Normally, poor transport limits the market for bulky commodities unless some additional factor intervenes. The limiting effect of transport on urban size has a compelling logic which prompts one scholar to comment: "Until the railroads reduced long-distance land transport costs, the needs of 10,000 or more city dwellers could only be met through waterborne commerce." ⁽¹⁾ Madrid, with twenty times that number and an overland supply system, is thus a rather remarkable artifact. It is already apparent that the city's supply systems reached far beyond the 50-75-mile range of private grain marketing apparent in the eighteenth century, and established far-reaching influence. In charting the areas the city drew upon, therefore, we can define another dimension of urban influence. At the same time, it is important to the discussion in Chapters 11 and 12 to relate the geographic incidence of Madrid's growing demands to the region that supplied Toledo and the other cities of the interior. Obviously, we will not be able to establish a sharp boundary and say "Here stops the influence of Madrid," but we can identify the regions that regularly interacted with the capital in an economic way.
 
[194] I. Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Expansion of Influence
 
A. Wheat
 
As we have seen, the earliest regulation of wheat supplies took the form of embargoes on all grain traded within a specified radius of the capital. As a complement to the long-established price ceiling (tasa) on wheat leaving the farm, this was an administrative redefinition of urban demand in an existing market. As the area of embargo was increased, it meant that Madrid preempted supplies customarily used by Toledo. Some embargoes directed the movement of all salable grain to the capital, others established price differentials that made Madrid a more attractive market. As the sixteenth century drew to a close, control zones with radii of 5 and 8 leagues gave way to a 12-league radius during the supply crises of 1583 and 1591, and the first 18-league radius appeared in the crisis of 1598-99. In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, 12 leagues became the minimum, 16- and 20-league radii appeared frequently, and in 1631 the city regulated wheat for a 32-league radius and bread-baking within 20 leagues. ⁽²⁾

The significance of these ever-expanding control areas is apparent when they are illustrated as on Map 9.1, which shows 8-, 18-, and 32-league limits. Beginning with the crisis of 1598-99, Madrid's supply zone frequently enveloped that of Toledo, as well as those of Ávila, Guadalajara, and Segovia. The 18-league radius, used or exceeded at least six times between 1598 and 1630, not only surrounded Toledo but included the best farming areas of New Castile.

As we have seen, this embargo system proved inadequate for the city's growing needs as the rural economy deteriorated. Specific references to grain sources are scanty before the supply crisis of 1630-31, but as late as 1614 officials of the Sala de Alcaldes y Corte still relied heavily in time of shortage upon La Mancha, Guadalajara, and the Bishoprics of Osma and Sigiienza north and east of Guadalajara. Of these, only La Mancha was outside the largest embargo radius, and recourse to Old Castile is mentioned only as an afterthought. ⁽³⁾

After two decades of rapid urban growth, the pestilence, cold weather, and crop failures of the late 1620's forced authorities to increase the scope of the supply system in order to maintain Madrid's grain supply. This is illustrated by three complementary accounts from 1630-31 which detail the purchase of 175,000 fanegas of wheat, a third of the annual supply. Two of the documents [195] are summary accounts of wheat purchased by agents who ranged from Andalucía to Falencia, while the third details purchases by an agent who acquired 55,000 fanegas of wheat in the provinces of Segovia, Ávila, Valladolid, and eastern Zamora and Salamanca. ⁽⁴⁾

The two general accounts list points of purchase throughout Old and New Castile and Andalucía (see Map 9.1), and represent the geographic range of the city's wheat purchases in the seventeenth century, 53% of which came from the Tierra de Campos between León, Falencia, Valladolid, and Zamora, while an additional 13% came from other parts of Old Castile and León. A fourth of the total came from Andalucía and La Mancha; and of the areas cited as sources in 1614, only Osma and La Mancha are mentioned in this crisis. ⁽⁵⁾

A third of the 175,000 fanegas in all three accounts came from the Tierra de Campos, and the number and density of the towns mentioned suggests that the area was thoroughly canvassed. Some 70% of the grain purchased by these roving agents came from beyond the 32-league control zone of 1630-31, ⁽⁶⁾ and virtually all of it came from beyond the 18-league radius of previous crises, prefiguring the three-tiered grain market outlined earlier. Madrid was now reaching to the extremes of the peninsula for supplies and making major intrusions into the wheat markets of Old Castile. The capital was clearly capable of disrupting the regional grain markets crucial to the Castilian urban network.

