[235] The underworld survived in early modern Seville. Abandoned children socialized one another into this criminal subculture, and women frequently entered through the profession of prostitution. Yet survival was difficult, for Seville, the city of sunshine and orange trees, was also the scene of many disasters. Dependent for food on good harvests, the city was particularly vulnerable to the natural disasters of climate and insects. The price of bread increased 1000 percent after poor harvests in 1520 and 1521. Neither price controls on wheat nor public granaries for storing excess food in years of plenty had been able to prevent this disaster. The frantic efforts of citizens who gathered up 120 bushels of locusts from one field near the city in 1547 could not save the harvest of that year from the insects. Drought, freezing, and floods also devastated harvests. City chronicles report dearth in 1520-21,1547, 1570, 1580, 1626, 1636, 1642, 1647, 1649-52, and 1677-79. ⁽¹⁾

The river brought another danger. Disease frequently entered the city from the ships and boats that came into port. In some cases the sick men on board were quarantined, but in the winter of 1562-63 so many galley slaves were ill with influenza aboard seven ships in port that the Jesuits asked permission to take them [236] to a house near the port where they could be given better medical treatment. Too often quarantine measures could not prevent disease from spreading into the city. Chronicles record epidemics of influenza, bubonic plague, carbuncular plague, or typhus in 1520-22, 1562-63, 1581, 1588, 1599-1600, 1626, and 1649. ⁽²⁾

Disasters attacked the poor of the city first, but no one remained untouched. Even the wealthiest citizens felt the dislocations in trade and marketing. When famine or disease hit the supply of labor, the entire economy of the city reeled. Disasters prompted extraordinary community measures, including religious processions and travel restrictions. Underworld people were not immune to city disasters. If they were not among those poor people who succumbed first, they were among the first who cleverly exploited misfortunes. They often ran headlong into emergency measures passed by city officials, and frequently they were identified as agents of misfortune.

The relationship of the underworld and the city oligarchy is best understood if it is examined in times of crisis as well as in periods of calm. Although epidemics and famines sometimes struck together, they can be discussed separately. People of Seville responded differently to each, and the differences are useful in considering ways that disasters affected the relationship between city government and the underworld. Epidemics and famines were usually regional, affecting both rural and urban people, but this discussion will focus on the responses of city government and underworld people. A comparison of two rebellions in 1521 and 1652 reveals the changes that occurred in Seville, and it demonstrates that the underworld played a political role that was essentially conservative.

[237] EPIDEMICS

Fear was the first response to an epidemic in the early modern period. Lacking antibiotics, people had ineffective treatments for typhus, bubonic plague, and influenza. One Portuguese entrepreneur asked the city council for permission to distribute his "medicinal water" in Seville as a defense against epidemics, but city council members refused, evidently wise to the empty promises of so many similar remedies. ⁽³⁾ City fathers recognized the importance of public health measures, like cleaning streets and isolating contagiously ill people. They directed citizens to burn the garments and bedding of sick people, and then to purify the air with rosemary and thyme. ⁽⁴⁾

Despite these measures, the specter of an epidemic was fearsome. Descriptions of Seville in the midst of one read like scenes from Dante's Inferno. Flooding and freezing added to the city's suffering in 1626. So many people died that corpses were piled by the fifties in the Puerta del Perdon, the main gate in front of the Cathedral. Dogs and pigs ran through the city, eating at the corpses that completely blocked some streets. A chronicler of the 1649 epidemic estimated that at its height 300,000 people died, 500 or 600 each day. ⁽⁵⁾ The city lacked healthy people to bury the dead, and the bodies lay in heaps beside churches and cemeteries, some wrapped in a sheet or the cloak of a religious order, others naked with green limbs and swollen abdomens. One morning a bed appeared on the steps of the Cathedral and in it were four small children, all dead from the plague. Churchmen attributed these disasters to sin. Penitents joined religious processions through the streets, their whips and cries punctuating the somber chants of monks. Fear grew in the confusion of chanting monks, ranting preachers, piles of bodies, and bonfires of contaminated clothing. [238] When people heard of disease in a neighboring area, they closed the city gates. Travelers could enter Seville only with a health passport showing that they were free of disease and neither they nor anything they had with them had just come from a diseased area. The guards who were posted at the gates demanded to see the health certificates and arrested those who tried to enter without them. City council members had periodic reports on the health of surrounding areas. Some members even rode to other villages to check their residents. ⁽⁶⁾

Health passports protected the city from some disease carriers, but Seville remained vulnerable to others. The priest of the parish of San Bernardo reminded the council in 1600 that his parish was outside the city walls and unprotected. In addition, the parish had a number of inns where people without health certificates gathered. He warned that his parish could become the center of "a great conflagration and general pestilence," and he pleaded that the city council extend its protection to San Bernardo. ⁽⁷⁾ Triana, the suburb across the river, as well as the entire port area were also outside the walls.

Once disease was discovered, the council took emergency measures. It ordered families to separate their healthy members from ill ones, and directed householders to clean their houses scrupulously and burn all clothing and bedding used by diseased people. Owners of cats and dogs were ordered to kill them. Schools were closed. All cases of illness were to be reported to the city government immediately, so that infected inns or entire parishes could be closed off. Hospitals were set up to isolate and care for the ill. In 1649 the city council appointed a health commission, composed of the chief justice, the president of the Contratación, the chief sheriff and the head of the royal audiencia. Evidently these officials recognized that an epidemic threatened law, order, and commerce as well as public health. ⁽⁸⁾

[239] Disposal of the dead posed a serious problem. "The poor people," wrote Diego Ignacio de Góngora in his report of the 1649 epidemic, "lacking money and unable to carry their dead to the sanctity of the doors of the churches, dragged them along by a cord tied to the feet, and left them in the middle of the streets and plazas." ⁽⁹⁾ Wealthier citizens hired cart drivers to haul bodies away for burial, but the city lacked space to bury all of them. A sixteenth-century complaint that cemeteries were too full and bodies too easily dug up by scavenging dogs was echoed in epidemics of the seventeenth century. Six new cemeteries were established in the epidemic of 1649.

