[212] Concerned with swaggering bullies and street urchins, churchmen and city leaders were also aware of the women in the underworld. They heard the raucous voices of the women who hawked wares in the streets. They saw the coarse manners of women who kept inns, and they watched the colorful actresses and singers. All of these women, they assumed, were prostitutes, or "lost women."

The euphemism that city fathers used suggests that the women were outcasts who had completely lost their way in the dominant culture of the city; but historical evidence shows that "lost women" were an integral part of their community, just as prostitutes are in present-day society. They supported themselves, their children, and a vast network of pimps, procuresses, and entrepreneurs. Pushed by the socioeconomic disruptions of the period, they easily crossed the invisible line between respectable society and the underworld. Their lives demonstrate how the underworld culture renewed and preserved itself in a city ruled by men who loudly proclaimed the evils of the underworld.

"Lost women" also demonstrate the political utility of the underworld. Concerned with maintaining order as the city rapidly grew and declined in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, city leaders consciously used legislation and existing institutions. They found in prostitution a commercial prop, an agency to reinforce lines of authority, and a symbol of evil. They pointed to prostitutes as diseased, disgusting, and parasitical. Prostitution became a symbol that united the community and justified the extension of governmental powers.

[213] Evidence that is available from early modern Seville cannot answer all of our questions about women and the underworld. It does not tell how many women became prostitutes, nor does it detail the ages or social backgrounds of prostitutes in Seville. Despite these limitations, a study of "lost women" contributes to our understanding of how the underworld fit into the culture of this city. First, it suggests that the changes of this period disrupted traditional patterns and promoted prostitution as a livelihood. Second, it demonstrates that prostitution was not only acceptable in the society of this city; it even acted as a pillar of the moral system that buttressed the existing social order. Finally, it argues that prostitution thrived because it was politically useful to the ruling elite.

PROSTITUTION AS A LIVELIHOOD

For centuries women in Seville had found many ways to survive. As wives or nuns, many had depended for a livelihood on husbands or convents. Others worked in crafts and industry, street-hawking and retail, domestic service, folk medicine, inns and drama. Widows owned and operated the shops and dramatic companies that they had inherited. Some women were kept as concubines by the wealthier men of the community, and others earned a living as prostitutes on the streets or in the public brothels. In the early modern period, social and economic changes combined to disrupt the other traditional roles of women and promote prostitution as a livelihood.

Convents, for example, offered fewer women a livelihood. Fathers had traditionally placed their daughters in convents when they lacked enough money for a suitable marriage dowry. In his poem "La Devoción de la Cruz," Calderón called this the "crime of poverty":

Because a poor gentleman
In things such as these
Cannot equalize
His quality with wealth
For a marriageable daughter
Without discrediting his blood,
[214] He places her in a convent,
Which is the crime of poverty. ⁽¹⁾

The silk-weaving of some nuns had supported some convents in Seville. By the late sixteenth century, however, the city's silk industry had fallen behind French silk weavers, who were able to produce in quantity the fashionable fabrics most in demand. Foreign competition pinched silk-producing convents so severely that the Crown prohibited the sale of foreign-made silks in 1621, declaring that foreign producers had caused many convents to lose their livelihood. By the middle of the seventeenth century an official of the silk masters' guild reported that of the city's 3,000 silk looms, only sixty were in use. ⁽³⁾

Since convents offered fewer women a livelihood, many became beatas, or holy women. Usually widows and young unmarried women who lacked a dowry for either marriage or convent, they lived together in "congregations," often in a house [215] next to the parish church. They supported themselves by the work of their hands and by income from any property they owned, but they were generally very poor. Although they often obeyed the parish priest as their director, they were suspected of being ungoverned and immoral. Churchmen who disapproved of this spontaneous form of religious community life tried to impose on beatas the control of the regular clergy. ⁽⁴⁾

Marriage became less likely for women in the lower income groups as local industry and small-scale agriculture declined. In his Third Discourse, the contemporary economist Martínez de Mata recognized the problems resulting because marriage was discouraged for young men with no livelihood. ⁽⁵⁾ He blamed foreign competition for taking away the jobs of many Spaniards and causing small farmers, textile workers, and artisan producers to become vagabonds. The women who could have married them in better economic circumstances, he declared, remained single and perished from hunger.

