[103] The Catholic Monarchs rejected the caballero concept of the state largely because it was inadequate for their political needs. The failure of the politically powerful nobility to impose their views on a relatively weak monarchy, however, was caused not by the weaknesses of the caballero theories but by the peculiarities of the nobility's position at the end of the fifteenth century. By organizing around the family as a stable political and social force in an otherwise chaotic society, the Castilian nobility successfully survived the chaos of the early fifteenth century, first taking advantage of the chaos to increase their own political and economic power and later withdrawing from national affairs to consolidate their control over local affairs. As a result of this shift, by 1500 the nobility dominated local politics and society but had generally abdicated their earlier role as formulators and executors of national policy.

This shift from national to local concerns, with a corresponding shift from public to private interests, can be clearly seen in the career of cardinal Mendoza, the most powerful prelate of fifteenth-century Castile and leader of the noble family most closely identified with the caballero writers. In the course of accumulating power, wealth, and status during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, the Mendoza displayed all the strengths and weaknesses that would first sustain and then defeat the caballero Renaissance in the intellectual conflicts of the sixteenth century.

The genealogical and political foundations of the family were laid in the disastrous days after the battle of Nájera. Their opportunity for a greatly accelerated rise began with the decimation of the old nobility and ricoshombres at the end of the fourteenth century and continued with [104] the need for new political and military leaders in the internecine warfare of the royal family during the early fifteenth century. The form in which the Mendoza banded themselves together -- the family -- was not inevitable, but its legal features made it as effective a social and economic force as such corporate groups as gilds and municipalities. The family's political and economic effectiveness was encouraged by the legal structure of the nuclear family, by bonds of loyalty within the extended family (which encouraged political unity), and by the accumulation of noble titles and mayorazgos, which made the primogenitus estate the economic center of gravity in the family.⁽¹⁾

The unity of the nuclear family was shaped by the legal status of adult sons. Before the reforms of the Cortes of Toro in 1505, a son did not achieve legal majority until his father died: an adult son could not establish an independent household, sign contracts, pledge an oath of homage, raise or command an army, or perform any other public act without the consent of his father.⁽²⁾ With these disabilities, it was inconceivable -- and obviously not expected -- that a son should make his fortune or political career outside the family circle.

In the extended family, ties were not so legally compelling, but emotionally they were almost equally compelling. Members of an extended family -- which was self-defining, of course -- were obliged to act together against enemies of the family and in support of allies. Both the obligations and the relatives bound by it were called deudos. This same deudo bound the vasallos del rey to the king -- where there were no fixed legal obligations between parties there nevertheless was a deudo -- a bond of mutual obligation and benefit.

In December 1443, Santillana drew up an alliance with his cousin, Luis de la Cerda, count of Medinaceli. Both were great-nephews of Ayala, and they were consuegros (co-fathers-in-law) since Santillana's daughter, Leonor, married Medinaceli's son and heir, Gastón. The bond between consuegros was close, and the two men had long been close friends. Their statement of purpose explaining their alliance is worth quoting at length because it reveals the remarkable mixture of politics, affection, and self-interest that made up the bond of deudo.

Inasmuch as in this kingdom there have been great disturbances, wars, scandals, and deaths and it is to be expected that there will be more in the future because of the reason which is known to everyone and this has taken place because it has been nourished so much by anger and hatred among the grandees of the kingdom in opposition to each other so that they are very divided in opinion and cannot easily agree [105] and in order to remedy this it will be first and foremost very appropriate and even necessary to achieve unity and friendship among the said grandees of the kingdom and, although they are not all easily brought into one accord, one should not leave off doing among a few of them that which is good and, rather, since they must look for and procure friendship together with those with whom they have the greatest deudo and with whom they are closest, since discord among these is most dangerous, therefore we don Luys de la Cerda count of Medina and señor of the Port of Santa María and Yñigo Lopez de Mendoza señor of la Vega wish and make known to all who may see this present document that for the service of God and the king our lord, in order to give a good start to the aforesaid accord, our full and free will is that among ourselves and our houses, being in such great deudo by consanguinity and the marriages of our children and grandchildren as we are, there may not nor can there reasonably arise any discord nor division at all. Further, that... we shall be together in one will and opinion through love, confederation, alliance, and good accord as the aforesaid deudos wish and mandate in the following manner: that we will guard and treat each other well and honestly each to the other and we will attempt to achieve each for the other that the said lord king should give mercedes to both of us and to each of us.⁽³⁾

In this situation, civil warfare was impractical, for one's enemies were also one's relatives, and it was almost unthinkable to break deudo by killing one's relatives. Because sons were not emancipated, the father of a numerous brood such as Santillana's had at his command a corps of political, administrative, and military lieutenants whose loyalty was more certain than that of the usual crew of subordinates. To lose one of these lieutenants in war was much more than a military loss; and after suffering disastrous losses at the battle of Aljubarrota in 1385, the Castilian aristocracy avoided pitched battles whenever possible -- only two occurred between Castilian knights in the first half of the fifteenth century.

Death in battle was the exception rather than the rule during the early [106] Trastámara period, and it was not unusual for a caballero to demand remuneration from the king for such loss of a son, brother, or uncle. Spain's leading historian of the period, Luis Suárez Fernández, has pointed out that our only documentary evidence of civil strife before the reign of the Catholic Monarchs is the large number of confederations signed among the nobility.⁽⁵⁾ Most of these confederations -- which look so ominous and belligerent to Suárez -- are really statements of impotence. Usually two parties agree to unite in warfare against their mutual enemies, but each reserves the right not to fight against his deudos, who are listed in careful detail. If one of the deudos of either party joined the enemy, there could be no battle.⁽⁶⁾ Deudo did not always work as a means of preventing strife, but it was believed to work; and when relatives acted together or agreed not to fight one another, they used deudo to explain their actions. Family loyalties were considered reasonable and admirable motives for political activity.

The Mendoza displayed the unity arising out of their sense of deudo on various public and military occasions when the head of the family called upon his relatives to make a show of force in support of the family honor. Santillana's eldest son, later to be the first duke of Infantado, became embroiled in a feud with the count of Benavente over the possession of Carrión. Although the count had a royal decree ceding the town to him, Infantado regarded it as a usurpation of his family's ancestral rights. In expectation of a battle against the count in 1473, he drew up a list of the forces he would call up: fourteen hundred cavalry -- seven hundred twenty-five from his own forces and six hundred seventy-five from his cousins, the counts of Treviño and Castañeda.⁽⁷⁾ Of the seven hundred twenty-five cavalry under his own command, forty were his continos (regular members of his household cavalry), one hundred sixty were to be hired on salary, and the remaining five hundred fifty were the troops of twenty commanders loyal to him. Of these twenty commanders, all but five were brothers, nephews, sons, and in-laws.

The armies of Infantado and Benavente actually faced each other on a field outside Carrión, but Femando the Catholic stepped between the two ranks and mediated a settlement before any blows were struck. A typical battle of early Trastámara Castile. Equally typical -- and significant -- is the duke of Infantado's ability to raise an army of fourteen hundred cavalry from within his own family. Despite the bitter antagonism over property between himself and his cousins, Pedro Manrique, count of Treviño, and Garci Fernández Manrique, count of Castañeda, their sense of deudo became paramount in the face of a military threat from outside the family.

