This is particularly true for early modern Castile, because we know remarkably little about the interurban aspects of its regional economic life. It is clear that by the mid-sixteenth century the Castilian interior had a fairly complex urban network. We have descriptive evidence of economic life, some perception of the regional exchange economy in the 1570's, and a few studies of towns like Valladolid, León, Segovia, Ciudad Real, and Talavera--but we lack a concrete understanding of how they fit together. The best evidence that we are dealing with a coherent, integrated system is that the cities of Old and New Castile formed an urban hierarchy very similar to that predicted by location theory for a functioning system of market-oriented towns. ⁽¹⁾

At the head of the system was Toledo, which maintained intense relations throughout New Castile, providing both commercial and politico-social services. [279] Toledo coordinated the long-distance and financial exchanges that linked the two Castiles with Valencia, Cartagena, Sevilla, and the Burgos-Bilbao-Flanders axis. Valladolid, with two-thirds the population, ranked second to Toledo in the urban hierarchy of the sixteenth century. Valladolid was the center of interurban activity in Old Castile. Its regular commercial contacts reached as far as Burgos, Segovia, Salamanca, Medina del Campo, and Medina del Rio Seco (Map 12.1). Only a few commercial contacts generated by the Court reached beyond that range, however, indicating a dependence on higher-order commercial functions emanating from Toledo, Burgos, or Bilbao. Valladolid's long-distance functions were as much administrative and political as commercial, depending on the Crown and the Chancilleria, which remained when the Crown moved away. Valladolid never contained the capitalist merchants found in Burgos, Toledo, or Sevilla; the structure of its workforce shows a surprisingly large class of legal and professional people. ⁽²⁾

Below Toledo and Valladolid were a number of important towns noted for their textile industries and/or relative size (10,000-25,000 in the late sixteenth century): Segovia, Ávila, Guadalajara, Cuenca, Salamanca. At the next level were several towns that performed special trade functions: Medina del Campo, Burgos, Astorga, Talavera; and regional agricultural centers with small nuclei of urban service elements: León, Ciudad Real, Albacete, Soria, Trujillo.

Obviously, such a list is incomplete and impressionistic; but the fact that it can easily be made is suggestive of the developed nature of Castile's sixteenth-century urban system and long-distance commerce. ⁽³⁾ The Castilian urban network integrated the wool exports, the great trade fairs, and the cloth, pottery, leather, and silk industries of Segovia, Palencia, Cuenca, Talavera, Toledo, and other communities. This exchange network was central to the credit of the Spanish Crown before the heyday of American silver; it reached as far as Flanders and Italy and attracted international trading firms.

Madrid played a major role in reorienting that urban system; but the system itself was also weakened by the transfer of the Court from Valladolid, the late sixteenth-century reorientation of bullion flows, and diversion of the wool trade from the north coast. In the following pages we will sketch the decline of some of these interior towns as the sixteenth-century urban hierarchy broke down, and review the stabilization of an urban system in the seventeenth century that contained few centers capable of providing higher-order services. Then we will try to sort out the reactions in that system to the growth of Madrid and rural population during the eighteenth century, concluding [281] this chapter with some comments on the role of Madrid as the link between interior and periphery.
 

I. Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries: The Collapse of the Urban Network
 
We have already seen how Toledo, after expanding in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, experienced serious difficulties in the third quarter and then managed a qualified recovery between 1580 and 1605. Behind that recovery was a deterioration of the city's long-distance commercial function and a shift of industrial output to products more appropriate to the regional market. After the Court was re-installed in Madrid in 1606, Toledo began a precipitous decline that reduced it to the level of an economic backwater, enhanced only by the presence of the metropolitan see.