Purchasing records from 1664-65 document Madrid's continued reliance on this Old Castilian supply system, despite a decline in the size of the city. ⁽⁷⁾ An area that includes 31 towns where an agent of the Pósito purchased 31,000 fanegas of wheat from the 1664-65 crop is shown on Map 9.1. While this is less than 10% of the city's consumption, it shows that even after its decline Madrid continued to reach as far as 200 miles into Old Castile for its grain: 70% of these purchases came from the Tierra de Campos, more than 125 miles from Madrid.

The sweeping nature of the capital's effort to attract grain supplies in years of dearth is evident. While the city may not have disturbed the affected areas in most years, it exacerbated the effects of periodic crop failure across a considerable distance. This mechanism helps to account for the extremely wide price fluctuations in market centers when the crop was poor, and thus for the parallelism of regional price trends noted by Earl Hamilton. Under the [197] circumstances, surprisingly small purchases could be very disturbing to the local market. ⁽⁸⁾

From 1601 to 1630, when the capital was expanding rapidly, there was a distinct geographic shift in wine sources (see Map 9.4). The same distant suppliers in Cuenca and La Mancha reappear, but Old Castile has virtually disappeared. While Madrid continued to draw from the towns to the northeast and immediate south, this period saw the supply net extend deep into the wine-producing regions around Toledo--the districts of Casarrubios del Monte, Ocaña, and Lillo in Toledo province, Tarrancón in Cuenca, and most notably the Orgaz district south of Toledo. This shift coincides with the unprecedented volume of wine entering Madrid at the time, and it is evident that the capital was coming to dominate the producing regions of New Castile. At the same time, the decline of wine prices between 1590 and 1615 explains the disappearance of Old Castilian wine from the market. The cost of transport from Old Castile and the collapse of demand in Toledo meant that wine from New Castile reached Madrid more cheaply. ⁽¹⁴⁾

As with wheat and bread, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw recurrent regional embargoes that regulated the price and movement of wine within various distances from the capital. In the later sixteenth century, the control area was typically 8 or 12 leagues, and exceptionally 15. From 1599 it was normally 15 leagues and on occasion was extended to 20. At the same time, the city applied a two- and three-tiered price structure to wine leaving the vineyards. The farther from the capital, the lower the price the producer was permitted to charge, thus compensating middlemen and supply contractors for transport costs. In this way the retail price in the city could be held down without reducing a contractor's profit as he drew in supplies from farther and farther afield. ⁽¹⁵⁾

The geography of the capital's wine supply shifted farther south in 1631-1700, even as consumption in Madrid declined rapidly. Old Castile disappeared completely, as did most of the towns northeast of the capital that had been Madrid's wine suppliers for 50 years before 1630. The Casarrubios and Tarrancón districts also disappeared, calling to mind Domínguez Ortiz' observation about the decline of western Guadalajara and eastern Toledo provinces in the early seventeenth century. These were some of the same districts that also faded from the bread and wheat supply. ⁽¹⁶⁾ What remained was the cluster of communities between Madrid and Toledo that had been prominent in 1601-30, and the areas around Ocaña, Orgaz, and Lillo that [202] now appear as regular, rather than occasional, contributors to the Madrid wine supply. Another aspect of the evolving wine market is the growing frequency of references to quality wines from long distances--Sevilla, Córdoba, and Valencia--and the growing prominence of La Mancha, including the regions of Madridejos, Consuegra, Ciudad Real, Daimiel, and Mebrilla. In more recent times, La Mancha has been the main source of Madrid's table wine, but references to the area became prominent in the sources only after 1650.

Thus the wine-supply system of Madrid shifted south during the seventeenth century, first as a response to growing total demand, then in a search for alternate suppliers as the towns of central New Castile dropped out of the market and regional demographic decline became serious. ⁽¹⁷⁾ This period of increasing dependence on newer and more distant suppliers coincides with the marked decline of per-capita consumption in the city.

In mapping the development of Madrid's seventeenth-century wheat, bread, and wine supplies, we have defined some of the fields of urban influence that the growing capital city created in the Spanish interior. Initially, the city relied on nearby parts of New Castile or its hinterland to the north and east, where Toledo's influence was relatively weak. Those sources were supplemented as necessary with wheat and wine from Old Castile. As the city grew, however, the Crown expanded its zones of wheat and wine control to include most of New Castile, reorienting bread production in the region between the two cities toward Madrid. At the same time, Madrid thrust more deeply into the wheat markets of Old Castile and into the wine-producing areas of Toledo and La Mancha. The result was the appearance of a supply system oriented to Madrid that stretched from León in the north to La Mancha in the south. Without details on meat and fuel, the evidence is not complete, but the redirection of those commodity trades certainly followed suit. By the eighteenth century, when they can be documented, the wide scope of Madrid's influence in the economy of the interior was well established.

