There are six kinds of adventurers in Spain:
the first goes to the Indies; the second to Italy;
and the third to Flanders; the fourth is in jail;
the fifth looks after lawsuits; and the sixth takes
Holy Orders. In the entire kingdom, there are no
other kinds of persons.

[128] Castilians of the sixteenth century found litigation difficult to explain except in traditional Augustinian terms. The view that lawsuits were products of man's godlessness and greed had wide currency, even among circles close to Castile's courts. "What had led to the art of lawsuits has been converted into an art for lucre," wrote Gabriel Monterroso y Alvarado. ⁽¹⁾ His contemporary, Tomás Cerdan de Tallada, an advocate who had also served as royal fiscal in Valencia, held a similar view. He admitted that lawsuits were caused by human malice, but Cerdan de Tallada was more of a lawyer than a moralist, and he listed eight additional factors to explain why "lawsuits were multiplying": bad laws, bad judges, too many laws, the lack of "distinctly marked municipal boundaries," censos, mayorazgos, false witness ("most litigants don't tell the truth"), and the "improper [129]administration of justice." ⁽²⁾ This complex explanation of the various forces behind litigation merits close investigation.

Modern theories of litigation vary, but most legal scholars agree that its rate is influenced by a combination of so-called legal factors, such as the nature of the law and specific legislative acts that might have a direct bearing on litigation, and nonlegal factors including economic and social change. ⁽³⁾ Cerdan de Tallada might have agreed. Unlike most of his moralizing contemporaries, he analyzed litigation to make allowance for both legal and nonlegal factors even though in most instances his explanation fell short. He recognized, for example, that purely legal factors (bad laws, too many laws) might promote litigation, but he ignored the possibility that deficiencies in the corpus of Castilian law might have had the opposite effect and persuaded disputants to settle out of court. Furthermore, by considering only weaknesses in the law, he overlooked the crucial fact that though the king's law was not perfect, it had many advantages over older fueros and customary usages, particularly with respect to commerce and trade. The fueros -- products of a backward, pastoral society in which commerce was minimal -- were out of step with the times, whereas the king's law, drawing upon Roman precedents made ample allowance for sophisticated contracts, credit arrangements, insurance schemes, and other financial operations necessary for Castile's expanding economy. ⁽⁴⁾ The law, in other words, was strong in precisely [130] those areas where the fueros were weak, providing answers to questions for which the older usages made no allowance. The law offered similar advantages with respect to testaments, donations, taxes, and the like; consequently, it encouraged widespread use of the king's courts regardless of the costs and delays lawsuits entailed.

Cerdan de Tallada's assessment of the relationship of law to litigation was thus slightly amiss, but it was an opinion widely held among Castilian jurists, particularly those seeking legal reform. Yet, confused and contradictory laws and the problems they were thought to give rise to were, in the absence of any drastic legal reforms, relatively constant throughout the early modern period in Castile. It is unlikely, therefore, that they alone could account for either the rapid surge in litigation during the sixteenth century or, as will be illustrated in chapter 6, its apparent decline in the seventeenth century.

Two other legal factors that Cerdan de Tallada recognized were the mayorazgo and the censo, both of which engendered thousands of lawsuits over the rights and privileges of the parties concerned. The mayorazgo, Spain's equivalent of an entailed estate, originated in the thirteenth century, but to create one prior to the sixteenth century required the permission of the monarchy.⁽⁵⁾ In 1505, however, Ferdinand of Aragon, in an attempt to get the Cortes to ratify his regency over Castile, liberalized the rules concerning mayorazgos, thus setting the path toward the widespread entailment of land in perpetuity. This scheme was designed to appeal to the representatives of the Cortes, many of whom were nobles seeking to safeguard their landed inheritances. Not much is known about the number of mayorazgos established or the dates these entails were originally constituted, but it appears that hundreds, possibly thousands, were created in the course of the sixteenth century as more and more families, noble and plebian alike, sought to safeguard the integrity of their estates.

The Leyes de Toro stipulated that a mayorazgo could not include more than one-third plus one-fifth of a landed inheritance; the remainder, the bienes libres, in accordance with customary practices of partible inheritance, was to be divided equitably among the heirs, including [131] the titleholder of the mayorazgo. ⁽⁶⁾ But this provision proved to be a constant source of friction in many families because it ran contrary to an older legal tradition that guaranteed all heirs equal shares in an estate. The disputes engendered by this aspect of the mayorazgo were compounded by the idea that in every generation the mayorazgo should be enlarged by incorporating additional bienes libres from the estate. ⁽⁷⁾ It is impossible to say how many lawsuits such practices caused, but, as we have already seen, both the chancillería and the Royal Council frequently had to decide cases in which siblings, cousins, and other close relatives were squabbling over their inheritance rights.

Cerdan de Tallada was correct, therefore, when he recognized that the mayorazgo was a major occasion for lawsuits, but, once again, his analysis was incomplete. The laws that eased the restrictions concerning these entails were ultimately responsible for much of this litigation, but what Cerdan de Tallada omitted from his analysis was the incremental effects of this legislation across time. As more and more mayorazgos were created, the pool of disgruntled heirs probably increased, leading eventually to a rise in the number of lawsuits that concerned disputes over bienes libres, new additions to the mayorazgos, and so forth. In addition, many of the lawsuits that concerned mayorazgos were themselves the products of other disputes. Those who died intestate, as Gaspar Astete wrote in 1598, left behind only "lawsuits, troubles, and enmities." The same was true for those whose wills were poorly prepared: "Many of the lawsuits that occupy royal tribunals and chancillerías and enrich lawyers and scribes are those relating to testamentary clauses; because these were not prepared carefully and deliberately, they open the door to infinite law-suits, differences, and enmities between siblings." ⁽⁸⁾ Yet negligence in the preparation of wills is not enough to explain the recurrence of inheritance suits in the king's courts. In the Middle Ages, similar disputes frequently led to fighting and feud. In contrast, these later cases were the result of a new willingness on the part of the nobility [132] to settle these and other disputes before a judge. The growth of a strong monarchy unwilling to tolerate feud was one reason for this increased litigation; the spread of education among the nobility was another. But whatever the precise cause, the liberalization of the rules concerning mayorazgos was only one among several reasons why more and more disputes over the entails were finally settled in courts.

Cerdan de Tallada's recognition of the censo as a major cause of litigation suffered from the same shortcomings as his analysis of the mayorazgo because once again he failed to make allowance for historical change. The censo, together with the letter of exchange, was introduced into Castile by Italian merchants and bankers in the course of the later Middle Ages. Censos existed in several varieties, of which the most common, the censo al quitar, was actually a short-term loan disguised as a sale to avoid prohibitions of usury. In such a contract, party A, seeking capital, surrendered title to a particular piece of property to party B, the censo holder, who agreed to pay him a certain amount. Party A, however, was guaranteed the use of the land for a fixed number of years, paying in exchange an annual sum fixed at 14 percent of the amount he originally received from party B. Also in wide use was the censo enfitéutico, a similar kind of contract but one in which title to the property in question was not transferred. In actuality, this kind of censo resembled a long-term mortgage loan and was used principally by prominent landowners seeking a means of paying for dowries and other large debts by installments across an extended period of time. It was also used by many as a means of raising the capital necessary to invest in new lands and government offices. ⁽⁹⁾

In the course of the sixteenth century, use of these and other types of censos spread quickly because they offered an easy means of acquiring credit as well as a relatively secure investment with a high rate of return. Censos, moreover, acquired a life of their own; they became objects of speculation in their own right and were constantly traded and retraded, much to the dismay of theologians, who considered them usurious instruments used by the rich to cheat the poor. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Despite such condemnations, the number of financial transactions that involved censos multiplied even though the laws that governed them remained ill-defined, giving rise to countless disputes over the payment of these annuities, the responsibilities of those who held them, and the circumstances under which they could be sold, inherited, or transferred. This combination of greater volume and uncertain regulations also helps to explain why more and more disputes concerning censos eventually came into court. ⁽¹¹⁾ In fact, because of their wide usage, censos were probably second only to the failure to pay ordinarily contracted debts as the source of lawsuits during the Habsburg epoch.

Cerdan de Tallada, therefore, was correct when he singled out such "legal" factors as the censo and mayorazgo as important reasons why lawsuits were increasing, but in neither case did his analysis allow for such "nonlegal" factors as the economic, social, and political changes that were the root cause of Castile's many lawsuits. Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, Castile entered a prolonged period of demographic growth and economic expansion. In effect, the economy, aided by the growth of population, rapid expansion in wool exports to northern Europe, and exploration in the south Atlantic, was in the midst of a dramatic transformation. Discoveries in the New World coupled with Habsburg political involvement in Europe and the Mediterranean to help integrate Castile's backward, pastoral economy into the nascent "world economy" of the day. Although the long-term development of domestic industry was crippled by a combination of high taxes, shortage of capital, and importation of cheaper, foreign-made goods, demand for Castilian raw materials, especially oil, wine, and wool, was increasing on both sides of the Atlantic at a time when population growth was creating new and increasingly important urban markets at home. Growing demand for agricultural products appears to have increased competition for valuable land which was the investment par excellence. Apparently, land prices were skyrocketing, as indicated by the sale of common lands such as the municipally owned tierras valdías to private individuals . Unfortunately, [134] Castile's land market in the sixteenth century has not yet been adequately studied, but it appears that the rise in land values was accompanied by the transfer of property on a massive scale. Nobles, letrados, merchants, and officeholders were the principal buyers, but many wealthy peasants also acquired new lands. The sellers, in addition to the crown, were principally lesser peasants who joined the expanding ranks of the impoverished jornalero class. ⁽¹²⁾

It thus appears that Castile's land market was flourishing at a time when the massive injection of New World silver was exacerbating a price rise already set into motion by population growth. The economy adjusted to these changing conditions by various means, including wage hikes for laborers, a shift from long-term to short-term rental agreements, a search for new sources of credit such as the censo, and, finally, the mayorazgo as a means of protecting landed inheritances and estates.