Wives were frequently abandoned by underemployed and unemployed husbands who left to seek their fortunes in the cities, the army, or the Indies. Foreigners married women of Seville so they could enjoy certain economic and political privileges in the city, only to leave their wives and return to their homelands when they had earned enough money. Although statistics of abandoned women are not available, this appears to have been a general pattern throughout the early modern period. The Venetian ambassador to Spain reported in 1525 that so many men had left Seville for the New World that "the city was left in the hands of women," ⁽⁶⁾ and 150 years later this same problem was noted in the 1667 survey of the poor.

Emigration, of course, was open to women as well as men, but it was regulated by the Crown. A royal letter of 1604 complained that more than 600 women had sailed from Seville for New Spain, although only fifty of them had been licensed. ⁽⁷⁾ Women [216] who emigrated had to have recommendations for a royal license or enough money to buy passage as nonlicensed emigrants. They also had to have a certain venturesome spirit.

One emigrant in 1603 was La Monja Alferez (nun second lieutenant) Catalina de Crusa. A nun in Vizcaya, she had run away from her convent and arrived in Seville in 1603. Disguising herself as a young man, she went to the New World, where she worked for twenty years, using a string of mules in Vera Cruz to bring in merchandise carried by the Spanish fleet to Mexico. Acquaintances in New Spain knew her as a young man, too tall for a woman, but lacking the stature and bearing of an arrogant youth. Her face was neither ugly nor beautiful, distinguished by shiny black wide-open eyes and a little fuzz above her upper lip. She wore her hair short like a man's, and carried a sword very well. Her step was light and elegant. Only her hands appeared rather feminine. ⁽⁸⁾

Catalina might have taken her secret to the grave, but in 1624 she was accused of killing a man. To save herself from the gallows, she declared that the court could not hang her because she was a woman and a nun. In great amazement, the local authorities sent her back to Spain, where the king gave her 500 ducats and the formal title of second lieutenant. She became a popular hero, treated as an awesome sensation. In 1630 she was licensed to dress as a man, and she was formally invested with this privilege in a ceremony in the Cathedral of Seville. ⁽⁹⁾

Obviously, Catalina was an exception. For most women, emigration was available neither as a means of escape nor as a catapult to fame. Marriage was favored in this society not only as a means of livelihood, but also as an institution to impose authority over young girls and prevent them from "losing themselves." ⁽¹⁰⁾ Because marriage appeared so crucial to social order, many benefactors provided charitable dowries so that poor girls could marry [217] and become safely absorbed into a traditional authoritative and economic system. Marriage was not always a formal arrangement, however, and many people took partners with neither dowry nor occupation. Poor people accepted these temporary alliances with practical cynicism, an attitude apparent in the following verse from a germanesca ballad:

A husband by night
Is a well-known threat:
Don't believe any promises,
Trust only what you can touch. ⁽¹¹⁾

The economic and social dislocations of early modern Seville encouraged the exploitation of every possible means to survive. Traditional informal social controls no longer restrained exploitation in neighborhoods teeming with newcomers who soon moved [218] away. Thousands of children and youths without parents appeared in Seville, overwhelming the few institutions that could provide food and shelter. People took in orphans and used them to beg money or get customers for both male and female prostitutes. Young women fortunate enough to find a job were considered fair prey by their employers, a problem still prevalent among poor young working women. ⁽¹³⁾

In his report on the Royal Prison of Seville, the lawyer Cristôbal de Chaves reported a case that probably described many young women servants. ⁽¹⁴⁾ Ana was seduced by Juan de Molina, the son of her master. He gave her lessons every day in how to be a successful prostitute, and he placed her in a brothel on the Calle del Agua. On the days that she did not take in much money, he beat her, for he wanted the money for gambling. He taught her how to call out and get clients, and he showed her many tricks for getting money from them.

Juan developed a system to prevent Ana from cheating on him. He watched from an alleyway outside the brothel and carefully counted her clients, placing a pebble in the hood of his cape for each one. Since he had made her agree to charge each client a set price, he could easily tell if she held back any of her earnings by counting the pebbles.

Ana finally talked with another prostitute about her problems, and Juan was soon arrested. Sentenced to the galleys for ten years, he tried to keep his hold over her. He wrote to her from prison, reminding her that she was his "thing." He drew a picture for her that showed him, the former master, now a galley slave in chains with a chain leading from him to the hands of a woman he entitled "Ana." Between the two figures he drew a heart pierced by two arrows. The heart, he wrote was Juan's, and the arrows were Ana's. Chaves did not indicate whether Ana saw the irony in the reversal of their roles.

