[33] Seville had been at the center of a regional market for hundreds of years, but in the sixteenth century the city became a world commercial center. With the opening of trade with the New World, business was so good that hundreds of people came to Seville to share in its fortunes. One of las Gradas, the steps of the Cathedral where merchants closed business deals, was reputed to be worth more than "the entire world." ⁽¹⁾

Before the end of the century, this open and highly visible commercial center on the Cathedral steps was replaced by proud new buildings: the Lonja (businessmen's exchange), the Casa de Contratación (board of trade), and the Casa de Moneda (mint). Much of the city's commerce remained in the streets and plazas, but another part reached far beyond las Gradas to the markets of the New World.

Commercial expansion affected people from all classes in Seville, and it increased tensions between those who made fortunes and those who did not. A commercial ethic and a growing number of regulations accompanied the development of trade. Crimes were defined differently within this developing commercial order, and boundaries changed for the commercial activities in which both underworld and respectable citizens participated.

[34] PEOPLE OF COMMERCE

The rapid growth of trade with the New World in the sixteenth century required many more merchants, shippers, and bankers in the city. Trade continued to be dominated by the Consulado, a corporation of the wealthiest merchant families in Seville, but it also opened to others. Attracted by the wealth of the, trade with the New World, merchants and shippers flocked to Seville from northern Spain and Italy. Artisans and less skilled workers came from France and Portugal. The Consulado tried to preserve its commercial monopoly, but it could not prevent the influx of outsiders. Some, like Claudio Irunza and Juan Antonio Corzo Vicentelo de Leca, became very wealthy. So many outsiders arrived in Seville to seek their fortunes that the city became known as "the mother of foreigners." ⁽²⁾

Bankers assumed new significance as Seville's commerce extended to many parts of the world. Merchants needed a banking system that had international connections. The greater distances and larger cargoes involved in trade with the New World required a substantial credit system that could make longer-term loans. Since Spain used no paper money at this time, merchants turned to bankers for letters of credit and bills of exchange to replace increasingly cumbersome metallic coins. The factors of time and geography increased the need for a reliable credit system and credit ethic, but at the same time they increased the opportunities for fraud. People of the underworld who had some education specialized in forging letters of credit. Merchants and bankers hesitated to expose these frauds because the mere acknowledgment that they had been fooled could bring down their entire credit structure. ⁽³⁾

Foreigners or Conversos usually provided banking services, for banking was stigmatized as a form of usury in this period. The Genoese and the Fugger family of Germany were bankers for sixteenth-century Seville, but their participation waned with [35] the bankruptcies declared by the government of Philip II. By 1595 so few bankers were available in Seville that the Espinosa family was named to provide public banking even though it had been previously involved in a counterfeiting case and was primarily interested in exporting to the New World the oil and wine produced on its estates. This bank failed in 1601, and merchants of the city had to report in 1616 that the money owed for an export tax was not available, nor could it be gathered together in a year. Portuguese Converso bankers had participated in the city's commerce, but they fell victim to the Inquisition after 1640. No longer protected by the Count-Duke of Olivares or any other royal minister who understood their importance to financing the military requirements of the Crown, their banking services in Seville declined abruptly. ⁽⁴⁾

The numbers of people involved in shipping increased rapidly in the sixteenth century. Figures 4 and 5 show that both the numbers of ships and the value of shipping grew very rapidly when trade with the New World increased. Seville never became a center for ship building, probably because the province lacked the necessary wood, but the port employed thousands to maintain and repair ships. Trained ships' pilots were in great demand- so scarce were they in fact that shipowners called for them throughout Seville and the nearby towns. Unable to find enough, they got permission to use unlicensed pilots and hoped that convoys would solve the problem of untrained pilots as well as that of marauders. ⁽⁵⁾

---

As the threat from French and English corsairs grew, the armaments industry also employed many people to manufacture the explosives and arms that could help protect the ships sailing to New Spain. The loss of a fleet between Spain and the New World would disrupt the entire life of the city. Commercial houses suspended payment, rich men declared bankruptcy, the wealthy reduced their charity and style of living, everyone had less money [38] for purchases, and churches filled with people seeking asylum from imprisonment for debt. To protect their fleets from the weather and marauders, merchants and shipowners agreed to sail in convoys with smaller military ships. The cost of defense was raised by an export tax (avería) that grew from 1.7 percent in 1585 to 8 percent in 1591. ⁽⁶⁾

