"Concerning lawsuits, diligence, an open purse, and patience."
"A lot of pen and ink, but little justice."
"Lawsuits are like cherries; have one and many follow."
SPANISH PROVERBS ⁽¹⁾

[3] One of the first to write about litigiousness in Castile was Gabriel Monterroso y Alvarado, a scribe working in the chancillería of Valladolid, one of the king's most important courts. In 1566, Monterroso published his Práctica criminal y civil, a treatise on procedural law, in which he noted that "lawsuits and conflicts among the populace are growing daily . . .; already, the world is so engulfed and involved in these disputes that almost nothing is resolved except by the cloth of legal judgment." ⁽²⁾

Monterroso's opinion about his countrymen's affinity for litigation was seconded in 1581 by that of a Valencian lawyer, Tomás Cerdan de Tallada, who observed that lawsuits were indeed "multiplying" although he was hard put to find the precise reason why. ⁽³⁾ By this date, other Spaniards were aware that the number of lawsuits had increased to a point where the courts of the kingdom were hopelessly clogged. As early as 1532, the Castilian Cortes complained to Charles V that [4] "the number of lawsuits has and continues to grow so rapidly that the cases cannot be dispatched with the speed that is necessary," resulting in "grave problems," among them costly delays that caused some lawsuits to last "twenty or thirty years and more." ⁽⁴⁾ The Cortes also griped that "these delays often forced both parties to spend much more than the lawsuit was worth with the result that the litigants wind up broke, the advocates, attorneys, and scribes, rich." ⁽⁵⁾ Subsequent visitations to royal courts uncovered "a multitude of lawsuits," "crowded dockets," and long, almost interminable backlogs of cases, additional indications that the volume of lawsuits was steadily increasing. ⁽⁶⁾ One visitation complained that the intake of cases was so great that judges frequently were unable to give cases more than brief, "summary" treatment. ⁽⁷⁾

Was Castle as litigious as contemporaries believed? Litigiousness is not easy to measure in quantitative terms, but the evidence is strong that the kingdom had entered into a highly litigious age. Courts and legal tribunals had existed in the kingdom since the early Middle Ages, but never in history do they appear to have been so widely utilized, by so many, and for such diverse reasons. Unfortunately, record keeping in the courts and tribunals of this epoch was so shoddy that only limited statistical evidence of this flood of litigation survives. Small, local courts were the worst offenders, mainly because much of their business was conducted orally, but even higher, appellate courts, which were accustomed to written proceedings, recorded their activities in a haphazard and often slipshod manner. This shortcoming was compounded by the failure of most tribunals to house their lawsuits and other legal records properly. Visitations to the king's courts in the sixteenth century regularly faulted court officials for failing to maintain adequate archives, ⁽⁸⁾ and a report, prepared in [5] 1721 for Phillip V, noted that each of the archives of the king's courts was in need of urgent reform. The author of this report, Santiago Agustín Riol, added that "these archives are regularly sold or given away," and he singled out the escribanos de cámara, the scribes to whom record keeping was entrusted, for blame. "Many papers are missing," he wrote, "because of their carelessness and also because they have indiscriminately sold them by the arroba for old paper." ⁽⁹⁾

The persistence of such practices means that Castile's legal archives are woefully incomplete, but, fortunately, enough documentation survives to indicate that legal business in the course of the sixteenth century was rising sharply. At the chancillería of Valladolid, a major appellate jurisdiction, incoming lawsuits were seperated into loose, administrative categories known as partidos that varied according to the litigants involved in a dispute and the amount of goods, money, or property at stake. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Not all of the records of these partidos survive, but those of the partido known as villa, which was reserved for cases worth from 1,000 to 4,000 ducats (=375,000 to 1,500,000 mrs.), indicate a total of 2,584 lawsuits for 1560. By 1580, 3,238 lawsuits were recorded, and in 1594, 3,880, an increase of approximately 50 percent in fifteen years. ⁽¹¹⁾ Increases of a similar order are also recorded in the [6] partido eclesiástico, which received civil cases involving churchmen and others who enjoyed the privileges of canonical law. ⁽¹²⁾

