The Spanish Church and the Papacy in the Thirteenth Century
Peter Linehan
The Economic Problems of the Castilian Church, 1
[101] After John of Abbeville's departure, the Spanish Church had to wait ninety years for another legate of similar calibre, by which time it had passed far from its heroic period -- according to Lafuente -- and deep into the impenetrably gloomy regions of the later Middle Ages.(1) In Lafuente's view, the break came in the mid-thirteenth century with the deaths of, among others, San Fernando, Rodrigo of Toledo and Innocent IV. Yet, if these three were such paragons, it is striking that none of them showed any enthusiasm for continuing the work of John of Abbeville. Whatever else they may have represented, 'las repetidas visitas de los legados' did not, as Villanueva imagined, serve to maintain contact between the Spanish Church and the springs of reform.(2)
The papal legates and nuncios who continued to ply to and fro between the papal Curia and Spain were the servants of Mammon, not of God. They came to collect cash, to raise the wherewithal for the military campaigns and diplomatic operations of the papacy; and they were, of course, bitterly resented everywhere. Spain was no exception. Though, moreover, the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile had no home-grown Matthew Paris to voice their grievances, they did have men with tongues in their heads, a plausible manner and some apparently quite respectable arguments. What right had the pope to expect contributions from them? Was not Christendom already beholden to them for their centuries of exertion breaking Moslem dominance in the Peninsula? Was it equitable, at a time when the Castilian churches had poured their treasure into the coffers of their kings and made possible the astonishingly rapid Christian [102] advance after the victory at Las Navas in 1212, that they should be called upon to finance harebrained schemes of papal diplomacy in the Eastern Mediterranean? Some such questions seem to have been asked by the Spanish contingent at the Fourth Lateran Council, and they were repeated by the Castilian bishops in the early 1260s. On both occasions they were meant to be questions expecting the answer 'no'. In the interval, however, certain great changes had occurred, changes which affected considerably the confidence of the prelates who asked these questions.
In 1215 the reconquistadores were in full cry, especially in Castile. The episcopal chronicler emphasised that all the credit for Las Navas was due to Spain, et precipue regno Castelle. The few foreigners who had come had not possessed sufficient vergüenza to stay and fight. Even the king of Aragon was a Castilian pensioner. Fifty years later, though, this confidence was evaporating fast. The Reconquest had slowed down to an aimless amble while precious resources had been, and were still being, squandered on their king's chimerical European ambitions. The prelates said that they were poor and they blamed the pope, forgetting that as recently as 1245, when their self-assurance had never been greater, it had been their leaders who had pressed Innocent IV to take even more vigorous measures against Frederick II, promising the pope every assistance 'in personis et rebus iuxta sue beneplacitum voluntatis'.(3)
That they were poor or even claimed to be poor, however, will surprise those historians for whom the wealth of the Spanish Church in every age is axiomatic. According to the doyen of Spanish medievalists, medieval churchmen were enormously wealthy, despite 'los ríos de oro y plata' which flowed towards Rome.(4) The Spanish Church was a hypertrophic growth,(5) and it was never better nourished than during the thirteenth century when, having 'profited enormously from the great conquests', it reached 'the zenith of its social power and prestige'.(6) There is clearly a conflict here between the [103] medieval bishops and their modern historians, a conflict which has to be resolved before proceeding to any conclusion about the place of the Church in Castilian society and its ability to control not only that society but also its own fortunes.