Many people tried to maintain control over prostitutes who [219] provided them with money, but others simply pawned women to the city brothels for a single lump sum. Fathers, brothers, boy friends, or husbands sold women into brothels for ten or twenty ducats. ⁽¹⁵⁾ The 1621 city ordinance reforming the administration of city brothels expressly prohibited the pawning of a woman to a brothel by a person to whom she owed a debt, even though she might agree to this arrangement. No woman, it asserted, should be sold into the brothels nor kept there to pay off a debt. ⁽¹⁶⁾

City regulations of this period encouraged prostitution because they made it difficult for women to earn a living in other occupations. Street-hawking, for example, was banned by city officials who suspected, with some justification, that it was a cover for prostitution and vagabonds. But their attempts to ban street selling cut off the livelihood of many people who then turned to prostitution in earnest. One woman agreed to leave prostitution in 1572 if she could regain her place for selling fruit, which a public official had taken from her. ⁽¹⁷⁾ Murillo painted street hawkers as quiet, rather serious young women trying to earn a living. City fathers, however, saw them as noisy, brazen price gougers who threatened the peace of the city.

The livelihood of another group of women was cut off by regulations on dramatic productions. Under pressure from clerics, Philip II prohibited all dramatic performances in 1598. Two years later the Crown directed a group of theologians to draw up conditions for dramatic performances in Spain. Among other conditions the theologians insisted that no woman should be permitted to act in dramatic productions because "such public activity especially provokes a woman to boldness..." ⁽¹⁸⁾ A royal council agreed to the conditions, except that it allowed women to continue in dramatic companies as long as they were [220] accompanied by husbands or fathers. These regulations at the same time that the number of religious festivals was reduced.

Sumptuary laws were passed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to prevent rich people from parading their wealth. Although they were aimed at the newly rich merchants and shippers who liked to dress and behave as nobles, the real victims of these laws were women workers. Prohibitions against silk and brocade fabrics reduced the jobs available for women in the silk industry and embroidery shops, while limitation of the numbers of domestic servants meant that fewer women could earn a living as servants. ⁽¹⁹⁾

The Inquisition's campaign against heresy brought many folk practitioners and sorcerers to an unhappy end. The Holy Office was not so much opposed to superstition as desirous of controlling all uses of superstition. During the early modern period it prosecuted many women who challenged its monopoly. For example, a woman hanged in 1581 for practicing witchcraft and abortion was a Moor. ⁽²⁰⁾ As a member of this rival religious group she had challenged the Church's attempts to monopolize truth. In 1624 a twenty-two-year-old woman was burned in an auto de fé because she claimed to have the power of knowing the future. ⁽²¹⁾ She might have escaped notice by the Inquisition if she had been older and had quietly plied her occult gifts as a neighborhood sabia (wise woman). The Inquisition dealt very cautiously with madness, and it often treated people accused of witchcraft as lunatics or senile eccentrics who should be only mildly punished. Insanity could be used by the Church as a weapon to discredit its competitors, but it could also provide a protective shield for folk practitioners who continued their traditional profession as "María la loca" or "Ana la fantástica."

Official regulations extended to the practice of medicine during this period, and uneducated women practitioners suffered. [221] A royal decree of 1593 required all medical practitioners to be licensed, and it prohibited women from having or dispensing medicines. In 1629 the asistente of Seville formally required that all midwives, as well as all other people practicing medicine, be examined and licensed by him within fifteen days. Practitioners who did not comply were subject to a fine of 10,000 maravedís. Since most midwives and folk practitioners were older women their inability to obtain a license did not necessarily mean that they became prostitutes. However, it is very likely that they increasingly turned to the subsidiary occupations by becoming procuresses, street bawds, and false "abbesses" who kept houses of prostitution. ⁽²²⁾

Prostitution flourished in this city not only because it provided a livelihood for women who had few alternatives, but also because it was a commercial enterprise that supported pimps, procuresses, property owners, innkeepers, and renters of little rooms and secondhand clothing. Underworld people regarded prostitution as a business, referring to brothels as aduanas (customs houses) or cambios (exchanges). They called prostitutes pelotas, a word that usually means a ball or toy, but underworld people also used it for a bag of money. ⁽²³⁾ Some women saw prostitution as their only means for survival, while others willingly entered prostitution as commercial entrepreneurs. Whether women became prostitutes under duress, unable to find another livelihood and shake themselves free of an exploiting "friend," or whether they voluntarily chose this profession as offering the best livelihood in the city, the socioeconomic changes in early modern Seville disrupted traditional roles for women and encouraged many to turn to prostitution.