The fate of Valladolid was very similar, although the cause appears to have been connected with the loss of political and social functions rather than, as in Toledo, the loss of commercial function and supply base. As was Madrid later, the Valladolid of the 1540's and 1550's was subsidized by the presence of the Court and a large resident nobility. This produced a midcentury boom, followed by a severe setback when the Court left in 1559. The population fell from 7,000 vecinos in the 1550's to 5,258 in 1570 before recovering to 8,112 vecinos in 1591. ⁽⁴⁾ The precarious economy was bolstered by the return of the Court in 1602; but with its departure in 1606, longer-range commercial links evaporated. ⁽⁵⁾ Having reached a population of about 40,000 people in 1595, Valladolid declined rapidly after 1606 and, although the chronology of decline is unclear, by 1688 the number of vecinos had fallen from the 8,112 of 1591 to only 3,000. ⁽⁶⁾ Having lost its major political function, the city ceased to serve as a coordinator for long-distance exchanges within Old Castile and rapidly declined to the same status as Toledo--an economic backwater enhanced, in this case, by the presence of the Chancillería of Valladolid.

As examples of cities of the next order of importance, we can consider the two cloth-producing centers of Segovia and Cuenca. Segovia, a major textile center, grew from about 14,000 inhabitants in 1531 to 21,000 in 1591. By that time, the city had passed the peak of its yearly textile production: 16,000 pieces of cloth of 40 varas each. In this respect Segovia's economy paralleled the industrial portion of Toledo's, where the tax on woolen cloth suggests a decline in production beginning in the 1590's. As of 1591, there were 600 [282] looms in Segovia itself; but by 1620 the number had fallen to 300, and by 1691 to only 159. ⁽⁷⁾ This is paralleled by population figures, which declined over 50% in the century after 1591. ⁽⁸⁾ It is noteworthy that towns like Segovia lost a smaller proportion of their population than the larger centers. What was lost was not a fixed proportion of each city's economic base, but functions that reached beyond the regional economy. Thus a town like Segovia, with a less complex set of urban functions, had less to lose than Valladolid or Toledo, and under the developing conditions soon found itself much more of an equal to them.

This pattern was repeated in Cuenca, midway between Valencia and Madrid in a relatively well-defined regional economy of its own. A substantial regional woolens industry was organized from the city, although the volume of cloth marketed was only about half as much as Segovia's. While most of Cuenca's woolens were sold in the interregional exchanges between Toledo and the Valencian frontier, some of its cloth was regularly traded as far away as Sevilla, Valencia, and Medina del Campo, illustrating the complexity of exchanges in the sixteenth-century Spanish interior. ⁽⁹⁾

A profile of Cuenca's commercial history is provided by the revenue figures from the city's correduría mayor y menor y sisa vieja from 1577 to 1670 (Table 12.1). ⁽¹⁰⁾ The highest revenue figures appear in the 1570's and '80's, after which a decline in both nominal and adjusted indices began. As in Toledo and Segovia, industrial activity linked to long-range commerce reached its peak before 1600, and market activity subsequently declined with the reorientation of Castilian urban resources and the breakup of interregional exchanges. By 1600, revenue had fallen 20-30%, although the trend was arrested briefly in the first decade of the new century, when pressure in the regional commodities markets was eased during the Court's absence from [283]New Castile. Revenues fell over 60% from 1600 to 1635, then stabilized despite the difficulties of the 1640's, echoing the pattern we have already seen in Toledo.
 

Astorga, 40 kilometers southwest of León and 20 kilometers northwest of the market town of La Bañeza, was at the crossroads of the Camino de Santiago and the royal highway from Madrid to Galicia (Map 12.1). It was the principal town of the maragato district, home of an important group of long-distance muleteers. ⁽¹¹⁾ After growing from 557 vecinos in 1571 to 656 by 1591, Astorga plummeted to 200 vecinos by 1659, as interregional trade declined and plague devastated the area. Astorga's transporters had prospered as a link between the cities of Old Castile and the ports of Asturias and Galicia. As urban life concentrated on Madrid, different routes to the coasts [284] were favored and the Old Castile markets disappeared; when Madrid itself declined after 1635, this situation was aggravated.