[107] In 1475, the Mendoza again rallied as a single military force, this time at Toro in defense of Fernando and Isabel against the king of Portugal. In anticipation of the battle, Isabel gave the second Santillana the title of duke of Infantado and expressed her thanks to him and his family for being the principal support of her cause. In the document granting this title, Fernando and Isabel name each of these captains of the Mendoza family and their relationship to Infantado:

And mindful of the great men and caballeros -- your brothers, sons-in-law, and sons, nephews, and relatives -- who came to stand with me and with you in the said battle, whom it is proper to name here because of their great dignities and estates, and because of the great deudo which they have with you, especially the Most Reverend don Pedro González de Mendoza, cardinal of Spain, archbishop of Seville and bishop of Sigüenza, our uncle, your brother; and don Pedro de Velasco, count of Haro, condestable de Castilla, your brother-in-law; and don Beltrán de la Cueva, duke of Alburquerque, your son-in-law; and don Lorenzo Suárez de Mendoza, count of Coruña, viscount of Torija, your brother; and don Gabriel Manrique, count of Osorno, your cousin; and don Pedro de Mendoza, count of Monteagudo, your nephew; and don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, bishop of Palencia, your nephew and Alonso de Arellano, your son-in-law; and don Juan and don Hurtado de Mendoza, your brothers; and don Bernardino de Velasco, your nephew, son of the said condestable; and don Pedro de Mendoza and don Juan de Mendoza your sons; and don Bernardino de Mendoza, your nephew, son of the said count of Coruña; and don García Manrique, comendador mayor de Castilla, your nephew, son of the said count of Osorno; and many other caballeros of your lineage and estate.⁽⁸⁾

The bonds within a family were so strong that political allies or close friends could find no more appropriate terms in which to express their feelings of deudo than the vocabulary of family relationships. It was customary to refer to a colleague many years one's senior as "uncle" -- as Isabel referred to cardinal Mendoza; to an ally of one's own age as "cousin" -- as Fernando most frequently addressed the Castilian nobles; and to a much younger man as "nephew" -- as the second Tendilla addressed his distant cousin, Pedro Laso de la Vega, elder brother of the great poet. In an age of revolution, royal minorities, institutional confusion, [108] and innovation, the family formed a point of stability whose moral and emotional bonds could be as compelling as legal constraints and whose customs and vocabulary could lend an aura of stability to less permanent relationships.

This all-pervasive sense of the family as an agglutinative force -- which, thanks to the chronicles of Pedro López de Ayala, the Mendoza seem to have felt more strongly than most -- facilitated the Mendoza's rise during the social confusion that followed the Trastámara revolution. The Mendoza did not begin to receive titles until the mid-fifteenth century, but their rise to noble status was a direct result of the Trastámara revolution. Along with other Alavese clans -- the Ayala, Guevara, Orozco, and Velasco -- the Mendoza appear with increasing frequency as public administrators, war heroes, and ambassadors during the first two-thirds of the fourteenth century. Their social mobility was nevertheless limited by their nonnoble condition.

In fourteenth-century Castile, noble titles were part of the royal patrimony and therefore not heritable. Traditionally, only members of the royal family received them, and they reverted to the crown, along with their incomes, upon the death of their holders. In the fourteenth century, the great political strength of the nobles derived from their personal influence over the king, for normally only nobles were del consejo del rey -- the epitome of Castilian political life. The royal military resources were organized under territorial governors appointed by the king, recruited from outstanding nonnoble members of the military and serving under a variety of titles according to the usage prevailing when each governorship was established -- prestamero mayor, merino mayor, adelantado, caudillo mayor. The territorial governors could not match the nobles in political or social influence, although the king granted the status of ricohombre to a few nonnobles considered essential to the good governance of the kingdom -- a royal treasurer, a frontier commander, a territorial governor -- and admitted them to the consejo del rey. Although the Alavese were too recently arrived to achieve the status of ricoshombres, by the time the Trastámara revolt began they had achieved enough status to form family ties with them.

All of this changed in the last third of the fourteenth century, after the Trastámara civil war launched one of the most radical social revolutions of Castilian history.⁽⁹⁾ Slowly but steadily the old noble and ricohombre families died, were suppressed, or went into exile; and the caballero families who had made up the bulk of the Trastámara fighting force became del consejo del rey, ricoshombres, and nobility. The Alavese clans who had immigrated in the early part of the century were exceptionally [109] successful in this regard; and they came to play a political, economic, and cultural role far out of proportion to their numbers: by the 1470s, four of the sixteen titled families of Castile were of Alavese origin. The Mendoza benefited more than most, and Mendoza prestige was intimately bound up with the fortunes of the Trastámara dynasty.

Through natural attrition, war, political exile, and the short life spans of most of the early Trastámara, the number of the king's relatives declined steadily in the twenty years after Enrique II assumed the throne. By 1390, there were only six titled noblemen in Castile -- two dukes, three counts, and one marquis -- all of them Enrique's nephews and cousins and all holding personal titles which were created specifically for them and would die out or revert to the crown along with their estates when they died.

During the minority of Enrique III, this small group of bitterly feuding and ambitious royal relatives lost control of the regent government; and by the beginning of the reign of Juan II, all but two of the personal titles had died out. The nobility's places in the royal council were taken by caballeros who had supported Enrique de Trastámara in his revolt against Pedro and by Portuguese nobles who had supported Castile in Juan I's attempt to claim the Portuguese throne and taken refuge in Castile after the Portuguese victory at Aljubarrota (1385). Thus the caballeros Enrique elevated to the highest political offices to counterbalance the titled nobility replaced the nobles in the consejo del rey by the beginning of the fifteenth century without being noble themselves. They achieved the epitome of political office in Castile without achieving the highest social status.

It was a commonplace of monarchical societies that a king needs a nobility; and at the turn of the century, Castle had a scarcity of nobles. Juan I and Enrique III made an attempt to correct the situation by giving personal titles to a few favorites outside the royal family. These titles ordinarily would have been held by members of the royal family; and in some cases, the king actually deprived a seditious relative of his title or refused it to the heir of a mistrusted relative, giving it instead to a caballero powerful enough to defend it from the claims of royal relatives. But this stopgap measure merely changed personnel without changing the institution.

During the reign of Juan II, however, the chaos created by the infantes of Aragon showed that the early Trastámara measures to curb royal relatives had not succeeded. Don Alvaro de Luna tipped the balance of power away from the infantes by changing the institution of nobility itself: first he and then Enrique IV created a new type of nobility -- one [110] of the most successful innovations of the Trastámara period, outlasting every other creation of the dynasty, including the mayorazgo, the Inquisition, the Audiencia, and the new royal offices. Don Alvaro began his innovation in 1438 when he made Fernán Alvarez de Toledo count of Alba. This title was different from previous Castilian titles, first because it was hereditary, and second because the estate of Alba was not part of the royal patrimony -- as a private estate, a señorío, it was outside the royal jurisdiction.

Hereditary titles of nobility proliferated during the next forty years, though the crown also continued to grant personal titles; and the caballero families who gained economic and political power during the Trastámara period now achieved the highest social status. This new nobility -- recruited from Enriquista caballero families and refugee Portuguese aristocracy and receiving hereditary titles for estates they already owned -- became the nobility of the late fifteenth century.