Despite the emergency efforts, Seville suffered serious dislocations. A basic problem was lack of manpower. Few healthy people were willing to work with the ill. In the epidemic of 1649 city council members, including the most illustrious veinticuatros, had to stand guard at city gates. Parishes were ordered to appoint deputies to carry sick people on litters to the hospitals, but they were overwhelmed by the numbers of the ill, and carts had to be called into service. ⁽¹⁰⁾

The shortage of people to care for the ill in the 1649 epidemic was so acute that the city government had to turn to its prisoners. Life sentences to the galleys or a presidio were commuted if prisoners would agree to work in the hospitals during the epidemic. Nearly all of the commuted prisoners became sick and died, but some hardy ones survived and were able to escape the city. Those who served in the hospitals characteristically exploited their new-found opportunities, robbing sick people and, in the words of a contemporary report, soliciting "illicit communication" with the women there. ⁽¹¹⁾

Forced to use less respectable people to care for the sick and the dead, the city oligarchy also depended upon lesser city [240] officials to supervise them. According to a chronicle of the 1649 epidemic, a minister of justice had to ride in each cart that hauled away bodies and infected clothing, to prevent the cart drivers from stealing the clothing. Unfortunately, supervisory officials became more difficult to find. Many city officials ignored their jobs during an epidemic. They moved their families out of the city if possible, or spent their time caring for their own sick relatives. Others preferred better jobs; one account of a seventeenth-century epidemic says that people would not serve as officials because they could receive higher wages for manual labor during this time of labor scarcity. ⁽¹²⁾

Many city functions ceased because there was no one to perform them. The militia dissolved. Sheriffs no longer made their rounds of the city to enforce laws. Justices did not prosecute thieves and murderers, nor were they able to prevent the theft and sale of contaminated bedding and clothing. Streets were not cleaned. The poor picked up the clothing of diseased people left in the streets and took it home "with pitiful security," as a contemporary warned. Trades continued only spasmodically, their guilds lacking masters or officials. ⁽¹³⁾

The most serious dislocation, however, was in the marketing of food. Fewer people were available to harvest crops, bring food to market, or bake the bread. The hardy who ventured into the streets to sell food demanded the highest prices possible. People were so fearful of food shortage that they paid the high prices. ⁽¹⁴⁾

City residents held their government responsible for their welfare during an epidemic, but they realized that the task required broader regulatory power. Public health measures became one of the strongest pillars of political power in Seville. In 1645 the city council directed each parish to elect two deputies to be in charge of street cleaning, who were empowered to compel householders to assist. A resident who refused would be fined [241] 500 maravedís and imprisoned for ten days. ⁽¹⁵⁾ The power was extended in 1667 when the council complained to the Crown that nobles and clergy were refusing to help pay the costs of street cleaning. In response the Crown ordered everyone, without exception, to pay - a clear victory for secular government. ⁽¹⁶⁾

By 1676 the issue of public health had so increased the powers of the city government that its health commission was able to assert control over many city activities, even in periods free of epidemics. A health ordinance of that year called for the Church to continue its "pious zeal," and for citizens to clean the streets and remove dead animals. It demanded the inspection of all corrales to ensure their cleanliness, and it decreed an absolute prohibition on throwing sewage water into streets. Residents were ordered to burn thyme and rosemary. The sale of spoiled fruit, fish, and meat was prohibited, and bakers were directed to put salt in their bread. The health commission prohibited the sale of old clothing during outbreaks of disease. It directed charitable groups to find shelter for the poor, and ordered postmen to refuse letters from areas known to be diseased. Public prisons were to be cleaned every Saturday, with special care given to the cleaning and sustenance of poor prisoners. Deputies were appointed to guard the city gates and to allow traffic through only seven of them. ⁽¹⁷⁾

Residents looked to their government for emergency regulations also, for they really had no alternative. The community catastrophe of an epidemic required collective action, and Seville had few institutions capable of taking collective city-wide action. Epidemics transcended neighborhoods and parishes. Cofradías and guilds provided some care for victims, but they had no organization to coordinate their work throughout the city, nor did they have authority to order the city gates closed. The Church was better equipped, from the council of the Cathedral to the parish system, but it relied on leading processions and prayers, ministering to the sick, and burying the dead. An [242] epidemic required citywide action, and by tradition people of the city looked to the city council to exercise that authority. In their concern for defensive health measures, residents did not complain about growing governmental power. Even when officials stopped functioning during an epidemic, citizens directed their complaints against the irresponsible individuals, not against the institutions of city government. ⁽¹⁸⁾

Although epidemics increased the regulatory powers of city government, it is likely that they also strengthened the resolve of underworld people. Those who were not victims of disease refused to be victims of the city oligarchy. They agreed to be used by the city government in caring for the sick or dead, but only if they could also use the situation to their own benefit. The specter of death from disease was not enough to soften the outlook of underworld people who saw death as a constant companion, sardonically grinning, certain to take them in the end. The underworld and city oligarchy continued to use one another, but the issue of survival pushed them into more rigid lines of opposition.

RESPONSES TO EPIDEMICS AND FAMINES

The residents of Seville who responded to epidemics with fear most often responded to famine with anger. Citizens unable to protect themselves from an epidemic willingly accepted more regulations from the city government, hoping to find in it an adequate defense from disaster, but the anger of rebels in a seventeenth-century bread riot rang out clearly when they shouted, "Long live the King of Spain and death to bad government!" ⁽¹⁹⁾

One reason that people of the city responded differently was that famines were more socially selective. True, wealthy people had some advantages in an epidemic. They were better nourished and could leave the city more easily until the epidemic had gone, and many lived farther from the port and extramural [243] parishes where epidemics were likely to appear first. Nevertheless, disease also struck the rich and well-fed. Moreover, no one seemed to profit from an epidemic except ex-prisoners, who stole from the sick and dying. In contrast, dearth was more obviously selective of its victims. The poorest people of the city were the first to feel hunger and to hear the wails of the children they could not feed. A wealthy merchant might complain of rising food prices, but he rarely went hungry. Worse, some people seemed to prosper when poorer people were dying from starvation. Where epidemics could level differences between the rich and poor, famine brought them into bold relief.