Another indication that the number of lawsuits handled by this tribunal was increasing is provided by the cartas ejecutorias, the executive writs issued when a lawsuit was finally completed. The number of these documents grew from about 530 in 1500 to nearly 1,400 by 1580, a 270 percent increase that far outstripped concomitant gains in population (Figure 1). Owing to gaps in the archives of the chancillería, it is impossible to determine whether the increase in the number of cartas ejecutorias was proportionally larger or smaller than increases in the number of lawsuits filed initially at this tribunal, but there is no doubt that the volume of business was expanding rapidly. One royal official, writing early in the 1590s, hinted at such an increase when he reported that ordinarily between 6,000 and 7,000 new cases were received annually, an estimate that was probably fairly accurate. ⁽¹³⁾ Whatever the exact figure, the influx of cases was so great that officials of the chancillería had to develop administrative shortcuts to keep up with the demand. These practices account for many of the complaints about illegible, hastily written registers, lost and misplaced documents, and the readiness of some officials to issue documents "without authorized signatures." ⁽¹⁴⁾ The deluge of cases at the chancillería also helps to explain why this tribunal failed to keep its archives up to date.

Nor was the chancillería of Valladolid unique. Lawsuits submitted to the chancillería of Granada, a similar institution, were also increasing. By the 1590s, this tribunal, which had jurisdiction over a population significantly smaller than that of Valladolid, received approximately 4,000 new cases a year, creating administrative problems similar to those of its northern counterpart.⁽¹⁵⁾ The Royal Council of Castile, the highest court in the kingdom, also had to cope with sharp [10] increases in judicial business. No statistics are available for this tribunal until the seventeenth century, but in 1572, Philip II complained to its newly appointed president, Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva, that his councillors were spending far too much time resolving lawsuits and too little on other important matters of policy and administration. ⁽¹⁶⁾ Philip instructed Covarrubias to right this imbalance, and he increased the amount of the bond appellants to the council were required to post. ⁽¹⁷⁾ But these efforts to restrict the volume of judicial business dispatched by the council failed. The number of lawsuits continued to rise, and in recognition of this situation, one of Philip II's last administrative actions before his death in 1598 was to establish within the Royal Council a special sala de justicia dedicated to resoluton of civil disputes. ⁽¹⁸⁾

Court records thus confirm what contemporaries believed, but how many Castilians went to court? Children under the age of legal majority, which was then set at twenty-five, together with women of any age, with the exception of widows, could not litigate on their own behalf, although both could bring suit if represented by their appointed male guardians, tutors, husbands, parents, or relatives. The courtroom, consequently, was a world populated principally by adult males. Court records show that these came from every estate. ⁽¹⁹⁾ One early seventeenth-century writer, Baltasar Alamos de Barrientos, calculated that at least three-quarters of Castile's population was in the habit of litigating. ⁽²⁰⁾ Although undoubtedly inflated, this estimate suggests the degree to which an educated Castilian was ready to believe that he lived in a society in which lawsuits were familiar to everyone, rich and poor alike.

The single most litigious individual in this society was the king. He [11] had to protect his vast personal patrimony, defeat those who challenged the jurisdiction of his officials, and prosecute any attempt to defraud the royal fisc. The king could not do all of this himself, and, since the fourteenth century, monarchs had been personally represented in legal matters by an official known as the fiscal. By the mid-sixteenth century, at least fifteen of these officials were stationed at the kingdom's major legal tribunals. Lawyers by training, fiscales intervened as an interested party in every criminal suit to make certain that malefactors were punished according to the king's law. They also took part in countless civil suits in which the crown had a stake and were especially active in the so-called pleitos de hidalguía, attempts by private individuals to prove their nobility and thus receive exemption from royal taxation. Indirectly, therefore, the king was party to thousands of lawsuits annually and, through his fiscales, was informed of important court cases as well as any difficulties in the administration of royal justice. ⁽²¹⁾

The Castilian aristocracy was almost as litigious as the king. As property owners and heirs to large estates, grandees and títulos were caught in an endless web of disputes over dowries, entails, inheritances, donations, landownership, and seigneurial obligations that came increasingly to court after the mid-fifteenth century. In addition, the aristocracy, at least in the sixteenth century, was dragged continuously into court by peasants who considered the lawsuit the only effective means of challenging the power and authority of their lords. As a result, most of Castile's leading families were obliged to retain expensive retinues of lawyers and other experts to advise them on legal matters. The duke of Medinaceli had agents in Granada, Valladolid, and Madrid as well as a regular council composed of law graduates to help administer his estates and supervise his many lawsuits.⁽²²⁾ The constable of Castile organized a similar council, and, [12] according to one report, in 1603 this important nobleman was simultaneously engaged in no less than nineteen different suits. ⁽²³⁾ Equally litigious were the dukes of Béjar, whose staff of legal advisers numbered at one point nearly twenty. ⁽²⁴⁾

