[34] The preceding profile of Madrid's long-term development offers a suggestive but impressionistic framework for analyzing the city's significance. To go beyond that requires examination of the structure of the population, its evolution over time, and the interaction between urban and rural demography. Building upon eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, there is evidence to establish the origins of urban population structure in the early seventeenth century. ⁽¹⁾

I. Residents, Immigrants, and Age-Sex Distribution

The striking feature of Madrid's pre-modern demography is the coexistence of two distinct populations within the same city--a stable "core" and a fluctuating "envelope" of immigrants and transients. The dual nature of Madrid's population is illustrated by the urban census of 1850-51, one version of which distinguishes between Madrid-born residents and immigrants by age, sex, and marital status; the resultant population pyramid is shown in Figure 3.1. ⁽²⁾ Only 40% of the population declared itself native to the city or province of Madrid. The age-sex pyramid of the city as a whole shows a huge [35] bulge in the 16-24 and 25-39 age groups, a bulge that is not reflected in the age distribution of Madrid-born residents. Taken as a separate entity, the city-born population has an age-sex distribution similar to that of the population of Old Castile in 1787 (see Figure 3.2). The lowest cohort is wider for the "inner city" than for Castile, but the configuration is the same, and the distortion reflects the city-born children of recent immigrants. ⁽³⁾ While we have no way of measuring the distortion, even a 25% reduction in the 0-6-year cohort would leave a pyramid resembling that of Castile and would be a passable representation of the population of the inner city. It represents that part of the urban society which was stable and self-sustaining despite changing economic conditions.

Less direct evidence of this core/envelope structure is present in the census of 1787. ⁽⁴⁾ By comparing the age-sex distribution, marriage ratios, and occupational structure of the eight districts of the city, certain demographic traits can be associated with broad occupational categories (see Table 3.1). Since [36] the citywide age-sex pyramid is strikingly like that of 1850-51 (see Figure 3.3), and the relative size of occupational categories is consistent over the long run (see Chapter 5), implications drawn from either census are probably valid for both.

Our initial assumptions are that: (1) nobility, commerce, the professions, government, and artisan industry implied status and activities in the "core" of the city; (2) domestic service (criados), casual labor, and unskilled labor were linked with the transient "envelope;" and (3) these categories exhibited [37]
 
 

[38] Table 3.1. (cont.) Percentage of Economically active Population
 

District	Servants	Day Labor	Artisans	Mercantile and Professional	Government	Listed as Hidalgo
San Francisco	32.7%	33.4%	10.8%	4.3%	14.6%	13.0%
Maravillas	39.4	11.4	24.8	4.8	14.5	3.3
Barquillo	42.6	18.9	18.9	4.7	9.4	4.9
Lavapies	23.6	34.5	24.3	5.1	8.9	3.7
Afligiados	59.1	18.8	3.9	1.4	12.5	6.0
San Gerónimo	54.5	7.5	18.9	5.4	13.3	2.6
Plaza Mayor	46.2	17.2	8.4	10.7	12.0	6.0
Real Palacio	33.0	6.3	14.0	6.7	27.6	8.5
All Madrid	39.7	20.5	16.1	5.7	12.8	5.8

Source: Calculations based on census data for 64 barrios in RAH, leg. 9/6235. 

Note: Cross-totals will not equal 100% because of an unknown degree of duplication between hidalgo and some other categories. Hidalgos are included as a separate group because they offer a crude proxy for rentier landowners.
 

The position of smaller urban elements is less clearcut, and requires a closer examination of the districts of San Francisco, Afligiados, Plaza Mayor, and Real Palacio. Each was dominated by one or more groups that were less prominent elsewhere in the city. The district of San Francisco shows the largest childhood cohorts and the highest marriage ratios in the city, despite a low proportion of artisans. The unique factor in this case was the large noble population; 13% of San Francisco's population was classed as hidalgo, twice that of any other district. Near the royal palace, the district was centered on the Basilica of San Francisco el Grande and was an important residential area for the nobility. The presence of so many relatively affluent families, with better infant survival rates and strong motives for marrying, helps explain the demographic structure of the district and links the nobility with the city's demographic core. ⁽⁷⁾

If the district of San Francisco was primarily residential and noble, the Plaza Mayor was dominated by commerce and the professions. Constituting 5.7% of the active population citywide, this sector averaged 5% in six districts and accounted for only 1.5% in peripheral Afligiados, but constituted 10.7% of the active population of Plaza Mayor. The district was also marked by traits that imply small childhood cohorts: a high ratio of males to females (114/100), low marriage ratios, a large proportion of domestics in the workforce (46%), and a very small artisan sector (8.4%). In fact, the 0-6-year cohort is second-smallest in the city, but the 7-16 cohort is the largest. Either family formation declined suddenly around 1780, or important elements had begun to restrict family size (an interesting possibility in eighteenth-century Spain), or else many of the domestics in the district were under the age of 17. Given the concentration of wholesale and retail activity, the last explanation is probably the best. If so, the commercial and professional element, though proportionately large in the district, contributed little to the demographic strength of the "core" of the city. It is worth noting that in Real Palacio, the other district where mercantile and professional elements were important, childhood cohorts were also small.

The district of Real Palacio highlights another element in the urban structure--the bureaucracy. The district was marked by very low marriage ratios, the smallest younger-childhood cohorts of the city, and a male-to-female ratio lower than that of the city as a whole (103.9/100 versus 105.6/100). The percentage of nobles in the population was high and the unskilled and domestic elements quite small. Dominating everything is the fact that over 27% of the economically active population was employed by the Crown. Given the proportion of households that must have been relatively affluent, the proportion of resident criados in the workforce is small. Apparently many households had servants who resided in other districts--the reverse of what we saw in Afligiados.