PROSTITUTION AND MORALITY

One reason that Seville's social order survived the serious [222] economic disruptions of this period was that city fathers used a widely accepted system of morality to preserve the hierarchy of authority. Prostitution was an integral part of the city's moral system. The connection between prostitution, morality, and social order is clearly evident in the three most popular female symbols of this period.

The Holy Virgin was elevated in the early seventeenth century through the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and stylized into the beautiful image still carried in the Holy Week processions of present-day Seville. Forever girl-like, she became a grieving woman. With diamond teardrops on her cheeks and a dagger thrust into her breast, her head slightly bowed by the weight of a golden crown, she held out her hands for the cares and sorrows of the world.

The Virgin was a pillar of the moral order of the city. Young girls who were taught to emulate her example of chastity and modesty would be less likely to defy parental authority and run off with the wild young men of the streets. With their eyes on the Virgin, women who entered convents had a beautiful image of perfection through chastity and obedience. For married women, the Virgin also symbolized chastity and submission to authority; but in addition, she represented a curiously asexual and influential motherhood. ⁽²⁴⁾ Women could thus feel elevated, content with their social roles, and inspired to obedience. They would be chaste and modest, restricting sex to marriage and never endangering the social order or the system of property inheritance.

Men were considered to be much more active sexually than women, and this required another female symbol, the Painted Prostitute. Women who emulated the Virgin were thought to be elevated above the weakness of the flesh, but men were naturally expected to succumb, to look for sex outside marriage. If men lacked prostitutes to absorb their lust, who knew what would happen to an innocent woman walking along the street on a proper errand? The problem was to distinguish respectable women from those who served men's baser needs.

[223] The Painted Prostitute represented depraved, sensual, commercial woman. Condemned for advertising herself in dress and manner, she was nevertheless required by law to wear a yellow hood so that she could be distinguished from the respectable women of the city. Unlike the well-kept courtesan or flirtatious matron, she was often hungry and ill-dressed. She usually walked the city streets, unable to afford a sedan chair or carriage. ⁽²⁵⁾ She held out her hands like the Virgin, but she sought money rather than grieving hearts. She epitomized the unnatural, painting herself and publicizing her promiscuity. When syphilis appeared in Seville in the sixteenth century, she was blamed for spreading that disfiguring, often fatal disease. The Painted Prostitute was another pillar of the moral order, for she permitted the existence of a double standard for men and women and provided a clear example of how respectable women should not behave.

Occasionally, however the symbol of the Painted Prostitute was not entirely negative. Orphanage administrators and priests who tried to reform prostitutes understood that the examples set by experienced pimps and prostitutes were as infectious as any diseases they might carry. The Jesuits established a little house as a temporary haven for converted prostitutes, and they carefully separated those young women from the older "women of the world" who wanted to procure for them and make money from them. ⁽²⁶⁾ The Jesuits' temporary home did not solve the problem, however, and city officials continued to worry that converted prostitutes could infect young girls, who would emulate them. One administrator of a girls' orphanage wrote to the city council complaining that the city's practice of placing converted prostitutes in his institution provided bad examples for young orphan girls. ⁽²⁷⁾

[224] Mary Magdalene, the converted prostitute in the stories of Jesus, was the third major female symbol of early modern Seville. Many clergymen taught that prostitution was an evil from which prostitutes and the entire city could be saved. They preached fervently to the prostitutes on the feast days of Mary Magdalene, and they gloried in counting their conversions. This symbol reinforced both their faith in converting sinners and their belief that extramarital, commercial sex was evil. In their view, unregulated sex threatened both social order and individual salvation.

A cult had grown up around the seductive figure of Mary Magdalene in the seventeenth century, perhaps a reaction to the puritanical tendencies of the sixteenth-century Counter Reformation. Mary Magdalene represented the titillating combination of sex and religion. Murillo painted her as a voluptuous young woman gazing heavenward. Her expression suggests the rapture of earthy sexual delights as well as spiritual transport. She avoids looking the observer boldly in the eye, for she is an appropriately modest, though sensual, "bride of Christ." One explanation for her popularity is that she represented the love goddess, Venus. Under the guise of pious devotion to a Church-approved saint, many people continued to venerate an ancient and traditional folk goddess who covered sex with a cloak of religion.