This sequence was repeated in the modest fair town and industrial center of Talavera de la Reina, although there the decline was slowed by the town's functional importance in the new Madrid-oriented urban hierarchy. ⁽¹²⁾ Located on the main route from Madrid and Toledo to Extremadura, with connections to Portugal, Sevilla, and Old Castile, Talavera grew rapidly in the early sixteenth century. It received a setback in the 1560's that coincides with problems in Toledo, Valladolid, Álava, and elsewhere, but recovered in the late 1570's and '80's. The regional economy was based on a combination of subsistence agriculture, livestock, textiles, and the added element of a pottery industry. The region was suffering from soil exhaustion by the 1590's, about the time that its livestock fair reached its peak. In the last decades of the century, population fluctuated around 8,000 (2,000 vecinos).

But despite the plagues and subsistence crises of 1598-99, 1607, and 1626-30, the town held most of its population, declining only 25% by 1632. It is this relative stability that documents Talavera's adjustment to the rise of Madrid. The town became a way station for long-distance connections with Andalucía and Portugal and a key part of the capital's meat-supply system. Once Madrid began to decline, however, Talavera lost its vitality, and by 1646 its population was just over half that of the late sixteenth century. Even so, Talavera fared proportionately better than Toledo, Valladolid, or Astorga, and continued to perform significant supply functions for the capital.

Finally, as examples of towns that were the centers of relatively self-contained agricultural regions, with tenuous and unspecialized connections to the larger urban network, we can look at León in the north and Albacete and Ciudad Real in southeastern New Castile. In these cases regional conditions were clearly the dominant factor in urban development, and external changes had less impact.

León is some distance from both Valladolid and Madrid. Center of an isolated agricultural zone, its development paralleled José Gentil da Suva's model for New Castile. In the last half of the sixteenth century, while the total number of vecinos did not change much, the composition of the economically active population did. There was a notable increase in the number of day laborers and textile, leather, and construction workers, and a smaller increase in the number of miscellaneous artisans. The service sector grew, adding government employees, professionals, and a number of people engaged in commercial activity. In New Castile, as rural demographic pressure increased, local craft industries developed to compensate for diminishing returns [285] in agriculture. León shows the same pattern for the northern meseta, with modest textile and leather industries that bolstered the city's economic base as supplies became more expensive. By 1600, with about 4,000 people, León looked somewhat less like a large farm town and a bit more like a modest regional capital. ⁽¹³⁾

Increased exchange activity is documented both by growth of the artisan, commercial, and service sectors and by revenue from the city's peso de mercancías. Revenues rose slowly in the 1560's and '70's, a period of distress almost everywhere, and then climbed rapidly in 1581-1610 (see Table 12.2). Between 1610 and 1640, the adjusted revenue index fluctuated between 85 and 100. Apparently the regional economy on which León was based remained fairly stable. Never strongly linked to the urban network, León was less exposed to the breakdown of interurban exchanges; and the city's population, which fluctuated around 900 vecinos from 1555 to 1594, fell by only 30% in the first half of the seventeenth century. ⁽¹⁴⁾ The pattern shows little correlation with trends in Madrid.

At the opposite corner of the Iberian interior, Albacete was a town in eastern La Mancha situated on the road from Madrid and Toledo to the Mediterranean. It was the center of a modest regional economy emphasizing wheat, livestock, and some wine. Adjusted for prices, the city's almotacenía increased 20% from 1561 to the 1580's, while the correduría (brokerage fee on large transactions) shows no significant trend (see Table 12.3). In the last two decades of the century, both indicators declined sharply--50-60% after adjustment for prices. Market activity then recovered sharply in 1600-10, before resuming a decline. Cereal output repeated the decline that Weisser has documented for the nearby Montes de Toledo; the wool trade was disrupted; and wine prices started to fall in the 1590's. We have seen that the temporary movement of the Court to Valladolid coincided with commercial recovery in Toledo, and this brief reprieve for the urban network may be reflected here as well.