While bureaucrats, merchants, and professionals constituted over a third of Real Palacio's economically active population--far more than in any other district--the younger childhood cohorts and the marriage ratios were the [42] smallest in the city. The origin of the small, modern, middle-class family in Spain has scarcely been discussed, but this suggests some interesting possibilities. One scholar talks of the spread of "bourgeois values," the individualization of women, the eroticization of costume, and the emergence of women as social and cultural arbiters. ⁽⁸⁾ This echoes the eighteenth-century playwright Ramón de la Cruz, who complained that women increasingly used pages for errands, maids and cooks for domestic work, governesses for child-care, and wet-nurses for their babies. ⁽⁹⁾ Whether these observations imply a trend strong enough to influence the demographic indicators is debatable, but the relationship is plausible.

The occupational group that has not yet appeared in this analysis is the unskilled day laborer or jornalero, 20.5% of the active population. Two very different districts, San Francisco and Lavapies, had the highest proportion of jornaleros in the district workforce. Both also had large childhood cohorts, which in San Francisco coincided with noble residence and in Lavapies with a large artisan element. Since the term jornalero in an urban context includes anything from a skilled journeyman in a guild to unskilled construction labor, the category is too heterogeneous to relate to our simple core/envelope model, although it does not appear associated with small childhood populations. While no doubt including many recent immigrants, the category was relatively stable and probably represented a socio-economic bridge between the stable core and the transient envelope.

Thus the dual structure evident in 1850-51 was a long-term feature that is suggested by the age distribution and the demographic and occcupational correlations in the census of 1787. The occupational groups of the urban core, while creating a normal population pyramid in 1850-51, did not contribute equally to the demographic basis of that core. The most prolific elements were the artisan class and the nobility--the most clearly "old regime" elements in the city. The merchant, professional, and bureaucratic segments had few children and low marriage rates. The element most readily identified with the outer envelope of the population pyramid of 1850-51, the domestic servant, was typically single and unattached. This was the group most marginal to the urban society and economy; it was also by far the largest component of the workforce. ⁽¹⁰⁾
 
The census of 1787 thus elaborates upon and lends chronological perspective to the two-part population structure of 1850-51. The "inner city" consisted of the personnel of long-distance trade, the landed and bureaucratic elites, and the artisan and retail groups that provided their needs. Dependent upon maritime Spain and the state, it operated far-reaching political and commercial fields of influence focused on the capital and shaped the city's demand for nonessential commodities. The "outer city" was economically marginal to that core, sensitive to the latter's fortunes because its services were expendable. It was linked with Madrid's fields of influence in the interior, source of many of its immigrants and of basic necessities.

II. Chronological Perspective on Demographic Structure
 
A. Seventeenth-Century Origins
 
The patterns of age distribution, immigration, and occupations point the way to solution of an interpretive problem raised in Chapter 2 regarding the population of Madrid in the seventeenth century, and in the process, provide validity to some long-neglected research and establish the early seventeenth century as the period when Madrid's "core/envelope" pattern of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries first appeared. In 1931 Ricardo Martorell set forth some unacceptably low estimates for the total population of the capital in the 1620's. ⁽¹¹⁾ He started, however, with carefully compiled figures for baptisms in Madrid in the 1590's and 1620's, using them as a base for a normal population pyramid (see Table B.I) from which he derived his estimated total. It is clear that his mistake was not in his method but in his neglect of immigration as a component of urban population. If we build a population pyramid on the baptism totals for 1622-26 shaped like that of the city-born population of 1850-51 (Figure 3.1), we arrive at an estimated population in 1625 close to that of the city-born element in 1850-51 and to Martorell's estimate for the total population. At the same time, the earlier Madrid had a reputation as the dirtiest and most noisome capital in Europe and had a massive housing problem--conditions that discourage family formation and raise infant mortality. ⁽¹²⁾ If we then recall that Madrid expanded at [44] an unprecedented pace after 1600--even faster than in the 1840's--an "inner city" of 60,000 is a plausible 35% of the estimate of 175,000 inhabitants in 1630 presented in Chapter 2. In this context, Martorell's long-neglected figures for Madrid baptisms fit and help identify and date the origins of Madrid's "core/envelope" pattern to the early seventeenth century.
 
B. Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Although Madrid's total population changed considerably, the age-sex structures are remarkably similar for 1787, 1804, and 1850-51 (see Figure 3.3). The high proportion of immigrants in the 1850-51 census appears as a remarkable bulge in the 16-24 and 25-49-year cohorts, giving the age-sex pyramid a pronounced wasp-waisted appearance. This structure is apparent in any pre-modern census of Madrid that contains age or sex data. One is struck by the degree to which Madrid in 1850-51 was structured like Madrid of the eighteenth century, which in turn apparently had not altered in this respect since the early seventeenth century.
A comparison of population pyramids allows additional insights, however. In 1787 and in 1850-51 Madrid had just experienced a period of rapid growth, whereas in 1804 a decline was under way. The 1850-51 census had a larger 7-16 cohort and a significantly higher percentage of females. The share of the population over 50 was smaller, indicating a more rapid rate of immigration in the 1840's than before 1787. The high proportion of women is paralleled by a large decline in the percentage of women who were married and an increase in the number of female domestics. This in turn reflects a change in the nature of household service from mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century (see Table 3.6 for sex and marriage ratios). ⁽¹³⁾