Defense was also needed on land, for the precious metals entering Seville from the New World tempted a variety of thieves. Some infiltrated the mint where the silver was stamped into coins, and others attacked armed land convoys taking the coins into interior Spain. ⁽⁷⁾ The wealthy silk and silver quarter of the city had its own set of guards and a gate that was locked each night, defenses that helped to prevent theft by outsiders but were ineffective against inside jobs. A silver dealer who needed money in 1581 killed the servant of another silver dealer and stole the gold he was carrying. The guards and gate of the quarter had not prevented the crime, but they helped to expose it, for the murderer had to get the body of his victim past the gate. He put it into a sack and told the guard that it was to be thrown on the rubbish heap outside the city walls. The guard, suspicious of such heavy rubbish, looked inside the sack and called the city sheriffs. ⁽⁸⁾

The convoy system used in trade with the New World led to moments of sudden frantic commercial activity followed by long periods of inactivity. The simple task of providing a ship with the biscuit needed for its voyage became gigantic when a whole fleet of ships had to be provided in time for the annual crossing. One study estimated that the ovens of Seville had to work constantly for four months to produce all the biscuit needed for a fleet going to the New World. When the fleet could not wait four months for provisions, shipowners got part of their biscuit supply from [39] Cadiz and El Puerto. ⁽⁹⁾ The irregularity of bursts of intense activity followed by long interludes of inactivity hardly promoted a middle-class ethic of steady, honest work. Many laborers in Seville were underemployed or unemployed during slack periods, and many were caught up in the feverish work of active periods. City officials noted another problem in provisioning fleets. In 1579 they asked the king to order ships to get their provisions in Malaga rather than Seville. "Because this city is so large and there is usually in it a great crowd of people, natives and foreigners, and they get here provisions for the commercial ships that enter and leave, and since the bread is almost all transported from the surrounding areas, it has been seen through experience, that after they have gotten their provisions here, they have raised very much the price of wheat, even though the harvests are plentiful." This price increase, they wrote, was "an obvious injury, especially to the poor, also to the landowners." ⁽¹⁰⁾

When a fleet arrived in Seville carrying millions of silver bars from New Spain or Peru, the mint came under intense pressure to convert the silver into money very quickly. One result was that money was often printed in large denominations, and this led to a shortage of the smaller coins and a depreciation of money. Seville's mint enjoyed a near monopoly on converting the silver because merchants were reluctant to pay to transport the silver to other mints. They were also impatient with any delays in converting the silver to money and preferred to have it laboriously stamped by hand in the Sevillian mint than to wait for it be stamped by the more efficient water mill or horse-turned mill in the mint of Segovia. Counterfeiters obviously favored the Sevillian mint because it was easier to counterfeit hand-printed coins.

As the number of ships sailing between Seville and the New World grew from three in 1504 to 283 in 1608, shippers needed greater numbers of day-laborers to load and unload them. ⁽¹¹⁾ [40] There is some evidence that workers tried to limit their own numbers so that they could enjoy more continuous employment and higher wages. City ordinances limited to fourteen the companies for loading and unloading ships, a provision that rankled city officials concerned with the growing independence of these laborers in the late sixteenth century. ⁽¹²⁾ Shipowners and merchants wanted many laborers available to load and unload their ships quickly, and they wanted to pay them as little as possible. They gladly used the underworld toughs who were willing to work occasionally, a pool of surplus labor that brought into line the licensed day-laborers.