A second reason for the differing responses is that people identified the causes for these disasters differently. They usually blamed epidemics on germ-laden vagabonds, wandering used-clothing merchants, sailors from foreign ships, and prostitutes, or on divine punishment, or such "natural causes" as refuse or unburied corpses. Measures taken against them strengthened a sense of solidarity among city residents. Enforcing public health standards provoked a few squabbles, but these regulations also promoted a collective view of how the people of the community should live together. Even divine punishment promoted a collective response. God punished all His children with the epidemic, and together they made penance, whipping themselves, chanting, marching, and praying together.

Famine, too, could be blamed on a punishing God, but it could also be blamed on visible human targets. Bakers were charged with selling short loaves or holding back their bread in order to get higher prices. ⁽²⁰⁾ Millers were accused of overcharging bakers or cheating on the flour they milled. Large agricultural producers could afford to keep their grain off the market until prices rose. Wealthy families bought up large quantities of grain and stored it until prices increased enough to return a handsome profit. Street vendors raised the prices of food as it became scarce, and officials enforced neither price controls nor other [244] retail regulations. The presence of so many who seemed to profit while others starved split the community into angry groups.

Government was blamed for famine because it had traditionally assumed responsibility for providing food. The basic assumption of the long and detailed city ordinances regulating the transportation and sale of food was that the city government would be discredited if it did not feed the people, a misfortune that would also reflect on the Crown. City ordinances blamed rising food prices and scarcity on "bad government" in the public granary and the slaughterhouse. They specifically warned against allowing "ruffians" to steal or buy up quantities of food for resale. ⁽²¹⁾ One reason for these warnings was that many underworld people made a part-time living as slaughterhouse workers and street hawkers, and Seville's slaughterhouse became notorious as a gathering place for them. The description by one of the dogs in Cervantes' story "The Dogs' Colloquy" undoubtedly reflects a popular conception of Seville's slaughterhouse:

The things I could tell you, brother Scipio, about what I saw in that slaughter-house, and about the extraordinary things which go on there! First of all, you must bear in mind that all those who work there, from the youngest to the oldest, are people with easy consciences, without mercy or fear for the king or his law. Most of them are living with concubines, and they're like birds of prey, maintaining themselves, along with their mistresses, on what they steal. Every meat day there are vast numbers of girls and youths in the slaughterhouse before daybreak, all with bags which are empty when they start, but which are full of pieces of meat when they go home.... But nothing shocked me more than to see that these slaughterers will kill a man as easily as they kill a cow. For a trifle, and without a thought, they put a knife in a man's stomach as readily as if they were killing a bull. It's a rare thing for a day to pass without [245] quarrels and wounds, and sometimes deaths; they all take pride in being tough, and even boast of being ruffians. ⁽²²⁾

Responsible for providing adequate food at a fair price, the city government must have found the presence of "suspicious people" useful in deflecting popular anger. Officials could say that ruffians who filched in the slaughterhouse were responsible for the lack of meat and the increase in prices. They could represent themselves as the legitimate leaders of a community united in angry indignation against retail bandits who resold bread at a higher price in the back streets of the city. People might forget official inadequacy in enforcing retail regulations if they could focus on a few visible violators.

City records suggest, however, that retail violators were not limited to people of the underworld. Ordinances for the city granary complained that rich people were buying up the bread that was to be sold from the granary to poor people for ten maravedís less than the usual price. These ordinances also complained of the numbers of people who were profiting from selling contraband bread. Bakers refused to bring their bread to the granary and sold it secretly in the city above the set price. Later in the sixteenth century the Crown complained that city officials had distributed bread from the public granary to their friends and vassals and had resold it at higher prices. ⁽²⁴⁾ Despite more [246] stringent royal controls, contraband bread remained a problem in Seville, and anger continued to be the principal response to famine.

MORAL ECONOMY AND POLITICAL REBELLION

City chronicles contain detailed reports of uprisings in Seville in 1521 and 1652. The dissimilarities between the two revolts are striking and cannot be explained simply as the result of accounts written by different people from varying points of view. These differences suggest significant changes that occurred in Seville in the early modern period. They also challenge some recent theories of pre-industrial urban unrest.

In his analysis of the English crowd in the eighteenth century, E. P. Thompson described a "paternalist model" of a moral economy in which local leaders were expected to enforce fair prices on food and to protect the people from profiteering retailers. ⁽²⁵⁾ When local officials failed to regulate the market, the people rose up and took direct action themselves. Unlike the "spasmodic" version of bread riots, however, Thompson emphasized the restraint of these uprisings. His rioters were not men crazed by hunger, blindly striking out at anything; they were reasonable, disciplined men and women, who restricted their demands to immediate economic objectives.

This model is of limited usefulness in studying the two riots of early modern Seville. It is true that Seville exhibited many of the characteristics that Thompson described for the moral economy: fair price, regulated marketing, general suspicion of retailers or middlemen, direct popular action when local officials failed to provide food at a fair price. In 1521 and 1652, however, the people rose up in bread riots that exploded into political rebellions. Direct action by the rebels was not limited to immediate economic demands, nor were their targets limited to profiteering middlemen.

Thompson's model does not apply to Seville because his analysis assumes that bread riots in pre-industrial societies [247] occurred in small, closed economies where the problem of hunger was simply a matter of sufficient local harvests and reasonable food prices. Although the people of Seville did depend upon food production in the surrounding countryside, they realized even in 1521 the larger economic and political ramifications of food supply. Seville had long since left the phase of the small, local economy which still prevailed in parts of northern Europe in the early modern period. For centuries Seville had participated in the larger Mediterranean economy, exporting wheat, wine, olives and many manufactured goods. A comparison of the 1521 and 1652 rebellions argues persuasively that rebels demanded more than bread, because during this period Seville became even more involved in world commerce and royal monetary policies. People of this city suspected in 1521 that their hunger was the result of more than bad harvests and profiteering hoarders. By 1652 they knew that food supply was intimately related to wages, monetary valuation, and taxes; they angrily demanded not bread alone, but also an end to devaluation and a prohibition of the millones, a royal sales tax first imposed in the sixteenth century.