By contrast, the census of 1804 illustrates a city in decline. The loss of 5,000 people in five years was not enough to eliminate the bulge in the middle cohorts, but it did alter the age-sex distribution. The relative sizes of the 16-24 and 25-49 age groups declined, while the aged and young became relatively more numerous, despite bad economic conditions. The population structure thus indicates a decline of immigration and an exodus of recent immigrants as economic opportunity faded in the capital. In view of the offhand way in which economic historians of Spain have talked about economic crisis stimulating immigration to the city, the reverse process in the late 1790's suggests the need for reexamination of another old chestnut of Spanish economic history. ⁽¹⁴⁾ The city contracted by reducing the marginal "envelope" while the core society continued relatively unaffected, probably [45] repeating the pattern of the mid-seventeenth century. Thus the ratio between immigrant and core populations was partly a function of the rate of growth in the years preceding each census. If the "inner city" constituted about 40% in 1850-51, it probably represented slightly more as of 1787, and a yet higher percentage in 1804. On the other hand, given the extremely rapid growth of the capital after 1600, the core population was proportionately smaller in 1630 than in the later examples. This helps explain how Madrid could fluctuate as it did in the seventeenth century without losing its importance to the elites of the country.
 
C. Urban Comparisons

Important insights into urban immigration emerge from comparison of Madrid's demographic structure with other communities. The massive role of immigration in Madrid's demography is suggested by comparison with the isolated provincial capital of Soria in 1787, ⁽¹⁵⁾ and with Barcelona in 1787 and 1863 (see Figures 3.4 and 3.5). ⁽¹⁶⁾ One-fifth the size of Madrid, Soria shows a conventional pyramid-shaped age-sex distribution that includes sizable childhood cohorts. There are some anomalies, notably a disproportionately large number of women in the middle age groups. This indicates either female immigration or male outmigration; the first is more likely, and suggests that even a fairly small city had complex demographic relationships with its hinterland.

Barcelona, a commercial and manufacturing port, provides a much more interesting contrast with Madrid. The age-sex distribution indicates the same duality that we have noted for Madrid--in particular, an age pyramid in which the childhood cohorts are small for the rest of the population. The situation is less pronounced than in Madrid, however. The city depended on immigrants for growth, but the larger number of children suggests more opportunities for economic stability and family formation in Barcelona than in Madrid. This reflects the wider range of functions performed by Barcelona as a port, entrepot, and manufacturing center, in particular the much larger artisan and manufacturing population (see Chapter 4).

D. City and Country

Other aspects of urban immigration are apparent in the population structures of nearby rural communities: the impoverished mountain district of Buitrago, two hill towns in the Real de Manzanares specializing in long-distance carting, and several farming communities in the province of Toledo.
 

The Toledan farming communities exhibit yet another rural pattern (see Figure 3.8). ⁽¹⁹⁾ The old-age cohorts are larger, while the 25-49 cohorts indicate male outmigration. At first glance it appears that the population lived longer, but it is more likely that many men left town temporarily and returned later in life. This is reflected in comments on the manuscript tally sheets that sometimes mention temporary emigration to Madrid, but more often refer to single men working as criados in other farming towns. It coincides with the small number of immigrants over 40 in the city in 1850-51. These farming towns show normal age distribution on the female side, suggesting that women tended to remain in the communities. Thus the isolated mountain towns produced young men and women for the city, while the carting towns sent out surplus women and the farm towns surplus men.
 
III. Geography of Migration
 
The rural population structures are linked to that of Madrid by the census of 1850-51, which lists all residents of Madrid by sex and province of origin. ⁽²⁰⁾ The importance of cityward migration to the sending provinces is indicated in Table 3.2, which shows the number of Madrid residents from each province as a percentage of the population of that province as of 1857. Five of the six biggest contributors, relative to the population of the sending districts, were near Madrid: Toledo, Guadalajara, Segovia, Ciudad Real, and [49]Cuenca (see Map 3.2). The only peripheral province to make a similar contribution was Oviedo. But if the provinces are ranked by the absolute size of their contingents in the capital, the picture changes (see Table 3.3 and Map 3.3): Oviedo heads the list, and Lugo, Alicante, and Valencia emerge as major contributors. In these cases, however, the contingents were small relative to the sending populations, and the interior provinces still rank as the major contributors to the capital's immigrant population. 
 
 

a. Based on Madrid censuses of 1850-51 and Spanish census of 1857; modern provincial boundaries. Only provinces registering more than 1.0% are listed.
 
 

The immigrant age-sex structure also varied with province of origin, and provides the link with the demographic structures of neighboring communities. Female immigrants were not only younger, but generally came from adjacent provinces, while males tended to be older and were more likely to have come from distant provinces with port cities (see Table 3.5). The migration from 11 provinces was over 55% female, with the percentage as high as 68.7% for Guadalajara; 6 of these 11 provinces were near Madrid and accounted for 14% of the city's entire female population, compared with 4.5% from the 5 distant provinces that sent more women than men (Map 3.4). The importance of nearby provinces as sources of women immigrants to Madrid confirms signs of female outmigration in the hill and mountain areas north and west of Madrid. ⁽²²⁾ in contrast, immigrant groups from 9 provinces were over 55% male. The percentage was as high as 74.6% from Oviedo, and the peripheral provinces in this group contributed 12.6% of the total city population of Madrid, while Córdoba, the one interior province with predominantly male migration, contributed only 0.6%.