But the aristocracy was not alone in having to pay for the costly services of advocates, attorneys, and other legal agents. Castilian cities were also caught in the web of litigation. In 1555, for example, Seville had eighty-five different lawsuits pending simultaneously at the chancillería of Granada, and to administer these and other cases the municipality retained the services of at least twelve lawyers. ⁽²⁵⁾ In some years the money disbursed to Seville's procurador mayor (chief attorney) in Madrid for "legal expenses" (gastos de pleitos) amounted to over 1 million mrs., a very considerable sum. ⁽²⁶⁾ Madrid and Toledo also maintained an extensive network of lawyers in a number of different tribunals and must have spent on a similar scale. ⁽²⁷⁾

Many ordinary citizens also appear to have made frequent use of the courts. Notable was El Greco, longtime resident of Toledo, for whom a lawsuit was neither an extraordinary nor an unusual occurrence but a regular business practice, a means of establishing the value of his work. El Greco's biographers made reference to his "litigious character," but the truth is that he was no different from many other artists and craftsmen of the Golden Age. His famous case against the alcabalero (a kind of tax collector) of Illescas in 1605 is especially important, however, because it established the precedent that painting [13] ought to be exempt from royal taxation. This landmark decision, later cited in a series of cases begun by such painters as Vicente Carducho, Eugenio Caxés, and Diego Velázquez y Silva, figured largely in the attempt of these artists to have their craft designated as "noble" and thus qualify them for a variety of royal honors and gifts. ⁽²⁸⁾

But what about the mass of Castilians, the vast majority of whom were illiterate peasants often lacking the financial means necessary to bring cases to court? Were they as litigious as Alamos de Barrientos would have us believe? In theory, the "poor" were entitled to free legal services, and, after the late thirteenth century, the crown maintained at each of its higher tribunals an advocate and attorney "de pobres" whose job was to help poor litigants bring their cases to court. ⁽²⁹⁾ Many cities provided similar services. ⁽³⁰⁾ In practice, however, many of the lawsuits presented by paupers (pleitos de pobres) were given only summary treatment, and in 1590 the official visitor to the chancillería of Valladolid said that poor litigants were obliged to "sell their capes" in order to pay the fees illegally charged by the abogado de pobres (advocate of the poor). ⁽³¹⁾ Even so, according to most evidence, the poor appeared regularly in the crown's tribunals. Official records of the chancillería of Granada suggest that at least 10 percent of the lawsuits brought to this tribunal were pleitos de pobres, ⁽³²⁾ and in Valladolid paupers in the late sixteenth century initiated between two and three hundred cases each year. ⁽³³⁾ Representative are Manta, a slave, who in 1551 sued Antonio Alonso, resident of Alba de Tormes, "for her liberty"; Juan de Hermosa, a poor peasant from Medina del Campo, who sued a local shopkeeper "over money"; and a woman [14] from the town of Traspiñedo, whose suit against the local town council in 1580 demanded that "they send someone out of the town to go find her husband ." ⁽³⁴⁾

Paupers, however, were not the only humble Castilians to adjudicate disputes in an important royal court. In 1589, a lawyer at the chancillería of Valladolid stated that "nine out of ten litigants who come to this royal tribunal are tanners, dyers, innkeepers, and other tradesmen." ⁽³⁵⁾ So abundant was the flow of ordinary Castilians into the king's courts that many officials noted that delays and inefficiencies in the administration of royal justice were primarily the result of the large number of pleitos menudos (minor lawsuits) the crown's justices had to review. According to the ordinances of the chancillería of Valladolid, for example, the civil judges attached to this tribunal had only to consider cases involving property worth 6,000 mrs. or more. In the Middle Ages, such a sum represented a considerable amount of money, but rapid inflation in the first half of the sixteenth century severely undermined the meaning of this particular restriction. In the 1530s, 6,000 mrs. was worth no more than 1,500 or 2,000 mrs. in 1480. This inflation enabled Castilians to bring to the king's courts relatively insignificant disputes that traditionally had been settled informally in small, village tribunals or privately, out of court. Arbitration by a village elder, a priest, or a local nobleman continued to be a mechanism by which countless disputes were settled, but inflation surely promoted litigation, giving the poor of Castile easy access to royal tribunals. In doing so, it also abetted the extension of royal justice at the expense of other means of resolving disputes.

