It stands to reason that he who lived dying, keeping death at the forefront
of everything he did -- that this person should die living.
Alejo Venegas, Agonía y tránsito de la muerte (1537)

Demographic and Economic Trends, 1591-1654.

The population of the diocese of Cuenca reached its peak sometime between 1560 and 1580. In 1575-79, one third of the towns in the

[172] Map 3.

The balance tipped in the decade of the 1590s. Although there were outbreaks of epidemic disease and crop failures throughout the sixteenth century, the end of the century was catastrophic. In 1592-93, for example, in Belmonte and Motilla del Palancar, births fell by one-third, and in Barajas de Melo and El Cañavate, births fell by two-thirds. The great plague of 1596-1602, which swept through most of Europe as well, affected every part of the diocese except for the northernmost reaches of the Serranía. It was accompanied by the worst agricultural crisis of the century and resulting famines.⁽³⁾ The city of Cuenca experienced the highest mortality of the entire early modern period when the plague struck again in 1606, and the death rate jumped more than 350 percent.⁽⁴⁾

Had the diocese experienced just the one epidemic, perhaps it could have recovered somewhat; instead, throughout the seventeenth century it seemed as if the plague and the government were conspiring together to bring about the ruin of the diocese. In 1659, Bishop Fernández Pacheco wrote gloomily in his visita ad limina report to Rome, that "generally, in the temporal [Cuenca] suffers much misery and poverty, and grave calamities from the wars which have consumed people and estates, from which follows the greatest prejudice to the churches and temples because of the loss in ecclesiastical income, which every day is less."⁽⁵⁾ Population figures speak for themselves. Overall, between 1591 and 1654 the diocese's population declined by some forty percent. Although La Mancha escaped severe depopulation, parts of the Serranía and the city of Cuenca lost up to 60 percent of their inhabitants (see map 3).⁽⁶⁾ The worst years of the crisis in the province were from 1601 to 1625, while the city of Cuenca was hit again by severe epidemics in 1631 and 1647.⁽⁷⁾ During the latter outbreak of disease, the city's doctor wrote a pamphlet designed to put to rest any fears that the illness was the plague. He argued that the city's climate retarded the spread of the disease, and concluded that the illness, from which some four hundred [174] people had died, was tabardillo [typhus], which he described as a contagious fever very common in Spain since it first appeared in Granada in 1557.⁽⁸⁾

The twin motors of Cuenca's economy, textiles and livestock, also went into steep decline. The first sign that the textile industry was in difficulty came in a report from the city's representative to the Cortes of 1576. The bottom must have fallen out immediately thereafter; according to the social projector from Cuenca, Caxa de Leruela, in 1631 the city's textile workers processed only 10,000 arrobas of wool, compared with the 150,000 arrobas that were worked in 1600. Caxa de Leruela saw the problems of seventeenth-century Spain from the perspective of the livestock industry, long a bulwark of Cuenca's wealth. If the herds could be restored, everything else would flow from that. In 1649, the head of the sheepowners' guild in Cuenca claimed that the conquense herds were only one fifth of what they had been and proposed various measures to rebuild them. Commercial tax revenues from the city express the collapse of the local economy most succinctly. Revenues reached their peak between 1577 and 1590, then fell by sixty percent before 1640.⁽⁹⁾

In a matter of two generations, the diocese of Cuenca suffered a demographic crisis similar to the one that ocurred in Spain following the Black Death in 1348.⁽¹⁰⁾ Just as medieval Christians turned to new religious strategies to cope with the enormity of the crisis, conquenses changed their spiritual priorities to find a safe haven for their souls.

For communities, one answer was to redouble their vows to the saints.⁽¹¹⁾ Between 1583 and 1654, when the next survey of rural chapels was conducted, conquenses made an enormous investment in heavenly protection. Despite the crippling loss in the communities' population and income, in seventy years, the diocese had managed to increase the number of rural shrines from an average of 2.4 chapels to 2.9 per community, or a total of 150 new shrines.⁽¹²⁾ The larger the community, the more new chapels (see table 6.1). Aside from the fact that larger communities had more resources to dedicate to chapels, most of them, located in La Mancha, were least affected by population loss. The larger communities also were better able to maintain their chapels. The chapels noted for being in a poor state of repair were located in communities that had fallen from about three hundred to one hundred households but were still saddled with the obligations of a larger town.  On the whole,

Note: The 1584 visitation covered one-third of the diocese, mostly the Serranía; the 1654 visitation covered half the diocese, the Serranía and La Mancha. Only 84 communities were visited in both years. Unfortunately, the records of the 1654 visitation do not list confraternities.

Conquenses were not content, however, to build new chapels to the same old saints, who, after all, had failed them just when they were needed most. As old saints proved inadequate, conquenses desperately "shopped" for new patrons. In this give and take, or shopping for saints, one can observe Trent's pressure coming to bear on the communities' search for new patrons. Clearly, despite the increase in different advocations, something akin to a centralization of devotions was taking place. By and large, conquenses abandoned minor cults and adopted more international or regionally known devotions.⁽¹³⁾ This trend reflects the successful knitting together of the diocese as one spiritual unit, rather than 354 independent parishes, each with its own practices. As had been the case in 1583, overall, eight saints still commanded over two-thirds of all chapel dedications, but locally popular saints, such as Christopher, Blaise, and Quitería, had given ground to better-known divinities (Ann, Roch) recognized for their general healing powers.

Although in the long run the better-known saints came to fore, on a town-by-town basis, much of the shopping for protectors seemed to be an aimless, hit-or-miss swapping of cults.⁽¹⁴⁾ One town's deadbeat

[176] might become another community's savior: although four communities gave up on Christopher, another four towns decided to try out his powers. In seventy years of trial and error, very few communities kept the same configuration of patrons. For example, in 1585 the town of Escamilla (382 households in 1591) maintained two chapels, one dedicated to Saint Sebastian and the other to Saint Lucy. Seventy years later, when the town's population down to 170 households, Saint Sebastian had survived but was reinforced by a new chapel dedicated to Saint Roch, and Lucy, a specialist saint, had been replaced by the more comprehensive Nuestra Señora del Remedio.⁽¹⁵⁾ In all, eighty-four communities visited in 1584 had dropped one third of their original patrons by 1654. Among the least popular cults were the Souls in Purgatory (more on this below), Christopher and Lucy (eye disease), Quitería (rabies), Bartholomew, Catherine, and the Holy Cross. Among the most enduring were the general healing or protecting saints- Mary, Sebastian, Santiago, and Archangel Michael. In addition to the cults that had survived, in place were more than one hundred chapels to saints whose cults were new to the town and even to the region (Peter Martyr, Barbara, Joseph). Most of these were healers as well. Thus, a simple comparison of the cults present at the time of each visitation obscures the heavy experimentation that went on in each community (see table 6.2).

The traditional saint for plague was Sebastian. Most communities evidently thought it prudent to keep their vows to Sebastian. But Sebastian by himself no longer was enough protection; to cope, conquenses turned to two new saints, Roch and Julián, who came from Cuenca itself. Roch's cult had been reconfirmed by the papacy in the sixteenth century and reinforced locally by holidays declared in the cities of Cuenca and Huete.⁽¹⁶⁾ In 1584 the saint had four chapels in eighty-four towns. All of the four towns kept Roch, and nineteen other towns, half of which already had chapels dedicated to Sebastian, vowed to the new saint. One town even dropped Sebastian and replaced him with Roch! Devotion to Julián, a local saint at first recognized only in the city of Cuenca, spread outside of the capital because of his reputation for being able to head off the plague.⁽¹⁷⁾ The twin doctors Cosme and Damian, also were adopted in the region, presumably on account of their healing abilities.

The clear winners, however, were Mary and the Holy Family - Ann, Joseph, and the Christ Child - who were prized for their more general ability to protect and heal communities, individuals, crops and animals.

Mary's importance and the changes in her devotion cannot be told by simply counting her chapels. During the seventeenth century, the cult of Mary more than ever came to serve as the bridge between local faith and the universal church. Villages placed enormous emphasis on Mary as the protector of humankind, to the detriment of the central message of Catholicism, redemption through Christ's sacrifice. To regain the correct perspective, the church promoted cults that emphasized Mary's suffering for the loss of her son.⁽²¹⁾ At the village chapels, internationally or regionally known forms and devotions replaced more local ones. For example, over half of the new cults to Mary involved the holy family or doctrine, while the remainder were the more traditional local manifestations. The cult of the Immaculate Conception, one of the most highly promoted devotions of the seventeenth century, gained seven new shrines in these remote villages.⁽²²⁾ Several of the well-known Marian cults, such as Our Lady of the Snows, Remedy, Solitude, and the order of Saint Dominic (Rosary) became more popular in the area, as did advocations of Mary that had been regional shrines in Cuenca in the sixteenth century, for example, Our Lady of Anguish, from the city of Cuenca, and Our Lady of Consolation, from Iniesta.