Since the new nobility did not receive royal estates with their titles -- or any other estates they did not own before -- their titles could be considered empty display. Buried in the litigation records of family archives, however, there is evidence that these titles were an effective tool for stabilizing the economy and society of the fifteenth century. Far from being mere labels, the new titles changed the legal status of the estates for which they were named. The Mendoza family received several titles during the fifteenth century; and in each case, they simultaneously gained clear hereditary rights to an estate that had been in litigation for years.

Title to the villages around the town of Santillana, for example, had been disputed between the Manrique and Mendoza families since the death of the admiral in 1404. Not only did the wheels of justice grind exceeding slow; but as soon as one party won a decision from the Audiencia, the rival party would appeal, and the estate would be in litigation all over again. When Juan II made Iñigo López de Mendoza marquis of Santillana in 1445, he not only created the first hereditary title of marquis in Castile but also cut through the judicial process by removing the dispute from the jurisdiction of the courts. By royal fiat, he granted legal title to the estate once and for all to whomever should hold the title of marquis of Santillana -- Iñigo López de Mendoza and his heirs. The noble titles granted to the Mendoza by Juan II, Enrique IV, and the Catholic Monarchs -- count of Real de Manzanares and marquis of Santillana (1445), count of Saldaña (1462), count of Tendilla (c. 1467), count of Coruña (c. 1469), marquis of Cid and of Cenete (1491), marquis of Mondéjar (1512) -- were all of this type. The [111] most significant clause in each new title was not that creating the title but that granting it "to you and your descendants for evermore."

These noble titles stabilized the family estate by removing much of it from litigation. When Santillana finally received his title in 1445, the litigation over his villages had been straining his resources for thirty years. He paid court, attorney, notarial, and scrivener fees; he used his military and political leverage with the crown to influence court decisions; and he sent armies to enforce -- or defy -- the Audiencia's decisions. As long as the estate was in litigation, Santillana could not enjoy its income, for the crown usually placed such estates under its own administration -- to the crown's advantage. Afterwards, however, the marquisate of Santillana passed from generation to generation without dispute until 1580 -- when it was inherited by a woman. The right of female inheritance was then disputed in a lawsuit that lasted twenty-nine years.

In a cadet branch of the Mendoza family, the second count of Tendilla, as the universal heir of his first wife, Marina de Mendoza (d. 1477), claimed her estate of Mondéjar and carried his fight against Marina's sister through the law courts for over twenty-five years until Fernando the Catholic made him marquis of Mondéjar in 1512. Title to the town of Mondéjar was not disputed again until 1604, when the fourth marquis died without direct successors. Every noble title granted to the Mendoza family during the last half of the fifteenth century represented a major bloc of property immunized against the type of property litigation that had nearly destroyed their prosperity at the beginning of the century.

The social stability achieved by the creation of hereditary nobility outside the royal family and patrimony can be measured in centuries. Almost one-half of the titles died out after one or two generations, but new titles were frequently created for upwardly mobile families; and the nobility in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were a constantly changing, socially fluid group. A handful of new nobles nevertheless came to dominate Castilian political and social life in the Trastámara period just as the royal relatives had dominated it in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Charles V regularized and ranked the noble titles in 1525, drawing up a list of twenty-five titles distinguished by wealth, power, and social status.

Although the number of titles increased in the sixteenth century and especially in the seventeenth and the families inheriting them changed several times in the next centuries, the titles retained their status, their landed estates, their seigneurial jurisdictions, and to a lesser [112] extent, their wealth into the nineteenth century. The Mendoza's titular estates provided the material focal point of Mendoza loyalties for centuries.

Hereditary titles were intimately associated with the mayorazgo, another old institution the Trastámara reshaped and revitalized. The mayorazgo also endured for centuries -- until a reforming government abolished it in 1836. Without the mayorazgo, nobles' estates would have been subject to the laws of partible inheritance and thus repeatedly reduced in size in the fecund fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. En placing a large portion of his property in a mayorazgo for his eldest son, Pedro González de Mendoza (d. 1385), founder of the family's fortune, believed that it would serve as the social and economic focal point of the Mendoza family and so perpetuate the family name forever.⁽¹⁰⁾ He did not anticipate that the mayorazgo would outlive the family itself.

Spanish law required that all the children of a marriage should receive fair, though not equal, shares of their parents' heritable property (the bienes partibles or bienes libres). Before these were divided, the law permitted up to one-third of them to be set aside for the eldest son (who also received one-fifth of the rest) to mejorar or enlarge the principal estate of the family. The remaining eight-fifteenths were divided among the other children, sons in clerical orders receiving less than the others. This system was so closely followed in the Mendoza family that by the late sixteenth century a Mendoza daughter could describe her brother as the first born, "having inherited the third and the fifth of our father's bienes libres."⁽¹¹⁾

In 1462, Enrique IV granted the title of count of Saldaña to the eldest son of the second marquis of Santillana. This was a significant innovation in Castilian inheritance practice -- a title of primogeniture that allowed the eldest son to enjoy a portion of his father's estate until he inherited the principal mayorazgo himself. The two mayorazgos remained autonomous but not independent of each other. Saldaña was near the Mendoza properties most seriously threatened by the Manrique, and it became the task of the count to defend the family's claims there. With the duke of Infantado thus freed from these most difficult to manage of all the Mendoza properties, he could devote himself to the enjoyment of his economic and ceremonial perquisites as head of the Mendoza and one of the richest men in the kingdom. Economically emancipated, the counts of Saldaña remained subject to the legal jurisdiction of their fathers. Not until the Comunero revolt of 1520 -- fifteen years after all married adults were emancipated by the Laws of Toro -- did a young count of Saldaña defy his father in political [113] matters. The splitting up of the mayorazgo nevertheless indicates that the estate had grown too unwieldy for a single management as early as 1462.

In the last half of the fifteenth century, both the pace and the pattern of Mendoza development changed. The principal mayorazgo, which had changed and grown dramatically in the first half of the century, reached its ultimate growth and final form in the last quarter of the century. Just as by 1500 one title of nobility proliferated into a half-dozen, each held by a self-appointed leader, the thrust of the entire family's energies into the growth of a single unified mayorazgo -- typical of the early Trastámara period -- was diffused into more than twenty mayorazgos held by eldest sons of cadet branches scattered throughout Castile. These changes in the structure, size, and distribution of the Mendoza estates produced so many atomized and self-generating households, each with its own aspirations, that it is difficult to find coherent patterns of development. At least it can be said with assurance that the Mendoza were rich and getting richer.