II. The Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Supply Zones
 
The seventeenth-century expansion of Madrid's fields of influence was the consequence of two processes--the growth and stabilization of the city itself and a decline of agriculture near the city which increased dependence on more distant suppliers, even though the size of the capital shrank considerably. [203] The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources are more complete; they allow us to map in detail the origins of wheat, charcoal, and meat, and offer other indications of the regional orientation to urban requirements.
 
A. Wheat
 
Several accounts have been combined to create a representative sample of 262,595 fanegas of wheat purchased by the Pósito in the late 1760's. Modest quantities of grain came from the nearby districts of Guadalajara, Madrid, and Toledo, significant amounts from La Mancha, and a sizable quantity from the Sigüenza-Osma area in southern Soria and northern Guadalajara provinces. The combined volume of all those sources, however, did not match the quantities brought from just the Tierra de Campos in Old Castile, not to mention the quantities from Salamanca, Ávila, and southern Valladolid. This pattern is supported by records from 1779 that indicate weekly grain arrivals at the Pósito by the region of origin. ⁽¹⁸⁾ These reiterate the dependence of the city on Old Castile and the thinness of supplies in the region near the city. They also add an element that is harder to document, the use of Andalucía to supply 10% of the total delivered to the Pósito. The region is treated as a routine source, and the Crown expressed concern about exports from the area; so it appears that by the late eighteenth century Madrid regularly bought grain from that far away.

The composite of supply accounts illustrated on Map 9.5 for 1785-90 is incomplete in that there are no eighteenth-century references to Soria-Guadalajara, La Mancha, or Andalucía, but it does reveal another aspect of the urban wheat supply. The Pósito did not normally supply all of the city's wheat, and with one exception its agents are seen operating at considerable distance from the capital. In Chapter 8 we showed that quantities of grain did come from nearby as small shipments brought by owners or transporters directly to the Pósito. The latter type of transaction is shown separately, indicating that the two mechanisms were geographically distinct. Moreover, considerable territory in Segovia, Ávila, and New Castile is not covered by either, despite the fact that those areas are known to have produced grain. These are the supply areas which were organized by the exchange centers considered as sites for grain fairs, and which supported the market network of Madrid's bakers and grain merchants. Since this grain was registered at the Alhóndiga without control as long as prices were stable, it represents an area of market influence which is hard for us to document directly.

Thus the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wheat supply involved fields of influence that drew modest amounts of grain from La Mancha and Cuenca, and important quantities from Madrid, Guadalajara, and Toledo provinces, but also relied heavily on Old Castile and León for supplies. Government intervention, which created most of our documentation, assumed a self-operating market in nearby regions, but organized purchase and delivery from more distant sources. The latter oriented the Old Castilian grain trade to Madrid and created a system that could then be copied by private traders as they acquired the connections and capital needed to hold stocks in anticipation of price changes. Thus it was that distant sources remained linked to Madrid after government intervention became less systematic. We glimpse here the development of entrepreneurs ready to take advantage of government withdrawal from management of the grain market. Regardless of the balance of public and private organization, the geographic scope of this aspect of Madrid's demands on Castile is well established.
 
B. Fuel, Lumber, and Transport
 
One of the important staples of any large city is fuel, and in pre-industrial Madrid this was primarily charcoal. By the end of the eighteenth century, the city used over 25,000 tons of charcoal yearly, with a market value in the capital reaching 10 million reales. Map 9.6 illustrates the geography of fuel supply, indicating the areas where the charcoal administration contracted for its fuel for the fiscal year 1803-04, and the districts that supplied 700 tons of firewood annually to the royal palaces in the 1640's. Madrid obtained over half of its charcoal from two districts: the belt of mountain country north and west of the city (the Guadarrama and Gredos Mountains), and the hill country known as the Alcarria in south-central Guadalajara and northern Cuenca. Sizable amounts also came from much farther afield--the Montes de Toledo, the rugged country of northwestern La Mancha, and the hill country along [207] the Salamanca-Avila border north of Bejar. Both are areas separated from Madrid by over 100 miles of rugged terrain. Smaller amounts arrived from as far as the extreme southeast of La Mancha and the Sierra de Gata in the northwest corner of Extremadura.