The important regional shrines, which almost always were centered around a local manifestation of the Virgin, were more closely identified with the church and in a sense homogenized, despite each cult's claim to uniqueness. This standardization was achieved by associating many of the shrines with a religious order and giving each one its official history. The process began in 1622, when Baltasar Porreño made a complete listing of the diocese's Marian shrines, including those that belonged to the religious orders.⁽²³⁾ Between 1630 and 1775, many of the diocese's important shrines were written up, a foundation legend was created or noted, and a list was made of the Virgin's miracles.⁽²⁴⁾

Images were the focal point of all of the chapels, in some cases their very reason for being. The foundation legend's function was to explain the existence and powers of these venerable images of the Virgin. Following the tradition of Spain's most famous shrines (Santiago and Guadalupe), images turned up in lonely fields, abandoned castles, even in a blackberry bramble. Once, a farmer in La Mancha was out plowing and his oxen suddenly could not move. When he lifted the plowshare, [179] he found it had stuck on an image of Mary not much larger than his thumb. Another image was found by a shepherd in a cave.⁽²⁵⁾ This was the chosen holy ground, and if villagers attempted to remove the image, it would return to the spot where it was found. The modern shrine would then be built around the miraculous image. According to the chroniclers, the oldest were the images venerated at Nuestra Señora de Monsalud in Córcoles and at Nuestra Señora de Texeda, whose images monastic promoters claimed had appeared or been given to their institutions in the thirteenth century. Another shrine known for its miraculous image was Nuestra Señora de la Zarza in Cañete, which according to tradition first was found in a castle cellar at Castiel, five leagues from Cañete. The image traveled during the night to Cañete and was found the next morning in a blackberry bramble outside the town wall. When the Castielans tried to steal back the image, she returned to her prickly throne.⁽²⁶⁾

The history of the shrine at Fuensanta betrayed the "process of sacralization" that was taking place among the diocese's shrines.⁽²⁷⁾ Truly powerful Marian images, although always discovered by humble shepherds and farmers, were thought to be better off in the hands of religious, who could serve Mary's cult with more honor than could a local priest or a confraternity. In the case of Fuensanta, according to the report made to the king by the town council of La Roda in 1576, the original shrine had been built at the site of a miraculous spring. The town council made no special mention of the image that was present at the shrine, although it was mentioned in a 1541 inquisitorial trial (see Chapter 5). After a struggle, the Trinitarian order got hold of the place in the 1550s and in 1648 published a foundation story that placed the apparition of the image, not the spring, at the center of cult and justified their custodianship of the image.⁽²⁸⁾

The seventeenth century in Spain was a time of increased reliance on the saints' ability to bargain with God; however, it was also a time to turn to unorthodox remedies to gain that supernatural advantage.⁽²⁹⁾ More than one hundred years earlier, conquenses commonly had turned to both white and black magic, as well as Christianity, in order to conjure their environment. In the seventeenth century, while they were tempted to do so again, conditions in the diocese had changed dramatically since the early sixteenth century. Diocesan officials and inquisitors moved in quickly whenever a supernatural event threatened to gain too much notoriety or to challenge the church's monopoly over [180] magic. For example, when the unscrupulous priest Garci Sánchez exorcised Ynés de Moratalla in 1514 and events got out of control, it was two years before authorities finally disciplined the priest. In 1604, when María Escalada of Tinajas was possessed by three devils, her relatives, like those of Ynes, took her to a local exorcist to be cured. This time, the priest worked his magic with the intercession of Ignatius Loyola in the presence of several Dominicans and Franciscans. Within one year, the miracle was officially investigated and approved by Bishop Pacheco.⁽³⁰⁾

While the bishop gained control over the diocese's miracles, it fell to the Inquisition to investigate other forms of supernatural events. In Cuenca, the Inquisition appears to have gained jurisdiction over virtually all cases of magic and witchcraft, as well as visions and prophecies. No cases involving religious crimes of any sort were tried by secular courts, and only a few cases of superstition appeared in the episcopal curia. Throughout most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on the average the tribunal of Cuenca processed one or two cases of magic each year, usually about 2 percent of the court's total annual case load. The exceptions were the decade of 1510-19 and the years between 1620 and 1649. For the most part, the tribunal approached its cases of sorcery, faith-healing, divination, black magic, and witchcraft with a great deal of caution. The tribunal reached a positive verdict in only 30 percent of the 306 complete trials preserved, while the remainder of cases were suspended or absolved. The low conviction rate reflects the tribunal's orders to rely solely on evidence of actual activities. Following the directives of the Suprema, inquisitors in Cuenca refused to convert folk magic into diabolism, even when the accused herself might have called upon the devil or wished to cause harm.

During the early, bloody years of the tribunal, when conviction rates for all offenses were extremely high, all seven of the defendants brought to trial for sorcery and superstition between 1491 and 1510 were found guilty, and several were executed.⁽³¹⁾ Yet, over the course of the sixteenth century the tribunal of Cuenca became increasingly skeptical of the crimes of witchcraft and sorcery; conviction rates declined throughout the century, while accusations hovered between1 percent and 4 percent of the tribunals' docket. Between 1590 and 1619 the tribunal found positively in only two cases out of the fifty-four preserved.

In 1585 the papacy issued a bull condemning divination, which the Spanish tribunals publicized in their edicts. In the first half of the seventeenth century, trials for sorcery and superstition became more [181] common, despite the overall decline in the Inquisition's activity. Moreover, the inquisitors' attitude towards such crimes seemed to stiffen, and convictions (none involving the death sentence) began to creep upwards until they stabilized at about one third of cases processed.

The most common charge (half of total charges) was for hechicerías, which roughly translates as "sorcery" and included a wide variety of practices, ranging from love magic to curses. The sorcerer, who could be either male or female, might call on the devil to execute spells but did not enter into a formal alliance with him, as did the witch. The term "superstition" was often used in connection with white magic, as when two women collected vervain one Midsummer's Eve and placed it under the altar cloth so that the herb would be blessed at the consecration of the host. These cases were easily disposed of by the inquisitors, who commented in 1616 that "it appears that these women are not malicious, and so correcting them seems sufficient."⁽³²⁾ Potentially more serious cases of maleficium, diabolism, and witchcraft were extremely rare. During the calamitous seventeenth century, more conquenses may have felt the need to rely on unorthodox supernatural help, but only rarely were they prepared to bring the devil actively into their affairs.

No matter how many precautions one took, sooner or later death claimed its due and the soul began its long journey towards paradise. Late medieval manuals for dying outlined in detail how to prepare for the inevitable; many authors in sixteenth-century Spain translated Kempis's Imitatio Christi or Erasmus's Preparación para la muerte or wrote their own tracts.⁽³³⁾ One of the most popular of all the guides was Venegas's Agonía y tránsito de la muerte, which was first published in 1537 and went through eleven editions before 1600.⁽³⁴⁾ Venegas's tract also contained a section of practical advice about the spiritual value of wills and detailed explanations of the doctrine of purgatory and suffrages. Venegas emphasized that through baptism, all Christians belonged to the Mystic Body, whose head was Christ. Death did not remove a Christians from the Body but immediately placed them on another plane of existence. The actions of Christians on earth, above all, the performance of the sacrifice and sacrament of mass, could benefit those who suffered in purgatory. Venegas's tract was soon reinforced by the authority of the Council of Trent, which decreed that the souls in purgatory could be aided by means of suffrages, particularly the sacrifice of mass.⁽³⁵⁾

[182] A few conquenses maintained a materialist view of life, and dared to say so.⁽³⁶⁾ The overwhelming majority, however, believed in the inevitability of purgatory (hell was a fairly remote possibility, and only the saints went straight to heaven). As Cosme García, a young shepherd, put it, only those who committed suicide (desesperarse) or died in mortal sin without repenting and doing penance went to hell; otherwise, no matter how vile a man's life, if he repented at the moment of death, God would forgive him.⁽³⁷⁾ Another young man believed that there was "glory, purgatory and hell and that there is another life. If they do good works, they'll go to heaven and without them they'll go to hell."⁽³⁸⁾ However, it was Benito de Solera, the son of a prosperous farmer, who had the most pragmatic understanding of the nature of salvation. He was working in a vineyard with some companions, when one of them told him,

"The Gospel says that it is no more possible for the rich to enter heaven than a camel through the eye of a needle." He [Benito] thought that they meant his father and father-in-law, who are rich, so he replied "They can so enter, and what's more, they're better equipped for it because they've got property. The Gospel wouldn't say such a thing!"⁽³⁹⁾

With this firm belief in the value of suffrages, the next world, and individual judgement, conquenses prepared for death. All of eternity rested on a what one did for a few moments and it was easy to slip. Ascetic writers and Lenten preachers dwelt on the importance of never losing sight of the final moment. In practical terms, the church's teaching meant that one should never die far from a priest and the sacraments, for, just as Cosme García had explained, a repentant death guaranteed one's salvation. And most conquenses managed to make a good death. In the parish death registers, which Trent had mandated, priests were required to record the circumstances of each parishioner's passing. In the late sixteenth century, virtually all adults in the parish of San Gil (Cuenca) and the village of Villarejo de la Peñuela received last rites, and the exceptions were duly explained.⁽⁴¹⁾

Prior to death, most conquenses drew up their wills or made their final wishes known to the parish priest. The earliest notarial registers [183] in Cuenca date from 1505. A surprising characteristic of conquense testaments is their sexual equality: men and women willed in equal numbers throughout the period studied. The vast majority of testators had to work within the restrictions imposed by the inheritance laws of Castile, which allowed testators to dispose freely of only one fifth of their estate when there were legal heirs.⁽⁴²⁾ Because of the partible inheritance laws, many conquenses did not draw up a will, but they did tell their priests how they wanted to be buried. From the notarial and parish registers, it is possible to gain an idea of the wishes of most of the city's adult population.⁽⁴³⁾

Unlike Inquisition testimony, the formulaic language of Cuenca's testaments casts no more than the most general light on attitudes about death and the afterlife. City notaries used the same preambles over and over again, and they freely copied the model wills printed in such handbooks as F. Díaz de Toledo's Las Notas del Relator and H. Díaz de Valdepeñas's Summa de notas copiosas.⁽⁴⁴⁾ Valdepeñas's guide even included a selection of preambles, from which the client could choose the profession of faith appropriate to his station in life. All preambles invoked the name of God or the Holy Trinity, indicated the testator's state of health and his or her desire to place their soul on the road to salvation, and called upon Mary to plead on their behalf with Christ the Redeemer. Holograph preambles were very rare and almost always written by priests.⁽⁴⁵⁾

Although ordinary conquenses did not often put words to their beliefs, the provisions of their wills speak for them. Until the turn of the sixteenth century, conquenses' approach to death was similar to the strategies worked out in other Catholic, corporate societies of the time. The underlying assumption was that after death the soul went to purgatory, where it would be purged of its sins for a determined period of time. Suffrages could either reduce the time the soul spent being cleansed of sin, increase its merit or both. The souls in purgatory had the right to expect the living to reduce their pains, and if the living did not, sometimes the suffering souls would leave purgatory to impress their wishes on the living. In 1628, for example, the soul of a Captain Chinchilla, who was beheaded in Cuenca in 1600, began to haunt a respectable "spiritual person" in Arévalo (Avila) in an effort to make his relatives in Cuenca do some good for his soul.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Thus, far from loosening the responsibilities of family and collective associations, for individuals of all social stations, death tightened the bonds of mutual self-help. [184] Death was a time to recognize one's debts to kin and community, past and present, and in turn make society honor its obligations to one's own self.