Accounts of Seville's two uprisings also challenge the theories of pre-industrial urban unrest presented by E. J. Hobsbawm. Describing urban riots as direct action by the urban poor to bring about economic or political changes, he calls these people "the mob," and he classifies them as "pre-political," because they lacked an ideology, "a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world." ⁽²⁶⁾ It is true that in neither 1521 nor 1652 did rebels nail on the Cathedral door a written program for a better Seville. However, rebels in both uprisings recognized that their economic demands required not only their direct action, but also action by people in power. In 1652 the rebels even placed their own nominees in these positions of power. Although they were not revolutionaries, they were nonetheless more sophisticated politically than the naive and inarticulate mob described by Hobsbawm. What is more, they were not a homogeneous group of urban poor who wanted only [248] to attack the rich and the powerful. Internal differences, rather than political naiveté, may account for their failure to bring about lasting changes. Evidence suggests that the presence of underworld people among the rebels helped to preserve the local government when it was threatened by popular rebellion.

City chronicles refer to these rebellions as the revolts of the Pendon Verde, a green banner carried by the rebels, and of the Feria, the section of the city in which the rebellions began. Both names have symbolic significance. The Pendon Verde had been captured from the Moors during the Reconquest and was preserved in a chapel in Omnium Sanctorum, the parish church for most of the Feria neighborhood. This traditional trophy was well known to the people of the city, and it was taken in both revolts without authorization of priests or officials by a group of rebels who carried it as they marched through the streets rallying supporters. When city officials approached the rebels in the revolt of 1521, they marched with the Pendon Real, the royal banner. The Pendon Verde thus seemed to symbolize local pride and popular direct action, as opposed to governmental authority allied to a central Crown.

The Feria is the name of a long, narrow winding Street some distance from the center of Seville. Significantly, one of the accounts of the 1652 uprising described the Feria as separate from the main commerce of the city, almost "remote." ⁽²⁷⁾ In many respects, the Feria was a separate community. In its main square stood the parish church, and small shops lined the streets. Every Thursday morning hundreds of small merchants came to sell their wares on the street, and on Tuesdays and Saturdays there were other fairs to sell horses and mules. The Feria was a gathering place for residents who felt themselves a small community separate from the city council, the substantial merchants of the Contratación, royal officials, and the hierarchy of the Cathedral. It symbolized separatism.

Both the 1521 and the 1652 riots began in times of food scarcity and sharply increased prices, but their immediate targets differed. In 1521 the rebels agreed to go together to sack houses [249] where they believed wheat was stored in the city. In 1652, however, the anger of the rebels focused on the bakers. For weeks bakers from outlying villages had been reluctant to bring their bread to sell in the city. One reason was that money had just been devalued by the Crown, and bakers demanded silver rather than devalued money. ⁽²⁸⁾ As they raised their prices and brought less bread, people began to rush them, taking their bread without paying. City officials sent troops to guard the bakers and force them to bring their bread to sell, but the soldiers blamed the officials for the bakers' lack of cooperation. People of the city suspected that the bakers were deliberately holding back bread in order to get higher prices. When only a few bakers appeared in the main square of the Feria early on May 22, 1652, and told the people that the price of bread had again risen, they were attacked by three armed men who dashed their bread to the ground with their swords.

Rebels in both uprisings were acting in the place of magistrates who, they believed, had failed to provide bread at a just price. Accounts of the 1521 rebellion describe the rebellious people as running through the streets searching houses for wheat and then converging on the chambers of the city council. There they noisily demanded bread, but they were soon placated by the asistente and a leading noble, Fernando Henriquez de Ribera. Many believed that the authorities' assurances of bread had quelled the uprising by the end of the first day. ⁽²⁹⁾

By 1652 Seville's was a capitalist, commercial, Atlantic-wide economy regulated by a government that could remain legitimate only if it provided food for its people. The 1652 rebels demanded the lifting of the millones tax, a royal sales tax imposed in the late sixteenth century from which neither nobles nor churchmen were exempt. They also demanded a return to the [250] previous value of vellon money, coins made from a mixture of silver and copper that progressively lost their silver content to the royal treasury as they were periodically reissued. Rebels demanded the release of people imprisoned for violating regulations on restamping money and stamped paper. These rebels had recognized that the problem of providing food was directly tied to taxation and monetary policies. They had no illusions of living in a local, closed economy dependent for food on the harvests of its own region. Wheat had been imported since the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and bread was bought by people who earned a living in the wine, oil, and shipping industries-all closely tied to an Atlantic-wide commerce. ⁽³⁰⁾

In 1652 rebels demanded not only food but a check on the developing capitalist system. They believed that merchants and large landholders had accumulated capital at their expense by squeezing higher food prices out of them and diverting local agricultural production into crops for more profitable foreign markets. Furthermore, they argued that the Crown's economic policies had promoted the drain of capital away from them by absorbing their small monetary holdings in taxes and monetary devaluation.

Rebels in 1652 did not bother to march to the city council to voice their demands. Instead, they waited until the second day of the rebellion and then went to the regente, the king's first minister in Seville. The implication is that people of the city recognized the impotence of the local city council. If they were to have bread, they would have to go to royal authorities, who were the only ones who could make the necessary changes in taxes, monetary policy, and commerce. This change is a key to understanding the growth of central political power in the development of modern states. Local governments like the city council of Seville lost authority and credibility when they could not feed their people.