If Maps 9.5 and 9.6, on wheat and charcoal supply, are superimposed, the second fills in many of the geographic spaces on the first, showing Madrid's widespread influence on commodity flows in the interior. The dominance was even more pervasive than this observation suggests. Certain commodities and services were closely linked within the pre-industrial economy. One of the most important of these complexes was charcoal, lumber, transport, and grazing--all of which involved the same basic resources and regions. Thus Maps 9.5 and 9.6 must be viewed in conjunction with Map 9.7, which locates a number of other supply activities. Madrid used about 1,600 carros of lumber yearly for construction, cabinetry, and wood-working. Not surprisingly, many of the areas producing fuel also provided lumber. The most significant exception is the hill country of Soria, which supplied lumber, but not fuel; this was the major source of the pine which constituted half of all the lumber used in Madrid.

Moreover, both charcoal and lumber were linked with transportation--in particular the long-haul carters, equipped to carry large, heavy cargoes, who frequently came from villages in the forest districts. These carters, in turn, employed transhumant cattle-grazing as an integral part of their economic activities, requiring the rental of winter pasture throughout the Spanish interior. ⁽¹⁹⁾ To illustrate the many points at which Madrid touched the economy of the interior, therefore, Map 9.7 indicates lumber sources, home towns of the professional carters, and the areas where they regularly rented winter pastures. The result is a complex of supply activities that ranged over most of the interior provinces of the old Crown of Castile.

The geographic significance of this is apparent when we look at Map 9.8. The cattle traded at Trujillo came from as far as 70 miles away, and the area thus reached by the agent at the Trujillo fair is shown on the map. If we infer the same pattern for the La Bañeza cattle fair, it would have reached the hills of northwest León and the mountains of Galicia. ⁽²¹⁾

The registers of sales transacted at Madrid provide incomplete data on the origins of that part of the livestock supply. Large numbers of cattle were sold by brokers or owners of feed-lots near the city, and we have no clues to where those animals originated. There were also numerous small sales of cattle from Burgos, Soria, Cuenca, Toledo, and La Mancha--frequently the home regions and towns of long-haul carters. Since the latter used oxen as draft animals, the overlap into the meat supply was logical. A sizable number of high-quality beef cattle came from Navarra and southern France. The sheep purchased in the city did not come from as far afield, originating in La Mancha, Toledo, Avila, and Segovia provinces. For the most part, this involved [211] districts between Madrid and the areas served by the western livestock fairs.

The composite of the eighteenth-century meat sources provides an example of a nearly peninsula-wide network focused on Madrid. It reached from Navarra and France in the north to Galicia in the northwest, to the sierras along the north edge of Andalucía. It touched eastern Cuenca and Guadalajara, and even reached into the Aragonese province of Teruel. While many of the more distant transactions were not very significant in the economies of the producing districts, the meat trade drew into Madrid's orbit areas not involved in supplying other commodities--in particular Córdoba, Badajoz, Zamora, and León-Galicia. By mid-nineteenth century, minor changes had taken place in this network, but the effect was to increase even further the geographic scope of the city's influence. Navarra and France are no longer mentioned, but Galicia is mentioned specifically, and all of the central and western provinces participated. In addition, there are references to pork coming from Jaén, Murcia, Valencia, and Aragón, and to beef cattle from the Cantabrian Mountains of Santander province.
 
III. General Observations
 
It would be foolish to assert that Madrid controlled the market economy of every area from which she drew some supplies, and many supplying areas participated in trade with other regions as well. Wine moved north through Old Castile to the mountains; meat and fish traveled the reverse route into Old Castile; and grain was hauled north to Cantabria and Santander from the Tierra de Campos. Wool and some wheat were exported. Valencia and Andalucía maintained a separate interregional exchange of wheat and rice, and Valencia bought its mutton from Castilian graziers. Wood and building materials [212] moved from Soria to Old Castile and the north coast. ⁽²³⁾ Yet if we superimpose the fields of influence represented by the various commodities markets onto a single map, and remember our earlier estimates of the quantities and values involved, Madrid emerges as the market par excellence for the interior. The city's effective hinterland stretched from the Cantabrian Mountains to the Sierra Morena, and from the Portuguese to the Aragonese borders, while several of the connections reached beyond into Andalucía, Galicia, Valencia, and Aragón.

This may not have represented a "market economy" in the sense used by Fontana Lázaro, ⁽²⁴⁾ but it represents a pattern of established economic activity of great permanence that linked the fortunes of the interior with those of the capital city. Taken together with the urban institutions of supply, the examples of how urban supply touched rural life, and the underlying patterns of interregional trade, this evidence for the geographic scope and complexity of Madrid's supply system offers a convincing picture of the structural patterns that oriented rural elites to affairs in the capital. The "bourgeois" oligarchy of Castile is not so much the product of economic change involving capitalist attitudes as the consolidation of a complex continuum of urban-rural relations.
 