Because two of the major exports from the city were wine and oil, the container-makers played a significant commercial role. Cask-makers had a guild strong enough to insist that the city prohibit the use of casks manufactured outside Seville. As the numbers of cask-makers increased in the sixteenth century, the membership of this guild appeared to decline in quality. City records reported a quarrel that two young cask-makers had in 1599 with another young man over a woman. They stalked him openly through the city streets with drawn swords until he turned into an alleyway, where they ran him through. ⁽¹³⁾

On a smaller scale, ceramic containers were also used for transporting oil and wine from the city. By the mid-sixteenth century there were some fifty earthenware workshops in Triana. Earthenware was so cheap and plentiful here that merchants bought large quantities to take to France, Flanders, and England. One problem was that the clay was gathered from the river banks along the Tablada, a pastureland, and the small islands in the river. Continuous gathering of clay undermined the pastureland rented out by the city in these areas and provoked many complaints. After investigating the problem in 1567, the city council posted guards to prevent the potters of Triana from gathering clay near the pasturelands. Conflicts continued into the seventeenth century, with city merchants arguing that pottery containers were essential to their trade and the potters' [41] guild complaining that the city's action against them was hurting the 5000 people involved in clay-gathering and pottery manufacture. ⁽¹⁴⁾ In this case, merchants, artisans, and workers shared a common interest against the landholding city council.

Commerce also involved local producers, but most were unable to keep up with the greatly increased demands triggered by the opening of trade with New Spain. Costs were higher here, for the influx of precious metals from the New World and the great population increase of the sixteenth century were felt most directly in Andalucia, where they pushed up prices sooner than in many other areas of Europe. Merchants in Seville turned to the producers from Flanders, Germany, and northern Spain to buy the cargoes for the ships that they sent to the Indies. The Sevillian producers of soap, gloves, cloth, printed books, and swords continued to produce for export, but there is no evidence that trade with the New World stimulated a markedly increased production. ⁽¹⁵⁾

Agricultural producers were more important to the export trade of Andalucia. Wine and olive oil were especially profitable in the markets of the New World, with wine selling in American markets for nearly twice the price that it got in Spain. ⁽¹⁶⁾ Some land around Seville that had been cultivated with cereals, fruits, or vegetables was converted to the more profitable olive and vine production. At the same time, population growth increased demands for agricultural products. Prices rose and agricultural producers began to cultivate more marginal land, a further impetus to higher prices for agricultural products.

[42] Noble families, the Church, and military orders owned most of the land around Seville, but usually they did not exploit it directly. They rented it out for money. Small agricultural producers who rented small parcels of land were unable to keep up with rising prices and increasing rents. Many of them abandoned agriculture and tried other occupations in the city. Larger agricultural producers fared better, cultivating more of the land abandoned by the smaller farmers. They faced a shortage of agricultural labor, however, a problem that some contemporary economists believed could be solved by relocating vagabonds and other idle people in agricultural colonies. ⁽¹⁷⁾

Sevillian commerce was also open to the lowly regatones (Street hawkers), and pregoneros (vendors). Both of these groups of people made their living through retail, but pregoneros had a special status. According to city ordinances of 1632, only thirteen pregoneros were authorized for the city, and each had his own territory within the city. These men were occasionally required to make public announcements, but their major economic role was to buy and sell secondhand goods. When a resident needed money quickly, he took one of his belongings to the pregonero, who would sell it for him. The pregonero was supposed to keep no more than 2 percent, or a maximum of 100 maravedís, from the selling price. ⁽¹⁸⁾

Regatones, on the other hand, were very numerous in the city and enjoyed no special status. Most sold food, but some also sold soap, pottery, and charcoal. Many had customary selling routes in the streets and plazas of their neighborhoods, although some regatones sold only from their houses. People of all ages worked as regatones, and both men and women found that they could combine this work with other jobs. Underworld people combined street retailing with prostitution, gambling, [43] and theft. Regatones were noted for their tough manners and gutter language. ⁽¹⁹⁾

Underworld attitude toward commerce was a cynical admiration. Underworld people used merchants' terms for their own enterprises. To underworld people the aduana referred not to the customs house but to the brothel or the place where thieves deposit their loot. They recognized the practicality of commercial regulation through a customs house and adapted it to their own economic activities. Because prostitution could be subjected to controls similar to those in banking houses, underworld people called the brothel a cambio (exchange). A pagote (payee) was the person guarding the women to be sure that clients paid them. ⁽²⁰⁾ Thieves' societies were reported to deposit loot in a box locked with three keys, the same system used by the Casa de Contratación.