[251] Officials listened to the rebels' demands in both uprisings because the rebels were armed and violent. The rebels of 1521 limited their violence on the first day of rebellion to breaking into houses where they suspected wheat was stored. On the second day, however, they broke into the house of the Duke of Medina Sidonia and seized four pieces of artillery, which they placed in the streets to fortify their stronghold in the Feria. Evidently they had lost faith in the calm assurances that local authorities had given on the previous day. Their resistance, however, was not reported as an aggressive, mindless violence; Ortiz de Zuñiga, a seventeenth-century noble, described "the common people taking up positions of defense in their parish and its plaza with four pieces of artillery that they had taken from the house of the Duke of Medina Sidonia." ⁽³¹⁾

Violence in the 1652 rebellion was much more immediate, wide-spread, and uncontrolled. One official estimated that 10,000 men poured through the city streets, sweeping along city officials in their rush. Officials who could make themselves heard urged the rebels to take all the wheat they found to the Alhóndiga, the public granary, where it could be better distributed. Ironically, the Alhóndiga also served as the city's armory and was a perfect target for hungry, angry rebels. A contemporary described the surge into the armory of "a great crowd and mob of roguish and base people who, in a very brief time, left not a single arm remaining." ⁽³²⁾ Some took guns with no powder or ammunition, and teen-aged boys happily ran off with antiquated armor and broadswords far too large for them.

After arming themselves at the Alhóndiga, the 1652 rebels went about the city in groups of twelve to twenty men. These quadrillas broke into houses demanding bread, wheat, bacon, ham, and cheese. They also took clothing, silver, and money. [252] The account by one eye-witness described the quadrilla that came to his house. A barefoot mulatto dressed in rags and armed with a helmet and breastplate led the noisy group. The captain and a few he chose came into the house to demand wheat while the others waited at the door and made "shameless comments." When the householder could find no wheat to give them, he gave some wine and money to the captain. The other members of the quadrilla complained loudly and said it was a shame that white men were subjected to a "dog mulatto." They killed the mulatto captain and left his body in a little plaza. ⁽³³⁾

Although the violence of the quadrillas threatened the entire city, it focused on bakers, law officers, and a royal prosecutor. Rebels chased bakers and sheriffs, wounding some, killing others, and even killing their horses. They sacked the homes of two criminal law clerks and then broke into their offices with hatchets. They destroyed their papers in a huge bonfire in the Plaza de San Francisco, adding papers to it from other lawyers' offices. A member of the king's Supreme Council who had come to Seville with the special commission of prosecuting violators of the new monetary laws left town just ahead of an angry band. Many city residents hated him for his vigorous punishment of small debtors. ⁽³⁴⁾

Rebels in both uprisings stormed city prisons and released prisoners. They did not limit their action to people imprisoned for debts or counterfeiting money or stamped paper; they freed all prisoners in the Royal Prison, prison of the Hermandad, prison of the Contratación, prison of the archbishop, and prison for prostitutes. After breaking down prison doors with hatchets and maces in 1652, they left imprisoned only one man, a Portuguese who had been accused of crimes against the king. ⁽³⁵⁾ The injustices protested by rebels in both of these uprisings included much more than the scarcity of bread at a "just price."

[253] Underworld people who were released from prison undoubtedly joined the rebels, exulting in the uprisings as fine opportunities for arming themselves, looting, and attacking hated figures of authority. There is no evidence that either the rebels or the prisoners greeted one another as brothers, however, nor that the underworld people took leading roles in the uprisings. Accounts of the 1521 rebellion described it as an uprising of "starving and needy common people" (plebe), and "very humble subjects" led by residents of the Feria. ⁽³⁶⁾ The more detailed accounts of the 1652 uprising indicate that it began with two silk weavers attacking the bakers in the plaza of the Feria. Leaders punished for the 1652 riot included workers of gold thread, barbers, masons, fishermen, shoemakers, and hat makers. All of these men were artisans and relatively prosperous, whose economic fortunes had declined by the middle of the seventeenth century. One man punished for his role in the rebellion was a sheriff of the Santa Hermandad who had complained too loudly about "evil government." ⁽³⁷⁾ Others punished included a Portuguese cleric and many people who had recently arrived in Seville.

The significance of the underworld in these events was more symbolic than real. Many participated, and they must have added a frightening and ridiculous aspect to the rebellion. One eyewitness who described the ragtag gangs that went about the city said that they were composed of "picaros, many of them barefoot, some with helmets, others with breastplates and swords, the bodyguards in armor, some with only gauntlets, others with pikes and arquebuses, according to what they had taken from the armory in the Alhóndiga." ⁽³⁸⁾ According to Ortiz de Zuñiga, the crowd that rushed to the initial attack on the bakers in the plaza of the Feria in 1652 included "vile subjects." Later in his account he referred to the rebels as "that infamous rabble." ⁽³⁹⁾ Although his own attitude toward rebellion colored [254] his account, they undoubtedly appeared to be the lowest, dirtiest, hungriest, and most frightening people of the city. The presence of underworld people among them confirmed a general contemporary attitude that crowd violence was chaotic, horrible, and carried out by the dregs of society. ⁽⁴⁰⁾

People of Triana, the suburb across the river, also joined the 1652 uprising. According to Maldonado, another chronicler, more than 600 rebels armed themselves in Triana and marched to a bugle across the bridge to the city. Rather than other armed rebels ready to join them there, however, they found some Franciscans, who assured them that the rebels of the Feria had disarmed because bread was now being distributed from the Convent of Santa Paula. Maldonado wrote that the Triana rebels received this news "gladly" and returned to Triana. ⁽⁴¹⁾ Ortiz de Zuñiga believed that local nobles defeated the rebels because they prevented the rebels of Triana from communicating with those of the Feria; they soon closed the city gates to prevent outsiders from joining the rebels inside. ⁽⁴²⁾

Clergymen played different roles in the two rebellions. Reports of the 1521 riot do not mention participation by clergy until the rebels had been routed by the nobles in street battles. The rebellion then died, closed by a romería, a traditional religious procession making a pilgrimage to a rural shrine. More than 1500 people from nearby Carmona entered the city on their way to pray for relief from famine at the shrine of Our Lady of Antiquity. Accompanied by their clergy and dressed as penitents with ropes around their necks, they intoned prayers and supplications to the Cathedral. From the Cathedral they received a Mass and sermon, food, and alms. People in the surrounding area who made similar romerías also received wheat that Seville bought at public expense from Africa, a demonstration that people who expressed their needs in traditional religious ways would receive help. ⁽⁴³⁾ The contrast between the pilgrims and the wounded, [255] slain, and discredited rebels could not have been greater. Probably the clergy responded more quickly than usual to the pilgrims in 1521 because the rebellion had jolted them from paralysis to action. Traditionally, the people looked to the Church to sustain them in times of calamity, and in 1521 the clergy was able to insist that their traditional support would come only in traditional forms.