In summary, with the exception of Oviedo, the provinces contributing the most immigrants relative to their own populations were near Madrid. Female immigrants were most likely to be in the 16-24 cohort and from the interior provinces. The peripheral provinces, on the other hand, sent far more men, and they were likely to be older.

One of the fascinating developments between 1757 and 1850-51 is the evolution of the male/female ratio and the marriage ratio of the 25-39-year cohort (see Table 3.6). In 1757 there were 111.2 men to 100 women, but by 1850-51 this ratio had fallen to 95/100. The change in the sex ratio was paralleled by a more pronounced change in the proportion of women who were married and not yet widowed, which can be traced from 1787. Consistently, few marriages took place below the age of 25. In 1787, only 13.8% of men and 27.7% of women in Madrid between 16 and 24 were married, and by 1850-51 this had dropped to 8.6% for men and 17.4% for women. Thus the important cohort for reproduction is that of ages 25-39. In the 1787 census, 57.9% of men in that age group were married, compared with 69.2% of women. Even these relatively high figures mark a contrast with Soria, where 87% of women and 89% of men in that age cohort were married. By 1850-51 [54]
 
 

The kinds of niches that immigration offered are fairly obvious. The majority of immigrants remained on the fringes of the city's society and economy, but the male-dominated immigration from the periphery also involved recruitment of personnel for the inner sector. The predominance of Basque names in mercantile activities, in the fish supply, and in the iron trade is but one example. The arrival of Catalan merchants, retailers, and craftsmen is well attested for the later eighteenth century. The eighteenth-century playwright Ramón de la Cruz noted large numbers of immigrants from Asturias, Galicia, Valencia, Catalonia, and Andalusia, observing that most of them were men and were occupied as manservants, produce buyers, and various types of petty middlemen and facilitators. Rather than vagrants, they have the air of purposeful, long-term migrant labor. ⁽²⁴⁾ To this commercially derived network, the nineteenth century added a political one. The parliamentary [57] system of deputies and elections provided new connections which brought provincials to the capital to feed the empleomanía that was one of the city's perennial problems. ⁽²⁵⁾

A similar pattern is apparent between immigrants from the Castilian hinterland and domestic service and food distribution. As recorded for both 1787 and 1845, domestics accounted for a sizable proportion of all immigrants, while their male/female ratio corresponded with that of migration from the interior provinces. In 1787 domestics constituted 12% of the entire population and 40% of the economically active population. In 1845, despite a 35% growth of the city, the 24,000 domestics constituted 11.5% of the population and 67.6% were female, as was the migration from the provinces near Madrid. This predominantly female migration was most likely to encounter household and casual or temporary unskilled employment. ⁽²⁶⁾ It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the inmates of the poorhouses of the day came primarily from the provinces of Toledo, Guadalajara, Cuenca, Segovia, and Ávila. ⁽²⁷⁾

The analogous networks of the early seventeenth century are not clearly documented, but the sources of immigration were probably similar. There was a large migration from Toledo after 1610 that made important additions to the commercial and artisan core, despite attempts to send them back to Toledo. ⁽²⁸⁾ There are descriptions of immigrant notables from all over the country, and of nobility seeking to expand access to royal largesse. ⁽²⁹⁾ The peticiones de vecindad which will be analyzed in Chapter 5 reflect this type of immigrant. Seventeenth-century guild lists show the patterns of regional names and implied linkages seen later. Not until after 1750 did domestic service shift from male retainers to female domestics, and women may not have been as important in seventeenth-century immigration from nearby regions as they became later. At the same time, seventeenth-century parish [58] registers feature arrivals from Old Castile, Asturias, and Galicia, demonstrating that the pattern of 1850-51 was very old. ⁽³⁰⁾

These movements of people in the context of a static society become understandable when seen as a particular type of migration. Cultural anthropologists refer to transformational migration, caused by changes in the structure of the sending village, and institutional migration, which is a solution to the problems of impartible inheritance or overpopulation. Institutional migration involves regular, often temporary departures to distant but well-known places needing unskilled and semi-skilled labor. ⁽³¹⁾ The large number of urban immigrants from Asturias, and the heavily female migration from the central provinces, clearly suggest such institutionalized patterns. Thus Madrid's steady absorption of young adults from rural society may help explain the stability of social and economic life in many Castilian villages. Only in the mid-nineteenth century is the appearance of transformational migration to the capital suggested. The accelerated immigration of the 1840's was accompanied by an increase in the relative size of Madrid's economically marginal population and by the growing demand for women as domestics. Given the consistent importance of domestic service in the workforce, the increasing surplus of females, and the decline of marriage ratios, there is evidence of a strong association between the marginal occupations of the city and immigration from nearby provinces. The countryside was producing more surplus population, and some interesting changes in the capital's economy and life-style were taking place. ⁽³²⁾
 
V. Demographic and Economic Trends After 1740
 
The chronology of changing conditions and population structure can be further clarified by reference to the volume of births, deaths, and marriages for 1743-1836. ⁽³³⁾ The lack of good population totals precludes construction of birth and death rates, ⁽³⁴⁾ and we must be satisfied with analyzing the actual numbers of baptisms, burials, and marriages relative to other trends. ⁽³⁵⁾ These [59] figures reveal several phases in the evolution of Madrid. The prosperity of the 1750's was followed by a crisis in the mid-'60's, a period of changing conditions and growth from 1770 to 1793, a sharp crisis around 1800, and decline until 1812. Demographic recovery marked the first restoration, followed by worsening economic conditions in the capital from 1824 to 1835.