Although underworld people used the terms and systems of successful merchants, they resisted the developing commercial ethic. Debt was nothing to them but a tool used by the more powerful against the weak, a snare to be evaded. Underworld people viewed commercial fortunes as the result of lucky speculations rather than hard work, and their vocabulary reflected a characteristic attitude toward money and work. In the underworld language the usual word for work, trabajo, referred to the prison or galleys. Money was called sangre (blood) or amigos (friends). A bag of money was called a pelota (ball). ⁽²¹⁾ Money did not seem to be the wages for labor to these people, but a plaything, a friend, the vital substance of living.

COMMERCIAL REGULATIONS

Trade with the New World brought Madrid and royal bureaucracy into the commerce of Seville. Eager to control relations with the newly discovered territories, the Crown established the Council of the Indies to make policy and the Casa de Contratación to administer the policy. International policies of the [44] Spanish Crown directly affected Sevillian commerce. The Spanish Hapsburgs' wars with France, Holland, and England closed several foreign ports to Sevillian merchants. In addition, the defeat of the Armada in 1588 lost countless ships and trained seamen needed for commerce.

The Casa de Contratación was closely tied to the Consulado through family and friendship, but it was a separate institution and required its own bureaucracy. According to one contemporary, the officers of the Casa included a president, administrator, treasurer, accountant, assessor, fiscal reporter, secretary, scribes, sheriffs, porters, warden of the Casa's prison, head pilot, cosmographers, boat inspectors, professor of astrology, professor of cosmography, receiver of export duties, accountant of duties, and lawyers. Some of these offices were only parttime. The presidency of the Casa did not become a continuous office until 1579, and in 1598 it was reserved for nobility of the blood. ⁽²²⁾

Regulatory duties of the Casa became more complex as the size of commercial ships increased and the Guadalquivir River filled with silt and became less navigable. When trade with the Indies began in the sixteenth century, the average size of ships was 100 tons. By 1650 the average size was 250 tons, and some were as large as 500. ⁽²³⁾ Because the sandbar at Sanlucar was especially difficult for the larger ships to cross, they were often partly loaded or unloaded at Sanlucar, El Puerto de Santa Maria, or Cadiz. The Casa de Contratación had to send representatives to these ports, and the city council of Seville had to oversee a fleet of smaller boats that could link the city with the larger ships unable to pass up the river to Seville. In 1717 Cadiz formally replaced Seville as the site of the Casa de Contratación, but the replacement was actually a long gradual procedure throughout the seventeenth century. During this period people who wanted to avoid trade regulations exploited the confusion of overlapping port authorities in and around Seville.

The Crown regulated commerce in Seville in order to raise money. In addition to the alcabalá, the traditional sales tax, the Crown found several other sources for revenue in the commerce [45] of the city. Some royal prerogatives brought in rather small amounts of revenue but still played a major role in the city's economy. An example is the tax of 360,000 maravedís which Seville paid to the Crown each year for permission to use the income from a nearby salt works. ⁽²⁴⁾ Much more important in the amount of revenue it produced was the almojarifazgo (import duty). In exchange for the periodic payment of lump sums, the Crown leased the right to collect import duties in the port of Seville. With the growing New World trade it was able to divide this privilege into the almojarifazgo major and the almojarifazgo de Indias (import duties on all items brought from the New World, or the Indies, as this area was commonly called). The latter was especially profitable, and its growth was estimated at 600 percent in the last half of the sixteenth century. ⁽²⁵⁾

As a royal prerogative the collection of import duties was supervised by the Aduana (customs house), an institution independent of the Casa de Contratación. The Aduana had its own set of officials, accountants, inspectors, and porters-as many as 250 employees. ⁽²⁶⁾ Ironically, the Aduana brought into play an even greater number of smugglers, forgers, fences, and counterfeiters. To avoid paying an import duty, merchants and shippers bribed inspectors and paid teamsters to hide merchandise. Passengers entering Seville from the Indies hired sailors to smuggle precious metals or jewels through the customs inspection. If legitimate merchants hesitated to handle contraband merchandise, smugglers knew many fences in the city. A letter of 1651 from a Franciscan friar in Seville complained that the parish of San Marcos was a center for contraband trade. A group of gente de mal vivir (bad people) freely bought and sold contraband merchandise in their houses in this parish, he reported, and they had become very rich and insolent. They [46] nearly killed a customs judge who got in their way, and other officials of the city were either afraid of them or respected them. ⁽²⁷⁾

