2099 (4-VI-1492), where it may be deduced that the juicio de residencia belongs in the preceding year.

85.  VIII, 1310 (13-IV-1491); 2513 (16-IX-1491).

86.  IX, 739.

87.  Ibid.. 1068-9.

88.  Ibid. 1431. On the multipartite de Córdoba linaje, cf. LADERO QUESADA. Andalucía en el siglo XV, pp. 44-52.

89.  See R. G. S. , X (1493). 92. 175-6. 194. 204, 321. 397. 514, 612-13, 754. 2156: XI (1494), 1722. 3348. 3507, 3985 (which speaks of 'las pragmaticas dadas sobre los cortijos'). 4532. In both years various other entries relating to dehesas at Córdoba subsume the pragmatica.

90.  Note 43, supra .

91.  Note 54, supra .

92.  R.G.S., VIII. 2610 (27-IX 1491).

93.  Ord. Sevilla , p. 115v, paragraph 2.

94.  Ibid., paragraph 3.

95.  Ord. Sevilla , p. 123 (124)v, paragraph 2.

96.  L. SUAREZ FERNANDEZ, in Historia de España , ed. R. MENENDEZ PIDAL, XV (Madrid, 1964), pp. 5-6; S. SOBREQUES in Historia de España y America , ed. J. VICENS VIVES, 2d. ed. (Barcelona, 1971), II, 281; VICENS VIVES, Manual , 235-6. Even in the Mesta Real, as KLEIN (pp. 59-62) emphasizes, the role of the smaller ganadero must not be unduly minimized.

97.  José MIRANDA, "Notas sobre la introducción de la Mesta en la Nueva Espana," Rev. de hist. de América , núm. 17 (June, 1944), pp. 1-26; DUSENBERRY, Mexican Mesta , pp. 44-53. For a more accurate analysis of the Mexican municipal Mestas, see Keith W. ALGIER, "The Puebla Mesta Ordinances of 1556 and 1560," New Mexico Historical Review, XLIV (1969), 5-24, at. p. 7. The genesis of the Mexican Mestas in the Andalusian municipal exemplars, not the Mesta Real, was pointed out a quarter of a century ago in my "The Peninsular Background of Latin American Cattle Ranching," Hispanic American Historical Review , XXXII (1952), 491- 515, at p. 505.

98.  SANCHO SOPRANIS, Hist. soc. de Jerez de la Frontera , I, 62, from Bartolomé GUTIERREZ, Historia y anales de la muy n. y muy l. ciudad de Xerez de la Frontera (Jerez, 1890-94), III, 281; GONZALEZ JIMENEZ, Concejo de Carmona , pp. 61-2.

99.  See, on the widespread expansion of European stockraising and concomitant sharp increase in meat consumption, Robert-Henri BAUTIER, "Les mutations agricoles des XIV ^e et XV^e siecles et les progres de l'élevage," Bull. philologique et historique du Comité des Travaux Hisforiques et Scientiflques , année 1967 (Paris, 1969), pp. 1-27; Fernand BRAUDEL, Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme (Paris, 1967), pp. 127-33. For Spain, the brief remarks of Antonio DOMINGUEZ ORTIZ, Alteraciones andaluzas (Madrid, 1973), pp. 22-3, underline the desirability of close study of this trend in Andalucía, where we may conjecture that the conditions of repoblación, Moorish antecedents, and the greater availability of beef displace the trans-Pyrenean factor of labor shortage in cereal agriculture due to the Black Death.

100.  Pedro de ESCAVIAS, Hechos del condestable don Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo (Madrid, 1940), pp. 47, 50, 135, 164-5, 167, 380, etc.

101.  Earl J. HAMILTON, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501-1650 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), p. 284.

102.  Ibid., pp. 335-8; see also, with specific reference to Andalucía, pp. 227-9, 283-6.

103.  Ordenanças de Sevilla, p. 57v; R. G. S., IX (1492), 1257 (importation of Irish hides at Sevilla by English and Florentine merchants there resident). On the Granadan livestock trade before 1492, cf. M. A. LADERO QUESADA, "Almojarifazgo sevillano y comercio exterior de Andalucia en el siglo XV," Anuario de historia económica y social, II (1969), 69-115, at p. 100.

104.  Manuel ALVAR, Atlas lingüístico y etnográfico de Andalucía, II (Granada, 1963), Mapas 442-537, on Industrias pecuarias and Animales domésticos.