The pattern in Albacete is paralleled in the baptismal records of nearby Ciudad Real, where population and baptisms rose erratically until 1575, fluctuated around a stable base for two decades, and then fell sharply between 1602 and 1620. The city then stabilized, and until the crisis of 1680 experienced strong cyclical fluctuations around a gradual upward trend. ⁽¹⁵⁾

Taking the urban system as a whole, the rise of Madrid prompted a redistribution of urban resources and high-order functions. This undermined long-distance retailing and deprived the larger sixteenth-century cities of functions that had made them important. As this situation developed, the urban network faced increasingly sharp supply shortages and rising food prices. The larger and stronger centers--Valladolid, Segovia, Toledo--maintained their positions for a while by diverting the surpluses that earlier had supplied the smaller centers. Many lesser cities declined fairly early in the last half of the century; Cuenca, Albacete, and Ciudad Real reflect this pattern. Up to 1610, the process was more apparent in New Castile, reflecting its closer proximity to the Court. The departure of the Court from Valladolid in 1559 crippled that city; its presence in Madrid put pressure on Toledo; and its temporary return to Valladolid clearly relieved that pressure in the commodities markets surrounding Toledo, Albacete, and Cuenca.

The development of Madrid as it competed with Toledo for supplies thus provides a suggestive counterpoint to the evolution of the rest of the urban network. Arbitrarily selected as the site of the government in 1560, Madrid began to grow steadily, and by the turn of the century matched Toledo in population. After a setback in 1602-06 while the Court was in Valladolid, Madrid nearly trebled in size by 1630, after which it declined 40% by 1680. This is clearly reflected in the development of commercial activity and consumption in the city. ⁽¹⁶⁾

The heavy pressure of Madrid on the regional commodities markets is evidenced in meat, oil, wine, and wheat consumption and prices. As the city grew, prices rose, and demand was increasingly focused upon stocks of basic foodstuffs that were essential to the urban network. From the 1590's to the 1630's, Madrid's use of olive oil almost doubled, wine and meat consumption more than doubled, and wheat consumption trebled. These supplies were produced by a combination of rent and tithe-paying subsistence producers, rentier accumulation, and specialization in activities like viticulture in the context of declining per-capita agricultural output. ⁽¹⁷⁾ The pressure of the capital on these stocks undermined the rest of the regional urban network.

At the same time, urban populations were hard put to buy the less essential [288] handicraft manufactures that represented the traditional resort of rural populations forced to compensate for declining living standards. This is reflected in the decline of peso revenues in most towns prior to 1600 and in the failure of Madrid's demand for such goods to increase as fast as its population. Thus while Madrid's pressure on the commodities market reduced the ability of other towns to obtain rural manufactures, Madrid itself did not become the alternative market that its growth might imply. The plausibility of this hypothesis is reinforced by the immediate rise of commercial indicators in New Castile while the Court was at Valladolid in 1602-06.

Thus the revival of Madrid's demands after 1606 broke the back of the regional urban network of Castile, and cities that had managed to sustain their commercial life into the seventeenth century collapsed in the next twenty years. Madrid's power to command resources was based on a political and economic empire that supported the capital's wealthy elites despite the rising cost of local foodstuffs. The extra-regional connections that this implies are illustrated by the startling rise of revenues from the barca de Arganda. Those revenues quintupled from the 1580's to the 1630's and were little affected by subsistence crises. While one road toll does not document a commercial network, the political and international basis of the capital's economy is patent, and insertion of the attendant political and social functions into an unstable regional economy inevitably caused a restructuring of the urban network. As a consequence, the region lost many middle-level urban functions, especially market coordination, and withdrew into local and regional subsistence. The worst of this shock had been absorbed by 1650, but by then the urban system outside of Madrid had acquired a homogeneity and rudimentary quality that was striking.
 