Beyond this common understanding of death, in the sixteenth century there was enormous variety in the provisions that individuals made for the final moment and beyond. The traditional burial and mourning period in Cuenca involved up to five phases, which served to wean the soul of the deceased away from the living and remand it to the relative anonymity of purgatory. First, there were the arrangements for the day of burial: the shroud for the body, the choice of gravesite, the procession to the final resting spot, the services held at the funeral or on that same day. In Cuenca, the remains were immediately buried inside the church in individual or family niches.⁽⁴⁷⁾ The burial was followed by a cycle of commemorative services and offerings lasting up to nine days - the novenario and ofrenda of wax, bread, and wine. Mourning and memorial masses or prayers could continue for one year following the funeral. During this time, the widow would not attend mass, or if she did, she would not stand up at the reading of the evangelist.⁽⁴⁸⁾ For the space of one year, a female member of the family might bring offerings (the añal) to the gravesite. On the anniversary of the funeral, to mark the closing of the mourning period, the same services that had been performed at the burial were performed again. Finally, if one were wealthy enough and so inclined, one could arrange to have masses said for his or her soul in perpetuity or even found a private chantry. Once the soul had taken up residence in purgatory, the living were obligated to work for its release by praying and buying memorial masses and indulgences.⁽⁴⁹⁾

Depending on one's wealth, social status, and heirs, infinite variations existed within the outline described above. Until the last quarter of the sixteenth century, conquenses participated enthusiastically in the corporate burial strategies of the late Middle Ages. The city was prosperous; before 1565 nearly half of all adults had testaments drawn up in front a notary.⁽⁵⁰⁾ Particularly popular in Cuenca until 1585 were elaborate processions of confraternities, individual gifts to the poor, mass cycles for oneself and the souls in purgatory, and the añal. Testators took laborious care to dictate a document of faith that precisely enumerated each good work that was to be performed by specific relatives and priests on behalf of the testator's soul and those in purgatory.⁽⁵¹⁾

The testator's first important decision concerned where the final resting spot would be and with whom he or she would rest. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, individuals were very clear [185] about where they wanted to be buried, but with time they became less insistent about with whom they were laid to rest, perhaps an indication that lineage was becoming less important to them. Before 1585, 80 percent of testators chose burial in their parish church, and the remainder chose one of the city's monasteries, usually San Francisco.⁽⁵²⁾ One-third of men chose to be buried alone, often because they had no family in the city. Only one-fifth of women chose burial by themselves, one-quarter with their spouses, and one-third with their family. The remainder left the choice to their executors. ⁽⁵³⁾

The solemn procession to the grave was an obligatory part of the laying to rest. Virtually everyone - men and women of all ranks- requested a cortege with clergy from the parish and their favorite confraternities. Members of the gentry and professional classes were the most insistent on large funerals, in 1585-95 asking on the average for 2.3 associations per procession. They were followed by the clergy (2.0) and third estate (1.9). Beyond the common desire for a public funeral, there was little similarity between processions. Although one could pay most cabildos to march in the cortege, each estate preferred to be buried by the confraternities most closely associated with its order and professions. The clergy called upon the ecclesiastical confraternities to march in their processions and indulged in the greatest amount of pomp, with six to twelve marchers carrying torches.⁽⁵⁴⁾ In accord with medieval ideas about charity, individual gifts of food and clothing were handed out to the paupers who showed up for the funeral or carried the torches.⁽⁵⁵⁾ In solidarity with the clergy, many members of the gentry requested that the beneficed priests accompany them to the grave along with their own noble associations. Like the clergy, the gentry paid for torches and gave out alms to the poor, though with less liberality. The third estate relied primarily on burial associations and their own guilds, with a scattering of requests for the newly founded parish confraternities of the Blessed Sacrament and the clerical cabildos.

After the body had been laid to rest, the family settled into the mourning period. Throughout the sixteenth century, conquenses observed an intense nine-day period of grieving, masses, and grave offerings, followed by a less intense year of mourning.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Before Trent, half of all testators made provisions for a year's worth of grave offerings known as the añal. Every day or on Sundays a female member of the deceased's household placed on the grave a gift of bread, wine, and wax which would collected by the priest.⁽⁵⁷⁾ Despite the pagan connotations of the practice, the añal was considered a form of suffrage [186] and was not openly condemned in the diocese's constitutions.⁽⁵⁸⁾ The añal's function was very different from the ritual funeral banquets that existed at the time in most countries and until recently in some villages of Spain. The wake served to bind the living together in one cathartic dinner; the añal, on the other hand, in a sense prolonged the deceased's life, because for an entire year the dead person continued to be a mouth to feed and a drain on the family budget.⁽⁵⁹⁾

The añal gifts in the first half of the century were modest compared to what they were to become. Typically, the testator asked for one maravedi's worth of bread, a blanca's worth of wine, and a wax tablet for weekdays, and double that amount on Sundays and feastdays. The cost came to about three ducats for the year.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Noble women and and priests championed its cause, and fewer individuals gave ever more extravagantly. No more did the testator ask for the simple chunk of bread and cup of wine. In 1575 Esteban de Palomares, a bonnet maker and familiar in the Inquisition, required on Sundays six pounds of bread, including a loaf of blessed bread, two maravedis' worth of wine, and two wax tapers; On Easter and the feasts of Our Lady, two pounds of stew and the same quantity of wine and wax; and finally, on weekdays, a pound of bread, one maravedi's worth of wine, and a wax tablet. Total cost for the year was about fifty ducats.⁽⁶¹⁾ The cura of the parish church of Santa Cruz, Lcdo. Diego de Cueva, wanted far less, but in 1605 high grain prices forced him to pay as much as Palomares. His request for a pound of bread, two tapers, wine and a wax tablet on Sundays, and just one half pound of bread and one maravedi's worth of wine on weekdays, if actually paid out, would cost his estate fifty ducats.⁽⁶²⁾ As a group, noble women gave most generously (an average of forty-two ducats per testator!), followed by the priests (thirty-two ducats) and bourgeois men (fifteen ducats). Artisans gave the least, about eight and one-half ducats a year (see table 6.3).

In later years the añal fell out of favor with most testators. What was perhaps symptomatic of the declining popularity of offerings of food and wax, many Inquisition trials dealing with suffrages involved criticism of the añal, which was perceived as benefiting the clergy rather than the soul or the cult. Germán Saiz, a barber-surgeon in Salmerón, put it succinctly: "It seemed total nonsense to him to take those añales just so the priests wouldn't complain." The inquisitors had to release Alvaro de Soria, a farmer-shepherd from Villanueva de los Escuderos, who said, "Masses and Pater Nosters are better for the souls than offerings. We make the abbots rich." Despite his critical attitude, the doctrine was right.  Perhaps because of the  decline

Note: Between 1505-35 and 1605-15, the prices of wheat and wine quadrupled in New Castile, and the price of wax tripled.

The añal was a form of suffrage, but it probably also was given with the hope that a generous gift would motivate the parish priests to say the memorial masses the deceased had requested. The most important feature of the period was the spiraling demand for masses, so many, in fact, that diocesan inspectors found that parish priests had difficulty keeping up with the orders.⁽⁶⁴⁾ As in everything else they did, testators were quite specific about the kinds of masses they wanted recited or chanted and for whose benefit the masses were intended.

Some theologians pointed out that if people really wanted to save their souls, rather than buying masses, they would be better off going to mass while they were still alive.⁽⁶⁵⁾ This advice fell on deaf ears; only one in ten Conquenses attended mass more frequently than they were required (see Chapter 4). Nonetheless, when the final moment drew near, conquenses wanted all the heavenly insurance money could buy. The trend to order more masses was universal (see graph 6.1). The numbers increased steadily throughout the sixteenth century until 1595. After a setback in 1605, suffrages resumed their upward spiral. As in Madrid, the extreme actions of a tiny minority of testators served to

Just as important as the number of masses ordered was their nature and purpose, for it is here that the effects of the church's teaching may be best observed. Before 1565, instead of requesting low masses, testators [190] preferred  to order

Although these mass cycles were certainly pious and believed to be of ancient origin, in the sixteenth century the church discouraged their use. The problem was not the cycles themselves but the superstitions and abuses that accompanied them, particularly the cycle known as the trental (treintanario). Trentals were cycles of thirty masses said for the souls of the dead; Saint Gregory (540-604) supposedly said the first trental for the soul of a departed friend. By the sixteenth century, the most pious trental (as well as the most expensive) involved shutting the priest inside the church for an entire month, during which time he would say a mass and perform other offices every day. In Spain, there were trentals of Saint Gregory (sometimes confused with Saint Vincent's), Saint Amador, and the Name of Jesus. In Cuenca, the price of enclosed trental was fixed in the 1531 constitutions at sixty reals for the priest and six reals for the sacristan, plus wax, altogether the equivalent of two months' salary for an artisan. Because of the excessive cost, virtually all testators asked for "open" trentals, which did not require the priest to live in the church and only cost fifteen reals plus wax and two reals for the sacristan.⁽⁶⁷⁾