The symbols of Virgin, Prostitute, and Mary Magdalene were as useful to city fathers as they were popular with all city residents. Through these symbols churchmen and city officials demonstrated their authority to define good and evil. The image of the Holy Virgin sanctified political events and provided a single visible personification of good that was understood by the entire community. On the other hand, the Painted Prostitute personified sex outside marriage, sex without the responsibility of children and home, sex with the threat of disease. When unregulated sex threatened their society, they could point to the lessons of the Virgin, the Prostitute, and Mary Magdalene, which taught very clearly that women should be safely enveloped in a convent or marriage, obedient, chaste, and modestly accepting their places in the social hierarchy.

Francisco Farfan, a sixteenth-century cleric of Spain, recognized that upside-down morality of prostitution. In his treatise on avoiding the sins of fornication, Farfan presented an argument for the moral practicality of prostitution. He declared that the brothel was necessary to a society just as a latrine was needed in a house:

The brothel in the city, then, is like the stable or latrine for the house. Because just as the city keeps itself clean by providing a separate place where filth and dung are gathered, etc., so neither less nor more, assuming the dissolution of the flesh, acts the brothel: where the filth and ugliness of the flesh are gathered like the garbage and dung of the city. ⁽²⁸⁾

PROSTITUTION AND REGULATION

City fathers had long tried to control prostitution in Seville, but many nonlicensed prostitutes pursued their trade outside the confines of city-regulated brothels. They gathered in several areas along the river bank, close to the port where many prospective clients entered the city. Prostitution also thrived in the poorer parts of the city that grew up along its margins and just outside its walls, such as the extramural parish of San Bernardo. Rents were undoubtedly lower in the marginal areas, and prostitutes could afford a room or a little shack. Since police power was less likely to invade the alleyways on the edges of town, innkeepers there were probably less conscientious about keeping prostitutes out of their rooms. The 1568 syphilis epidemic in the city was called el contagio de San Gil because it first broke out in San Gil, another parish bordering the city's walls. Hospitals for victims of this epidemic were set up outside the city walls in the parish of San Bernardo. ⁽²⁹⁾

Fear of disease is the major reason that the city government increased its efforts to regulate prostitution and limit it to the medically inspected, city-licensed brothels. Plagues passed from port to port in the early modern period and ravaged city populations. They posed a political threat as well as a very real physical danger, for the city in the throes of an epidemic was noted for neither law nor order. The machinery of local government frequently fell into paralysis, and many officials died or disappeared. On the other hand, rumors of an epidemic so frightened city residents that they were willing to accept greatly [228] expanded government regulations. These regulations were directed particularly against prostitutes, who were commonly suspected of passing on plagues. Clients of prostitutes, after all, often entered the city from a ship that had arrived in port, and prostitutes could easily contact any diseases they carried and pass them on into the city. Prostitutes were more susceptible to illness, too, if they were the poorer women who were undernourished and used secondhand clothing and bedding, both of which frequently carried disease in this period.

The epidemic of syphilis brought death and disfigurement to thousands, and frightened the city government into redoubling its efforts to regulate prostitution. The city council appointed medical inspectors to examine prostitutes and recommend action against the disease. One doctor warned that the city's health was endangered by the bad condition of lettuce and deer's tongue (a plant) that were being sold in the city brothels as remedies for syphilis. Another surgeon urged that the city not merely discharge sick prostitutes from brothels, but also confine them in hospitals to prevent them from continuing their trade. In the early seventeenth century, the administrator of city brothels countered clergymen's proposals to close the public brothels. He argued that this action would not end prostitution, but merely deregulate it and damage the health and well-being of the city. If prostitutes were not confined to city-licensed and medically inspected brothels, he said, they would scatter throughout the city, free to spread disease and provoke quarrels and murders. ⁽³⁰⁾

Seville, however, lacked the hospital space to confine all its syphilitic prostitutes. Several hospitals would not accept people with any contagious disease. In the last part of the sixteenth century the Hospital de San Cosme y San Damian was known as las Bubas because it was designated to treat syphilitics, or those with pustules (bubas) resulting from la mal frances. Unfortunately, this hospital had only forty beds, and only twelve were [229] for infected women. Patients here were treated for thirty days with agua del Palo, a medicinal water. ⁽³¹⁾