II. The Later Seventeenth Century in Castile
 
The later seventeenth century was characterized by a new balance between subsistence and exchange because of changes in the urban hierarchy of Old and New Castile. The economic life of the Spanish interior after 1650 was very different from the commercial development in Barcelona and around the coastal periphery. Stability here was achieved amid the ruins of the urban network of the previous century and in the context of heightened rural self-sufficiency. This reflects Madrid's preemption of urban resources and functions, a process that concentrated urban markets, economic incentives, and urban functions so that they were more distant from and less accessible to much of the interior. This blend of stability and isolation appears everywhere in Castile from Burgos to León, from Talavera to Cuenca. Outside of Madrid, there is little to distinguish levels in an urban hierarchy, and the monotonic [289] character of the urban network is apparent in the following survey of towns which indicate market trends.

The road and gate tolls of Burgos (Table 12.4) offer us a glimpse at the contrast and separation between the local economy and long-distance pass-through trade between Madrid and Bilbao which suggests that regional economic activity may have been less sensitive to the international situation than the transit trade through Pancorbo. The nominal value of the five-year average of duties at the Burgos city gates dropped 15% between the late 1670's and the '80's; but adjusted for price levels, real value rose 49% and then remained stable until the end of the series. This indicates stability in market activity oriented to the city itself, suggesting that Burgos' seventeenth-century crisis had long since passed. This impression is reinforced by the road toll at Barbadillo del Mercado, on the route from Soria to Burgos. Here the five-year average dropped 20% after 1675-80, but recovered in the last decade of the century. The commodities most likely to pass this toll were wool and lumber from Soria bound for Bilbao. Thus there are signs of recovery that reflect increased export of regional raw materials.

Pancorbo revenues, however, declined until the last few years of the century, indicating that long-distance trade into the interior was less dynamic than regional exports. The strongest signs of regional change in the period thus resemble the response of various coastal regions to external demand. Wool exports in particular were recovering, but this represented a kind of enclave industry in an isolated interior, and the regional economy was otherwise disengaged from interior-periphery market associations.

Northwest of Valladolid and midway between Burgos and the towns of Astorga and Benavente lies the regional center of Palencia, long noted for woolens production. By the 1660's, when our series begins, the seventeenth-century decline had passed and market indicators had stabilized (see Table 12.5). Nominal income from the corredurías del pueblo (merchandise brokerage) rose sharply after 1680. When adjusted for prices, the increase is even more remarkable, although much of it is probably a recovery from the difficulties of the 1670's. Taxes on wood and fuller's earth give conflicting trends--the former rising significantly in both nominal and adjusted terms, while the latter declined with equal lack of ambiguity. The modest size of the town suggests that increased market activity reflects a reintegration of regional markets in which woolens production was now ruralized, but coordinated from the city.

This echoes the pattern in Segovia, where the quality textile industry languished, but rough cloth continued to appear in local markets. Agricultural production there stabilized by mid-seventeenth century, but shifted to crops such as rye and barley that required less labor and were better suited to regional markets than the wheat and wine earlier demanded by larger cities. ⁽¹⁹⁾

The stabilization of regional subsistence exchanges apart from long-distance trade is also apparent in New Castile. There are close parallels between market trends in Toledo, now stripped of its higher-order urban functions, and Benavente, Astorga, Palencia, or Burgos as regional centers (see Table 12.6). A close examination of rural production in the area would probably yield results similar to those found in seventeenth-century Segovia, since the changes in landholding show the same concentration of ownership. ⁽²⁰⁾ Within the city of Toledo, general market activity (the peso) declined into the 1670's, and by the end of the century was at best below the level of the 1650's. The [291] almotacenía collected on merchandise showed greater volatility and reached its low point a decade earlier, but closed the century well below the level of the 1650's.