If considered independently, each of these developments -- population growth, the price rise, the booming land market, and Castile's increasingly active participation in an increasingly sophisticated international economy -- would have been sufficient to create disputes that might eventually have repercussions in the courts of law and particularly royal courts, which were the only legal institutions capable of resolving disputes on a national scale. Growth fostered litigation by increasing the number of commercial and financial transactions and, therefore, the number of potential lawsuits; it increased the stakes involved in these transactions, making it worthwhile to take an opponent to court; and it also enlarged the pool of wealthy, propertied individuals who were both willing and able to pay the cost of a protracted lawsuit. Furthermore, by promoting long-distance trade, growth was instrumental in helping to unify Castile's traditionally separate, predominantly regional economies into a single national market that revolved around the trade fairs of Old Castile. Commerce on this scale quickly gave rise to disputes so complex that they were beyond the capacity of existing guild courts and other local tribunals [135] to resolve. The personal, face-to-face arbitration procedures required by these tribunals were unsuited to this growing economy, whereas a lawsuit in one of the king's courts provided a means through which merchants resident in widely separated parts of the kingdom or even abroad could begin to settle their disputes. The increased geographical mobility occasioned by growth in the economy and changes in landownership worked in a similar fashion. Just as widows looked to the courts for protection, individuals lacking in strong lineage ties, newly arrived in one of Castile's cities probably did so as well. Finally, growth in the economy was ultimately responsible for altering the makeup of Castile's population. Recent scholarship has demonstrated a growing disparity between rich and poor in the villages; ⁽¹³⁾ in the towns, a new diversity of guilds, occupations, and regional origins was clearly in evidence. ⁽¹⁴⁾ Life, in short, was becoming more complex and was accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of disputes that could not be adequately resolved by resort to informal methods of conciliation and compromise. Under these circumstances, litigation, despite its many shortcomings, rapidly became an effective and convenient means of protecting one's interests and furthering one's ends.

Consideration of long-term changes in Castile's economy is therefore essential if the analysis of litigation provided by Cerdan de Tallada is to make any sense. He was on the right track when he noted that "poorly marked and surveyed boundaries" were an important cause of lawsuits. Traditionally, the territorial limits of villages were defined according to hallowed, customary markers: a ditch, a stream, a grove of trees, a pile of rocks, many of which were open to dispute. Indeed, the lack of sharp, precise boundaries might explain why disputes over outlying districts (terminos) represented an important share of the lawsuits that came to the chancillería, ⁽¹⁵⁾ but the underlying reason, at least in the sixteenth century, was the rising value of the land in question. As population grew and outlying fields were cultivated, competition for land increased. Lawsuits over ownership, [136] traditional grazing rights, passageways, and the like were soon to erupt. Similarly, as new markets for wool, meat, oil, charcoal, and other village products developed, distant meadows, scrub, timberlands, and mountainous areas that were previously uneconomical and underutilized became increasingly valuable. Since in most cases title to these marginal lands had never been established, the rifts and squabbles that emerged among villages claiming possession increasingly found their way into court.

I am suggesting, in short, that the changes set into motion by economic expansion and population growth were the fundamental cause of much of the increase in litigation recorded in Castile's courts. The lawsuits in the Montes of Toledo are a case in point since many of them appear to have been directly related to the conflicts and tensions resulting from growth in these small, rural communities. As competition for the relatively inelastic natural resources of the region intensified, disputes in and among villages increased, and local residents probably found that such traditional methods of dispute settlement as recourse to a local churchman or village seigneur for arbitration no longer sufficed. Custom in this respect appears to have been unable to resolve the conflicts of peasants who were rapidly being drawn into the orbit of urban life. The response varied: some used violence, picking fights and shouting insults; others used the Inquisition as their means of revenge, accusing their enemies of blasphemies, "scandalous words," and other practices likely to attract the attention of the Holy Office; but still more, particularly in the second half of the century when the Inquisition all but abandoned its activities in rural areas, found that a lawsuit was an excellent means of settling scores, exacting revenge, and getting what one had hoped to achieve through other, more amicable means. ⁽¹⁶⁾ Peasants in England and France experienced tensions similar to those of the Montes, and in these countries the evidence also suggests that litigation in the sixteenth century was on the rise. Castile, therefore, was not alone in its increasing reliance [137] upon the lawsuit as a means of resolving the disputes that change in the countryside had engendered. ⁽¹⁷⁾

On the basis of these examples, it is tempting to suggest that Castile's litigiousness in the sixteenth century was primarily a response to the tensions precipitated by economic and demographic growth. But studies of other courts in other countries have demonstrated that whereas economic and social change are important determinants of lawsuits, they are not the only variable affecting rates of litigation. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Going to court involves a series of decisions and generally occurs only after other methods of reconciliation, arbitration, and compromise have failed. The impact of economic and social changes upon litigation is therefore muted, having first been filtered through what might be called a society's legal culture, a term that embraces attitudes toward law, lawyers, and judges as well as the composition, structure, and performance of the legal system itself. Cerdan de Tallada, for example, hinted at the existence of this judicial culture when he postulated that, in addition to purely legal and nonlegal factors, "false witness," "bad judges," and the "improper administration of justice" were also causes of lawsuits, presumably because they were sources of confusion and dispute. Tallada's reasoning is once again suspect because, even if these myths or prejudices worked to keep potential litigants out of court, popular attitudes toward magistrates were actually instrumental in promoting lawsuits. The willingness of magistrates, for example, to consider certain kinds of cases while rejecting others is particularly important in this regard, and in the [138] sixteenth century this was best expressed in the readiness of the chancillería of Valladolid to hear cases initiated by villages against their lords. The peasants did not always win, but the chance of victory or at least of forestalling the attempts of seigneurs to augment their powers or to impose new taxes may have encouraged other villages to initiate this kind of lawsuit. ⁽¹⁹⁾ In other words, the degree to which litigants believe a court is sympathetic to their cause has a direct bearing upon the overall volume of litigation as well as the incidence of appeals from lower to higher jurisdictions.

Equally important in explaining appeals is the so-called reversal rate. If a higher court continually affirmed lower court decisions, it seems likely that the determination of losing parties, particularly those with limited financial resources, to carry their case to a higher court might be undermined. As Table 2 indicated, however, the chancillería of Valladolid amended or reversed one-third of the decisions in cases that came to it on appeal. These figures compare favorably with those of eighteenth-century bailliage courts in France as well as with modern legal systems for which comparable statistics exist. ⁽²⁰⁾ A one in three chance of obtaining a favorable judgment may have been sufficient to encourage litigants to continue their cases and file suit in an upper court. The chancillería's independence from local courts and other influences was therefore instrumental in persuading persons of humble background to appeal to royal justice, and their doing so helped to enlarge even further the number of individuals willing to bring their grievances to court.

Another aspect of Castile's legal culture and one that also affected litigation was self-interest on the part of its legal officials. We have already seen how the courts of this epoch resembled interest groups, actively soliciting business whenever they could. The lawyers might be viewed in a similar light. It is an open question, of course, whether litigation breeds lawyers or lawyers litigation. The rapid growth in the size and sophistication of the legal profession was certainly a response to increased demand and opportunities for lawyers, but there are [139] also indications that by the end of the century some lawyers, as the advocates of Seville hinted in their letter to Philip II, were under-employed. ⁽²¹⁾ It is doubtful, however, that lawyers responded to this situation by actively drumming up new clients and fomenting legal disputes even though one solicitor in 1629 was specifically charged with posing as an advocate and then "going about all of the towns and villages initiating lawsuits one against the other, and of setting some vecinos against others." ⁽²²⁾ Instead, lawyers found employment as estate agents and tax collectors; other emigrated to the New World; and advocates in particular profited from the rising cost of litigation by serving as arbitrators for those who wished to settle their disputes out of court. ⁽²³⁾

The increase in the number of lawyers, therefore, does not seem to have been a primary cause of the increase in the number of lawsuits recorded in Castile's courts, but it would be wrong to push this argument so far as to suggest that lawyers had nothing to do with litigation. The social and economic changes that growth had engendered were gradually but relentlessly altering the fabric of Castilian life, helping to foment conflicts and disputes which many contemporaries were unable to understand. As a legal expert, part of a lawyer's job is to help laymen mediate and resolve conflicts of precisely this sort, but in doing so, lawyers also create the conditions upon which their livelihood depends. In response to conflict they generate new rules and regulations that in turn become additional sources of contention and disputes of a kind that lawyers and courts claim a special authority to resolve. In the process, legal conflicts multiply, opportunities for arbitration and adjudication arise, and lawyers find employment. Perhaps the best example of this process at work involves notaries, another of the junior branches of Castile's legal profession. Organized into "colleges" in 1502, the profession flourished in the sixteenth century owing to the spread of written contracts and other legal documents they themselves helped introduce. Traditionally, many agreements among merchants, peasants, itinerant tradesmen, building workers, and many artisans were verbal, sealed with a handshake [140] and a shared drink of wine. ⁽²⁴⁾ But although evidence suggests that this customary way of doing business survived into later centuries, it was gradually displaced by sophisticated contracts which, owing to the proliferation of printed formularies, even a humble village escribano could prepare. ⁽²⁵⁾ Admittedly, Castile's increasingly complex economy required such contracts, but they might not have proliferated so rapidly were it not for the efforts of notaries to augment their own importance, incomes, and prestige. Advocates and attorneys worked in much the same way. As their numbers grew, more and more Castilians learned about courts, litigation, and the advantages of having lawyers draw up a will, hammer out marriage arrangements, and perform other essential tasks. But, meanwhile, the lawyers, eager to improve their own public standing, did not stand idly by. Legalism was their creed, the gospel they were prepared to spread. Not surprisingly, litigation followed in their wake. Quevedo was not too far from the truth when he described lawyers as the architects of countless discords and disputes. ⁽²⁶⁾ The tensions underlying these disputes may have occurred anyway, but in this case the architects were able to formulate the disputes in such a way as to draw them into a legal forum.