From an average of 4,750 in the 1750's, baptisms fell 10% by 1770, and then stabilized until 1783 with only a slight downward drift. The number of marriages, after a post-crisis jump in 1767, fell sharply by 1770 but subsequently rose steadily and by 1783 was 15% higher than in 1770. The number of burials, around 3,000 in the late 1750's, peaked sharply in the mid-1760's, then oscillated around 4,000 until 1784. Stable mortality levels, rising marriages, declining births, and growing population do not fit together unless we consider the cityward migration of young adults, the majority of whom were women, judging from the declining proportion of men in the city. This explains how marriages and total population could grow without a corresponding increase in the number of burials, but does not explain the decline in baptisms. The latter is confirmed, however, by the number of infants entering the royal foundling home, which also declined through the 1770's. One possible explanation is that factors were working to restrict family size, even though family formation increased. As we have seen, the 1787 census suggests that only the relatively traditional artisan and hidalgo classes were associated with large childhood cohorts in their districts, while other groups were associated with smaller numbers of children. Obviously, this is an answer that is a question in its own right; but in general, the period 1770-83 seems to be one of growth and relatively good economic conditions in the city.

This expansive phase continued until 1793, but with growing signs of economic distress in urban society. The number of marriages continued to rise with the influx of adult immigrants, and by 1794 was 22% larger than in 1770. The number of baptisms rose sharply after 1783, reversing the trend of the previous decade: from 4,400 per year between 1774 and 1783, it reached nearly 6,000 in 1793. Admissions to the foundling home experienced an even faster rise, from 650 a year to almost 1,000. The mortality figures are more erratic, rising in the late 1780's and then falling back below the 4,000 level in 1791 -92. During 1784-93 Madrid continued to expand, but living conditions were deteriorating and the food supply was becoming precarious as demand grew, ⁽³⁶⁾ causing high food prices and mortality levels. The growth in marriages and baptisms in the early '90's thus reflects family re-formation after the mortality of the late '80's rather than renewed prosperity. Apparently the impact of increasing supply instability was confined to the outer envelope of [60] the population structure. The inner core of society, while not immune to the crises of 1785-89, recovered rapidly from the effects of the episode. Nevertheless, the 1780's brought a growing public uneasiness about the numbers of vagrants, hangers-on, and unemployed, a sharpening of establishment attitudes toward the poor, and attempts to expel impecunious pretendientes from the city. ⁽³⁷⁾

The year 1793 marks a turning point in the development of the city. Population continued to grow until about 1798, but other indicators show a marked worsening of urban conditions, and even before the subsistence crisis of 1804 the population began to decline. Between 1793 and 1802 marriages dropped sharply and, despite a recovery after 1804, remained low until the Napoleonic occupation. Baptisms declined from the high of 6,000 in 1793 to about 4,700 in 1806--a level comparable to that of the 1750's. Burials, meanwhile, rose rapidly after 1792--and even excluding the crisis of 1804, which killed 11,000 people, were consistently above the previous norm. This is the Madrid depicted by Antonio Flores in his withering description of the perpetual hunger and the "sopa boba" that the Old Regime dispensed at the convent doors. ⁽³⁸⁾ Foundling hospital admissions present an even more telling testimony to urban conditions. Despite declining baptisms, the number of foundlings rose from 650 per year in the 1770's to an average of 1,300 in the decade before the French occupation.

Clearly Madrid entered an economic crisis after 1793. The instability of the food supply, apparent in 1785-89, worsened in the 1790's and culminated in the subsistence crisis of 1804. Disruption of trade and diversion of government resources to the war effort undermined the economy of the urban core, and by 1804 population had begun to decline. The immigrant-swollen young adult cohorts contracted and the 0-7 childhood cohort became significantly smaller than in 1787 or 1793. The biggest impact was on the male population in the 25-39 cohort; the crisis apparently displaced men more readily than women, as falling employment combined with the effects or threat of conscription to encourage departure. Thus the fifteen years before the French occupation were marked by rising death and child-abandonment figures and declining birth and marriage totals. The economic base of the city was contracting and marginal groups were being pushed below the subsistence level, discouraging immigration.

The trends of the early nineteenth century are harder to discern, because of gaps in the vital statistics and the quality of the census data. The French occupation was disastrous and brought a subsistence crisis in 1812 far worse [61] than that of 1804. ⁽³⁹⁾ As late as 1821 the population was well below that of the 1790's, even though postwar birth and marriage figures reflect demographic recovery and immigration. In 1814-22 marriages exceeded the previous high of 1784-93, and baptisms regained the 6,000 level by 1821. Death figures were relatively low, reflecting loss of the weaker inhabitants in the preceding crisis. The marginality of the new population is apparent in admissions to the foundling home, which matched those of the late 1790's despite the reduced population. If the city was younger and more fertile in this first restoration, it was also poorer. The balance between the "inner city" and its marginal "envelope" was shifting and the latter was becoming proportionately larger, anticipating the structure of 1850-51.

This is borne out by vital statistics during the second restoration and its aftermath (1824-36) which suggest that urban conditions in the late 1820's were bad and that the 1830's were little better. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ The average number of marriages in 1822-29 was lower than in any crisis year in the eighteenth century. Marriages did not reach eighteenth-century levels until 1835-36, in the aftermath of an epidemic. Baptisms, however, stayed fairly high, while admissions to the foundling home continued to rise. Burials rose rapidly after the low of the first restoration, reached eighteenth-century levels by the late 1820's, and continued to climb to the epidemic of 1834.

Thus, while Madrid recovered its eighteenth-century maximum by 1825-30, its economic base was weaker, and more of the population was economically marginal and sensitive to economic stress. This dismal situation provided the background for the rapid expansion of the 1840's which will be discussed in Chapter 5.
 