It is difficult to measure the wealth of the Mendoza. Estate records are sparse before 1502, when notaries were first required to keep protocols. Rent rolls have survived in a haphazard fashion and in small quantities, usually transcribed into dowry litigation. Even if we could estimate the income from a given property, however, it would be difficult to know which properties the estate comprised at any given time. The Mendoza properties developed in an extremely fluid manner in this period: those received from the king for life reverted to the crown; others remained in the family permanently. The Mendoza bought properties, exchanged them, mortgaged them to raise capital, leased them for a safe annual return, sold them, bought them over again, divided them, and gave their incomes as dowries, religious donations, private gifts, payments for service, and acts of charity.⁽¹²⁾ Even the supposedly inalienable property in the mayorazgo was as leaky as a sieve: throughout the Trastámara period, the Mendoza carried on a balancing act, moving property in and out of the mayorazgo to even up the inheritances of various sons and give them geographically compact properties and selling parts of the mayorazgo to raise the capital for adding new sections to it.⁽¹³⁾

A rough way to measure the growth and subsequent stabilization of the estate is to count the number of separate holdings mentioned in Mendoza legacies -- a process English historians call "manor counting." In his will of 1383, Pedro González de Mendoza left thirty separate properties to his heirs -- including three towns and twenty villages. His [114] son, the admiral, left another twenty properties not mentioned in his father's will, including five and one-third towns and ten villages. In 1458, the marquis of Santillana left another twenty-six properties not mentioned in the admiral's will, including eight and two-thirds towns and fourteen villages. The duke of Infantado (d. 1479), did not individually list the estates willed to his heirs, but we know from other sources that in 1470 he acquired the four towns of the estate of Infantado that straddled the border between Guadalajara and Cuenca provinces, which he added to his mayorazgo, as well as another four villages. This was the last major addition to the principal mayorazgo of the Mendoza family for seventy years.⁽¹⁴⁾

These estates were the source of the Mendoza wealth, for their income was derived mainly from agricultural sources, although they also had recourse to some more varied and less consistent types of income. The bulk of their income consisted of seigneurial taxes and rents from agricultural leases, which appear to have been stable or even growing despite crop failures after 1480.⁽¹⁵⁾ The wool producers of Castile prospered in the last years of the century, and since the Mendoza held lands in the Tajo Basin and north of the Guadarrama Mountains that straddled two of the four major sheepwalks of Castile, they received pasturage fees as well as profits from the sale of their own wool and of the honey and beeswax cultivated in their pasturelands.

Wool and honey were their major export products for the North Atlantic trade, but they also exported lumber to Valencia. In addition, they maintained a near monopoly on processing the fruits of the land for local markets -- wine and olive presses, hemp mills, bakeries, forges, tanneries and tallow works, grain mills, salt mines, quarries, wine cellars -- even the collection and marketing of herbs used as medicine, spices, and dyes. Santillana and Infantado received royal concessions for market fairs in their towns along the sheepwalks and major routes into the Tajo Basin. The sales taxes they collected from these fairs -- usually set at a little over 3 percent -- were an important source of income, zealously watched over by the dukes and their stewards.⁽¹⁶⁾

There were no demesne farms in the land tenure system of Castle, so the Mendoza did not directly manage grain production on their estates. They did receive and market the grain their tenants paid as a portion of their lease rents and as the tercias -- which the crown frequently conceded to the señores as a merced. The bishopric of Sigüenza became almost hereditary in the Mendoza family; and as the Mendoza continued to produce large families until late in the sixteenth century, they continued to send younger sons into this and other lucrative [115] positions in the church. By 1492, the Mendoza were by far the wealthiest noble house in Castile.⁽¹⁷⁾

The feature of the Mendoza that has most caught the attention of historians is their domination of the city of Guadalajara. The city's archivist, fray Francisco Layna Serrano, entitled his loving four-volume work on this subject Guadalajara and its Mendoza. It would be more aptly called The Mendoza and their Guadalajara. From the beginning of their residence in Guadalajara, the Mendoza bought up houses and commercial property in the city, as well as nearby farms, olive presses, grain and fulling mills, and pasture lands. The admiral bought a wine cellar with its tinajas (storage jars) and a tavern in the center of the city, known thereafter as "La Bodega del Almirante." The plaza in front of this bodega was known into modern times as the "Plaza del Almirante." Pedro González de Mendoza (d. 1385) began building some large houses in the city for the family's residence; and his son, the admiral, continued and expanded this project. Fernán Pérez de Guzmán associated the admiral's building projects with his sense of family:

[The admiral] was very proud of his lineage and allied himself with his relatives with great love, more than any other grandee of his time, and he greatly enjoyed constructing buildings and built very good houses.⁽¹⁸⁾

[116] The size of the Mendoza households and the extent of their building projects must have had an important impact on the economy of Guadalajara, especially on the construction and crafts industries. At the height of their building activity, the family hired foreign-trained architects to supervise their construction projects; but the work was carried out by craftsmen from the city and province of Guadalajara under direct contract between patron and craftsman. Layna has published a number of these contracts, and the entire construction process resembles the procedures used in the building of the Strozzi Palace in Florence.⁽²⁰⁾

The city of Guadalajara had an abundant supply of water, and those who could afford the necessary plumbing enjoyed running water in their houses. One of the first steps in each Mendoza construction project was a petition to the city council for a greater flow of water. In one instance, the Mendoza gave the city an artesian well outside the city in exchange for a greater volume of water within it. Then came contracts for the manufacture and installation of the piping -- followed by contracts for foundation works, bricks, tiles, stone columns, and carved ceilings. All were manufactured to the patron's specifications, often described simply as "like the sample the duke has shown him."

Once the construction was completed, the palace furnishings also provided some contracts, but Spanish houses -- even those of the nobility -- tended to be sparsely furnished. What furnishings the Mendoza did buy were not easily supplied by local artisans. The furnishings most frequently left as legacies were beds with their linens and hangings, armor, tapestries, gold, silver, and precious stones. Not much of this was of local craftsmanship. The fifteenth-century Mendoza commissioned gold and silver pieces from craftsmen in Barcelona; the marquis of Santillana and the first and second dukes of Infantado commissioned paintings from foreigners, such as Jorge el Inglés. The second Infantado bought much of his silver, gold, and tapestries at the sale of Philip I's household effects in 1506.

By the sheer weight of their physical presence, the Mendoza shaped the appearance and economy of Guadalajara; and their impact on the society and politics of the city was overwhelming. Inasmuch as the Mendoza were the only noble family in the city, Guadalajara was spared the rivalries and feuds that tore apart other Castilian cities such as Toledo, Burgos, and Córdoba. Technically, Guadalajara was a royal villa, and traditionally its government and seigneurial income had belonged to the queen. Enrique II, Juan I, Enrique III, and Juan II, however, had given the city's income and government over to the Mendoza. Pedro González de Mendoza (d. 1385) was alcaide of the [117] city's alcázar and had the right to collect the portazgo (transit tax). In addition to these privileges, his son, the admiral, received the right to name the alcalde, regidores, and alguaciles (mayor, city councilmen, and constables).

Layna reports that until the end of the eighteenth century the city carried out an annual ceremony of petitioning the duke of Infantado to assume the city's government "to save it from discord" and celebrating his gracious acceptance with a show of trumpets and banners. Thus the fiction of an independent city and the reality of Mendoza control were maintained. As far as we know, there were no uprisings, violent feuds, or overt attacks on the Mendoza by the people of Guadalajara, though the city was always touchy about its status as an independent city.

Royal advisers were likewise unhappy about a royal villa remaining in private hands and occasionally tried to wrest control from the Mendoza in the name of the crown. In 1441, don Alvaro de Luna prevailed upon Juan II to give the government of Guadalajara to crown prince Enrique. In 1459, Juan Pacheco occupied the city in the name of Enrique IV -- with or without the king's command is not clear. In both cases, the Mendoza simply packed up and moved their households to their fortified castles in Hita and Buitrago, returning to Guadalajara after winning back the crown's favor.