But lawyers were not the only ones contributing to litigation. Equally culpable were the kingdom's universities. Since their inception in the thirteenth century, these institutions monopolized the teaching of law and the granting of certificates of legal knowledge. It is difficult to separate the history of legal education in Castile from that of its universities even though, beginning in the sixteenth century, new extracurricular methods of legal learning gradually emerged. Even so, the university remained at the center of legal learning and provided a home for some of Castile's best legal minds.

The first university to teach law in Spain was Salamanca. By the mid-thirteenth century it had two law faculties, one to teach Roman law, the other canon law, and the existence of both was recognized [141] in the Siete Partidas. ⁽²⁷⁾ Valladolid, the kingdom's second university (founded in 1243) also had two legal faculties, although, despite royal encouragement, neither of these institutions had much of a reputation until the end of the fifteenth century. Consequently, most students seriously interested in jurisprudence went abroad, either to southern France, to study in Toulouse, Montpellier, or Avignon, or to Bologna, where the creation of the Spanish College in 1369 by Cardinal Gil de Albornoz provided both lodgings and financial support. ⁽²⁸⁾

Bologna was to remain a favorite destination among law students from Spain until the early sixteenth century, and the strength and persistence of this tradition helps to explain why Castilian jurisprudence in the Renaissance was modeled principally upon the "Bolognese school" of Bartholus, Baldus, and Joannes Andreas. ⁽²⁹⁾ Castilian legal scholarship throughout this period associated itself closely with the mos italicus docendi, the traditional Italian method of teaching law. This meant that it was largely ahistorical in its approach to law, had little use for philosophical inquiry, and considered that ideally jurists should devote themselves to explaining apparent contradictions in the corpus of Roman law through the use of the dialectic and scholastic argument. ⁽³⁰⁾ The mos gallicus, another school of legal thinking, pioneered by Andrea Alciato and Jacques Cujas in the early sixteenth century, which imparted a new, more critical spirit to the study of law, was not unknown in Spain, but the kingdom's famous legal scholars were those who championed the traditional approach. ⁽³¹⁾ The most renowned of these jurists were actually theologians trained in the law who attempted to reconcile both human and natural law with the fundamental tenets of the Catholic theology. Francisco de Vitoria (1480-1546) is the most famous of these jurist-theologians, although [142] he is best known to later generations of legal scholars for his work in international law and the law of nations. ⁽³²⁾ Other members of this legal "school" included Vitoria's disciple Domingo de Soto (1494-1570), Antonio Gómez (b. 1501), and Francisco Suárez (1548-1617). Another Castilian famous throughout Europe for his juridical scholarship was Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva (1523-77), who was known as the "Spanish Bartholus." His Opera omnia (Salamanca, 1572) was reprinted on several occasions in Venice and Lyons. Yet another jurist with an international reputation was Antonio Agustín (1517-86). Having studied with Alciato when he was in Bologna, Agustín was probably the most humanistic of the Castilian jurists during the sixteenth century. Jacques Cujas, the noted French jurist, reportedly attested that Agustín was "a man never praised enough" (vir numquam laudatus satis). ⁽³³⁾

As in the Middle Ages, the principal centers for this brand of legal scholarship were Salamanca and Valladolid. These universities attracted students from all parts of the peninsula, sending matriculations in the law faculties to record heights. By the 1580s, law students at Salamanca numbered just over thirty-eight hundred, a figure that represented well over half of the total number of students registered at the university. The law faculties at Valladolid were somewhat smaller, but by the end of the century students at this university accounted for three-fourths of its total enrollment. Graduates of the law faculties were also numerous. Salamanca, for example, awarded as many as four hundred bachelors' degrees each year, Valladolid about one-half that number. In comparison, the advanced law degrees of licentiate and doctor were scarce commodities; Salamanca conferred no more than twenty per year. ⁽³⁴⁾

These were figures which no other Castilian (let alone European) university in the sixteenth century could match, but law was equally popular among the students at most of Castile's other universities. Granada, Santiago de Compostela, and Seville were also inundated by law students, and even the University of Alcalá de Henares, an institution opened in 1508 with the express purpose of promoting studies in the liberal arts and theology, was gradually given over to the study of the law. Writing in 1591, Lic. Francisco de Barrioneuvo admitted that more than five hundred students crowded into one of Alcalá's colleges, "where they read civil law because the teaching of this subject is prohibited in the 'Schools.'" ⁽³⁵⁾

The reason for the popularity of legal studies during this epoch is not very well known. Contemporaries explained it in terms of the numerous careers -- premios or prizes as they were called -- open to students with a law degree. Both the Spanish monarchy and the Spanish church in the sixteenth century were expanding rapidly, and to fill new places both preferred letrados with an advanced law degree. In addition, jobs for letrados were available in the households of important noblemen and in the service of colleges, hospitals, municipalities, and other institutions in need of legal advice. The choicest careers were those in the royal judiciary and the upper echelons of the church, but letrados working independently as lawyers could also hope to gain substantial rewards. Jobs for law graduates could also be found at the universities, each of which, owing to the crush of students, established new teaching positions in both of the law faculties. ⁽³⁶⁾

Job opportunities alone, however, cannot fully account for the rush of students into the law faculties. In the first place, it is very unlikely that all of the students studying law were professionally oriented. Unlike today's law schools, which are essentially guild schools providing highly specialized vocational training, law faculties in the sixteenth century served a much wider and more diversified clientele. Law was a subject equivalent with training in civics, moral philosophy, and politics. In the civil law faculty, teaching nominally focused on Roman law, but time was also given to instruction in natural law, which was believed to help students distinguish between good and evil, justice and injustice. One enthusiastic educator, Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza, stated bluntly that the study of law "ennobled the [144] soul." ⁽³⁷⁾ Nor were his views unique. Most educators of the period believed that education's primary purpose was to prepare students for the "vita activa e civile," and in this context law was considered as the culmination of preliminary training in Latin, the classics, rhetoric, and philosophy. Law, moreover, was thought to provide students with knowledge of the peaceful, ordered world of Imperial Rome which so many thinkers and statesmen in the sixteenth century sought to construct anew in the guise of the Monarchia Christiana. As such, law was described as "the soul of the Republic, the sole guarantee of justice, order, and peace." ⁽³⁸⁾

This broad conception of legal training explains why so many of Castile's nobility were trained in the law. The tutor who accompanied don Gaspar de Guzmán, the future count-duke of Olivares, to Salamanca in 1601 was specifically instructed by the young student's father that "it will be necessary for don Gaspar to memorize all of the rules of canon and civil law and to understand them as quickly as possible since such knowledge will be extremely useful." ⁽³⁹⁾ Most of the other sons of the titled nobility who attended universities also studied the law, but they did so, not in preparation for a legal career, but because exposure to this subject was thought to be necessary for seigneurs and custodians of large, landed estates. The subject was deemed essential to a young gentleman's training, and this attitude, together with the careers available for students holding a law degree, was chiefly responsible for the thousands of young men (no women, to my knowledge, matriculated at a Spanish university until the nineteenth century) who elected to study the law.

The importance of this new interest in legal study cannot be underestimated. Knowledge of law, once the exclusive prerogative of jurists, lawyers, and magistrates, spread rapidly, especially among the upper and middle classes of Castilian society. It can be estimated, for example, that approximately one-quarter to one-third of Castile's hidalgos late in the sixteenth century had attended university, and of these the vast majority studied law. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ It follows that the gulf that today separates [145] the world of law from that of ordinary, educated people did not exist. An educated Castilian was one who, if not expert in, was at least well acquainted with law, procedure, and legal reasoning. Such familiarity also helps to explain why so many Castilians in the sixteenth century were prepared to litigate. In this respect, it might not be unfair to state that if litigation bred the study of law, so did the study of law breed litigation.