In Cuenca's constitutions, Bishop Ramírez noted that during enclosed trentals, to pass the time, the priests amused themselves by playing dice or cards in the church. Superstitions surrounded the cycles as well: men and women believed that Saint Amador's and Saint Vincent's masses would only be effective if the candles were arranged in a certain way.⁽⁶⁸⁾ The contemporary theologian, Pedro Ciruelo, condemned the trentals harshly. He ridiculed people's belief in these cycles and their obsession with having all the masses said correctly without interruptions.⁽⁶⁹⁾ Although no specific orders condemning the cycles in Cuenca have been found, they must have been officially discouraged because they all but [191] disappeared from the city and country parishes between 1575 and 1585.⁽⁷⁰⁾ The force of tradition lived on, however, and sometimes individuals would order pseudo-trentals by asking for blocks of thirty masses to be said for their dead or themselves.⁽⁷¹⁾

As the trentals and other cycles disappeared, two new types of masses appeared in the testaments, the devotional and perpetual masses. Unlike the mass cycles, they never represented a significant percentage of the total masses ordered (the function of the trentals, to reduce the pains of purgatory, was replaced by large numbers of low masses, or misas rezadas). Rather, as discussed in Chapter 5, devotional masses reflected an individual's attachment to specific cults and the sacrifice of the mass itself. Perpetual masses, on the other hand, were endowed masses for the soul(s) in purgatory. Because of their cost, few testators could afford to establish them. However, Venegas, in his influential tract on death, stated unequivocably that perpetual masses were the best form of suffrage, and apparently, for a while conquenses, particularly women, agreed with him.⁽⁷²⁾ Although in the early part of the century just 20 percent of female testators established perpetual masses, during the years between 1565 and 1575, one third found the money for a perpetual mass, usually in honor of the Virgin.

Conquenses undeniably showed enormous concern for the welfare of their own souls, but what about the souls already in purgatory? These souls had a claim on the charity of the living, but before Trent conquenses paid little attention to their rights. Before 1555, only one-third of testators made provisions for the souls in purgatory. Over the course of the century, however, concern for the welfare of the souls in purgatory grew in tandem with the increase in masses to be said for oneself. By 1565, most men and women were setting aside some money for the souls in purgatory. The rapid increase occurred among all social groups. In 1565, for example, three quarters of the third estate gave to the souls in purgatory, and two-thirds of clergy and gentry gave as well. During the next twenty years, more members of the clergy and gentry were giving to the souls in purgatory, but interest among the artisans and merchants of Cuenca had fallen to only half of testators.⁽⁷³⁾

During this golden age of purgatory, priests reminded the faithful that their obligation to the dead was not limited to their own relatives; as Christians they were bound to work for the salvation of the entire Mystic Body, and that included strangers as well. Clearly, this message was absorbed. Testators earmarked certain numbers of masses for categories of souls in purgatory: ten masses for the souls of one's parents

Just how many masses were conquenses willing to consign for the souls in purgatory? Concern for these souls was a noble thought, one that could easily be gratified by a token mass or two. However, true desire to do good by others meant spending limited resources on masses for relatives and strangers that more profitably could be spent on one's own soul. Had all good works had equal value in the eyes of God, perhaps conquenses would have behaved less like accountants about

[193] the matter, but the bottom line was that masses were more efficacious than other forms of good works, and they could be said for the benefit of specific individuals.⁽⁷⁴⁾ Thus, spending a great deal of one's available resources on the souls in purgatory was an act of determined charity and some self-abnegation. Graph 6.1 shows the overall mean numbers of masses ordered by citizens of the city of Cuenca but does not differentiate between masses put toward personal salvation as opposed to the salvation of others. Graph 6.2 illustrates how testators viewed the relative merits of buying masses for others. At no time between 1505 and 1645 were Conquenses as a group willing to put other souls ahead of their own, but at certain times they felt more keenly their obligations to the souls in purgatory than at others.

In the sixteenth century, the church's teaching about purgatory made deep inroads on conquenses' testamentary wishes. Conquenses provided for more masses for their own souls, for the souls of their families, and significantly, for the souls of strangers. The church successfully broke through the medieval tendency to see relationships primarily in terms of blood. The essential thing for Christians was to remember that the real bond between them was spiritual and included everyone; bonds of kinship were of secondary importance. However, the church's teaching was not yet complete: funeral arrangements in the sixteenth century still emphasized the corporate nature of salvation. Conquenses had yet to learn that at the final moment they stood alone before God.
 

The carefully orchestrated, elaborate dance of death unraveled in the years between 1585 and 1615. While funerals remained public affairs, most testators increasingly focused on a solitary approach towards salvation. A few conquenses, however, responded to these years of intense crisis in the city by redoubling their efforts to ease the suffering of their fellow citizens.

In many matters regarding their funerals, some testators simply ceased to care any more. Decisions about which confraternities should march in the cortege, what kinds of services to hold, the offering, and the añal frequently were left to the executors, who were asked merely to do whatever was appropriate or customary.⁽⁷⁵⁾ This seeming lack of interest was most pronounced in 1605, a year of severe plague in the city, but continued after the epidemic subsided. Persons who specified what they wanted during these years came to have a very different idea about what was the correct way to leave this world and enter the next.

In general, testators wanted what can be best described as a "quick [194] fix."⁽⁷⁶⁾ First, the entire funeral process was shortened. The novena, if observed at all, was reduced from nine days to three. The anniversary ceremony, instead of being held at the end of the year, was moved up to the end of the novenario. Many testators asked for the so-called bula de difuntos and were buried in the Franciscan habit, which they hoped would speed their passage through purgatory. Very few testators required the year-long añal, and the emphasis shifted from gifts of bread and wine for the priest to expensive wax tapers symbolizing Christ the Redeemer.⁽⁷⁷⁾ The popularity of perpetual masses plummeted; instead, testators put their money into masses that were to be said as soon as possible, at least a few of them at the privileged altars in the city (see plate 7).⁽⁷⁸⁾

This abbreviation of rituals signals two changes in popular belief. First, like Catholics elsewhere, conquenses were now convinced that the judgment of their soul would take place immediately following their death.⁽⁷⁹⁾ The author Fr. Gracían de la Madre de Dios, explained this notion quite graphically: "The instant the soul is torn from the flesh, it appears before Christ crucified for personal judgment, accompanied by its two angels, good and bad, and there it gives an account of all of its deeds, words, and thoughts that it has done, said, or had since the time it had the use of reason."⁽⁸⁰⁾ Since judgment was immediate and personal, to grab God's attention, as many suffrages as possible had to be crammed into a three-day burial period. The second change involved the purpose of suffrages. Indulgences and low masses, which served only to reduce the pains of purgatory, triumphed over perpetual masses, or masses said over the course of a year, which were thought to enhance the soul's merit after it arrived in purgatory. This was a direct reversal of the approach recommended by Alexo Venegas, who counseled choice of suffrages based on their capacity to enhance merit over time.⁽⁸¹⁾ Indeed, after 1583, the once-popular book was not reprinted for one hundred years.⁽⁸²⁾

This obsession with a quick and favorable judgment accounts for one of the most striking changes in the funeral arrangements, which was the rise in the importance of the mendicant orders in every aspect of testators' decisions - at the cost, in both income and prestige, of the secular clergy and the burial associations. For a few decades, the Tridentine reform of the secular clergy seemed to bolster their influence among testators in the late sixteenth century, but they were soon overtaken in popularity by the mendicants. ⁽⁸³⁾ After 1565 more testators began to request burial in one of the order's habits (usually the Franciscans)

The city's religious orders soon began to provide more than extra burial space.⁽⁸⁶⁾ The essential shift occurred between 1585 and 1595, when requests for mendicants in the cortege jumped from 7 percent to 26 percent. In 1605-1615, testators of all classes except the clergy wanted larger funeral processions, with an average of three associations per cortege. However, the old corporate loyalties were breaking down. Noble and professional membership in confraternities had fallen from an average of .53 cofradías per person in 1565-75 to .15 in 1605-15; clerical memberships declined from .77 to .33; and the third estate dropped from .50 memberships per person to .36. Instead of calling upon their trade and burial confraternities, conquenses wanted to be buried by the religious orders and mercenary priests, the penitential confraternities and the niños de la doctrina. In short, rather than a social spectacle in which one's peers prayed for one's salvation, testators wanted a religious burial by priests, penitents, and innocents, whose combined prayers God would be sure to hear distinctly. The ostentatious torches were doused, and the beggar-marchers sent away. In succeeding years, even the presence of most of the remaining confraternities was not requested, and the religious orders became the first choice of all testators, who would ask for as many friars from the city's Franciscans, Trinitarians, Augustinians, Mercedarians, and Dominicans as they could afford (see graph 6.3).

Although the turn of the century seems to have been the take-off point for the city's monasteries, it would be another generation before testators' charitable giving fully reflected the new prestige of the religious orders and shrines. In 1605-15 some conquenses' minds were on other problems. The famines and plagues of the preceding twenty years had left a legacy of orphaned children, vagabonds, and sick. All across Castile a debate raged over the best way to deal with the social disaster.