In fact, the Mendoza's weight in Guadalajara seems to have amounted to more than the sum of its parts. Although physical presence, military and political power, and economic activity all played a role, all had weaknesses. The Mendoza could not control Guadalajara either militarily or politically. In any instance when the crown failed to support the Mendoza, the family fled, trapped between the city and royal forces. They had no close military strongpoints to use against Guadalajara: their closest sure fortresses were Hita and Buitrago. The Infantado wealth came not from Guadalajara or her province but from lands in Alava, Asturias, and the Duero Basin. The family could control the city's government through appointments to city offices; and it is common to find Mendoza younger sons, in-laws, secretaries, and clients serving as members of the city council. Even so, there were times when the crown intervened and made its own appointments in the city. The city council also occasionally asserted its theoretical independence, complaining, for example, that the Mendoza were enlarging their own households at the expense of the city: the new residents increased the burdens on city services, but their tax-free status as hidalgos reduced the proportional tax base of the city's population.⁽²¹⁾

[118] The Mendoza lived in Guadalajara largely because they preferred urban life to rural, like most Castilian aristocrats. Fernán Pérez de Guzmán wrote to his cousin Santillana complaining -- in a tone reminiscent of Machiavelli's complaints while he was exiled from Florence -- that living in his village of Batres he was surrounded by rustics and cut off from all cultural life.⁽²²⁾ And Tendilla, Santillana's grandson, wrote to a friend: "Although everyone claims that you are staying in [the village of] Las Arenas, I don't believe them because, as the wise man said, the country is a nice place to visit but not to live in."⁽²³⁾

In addition to preferring the stimulation of urban life, the Mendoza developed a specific affection for Guadalajara, where they were surrounded by family, friends, and clients. After Tendilla moved to Granada, he thrived on the conflicts and variety of one of Spain's largest and most cosmopolitan cities. But when he felt defeated and isolated, he regretted leaving Guadalajara where "I left behind all that was mine and dismantled my household there full of the servants of my grandparents, and of my father and children."⁽²⁴⁾ Even this most independent of the Mendoza continued to regard Guadalajara as the focus of stability, earthly comfort, and family pride.

Secure in their wealth, their social status, their control over local administration, the Mendoza continued to be one of the major powers in the kingdom; but they did not regard politics in the same way their ancestors had. In contrast to the all consuming passions and moral conflicts with which Pedro López de Ayala and Fernán Pérez de Guzmán engaged the political issues of their day, the Mendoza of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs regarded politics with a serenity that approaches aloofness. Lacking emotional engagement, no political policy, no political figure became identified with the Mendoza family: there was no compelling cause around which the whole family could rally as a single political or military force. Just as the family's landed estate had begun to subdivide and the noble titles to proliferate, the political leadership of the family splintered among several talented figures, who -- while not competing with each other -- did not act as a unified party.

If it were necessary to single out one Mendoza as the most famous political figure of a family that produced so many, it would surely be cardinal Mendoza.⁽²⁵⁾ His active and successful role in strengthening the fortunes of the family can hardly be disputed -- although the political results, as we shall see, were not felicitous. His popular image as the "third king of Spain," the eminence grise shaping the policies of the Catholic Monarchs, is more difficult to justify on the basis of scholarly [119] research. A careful examination of the chronicles and the archival documents, in fact, indicates that cardinal Mendoza was outstanding principally in the degree to which he remained true to his generation's very limited ideals and focused on material and social advancement.

Pedro González de Mendoza was the youngest of Santillana's ten children. His parents intended him for a church career; and when he was about twelve years old, they sent him to live with their cousin, Gutierre Gómez de Toledo, bishop of Palencia. Gutierre Gómez was a nephew of Pedro López de Ayala; and in the tradition of that family, he resided and made his career in the city of Toledo, of which he became archbishop in 1442. Through the patronage of this powerful relative, Pedro González received the benefice of the archdeaconate of Guadalajara. He also received a thorough grounding in Latin in the archbishop's household. When Gutierre Gómez died in 1445, Pedro González had not yet received a bishopric; and the young cleric spent several years at the University of Salamanca, living on his comfortable income as archdeacon of Guadalajara and reading canon law. There is no record of his having matriculated, and he never took a degree. During this residence in Salamanca, however, his father wrote the famous letter asking Pedro González to translate the Iliad from Latin into Castilian. In the prologue to his elegant and intelligent translations of the Aeneid and some books of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pedro González states that he made these translations during his vacations.⁽²⁶⁾

After seven years at the university, Pedro González still had not moved up in his ecclesiastical career; and in 1452, he departed for the royal court, where he won the attention and favor of don Alonso de Fonseca, archbishop of Seville, whose patronage launched Pedro González on his great career. In 1454, he became bishop of Calahorra; and after residing a year in his diocese, he returned to the royal court and began to win the favor of the new king, Enrique IV. His first move into politics occurred in 1460, when he negotiated an agreement between the king and the Mendoza. The king agreed to return control over the city of Guadalajara to Pedro González's brother, the second Santillana, in exchange for some fortresses and Santillana's son, Juan Hurtado de Mendoza, as security for the agreement. From this time until 1468, Pedro González remained with the royal court almost continuously, protecting Mendoza interests from the manipulations of the king's favorite, Juan Pacheco, and urging the king to take firmer action against his enemies. His role as spokesman for both the Mendoza and Enrique IV was apparent not only in the numerous alliances he arranged [120] in this period but also in his public speeches supporting the king and his daughter, Juana, after the rebels deposed him in absentia in Avila (1465) and after Enrique met with Isabel at Toros de Guisando (1468).⁽²⁷⁾

Although Pedro González and the Mendoza remained loyal to Enrique throughout his reign, their active support changed to a passive abstention from politics after 1469, when two events changed both the situation in Castile and Pedro González's own priorities: the marriage of Fernando and Isabel reunited the two branches of the Trastámara dynasty; and the first of Pedro González's illegitimate sons, Rodrigo, was born.⁽²⁸⁾ From this time on, the Mendoza brothers, led by Pedro González, consolidated their forces and offered them to Fernando and Isabel in return for lavish promises of income and territory. Pedro González also used his position as leader of the family to extract from the royal couple and from the papal legate, Rodrigo Borgia, mercedes, a cardinalate, and the archbishopric of Seville.

As an immediate consequence of these events, the Mendoza adopted their policy of watchful abstention from politics until the death of Enrique IV. Pedro González embarked upon a twenty-year career of financial and political manipulation that acquired a private fortune for his illegitimate sons and increased the income and offices of the whole Mendoza family. In exchange for Mendoza support of Isabel, Pedro González was made archbishop of Seville and cardinal of Santa Croce; and Juan II of Aragon guaranteed Mendoza possession of the Infantado estates in Castile that Juan II of Castile had given them in an effort to dispossess the Aragonese king of his power in Castile.⁽²⁹⁾

The cardinal's first concern was to build a landed estate for his son, Rodrigo. Through royal merced, purchase, and trade he acquired six major estates in Castile, Valencia, and Granada and placed most of this property in mayorazgo. He then obtained assurance that no one could interfere with Rodrigo's inheritance by acquiring legitimation of his sons from both pope and crown and two titles of nobility for Rodrigo -- marquis of Cenete and count of Cid -- from the crown. The magnitude of the cardinal's accomplishments as a financial manager can be seen by comparing the income of his ecclesiastical offices with that of the estate he built for his son: in 1485, after he became archbishop of Toledo, his annual income reached 65,000 florins (45,500 ducats); in 1501, Rodrigo was estimated to have an income of 16,000 florins (11,000 ducats).⁽³⁰⁾ In the twenty-one years from 1469 to 1490, the cardinal built a private fortune with an income one-quarter the size of that of the archbishopric of Toledo, the richest see in Spain.