At the core of Castile's legal curriculum was the study of canon and civil law. To earn a degree, a student normally had to matriculate in the two faculties. Instruction in the former concentrated upon the Decretals, Clementines, and other collections of church canons, decrees, and epistolae together with the works of Joannes Andreas, the famed fourteenth-century Bolognese canonist. The civil law faculty was devoted wholly to Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis and the works of the medieval glossators who had commented upon it. In both faculties the lecture system prevailed; the instructor explicated selected portions of a text; the students, known as oyentes or auditors, either listened and memorized what was being said or, as was increasingly common, took notes. A bachelor's degree could be earned after five years of study, a licentiate after another two. A doctorate was also granted, but was primarily an honorary degree.

An obvious gap in this curriculum was instruction in the laws of Castile. "National" law, which included the fueros, the Siete Partidas, the Nueva Recopilación, and other collections of royal law, was not officially taught until the middle of the eighteenth century and then only with considerable reluctance on the part of the universities. ⁽⁴¹⁾ Opposition to it was rooted in the jurists' conception of Roman law as distinctly superior to Castilian law, and perhaps the only scholar to think otherwise was Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza, who, writing in 1612, argued that customary law should be accorded an honored place in the legal curriculum. ⁽⁴²⁾

But the universities' reluctance to teach national law was also linked to the law professors' view of themselves as jurisconsults and legal philosophers. These scholars sought to separate themselves, socially and intellectually, from advocates and attorneys, whose interest in law was thought to be only [146]pecuniary. The teaching of national law raised the specter of a vocationally oriented curriculum which law faculty believed would eventually compromise their own scholarly and intellectual approach.

The refusal of the universities to establish a chair in national law does not mean that law graduates were totally ill-prepared to understand the laws and procedures of Castile's courts. Castilian procedural law was largely adopted from both Roman and canonical usage, and courts were allowed recourse to Roman law when it alone could provide the basis for a reasoned judgment.⁽⁴³⁾ Accordingly, most of the briefs submitted by Castile's advocates were worded in the language of Roman law, and even in the eighteenth century, when Roman law was under sharp attack from those who favored the exclusive usage of national law, advocates generally relied more on Roman than national law to prepare their briefs. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ The ancient law in this respect was a living law that lawyers and laymen alike could put to immediate, practical use.

National law, moreover, was the subject of considerable study in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, much of it sponsored by a monarchy interested in new and definitive editions of essential texts. A "national" school of learned jurists, similar to that pioneered in sixteenth-century France by Jacques Cujas, gradually emerged. Principally lawyers and magistrates, rather than university instructors, members of this "school" set about editing the corpus of royal law. One of the first was Alfonso Díaz de Montalvo, royal councillor and judge (1405-99), who prepared the Ordenanzas reales de Castilla, a work designed to bring the Siete Partidas up to date as well as a gloss of the Fuero Real. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ He was followed by Juan López de Palacios-Rubios (1450-1524), also a member of the Royal Council, who glossed the Leyes de Toro in addition to writing a number of important legal treatises, including one on family law, another on the rights of Indians in the New World. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Other members of this school included Miguel [147] de Cifuentes, ⁽⁴⁷⁾ Diego Pérez de Salamanca, ⁽⁴⁸⁾ Gregorio López Tovar (1496-1560), ⁽⁴⁹⁾ and Rodrigo Suárez, ⁽⁵⁰⁾ each of whom produced an edition or gloss of one of the major collections of royal law. ⁽⁵¹⁾

The aims of such scholarship varied. The clarification and explication of garbled texts was important. So, too, was the making of new law by applying general principles to new, specific transactions such as the censo, the mayorazgo, and the letter of exchange. Much of this work also concentrated upon demonstrating concordances between "national" law and the law of Rome in an effort to increase the former's reputation and prestige. ⁽⁵²⁾ But whatever their precise purpose, these works circulated widely and may have even been utilized as textbooks in "extraordinary" lectures at the universities that taught national law. Little is known about these classes, but apparently they were conducted on a regular basis at most institutions, often by advanced graduate students and occasionally by lawyers and judges in their spare time. Certainly the Siete Partidas were taught in this fashion at Salamanca, and a notebook kept by Antonio Vidal y Mendoza in the early seventeenth century attests that this law student regularly attended lectures by Lic. López entitled "Ad Leges Tauri" (On the Laws of Toro), a course essential for anyone interested in the nature of Castilian law. ⁽⁵³⁾

[148] But no matter how important the universities may have been for spreading knowledge of law and legal procedures, many more Castilians in the sixteenth century learned about these subjects by studying on their own. Available for this purpose was a host of legal hand-books, dictionaries, and formularies, written expressly for a broad, popular readership. Hugo de Celso, author of the best-selling Leyes de todos los reynos de Castilla (first edition, Valladolid, 1538), attested that he wrote his book for "the letrado as well as those . . . who, because of their ignorance of law, cannot obtain justice" (p.5v) . The intended audience of Gabriel Monterroso y Alvarado's Práctica criminal y civil (Valladolid, 1566) was only slightly different; his treatise "was to instruct the officials of lower courts, especially those in which the judges are not letrados nor skilled in the style and practice of civil and criminal cases and are generally ignorant of law" (p.2v).

Most of the authors of these popular handbooks were prácticos, men whose knowledge of law and procedure was derived principally from experience gained in the courts. The only jurist to produce such a work was Alfonso Díaz de Montalvo, whose Reportorium sive tabula notabilium questionium (Seville, 1477) was one of the first of these handbooks to appear. Hugo de Celso was an advocate of Burgundian origin who had edited the customary laws of his native duchy before emigrating to Castile;⁽⁵⁴⁾ Monterroso y Alvarado was a scribe in the chancillería of Valladolid; and Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla was a corregidor when he wrote his famous Política para corregidores. ⁽⁵⁵⁾

The principal difference between the prácticos and the jurisconsults was that the former, in keeping with the practice of Castile's courts, wrote not in Latin but in the vernacular. ⁽⁵⁶⁾ Furthermore, their hand books pointedly lacked the heavy scholarly apparatus and lengthy [149] marginal citations characteristic of the jurisconsults. Celso's work, for example, written in Castilian, was neatly arranged like a dictionary in A, B, C order and its clear, uncluttered text provided ready reference to a host of legal terms, definitions, and procedures, along with the corpus of Castilian law. Reprinted at least five times, Celso's Reportorio remained the standard work on Castilian law until the seventeenth century, when it was supplanted by Alfonso de Villadiego's Instrucción política and práctica judicial (Valladolid, 1612). Villadiego, an advocate from Toledo, was quickly overshadowed by Juan de Hevia Bolaños, a scribe attached to the royal audiencia of Peru. His book, entitled Curia philipica, was a massive guide to Castilian law and judicial practice. Originally published (in Castilian) in Lima in 1602, a second edition, printed in Valladolid, appeared three years later, and it rapidly became the definitive book on Castilian procedural law. Subsequently reprinted no less than thirty-four times, it earned for its author the title of "oracle of practice." ⁽⁵⁷⁾

The success of the prácticos in selling their handbooks is witness to Castile's growing interest in law and legal procedures. The prácticos, of course, benefited directly from the emergence of a reading public able to digest and utilize the information their handbooks contained. Studies on Castilian literacy during this epoch are few, but it is certain that the hundreds of schools and colegios established during the century brought reading skills to at least 20 percent of the male population, possibly more. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ Clearly, all of the clergy and the nobility could read, along with merchants, professionals, officeholders, shop-keepers, most artisans, and a substantial proportion of the kingdom's labradores. And since there is evidence to suggest that litigation and literacy went hand in hand, the prácticos' audience was precisely those individuals who could benefit directly from their books. Yet thousands of illiterate Castilians, simply by listening to others read aloud -- a common practice in semiliterate societies -- also learned about what the prácticos wrote. The illiterate, of course, [150] learned about litigation by watching and hearing about the experience of others. In this sense, the law court, which was centrally placed in most towns and villages, served as both a school and a theater, helping to instruct the illiterate as to what litigation entailed.

Castile, therefore, although not a particularly literate society, was nevertheless well acquainted with the techniques and procedures litigation entailed. Its litigiousness may have been rooted in the conflicts and tensions arising from a prolonged period of demographic growth and economic expansion, but it should also be recognized that Castile's prácticos, together with its universities, provided much of the knowledge that enabled litigiousness to spread. The crucial link here is that the prácticos and universities had also contributed to the formalization of Castilian law and procedure. If the style of the courts had remained informal and legal procedures primarily oral and oriented more toward the arbitration than the adjudication of disputes, the rise in litigation would probably have occurred without a corresponding rise in the rate of literacy and an increase in the number of lawyers. Only because a formal legal style was entrenched in the courts did the rise in litigation depend upon the expansion of legal education, the publications of the prácticos, and the spread of knowledge about law and legal procedure. And it was in this respect that Castile's legal culture was inextricably connected to the rise in litigation which Cerdan de Tallada had attempted to explain.

The final component of Castile's legal culture and one that was also instrumental in promoting litigation in the sixteenth century was the Habsburg monarchy, the institution chiefly responsible for the administration and enforcement of law. Cerdan de Tallada recognized the importance of the monarchy in this respect when he wrote that "the improper administration of justice" was one reason why "lawsuits were multiplying," but his interpretation of the relationship of political power to litigation was wrong. Litigation is more of a response [151] to strong than to weak government, and it especially reflects a regime committed to what is commonly known as a rule of law. When government is weak, power divided, and the enforcement of judicial decisions haphazard, litigation is likely to diminish in relation to other modes of dispute settlement, including personal reconciliation, out-of-court arbitration, and feud. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ The interregnum lasting from the death of Queen Isabella in 1504 to the victory of Charles V over the Comunero rebels in 1521 was an epoch of precisely this sort. After the defeat of the rebels, however, the new king quickly set about restoring royal authority, devoting special attention to the development of strong legal institutions in an attempt to implement an effective rule of law.