VI. Implications of Demographic Structure and Change
 
The dualism of Madrid's population structure and society was a persistent phenomenon from the early seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. This is not a surprising discovery, since no pre-industrial city could grow rapidly without recruiting immigrants. ⁽⁴¹⁾ In the case of Madrid, the urban core constituted barely 40% of the population and provided an even smaller share of the economically active inhabitants. This sector imported, processed, and consumed most of the goods brought to Madrid from outside the Castilian [62] interior. It staffed the bureaucracy and collected, lived from, and redistributed most of the taxes, rents, and profits that subsidized the capital. As we will see, the concentrations of wealth were far more extreme than the preceding discussion suggests. Population structure and income distribution thus constitute key aspects of Madrid's impact on the economic history of Castile and Spain.

This duality of urban society reinforces the inferences drawn in Chapter 2. Population trends, prices, and revenue from duties based on regional exchange suggest that per-capita income decided after 1620. This forced most of the population to shift buying power toward essential commodities not reflected in the peso revenues, even as long-distance traffic serving the urban elites continued to expand. The structure of the urban population reinforces this perception and helps explain contradictory trends.

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The "inner city" continued to develop after 1620 as long as imperial policy was vigorous (see Chapter 5), lion growth was due to immigrants joining the outer "envelope"of casual labor. As urban growth and money supply pushed up food prices, this marginal sector bought less and less that was not essential to survival. The process can be seen in greater detail in the varying elasticities of demand for different foodstuffs, which will be presented in Chapter 6. The same sensitivity to shortage, food prices, and political failure plagued the city in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1850-51, 60% of the population consisted of people who had entered the city as young adults (see Figure 3.9), and this 60% included only those immigrants stable enough to be counted by inefficient census-taking. When the market Madrid presented to the interior changed, it was primarily because [63] of conditions affecting the size and well-being of this part of urban society. The significance of those changes is measured by the importance of that market for the rural economy, as will be shown in Chapters 6-9.

The identification of immigrants with the urban poor can easily be overstated, and it is important to note that the immigrant population was more complex than that identification suggests. Two well-defined flows of immigrants came to Madrid: one from the nearby provinces, the other from maritime provinces and port cities. Interior immigration was dominated by relatively young women, while maritime immigrants were older and predominantly male. In the first case, the contacts that brought people to the capital usually channeled them to household service, casual labor, and vending of foodstuffs; the second migration paralleled the links between the "inner city" of Madrid and the maritime world. While there is no doubt that most of the 20,000 Asturians and Gallegos entered marginal niches, immigrants from the periphery were more likely to be found in petty retailing and activities associated with the basic functions of Madrid.

The relative weight of the city-born and immigrant populations varied, depending on the conditions of the maritime economy and the empire. Thus the rapid expansion of Madrid after 1590 established the pattern of an inner city with a normal age-sex structure and a fluctuating envelope of adult immigrants. Initially, the latter sector was proportionately quite large. This imbalance was reduced during the stagnation after 1650, but increased with urban growth after 1750, producing the population pyramid of 1787 (see Figure 3.2). During the subsequent crisis, immigration was throttled back, enhancing the relative importance of the "inner city." In the post-Napoleonic restorations, reconstruction of a poorer urban population took place around an inner core debilitated economically by the collapse of the state and loss of empire. This is reflected in the faster growth of the female population, the relative importance of domestic service, declining marriage ratios, and an increased number of foundlings.

This sheds some light on the question of the degree to which a pre-modern city maintained itself demographically and shows that urban misery and bad living conditions are not the whole answer. Madrid's city-born population was demographically self-supporting with a normal age-sex-distribution pyramid. Its marriage ratios were higher than among immigrants and, in the census of 1787, certain districts where stable occupations predominated had large childhood cohorts. The artisan class and the nobility emerge as the demographically strongest sectors, while the mercantile, professional, and bureaucratic elements had low marriage ratios and small childhood cohorts (see Table 3.1). Thus the more traditional core elements were demographically strongest, not necessarily the most affluent. The "modern" elements had the smaller family associated with modern urban society. As we will see, the [64] distribution of income was extremely uneven in Madrid, but it was not until the nineteenth century that it was accompanied by the signs of misery seen in eighteenth-century Paris and London.

Important city-country relationships emerge from the population structure. We will see that--tied to both the interior and maritime economies of Spain, and to its function as political capital--Madrid attracted its luxuries and manufactures from far beyond the two Castiles. Its food, fuel, building materials, and the rough manufactures used by the poor, however, were drawn from a series of supply zones and areas of urban influence embracing Old and New Castile. The structure of Madrid's population, partly as a result of this dual economic life, embodied various city-country interactions. Thanks to unstable weather, weak market organization, and poor transport, frequent supply crises hit the capital, reducing demand for nonessential goods. When the city expanded, this problem intensified, forcing the urban poor to shift their buying power to basic food with greater frequency, and weakening demand for the rough manufactures. Changes in the economic base of the "inner city" reflected changes in Spain's imperial and maritime resources. Crisis in the traditional structure of power, as in 1793-1808, reduced support for marginal functions and new immigrants. Disruption of that structure, as in mid-seventeenth century and again in 1808-25, damaged the economic base of the capital so the urban core contracted, reducing the number of artisans and functionaries as well.