For the rest of his life, cardinal Mendoza used his position as head [121] of the family to provide the crown with a powerful and consistent military force. At the same time, he used his influence over the young monarchs to enrich himself and his family, placing his relatives in positions of power throughout the kingdom and, securing their legal hold on their estates with titles of nobility.⁽³¹⁾ At the height of Pedro González's influence over Enrique IV, about 1467, two of his brothers received titles of nobility: Iñigo López de Mendoza became count of Tendilla and Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa became count of Coruña. Pedro Fernández de Velasco, who was married to their eldest sister, Mencía de Mendoza, became constable of Castile in 1472, and the office became hereditary in their family. Through the cardinal's influence with Fernando and Isabel, the eldest brother, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, marquis of Santillana, also became duke of Infantado in 1475, confirming his possession of the Infantado estates.

When the cardinal became archbishop of Toledo in 1485, he appointed another of his brothers, Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza, as adelantado of Cazorla, the important archdiocesan military command on the frontier with Granada. A sister, María de Mendoza, was married to the adelantado of Andalucía, Pero Afán de Rivera. In 1476, they were given the hereditary title of count of los Molares; and in 1492, the office of adelantado was made hereditary in their family. The cardinal's third sister, Leonor de la Vega, had married their cousin, the count of Medinaceli; and in 1479, their title was elevated to duke of Medinaceli. In 1491, when the duke asked the cardinal, as head of the family, to arrange a suitably honorable marriage for his only daughter, Leonor, the cardinal acquired both the position of alcaide of Guadix (Granada) and two noble titles for his own son Rodrigo, who then married Leonor.

Two of the cardinal's nephews, Iñigo López de Mendoza and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, sons of the count of Tendilla, were appointed captain general of Granada (1492) and bishop of Palencia (1473) respectively. At the specific request of the cardinal, Diego Hurtado succeeded his uncle as archbishop of Seville in 1485. Looking back on these golden days, Tendilla in 1514 would recall the royal nomination of his brother as archbishop of Seville in these words: "The cardinal my uncle said to the marquise of Moya, 'I told the queen that if she gives the archbishopric of Seville to a favorite she gives me nothing, but if she gives it to anyone but my nephew I will never again live at her court.'"⁽³²⁾ Through this policy, the cardinal added to the family's wealth and gave them new power over local areas of royal administration, most notably in Andalucía, but he also began a physical dispersion of the most talented members of the younger generation that would change the [122] tightly knit party of his own generation into individually powerful but disunited branches of the Mendoza family.

From the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries, loyal sons of Guadalajara and descendants of the Mendoza family have written biographies of cardinal Mendoza; and since the seventeenth century, they have referred to him as "the Great Cardinal." Despite all these laudatory biographies -- or perhaps because of them -- the cardinal remains a shadowy figure in the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. In the chronicles of the period and in the documents emanating from the royal chancery, his name appears in almost every incident of historical significance: Isabel accepting the oaths of homage in Segovia in 1474, the triumphal entry into the city of Granada in 1492, the royal audience with Christopher Columbus. While all must agree that he was in constant residence at the royal court and controlled many royal as well as ecclesiastical appointments, we cannot be sure of what advice he gave at any given juncture. The royal chronicler, Hernando del Pulgar, who was a client of the cardinal and never missed a chance to give credit to the Mendoza, simply mentions the cardinal's presence without attributing royal decisions to his influence, whereas he credits other counsellors, such as the queen's confessor, fray Hernando de Talavera, with persuading the monarchs to take such important actions as the mercedes reform of 1480.⁽³³⁾

Even on such an important question as the Inquisition, for example, the evidence is slight and contradictory. It is hard to understand why the cardinal, a bishop himself, would want to remove inquisitorial powers from the bishops, where they had traditionally resided, and give them to the crown. Instead of using his episcopal inquisitorial powers to investigate reports of judaizing in his own archdiocese of Seville, the cardinal had drawn up and published a set of guidelines to instruct new Christians in the daily conduct of Christian life. When the new Inquisition was established, it opened its operations in the archdiocese of Seville, as if to emphasize the contrast between the cardinal's methods of dealing with judaizers and its own. Nevertheless, the chronicler, Bernáldez, an eyewitness to the events in Seville, seems to accuse the cardinal of creating obstacles to the Inquisition's operation. Furthermore, we should assume that the papacy would not have approved the establishment of the royal Inquisition unless it had been supported by the cardinal. Yet the negotiations leading to papal approval of the new Inquisition were conducted directly between the papacy and the monarchs, without reference to the cardinal; and the papal correspondence [123] suggests that the negotiations were carried out with something less than candor.⁽³⁴⁾

Thus, the superabundance of archival evidence shedding light on the cardinal's activities in building the Mendoza wealth and creating fortunes for his illegitimate sons presents a stark contrast to the paucity of materials relating to his political activities at court. At the time of this writing, there is no calendar of the cardinal's papers; and only a small portion of his correspondence has been uncovered and edited, whereas his private estate papers constitute the largest and most complete collection of estate documents in the vast Sección Osuna of the Archivo Histórico Nacional. This disparity between the documentation for his public and private lives adds to the impression that once he had succeeded in mobilizing the Mendoza family behind the Isabelline party and securing the throne for Isabel and Fernando, the cardinal concentrated his creative energies on his private affairs.

The most that can reasonably be concluded with the material now available is that his principal accomplishment lay in leading the Mendoza family in a united policy, to the benefit of both the crown and the Mendoza, while his reputation as a formulator and director of royal policy rests more on the tendency of some traditional historians to explain historical change by the deeds of Great Men than on any evidence from the archives or chronicles of the period.

The Mendoza of the early Trastámara period had been aggressive, upwardly mobile military entrepreneurs, constantly balancing profits against risks and deeply troubled by the political and moral expediencies their careers seemed to demand. In many respects, the social instability and moral conflicts of these early Mendoza are similar to those of their Florentine contemporaries. In the course of the fifteenth century, however, the Mendoza were transformed from an upstart clan into the epitome of a noble dynasty. Through marriage, manipulation of inheritance laws, service to the crown, purchase, and even shady dealings, the heads of the family increased their heritable lands, the number of towns and cities they controlled, and the number of residents under their jurisdiction. They became noblemen and began to multiply the number of their titles until they became the most titled family in the kingdom. For most Mendoza in the late fifteenth century, the social manifestations of their position -- the family itself, the estates, the households, the noble titles -- were sufficient cause for satisfaction, and the old need to refer actions and ideas to the glorious past became less pressing. The earlier generations, which had risked everything to found [124] the family's fortune and power and developed a Renaissance humanism to justify their actions, gave way during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs to a generation rich, comfortable, and uncurious. In the process of transforming the family into a noble dynasty, most of the Mendoza developed a way of life and a social milieu hostile to the sustenance of Renaissance humanism.