One other sign of the litigiousness of this epoch was the indebtedness directly caused by incessant litigation. Early in the sixteenth century, for example, the Convento de la Madre de Dios in Salamanca informed Charles V that it had spent over 1 million mrs. pursuing a certain lawsuit for nearly four years, and, as a result, the religious community found itself "much indebted and in want."⁽³⁶⁾ The monastery then asked the monarch for permission to encumber one of its properties with a censo (a type of mortgage annuity) worth 1,400,000 mrs. and to use the money derived from this transaction to pay off its legal debts. Many small towns and villages made similar requests.[15] In 1552, the town of Castropol had to beg Charles V to allow it to raise 40,000 mrs. among its residents, the amount needed "to finish and complete" an important lawsuit Castropol had with the city of Oviedo. ⁽³⁷⁾ Expensive lawsuits also figured in the petition of the New Castilian village of Corral de Almaguer which asked Philip II if it could levy a special head tax among its residents.

The said village owes a great deal of money to private individuals and other villages. In addition, it has many lawsuits pending in Madrid as well as in the city of Granada and the audiencia of Valladolid, but it lacks the rents, income, and fees needed to meet its debts. The need is great and since the vecinos of the village are wealthy, they have met and decided to levy among themselves a assessment of 300 ducats [= 112,500 mrs.]..., there is no other way for the village to pay the above debts nor continue its lawsuits which are of such great importance. ⁽³⁸⁾

Endless lawsuits were also a cause of financial trouble for some members of the Castilian aristocracy. In 1634, for example, the count of Rivadavia declared that he owed 487,500 mrs. in legal expenses and an additional 1,350,000 mrs. to his advocates, attorneys, and solicitors. ⁽⁴¹⁾ Nor was Rivadavia alone; the early seventeenth century was a difficult time for most of the Castilian aristocracy, and the financial burden of multiple lawsuits was a major contributing cause. ⁽⁴²⁾

[16] In spite of the apparent participation of all ranks of Castilian society in litigation, it remains difficult, if not impossible, to answer the question posed at the beginning of this chapter: was Castile a litigious society? Ample evidence, such as growing backlogs of cases, suggests that the number of lawsuits was more than the law courts could easily absorb, but this ought not to be confused with litigiousness. The latter is a relative term, and, ideally, Castile's experience with lawsuits should be compared with that of other societies. Unfortunately, studies of litigation in other sixteenth-century states are few, but a comparison of appellate court jurisdictions -- the only ones for which figures exist -- suggests that Castile was well attuned to litigation. The royal chancillería of Valladolid, which had approximately four million people living within its jurisdiction, received as many as six or seven thousand new cases a year at the end of the sixteenth century. In contrast, the Court of Chancery during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) was the largest of England's five central courts, yet it received only about five hundred new cases a year from a country with a population of well over four million. ⁽⁴³⁾ Figures for the number of lawsuits registered at the parlements of France during this epoch are not available, but it would be surprising to learn that any of these tribunals were inundated with comparatively more lawsuits than the chancillería of Valladolid. Judged, therefore, within the context of its times, Castile does indeed appear to have been litigious.

Comparison with other countries and other centuries is more difficult since the duties assigned to courts change radically over time. A glance at the relative performance of state supreme courts in the United States of America -- a society widely reputed to be highly litigious -- and the chancillería of Valladolid in the late sixteenth century might be instructive. The former resemble the chancillería in that they are appellate jurisdictions, serve as courts of last resort, normally adjudicate a wide range of disputes, and often serve populations roughly similar in size to that living within the jurisdiction of the chancillería. According to a recent study, these courts were at their peak in the years between 1870 to 1900, during which time they issued [17] approximately 200 opinions per million population. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ In comparison, the chancillería issued between 1,200 and 1,400 cartas ejecutorias every year, a figure that works out to over 300 decisions per million persons, a rate one-third above that of the state supreme courts. Of course, the state supreme courts were paralleled by those of the federal system. Even in 1970, however, the eleven circuits of the United States federal courts of appeals docketed only 11,662 cases. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ The population of the United States at this time stood at approximately two hundred million. Castile at the end of the sixteenth century had a population of a little over six million, yet its two chancillerías -- Granada and Valladolid -- received well over 10,000 new cases annually. Thus, by either of these measures, Castile's experience with litigation does indeed appear remarkable.