The underlying aim of Charles's policy was to promote royal absolutism and, specifically, to increase the power of royal tribunals vis á vis those of the municipalities, the nobility, and the church. But Charles, schooled in the teachings of Erasmus, also believed that power had to be tempered with justice, the highest of all temporal virtues and one without which no Christian monarch in the sixteenth century could presume to rule. This justice was that of natural law, and, in Castile, was popularly defined as "not hurting anyone, rendering unto each what is rightfully his, rewarding good, punishing evil, and guarding the faith." ⁽⁶⁰⁾ Justice also implied peace, whereas its opposite, injustice, the equivalent of crime, banditry, feud, contempt of authority, and the abuse of office, implied chaos or the conditions under which an individual's "natural" rights could not be guaranteed. So defined, justice in the sixteenth century was a scarce commodity indeed, but first Charles and later Philip II, in accordance with the traditional Castilian monarch as the giver of laws and guardian of justice, worked hard to become a rey justiciero in more than name alone.

When Charles first visited his Castilian realms in 1518, he found his kingdom in disarray. The era since the death of Isabella in 1504 [152] had been one of lawlessness and feud, much of it precipitated by nobles seeking to exploit the weakness of the monarchy during the regencies of Ferdinand and Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros to their own advantage. Royal jurisdictions had been usurped by powerful nobles, and many municipalities suffered from similar losses, but in the absence of strong royal authority little could be done to bring the guilty to justice. Many of the crown's corregidores were in the pay of wealthy nobles, and the two chancillerías had fallen prey to private interests as well. Even the Royal Council lost much of its creditability and power because of the close ties of its members with the landed aristocracy. ⁽⁶¹⁾

In protest, the cities represented in the Cortes complained about the lack of justicia, urging the new monarch to set matters right. But when Charles first arrived -- young, ungainly, speaking no Castilian, and surrounded by Flemish advisers with little feeling or concern for Castile's domestic troubles -- nothing was done. Matters finally grew to a head at the Cortes of the following year. The cities pressed their cause, but Charles, interested only in money and hurried for time, did not listen, and even before his ship embarked from La Coruña in the spring of 1520, most of the cities of the central meseta, including Toledo, Segovia, and Valladolid, were openly in revolt. By refusing to respond to the grievances presented in the Cortes, Charles, in Castilian eyes, had ignored his responsibility to provide justicia. The Capítulos de Tordesillas, a series of reform proposals subsequently compiled by the leaders of this revolt, made this point clear: by failing to correct the abuses that the Cortes had previously outlined, Charles had failed as a rey justiciero. ⁽⁶²⁾

That the monarchy finally defeated the Comunero revolt with the help of Castile's aristocracy at the battle of Villalar in April 1521 is a [153] well-known fact, but the accounts of this rebellion often omit mention of how Charles hastened to meet many of the rebels' central demands . By the early 1520s, Charles himself recognized the importance of Castile's resources, both human and financial, to the success of his European ventures; consequently, he moved quickly to pacify his troubled realm. Save for the execution of the revolt's leaders, about one hundred in total, treatment of the rebels was extremely conciliatory. ⁽⁶³⁾ And at the Cortes of 1523, a meeting pointedly held in the Comunero stronghold of Valladolid, Charles listened to petitions that differed little in substance from the Capítulos de Tordesillas . The Comuneros had insisted that Charles reside in Castile; the Cortes asked the same, ⁽⁶⁴⁾ and it is probably no coincidence that, to avoid adding fuel to the revolt's still smoldering ashes, Charles remained in the kingdom from 1522 to 1529, the longest he ever remained continuously in any one of his many realms. Similarly, the Comuneros had requested that Charles remove his Flemish advisers from Castillan posts; again the Cortes echoed this demand, and the emperor responded by "castilianizing" his governments appointing two of his Castilian advisers, Francisco de los Cobos and Juan de Tavera, archbishop of Seville, to key administrative positions. ⁽⁶⁵⁾

As for the administration of justice, Charles showed that he was also prepared to meet many of the rebels' demands. Beginning in 1523, the Royal Council and the chancillerías were subjected to rigorous visitations; new ministers were appointed to replace those about whom the Comuneros had complained; and an effort was made to lower the fees that officials attached to royal tribunals had been illegally collecting in violation of the official tariff. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ Charles also promised to begin work on a new collection of royal law because the previous one, the Ordenanzas de Castilla, was recognized by both [154] the Comuneros and the Cortes as woefully inadequate. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ Another rebel demand was an end to the cédulas de suspension which they believed unjustly benefited powerful noblemen at their expense. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ Charles agreed. In 1532, the duke of Béjar's request for certain favors by means of "la via de gratificación" in his lawsuit with the count of Miranda was flatly denied. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ Throughout his reign, Charles made it a point never to intervene personally in the administration of royal justice and instructed his ministers to do the same. In 1532, for example, the powerful members of the Council of State were told not to meddle in the judicial affairs of the Royal Council, and the Royal Council was reminded on several occasions not to meddle with cases that legitimately belonged to the chancillerías of Granada and Valladolid. ⁽⁷⁰⁾ Charles's official correspondence also reveals that he paid scrupulous attention to the appointment of royal magistrates. He personally reviewed each of the lists of potential candidates his subordinates had prepared, making every effort to appoint qualified letrados to important positions on the royal bench. ⁽⁷¹⁾ Finally, in keeping with demands from the Cortes for faster, more efficient royal justice, Charles increased the number of magistrates on the Royal Council from twelve to sixteen, added another chamber of four judges to each of the two chancillerías, and, as we have already seen, established new audiencias in the Canary Islands and in Seville. ⁽⁷²⁾

Charles was taking the role of rey justiciero seriously, and on each of the occasions when he left the government of Castile to others, he exhorted his representatives to do likewise. In 1528, when he was about to leave Spain, he stressed in a letter to the queen, Isabel of Portugal, the vital importance of "business pertaining to justice" and a year later wrote her, "I beg and implore you as much as I am able to take especial care in the administration of justice and to be certain that in business which relates to it, do not listen to anyone's petition [155] nor be overly respectful of anyone's personal wishes." ⁽⁷³⁾ Later instructions to Prince Philip expressed similar concerns: "Son, you must be very justiciero, and order every magistrate to administer justice honestly and to resist being influenced either by affection or by passion nor allow himself to be corrupted by gifts and other things, and, especially, you must not, for anything in the world, permit him to accept any bribe." ⁽⁷⁴⁾ He also stressed that Philip was not to intervene in the ordinary course of justice, regardless of the personalities and interests that might be involved.

These and other "instructions" left by the emperor may not necessarily reflect Charles's own views on justice since even the "secret" instructions he left for Philip in 1543 might have been prepared with the help of Cobos, Tavera, or some other adviser. ⁽⁷⁵⁾ But it is apparent that Charles had learned a lesson from the Comunero revolt. The emperor asked each of his various realms to support him, with men and with money, but the intensity of the revolt had seemingly taught him that he could not afford to violate his subjects' traditional privileges and rights. In the years following this rebellion, Charles usually promised more than he could deliver, yet his efforts to improve the administration of justice and to promote a rule of law within the kingdom were undoubtedly sincere since this was an effective means of legitimizing his right to rule in Castile. By promoting a rule of law, he not only provided a popular service but also improved his image as a just monarch entitled to absolute authority. Similar reasoning led Charles to promote a rule of law in his other realms, notably in Germany, where a major revision of criminal law carried out under his auspices is still known as La Carolina. ⁽⁷⁶⁾

Like his father, a man he idealized, Philip II adopted the role of rey justiciero. Educated in a humanist vein, the young prince was exposed to a wealth of "mirror of princes" literature that exhorted rulers that the administration of justice was a sacred task. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ Especially influential were the works of Fray Antonio de Guevara, one of Spain's [156] leading moralists, who wrote that a king, "the highest of earthly judges," had not only to be just in his own private life but also to make certain that the ministers actually in charge of justice were selected with care: "Judges must not be avaricious, for greed and justice are hardly compatible. Those whose task it is to rule or judge lawsuits must take care not to be corrupted by gifts." ⁽⁷⁸⁾ Such advice, coupled with that of the emperor, apparently convinced Philip that unless he took an active role in judicial appointments, he could never be certain the officials who dispensed royal justice were worthy of their posts. And it is with regard to his continuing efforts to create a well-honed, highly professional judiciary that Philip best demonstrates what he considered to be the task of a rey justiciero. ⁽⁷⁹⁾