People migrate because they see opportunity such as the city offered in the early seventeenth, late eighteenth, and mid-nineteenth centuries. They also migrate because of limited local opportunities. This was a contributing factor in the early seventeenth century and mid-nineteenth century, when a deteriorating rural situation complemented an urban construction boom and relatively stable food supplies. Any circumstances that strengthened the urban core then led to rising population and consumption. This required ever more vigorous intrusions into the rural economy, displacing ever more people to the city, even as urban opportunity was eroded by the erratic prices and declining real wages produced by their arrival. This happened after 1620 and also in the late eighteenth century, and possibly in the nineteenth century.

By 1650 Madrid had become the preeminent city of the entire Spanish interior. Immigration took place in a more stable framework as regional and urban population reached a new equilibrium. There was general prosperity from 1720 to 1750, and urban prosperity as late as 1780. Thereafter urban conditions deteriorated, and by 1800 the balance of forces had reversed and immigration declined. The post-Napoleonic period saw a burst of urban replacement from a disrupted countryside. By the 1840's, a growing rural population and renewed urban prosperity again created a flood of people ready to believe that there were places for them in the great city.

[65] In the long run, Madrid's demand for migrants was unstable, as was the demand for the goods the population consumed. As we will see, the wealthier and more stable part of the urban market depended on distant resources for much of what it consumed, while the huge marginal segments of the population constituted most of the market that Madrid presented to Castile. That market was repeatedly disturbed both by long-term urban growth and by recurrent subsistence crises. This economic dualism--suggested by our long-term profile in Chapter 2, by the structure of urban population, and by the nature of migration to the city--can now be examined more directly.

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 Notes for Chapter 3  
 1. The censuses used are dated 1757, 1787, 1793, 1804, 1831, 1845, 1850-51, 1857, 1865, and 1869, and are cited in Appendix A. The early baptism figures, dated 1594-98 and 1622-26, are in Ricardo Martorell Téllez Girón, Aportaciones al estudio de la población de Madrid en el siglo XVII (1930). Later baptisms, burials, marriages, and foundlings are in Maria Carbajo Isla, "Primeros resultados cuantitativos de un estudio sobre la población de Madrid,1742-1836"(1968).

2. There are two tabulations for 1850-51, one distinguishing age, sex, marital status, and whether or not Madrid-born, the other indicating sex and province of origin; both are in AVM, Secretaria, sig. 6-61 -49. See also Antonio Fernández García, El abastecimiento de Madrid en el remado de Isabel II (1971), p. 148.

3. This kind of dual structure is implicit in E. A. Wrigley's discussion of pre-industrial London in "A Simple Model," pp. 45-63. During its rapid growth in the late eighteenth century, Bordeaux experienced a similar influx; see J. P. Poussou, "Les structures démographiques et sociales," in Histoire de Bordeaux, vol. 5, Bordeaux au XVIIIe siecle (1968), pp. 332-333. A discussion of immigration to various European towns is in Roger Mols, Introduction a la démographie historique des villes d'Europe du XIVau XVIIIe siécle, vol. 3, pp. 374-393.

4. This Censo de Floridablanca, in RAH in numerous legajos, is preserved in the form of summary tallies for every village and town in Spain. The materials for Madrid do not distinguish between city-born and immigrant residents, but they do give age, sex, and marital status by 6 cohorts and list several occupational categories for each of 64 barrios grouped in 8 cuarteles. For Madrid, there are two separate tabulations from the first half of 1787 (leg. 9/6235).

5. A discussion of the elites within the "inner city" as part of this core/envelope model is in A. B. Hibbert, "Medieval Town Patricians" (1953). The definitions and assumptions used in this section are general and serve to relate occupational groups to the dual urban demographic structure.

6. Poussou, in Bordeaux, "Les structures," p. 360, provides evidence for this in the high proportion of marriages attributed to the artisan class in the same period.

7. This contrasts sharply with Stone's findings on the English peerage, but this is not surprising. The Spanish hidalguía was much larger, including the equivalent of the gentry. In practice we are discussing a fair-sized urban element that was neither aristocratic nor bourgeois (in the economic sense) but primarily a land-owning and rentier group. See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (1965), pp. 161-174.

8. Numerous perceptive comments on the life-style of the upper classes in eighteenth-century Madrid are offered by Pedro Romero de Solis, La población española en los siglos XIII y XIX (1913), pp. 83-103. He considers these as indicators of the development of the modern small middle-class family.

9. Arthur Hamilton, "A Study of Spanish Manners, 1750-1800, from the Plays of Ramón de la Cruz" (1926), pp. 17-25.

10. The clergy has been excluded from this discussion in part because they were not included in contemporary age and sex calculations and their subsequent insertion would have distorted the analysis in this passage. They were supported in large part by endowments, were The Urban Population part of the urban "core" professionally, and declined from about 4,000 at the end of the eighteenth century to about 2,000 in the 1850's because of the seizure of religious property and the corresponding loss of an economic base.
    Some of the qualitative aspects of migration to the city for domestic service are discussed by Teresa McBride in "Traditional Socialization and the Process of Modernization for Women: Domestic Service in Nineteenth-Century France" (1974 and 1976).

11. Martorell, Aportaciones.

12. Ruth Lee Kennedy, "The New Plaza Mayor of 1620 and Its Reflection in the Literature of the Time" (1944), pp. 49, 56; José Deleito y Piñuelo, Solo Madrid es Corte: La capital de dos mundos bajo Felipe IV (1953), pp. 127-128.