During the rebellion of 1652, however, the clergy added some innovations to these traditional forms and played a much more active role in the rebellion. In order to stop the marauding violence of armed quadrillas, monks offered food and drink to them and persuaded them to put down their arms while they ate. In this way, Maldonado wrote, they were able to disarm entire quadrillas. Franciscans distributed themselves among the rebels to enforce peace after the rebel-approved governor tried to restore order to the rebellious city. The religious of the Convent of Santa Paula gave city authorities permission to station an armed guard there. ⁽⁴⁴⁾

On the fourth day of the rebellion, twenty-five monks entered the Feria and persuaded the rebels to go to the archbishop, ask pardon, and make peace. As the archbishop pardoned them in the name of the king, church bells and the Cathedral bells rang out the news, and some rebels laid down their arms. Others insisted that they should keep their weapons until they knew for certain that the king's pardon was genuine, the value of vellon money had been restored, and the hated taxes removed. The archbishop, regente, and asistente later went to the Feria to convince the people that the pardon was genuine and they could put down their arms. Many rebels refused, however, replying that they would not disarm until they received assurances from the king, "written in letters fat with gold," that they had won their demands and had been pardoned for their rebellion. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

Some clerics disagreed with the peace-making attempts of monks and the archbishop that seemed to align them with local authorities against the rebels. When Maldonado discussed the [256] causes of the 1652 rebellion, he described an incident in which secular officers of justice had "violated" and "profaned" a monastery when they broke into it to search for counterfeiters. They had been told that some men in the monastery had received the abbot's permission to restamp money there. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ This incident sparked a long-smoldering resentment that involved disputes over legal jurisdiction, abuses of religious asylum, the imposition of the millones tax on a clergy that believed it should be exempt, a royal requirement for using stamped paper (another illegal tax, according to some clergy), and the recent devaluation of vellon money. Required to pay its "donations" to the Crown in silver, the Church was pinched by the devaluation of vellon money. In addition, the lower secular clergy in Seville had to live on fees paid in vellon for Masses, burials, and baptisms. ⁽⁴⁷⁾

It is no accident that one of the leaders of the rebellion was a priest, undoubtedly a member of the lower clergy. Bernabe Lopez Filgueras, whom Ortiz de Zuñiga called "the seditious cleric," ⁽⁴⁸⁾48 was also Portuguese, born in the country that had just risen once more against its Spanish rulers. Maldonado described him as the "grand mutineer [grandíssimo amotinado], and the main leader of [the rebels], who as a priest and ecclesiastic had much hand and authority with them." ⁽⁴⁹⁾ According to witnesses, he urged the rebels to break down the doors of the Alcázar, a traditional symbol of authority. He demanded that a city official not only agree to the rebels' demands, but swear on a missal to uphold and support the ends of the people. When the archbishop pronounced pardon in the king's name, Lopez Filgueras scoffed that only the king could grant the pardon. He urged the rebels to keep their arms until they had heard from the king, himself, and he ridiculed those who believed the king would pardon them after they had committed such crimes. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ This priest was offering [257] support to a needy people, but hardly in the traditional manner. In 1521 no priest had appeared as a rebel leader, but by 1652 the economic and political development of Spain had produced a group of clergy who felt the injustices of the existing system as keenly as the rebellious artisans and unskilled workers.

There were no pilgrimages to close the rebellion of 1652, as in 1521. On the contrary, Church leaders and city officials sensed the danger of permitting religious festivals to take place soon after the rebellion had been put down. They decided to postpone the festival of Corpus Christi for one month because "it is very evident that the rebels intend to use this day to make a great havoc and slaughter in the justice and nobility of this city." ⁽⁵¹⁾ In the sixteenth-century rebellion a religious procession had been used to reinforce traditional values and responses; in 1652 city fathers feared that the group identity, collective action, and legitimation arising from a religious procession would be used against them. And though the institutional Church was still allied with the ruling class, some of the disaffected clergy were not. Also, the religious wars that had devastated Europe in the early modern period had demonstrated that religion, uncontrolled by a Church firmly allied with the government, could be a potent agency for popular protest, legitimizing political challenges and even sanctifying revolution.

Rebels in 1652 demonstrated more organizational skill than in 1521. Accounts of the sixteenth-century uprising have little evidence of rebel organization. The rebels appeared to agree on the targets for their direct action, and they went together to the city council, but they had no spokesmen, nor do accounts accuse any individuals of being leaders of the rebellion. Rebels cooperated in placing artillery pieces in the streets, but they had no plan or leaders to turn to when the nobles of the city routed them.

In contrast, accounts of the 1652 uprising suggest that it had been planned. In ordinary circumstances, for example, two silk weavers would not go to the plaza armed and on horseback to buy bread. In addition, the bakers' high price didn't provoke a [258] loud outburst of profanity, as might be expected, but a cry, "Long live the King of Spain, and death to bad government!" This was clearly a rallying cry, undoubtedly agreed upon by residents of the Feria as a signal. One historian has found evidence that it was also a rallying cry in several other uprisings in Andalucia during this year. ⁽⁵²⁾

Although the quadrillas probably arose spontaneously in the 1652 rebellion, these rebel gangs do show evidence of organization. Maldonado's eye witnesses said the gangs had leaders. Moreover, the gangs imposed their own kind of justice on their members. They imprisoned one gang member who had violated their code, and when a bystander inquired what the arrested man had done, members of the gang replied, "He has been imprisoned by order of the crowd . . . because he stole a silver vase from a house." ⁽⁵³⁾ Perhaps the victim was an underworld character who had violated the rebels' code, demonstrating less interest in justice than in loot.