The tensions which existed between the three points of the eternal medieval triangle -- king, pope and bishops -- were at least in part economic tensions But the issue was one of sovereignty, and it was affected by circumstances which were peculiar to each country. The peculiar circumstances of Spain were numerous. One of them was the distance which, it was felt by some pontiffs, separated the Peninsula from Rome According to Urban IV, for example, Lisbon was at the back of beyond(7). Naturally enough, therefore, Spanish bishops identified themselves with their king. So, of course, did other bishops elsewhere. In Spain, though, king and bishops had a common Christian mission which drew them even closer together and which in the first half of the thirteenth century was at the forefront of attention: the Reconquest. Yet in this joint enterprise the bishops were quite decidedly the junior partners, for, having given the Church her liberty, the kings of Aragon and Castile felt perfectly free to take liberties with her. And, by implication at least, contemporaries accepted this. It did not surprise Matthew Paris when Innocent IV forgave Jaime of Aragon for having maimed the bishop of Gerona. The king, after all, as he drily observed, 'tam fideliter Deo contra Hispanos Sarracenos militaverat et gloriose triumphaverat'.(8)
Gossipy prelates were not the only casualties, for the Spanish monarchs seem on occasion to have believed that their privileged position placed them altogether above the moral law. Jaime of Aragon was dubbed the Conqueror: appropriately enough, for his tally of conquests of Christian ladies was no shorter than that of his assaults on Moorish strongholds, and the adulterous king assumed quite candidly that his undertaking to recapture Murcia would automatically atone for his outstanding violations of the sixth and ninth Commandments(9). Similarly, the Roman proctor of Sancho IV assured the clerk whom he had engaged to forge a bull regularising the king's liaison with María de Molina in 1292, that what he was seeking was for the honour of the Church and, further, that whoever was elected to fill the papal vacancy would certainly ratify the deed. For was not Sancho locked in daily combat with the enemies of the faith?(10) In point of fact, he was not, but it suited him very well to reiterate an argument which had secured so many benefits in the past.
Boundless arrogance was the most striking of the national characteristics which were so jauntily displayed by the Castilian contingent in their almost totally irrelevant contribution to the discussion on the nature of the soul, as related by Virgil of Córdoba.(11) Contemporary fantasy told of the humiliation at the gates of Paris by Fernando I and the Cid of the French king, the German emperor, the patriarch and the pope in response to their demand for tribute from Spain.(12) Their overbearing behaviour gave Spaniards a bad name abroad. That Matthew Paris should not have had a good word to say for them was predictable,(13) but he was not their only critic. The papal nuncio, Nicholas of Terracina, described them as impatientes, and did not expect his characterisation to surprise anyone.(14)
Even the canonist Vincentius Hispanus fell victim to this heady propaganda. In his gloss to the Venerabilem in the Decretals of Gregory IX he contrasted the admirable Spaniards, who had forged themselves an empire virtute sua, with the pathetic Germans whose incompetence had cost them theirs per busnardiam.Vincentius expressed [105] these views at a moment when the evidence was very much in his favour, sometime between 1234 and 1248.(15) While Germany was disintegrating, the kingdoms of Castile and Leon, united by Fernando III in 1230, were recovering territory from the Moors at a breathless pace. Within thirty years the peninsular balance of power had been transformed, and even before the reconquest of Córdoba Fernando could quite reasonably stake a claim to imperial dignity.(16) But the climax of Castilian achievement was the taking of Seville in 1248, the year of Vincentius's death, and the eulogy of Spain which the canonist provided in his gloss was a commonplace of nationalistic literature during these years.(17) 'Oh, what blessed times are these', intoned the episcopal chronicler, Lucas of Túy, waxing eloquent over the virtues of a country which was distinguished by the purity of its faith, the active orthodoxy of its kings, the achievements of its arms and the Virgilian contentment of its peasant cultivators.(18) The author of the Poema de Fernán González was even more extravagant. With Vincentius he insisted upon Spain's superiority over all other nations of the West. Neither England nor France could boast an apostle to match Santiago. Spain had the best of everything from fresh fish to horses which were sought the world over.(19) (He was right about the horses.)(20)Pero de toda Spanna Castylla es mejor.(21) Spain, [106] in short, was like paradise,(22) and Spaniards on leave never tired of reminding their hosts of the fact. From the lips of an 'eloquent and elegant' knight, a messenger of Alfonso X, Matthew Paris learnt of the fabulous riches of recently reconquered Seville. Matthew was sceptical, as usual. It all seemed hardly credible to 'us westerners.'(23)