Yet, for all of their apparent litigiousness and possibly as a consequence of it, Castilians in the sixteenth century looked harshly upon lawsuits and with suspicion on the lawyers, scribes, and other officials to which the harvest of the courts gave rise. The more pervasive litigation was, the more Castilians viewed it with disapproval and distaste. Some likened it to a disease, others to feud, or considered it another means by which the "strong" oppressed the "weak" and thus allowed injustice to flourish. ⁽⁴⁶⁾For this reason, lawsuits were widely considered as sinful, although Alamos de Barrientos, writing early in the seventeenth century, went even further: he classified lawsuits along with crime, vice, and luxury as "public evils" fomented by human envy and greed that ought forever to be eradicated from Castile. ⁽⁴⁷⁾ His contemporary Antonio Liñon y Verdugo, answering the question, "What are lawsuits?" wrote, "Lawsuits are -- to ask for the property of another and to fight over what both possess, justly or unjustly." ⁽⁴⁸⁾ Apparently, popular opinion regarding lawsuits during this epoch was much the same. The proverbs listed at the head of this [18] chapter provide at least some indication of the deep-seated suspicion of lawsuits that many Castilians seemed to have shared.

Much of Castile's thinking about lawsuits was, of course, conditioned by Christian tradition, and especially by St. Augustine's fourth-century condemnation of this particular legal instrument as a symbol of discord in the earthly city. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ The lawsuit epitomized man's inherent sinfulness and served as proof positive of his lack of goodwill, justice, and simple Christian charity.

Yet Castile's suspicion of the lawsuit had other causes, one of which may be traced to the intrinsic nature of Castilian society. Although frequently described as a society of "orders" or "estates," Castile was actually a "composite society," an amalgam of hundreds of small corporate groups and communities held together only loosely by common economic circumstances, legal privileges, and shared allegiances to the church and the Spanish crown. Identification with class or caste was not absent, but life for most individuals in the sixteenth century revolved principally around small clusters -- family, lineage, parish, village, confraternity, guilds, and the like -- to which they swore hermandad, loyalty and fraternity. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ Ideally, each cluster was semiautonomous, safeguarding its interests, protecting its privileges, and taking every opportunity to aggrandize its position with regard to competing groups. To promote such ends, absolute loyalty to the community was essential, since any ongoing dispute or division between members could easily weaken the community as a whole.

It follows that each of these communities placed considerable emphasis on the need to resolve their members' conflicts quickly and amicably. Compromise was the ideal, and an arbitrated settlement within the confines of the community was the preferred mechanism for ending disputes. In contrast, lawsuits, which were slow, costly, and involved the help of outsiders, were thought to disrupt normal workings of the community. The statutes of the consulado of Burgos, for example, expressly prohibited merchants from suing other members of the consulado "because we know that lawsuits among merchants are never finished, largely because of the briefs and papers prepared by lawyers interested in supporting themselves. The lawsuits [19], consequently, become immortal, and this does great harm and damage to commerce and also causes merchants to lose confidence in each other." ⁽⁵¹⁾ In lieu of lawsuits, the consulado required its members to rely initially upon arbitration, and for this purpose the merchants elected among themselves a juez arbitro whose job was to resolve any such disputes that arose. Proceedings were to be oral; lawyers and legal counsel were strictly banned; and the arbitrator, whenever possible, was to reach a compromise settlement so that normal commercial relationships could be quickly restored.