Most treatments for syphilis were, obviously, ineffective, and it became a sixteenth-century successor to leprosy, flourishing despite city attempts to detect and isolate infected people. When Pedro de Lean began working with the people in the city brothels in the late sixteenth century, he found many who were ill. He described the illness as "hideous," causing great pain, many pustules, and death. ⁽³²⁾ The 1621 ordinances to reform the ancient regulations on prostitution in the city prohibited the city brothels from admitting boys under the age of fourteen, adding that many "boys of a tender age" had become infected in the brothels. ⁽³³⁾ The infected prostitute released from city-licensed brothels could continue her trade as long as she was able to, but when her infection became so obvious that she could no longer get clients, she was as likely to die from starvation as from infection.

It is not surprising that the little houses of a brothel were sometimes called boticas, a word also used for pharmacies or little shops. Prostitutes were traditionally believed to use potions, herbs, ointments, and pessaries as contraceptives. In the sixteenth century they also began to use herbal preparations to treat syphilis infections, and it has been suggested that men first used contraceptive sheaths in brothels as a means to prevent venereal infection. ⁽³⁴⁾ Prostitutes and procuresses knew many other forms of contraception. They prepared pessaries and ointments from herbs and dung. They made amulets, such as a seed of sorrel enclosed in a cloth bag, which was thought to prevent conception as long as it was carried on the left arm. [230] They mixed alum and the yellow pulp of pomegranate to make vaginal pessaries, and they practiced some numerical magic, such as jumping backward seven or nines times after coitus. Prostitutes were closely associated with the practice of abortion, as well, and they and their older female companions also prepared aphrodisiacs. ⁽³⁵⁾ The brothel as pharmacy represented the evil of illicit sex supported by an unlicensed folk medicine that bordered on magic. It challenged both the Church's claim to monopolize magic and the city's presumption to license doctors.

Concern with increasing public disorder also pushed city officials into more energetic regulation of prostitution. The ships sailing between Seville and the New World brought numbers of soldiers and sailors to the city. Fights over women often ended in big street brawls. Confining prostitutes to city-licensed brothels could, prevent many quarrels, fights, and crimes. It could also get rid of the swarms of streetwalkers and the children or false beggars who acted as procurers. ⁽³⁶⁾

Closely related to the desire to keep public order was the necessity to protect property. When a captain wrote the city council to complain that ships in the port were being robbed and damaged, he asserted that men were robbing the ships in order to give money to the "bad women" who lived in little houses in the area of the port. ⁽³⁷⁾ Other residents complained of property damaged in the brawls that began over women.

Confining prostitutes in licensed brothels prevented some property damage, and it also protected the interests of those who owned the property used as the city brothels. The historian Francisco Rodriguez Mann examined documents, which are no longer available in the city archives, and concluded that the property used as city-licensed brothels in the last part of the sixteenth century was owned by city officials and religious corporations, including the Cathedral council. These owners leased the property to private individuals, who then rented it to [231] various prostitutes. In 1571 owners of the houses used by the city brothel included a veinticuatro, an official of the Santa Hermandad, and one of the twenty sheriffs with major law enforcement responsibilities. In 1604 the houses of the city brothel were rented by a sheriff who collected a daily rent of one and one-half reales from each prostitute. ⁽³⁸⁾

The property involved in the city-licensed brothels was lowlying and close to the river, so that it had little commercial or residential value. When the Bishop of Esquilache asked permission in 1575 to establish a monastery in place of the brothels, he pointed out that this area was "of such poor quality that it could not be purified." The city council appointed a commission to study the proposal, and it suggested compensating the owners of the property with houses on another street and moving the brothels to a section next to the city wall. The council rejected this proposal, however, concluding that the brothels should remain in their "ancient and proper place." ⁽³⁹⁾ It might have added that this "proper" place was also highly profitable to members of the city government.