The family loyalty of Santillana's sons does not seem to have extended to the next generation. After the cardinal's death, the leadership of the family passed to the constable of Castle, Bernardino Fernández de Velasco, the son of Santillana's eldest daughter, Mencía de Mendoza. That it should have been the constable, based in Burgos, rather than the duke of Infantado, based in Guadalajara, who led the Mendoza during the critical years when the royal succession passed from the Trastámara to the Hapsburg dynasties is something of an anomaly for historians. Traditionally, historians of the Mendoza have treated the dukes of Infantado as the effective, as well as symbolic, head of the family throughout the centuries. But contemporary observers, both foreign and domestic, and members of the family in other parts of the kingdom recognized the constable as the spokesman for the Mendoza in matters of national policy.⁽³⁵⁾

Part of this can be explained by the Infantado's exaggerated focus on private matters -- sometimes of a spectacularly scandalous nature -- and on their sedentary lives caused by a tendency to gout throughout the sixteenth century. It is also evident that the constable was one of the most incisive and vigorous men of his generation, whose influence was certainly not diminished by his second marriage, to Fernando's illegitimate daughter, Juana de Aragón, and by his command of the royal military forces. The constable, however, presided over a Mendoza family less amenable to a single leader. The very positions of power the cardinal had acquired for this younger generation enabled them to follow careers independent of the constable. The palace of the duke of Infantado in the city of Guadalajara continued to be the physical center of the family, and the Mendoza who remained in New Castile and maintained households in Guadalajara accepted the leadership of the constable. Nevertheless, even among these Mendoza, disputes and rivalries -- especially between Infantado and the count of Coruña -- served to weaken loyalties to the family as a single political and military unit. More serious threats to family unity were posed by two of Santillana's grandsons in the kingdom of Granada -- the cardinal's eldest son, Rodrigo, marquis of Cenete, and the second count of Tendilla.

Cenete acted independently of the Mendoza in every way, apparently [125] out of his own independent and arrogant nature, which had led the cardinal to specify in his will that his properties in Guadalajara -- including his newly built palace -- be sold in order to prevent conflict between Cenete and the duke of Infantado.⁽³⁶⁾ From his base in the kingdom of Granada -- where, thanks to his father, he owned vast estates, held the post of alcaide of the city of Guadix, and became a member of the city council of Granada -- Cenete pursued a career marked by brashness, opportunism, and scandal. His political actions were bewilderingly unpredictable. In 1502, he secretly married, and in 1506 kidnapped, the woman Isabel the Catholic had forbidden him to marry. In 1514, the crown brought charges against him for entering the city of Valencia fully armed without royal permission. In 1523, he impulsively joined his younger brother, the count of Mélito, viceroy of Valencia, in crushing the Germanía revolt.⁽³⁷⁾ In 1535, Cenete's second daughter, heiress to his title and fortune, married the heir of the duke of Infantado. Thus these two branches of the Mendoza were reunited and have since formed a single house. The Cenete branch of the Mendoza family in Granada played a spectacular but erratic role in political and artistic life during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. Since Cenete left no male heirs and his successors were incorporated into the estates and titles of the dukes of Infantado, this branch of the family did not play an independent role during the rest of the sixteenth century.

The career of Cenete's younger brother, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (d. 1536), count of Mélito, showed exactly the opposite pattern. Mélito himself played a moderately important role as viceroy of Valencia in the early years of the reign of Charles V. His only grandchild, Ana de Mendoza (1540-1591), was betrothed to Philip II's favorite, Ruy Gómez da Silva, in 1553; and this couple, named princes of Eboli in 1559, became the focal point of a political party at the royal court. J.H. Elliott has described this Mendoza party as advocating an "open Spain" policy in contrast to the "closed Spain" advocated by the party of the duke of Alba.⁽³⁸⁾

The period of Eboli ascendancy in Castilian politics -- roughly from 1555 until Ruy Gómez' death in 1573 -- falls outside the scope of this book, but it should be noted that the Eboli's "open Spain" policy was typical not of the Mendoza family as a whole but of the branches of the family cardinal Mendoza created as separate power bases in the kingdoms of Granada and Valencia.

The most capable and famous of Santillana's grandsons was the second count of Tendilla. Through the influence of his uncle, the [126] cardinal, Tendilla was named captain general of the kingdom of Granada and alcaide of the Alhambra. Immediately after the conquest, he moved his entire household to Granada, where the family resided in one of the Muslim palaces of the Alhambra. Tendilla was as capable of the flamboyant gesture as his cousin Cenete, but he was intensely loyal to Fernando the Catholic; and during the succession disputes after 1504, he was one of a handful of Castilian nobles who remained loyal to Fernando and opposed the efforts of Philip of Burgundy to take over the kingdom. Caught up in the tumultuous affairs of the kingdom of Granada, Tendilla became increasingly isolated from the rest of the family. The most important result of this isolation was to increase the Tendilla conservatism and with it the Tendilla conviction that they were the only members of the Mendoza true to the family's traditions.

During most of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, there were no serious conflicts within the nobility and no national crises that might have put family loyalties to the test. Tendilla and his cousins -- separated by the generational sprawl of an unusually fecund family and by the geographical dispersion of their careers -- pursued successful policies independently of any considerations of the family as a whole. When succession disputes again generated serious conflicts within Castile, the Mendoza were unable or unwilling to act as a single group; and Tendilla in particular followed a course in opposition to that of the rest of the family. In the atmosphere of crisis, suspicion, and rebellion that gripped Castile after the death of Isabel in 1504, the Mendoza were forced to choose between the traditional policies, which had brought the family success in the past, and new policies, which would bring success in the future. The third duke of Infantado, nominal head of the Mendoza, and the constable, the effective leader of the family, flexibly chose new policies to maintain the family's strength as a political unit. Tendilla, the most vigorous and talented Mendoza of this generation, chose to maintain the tradition. So long as Castile was ruled by the Trastámara, his policies were successful. When it became clear that the Trastámara dynasty in Castile would end with Fernando, however, Tendilla's policies undermined both his political influence and his prosperity, thus precluding the possibility of united family action and thereby weakening the political effectiveness of the whole Mendoza family. By playing the "spoiler," the conservative Tendilla exercised a greater influence on the political fortunes of the Mendoza family than either of his much richer and more powerful cousins -- the constable and the duke of Infantado. Because of its influential political role in the reign of the Catholic [127] Monarchs, because of its singular devotion to the Mendoza traditions, and because Tendilla's correspondence is the largest extant body of prose by a Castilian nobleman, this branch of the family provides the most interesting and significant focus for an investigation of the Mendoza in the last half of the reign of the Catholic Monarchs.

1. The analyses of noble titles, family structure, and estate building which follow are my own, based on the documents in Osuna, Mondéjar, and Salazar. They differ in several important respects from the usual interpretations which, I believe, are anachronistic because they are based on juridical and theoretical works that date, for the most part, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is especially the case in Bartolomé Clavero, Mayorazgo: Propiedad feudal en Castilla, 1369-1836, Madrid, 1974.

