[263] By the end of the seventeenth century Seville had faded. Once thronged with jostling crowds, the city streets now wound mutely past deserted buildings. The clamor of bankers and merchants on the Cathedral steps had died away as fewer ships sailed into port. The famous Casa de Contratación no longer throbbed with the commercial enterprise at the heart of the city. Now it functioned far away in Cadiz.

The city government had survived, however, even though it had become more closely tied to a faltering monarchy. Local authorities had even extended their regulatory powers. One reason for the persistence and development of this political power was the presence in the city of underworld people. Far more than a curious fringe group, they complemented the city's inadequate systems of commerce, justice, and charity. They diverted potentially revolutionary fervor into antisocial sniping, and by their participation discredited some popular outbursts against political authorities.

The partnership of crime and political authority goes far beyond early modern Seville. Police have long depended on underworld informers, and many governments have hired thugs to reinforce their own power with terrorism and strategic assassinations. There is even some indication that agencies of the United States government have collaborated with the Mafia and utilized underworld connections in the conduct of foreign policy.

The underworld of early modern Seville helps to explain this partnership. Ostensibly enemies of the city oligarchy, underworld [264] people actually supported it. They were conservatives, as determined to preserve the social order as they were to exploit it. For its part, the city oligarchy used the underworld as a symbol of a common enemy, an embodiment of evil that all city residents could recognize and oppose. The presence of underworld people justified the extension of political power and more vigorous governmental action to control the use of violence.

The peculiar partnership between political authority and the underworld in Seville demonstrates that criminality is associated with a distinct subculture, but it was also well integrated with other social, economic, and political activities of the city. While criminals were punished as individuals, their offences were not simply isolated incidents of deviance. Sometimes crime was social protest, and sometimes it was anti-social villainy. In every case, it was the deviance that political authority defined as crime. Seville shows that the right to define and prosecute crime is so crucial in the consolidation of power that crime persists not merely as a symptom of social illness, but also because it is indispensable to political power.