Stung by countless smuggling ruses, the royal government increased the penalties on smugglers. Boatmen or shipowners caught smuggling were to lose their vessels. Merchants who proclaimed their innocence of trying to smuggle valuable merchandise concealed in loads of less valuable products were to lose all concealed merchandise, as well as the beasts carrying it. When contraband merchandise was discovered and seized, duties were first extracted. The value of the remainder was divided, with one quarter going to the denouncer, one quarter to the royal officers of contraband, and one half to the royal treasury. ⁽²⁸⁾

Since the Crown wanted to use the gold and silver coming into Seville as collateral for foreign loans, it directed city officials to register all money withdrawn from Seville. This regulation, as city officials noted in 1579, was "very prejudicial and harmful for the citizens of this city, and for the foreigners who come here for business, who receive so many vexations and so much bother that commerce could decline to a great extent, because thieves and highwaymen learn and take notice of those who withdraw money, whenever and wherever they go, in order to rob and kill them, as has been seen many times." ⁽²⁹⁾

The monarchy imposed commercial rules to safeguard its authority. The privileges it granted would have meant very little without their economic advantages, such as exemption from [47] certain taxes or commercial restrictions. From the sale of noble titles, the Crown gained income and support of the newly appointed nobles, who now enjoyed some economic advantages. What is more, the Crown demonstrated that it was the source of privilege and advantage.

The Crown was not above making commercial deals in return for money. Urgently needing money for its wars in Flanders and Portugal and its campaigns against France and England, the Crown turned to foreign bankers for loans. It granted the Fuggers the administration of the mercury mines of Almaden and the silver mines of Guadalcanal in southern Spain in return for loans. Some Genoese bankers loaned money to the Spanish Crown and were rewarded with a monopoly on the sale of playing cards in Spain, as well as the control of salt works in Andalucia.

Royal policies discouraged merchants from reinvesting their profits in commercial enterprise in Spain. Some remained in the Indies or other foreign ports, where they could continue trading without paying high import duties and other taxes to the Spanish Crown. Periodic monetary devaluation outraged some merchants, who refused to sell at old prices for the new devalued currency. Foreign wars increased the risks of overseas trade, but the Crown seemed deaf to merchants' pleas for peace. Drake's raid on Cadiz in 1587 destroyed the fleet of New Spain that was in port, and with it the confidence of Spanish merchants who had invested large sums in the Indies trade. ⁽³⁰⁾

One reaction was to blame all these problems on foreigners. Spain, declared contemporary economist Martinez de Mata, was the "Indies of Europe" because it provided markets and profits for foreign manufacturers. ⁽³¹⁾ In response to Sevillian merchants' complaints about foreigners, Philip III decreed in 1608 that [48] foreigners should have no part in the trade with the Indies. ⁽³²⁾ This was obviously impossible to enforce, because the profitability of the Indies trade depended on the exchange of goods and money between the Indies and all parts of the world. Furthermore, the Crown had borrowed so heavily from foreign creditors that profits from trade with the Indies frequently went directly into the coffers of foreign lenders. One citizen of Seville estimated that one third of all the value of precious metals from the Indies went to foreigners. His complaint to the king was not that the Crown was spending too much, but that foreigners were taking too much - a clear example of xenophobia defusing internal tensions and deflecting them to outsiders. ⁽³³⁾

The city government imposed commercial regulations to raise revenue. To pay the obligatory "donations" that the city had to pay to the Crown, the city government usually estimated and paid a sales tax to the Crown before it was actually collected. The city then used several ways to collect the tax, such as duties on food and merchandise brought into the city for resale. Sales taxes became so complicated that the city in 1515 decided to combine many of them into the blanca de carne, a tax of approximately two maravedís for each pound of meat sold in the public meat markets. Any person who bought meat in the city automatically paid the blanca in the selling price. Nobles, clergymen, and certain other privileged groups were exempt from this tax, but they had to petition the city council to return the tax to them after they had paid it. ⁽³⁴⁾

Social order was another motive in the regulations imposed by city government on the sale of food. The stability of any government depends to some degree on its ability to provide food [49] for its people at a price they can afford. The city government had been charged with this responsibility since the eleventh century, although the Crown occasionally interfered. Millers, bakers, innkeepers, and food-retailers were required to post official prices, and they were prosecuted for charging more than these prices. ⁽³⁵⁾