Charles had delegated most of the day-to-day work of royal patronage to the president of the Royal Council, who, working together with a royal secretary, prepared the final short list of candidates or consulta de oficios from which the emperor made the final choice. ⁽⁸⁰⁾ Initially, Philip continued this practice, allowing the energetic Diego de Espinosa, president of the Royal Council from 1562 to 1572, to run the business of royal patronage almost as if the offices he distributed were his own. But Espinosa acquired a reputation for having distributed offices largely on the basis of personal favors and requests, and following his death, Philip instituted a number of reforms. The first sign of this policy was the appointment of Mateo Vázquez, Espinosa's former aide, as royal secretary. ⁽⁸¹⁾ Vázquez had in his possession the long lists of officeseekers that Espinosa had prepared, and Philip, in his famous Advertencias to the newly appointed president of the council, Diego de Covarrubias y Leyva, wrote that only experienced, qualified letrados were to be appointed to royal judgeships, warning Covarrubias to be wary of "pleas and intercessions" on behalf of particular individuals and to recommend candidates only on the basis of their "merits and qualities." ⁽⁸²⁾ Furthermore, Philip, with the habitual [157] mistrust characteristic of this "prudent" king, divided the responsibility of preselecting candidates suitable for the royal bench between Vázquez and the president of the Royal Council, a practice he continued until late in the 1580s when the aging Vázquez grew feeble. Philip then restructured an existing council, the Cámara de Castilla, filling it with the most senior and presumably the most trustworthy members of the Royal Council of Castile. The Cámara's only task was the distribution of patronage, and it was obliged to provide for the king an extremely detailed consulta de oficios designed to enable the monarch to make a reasoned choice. By dividing the responsibility for appointment among several experienced ministers, Philip further hoped to reduce opportunities for favoritism, a problem that he continued to regard as serious. ⁽⁸³⁾

Whether the cámara lived up to Philip's expectations is open for debate, but its creation is testimony of his determined efforts to appoint, as the sixteenth-century refrain put it, "men to offices, and not offices to men." Exactly how Philip interpreted this proverb is uncertain, but at one point Vázquez was instructed to strike from the lists of potential judges "those who have not studied in nor have graduated from recognized universities and those who with few letters and less understanding, intelligence, and prudence would dare, at great risk to their consciences, to use every available trick to have themselves considered for judicial posts." ⁽⁸⁴⁾ Catholic orthodoxy and purity of blood were also high on Philip's list, but experience in minor offices was equally important. A good illustration occurred in 1586, when the president of the Council of the Indies recommended to Philip a certain Dr. Madera, "son of the Dr. Madera, a good letrado, and a virtuous man," for the vacant office of fiscal in Seville's Casa de Contratación. Defending his recommendation, the president wrote: "It is always individuals with previous experience in the king's service who appear in the consultas, and these men deserve to be appointed, but positions as lowly as this one excite experienced men little. The reason why Your Majesty is today offered a choice of candidates is that each of the councillors has named his friend." Philip replied: "Dr. Madera can begin in other, lesser offices and after having given a good account of himself in them, he can pass to more [158] advanced positions as his age and experience allow." ⁽⁸⁵⁾ The king then appointed Dr. Busto de Bustamente, a letrado with experience in a number of temporal offices, to the vacant post.

Two years later, in his instructions to the newly formed Cámara de Castilla, Philip reiterated his dislike of naming inexperienced letrados to important positions on the royal chancillerías. In this case, his remarks were directed principally at graduates of the famed Colegios Mayores who were commonly recommended for these positions by their friends and fellow graduates in high places at court. Presidents of the Royal Council, especially those who were themselves graduates of these communities, had long favored other colegiales in their consultas, a situation about which Mateo Vázquez had previously warned Philip. ⁽⁸⁶⁾ Now Philip reminded the cámara that "to take men who have not served in lesser audiencias or those who have come directly from the colleges and to appoint them to the chancillería must be considered very thoroughly." ⁽⁸⁷⁾

Philip in this respect was primarily responsible for the creation within the royal judiciary of a cursus honorum that required each of the king's magistrates to prove his worth in a series of lesser appointments if he hoped to obtain more exalted positions at court. Early in the sixteenth century, talented university graduates had moved directly from the university to important judgeships in what the president of the Royal Council in 1526 described as a "sudden jump," ⁽⁸⁸⁾ but by 1588, owing chiefly to Philip's determination to have an experienced judiciary, no letrado reached an important council without having served first in a series of lesser posts. This cursus honorum survived Philip's death, eventually becoming a trademark of the Castilian bureaucracy and one that foreshadowed the larger, strictly graduated state bureaucracies of the nineteenth century.

Philip's zeal for judicial administration has yet another side. Convinced of man's inherent depravity and supposed natural tendency for sin and corruption, he did his best to keep a close watch on all his officials. He consequently ordered trusted court officials and churchmen [159] to "visit" his tribunals, both in Castile and the New World, on a regular basis to make certain that royal justice was being properly administered. ⁽⁸⁹⁾ Similar concerns led him at the end of his reign to establish a special corps of twenty jueces de reino whose job was to make certain that the residencias of the king's officials were carried out as prescribed by law; apparently, these reviews of a corregidor's record had lost much of their effectiveness and worth. ⁽⁹⁰⁾

Finally, Philip's efforts to become a rey justiciero can be demonstrated by his reluctance to interfere with the due process of law. Following his father's example, he refrained from issuing unnecessary cédulas de suspension, and he firmly believed that the king's justice ought not to be disrupted by special favors and grants. When the marquis of Viana petitioned for an extraordinary third hearing in a lawsuit he had with the town of Viana that was pending at the chancillería of Valladolid, Philip refused. In two previous judgments, the chancillería had ruled for the town, but the marquis persisted, taking his case directly to the king. But Philip responded to this request, as he had often done before, with the curt phrase: "no way" (no ha lugar). ⁽⁹¹⁾ And two years later, when the count of Olivares asked him to intervene in a certain lawsuit, Philip said no. ⁽⁹²⁾ When he did so, was he perhaps reminded of his father's secret instructions of 1543? Charles had told him that in matters of justice he should not grant special favors to títulos and grandees lest the king's justice be undermined.

In sum, Philip conceived of his role as rey justiciero as one of constant vigilance. Not only did he have to be circumspect in his own actions, thereby setting an example for others to follow, but he had also to be on the lookout for officials who might corrupt the justice he sought. Wary and suspicious of his subordinates, Philip shouldered much of the burden of law and administration himself. Of course, no ruler in the sixteenth century could ever realistically hope to control the workings of government alone, but for Philip justice was synonymous with monarchical absolutism. Only an active, vigilant ruler could guarantee his subjects a just and equitable rule of law, and the [160] prudent king's life, so much of which was spent at his desk in the Escorial, is evidence of Philip's attempts to realize this goal.
 

It has been suggested that the successful establishment of a rule of law depends primarily upon a shift in men's values. With reference to Tudor and Stuart England, Lawrence Stone has forcefully argued that the introduction of new, more lethal weapons such as the rapier and a variety of small arms gradually persuaded Englishmen in the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to seek nonviolent ways of resolving disputes. He also demonstrated that the spread of education and accompanying changes in manners and courtesy helped to "civilize" Englishmen's ways, thereby aiding the monarchy in its efforts to establish a rule of law. ⁽⁹³⁾

Some if not all of these preconditions also existed in Castile. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the aristocracy displayed growing interest in the "new learning" proposed by Italian humanists and pedagogues, and, indeed, the Mendoza family, as a recent study has demonstrated, was almost single-handedly responsible for the origins of the Castilian Renaissance. ⁽⁹⁴⁾ Private tutors, many imported from Italy, proliferated quickly among aristocratic households, teaching their young wards the rudiments of literacy, Latin, and the classics in a program that combined education in the liberal arts with training in courtly manners and the chivalric arts, much of it inspired by Baldassare Castiglione's Courtier, a best-seller in Spain. Later in the sixteenth century, newly established grammar schools and colleges, many administered by the Jesuits, taught a similar program to increasing numbers of children, including those of quite modest means.

Whether the spread of education in Castile had the same civilizing effect as it appears to have had in England is a question for which there is as yet no precise answer. Some Castilians were concerned that the rise of primary and secondary education, which opened the way to careers in government and the church, was primarily responsible for the decline in the kingdom's aptitude and readiness for war, but whether education had any influence on everyday manners remains unknown. ⁽⁹⁵⁾ Eduard Duance no doubt was only contributing to [161] the Black Legend when he described the "cruel, vicious nature" of Spaniards in 1590, ⁽⁹⁶⁾ and forty years later, James Wadsworth, another English visitor, commented on Spaniards' nature: "They hate duels, but often use private quarreling in the streets and are much given to sudden desperate stabbing, as also to venery and women." ⁽⁹⁷⁾ The accuracy of such descriptions, often derived from court gossip, may be questioned, but even if one assumes that education was a positive influence on Castilian manners, it is unlikely that a shift in values such as that described by Stone can fully account for Castile's acceptance of a rule of law.

Going to court in the sixteenth century was not a "civilized" act. For many contemporaries, it closely resembled feuding except that it took place in a new arena where the contestants armed themselves not with arquebuses and rapiers but with a brace of lawyers and a torrent of legal briefs. Litigation may have lacked some of the glamour and fanfare of a real battle, but a battle it remained, and skill, daring, and courage were required if one were to come out on top. The winner, moreover, had the satisfaction of seeing his opponent defeated, dishonored, and humiliated before the public's eye. The rule of law in this respect did not necessarily depend a priori upon any change in values or the adaptation of more "civilized" ways of life: the old military values engendered during centuries of fighting the Moors were well adapted to litigating in court.