One account of the 1652 rebellion listed the "impudences" committed by the rebels, and among "other infinitely evil things" declared that the rebels had established price controls. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ Maldonado asserted that the rebels had agreed on whom they would appoint regente and asistente, although he gave no names. The rebels made Juan de Villasis the head of their army, and they accepted the aide of the asistente as governor of the city after he had bowed to their demands and had sworn on a missal to uphold their interests. They directed him to name chiefs of the quadrillas and body guards and place them in charge of the parishes, evidently realizing that organization was crucial to consolidating their position. ⁽⁵⁵⁾

Despite the superior organization of rebels in 1652, this uprising failed in an armed rout similar to that of 1521. Ortiz de Zuñiga, who had belonged to one of the noble groups that [259] restored order in 1652, gave credit to the nobility for putting down both rebellions. Not only were the nobles superior militarily to the rebels, he wrote; they were also true paternalists, demonstrating their care and regard for the common people. ⁽⁵⁶⁾ Ortiz de Zuñiga failed to recognize the differences between the nobles in the 1521 revolt and those putting down the 1652 rebellion. He happily noted that one result of the 1521 revolt was to bring the dukes of Medina Sidonia and Arcos back to Seville, strong and willing to accept their paternalist obligations to the city. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ But he did not see the connection with the Comunero Revolt, a series of local uprisings which broke out all over Spain against Charles I in 1520-21. In this period the Crown was vulnerable and had to depend on the local authority of nobles, such as the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who could restore order. People of the city accepted their nobles as responsible patrons, and the nobles demonstrated their generosity and understanding by pardoning the rebels. Although the famine of Seville continued for at least another year, leaving the streets full of corpses and starving beggars, the people revolted no more. Their anger seemed to disappear with the gunsmoke in the streets, and they willingly returned to the traditional responses to hunger: religious processions, begging, seeking bread from the city council and archbishopric. As long as their patrons provided some food, they held their peace.

By 1652, however, the paternalism of the local nobles was more form than substance. In a very literal sense nobles no longer provided wheat for the people. Much of the land belonging to nobles had been converted to the more profitable wine and olive cultivation. Wheat, now imported from other countries, was carried to the city by merchants and other commercial officials. In addition, nobles were increasingly absent from the city and their land. They leased their holdings to other cultivators and delegated their responsibilities in city government to lesser officials so that they could spend increasing time at the royal court. The preeminence of the Crown over local nobles [260] was clearly recognized by the rebels, who refused to disarm until they heard from the king himself that he had granted their demands and had pardoned them.

The rebels of 1652 were defeated in an engagement on Saturday, May 26, 1652, when a combined city force captured their artillery and routed their defenses. They were defeated a second time two days later when the ruling junta rescinded all concessions made to the rebels. Vellon money would return to its previous level, and all royal taxes would be reimposed. Concessions had been promised, the announcement declared, only to quiet the rebels. They were now rescinded because they were "against the service of his majesty." ⁽⁵⁸⁾ A royal directive sent by special mail soon arrived in Seville to confirm this action. The king also exempted 56 rebel leaders from his pardon, 38 from the Feria and 18 from Triana. Five of these rebels had already been shot, their bodies hanged from windows on the Plaza de San Francisco. Two brothers were hanged in the Plaza and their heads displayed in the square of the Feria. Authorities delayed the execution of one leader in an unsuccessful attempt to force him, under torture, to name other rebel leaders. ⁽⁵⁹⁾

While none of the rebels executed was described as a ruffian or member of the underworld, the role of the underworld in the rebellion should not be discounted. In the first place, the presence of underworld people among the rebels discredited the uprising and helped city officials justify their actions in putting it down. They could make insincere promises to people as low and dishonest as those ruffians. They could insist that all arms be kept in the Tower of Gold by city-paid guards, for no reasonable resident wanted to permit armed thugs and murderers in the city. Finally, they could punish the Feria under the guise of clearing out a nest of criminals. As Maldonado wrote: "because the site of the Feria has always been a refuge of the delinquents in this city, both natives and those from afar, the council and government agreed to close all the taverns and bars there." ⁽⁶⁰⁾[261] Opposition between underworld and city government became more rigid during such crises as bread riots and political rebellions.

City officials opposed the underworld during crises, but they usually opposed them from a weaker position. One account of the 1652 rebellion used the following often contradictory metaphors to describe the weakness of the city:

The veinticuatro not worth one
The ministers servants, and the servants ministers
The staffs of office (varas) at a standstill (varadas)
Sheriffs invisible
The city alone, the city full
Judges without a court; the court for horses
Broken soldiers
Money with no value
The Lonja a skeleton
The Alcázar in forgetfulness. ⁽⁶¹⁾

The underworld exploited the lack of law and order, but it could not survive as a parasite on a host reduced to bones. Survival for the underworld depended upon the city overcoming its crises. Underworld people nipped at the heels of the city oligarchy, but they refused to sink tooth or claw into it. They diverted potentially revolutionary fervor into a toothless, claw-less pose, threatening and fearsome but ultimately supportive of the existing social order.

Crises in early modern Seville demonstrate that governments gather political power from sources as mundane as public health and bread. The city government in Seville survived the painful dislocations of famine and epidemic and even wrested from these traumas an extension of power. One reason is that the parasitical underworld realized that its own survival depended upon preserving the existing order. A second reason is that the underworld [262] provided city fathers with a justification for enforcing more regulations and monopolizing violence. As a symbol of evil, the underworld enabled the dominant culture to define itself as just and moral, author of a legitimate social order.