In order to enforce price controls, the city government regulated weights and measures used in the city and limited the places where food could be sold within the city. Food retailers were required to sell in plazas where they could be more effectively policed than in the mazes of narrow back streets. Meat could only be sold in the licensed meat markets, a regulation of even more significance because the tax on meat sales was crucial to the city. Innkeepers and secondhand dealers were very closely regulated because they were notorious for violating price controls, as well as for selling stolen property. The city's ancient ordinances warned of innkeepers who bought and sold game at high prices, a complaint repeated frequently before the more stringent regulations of 1629. ⁽³⁶⁾

When the Count of Puñoenrostro (Francisco Arias de Bobadila) was named head of the city council in the last years of the sixteenth century, he decided to enforce city regulations on price ceilings. ⁽³⁷⁾ He directed a pregonero to announce in the main squares that people breaking price regulations would be severely punished. Very soon he had arrested and punished several street hawkers, but, significantly, more substantial merchants were not prosecuted for price violations. This may indicate [50] that merchants were trying to observe the traditional commercial ethic, or that street hawkers were prosecuted in order to deflect popular indignation about prices away from the "big fish" and on to the "small fish" who were certainly more visible to most city residents.

An example of a small fish was Francisca Gamarra, a well-known old vegetable seller. When the Count moved to arrest her for selling vegetables above the price ceiling, she and her son fled the city. After a few days they were found hiding under a fig tree in an orchard. The Count sentenced the son to a whipping and ten years in the galleys. He marched La Gamarra through the streets with pieces of squash tied around her neck. As city officials gave her the prescribed two hundred strokes, other street hawkers gathered to watch and shout. Some smiled and some cursed. Two weeks after the uproar, La Gamarra was back selling vegetables. People passing her door said, "Look how little shame she has. She was whipped yesterday, and now she is here selling." La Gamarra retorted, "Look out for your necks, suckers, some sucker is watching me." The Count merely said that it was a pity that the old hawker had not been exiled. ⁽³⁸⁾

The Count's crusade created a clamorous public uproar in the city, especially in the case of Maria de la O, a soap vendor who was accused of price gouging. When she was arrested, she appealed to the audiencia. Already feuding with the Count, the gentlemen of the audiencia rose to her defense, locking themselves in prison with her so the Count could not whip her. The Count and his men quickly broke into prison, clapped the members of the audiencia into irons, and drove Maria de la O through the city streets on an ass, stripped to the waist for a public whipping. ⁽³⁹⁾

Some of the uproar between the Count and audiencia took the form of verses that circulated through the city. Since most were favorable to the Count, the audiencia arrested three versemakers; they were later freed on order from Madrid. The chronicler who recorded the verses favored the Count, and his sympathies colored his report. Nevertheless, the verses he [51] recorded indicate the attitudes of local authorities about the moral commerical order. One verse depicted the Count as a hero who had saved Seville from the "unreason" of the abusive street hawkers:

When Seville was infested
By street hawkers
And their shameful abuses,
The famous Bobadilla
Got rid of the creeps. ⁽⁴⁰⁾

A thousand honorable hymns.
Because the street hawker has been frightened
The just and holy justice
Preserves you well here. ⁽⁴¹⁾

She has these positions:
First, she keeps a tavern,
A perfume shop and soap shop,
She is a procuress of fornications
And does a little black magic. ⁽⁴²⁾

In this account the chronicler deliberately undercut any hints that these women were popular heroines. He had to report that Maria de la O was showered with bouquets and attention when she returned home after her whipping, but he added that she spoke insultingly, calling the Count and other officials cuckolds and fornicators. ⁽⁴³⁾ The arrogant tongue of Maria de la O must have delighted many people, from members of the audiencia to the lowest thief of the underworld. Price-gouging may be antisocial, but defying government regulations and sassing the authorities are popular gestures that are especially appreciated by people who are afraid to speak out. By depicting Maria de la O as a filthy-mouthed scold, the city authorities could discredit her protests against them.