Much more important for the spread of litigation than changes in values was the emergence of institutions capable of efficiently administering and enforcing the law. Contemporary criticism of the evils of the court systems, as I have already explained, was overstated and stood in the face of the thousands of ordinary Castilians, who, despite the high costs and obvious risks that litigation entailed, took their disputes and their grievances to court. Credit for the implementation of Castile's rule of law, therefore, must go to the Habsburg monarchy and especially to the vigilant efforts of both Charles V and Philip II to create a tough, independent judiciary composed of magistrates who thought of themselves as the champions of law and the [161] guardians of justice. If such a judiciary had been lacking, it is almost unthinkable that the rise in litigation recorded in the sixteenth century and explained in this chapter could have occurred. The following chapter will take a closer look at this judiciary and especially at the key institution -- the chancillería of Valladolid -- to explain why, in the course of the seventeenth century, the rule of law, so diligently constructed by the first Spanish Habsburgs, fell apart.

1. Gabriel Monterroso y Alvarado, Práctica criminal y civil (Valladolid, 1566), p. 2V.

2. Tomás Cerdan de Tallada, Verdadero gobierno desta monarchía (Valencia, 1585), chaps. 7-14.

3. The literature on this subject is vast and still growing. Some recent articles include Richard J. Abel, "A Comparative Theory of Dispute Institutions in Society," Law and Society Review 8 (Winter 1973):217-347; William L. F. Felstiner, "Influence of Social Organization On Dispute Processing," Law and Society Review 9 (Fall 1974):63-94; and Martin Shapiro, "Courts," in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., Handbook for Political Science (Reading, Mass., 1975), 5:327-31.

4. Many of Castile's commercial laws are listed in Book V of the Recopilación de las leyes de estos reinos (Alcalá de Henares, 1569). For treatises on the law of contracts, see above, note 103.

5. Bartolomé Clavero, Mayorazgo, propiedad feudal en Castilla (1369-1836) (Madrid, 1974), examines the history of the Castilian entail.

6. Laws 17-29 of the Laws of Toro deal generally with rules of inheritance, laws 40-46 specifically with mayorazgos. See CECA, 1:567-81.

7. See Helen Nader, "Noble Incomes in Sixteenth Century Castile: The Case of the Marquises of Mondéjar, 1480-1580," Economic History Review 30 (August 1977):414.

8. Gaspar Astete, Del gobierno de la familia y estado del matrimonio (Valladolid, 1598), pp. 582-83.

9. For a recent discussion of censos, see Carla Rahn Philips, Ciudad Real, 1500-1750 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 61-62. Also useful are Nader, "Noble Incomes," pp. 11-28, and Carmelo Viñas y Mey, El problema de la tierra en la España de los siglosXVI y XVII (Madrid, 1941), chap. 2. For contemporary views of censos, see Gregorio López Madera, Discurso sobre la justificación de los censos (Granada, nd.), a late sixteenth-century tract available in the BNM: Sección de Raros 218, no. 81 . Also useful is Francisco García, Tratado de todos los contratos (Valencia, 1583), pp. 63 ff.

10. See, for example, Tomás de Mercado, Tratos y contratos de mercaderes (Seville, 1569; Madrid, 1976), and his Suma de todos los tratos y contratos (Seville, 1571; Madrid, 1975).

11. See chapter 3, Table 5.

12. The land market in the sixteenth century has not yet been adequately studied. Sales of ecclesiastical and common lands are examined in Salvador de Moxó, "Las desamortizaciones eclesiásticas del siglo XVI," AHDE 31 (1961):327-61, and David E. Vassberg, "The Sale of Tierras Baldías in Sixteenth Century Castile," Journal of Modern History 47 (Dec. 1975): 629-54. See also Michael R. Weisser, Peasants of the Montes (Chicago, 1976), pp. 39-45. Philips, pp. 65-75, examines land sales in one part of New Castile but only for the seventeenth century.

13. See Weisser, Peasants, pp. 31-35.

14. The best urban study of Castilian cities in the sixteenth century remains Bartolomé Bennassar, Valladolid au siècle d'or (Paris, 1967). See also Francisco Morales Padrón, La ciudad del quinientos: Historia de Sevilla, vol. 3 (Seville, 1977), and Philips, passim.

15. See chapter 3, Table 5.

16. For a study of rural crime in Castile, see Michael R. Weisser, "Crime and Subsistence: The Peasants of the Tierra of Toledo, 1550-1700" (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1972). Weisser, however, limited his study to the papers of Toledo's fiel del juzgado. The criminal cases tried before the Santa Hermandad, a kind of rural police force organized by Ferdinand and Isabella, offer another look at criminality in the villages of New Castile. See AHN: Diversos, caja 81. For the activities of the Holy Office in New Castile, see Jean Pierre Dedieu, "Les Inquisiteurs de Tolede et la visite du district," Mélanges de la casa de Velázquez 13 (1977):235-56.

17. For litigation in England, see R. H. Tawney, "The Rise of the Gentry," in J.Winter, ed., History and Society: Essays by R. H. Tawney (London, 1978), esp. pp. 90, 101. In France, Henry II established a network of presidial courts to accommodate a rising number of lawsuits. See Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises, 13 (Paris, 1882-83), 249.

18. See, for example, Robert A. Kagan, Bliss Cartwright, Lawrence M. Friedman, and Stanton Wheeler, "The Business of State Supreme Courts, 1870-1970," Stanford Law Review 30 (Nov. 1977):121-56.

19. For an example of this kind of lawsuit, see Ildefonso Mozas Aquilló y Juan Bautista Vilar, "Un conflicto de señoríos en la España de siglo XVI: Pleito entre la villa de Alhama de Murcia y su señor el marques de los Velez (1548-1592), Estudís 6 (1977):27-70.

20. See John A. Dickinson, "L'activité judicaire d'après la procédure civile. La Bailliage de Failaise, 1668-1790," Revue d'histoire économique et sociale 84 (1976):145-68, and Kagan et al., passim.

21. See chapter 3 at note 45.

22. AHN: Cons., leg. 4426, no. 59.

23. Procedures for such "compromises" were part of Roman law and introduced into Castile in the Siete Partidas. In theory, anyone could serve as a juez arbitro, but in practice advocates were selected for this task.

24. See Weisser, Peasants, p. 83.

25. Such works include Bartolomé de Albornoz, Arte de las contratos (Valencia, 1573); Francisco García, Tratado de todos los contratos; Francisco González de Torneo, Práctica de escribanos (Madrid, 1600); Pedro Melgarejo, Compendio de contratos públicos (Madrid, 1674); and Monterroso y Alvarado, Práctica criminal y civil. This list is not meant to be exhaustive.

26. See the satirical work, "El sueño de la muerte," in Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas, Obras completas (Madrid, 1945), 1:244.

27. See Partida II, título 31.

28. See Jacques Verger, "Le recrutement géographique des universités françaises au début du XV^e siècle d'après les suppliques de 1403," Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire de l'école française de Rome 82 (1970):855-902. A recent history of the Spanish college is Berthe M. Marti, The Spanish College at Bologna (Philadelphia, 1966).

29. The best introduction to Spanish jurisprudence of this epoch is Alonso García Gallo, Manual de historia del derecho español (Madrid, 1971). See also Francisco Tomás y Valiente, El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta (Madrid, 1969), esp. chap. 2.

30. Differences between the mos italicus and the mos gallicus figure largely in Domenico Maffei, Gli inizi dell' umanésimo giuridico (Milan, 1956).

31. On the mos gallicus in Spain, see D. Eparraguirre, "Quelques aspects de l'enseignement dans les universités espagnoles à l'époque de la Renaissance," in Pedagogues et juristes (Paris, 1963), pp. 80-83.

32. J. A. Fernández-Santamaria, The State, War, and Peace: Political Thought in the Renaissance, 1516-1559 (Cambridge, 1977), provides an excellent introduction to the writings of Vitoria and the rest of Salamanca's jurists. See also Luciano Pereña Vicente, La Universidad de Salamanca, forja del pensamiento político español en el siglo XVI (Salamanca, 1954).

33. Cited in Diego Covarrubias y Leyva, Textos jurídico-políticos, ed. Manuel Fraga Iribarne (Madrid, 1957), p. xii. For a biography of Agustín, see Francisco de Zulueta, Don Antonio Agustín (Glasgow, 1939).

34. This paragraph is based upon Richard L. Kagan, Students and Society in Early Modern Spain (Baltimore, 1974), chap. 9.

35. AGS: CC, leg. 2724, Visita to the chancillería of Granada.

36. See Kagan, pp. 81-87.

37. Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza, Arte legal para estudiar la jurisprudencia (Salamanca, 1612), p. 24.

38. Ibid., p. 27.

39. BNM: 10486, "Instrucción que don Enrique de Guzmán embajador en Roma dío a Don Laurencio de Guzmán, Ayo de Don Gaspar de Guzmán su hijo quando le enbío a estudiar a Salamanca donde fue rector a 7 de enero de 1601," fol. 13.

40. Kagan, p. 199, and, more generally, Mariano Peset Reig and José Luís Peset Reig, La universidad española (siglos XVIII y XIX): Despotismo, ilustración y revolución liberal (Madrid, 1974).

41. Kagan, p. 42.

42. Bermúdez de Pedraza, pp. 62-70.

43. Ibid., p. 72.

44. See Mariano Peset Reig, "Derecho romano y derecho real en las universidades del siglo XVIII," AHDE 45 (1975):297-99.

45. See Fermin Caballero, Noticias de la vida, cargos, y escritos del Doctor don Alonso Díaz de Montalvo (Madrid, 1873), and Juan José de Montalvo, De la historia de Arevalo y sus sexmos (Valladolid, 1928), Appendix.