The city government's proprietary interest in the licensed brothels is evident in the time and money it spent administering, inspecting, and repairing them. The city council appointed padres, or administrators of the city-licensed brothels. In the last part of the sixteenth century, there were three padres, each the head of a separate house licensed by the city. The 1621 ordinances limited the number of padres to two and required that they swear to uphold the laws of the city. These ordinances also prohibited the padres from renting clothing or bedding to prostitutes and from accepting "pawned" women in the brothels, [232] two prohibitions that were also contained in a set of 1570 royal ordinances. ⁽⁴⁰⁾

Brothel administrators often requested that the city repair walls and gates that seemed to crumble rapidly in the dampness of the river air and the harshness of their use. In 1590, for example, one padre reported to the city council that the gate for the brothel had been destroyed, allowing ruffians to mistreat the prostitutes, destroy the little houses of the brothel, and steal doors and other materials. Other padres invited the city council to send a deputation to visit the brothel and see for themselves that repairs were necessary. ⁽⁴¹⁾

City officials inspected the brothels not only to maintain the value of their real estate, but also to preserve the value of the human property contained in their brothels. Three officials accompanied the canon of the Church of San Salvador on July 22, 1620, when he visited the brothels to preach to the prostitutes and try to convert them. Immediately after the visit, the officials announced that they would bring a doctor to examine the prostitutes. They fined one padre twelve reales for receiving an unlicensed prostitute into the brothel, and she was ordered to leave under penalty of 100 lashes. Another prostitute was ordered to leave the brothel because she appeared ill and could infect the others. A third prostitute was ordered to leave because of her age; she had been in the brothel too long. Evidently, city officials were as concerned to have attractive prostitutes as to prevent epidemics. ⁽⁴²⁾

Prostitution made sound business sense not only to the procurers and owners of brothels, but also to the charitable benefactors who were unable to provide every poor girl of the city with a dowry or a job. As demands for charity increased in the [233] last part of the sixteenth century, many city fathers concluded that practicality outweighed morality in the question of prostitution. They saw that it was an evil, but they agreed that it was better to accept it and regulate it than to forbid it and send converted prostitutes to seek a nonexistent livelihood. Even the optimistic and diligent Pedro de León, who worked so hard to convert women from prostitution, admitted the difficulty of finding husbands, parents, or jobs for converted prostitutes. ⁽⁴³⁾ The 1667 survey of the poor in Seville is filled with the names of young women of marriageable age unable to marry because they were too poor, unable to find work, and doomed to die from starvation. City fathers who owned brothels could thus argue that these brothels benefitted the entire community because they provided a livelihood for otherwise destitute women. It is not surprising, then, that the city council listened sympathetically to a padre of a brothel when he complained bitterly about "strange clergymen" and pious laymen called congregados who were driving women away from city-licensed brothels. ⁽⁴⁴⁾ To most city fathers prostitution was not only thinkable; it was practical.

"Lost women" were not lost at all in early modern Seville. They lived within the specific social and economic conditions of their city, and prostitution was one response to these conditions. But if they were not lost, they were used. Prostitution was commercially profitable for city officials and churchmen as well as street people. It reinforced the authority of the ruling class over unmarried women, folk practitioners, sailors, youths, and quick-fisted dandies. Prostitution was even a form of public assistance, providing jobs for women who would otherwise starve. It strengthened the moral attitudes that supported the city's hierarchy of authority, and it permitted the city oligarchy to demonstrate its authority to define and confine evil. Under the guise of public health and public order, it extended the [234] powers of city government. If prostitution was a symptom of social disease, it was also an example of social adaptation. In Seville prostitution helped to preserve the existing social order. It became a useful, practical political tool.

1. Quoted in Deleito y Piñuela, Religiosa, p. 107. In Spanish the poem reads, "Porque un caballero pobre/cuando, en cosas como éstas,/no puede medir iguales/la calidad y la hacienda,/por no deslucir su sangre/con una hija doncella,/hace sagrado un convento,/que es delito la pobreza."

2. Parroquias. Morgado, pp. 465-466. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 14, No. 7. Domínguez Ortiz, Estamento, p. 118.

3. Memorial to the king from the head of the city's silk guild, quoted in the Eighth Discourse of Martinez de Mata in Anes Alvarez, pp. 194-195. See also Dominguez Ortiz: Golden Age, p. 186; Orto, pp. 34-36, 84; and Estamento, p. 119.

4. Domínguez Ortiz, Estamento, pp. 113-144.

5. Quoted in Anes Alvarez, p. 129.

6. Navagero, p. 57.

7. Jorge Nadal, La población española, siglos XVI a XX (Barcelona, 1966), p.73.

8. Ignacio de Góngora, reported in M. Chaves, pp. 174-176. Catalina was also referred to as "Catalina de Eranso."

9. AMS, Efemérides, "Noticias y casos," No. 1.

10. AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 24, No. 1. Morgado, pp. 373-374.

11. Hill, p. 64. The Spanish text reads: "Ningun marido de noche,/ que es peligro conocido: mo te creas de promesas/lo seguro es lo granido."