The Count's crusade, which identified street hawkers as immoral violators of a just economy, defused tensions and deflected antagonisms within Seville. The city depended upon the success of wealthy merchants, and the city oligarchy rested upon an alliance of nobles, churchmen, artisans, and merchants. Nevertheless, the merchants' success provoked much resentment. Nobles resented the newly rich bankers and merchants from whom they had to borrow money. They feared that the power of money would undercut their position. One seventeenth-century poet played on the names of coins as he suggested the power of money to buy ancestry:

Cruzados make crusaders,
Escudos paint armorial shields,
And very shabby gamblers
Make earldoms with their dice;
Ducats produce dukedoms
And coronas true
Majesty. ⁽⁴⁴⁾

A powerful gentleman
Is Mr. Money. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

1. Alonso Sanchez Gordillo, "Recopilacion de las cosas seculares de Sevilla," Memorial de historia eclesiástica de la ciudad de Sevilla, BC., 82-6-19, 1612, folios 20-20^v. Also, see the prologue by Antonio María Fabié in Ariño, p. xxvi.

2. Peraza, pp. 1173-74. Sanchez Gordillo, folio 23^v. Domínguez Ortiz, Golden Age, pp. 140-41. Domínguez Ortiz, Orto, p. 47.

3. See the commercial frauds described by Pedro de León, Part II, chapter 25, folios 193-197.

4. Antonio Domínquez Ortiz and Francisco Aguilar Piñal, El Barroco y la Ilustracion; Historia de Sevilla, Vol. 4 (Sevilla, 1976), pp. 73-74. Kamen, p. 220.

5. Luis Navarro García, "Pilotos, maestres y señores de naos en la Carrera de las Indias," Archivo Hispalense, Series 2, 46-47 (1967), 275-276.

6. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, "Una relación de la pérdida de la Armada de don Juan de Hoyos," Archivo Hispalense (1967), 299-307. Lynch, 1:157, 165-66.

7. AMS, Papeles del Conde de Aguila, Efemérides, Cuadro 2. AMS, Siglo XVII, Sección 4, Escribanlas de Cabildo, Tomo 23, No. 9.

8. Pedro de Leon, appendix 1 to Part II, Case 60.

9. Domínguez Ortiz and Aguilar Piñal, p. 75.

10. Guichot y Parody, 2:89-90.

11. Domínguez Ortiz, Orto, p. 16. Luís Navarro Garcia, "El puerto de Sevilla a fines del siglo XVI," Archivo Hispalense, Series 2, 44-45 (1966), 166-176. Domínguez Ortiz, Golden Age, p. 183. Chaunu, 6:116-157.

12. Navarro García, "El puerto," pp. 176-177.

13. Domínguez Ortiz, Orto, p. 18, Al, Casa de Contratación, Seccion 2, Legajo 64.

14. Domínguez Ortiz, Orto, p. 15, Navarro Garcia, "El puerto," pp. 162-165.

15. Domínguez Ortiz, Orto, esp. pp. 12 and 27, is the best single source for local producers. See also Morgado, p. 157, for the soap industry. The city's ordinances in AMS, Ordenanzas, suggest the great variety of local producers in Seville. Tomás de la Torre, p. 460, describes the many products purchased in Seville to outfit his ship. The sixteenth-century Price Revolution is discussed in Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), and J. Nadal, "La Revolución de los Precios españoles en el siglo XVII; Estado actual de la cuestion," Hispania, 19 (1959), 503-529.

16. Carande Thobar, pp. 83-84.

17. Domínguez Ortiz, Orto, p. 51. Carmelo Viñas Mey, El problema de la tierra en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid, 1941), pp. 24-28, 123, 139, 191-192. Olwen Hufton, Bayeux in the Late Eighteenth Century; A Social Study (Oxford, 1967), pp. 11-15, found a similar response to agricultural crisis in Bayeux.

18. AMS, Ordenanzas de Sevilla, recopiladas, Archivo de Privilegios, 1632, "Titulo: De los Pregoneros," folios 132-135.

19. Ariño, pp. 79-92.

20. Hill, pp. 107, 119, 122, 124.

21. Ibid., p. 119.

22. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:559. Morgado, p. 166.