In Spain, however, there was no room for scepticism. Confidence was boundless, and infectious. It was also, in a sense, desperate, even febrile. If there had not been a Seville it would have been necessary to invent one; and if Seville had not been a place of unlimited riches it would have been necessary to treat it as though it were. After their long and hungry haul the Christians needed an oasis, so it is little to be wondered that Alfonso X himself, when singing the praises of the fertile valley of the Guadalquivir, sounded as though he were describing the capture of a granary rather than that of a kingdom. It was a land flowing with milk and honey, rich above all other regions of Spain in the necessities of life, in bread, wine, meat, fish and oil, with a perfect climate to match. But, most important, it was self-sufficient.(24) For ever since 1212 the Castilians had been haunted by the spectre of famine and delayed by its reality. In 1214 the army had been forced to a truce by privation so severe that hardly enough survived to bury the dead and those who did survive were reduced to eating meat during Lent.(25) Limited resources were dangerously extended by the Great Leap Forward. It has been calculated that between the battle of Las Navas and the recapture of Seville the national territory had increased by nearly 50 per cent while population had grown by barely 10 per cent.(26) Men, food and money were at a premium, and to redress the balance spectacular gains were needed in all three -- in men especially, since the untaxed frontier acted as a magnet drawing cultivators away from the north and centre. For property owners like the Order of Santiago, with land both in the north and in the south, there was the delicate problem of striking a balance and maintaining [107] rents in one sector while populating the other.(27) Many men, however, evidently made their own decision to go south at the time when the supply of manpower from abroad had virtually ceased. In 1268 Pope Clement IV was told by the Portuguese bishops that Extremadura was the most heavily populated area of their country.(28) And the same effect must have been produced in Spain by Fernando III's policy which his son described proudly in the Setenario.(29) It was a policy which was to create considerable tension between north and south in the not too distant future.(30) Meanwhile, however, hard-pressed landlords whose tenants were drifting away sought temporary relief in the one cure that was guaranteed to feed the disease: the raising of rents. In 1236 the archbishop of Toledo adopted this ill-advised remedy on his Illescas estates.(31)
Later that year Córdoba was taken. Here, it was confidently assumed, was the panacea. But, instead, settlers flocked there 'as to a king's wedding' in greater numbers than could be accommodated,(32) and for at least the first decade of Christian occupation the area was yet a further drain on resources. On three occasions Fernando III was obliged to provision the place from the depleted regions of the north.(33) Twelve years after, it was the turn of Seville, and, according to a late source, it was in the hope of capturing an excellent standing harvest that Fernando chose to launch his attack when he did.(34)
[108] If the bliss of being alive in that false dawn was somewhat modified by the ineluctable conditions of the frontier, for those broken reeds, the bishops, the consequences of being dragooned into the fight were little short of ruinous What sustained them through these difficult years was the belief that at the eventual distribution of spoils they would be richly rewarded for all their sacrifices They were identified absolutely with the struggle against the Moors, naturally as churchmen and necessarily as subjects, in 1212, when the clergy surrendered half their year's income for the Las Navas campaign, and after. Under the leadership of Rodrigo of Toledo, who by his own admission was opposed to any change in the political status quo,(35)they were entirely at the royal beck and call.