13. Romero de Soils, La población, pp. 83-103, definitely finds this sort of change in household life.

14. Jaime Vicens Vives, Manual de historia económica, pp. 400-401, is a choice example of this kind of loose analysis.

15. RAH, leg. 9/6244, Province of Soria.

16. For 1787, Josep Iglesias, ed., El cens de Comte de Floridablanca, 1787: Parte de Catalunya (1968), p. 58; for 1863, Armando Saez Buesa, La población de Barcelona en 1863 y 1960 (1968), pp. 16-17.

17. El Antiguo Régimen: El señorío de Buitrago (1974), pp. 57-58.

18. RAH, leg. 9/6226, Province of Guadalajara, for Becerril and Collado Mediano. This sample and the next one cited (Figures 3.7 and 3.8) had abnormally small numbers of male children aged 0-6 in 1787. Appparently New Castile suffered from a serious epidemic of "fiebres tercianas" from September 1783 until 1787, with lingering effects until 1791. This might account for the small infant cohorts, and apparently it didn't reach the mountains where Buitrago (Figure 3.6) is located, but this doesn't readily explain the differential impact on the sexes. See Mariano and José Luis Peset, Muerte en España: Política y sociedad entre la peste y el cólera (1972), pp. 76-77. About then (1785-87) there was a pronounced peak in hospital admissions and burials in Madrid; see Carbajo Isla, "Primeros resultados," pp. 81-82.

19. RAH, leg. 9/6226, Province of Guadalajara, and 9/6248-49, Province of Toledo

20. AVM, Secretaría, sig. 6-61 -49.

21. This can be inferred from the fact that census records for this period were found with tallies of draft-eligible men.

22. This pattern of migration--with skilled and professional persons from relatively long distances and large towns; and unskilied labor, especially women from nearby rural districts, often for domestic service--is evident in many cities. Examples are nineteenth-century Paris, eighteenth-century Bordeaux, and seventeenth-century Amiens; see McBride, "Traditional Socialization"; Poussou, "Les structures," pp. 334-350; and Pierre Deyon, Amiens, capitate Provinciate (1967), pp. 7-10.

23. For the commercial bases of these networks, see Chapters 6 and 7.

24. Arthur Hamilton, "A Study of Spanish Manners," pp. 56-57, 70. Ramón de Mesonero Romanos--in Obras (1967), vol. 2, p. 190--describes Castilian food vendors and wandering peddlers from Valencia and Aragón. George Rude identifies this pattern for Paris in "The Growth of Cities and Popular Revolt, 1750-1850, with Particular Reference to Paris" (1973), p. 174.

25. Vicens Vives, Manual de historia económica, pp. 443, 504-505; Deyon, Amiens, pp. 7-10; Poussou, "Les structures," pp. 334-350; Antonio Flores, La sociedad de 1850 (1963), p. 85. Empleomanía was a contemporary term denigrating the perpetual scramble of would-be office-seekers for bureaucratic sinecures in Madrid.

26. This pattern is identical with that observed in Seville; see Juan Ignacio Carmena García, Una aportación a la demografía de Sevilla en los siglos XVIII y XIX: Las series parroquiales de San Martin (1750-1860) (1976), pp. 138-139.

27. William Callahan, "Corporate Charity in Spain: The Hermandad del Refugio of Madrid, 1518-1814" (1976), p. 163.

28. Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española del siglo XVII, vol. 1, pp. 131-132.

29. Michel Devéze, L'Espagne de Philippe IV (1621-1665), pp. 263-264; Thomas K. Niehaus, "Population Problems and Land Use in the Writings of the Spanish Arbitristas: Social and Economic Thinkers, 1600-1650" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1976), pp. 202-212.

30. Claude Larquié, "Quartiers et paroisses urbaines," p. 191.

31. Stanley H. Brandes, Migration, Kinship and Community: Tradition and Transition in a Spanish Village (1975), pp. 14-15. The case of Galician migration is famous; see Antonio Mejide Pardo, La emigración gallega intrapenínsular del siglo XVIII (1960).

32. Some fascinating impressions of this are in Flores, La sociedad de 1850.

33. Carbajo Isla, "Primeros resultados."

34. Alexandre Moreau de Jonnes--in Statistique de l'Espagne (1834), p. 51--calculated a birth rate of 31.4/1000 and a death rate of 25.0/1000 for Madrid in 1788, the latter being suspiciously low. For 1797 the birth rate varied from 31.3 to 29.4 and the death rate from 29.4 to 26.6, depending on which of the available base figures one chooses. For comparable serial data on Parisian vital indicators, see E. Chariot and J. Düpaquier, "Mouvement annuel de la population de la ville de Paris de 1670 á 1821" (1967).

35. Rudé, "The Growth of Cities," pp. 182-183, insists on the usefulness of these indicators for documenting deteriorating conditions in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century.

36. See Ringrose, Transportation and Economic Stagnation in Spain, 1750-1850, pp. 124-127

37. Romero de Soils, La población, pp. 43-44.

38. Antonio Flores, Ayer, Hoy y Mañana: Cuadros sociales de 1800,1850 y 1899, vol. I, pp. 128-132.

39. Manuel Espadas Burgos. "El hambre de 1812 en Madrid" (1968).

40. Spain was hit by cholera in 1834-35; but even before that, the figures given by Mesonero Romanos for 1831 include such signs of distress as unusually large numbers of widows and widowers and an unusual shortage of males. Unfortunately the figures lack detail to permit more careful analysis. See Peset and Peset, Muerte en España, pp. 216-217, and Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Manual de Madrid (1833), pp. 44-45, "Población de Madrid en 1831."

41. Wrigley, "A Simple Model," pp. 45-63; Mols, Introduction a la démographie historique, vol. 3, pp. 374-393.