Cuenca's testators responded generously to the crisis by changing their giving preferences. The traditional "scattering" of gifts among the poor at funerals was an inefficient way of channeling funds to the needy. In 1605-15, distributing gifts of food and clothing to the city's poor at funerals declined for the first time in a century, while gifts to hospitals, orphans, and schools increased to one third of all charitable bequests. The city's hospitals were the first to attract attention. In 1565-75 gifts to hospitals accounted for only 5 percent of the total number of bequests; they rose to 10 percent in 1585-95, then 17 percent in 1605-25, and 30 percent by 1645. The bishop of Cuenca, Juan Fernández Vadillo, who [198] died in 1595, led the way by giving the huge sum of twenty thousand ducats to the Hospital of Saint Lucy for the purpose "of curing the shameful poor of this city of Cuenca, giving them doctors, surgeons, diets, and medicines, and whatever else may be necessary for their cure"⁽⁸⁸⁾

The plagues exacerbated the problem of orphaned children. Boys were placed in the city's Colegio de los Niños de la Doctrina and earned their charity by marching in funerals- almost one third of testators in 1605-35 requested their presence in the cortege. Orphaned girls needed dowries. Testators began to realize this especially after 1625, when giving jumped from 9 percent of the total number of bequests to 20 percent. Donors were often women and priests. Don Francisco de Prado, prior of Cuenca and the nephew of Bishop Fresneda, gave five thousand ducats to marry five orphans from towns in the province where he had drawn benefices. Doña Melchora de Montemayor Velázquez was more concerned about taking care of orphans and widows of her own class and lineage. She gave three hundred reals to widowed noblewomen, six hundred reals to three orphan girls, and two thousand ducats for a foundation dedicated to dowering one orphan from her lineage each year.⁽⁸⁹⁾

The number of bequests to charities, however, do not tell the entire story. In reality, in the seventeenth century it was the third estate that responded most vigorously to the city's social crisis by dedicating the majority of their bequests to hospitals, orphans, and schools. But nothing underscored more the unequal distribution of wealth and difference in priorities in the city than did gifts to charity. Although artisans, shopkeepers, and merchants accounted for about two thirds of all bequests between 1605 and 1645, the value of their gifts was a tiny 4 percent of the money given during this time. The clergy and gentry gave both less frequently and less generously to social causes in the city. Social charity had its own merits, but as a form of suffrage, it was not nearly as effective as supporting the divine cult.⁽⁹⁰⁾ With few exceptions the largest gifts went to the city's churches and monasteries.⁽⁹¹⁾ This fact inexorably leads one back to the ever-present preoccupation of the age, personal salvation and the cult of the dead.

After a temporary setback in 1605, the total number of masses ordered per person began to climb again, while the types of masses requested changed. Beyond the customary high mass sung at the funeral, testators increasingly wanted just two other kinds of services: low masses and the special masses said at privileged altars. Devotional masses, which [199] had enjoyed enormous popularity in the sixteenth century, fell to less than 12 percent of requests by 1645 (see graph 5.1). Meanwhile, the mean number of masses ordered per testator tripled between 1605 and 1635. In the parishes, among those who chose not to will, requests for suffrages also rose, so that by 1645 the average order for masses was a third higher than it had been in 1605.

While conquenses were ordering more masses for themselves, what was the fate of the souls already in purgatory? In general, after peaking in 1565 at 80 percent of all testators, each year fewer persons from all social classes gave to the souls in purgatory. By 1645 only 40 percent of testators were making arrangements for the souls; the majority of conquenses were putting their money into masses meant exclusively for themselves. The change in priorities is reflected in the decline in membership in the city's confraternity dedicated to the souls in purgatory and the disappearance in the diocese of several shrines dedicated to the souls (see table 6.2). However, among those who believed firmly in their obligation to the souls in purgatory, the story was slightly different. The two highest percentages of masses ever dedicated to the souls on purgatory (57 percent and 46 percent of all masses) coincided with the worst periods of mortality in the city. It was as if the mortality crisis affected people in radically different ways. During good times, more people remembered the souls in purgatory, but felt less urgency about their plight. During mortality crisis, most testators moved to protect their own souls, but a few selfless individuals took it upon themselves to provide for the well-being of other souls and perhaps placate God with their sacrifices.
 
 

Over the course of one hundred years, residents of the city of Cuenca changed their approach to death and the afterlife. In their concern for ever-larger bequests of masses and numbers of friars, conquenses differed only in degree from Catholics in Madrid, Grenoble, Lyon, or Siena. The same was true of the diocese's towns and villages. A brief excursion to three localities, Villarejo de la Peñuela, San Lorenzo de la Parilla, and Iniesta, suggests that provincial practices evolved similarly to those described in the city.⁽⁹²⁾

Pious bequests outside of the city were smaller but not insignificant in value. In the sixteenth century, funerals were arranged with the same meticulous attention to detail, although without the pomp that the city [200] could provide. The seignorial village of Villarejo de la Peñuela (seventy households in 1579), which lies halfway between the cities of Cuenca and Huete, preserves one of the diocese's oldest death registers, starting in 1557, when the village belonged to Don Perafán de Ribera. Between 1557 and 1578, when the register ends, sixty-seven adults died in the village. According to the new Tridentine laws, the parish priest entered the parishioners' final bequests involving his church. He also noted whether individuals had drawn up a last will and testament, which half of them had -the same incidence of willing as was found in the city of Cuenca at that time. As in the city of Cuenca, those who willed requested more suffrages than those who did not. However, in Villarejo, no great gulf divided the two groups: those who died intestate ordered on the average fifty masses per person, while those who willed ordered eighty-three. (In Cuenca, the numbers in 1575 were 33 to 128!) The villagers ordered on the average sixty-four masses per adult, thirteen of which were earmarked for the souls already in purgatory, a somewhat lower ratio of giving to the souls than in the city.

Although there were some variations, funeral customs in the village were similar to those held in Cuenca at that time. Villarejeños, like conquenses, participated in the vogue for votive masses. One third of those who died requested these masses in honor of the Five Wounds of Christ, the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Holy Ghost-up to twenty-two different masses altogether. Residents of Villarejo were united in their belief that the novena that followed burial was an indispensable part of funeral services, and had to last the full nine days. About the same percentage of individuals as in the city requested the añal, although without the extremes in giving exhibited by conquense testators.⁽⁹³⁾ The village supported two cofradías, the Blessed Sacrament and Souls in Purgatory, which sometimes charged to accompany them to their place of burial.⁽⁹⁴⁾ About one third of villagers gave to charity, primarily to their parish church and local shrines. One variation from the city, however, was the custom of paying to have one's soul remembered in Sunday services for a year (the rogativa). This was the same practice that another town, Ribatajada, complained about in its letter to the bishop of Cuenca in 1566. Another difference consisted in the specific services to held on the day of burial. Residents of Villarejo relied on parts of the liturgy- nocturns and litanies - that were rarely requested in the city.

In contrast to the village of Villarejo, San Lorenzo de la Parrilla and Iniesta were fair-sized towns located in the La Mancha. La Parrilla [201] (738 households in 1591) apparently did not have a notary, but in 1605, Juan de Orozquieta, a notary from Cuenca, visited the town and drew up wills for ten citizens. Iniesta (1030 households) had its own notary, who drew up seventeen wills in the town between 1605 and 1606. Although the numbers are very small, the pattern of pious bequests in La Parrilla and Iniesta bear a strong resemblance to the fashions then current in the city of Cuenca. One was the presence of the mendicant orders in funerals. Both towns had Franciscan convents, which had made a strong impact on the residents' funeral strategies. No one neglected to ask for a mass to be said at the privileged altars maintained in the convents, and almost all testators split their suffrages between the parish church and the Franciscan convent. A few asked to be buried in the Franciscan habit and several wanted the friars to march in their cortege. As in Cuenca, residents of both La Parrilla and Iniesta had simplified and compressed funeral services into the space of three days. Virtually no one asked for devotional masses, and the seventeen Iniestans omitted the añal and novena entirely.⁽⁹⁵⁾

Suffrages cost money, and as time went on, the price of salvation became increasingly more expensive. Or did it? The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were periods of rapid inflation and currency debasement; if funeral costs did not rise in tandem with other costs and salaries, over time testators may have found that the price of masses, the funeral cortege, and the añal was a bargain. Thus, the increase in the numbers of masses may only reflect their relative cheapness, not an investment over and beyond what people were used to paying. Anomalous as it sounds, indexing the cult of the dead for inflation will allow one to understand what part of the cost of salvation was linked to the Price Revolution and what part was the result of changing priorities of testators.

The first item to reflect the impact of inflation was the añal. In the first half of the sixteenth century, testators ordered their añal by referring to monetary amounts: a maravedi's worth of wine, two maravedis' worth of bread, and so on, a practice which made sense during a time of stationary prices. Very quickly, however, as inflation took hold, testators began to stipulate the actual quantities of goods wanted - a pound of bread, a pint of wine - to ensure that the proper amount of offering was placed on the grave. Despite the relentless rise in the prices of these [202] goods (see table 6.3), among testators who desired the añal to be set out, the sheer quantities, as well as the variety of giving, increased.

Relatively few testators wanted the añal, especially as time went on, so in aggregate the cost of the añal did not represent a significant portion of the total amount of money invested in salvation. The most significant cost, of course, was for masses. Although the money spent on masses was referred to as "charity," the money represented an important portion of the unbeneficed priests' income. Ideally, to protect its personnel, the church could not allow the price of masses to lag too far behind inflation. While prices in general rose two and one-half times between 1531 and 1600, the cost of masses rose three times, from seventeen maravedis for a low mass in 1531 to fifty-one maravedis in 1605.⁽⁹⁶⁾ However, adjustments in the cost of a mass were made infrequently, so that towards the end of the sixteenth century the cost of a mass was cheap relative to other expenses.

Although masses were a main feature of the cult of the dead, as seen above, the funeral and mourning period involved many voluntary expenses; it would be misleading to consider only the quantity or monetary value of masses. To create an index for suffrages, several components of the cult were added together: the value of the añal in contemporary prices, the total cost of masses, including perpetual ones, also at contemporary values, and the amount of money given to charities.⁽⁹⁷⁾ The base year was set at 1565- 75 to afford a comparison with Hamilton's price-wage indexes for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Graph 6.4, shows that the price of masses lagged behind inflation in the second half of the sixteenth century. Testators, however, were not content to spend what their parents and grandparents had spent on suffrages and pocket the savings. Instead, the inflation of the cult of the dead rose at twice the rate of inflation in general. The peak of testators' spending coincided with the high mortality of the first quarter of the seventeenth centuries, despite the fact that the price of masses had just been raised by fifty percent.