Similarly, lawsuits were thought to be at odds with the fundamental principles of family life. The Castilian Cortes in 1532, for example, maintained that the "rancor and passion" resulting from lawsuits were incompatible with "love and concord among Christians" and specifically asked Charles V to order "that all lawsuits between relatives within the fourth degree be settled and determined through compromise arbitration." ⁽⁵²⁾ The Cortes also wanted Charles to establish in every town two conciliators whose job would be "to arbitrate between all persons . . . who had lawsuits and other differences between them." To justify this novel attempt to extirpate lawsuits from Castilian society once and for all, the Cortes pointed to "the evils and dangers which lawsuits engender." These are "so many," the Cortes explained, "that they cannot be enumerated; it is enough to say that lawsuits destroy the human spirit, strain the human body and render it old, and ruin individual finances." ⁽⁵³⁾

In view of such hostile attitudes toward lawsuits, it is not surprising that the crown had agreed in 1529 to ban all lawyers from its new colony in Peru. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ In the opinion of most contemporaries, lawyers were a major source of lawsuits and thus a threat to life itself. The fact is, however, that the legal profession in Castile was so deeply entrenched by the sixteenth century that little could be done to remove it. The Americas, however, were a new society. The New World presented an opportunity to foster the harmony and accord which the litigious mother country lacked.

[20] Under the corporate principles governing Castilian life, a lawsuit, especially if directed against a neighbor, close relative, or some other person or institution with whom one had sworn hermandad, was the moral equivalent of war, a sign that the bond was broken and their mutual relationship was at an end. Gabriel de Moncada, a native of Toledo, was thus somewhat apologetic when he wrote in 1623 to inform the regimiento (governing council) of that city that their refusal to pay certain monies owed to his father, a former municipal official, obliged him to go to court. "I am sorry to begin a lawsuit against you [the regimiento] because I was born obliged to serve you." ⁽⁵⁵⁾ The idea of the lawsuit as a nasty, disruptive force is also evident in the wording of the countless escrituras de compromiso (compromise agreements) that, particularly in the seventeenth century, were drawn up to bring long and costly lawsuits to an end. In one incident involving a dispute over an inheritance between a widowed mother and her two sons, the two parties stated clearly that the purpose of their compromise was "to stop the lawsuits between us, to save on costs and expenses, and to conserve the peace and friendship that is just and natural between relatives who are so close." ⁽⁵⁶⁾

Castlians thus confronted a paradoxical situation. Lawsuits were detested, yet seemingly embarked upon more than ever before. Reformers urged that, for moral and Christian reasons, the number of lawsuits should be reduced, but neither they nor other Castilians recognized that the tide of litigation was symptomatic of a society in which the traditional bonds of loyalty and fraternity were weakening as a result of the numerous changes -- demographic, economic, social, legal, and political -- that rapid growth and development in the sixteenth century had engendered. For the following chapters, I will attempt to unravel this story and in doing so provide a description of what it was like to litigate in Castilian courts together with an analysis of the persons and issues involved.

1. Luís Martínez Kleiser, Refranero general ideológico español (Madrid, 1953), cf. Pleitos.

2. Gabriel de Monterroso y Alvarado, Práctica criminal y civil: Instrucción de scrivanos (Valladolid, 1566), p. 2V.

3. Tomás Cerdan de Tallada, Verdadero gobierno desta monarchia (Valencia, 1581), p. 88.

4. CLC, 4:528, 538.

5. Ibid., p. 538.

6. The records of these visitas can be found in the AGS: CC, legs. 2711-39.

7. Ibid., leg. 2715, Visita to the chancillería of Granada (1554).

8. The visitation to the chancillería of Valladolid in 1554 noted that the archives of this tribunal were so full that cases were not being deposited. See AGS: CC, leg. 2714. A few years later, the judges at the chancillería of Granada were reprimanded for not bothering to record their sentencias (decisions), apparently because of the crush of business. See ibid., leg. 2739, Visita to the chancillería of Granada. The chaotic archival situation at the crown's audiencias also came to the attention of the Cortes. See CLC, vol. 5: Cortes de 1551, pet. 51, p. 522.

9. Santiago Augusín Riol, "Informe que hiso a su magestad en 16 junio de 1721... sobre la creación, erección, e institución de los consejos y tribunales," in Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor, ed., Semanario erudito (Madrid, 1788) 3:30-31.