1. "Feria y Pendon Verde de Sevilla año MDXXI," Papeles varios, BC, 85-4-13.Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:504. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 19, No. 19. AMS, Archivo General, Sección 1, Carpeta 27, No. 379. Memorias eclesiásticas, BC, 84-7-19. Guichot y Parody, 2:294.

2. Astrain, 2:528-530. AMS, Efemérides, "Noticias y casos," No. 1. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 7, Nos. 16. 17. Memorias eclesiásticas, BC, 84-7-19. Diego Ignacio de Góngora, "Relacion del contagio que padeció esta ciudad de Sevilla el año de 1649," Memorias de diferentes cosas, BC, 84-7-21. Note that epidemics of "bubas" may have been syphilis rather than bubonic plague.

3. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 7, No. 8.

4. Nicolás Monardes, Sevilla medicina, que trata el modo conservativo y curativo de los que habitan en la muy insigne ciudad de Sevilla, la cual sirve y aprovecha para cualquier otro lugar de estos reinos (Sevilla, 1866), p. 42.

5. AMS, Efemérides, cuadro 2. Góngora, folios 86^V, 101^V.

6. A sample letter to be used as a health passport is in AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 16, No. 73. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 7, No. 17.

7. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 7, No. 17.

8. Ortiz de Zuniga. 4:709. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 7, Nos. 14, 17. Góngora, folios 57^V, 60, 83, 83^V.

9. Quoted in Guichot y Parody, 2:260. AMS, Papeles Importantes, Siglo XVI, Tomo 3, No. 26. Oritz de Zuñiga, 4:707-710.

10. Góngora, folios 56^V-57, 61. Cf. Anne Cornelisen's description of a typhoid epidemic in a twentieth-century Italian village, in Torregreca, p. 77.

11. Góngora, folio 86.

12. Ibid., folio 69; Guichot y Parody, 2:259-261. A sixteenth-century account of the paralysis of city functions during an epidemic is in AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 7, No. 10.

13. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 7, No. 10.

14. Góngora, folio 63^V. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:707-710.

15. AMS, Papeles Importantes, Siglo XVII, Tomo 4, No. 58.

16. Reported in Guichot y Parody, 2:276-277.

17. AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 16, No. 59.

18. AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 7, No. 10.

19. Joseph Maldonado Danila y Saavedra, "Tratado verdadero del motin que hubo en esta ciudad este año de 1652," 1663, Sevilla, BC, 84-7-21, folios 115^V-116.

20. An example is in AMS, Archivo General, Sección 1, Carpeta 27, No. 364.

21. AMS, Ordenanzas, "Ordenanzas primeras del Alhóndiga del pan de Sevilla," See also Morgado, p. 154. AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 22, No. 22.

22. Cervantes, "The Dogs' Colloquy," pp. 197-198.

23. Thomas de Mercado, pp. 33-36.

24. AMS, Ordenanzas, "Ordenanzas segundas del Alhóndiga." AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 13, No. 13.

25. Thompson, pp. 83-84.

26. AMS, Ordenanzas, "Ordenanzas segundas del Alhóndiga." AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 13, No. 13.

27. Maldonado, folios 114-114^V.

28. Letter from the city of Seville to Philip IV, June 1652, quoted in Domínguez Ortiz, Alteraciones, p. 217. This study is based on a wealth of archival evidence from Granada, Cordoba, and Seville. It discusses the 1652 revolt in Seville as part of a larger picture of social unrest in Andalucia.

29. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 3:325-326. Maldonado, folio 114^V.

30. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:743. Maldonado, folio 122. Elizabeth Fox Genoese, "The Many Faces of Moral Economy: A Contribution to a Debate," Past and Present, No. 58 (1973), discusses the flaws in Thompson's model of a moral economy; see esp. pp. 163-167.

31. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 3:325.

32. Domínguez Ortiz, Alteraciones, letter from Seville to the royal government, May 22, 1652, quoted in the appendix, pp. 208-209. Maldonado, folio 116^V. Davis, Chapter 6, also printed as "Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France," Past and Present, No. 59 (1973), 87-88, suggests a parallel between the youths who participated in religious riots and the youth festivals of misrule that she discussed in "Misrule."

33. Maldonado, folios 153^V-154.

34. Ibid., folios 117^V-118, 123-123^V. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:741. For the city's hatred of the royal prosecutor, see the letter of Fray Juan de los Santos, April 23, 1652, quoted in the appendix of Domínguez Ortiz, Alteraciones, pp. 205-207.

35. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:743. Maldonado, folio 122^V.

36. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 3:325. Maldonado, folio 114^V.

37. Maldonado, folios 141, 145. AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanías de Cabildo, Tomo 28, No. 19.

38. Maldonado, folio 153^V.

39. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:739-740, 743.

40. Davis, "Religious Riots," p. 52, discusses sixteenth-century attitudes about crowd violence.

41. Maldonado, folios 119^V-120.

42. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:747.

43. Ibid., 3:325-327.

44. Maldonado, folios 118^V-119^V. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:744.

45. Maldonado, folio 133^V.

46. Ibid.

47. Domínguez Ortiz, Estamento, discusses taxes on the Church, pp. 153, 155; see pp. 71-73 for concerns about economic support of the clergy, and pp. 62-63 for a discussion of the poverty of the lower clergy.

48. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:744.

49. Maldonado, folio 141.

50. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:741, 747-748. Maldonado, folios 125^V, 133^V.

51. Maldonado, folio 144.

52. Domínguez Ortiz, Alteraciones, pp. 53, 220.

53. Maldonado, folio 154.

54. Andrés de Vega, in AMS, Papeles del Conde de Aguila, Sección especial, Tomo 10 en folio, No. 30.

55. Ibid. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:744.

56. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:741-742, 746.

57. Ibid., 3:326-327.

58. Maldonado, folios 143^V-144.

59. Ibid., folios 141, 144^V, 147-147^V.

60. Ibid., folio 150.

61. "Casos del tumulto de Sevilla de 22 de mayo del año de 1652," Papeles varios, BC, 83-7-14, folios 181-182.