The very real increase in the cost and amount of suffrages given in Cuenca may help account for one of the remarkable features of seventeenth-century Spain. Even while the population declined and the economy went through one crisis after the next, the ecclesiastical estate prospered. Contemporaries decried the rising numbers of priests, who contributed nothing to the economy and, by their celibacy, robbed the nation of potential new citizens. Modern historians have suggested that the increase in the number of clergy was the result of people entering

Despite Bishop Fernández Pacheco's protestation that church rents were falling, in 1654 the church in Cuenca was larger than it had been in 1591. There were approximately 150 new chapels and 10 new monasteries in the diocese. What is most remarkable, despite the precipitous decline in the bishopric's population, the number of priests had increased by some 30 percent since 1591, with the effect that the percentage of priests in the population doubled. In some parts of the Serranía, where there had been 70 to 94 households for each priest, there were now only 27 to 50 households. In La Mancha, in 1654 there was a priest for every 17 to 26 households (see map 3).

Some of this increase in the number of clergy had to be related to the new foundations of chapels and the large number of masses for the dead. Between 1585 and 1645, by any measure the total number of [204] masses being ordered per adult had at almost doubled. While the diocese's population had been decimated, higher numbers of masses made up for some of the loss in potential testators. For example, although there were only 44 testators in the city of Cuenca in 1645, they ordered a total of 14,319 masses. In 1585, 69 testators ordered 11,874 masses. In other words, while the total number of testators had declined by one-third, the number of masses they ordered more than exceeded the 1585 total. If these figures are borne out by the rest of the diocese, it means that a much smaller population was ordering the same number of suffrages as had been ordered sixty years before.

In the end, an enormous amount of money and real estate was transferred to the church. Between 1505 and 1645, 626 testators in the city of Cuenca willed approximately 69,755 ducats' worth of moveable property to the church and various charities, most of them administered by the church. In addition, five private chapels were endowed by means of entailed properties. The 623 testators represent about 10 percent of the wills drawn up in the city during the period surveyed. One must not forget the majority of faithful who died intestate but who requested masses and gave offerings and charity, or even the many who gave charity or bought indulgences while they were alive. Very quickly it all mounts up. Some of the money disappeared into pittances for the clergy. Much of it eventually was invested in real estate in the city, to be added to the properties willed to the church to fund the perpetual masses and private chapels. In 1752, Cuenca was a clerical and service city in which two-fifths of the inhabitants derived their occupation from the church or as servants to the clergy or other rentiers. Fifty-seven percent of properties and 44 percent of the land area belonged to the various priests and ecclesiastical establishments located in the city.⁽⁹⁸⁾ Outside the city, in terms of value, about 17 percent of rural real estate was owned by the church.⁽⁹⁹⁾ After generations of investing in salvation, the city had become a vast monument to the dead.

In the sixteenth century, members of the church and laity coincided in their goal to cultivate a more intense personal religiosity that included the desire to know God, to live according to Christ's example, and to prepare for death. Private devotions, penitential confraternities, and participation in the church's sacraments all increased. Judging by the types of devotions practiced and suffrages ordered, people were not at all sure that their good works and faith would justify them. Conquenses prayed and read, punished their bodies, and bought perpetual [205] masses in an effort to improve their merit. In the seventeenth century, however, this energy was channeled into very specific provisions for the afterlife. The question of personal salvation was transformed into a new religiosity, one that for many individuals substituted money and priests for prayers and community action. The church had succeeded in implanting a more personal faith, but one that became increasingly mechanical as time went on. If conquenses' wills are any measure of their faith, in the seventeenth century individuals no longer doubted the final destination of their souls or worried about the degree of glory they could achieve in heaven. Hell had receded into the background, and purgatory could be compassed in prayer. Conquenses seemed to ask, not "Will I be saved?" but, "How long until I reach heaven?" and "How much will it cost?" The answer was a question of personal finances. The long-term consequences for Cuenca were plain to see: the subversion of faith and the investment of capital into enterprises that would yield no profit in this world.
 

Epigraph: A. Venegas, Agonía y tránsito de la muerte (1537), 129.

1. J. Gentil da Silva, Desarrollo económico, subsistencia y decadencia en España (Madrid, 1967), 24; J. López-Salazar Pérez, "La población manchega en los siglos XVI y XVII," Revista Internacional de Sociología 38 (1981): 226.

2. V. Pérez Moreda concludes that birth rates, a good indicator of the health of a population, reached their peak in most parts of Spain sometime before 1590 (Las crisis de mortalidad en la España interior, 247).

3. Ibid., 254-64, 270-72.

4. Reher, Town and Country in Pre-Industrial Spain, 153. The actual crisis mortality ratio (percent of mortality in excess of the norm, figured as a twenty-five year running average) was 372.7 percent. Anything more than 50 percent over the norm is considered a crisis.

5. ASV, Cong. Conc., Visitationes, scat. 249A, fol. 1v.

6. The regional figures were arrived at by comparing the populations of towns counted in both the 1591 census and the 1654 diocesan visitation. For the city of Cuenca, see Reher, Town and Country in Pre-Industrial Spain, 120. One report put the city's population in 1644 at 1,200 vecinos, down from 3,083 in 1597. The figures may seem extraordinary but are consistent with other data. The cities of Burgos, Medina del Campo, Avila, and Toledo suffered similar catastrophic declines, and the regions bordering the Serranía conquense - Guadalajara, Soria, and Teruel - suffered the three highest aggregate crisis mortality rates in all of interior Spain. The modern provinces of Toledo and Madrid, which bordered Cuenca's less stricken southern and western districts, were among the least affected (Pérez Moreda, Las crisis de mortalidad en la España interior, 126).

7. Pérez Moreda, Las crisis de mortalidad en la España interior, 126; Reher, Town and Country in Pre-Industrial Spain, 153.

8. Descalzi de Salcedo, Información y defensorio contra la mala voz de pestilencia (1647). Reher maintains the epidemic was plague, but does not cite Descalzi (Town and Country in Pre-Industrial Spain, 154).

9. Troitiño Vinuesa, Cuenca, 21-58; Reher, Town and Country in Pre-Industrial Spain, 32.

10. For a recent discussion of the impact of the plague in Castile and bibliography, see P. Iradiel et al., Historia medieval de la España cristiana (Madrid, 1989), 464-73.

11. Elsewhere in Spain, the relationship between religious commitment and hard times did not go unnoticed by the seventeenth-century observer, Juan de la Portilla Duque, who wrote in 1661,

"In these last twenty years, we have built and consecrated to God, to His Most Holy Mother, and to His Saints, new temples, new altars, new chapels; rebuilt old churches, founded new congregations, and constructed different monasteries and hospitals with incredible outlays of new devotion and grandeur" (cited in Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 200-201). A local study which shows the religious response to disaster is J. Calvo Poyato, "Religiosidad y calamidades en tierras de Córdoba a finales del siglo XVII," Hispania Sacra 39 (1987): 185-202.

12. The two visitation reports are not easily compared: in 1584 inspectors reported on 116 towns and in 1654 over 186 towns were visited. Only 84 communities figure in both inspections. In 1659, Bishop Fernández Pacheco wrote to Rome that there were 1,000 chapels in the diocese, 282 communities and 350 pilas, or parishes, which works out to the same ratio of chapels to communities as in the partial survey conducted in 1654. Knowing that the bishop's surveys were accurate, though incomplete, the 1584 coefficient of 2.4 chapels per parish works out to a total of 840 chapels for the entire diocese at that time.

13. This dropping of saints occurred despite the fear of reprisals from the saints, and the need for formal dispensation (Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 31-32 and note 29). The same process of conversion to better-known devotions occurs in seventeenth-century Lyon (Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 119).

14. For a description of how towns selected saints, see Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 33-42.

15. ADC, L-204A, fol. 84v and C.E. leg. 1, exp. 20.

16. The city of Cuenca first vowed devotion to Roch in 1508 (AMC, leg. 225, exp. 1, fol. 117r). In 1602, Pacheco ordered that Roch's feast day be observed in the cities of Huete and Cuenca (Pacheco, CS, bk. 2, title 6, const. 2).

17. Nalle, "A Saint for All Seasons." See also B. Alcazar, Vida, virtudes, y milagros, de San Julian, segundo obispo de Cuenca (Madrid, 1692).

18. D.H. Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford, 1978), 17-18.

19. Christian, Local religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 94.

20. Ibid., 182.

21. Flynn, Sacred Charity, 124-26.

22. The diocese had several convents dedicated to the new Franciscan order of the Immaculate Conception. In 1621, Philip ordered all of Spain to defend the honor of the Immaculate Conception (AMC, leg. 837, exp. 3, fol. 124); in 1650 the city of Cuenca vowed to defend it perpetually (ibid., leg. 279, fol. 96r).

23. BNM, ms. 12961/7, B. Porreño, Declaración del mapa del obispado de Cuenca (1622).

24. On shrines whose histories were written between 1625 and 1775, see: Granados de los Ríos, Historia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios de Fuensanta; P. Ponce de León, Milagros y loores confirmados con mvchos ...(1663?); B. Cartes, Historia de la milagrosa imagen de Nuestra Señora de Monsalud.... (Alcalá de Henares, 1721); M. Huerta Cabrejas, Historia panegirica del Santuario de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Altarejos (1746?); Diego Cortes, "En loor de la esclarecida Virgen, en su santa Casa, sita en la sierra de Cañavate, en el obispado de Cuenca" in J. de Sanca, Romancero y Cancionero sagrados (Madrid, 1855) no. 368.; F.A. Fuero, Historia del Santuario de Nuestra Señora de los Hoyos (Alcalá de Henares, 1765); J. Talamanco (1692-1754), Historia de la milagrosa, y morenita imagen de María Santíssima de la Merced, que se venera en la Ciudad de Huete (BNM, ms. 7.002, n.d.); M. de Villanueva, Breve noticia de la singular y antigua aparición de la milagrosa imagen de Nuestra Señora de la Zarza.... (Madrid, 1762).

25. Zarco Cuevas, Relaciones de pueblos del obispado de Cuenca, 344-45; P. Ponce de León, Milagros y loores confirmados...., 14, 23. Since to know or witness the creation of the image detracts from its value as a sacred symbol, these discovery legends are vague about the actual composition of the image.