10. ARCV: Libros Civiles, cajas 12-99. The partidos were as follows: (1) perdido: for cases worth less than 100 ducats (= 37,500 mrs.), those labeled casos de corte, disputes over alcabalas, and cases on appeal from the chancillería's sala de hidalquía; (2) menor: for cases worth from 100 to 1,000 ducats (= 37,500 to 375,000 mrs.) and those originating in the province of Valladolid; (3) villa: for cases worth from 1,000 to 4,000 ducats (= 375,000 to 1,500,000 mrs.), others involving the Mesta and those on appeal from the audiencia of Galicia; (4) eclesiástico: for cases involving clerics and others on appeal from ecclesiastical courts by a procedure known as via de fuerza; (5) grandes: for cases involving members of the titled nobility; (6) pobres: for cases involving litigants who qualified as paupers, as well as convents, monasteries, hospitals, and the like: (7) administraciones: for bankruptcy proceedings and cases involving the administration of estates; (8) competencias: for jurisdictional disputes; (9) residencias: for disputes over the conduct of public officials; (10) provisiones que no causan pendencia: a miscellaneous category that included cases over election to municipal offices, recusaciones, etc. In addition there were the partido criminal for criminal cases, hidalguía for lawsuits over the privileges of nobility, and one known as vizcaya that was reserved for disputes involving persons covered by the fuero of that region. See Manual Fernández Ayala Aulestia, Práctica y formulario de la chancillería de Valladolid (Valladolid, 1667), chap. 22.

11. ARCV: Libros Civiles, cajas 32, 35-36, 40.

12. Ibid., cajas 15-18. In 1580, a total of 1,653 cases were filed in this partido. By 1595, the total had reached 2,500. The only other partido for which accurate figures exist are perdido and pobres. In 1563, the former registered over 2,700 cases. Figures for the latter are as follows: 1555-416; 1560-338; 1575-245; 1580-214; and 1585-233.

13. BNP: 261, fol 4.

14. See, for example, complaints about illegible registers in the AGS: CC, leg. 2711, Visita to the chancillería of Valladolid (1550), especially the charges (cargos) against Lope Rodríguez, receptor. See also ibid., legs. 2738-39, Visita to the chancillería of Granada (1554).

15. ARCG: libs. 347-48, de repartimento.

16. BNM: 11261⁶, "Advertencias que hizo Felipe II al Sr. Covarrubias cuando le eligío Presidente del Consejo (1572)," fol. 2v. A document, probably dating from the late 1560s, indicates that the council at one point had at least thirty-one different lawsuits pending simultaneously. Other legal business included the review of eleven visitas and more than one hundred other items. See BL: Add. 28, 352, fols. 36-37.

17. By the reign of Philip II, however, only a case worth more than 4,000 ducats (= 1.5 million mrs.) could be appealed to the sala de mil y quinientos doblas. See BL: Cotton Vespaian C. VI, "España, 1577," fol. 9.

18. BNM: 18, 722, "Memoria del nuevo orden que a de aver en las salas, 17 Feb. 1598."

19. See below, chapter 4.

20. HSA: MS. HC 380/80, "Advertencias políticas sobre lo particular y público de esta monarchia," fol. 133.

21. The history of this important royal official has yet to be written. A brief introduction to the role of the fiscal in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is provided by Miguel Angel Pérez de la Canal, "La justicia en la corte de Castilla durante los siglos XIII al XV," Historia instituciones documentos 2 (1975):428-29, 440. In the seventeenth century, one official described the fiscal "almost as a guardian of the kingdom and superintendent of the monies of the public lands and grainhouses." See ACB: lib. 17, consulta, 31 Dec.1627. The king was represented by fiscales in each of the royal councils, regional tribunals (audiencias), both in Spain and the New World, and in Seville's Casa de Contratación.

22. ACM: leg. 139 notes that in 1585, Dr. Mateo de Espinosa, a member of the consejo del duque, received an annual salary of 37,500 mrs. In addition, the duke paid his agente at the chancillería of Valladolid a salary of 30,000 mrs., two advocates retainers of 16,ooo mrs. and 20,000 mrs., respectively. Some years later, Lic. Madrid de Salçedo, a judge on the duke's council, received a salary worth 100,000 mrs. annually. See ACM: leg. 231, consulta, 14 Jan. 1605.

23. ADF: leg. 190, no. 11, "Advertencias al Conde de Monterrey para cosas tocantes a gobierno del estado del Condestable, 29 Oct. 1603."

24. AHN: Osuna, leg. 249, secc. 1, fol. 1. In 1640, for example, the duke had at least twenty-nine different lawsuits pending, fourteen in the chancillería of Valladolid, fifteen in the Royal Council. For more on lawyers in private service, see Manuel Serrano y Sanz, "El Licenciado Juan de Cervantes y don Iñigo López de Mendoza, Cuarto Duque del Infantado," Boletín de la real academia española 13 (1926):18-43.