2. "El fijo o fija casado e velado, sea avido por hemancipado en todas las cosas para siempre," and "Mandamos que de aqui adelante el fijo o fija, casandose o velandose, ayan para sy el usofruto de todos sus bienes adventicios, puesto que sea bivo su padre, el qual sea obligado a gelo restiuyr, syn le quedar parte alguna del usofruto dellos." Cortes de Toro de 1505, Nos. 47 and 48, Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y de Castilla. Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid, 1882, Vol. IV (1476-1537),194-219.

3. Osuna, 1860/5.

4. Mondéjar, ff. 316v, 317.

5. "El signo de la guerra civil es una constante negociación." Suárez, Nobleza y monarquía, p. 148.

6. Osuna, 1860/30. This attitude also extended to foreign relations: "Ante que partiesen los embaxadores de los Reyes de Aragon e Navarra del Burgo, hablaron secretamente con algunos de los del Consejo del Rey, diciendoles que les parescia ser gran cargo de no suplicar al Rey que se diesen algunos medios para haber paz entre estos Reyes, entre quien tan gran debdo habia." Cronica de Juan II, BAE 68:485b.

7. Osuna, 1860/42.

8. Arteaga, Casa del Infantado, I, 212-213.

9. For some recent work based solidly on fourteenth and fifteenth century sources, see Mitre, Evolución de la nobleza; Salvador de Moxó, "De la nobleza vieja a la nobleza nueva. La tranformación nobilaria castellana en la Baja Edad Media," Cuadernos de Historia 3 (1969), 1-120.

10. Osuna, 1762, printed in Layna, Guadalajara.

11. Osuna, 291-2/11.

12. For example, the town of Saldaña, which Santillana received as a royal merced in December 1445, changed hands four times before he reacquired it permanently in exchange for the town of Coca in December 1451. Osuna, 1825/5.

13. See, for example, Santillana's manipulations of the estates of Alcovendas and Torija in 1453. Osuna, 1873/26, 27.

14. All of these wills are in Osuna, 1762.

15. Eduardo Ibarra y Rodríquez, El problema cerealista en España durante el reinado de los Reyes Católicos, 1475-1516, Madrid, 1944, especially the tables on pp. 159-165; Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, "Los cereales en Andalucía del siglo XV," Revista de la Universidad de Madrid, 18 (1969).

16. See the duke's investigation of his stewards' accounts for Saldaña in 1501 and Castrillo in 1488, in Osuna, 1825/8; 1825/38^1-2.

17. Based on a 1501 estimate of income and household cavalry by Lalaing, Relation, pp. 231-237.

18. Generaciones, p. 17.

19. For the Mendoza architectural projects, see Francisco Layna Serrano, Castillos de Guadalajara, Madrid 1962; Vicente Lampérez y Romea, Los Mendoza del siglo XV y el castillo del Real de Manzanares, Madrid, 1916. These projects are also discussed in greater detail in Chapter VIII.

20. Osuna, 1875, printed as appendixes in Layna, Guadalajara, III.

21. Ibid., I, 286-288.

22. Generaciones, ed. Domínguez Bordona, p. xvi

23. "Aunque todos afirman que estays en arenas yo no creo a todos gentes porque dize un sabio que las aldeas son para ver y no para morar." Copiador, Tendilla to Gutierre Gómez de Fuensalida, 11 June 1515.

24. "Deje la mia y deshize mi casa alla de criados de mis abuelos y de mi padre y niños." Copiador, Tendilla to Francisco Ortiz, 10 March 1514.

25. Francisco de Medina y Mendoza, Vida del Cardenal D. Pedro González de Mendoza, in Memorial Histórico Español, vol. VI, Madrid, 1853; Francisco Layna Serrano, "El Cardenal Mendoza como político y consejero de los Reyes Católicos," Madrid, 1935, Biblioteca Nacional, Varios, Q 1509-10.

26. "Carta de Iñigo López de Mendoza, marqués de Santillana, a su hijo Pedro González de Mendoza cuando estaba estudiando en Salamanca, encargándole que tradujera del latin al castellana la Iliada de Homero," Buitrago, nd., Salazar, N-44, f. 567v (323v moderna).

27. See especially Osuna 1860/15, 16, 17, 20, 38.

28. Osuna 2028.

29. For continued relations between Borgia, the Catholic Monarchs, and cardinal Mendoza, Osuna 844; Caja 7/15; 616/68.

30. Osuna 762/9; 750/22; 1873/29; 1703/3,4; 1706/1,2; 1707/7; 1730/1;1760/4-11; 1883/1; 1887/1,2; 1891; 1914/2,3; 2021; 2048; 1893/2; 1953/6; 2020; 2045/3; 1833; 1932; 1934. Many of the documents for tehse estates are copied in Salazar, D-13. See also Layna Serrano, "El Cardenal," p. 21; Lalaing, Relation, pp. 252-56.

31. Osuna 417/20; bis 1827/4; 1840/10. For a sample of Mendoza mercedes in the city of Guadalajara alone, Osuna 1842; 1862/3; 1875/1,2; 1878; 1879.

32. "Dixo el cardenal mi tio a la marquesa de Moya, 'Dezi[d] a la rayna que sy da el arzobispado de Sevilla a privado no me da nada, mas sy lo da a otro syno a my sobrino nunca mas viviera en su corte.'" Copiador, Tendilla to the Bishop of Málaga, 9 August 1514; Osuna 1873/8; 1970/4,6; Medina y Mendoza, Vida, pp. 292-293.

33. Pulgar, Crónica, Ch. 95.

34. Ibid., Ch. 78, Bernáldez, Memorias, pp. 99-103; Azcona, Isabel, pp. 385-408.

35. The traditional view is especially noticeable in Arteaga (sister of the present duke of Infantado), La Casa del Infantado; Layna Serrano (provincial archivist of Guadalajara), Guadalajara; and Medina y Mendoza (a "poor relation" of the family), Vida. In 1501, Lalaing reported that the constable was the head of the Mendoza, Relation, p. 250; members of the Mendoza family made formal alliances with the constable, rather than Infantado, in times of need. Osuna, 1860/34; 1873. Tendilla believed that Infantado was stupid: "A lo que decis que os hablo Juan Herrera que tiene ay cargo de los negocios del duque del Infantado, plugiese a Dios que su amo tuviese el seso que el tiene. Mas parece me que podemos decir que el que avia de guardar el baño es rey." Copiador, Tendilla to Francisco Ortiz, 5 December 1514. He repeatedly refers to the constable reather than Infantado as the head of the Mendoza in Guadalajara. Copiador, Tendilla to Iñigo de Velasco, 3 May 1509; 20 August 1509; 29 September 1509; Tendilla to Diego López de Mendoza, [November 1509]. Both Walther, Die Anfänge, p. 46, and Suárez, Nobleza, p. 239, include the constable in the Mendoza family but fail to recognize him as its head.

36. Osuna 1765/9; 1878/1,2; 2023.

37. Particularly interesting in revealing Cenete's wild career and the problems posed by the continued Muslim customs of his tenants in Granada and Valencia are Osuna 750/1; 1717/1^-1; 1897/4; 1899/20; 1906; 1908; 1909; 1933; 1934; 1942/16; 1968; 1969; 1973. The Best account of his life is in Vicente Lampérez y Romea, El castillo de la Calahorra (Granada), Madrid 1914.

38. Elliot, Imperial Spain, pp. 247-249.