1. Josef W. Konvitz, Cities and the Sea, Port City Planning in Early Modern Europe (1978), p. xi.

2. AHN, Alcaldes, libros for 1583, fol. 78; 1591, fol. 400; 1599, fol. 224; 1605, fols. 293-298, 305; 1606, fols. 37,41; 1607, fols. 37,41; 1610, fols. 570-572; 1613, fol. 110; 1614, fol. 241; 1616, fol. 327; 1631, fol. 118; and 1641, fols. 1, 152; AVM, Secretaría, sigs. 2-95-23 (1598), 2-96-2 (1599), 1-455-2 (1608), and 2-447-26 (1609); F. Pérez de Castro, "El abasto de pan," p. 131.

3. AHN, Alcaldes, libros for 1606, fol. 41, and 1614, fol. 241.

4. It also refers to 42,000 fanegas purchased by the Corregidor of Zamora on a similar commission in the Zamora-Salamanca area: based on AVM, Contaduría, sigs. 2-580-1 and 2-103-1; and Pérez de Castro, "El abasto de pan, " which is based on AVM, Estadística, sig. 3-284-3.

5. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad del siglo XVII, vol. 1, pp. 124-126.

6. Pérez de Castro, "El abasto de pan," p. 131.

7. AVM, Contaduría, sig. 3-64I-2, and Secretaría, sig. 2-106-28.

8. Earl Hamilton, American Treasure, pp. 203-221.

9. The libros of the Sala de Alcaldes y Corte contain numerous lists, but most are of towns that had not met their obligations. The lists cited here enumerate the towns that actually participated. On 1599: AVM, Secretaría, sig. 2-95-28.

10. AHN, Alcaldes, libro for 1739, fol. 182.

11. José Gentil da Suva's figures for village wine sales from En Espagne, pp. 36-38, and Hamilton's prices for wine in Toledo.

12. Additional citations come from Miguel Herrero García, Las bebidas (1933), pp. 5-55.

13. In addition, see Alain Huetz de Lemps, "Le vignoble de la Tierra de Medina aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siécles " (1957), pp. 410-411; he refers to Alaejos, Medina del Campo, Coca, and Nava de Medina.

14. Ibid., pp. 411-412.

15. AHN, Alcaldes, libros for 1586, fol. 194; 1595, fol. 69; 1598, fols. 157, 166, 178; 1599, fol. 224; 1613, fol. 110; 1623, fol. 520; and 1628, fols. 110,176; Herrero García, Las bebidas, p. 37.

16. Domínguez Ortiz, Siglo XVII. pp. 124-126.

17. Michael M. Weisser, "The Decline of Castile Revisited: The Case of Toledo" (1973), pp. 638-640. This is discussed in detail in Weisser's manuscript, "The Demography of the Heartland of New Castile, 1550-1700," pp. 5-7; he shows the population of Toledo's hinterland declining by two thirds in the seventeenth century.

18. AHN, Consejos, leg. 6775-3.

19. David R. Ringrose, Transportation, pp. 43-57 and map 14.

20. Here we see overlapping fields of influence. Madrid ceased to draw wine from Old Castile, but the areas that had supplied her in the sixteenth century continued to export wine, having reoriented themselves to an interregional exchange with the Cantabrian Mountains: Ringrose, Transportation, p. 20. In the nineteenth century, Medina, Alaejos, and Nava del Rey declined, although Rueda and La Seca continued as important wine centers. As transport improved, competition from La Mancha affected the region; see Huetz de Lemps, "Le vignoble," p. 414.

21. The significance of the fair at La Bañeza is suggested by the fact that villagers from as far away as the Tierra de Campos routinely used it to buy cattle, wood, charcoal, and other mountain products from the northwest; see Peña Sánchez, Crisis rural, pp. 87-88. José Lucas Labrada--in Descripción económica del Reino de Galicia (1971, first published in 1804), pp. 130, 143, 200--makes several references to Galician trade with Castile.

22. AHN, Consejos, leg. 11463, mentions several towns and districts affected.

23. Ringrose, Transportation, maps.

24. Josep Fontana Lázaro, La quiebra de la monarquía absoluta, 1814-1820 (1971), pp. 47-57, and Cambio económico y actitudes políticas en la España del siglo XIX (1973),pp. 17-37.