12. "Consulta theologica en que se pregunta se seth justo y conveniente que se apliquen las obras pias de esta ciudad al remedio de la necesidad publica que al presente ay en esta ciudad de Sevilla," Papeles varios, BC, 83-7-14, folio 109.

13. AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanias de Cabildo, Tomo 24, Nos. 26, 30; Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York, 1961), p. 306.

14. C. Chaves, Part II.

15. Dóminguez Ortiz, "Vida," p. 167.

16. AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanfas de Cabildo, Tomo 22, No. 14.

17. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 11, No. 33. AMS, Archivo General, Sección 1, Carpeta 151, No. 238.

18. Sanchez Arjona, p. 100.

19. Domínguez Ortiz, Orto, p. 80. Stone, p. 28, presents a similar view of sumptuary laws as buttresses of the existing social order.

20. Pedro de León, appendix 1 to Part II, Case 59.

21. AMS, Efemérides, cuadro 2. See Thomas, Religion, pp. 49, 255-256, for a discussion of Church opposition to magic.

22. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 11, No. 78. Guichot y Parody, 2:2 13. Older women procuresses are described in AMS, Ordenanzas, "Titulo: De las mugeres barrangas y desonestas," folio 63.

23. Hill, pp. 106, 110, 119.

24. Christian, Person, p. 100.

25. See the royal letter to the city council of Seville in 1500 printed in Guichot y Parody, 1:375-377. The problems of respectable women walking in the city was discussed in a January 1570 petition to the city council, reported ibid., 2:68-70.

26. Pedro de León, Part I, chapter 5, folios 14-15.

27. AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 22, No. 12.

28. Francisco Farfan, Tres libros contra de peccado de la simple fornicacion; donde se averigua, que la torpeza entre solteros es peccado mortal, segun ley divina, natural, y humana; y se responde a los engaños de los que dizen qua no es peccado (Salamanca, 1585), p. 730. I am indebted to William Christian, who found this book in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, and permitted me to use his notes. This essay echoes an earlier argument by St. Augustine which described prostitution as a necessary evil.

29. Deleito y Piñuela, Mala, pp. 50-54. Domínguez Ortiz, "Vida," p. 168. Herrera Puga, pp. 55, 66. Rodríguez Marín, Miscelánea, p. 67. Ordinances prohibiting innkeepers from providing prostitutes with shelter or food are in AMS, Ordenanzas, "Titulo: De los tabernos y mesoneros," folio 89. Concern with disease is in José Velasquez y Sanchez, Anales epidémicos; reseña histórica de las enfermedades contagiosas en Sevilla desde la reconquista cristiana hasta de presente (Sevila, 1866), p. 67.

30. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 11, Nos. 62, 69; Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 22, Nos. 9, 17.

31. Morgado, pp. 365-366.

32. Pedro de León, Part I, chapter 4.

33. AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 22, No. 14.

34. John T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, 1966), p. 221. Norman E. Himes, Medical History of Contraception (New York, 1970), p. 187. An example of brothels referred to as "boticas" is in AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 11, No. 58.

35. Noonan, pp. 17, 201-202. Himes, pp. 153-154.

36. AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 16, No. 20, and Tomo 24, No. 27.

37. Ibid.

38. Rodríguez Marín, El loaysa, and his critical edition of Cervantes' Rinconete y Cortadillo (Madrid, 1920). This material is also discussed in Joaquin Hazañas y la Rua, Los rufianes de Cervantes: "El Rufian Dichoso" y "El Rufian Viudo" con un estudio preliminar y notas (Sevilla, 1906), note 1 on p. 26; and in Pike, Aristocrats, p. 204.

39. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 11, No. 1.

40. The 1570 ordinances are in BM, Egerton 1873, "Tractatus varii, et collectanea," folios 155-156. See AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 22, No. 14, for the 1621 ordinances.

41. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 11, Nos. 60, 63.

42. The account of this visit is in AMS, Colección del Conde de Aguila, Tomo 7, Letra A, No. 63. It is also presented in "Documentos relativos a la mancebla," Archivo Hispalense, Series 1, 3 (1887), 16-18.

43. Pedro de León, Part I, chapter 5, folios 14-15. See also Domínguez Ortiz, "Vida," p. 167.

44. AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 22, No. 11.