26. Villanueva, Breve noticia de la singular y antigua aparición de la milagrosa imagen de Nuestra Señora de la Zarza.... The author, a native of Cañete, gave no date for this event, lost in medieval legend. The confraternity did possess records going back to 1400.

27. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 84.

28. Granados de los Ríos, Historia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios de Fuensanta.

29. Despite the richness of Spain's magical tradition (high and folk, Jewish and Islamic), the country still lacks a good history of the subject. J. Caro Baroja's Vidas mágicas e Inquisición remains the best general work. C. Lisón Tolosana's Demonios y exorcismos en los siglos de oro relies on published sources. For recent treatments of the Inquisition and magic, see Dedieu, L'administration de la foi, 309-28; Haliczer, Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 313-23; Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 255-75; and less recently, G. Henningsen, The Witches' Advocate.

30. T. Muñoz y Soliva, Noticias de todos los ilustríssimos señores obispos..., 290-92.

31. The women executed were also accused of Judaizing.

32. Quoted in Cirac Estopañán, Los procesos de hechicerías en la Inquisición de Castilla la Nueva, 243.

33. The Spanish bibliographer Nicolás Antonio identified some seventy works printed or written between 1500 and 1775 (Bibliotheca Hispana Nova, vol. 4 [Madrid, 1778]).

34. A somewhat polemical study of Venegas's life and work is I. Adeva Martín, El maestro Alejo Venegas de Busto. Adeva provides a good synopsis of the dense argument of Agonía.

35. CTrid.25.Decr1. All gifts made to the church and charities qualified as suffrages, but the mass ranked highest in effectiveness. Some modern authors place all suffrages, or pious bequests, in the same category of analysis. However, since Spanish testators clearly preferred masses to other forms of pious bequests, in this analysis, gifts to charity, including gifts to churches, are considered separately from masses, although all fall under the general heading of pious bequests.

36. See Chapter 2.

37. ADC, Inq., leg. 241, exp. 3148 (1568). García seems to echo St. Augustine, perhaps heard in a sermon. Several years later, Fr. J. Gracían de la Madre de Dios wrote, "And St. Augustine says that there is no man so evil that he cannot be saved at the time of death," Arte de bien morir [1618], in Obras, 2: 319.

38. ADC, leg. 235, exp. 3017 (1565).

39. From Benito's confession. His companions then asked him, "So then you say that the Gospel lies?" Benito replied, "I'm not saying that, just that a rich man is better equipped than a poor man to get into heaven if he wants." The inquisitor, after listening to this, caught Benito in his quandary. He asked Benito if he believed that everything contained in the Gospel was true. Benito replied that he believed so. Then the inquisitor asked him whether he believed what the Gospel said about a rich man not being able to enter heaven. Benito had to reply that he did not know if the Gospel said that, in other words, he was unwilling to believe that it did. Benito was found guilty and penanced (ibid., leg. 239, exp. 3092 [1568].)

40. On the growth of the doctrine of Purgatory, see J. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory. Conquenses never talked about hell; all of their imagination seemed focused on purgatory and heaven. By contrast, the clerical establishment preferred to linger on the pains of hell and the exclusiveness of heaven (see J. Delumeau, Sin and Fear).

41. ADC, P-186, P-2124.

42. Reher, Town and Country in Pre-industrial Spain, 75-76. Unless testators applied for entail, all property contributed to the marriage had to be divided equally among the heirs. Testators could name their souls as their sole heir only when there were no living heirs. If the heirs were ascendent, one third of the estate could be disposed of freely.

43. The death registers include the provisions made on the behalf of children as well. Although one would like to know how parents valued their offspring's salvation (for example, children above the age of reason and therefore responsible for their sins, received more suffrages than infants), the subject must wait future study.

44. Díaz de Toledo's formulary dated back to the mid-fifteenth century and was first printed in 1493 in Valladolid; it was also referred to as the Notas breves. F. Díaz de Valdepeñas's Summa de notas copiosas was first published in Toledo in 1543. The notary might use part of Valdepeñas and add an extra flourish. Oddly, none of the recent Spanish studies of death comment on the existence of the printed models.

45. The earliest testaments, dating from before the dissemination of the notaries' guides, show considerable variation in their preambles. After the arrival of the books (in 1545 Remón's bookstore had ten copies of Summa de notas and fourteen copies of the Las notas del relator) there is little change until the late sixteenth century, when a few testators began to include in the preamble the names of their patron saints, particularly the Guardian Angel.

46. BNM, ms. 18654.17, "Relación de las misas que se dijeron en la ciudad de Cuenca por el alma del Capitán Chinchilla, con motivo de haberse aparecido su alma. 29 de enero 1628". In a case dating from 1515, Saint Catherine revealed to a woman in Belmonte that the souls of Juan Ramírez's parents were wandering in pain (ADC, Inq., leg. 56, exp. 824). Less dramatically, in 1592 a neighbor reported that Juana Rubia claimed that the soul of a dead neighbor had appeared to her and had demanded that they say four masses for him because he was in pain (leg. 332, exp. 4735, Valera de Abajo). Theologians acknowledged that the dead could make such demands but warned that most often this was one of the devil's tricks. No reference to processions of the dead as described by C. Ginzburg in The Night Battles has turned up in conquense sources.

47. A description of the burial of a wealthy individual is preserved in J. M. Díez Borque, La sociedad española y los viajeros del siglo XVII (Madrid, 1975), 158-59. The sights and smells coming from the interior a sixteenth-century church in Cuenca must have been overwhelming.

48. All editions of Cuenca's synodal constitutions (1531, 1571, 1602 and 1627) pointedly condemn this practice.

49. This year-long mourning period is similar to the year of mourning observed in late-medieval Marseille, Avignon, and San Sepulchro (Italy) (see J. R. Banker, Death in the Community: Memorialization and Confraternities in an Italian Commune in the Late Middle Ages [Athens, Georgia, 1988], 6-13; and J. Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l'au-delà).

50. In addition to noting down deaths and suffrages, the priest was required to find out if the deceased had made out a testament and then go to the notary for a copy of the pious bequests that involved the parish church. If the deceased had not made out a will, the priest was to record the reason. According to such notations, before 1565, 47 percent of conquenses made out wills, 40 percent chose not to or died too suddenly, and 13 percent did not have any property to will. After 1565, the percentage of testators declined while the numbers of indigent increased. Between 1550 and 1650, in the parishes surveyed, the percentage of testators hit its lowest point (28 percent) in 1645-50, and the percentage of indigents peaked at 36 percent in 1625-35. Thus, over time, testaments represent the actions of an increasingly narrower segment of the population, a bias that I have attempted to keep in account in the discussion that follows. A percentage of 30-40 percent of adults willing was not unusual, nor was the decline in testators and rise in indigent in the seventeenth century (see López López, Comportamientos religiosos en Asturias durante el Antiguo Régimen, 40-41; and Larquié, "Popular uprisings in Spain in the Mid-Seventeenth century," 98).

51. Here, conquenses' behavior is similar to the pre-Tridentine funerals of madrileños (Carlos M. N. Eire, untitled book manuscript on attitudes towards death and the afterlife in sixteenth-century Spain), the Lyonnaise (Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 22-23), and the people of Valladolid, Murcia, and Avignon (A. Rucquoi, Valladolid en la Edad Media, A. Bejarano Rubio, El hombre y la muerte; Chiffoleau, La comptabilité de l'au-delà).

52. The parish of Santa María de Gracia was an exception. Santa María was built on the site of the Jewish synagogue, destroyed in 1402. Two hundred and fifty years later, people from all over the city were returning to be buried at Santa María. On the church and the converso community in Cuenca, see D. Pérez Ramírez, "La sinagoga de Cuenca, iglesia de Santa María la Nueva," Revista Cuenca, 19 and 20 (1982): 47-78.

53. Tombs could be purchased at any time, just as testaments could be drawn up while the testator was still in good health. Occasionally, a wife asked to be buried in her husband's sepulcher even though the latter was still alive.

54. In 1565 the royal government limited the number of torches allowed in funerals to twelve (López López, Comportamientos religiosos en Asturias durante el Antiguo Régimen, 74). The law appears to have been obeyed in Cuenca.

55. See Bossy, Christianity in the West, 144-49, for a summary of the tension between the medieval and modern approaches to charity. On Spain, see. Flynn, Sacred Charity, chap. 2; and Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain.

56. The grave offering during the nine-day period was known as the ofrenda, and in other parts of Spain could be quite extravagant (see López López, Comportamientos religiosos en Asturias durante el Antiguo Régimen, 113; Domínguez Ortiz, Las clases privilegiadas en el Antiguo Régimen, 259). One cannot help but be struck by the fact that the Romans also observed a nine-day mourning period accompanied by feasts, which was adopted by the early Christians and condemned by Saint Augustine (F. Paxton, Christianizing Death: the Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe [Ithaca, 1990], 23, 26).

57. The añal has been described in a few recent studies of religion in old regime Spain, particularly in López López, Comportamientos religiosos en Asturias durante el Antiguo Régimen, 107-12. Although the añal seems to have fallen totally out of favor in Cuenca by the middle of the seventeenth century, in Segovia in the eighteenth century women were still placing bread, wax, and coins on their dead's tombs (M. Barrio Gozalo, Estudio socio-económico de la iglesia de Segovia.., 148).

58. Venegas mentions the añal by name (Agonía y tránsito de la muerte, 222). Other authors write generally about gifts of bread and suffrages (Gracían de la Madre de Dios, Arte de Bien Morir (1618) in Obras, 2: 330-31; L. de Rebolledo, Cinqventa oraciones fvnerales [Zaragoza, 1608], 335-41).