46. See Eloy Bullón y Fernández, El Doctor Palacios Rubios y sus obras (Madrid, 1927).

47. Cifuentes wrote a gloss of the Leyes de Toro, first published in Medina del Campo, 1546.

48. His best-known work is Commentaria in quatuor priores libros in ordinationum regni castellae (Salamanca, 1574), an edition and gloss of Montalvo's Ordenanzas Reales.

49. See José Martínez Cardos, Gregorio López, consejero de Indias, glosador de las partidas (Madrid, 1960).

50. An advocate practicing in the chancillería de Valladolid, his Allegationes et consilia (Salamanca, 1568) was published posthumously. It is an extended gloss of the Fuero Real.

51. Other members of this "school" include Alonso de Azevedo (d. 1598), notable for his Commentariorum juris civilis in Hispaniae regias constitutiones (Salamanca, 1583), a commentary of the Nueva Recopilación; Juan Gutiérrez y Vázquez, who produced several commentaries on royal as well as canon law; and Cristóbal de Paz, who wrote on the leyes de fuero and de estilo. See the volume Junsconsultos españoles, ed Real Academia de Jurisprudencia y Legislación (Madrid, 1911).

52. Characteristic of this genre is Sebastian Giménez, Concordantia utriusque juris civilis et canonici cum legibus partitarum glosematibusque Gregorii Lopez et plurimorum doctorum (Toledo, 1 596), a concordance that noted the inconsistencies of the Siete Partidas with reference to Roman and canon law.

53. BNM: 6465, "Materia de Leyes y Canones que yo Antonio Vidal escriví en Salamanca mi primero y segundo cursos que comencé el mes de octubre de 1607 y en el de1608 y en el de 1609 hasta pasquas," fols. 163-66v. In addition to these lectures, Vidal attended others on contracts, donations, inheritance law, real property, wills and testaments, and the Digest, a part of the Corpus Juris Civilis.

54. See Hugues Descousu, Les coustumes du pays de Bourgougne (Lyons, 1521).

55. For more on this influential jurist, see Francisco Tomás y Valiente, "Castillo de Bobadilla (c. 1547- c.1605), semblanza personal y professional de un juez del antiguo régimen," AHDE 45 (1975):159-238, and an earlier study by F. Elias de T. Spinola, Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla (Madrid, 1939).

56. Notable exceptions are Gonzalo Suárez de Paz, Praxis ecclesiastica et secularis (Salamanca, 1583), and Joannis Yañez Parladorii, Rerum quotidianarum (Valladolid, 1579). More representative of this genre are Francisco de Espinosa, "Sobre les leyes y los fueros de España" (BNM: 431); Jerónimo Fernández de Herrera Villaröel, Práctica criminal (Madrid, 1672); Pedro Molinos, Libro de la práctica judicaria del reyno de Aragón (Zaragoza, 1575); Francisco de la Pradilla Barnuevo, Suma de todas las leyes (Madrid, 1621); and Jaime Soler, Reportorio de todas las leyes de Castilla (Toledo, 1529).

57. See Guillermo Lohmann Villena, "En torno de Juan de Hevia Bolaños," AHDE 31 (1961):121-61, and Guttiérez Vera, "Sobre el libro Curia Filipica," Revista universitaria (Truxillo, Peru) 3 (1954):97-102.

58. Studies of Castilian literacy during this period are few. The estimate is my own; see Kagan, p. 23.

59. Sicily provides a good example of how centuries of weak and divided government in the interior of the island led gradually to the emergence of mafiosi, private warfare, and persistent feud. See Henner Hess, Mafia and Mafiosi: The Structure of Power (London, 1973), esp. pp. 14-17. A more theoretical approach toward the conditions that abet the emergence of feud is offered by Leopold Pospíšil, Anthropology of Law: A Comparative Theory (New York, 1971), p. 8.

60. Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla, Política para corregidores (Madrid, 1597), Libro II, cap. ii.

61. Detailed studies of this turbulent epoch in Castilian history are relatively few. See John H. Elliott, Imperial Spain (London, 1963), pp. 126-49, and J. H. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250-1516 (Oxford, 1978), 2:585-604, for two general accounts. Another slant is provided by Helen Nader, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350-1550 (New Brunswick, 1979), chap. 7. For a local study, see Stephen Haliczer, "Political Opposition and Collective Violence in Segovia, 1475-1520," Journal of Modern History, on-demand supplement, abstract in 48 (Dec. 1976).

62. The definitive account of this revolt is Joseph Pérez, La révolution des 'Comunidades' de Castille(1520-21) (Bordeaux, 1970), although José Ignacio Gutiérrez Nieto, Las comunidades como movimiento anti-señorial (Barcelona, 1973), offers another, more recent interpretation. The Capítulos de Tordesillas are published in Juan Maldonado, La revolución comunera (Madrid, 1975), Appendix.

63. See Pérez, pp. 583-634.

64. CLC, vol. 4: Cortes de 1523, pet. 2, p. 365.

65. Ibid., vol. 4: pet. 4, p. 366.

66. The visitas requested by the Cortes (see CLC, 4:396) were completed in 1525. In the meanwhile, Charles's determination to lower court costs for litigants was reflected in a new edition of the arancel originally promulgated by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1503. See Aranzel; quaderno de las ordenancas fechas cerca de lo orden judicial aranzeles de los derechos que las justicias y escrivanos del reyno han de llevar (Burgos? 1525?). Under instructions from Charles, the president of the chancillería of Valladolid cracked down on the corrupt practices of escribanos attached to that tribunal. See ARCV: Libro 28, Autos de los Presidentes y Oidores, fols. 36 ff.

67. CLC, vol. 4: Cortes de 1523, pet. 56, p. 382.

68. The Cortes of 1523 echoed the Comunero demand. See CLC, vol. 4; pet. 76, p. 386.

69. AGS: E, leg. 24, fols. 163-65, Tavera to Charles V, 4 Sept. 1532.

70. Ibid., fols. 228-30. In 1523, the Cortes also asked Charles to instruct the Royal Council not to interfere in cases that legitimately belonged in the chancillería. See CLC, vol. 4: pet. 80, p. 387.

71. This correspondence is located in the AGS: E. See esp. legs. 13-15.

72. These administrative changes and other facets of the emperor's judicial policy are outlined in Esteban de la Puente, "Carlos V y la administración de justicia," Revista de Indias 18 (1958):397-461.

73. Corpus documental de Carlos V, ed. M. Fernández Alvarez (Salamanca, 1973), 1:132, 148.

74. Francisco Laiglesia y Auset, Estudios históricos (Madrid, 1918), 1-70.

75. Authorship of the "Carolinian instructions" is discussed in Fernández-Santamaria, pp. 237-47.

76. See John H. Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), pp. 155-209.

77. Femández-Santamaria, pp. 247-79.

78. Ibid., pp. 268-69. The quotation is from Guevara's Vida del famisísimo emperador Marco Aurelio, con el relox de príncipes (Seville, 1532).

79. The principles guiding Philip's judicial policy are briefly discussed in Geoffrey Parker, Philip II (Boston, 1978), pp. 58-60.

80. Most of these consultas are housed in IVdeDJ: Envios 16-17, 21 , 28, and 90. Others can be found in the BL: Add. 28, 347-49; 28, 353; 28, 358; 28, 363.

81. See Albert Lovett, Philip II and Mateo Vázquez de Leca: The Government of Spain (1572-1592) (Geneva, 1977), esp. pp. 29-39, and his "A Cardinal's Papers: The Rise of Mateo Vázquez de Leca," English Historical Review 88 (April 1973):241-61.

82. BNM: 11261, no. 6, "Advertencias ...," fol. 3v.

83. See Lovett, Philip II, pp. 143. The consultas de oficios prepared by the cámara are housed in AHN: Cons., legs. 13489, 13494, 13500-13501, 13515-18, and 13529.

84. IVdeDJ: Envio 90, no. 528, consulta, 11 May 1586.

85. Archivo General de Indias: Indiferente General, leg. 741, ramo 4, no. 108, consulta, 10 Sept. 1586.

86. See IVdeDJ: Envio 24, consulta, Feb. 1576.

87. AHN: Cons., lib. 666, fol. 4.

88. AGS: E, leg.13, fol. 42.

89. For more on visitas, see chapter 5.

90. BNM: 13529, no. 17, "Relación de la Orden . . .14 febrero 1598."

91. AHN: Cons., lib. 1419, Consultas de Viernes, 27 Mar. 1578.

92. BL: Add. 28, 340, fol. 93, consulta, 27 July 1580.

93. See his Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 199-270.

94. Nader, The Mendoza Family, passim.

95. One author who expressed such doubts was Pedro Fernández de Navarrete, Conservación de monarchias (Madrid, 1621), Discursos XLVI-XLVII. This point of view was shared by Joseph Arnorfini de Illescas, " Discurso hispano político sobre el estado presente de la monarchia, 1622" (BL: Add. 28455, fols. 136 ff.), and Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea de un príncipe christiano (Munich, 1640), Empresa 66.

96. A Brief Discourse on the Spanish State (London, 1590), pp. 4-5.

97. The Present State of Spain (London, 1630), p. 73.