The situation in Cuenca, with its links to Valencia, was somewhat different. The decline in market activity that became pronounced in the first half of the century continued to the end of the first Cuenca series in 1670, but was less Pronounced than in Toledo (see Table 12.7). Nominal revenue remained stable and the adjusted revenue fell only 30% to the 1670's, a decade marked by depression everywhere. The relative stability in the third quarter of the [292] century, and the expansion of activity thereafter (see discussion of eighteenth-century Cuenca below), indicate a commercial life conditioned by the revival of wool exports and by the growth of Valencia and its port activity.
 

These are some of the parallel trends that explain the levels of market activity noted in Toledo, Palencia, and elsewhere. They are also apparent in Talavera de la Reina, where the population developed as in Ciudad Real and there was a survival and concentration of specialized craft industry among urban notables similar to the concentration of land control elsewhere. ⁽²²⁾ The pattern is also seen in a minor boat toll near Alcalá de Henares where, reflecting local and regional traffic, revenues dropped sharply in the first half of the century and then fluctuated at around 60-70% of 1670's levels as late as 1720 (see Table 12.8).

Although the contrast is not strong, trends in Madrid and its university satellite, Alcalá de Henares, suggest that commercial life in the capital was continuing the dual pattern created by the structure of the city's economy. The strongest indicators of economic activity were those connected most closely with the political and social functions of the capital city. During the entire half-century beginning in 1670, only one ten-year period shows the revenue of the barca de Arganda significantly below the peak of the early [293] seventeenth century, and in its worst decade (the 1650's), the boat toll fell by only 25% (see Table 12.9).

Nevertheless, the eighteenth century is generally regarded as one of expansion in Spain, and we have seen that most port areas enjoyed a long rise in market activity. Even within the maritime provinces, however, there are indications of persistent dualism. Away from the coasts and ports, population trends, agricultural output, and markets based on the rural economy document an expansion in the first half of the eighteenth century that slowed markedly after the 1750's. Inland from Cartagena and Málaga and around Granada, this was apparent after 1760. It developed in Vizcaya about 1775 and in Álava around 1785, while overland commerce was stagnant or declining around Sevilla and Córdoba after 1770.

With such trends developing in the interior zones of the maritime [295] provinces, it is hardly surprising that similar indications are found in León and Benavente in the west, Palencia and Segovia in the north-central areas, and Cuenca, Albacete, Toledo, Ciudad Real, and Talavera de la Reina in New Castile. Eighteenth-century expansion was more complicated than a general survey might suggest. ⁽²⁵⁾
 
A. Old Castile and León
 
At León, in contrast to the expansion of commercial activity that accompanied peninsular prosperity in the sixteenth century, the tax on market activity (the peso) declined about 30% between 1721 and 1740, then remained static from 1740 to 1780 (see Table 12.10). Adjusted for prices, the decline amounted to almost 40% from 1721 to 1760; and after stabilizing in the 1760's, revenue fell another 10% in the 1770's. Beginning in 1751, the tax on merchandise is virtually static, varying only 5% from 1751 to 1780. Not until the 1780's is there an indication of expansion of commerce, as revenues rose about 35% after adjustment for inflation. The wine and olive oil series (the peso de San Francisco) declined from 1750 to 1770, started to rise sooner (in the mid-1770's), and in the 1780's averaged 47% higher than in the 1770's, doubling the 1760's average even after adjustment. By the last decade of the century, however, the signals are contradictory. The revenue of the general peso trebled between decades; and even adjusted for prices, the increase is about 240%. This abrupt change suggests a change in the rates of taxation. Since the revenue collected on merchandise rose only 20%, and adjusted for prices fell 5%, the behavior of the peso cannot reflect the actual flow of commodities.