23. Chaunu, 4:334-336.

24. AMS, Ordenanzas, "Titulo: Sumario de los privilegios de Sevilla," folio 132.

25. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York, 1972), 1:293-294. See also Chaunu, Vol. 6.

26. Ortiz de Zuñiga, 4:564-565.

27. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, "Documentos para la historia de Sevilla y su Antiguo Reino," Archivo Hispalense, Series 2, 44-45 (1966), 74-75. AMS, Archivo General, Sección 1, Carpeta 26, No. 310, AI, Indiferente General, Sección 5, Legajo 2003, "Libro de documentos que vinieron y de cartas escritas a S. M. por los Jueces de la Contratación y otras personas de Sevilla y otras partes años 1563 y 1564," describes the arrival of a fleet from New Spain in 1564 and the imprisonment of people attempting to smuggle precious metals and jewels into the port.

28. AMS, Papeles del Conde de Aguila, Sección Especial, Tomo 29 en folio, No. 13. Navarro Garcia, "El puerto," pp. 176-177. Navarro Garcia, "Photos," pp. 241-243, 279-280, 293-295. Domínguez Ortiz, Golden Age, pp. 142-143. Domínguez Ortiz, Orto, p. 115. Peraza, pp. 1170-74. Guichot y Parody, 2:288-290.

29. Guichot y Parody, 2:91.

30. Ibid., pp. 215-218, 232-233. Domínguez Ortiz, Orto, pp. 73-75. Lynch, 1:166.

31. Gonzalo Anes Alvarez, ed., Memoriales y discursos de Francisco Martínez de Mata (Madrid, 1971), p. 60. A similar statement is in Cristóval Suarez de Figueroa, El Passagero, 1617 (Madrid, 1914), p. 20. Two contemporary historians, Barbara and Stanley Stein, discuss this argument in their thoughtful study The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York, 1970).

32. AMS, Archivo General, Sección 1, Carpeta 8, No. 149.

33. "Papeles varios," BM, Add. 14015. Note, however, that the Stems have argued that the ruling elite in Spain actually favored economic dependence on the rest of Europe, because this facilitated the survival of their traditional life-style; see esp. their p. 26.

34. Guichot y Parody, 1:204-205; 2:336-337. An example of a petition by a noble for the return of the blanca is in AMS, Siglo XVI, Sección 3, Escribanias de Cabildo, Tomo 4, No. 44. An account of the blanca for 1573 is given ibid., Tomo 3, No. 40. A description of the tax and those exempt is in Memorias eclesiásticas, BC, 84-7-19, folios 114v-115.

35. See the laws proclaimed by the city asistente in 1629, reported in Guichot y Parody, 2:210-211. Ariño described the price regulations of 1597, pp. 91-92. See also E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, No. 50, February 1971. The best description of the just merchant and moral economy by a Spaniard in the early modern period is in Thomas de Mercado, Book II, pp. 20, 33-35. See also "Food Supply and Public Order in Modern Europe," in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, 1975), pp. 380-455.

36. AMS, Ordenanzas, "Titulo: De los tabernos y mesoneros," folios 88-89. Guichot y Parody, 2:156, 210-211.

37. Ariño, pp. 91-92.

38. Ibid., pp. 79-92.

39. Ibid., pp. 67-79.

40. Ibid., pp. 76-79, 82. The Spanish text is, "Pues, cuando estaba Sevilla/vencida de regatones/y de abusos, que es mancilla,/el famoso Bobadilla/se ha opuesto a sus sinrazones."

41. Ibid., p. 87. The Spanish verse is, "Toda Sevilla te canta/mil himnos dignos de ti/porque el regaton se espanta/la justicia justa y santa/te conserve mucho aquí."

42. Ibid. The Spanish text is, "Ella tenía estos oficios:/el primero tabernera,/perfumera y jabonera,/coberta de fornicios/y un poquito hechicera."

43. Ibid., p. 79.

44. Quoted by Julio Caro Baroja, "Honour and Shame," in J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (London, 1965), p. 105. In Spanish the poem is, "Cruzados hacen cruzados,/escudos pintan escudos,/y tahures muy desnudos/con dados hacen condados ;/ ducados dejan decados / y coronas majestad /verdad."

45. Ibid., p. 106. "Poderoso caballero/es don Dinero."