25. AMS: Secc. III, tomo 12, fols. 1-48.

26. AMS: Secc. II, carpeta 201, lists Seville's gastos de pleitos in various years.

27. On Toledo's legal staff, see AMT: Libro de la Contaduría Mayor de Toledo, año 1587, fol. 29. For Madrid's, see the Archivo de la Villa de Madrid, 2/404/8-9.

28. For more on these lawsuits and their implications for Spanish painting, see Julián Gállego, El pintor de artesano a artista (Granada, 1976), pp. 101-48, 167-85.

29. Pérez de la Canal, pp. 428-40.

30. Seville, for example. See Recopilación de los ordenamientos de Sevilla (Seville, 1620), título 21.

31. AGS: CC, leg. 2719, Visita to the chancillería of Valladolid (1590). One cause of these abuses was the low pay. The abogado de pobres, for example, earned only 10,000 mrs. a year, a sum one observer said was insufficient for the amount of work the position entailed. Consequently, talented lawyers rarely accepted these posts, and those who did looked for ways where "they could earn more money." See AGS: CC, leg. 2714, Visita to the chancillería of Valladolid (1543).

32. ARCG: lib. 547, Repartimientos Civiles.

33. ARCV: Libros Civiles, caja 63. This represented approximately 4 to 5 percent of the total number of cases filed at this court.

34. Ibid., caja 63.

35. AGS: CC, leg. 2719. Visita to the chancillería of Valladolid (1589).

36. Ibid., Pueblos, leg. 16.

37. This document, dated 17 May 1552, is in my possession. Copies are available upon request.

38. AHN: Ordenes Militares, pleito 21161.

39. AHN: Cons., leg. 7043, no. 14.

40. See AHN: lib. 1419, Consultas de Viernes (1578).

41. AHPV: Prots. 2019, fol. 403.

42. On the financial difficulties of aristocracy, see Charles Jago, "The Influence of Debt on the Relations between Crown and Aristocracy in Seventeenth-Century Castile," Economic History Review 26 (May 1973):218-36, and his recent article, "The 'Crisis of the Aristocracy' in Seventeenth-Century Castile," Past & Present (Aug. 1979):59-90. One grandee who found himself in serious financial trouble was the constable of Castile. In 1643, his debts totaled more than 21 million mrs., of which a little over 1 million represented salaries owed to "servants, advocates, agents, and attorneys." See AMAE: MS. 39, fol. 88.

43. See W. J. Jones, The Elizabethan Court of Chancery (Oxford, 1967), p. 305, and C. W. Brooks, "Litigants and Attorneys in the King's Bench and Common Pleas, 1560-1640,"in Legal Records and the Historian, ed. J. H. Baker (London, 1978), pp. 43-44. The figures presented by the latter, however, are somewhat confusing.

44. Robert A. Kagan, Bliss Cartwright, Laurence M. Friedman, and Stanton Wheeler, "The Evolution of State Supreme Courts," Michigan Law Review 76 (May 1978):964.

45. Laurence Baum, Sheldon Goldman, and Austin Sarat, "The Evolution of Litigation in the Federal Courts of Appeals, 1895-1975," paper read at the Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, Columbus, Ohio, 1978.

46. See, for example, Juan de Mariana, De rege et regis institutione (Toledo, 1599), Biblioteca de autores españoles (Madrid, 1854), 31:534.

47. Alamos de Barrientos, "Advertencias politicas," fol. 131.

48. Antonio Liñon y Verdugo, Guía y avisos de forasteros que vienen a la corte (Madrid, 1623), p. 18.

49. City of God, trans. William C. Greene (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 19:5.

50. For a similar view of the importance of these ties, see Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Renaissance (New Brunswick, 1979), p. 69.

51. CECA, 12:454. See also Enrique Gacto Fernández, Historia de la jurisdicción mercantil en España (Seville, 1971), pp. 124-25, 146.

52. CLC, vol. 4: pet. 35, p. 638.

53. CLC, vol. 4: pet. 111, p. 690.

54. James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: A Colonial Society (Madison, 1968), p. 69.

55. AMT: CV, letter dated 14 Aug. 1623.

56. AHPV: Prots. 2019, fol 267. Compromiso dated 9 July 1634.