Evidence from the nearby towns of Benavente and Astorga supports this pattern, since with León the three towns surround the fair center at La Bañeza. The Astorgan arrieros maragatos operated between Galicia, León, and Valladolid in the sixteenth century, and in the eighteenth they were drawn to the long-distance transport of imports into Madrid and of Castilian agricultural products to the mountains and Galician ports. Concurrently, the population of Astorga rose from 1,200 in 1709 to 2,900 in 1753, when the city counted 700 vecinos. By 1808 it had dropped to only 500 vecinos, and as late as 1845 the town was no larger than in 1753. The principal change in the economic structure of the town as it grew was an increase in the number of long-distance transporters. ⁽²⁶⁾ This documents the rise of commerce between Madrid and the maritime world and provides a counterpoint to the largely self-contained regional economy of León, situated outside the fields of influence of any large city.

Benavente is represented by taxes on general market activity and wool traded in the town. The town-based revenues are complemented by the revenues from two tolls (Table 12.11), one of them on the route between Galicia and Castile. The peso y medidas revenue indicates that the nominal value of market activity rose gradually through the century, with recessions in the 1720's and 1740's, and that the yield doubled between 1690 and 1790. After adjustment for changing prices, however, what appears is a strong increase to the 1740's, followed by a downward secular trend broken only by a few years in the 1780's. Thus by the 1790's, the real value of revenue was only 15% more than a century before.

The two ferries near Benavente reflect the actual movement of goods destined for the market (Table 12.12). The boat revenue at Villafer, on a secondary route, indicates an expansion of traffic from 1690 to 1725, but then a decline of over 50% by 1784. Traffic recovered sharply at the same time that market activity rose in León, just as Madrid was increasing its demand for Old Castilian supplies. The ferry at Santa Cristina, on the Galicia-Madrid highway, shows a century-long upward trend, with a cumulative 50% increase in traffic. This was broken by recessions in the 1720's and in 1750-70, but the pattern is not unlike that for port activity in Cádiz and reflects the recovery and reorientation to Madrid of the muleteers of Astorga and the integration of Galicia into the supply commerce of Madrid.

The contrasts between the four series from Benavente suggest the [298] separation of the two Spains, if in a complex way. The town, center of a largely self-sufficient region, experienced the same lackluster eighteenth-century trends as León and Segovia. The long-distance traffic passing by from Galicia and Asturias to Castile and Madrid, however, echoed the fluctuations of maritime trade from coast to capital city. The turn-of-the-century depression in Astorga indicates that the crises after 1795 cut short the growth of this traffic.

The same pattern of early eighteenth-century growth, third-quarter recession, and end-of-century rise of commercial activity also appears in Palencia, which is represented by two indicators of market activity and two taxes on raw materials, supplemented by cloth production figures for 1763-86 (Tables 12.13 and 12.14). On the edge of the Tierra de Campos, Palencia was a major link in the urban network centered on Valladolid, and in its own right was a center of textile manufacturing that produced rough woolens and blankets traded throughout the interior. ⁽²⁸⁾ As measured by nominal revenues from the peso real, market activity rose from the 1680's to the 1720's, drifted downward to the 1750's, and then rose to the 1770's -- but the century-long increase was only 15%. Adjusted for changes in the price level, the trends are more pronounced. Market activity rose 70% from the 1670's to the 1720's. It then fell rapidly for 30 years and leveled off at an adjusted value only 12% above the seventeenth-century low and well below the level of the 1660's and '70's. The nominal value of the corredurías taxing manufactured goods was [299] stable during 1680-1710, and fell in the 1740's, but overall experienced a slight upward trend from the 1690's to the 1760's. Adjusted for prices, however, the series drifts upward to the 1740's and then begins a sharp 30-year decline to 1780, when the tax series ends.

The impression is one of slow expansion in the first third of the eighteenth century and of decline or stagnation in the second third. The nominal figures suggest a recovery beginning in the 1760's, while the price-adjusted ones indicate that the decline reached into the 1770's. The volume of activity as of 1780 was little more than in 1690 (see Table 12.13).