59. For modern-day Spanish wakes, see R. Behar, Santa María del Monte (Princeton, 1986), 178-79. The equivalent of the añal is not mentioned in several modern studies of death and pious bequests in other Catholic countries, although the practice might have existed at some point in the past (see C. Gittings, Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England [London, 1984], 44-45. On the continuum of living and dead, see N. Z. Davis, "Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France," Daedelaus 106 (1977): 87-114).

60. Because of the differing amounts of bread, wine, wax and other items, the añal is not easily converted into a value that can be quantitified. For more information, see Appendix I.

61. AHPC, P-600, fols. 578 and passim. Blessed bread (pan bendito) has survived to this day in what was once the eastern part of the diocese; there are both sweet and salty versions of the recipe. The sweetened bread is similar to the Italian panetone, without the raisins. On holidays, the special bread is blessed by priests and then consumed by people and animals. No memory survives of it being used in burial rites. (F. Pardo Pardo, "Pan bendito y caridás en los rituales religioso-populares del campo de Requena-Utiel,"in La religiosidad popular, 3 vols. [Seville, 1989] 2: 563-84.) The ollada may have been a stew of chickpeas or favas and meat. Such a stew was doled out to the paupers who attended funerals in late medieval Avignon, and the chickpea (a popular legume in modern Spain) according to Chiffoleau had a long history in the funeral rites of the ancient world (La comptabilité de l'au-delà, 145).

62. AHPC, P-414, fols. 949-51.

63. ADC, Inq., leg. 248, exp. 3338 (1570); leg. 251, 3385 (1569). Rebolledo, Cinqventa oraciones fvnerales, 335-41.

64. In the 1569 visitation, the diocesan inspector listed the churches that were arrears in saying the masses and noted how many were needed.

65. Venegas, Agonía y tránsito de la muerte, e.g. 132. The labrador Juan Sánchez Benito had another reason for not putting off good works. One day in 1570, he and some other members of his confraternity were doing the accounting and started to discuss the suffrages that the confraternity paid for the dead. Sánchez, who was sixty years old, was not convinced that other people would make sure the suffrages would be said; he maintained it was better to do everything "in this life" because afterwards "'we don't remember the [dead's] souls'" (ADC, Inq., leg. 249, exp. 3353 [Peraleja]).

66. In Cuenca, twenty-five individuals (4 percent of testators) paid for one thousand masses or more, accounting for 43 percent of the total. In Madrid, Carlos Eire has linked the exaggeration of suffrages and burials to the extravagant royal funerals of Don Carlos and Queen Elizabeth of Valois in 1568 (untitled book manuscript).

67. Ramírez de Villaescusa, CS, fols. 39r-40r.

68. Ibid.

69. Ciruelo, Reprouacion de la supersticiones y hechizerías, 133-34. The superstition was common throughout Spain. On mass cycles in Mallorca and Catalunya, see the fine article by G. Llompart, "Aspectos populares del purgatorio medieval," Revista de dialectología y tradiciones populares 26 (1970): 253-74.

70. Trentals also disappeared from Madrid and were replaced by the Trent-approved misa del anima (Eire, "Masses for the Dead). In Murcia, however, the popularity of Saint Amador's trental went up during the sixteenth century (personal communication from J.B. Owens), and in Siena, Italy, Saint Gregory's trental became popular in the seventeenth century (Cohn, Death and Property, 167).

71. J. L. González Novalín found that trentals were dropped from missals, but because of their continued popularity, priests secretly kept copies of the ritual on hand ("Religiosidad y reforma. ..," 371-74).

72. Venegas, Agonía y tránsito de la muerte, 134.

73. Unfortunately, on this point, the information in parish registers is not detailed enough to make a valid comparison with the data in testaments. The total number of masses involving the parish (but not other churches) was written down, as was the name of any perpetual mass, which would be put on a calendar of memoriales to be said during the year, but rarely anything more specific.

74. See J. Bossy, "The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200-1700," Past and Present, no. 100 (1983), 29-61.

75. This trend also occurred in Madrid and late medieval Valladolid, where Eire and Rucquoi suggest that testators' apparent lack of interest may have been the result of a "codification of ritual based on status" (the quotation is from Eire, unpublishe book manuscript; see Rucquoi, Valladolid en la Edad Media). However, one is also tempted to see the sloughing off of responsibilities as a symptom of a city under siege: in 1606, the death rate in Cuenca was more than three times the norm.

76. The simplification of ceremony has been observed in other parts of Spain as well, although no one has offered the interpretation that follows. I. Testón Nuñez, describing the changes in Extremadura, ascribed to them the increased importance of a direct relationship with God and the suppression of superstition (Estructuras mentales y vida cotidiana, 34-35).

77. In seventeenth-century Asturias, there was the same drop in the añal's popularity, as well as the shift to wax tapers (López López, Comportamientos religiosos en Asturias durante el Antiguo Régimen, 115).

78. These masses, known as the misas del anima (in Cuenca, often referred to as "misas del altar privilegiado" or "de la indulgencia"), first made their appearance in the city in the 1570s. They also became popular in Madrid at this time, where novenario also disappeared (Eire, "Masses for the Dead").

79. Originally, judgment of the soul was thought to take place at Judgment Day. With the introduction of the doctrine of purgatory, over time theologians began to differentiate between personal judgement, which took place sometime before the end of the world, and general judgement (P. Chaunu, La mort à Paris, 116-18). All the sixteenth-century popular Spanish writers on death which I have been able to consult (Venegas, Luis de Granada, Juan Basileo de Sanctoro, and Pedro de Medina) taught that personal judgment occurred immediately following death. Pedro de Medina's very successful Libro de la Verdad (Valladolid, 1555), which contained commonsense questions and answers about death, the soul, purgatory, and suffrages, was republished in Cuenca in 1592.

80. Gracían de la Madre de Dios, Arte de bien morir, in Obras, 2:318.

81. Venegas, Agonía y tránsito de la muerte, 210-23. In his discussion of suffrages, Venegas's underlying concern is how to improve on the merit one has accrued in life so that the soul will achieve a greater degree of glory in heaven. Thus masses, prayers, and works of charity, which have this effect, are infinitely preferable to indulgences, which only reduce suffering imposed for incomplete satisfaction of sins. Moreover, Venegas continues, indulgences are inherently selfish because they benefit only the person for whom they are purchased and do nothing for the Mystic Body of Christians as a whole (220).

82. Adeva Martín, El maestro Alexo Venegas, 186.

83. Popularity is measured in terms of gifts to religious orders, purchase of habits for burial, choice of burial site, and accompaniment of friars or priests in the funeral cortege.

84. Burial in an order's habit reflected the individual's dedication to the ideals of that order and the belief that purchase of the habit itself served as a form of suffrage.

85. During the entire period studied, 23 percent of the clergy, 27 percent of the gentry and professional classes, and 29 percent of the working classes requested burial in a religious house.

86. Occasionally one reads references to there being no more space for burials inside the churches in the late sixteenth century. But selection of the burial site was one of the aspects of their funerals that conquenses did not turn over to executors; virtually all testators knew where they wanted to be buried.

87. Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain, 61. Bishop Fresneda was on the three-man panel that oversaw the consolidation, which proved unsuccessful.

88. AHPC, P-384; P-628, fols. 845r-47r. Vadillo named his soul as his heir so that he could dedicate his entire estate to perpetual gifts in favor of the needy. The value of Vadillo's gifts, totalling 7.9 million maravedis, was so enormous that it eclipsed the total of all charitable giving in the sample by three million maravedis! Vadillo also ordered 4,000 masses for his soul to be said in the churches of his hometown, Alaejos, and 3,000 masses for the souls in purgatory.

89. Ibid., P-726, fols. 572r-79r (1605); P-966, fols. 212r-17r (1616).

90. Venegas, Agonía y tránsito de la muerte, 210-23. In order of effectiveness, the four kinds of suffrages were the sacrifice of mass (and by extension, anything that promoted the divine cult, such as gifts to the church), prayer, the seven acts of mercy, and disciplines such as fasting, hairshirts, and so on.

91. In seventeenth-century Grenoble, bequests to charity increased as well, despite hard times. In Grenoble, however, the gentry led the way in charitable giving (Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble).

92. ADC, P-2124; AHPC P-876, 2164. More than a few of the diocese's country parishes preserve death registers dating from the second half of the sixteenth century; notarial registers start around 1600. As is the case of confraternity records, more than enough materials have been preserved to make feasible an in-depth study of small-town funeral and suffrage customs.

93. People in the village often requested something called the canastilla (small basket).

94. Only a few people specifically asked for one or the other of the cofradías to accompany the cortege. For the village to support two cofradias, however, most adults must have belonged to one or both.

95. Given the small number of cases, the differing size of the towns, and the lack of continuous data, it would be meaningless to compare the amount of suffrages asked for by testators in each community. The average bequest for masses in La Parrilla was 79, and 131 in Iniesta.

96. The 1531 constitutions established the prices for open and closed trentals. In the open trental, in which the priest was being recompensed only for the masses, the price per mass was seventeen maravedis. Ramírez did not fix the price of other masses, but several references in testaments during the 1550s suggest that testators were paying twenty maravedis for requiem masses, and one real for a high mass. In 1566, Fresneda set the prices as follows: one real for a low mass, one real and a half for a high mass, and two reals for a high mass with a diácono and a subdiácono assisting the priest. These prices remained fixed until the early seventeenth century, when the low mass was raised by fifty percent, to one and a half reals. Pimentel confirmed the raise in the 1625 constitutions, expressly explaining that the higher price was to cover the rise in the cost of living. Similar hikes in the price of a mass occurred across Castile (Domínguez Ortiz, Las clases privilegiadas en el Antiguo Régimen, 265-66).

97. The fourth important component, the funeral cortege, was excluded for lack of concrete information about the customary "limosna" paid to the different confraternities and members of the religious orders. The amount of money needed endow a perpetual mass was calculated at a rate of return of 4 percent, perhaps a conservative estimate.

98. Troitiño Vinuesa, Cuenca, 62-67.

99. R. Herr, Rural Change and Royal Finances,129.