When Archbishop Rodrigo had given a practical demonstration of what his political philosophy meant, Honorius III had sent him and his suffragans a letter of sharp reproof, but as the Reconquest gathered pace neither of Honorius's successors made any difficulties about royal policy towards the Castilian Church. Both Gregory IX and Innocent IV permitted Fernando III to exercise to the full the right to intervene in episcopal elections -- as lord of the land and defender of the Faith -- which Fernando's son would enunciate in the Primera Partida.(36)Indeed, Gregory was even willing, in December 1237, to revoke his own previous confirmation of the translation of Bishop Juan of Osma to the see of León when it was put to him by the king that Juan, 'tanquam vir magni consilii tibi utilis ac necessarius regno', could not conveniently be spared.(37) The king's concern in the matter was understandable since Juan was his chancellor for both kingdoms -- though since the bishop was for that reason almost permanently attached to the court, it is not clear why it should have [109] mattered to him which see Juan occupied. What, however, is clear is that Fernando's intervention was decisive and that Gregory complied with his wishes both then, in 1237, and again in March 1240 when, this time with the king's active support, Juan was translated to the see of Burgos.(38)
Nor was Innocent IV any less accommodating than Gregory, despite his reputation for promoting his friends and relations to every vacant bishopric or benefice from Graz to Galloway. Indeed it is probable that his preparedness to co-operate with King Fernando provides the correct explanation of what Bishop Mansilla has recorded as a classic example of papal promotion of a favoured foreigner to a Spanish see: that of the dean of Chartres to Mondoñedo in 1248.(39) For Juan Sebastianes was no Frenchman. His hitherto unnoticed presence at the Paris negotiations of September 1245 between the leaders of the Portuguese Church and the Count of Boulogne indicates that Johannes Hispanus -- as he was referred to in papal correspondence -- was, rather, one of the many ecclesiastical refugees from Castile's westerly neighbour.(40) He was not the only Portuguese Johannes Hispanus in circulation at this time, and like his namesake, the bishop of Lisbon, he was supported by revenue from the Castilian Church: by January 1244 he possessed canonries both at Lugo and at Salamanca, possibly as result of a papal grant such as that which had been made to the other Johannes Hispanus in May 1238.(41) But a papal grant did not make him a papal pensioner, any more than his French [110] benefices(42) made him a Frenchman, and the fact that by 1246 he had made a niche for himself at the Castilian court and was regarded as sufficiently eminent to witness the pact between the Order of Santiago and the Latin Emperor, Baldwin de Courtenay,(43) suggests that he was no stranger in those parts and that his promotion to Mondoñedo came as no unpleasant surprise to Fernando III.
Nor was this all. For Innocent also permitted the king to use ecclesiastical benefices and dignities (and the cash that went therewith) as douceurs and endowments for his younger sons. At a tender agel Sancho and Felipe were given charge, as procurators, of the archbishoprics of Toledo and Seville respectively.(44) Outwardly the, brothers had little in common. An Icelandic nobleman who met the pair of them early in 1258 thought the former rather po-faced and eminently suitable for high office in the Church, while Felipe struck him as a thoroughly good fellow but a pretty improbable archbishop.(45) But appearances are deceptive,(46) and at the time of their appointment all that could be said about them for certain was that neither was ordained. Their benefices were simply agglomerations of real estate, and the exchanges which passed between Felipe and his brother, Alfonso X, when the plan for the former to marry Princess Christina of Norway had foundered, express perfectly the view of ecclesiastical offices that was taken by the royal family. In reply to the Infante's complaint that, having resigned an archbishopric and a couple of abbacies, he now lacked both clerecía and wife, Alfonso observed that the tertie decimarum of the sees of Toledo, Segovia and Ávila were hardly negligible recompense for all that Felipe had suffered.(47)[111] The grant of tercias -- the third part of the ecclesiastical tithe normally earmarked for the upkeep of the church's fabric(48) -- which Alfonso felt able to use for purely political purposes, had been made to Alfonso's father, Fernando III, by Innocent IV in April 1247 as a contribution towards the cost of the Seville campaign.(49) This was not the first papal grant of tercias to the war-chest. Nor was it the earliest indication of secular interest in ecclesiastical revenue. Archbishop Rodrigo had both received such a grant, in March 1219,(50) and earlier restrained Count Alvaro Nuñez de Lara, guardian ofthe young King Enrique I, from helping himself (51). But it was the first such grant to the king, and it was to have many repercussions. After the recapture of Córdoba, Gregory IX had declared that Fernando's military achievement had put the Roman Church in the king's debt(52). Gregory had repaid the debt, though, by permitting Fernando to dispose of bishoprics to his own convenience. He had not allowed him to make free with the tercias, and when the king had attempted to do so in 1228 he had received a sharp reproof.(53) Papal assistance on the occasion of the Cordoba campaign had taken the form of a lump sum, of sixty thousand maravedís, from the Castilian and Leonese Churches -- a liberal grant indeed at a period of such general hardship, as Burriel observed, though it cost Gregory himself nothing.(54) Yet even if, as he appears to have done, the king contrived to triple the value of that grant,(55) it was still a bargain for the churches, in comparison with the [112] concession of 1247. Gregory had done well, better than Innocent, for without the tercias, which the kings having secured were never to release, the ecclesiastical community was crippled financially and permanently. Throughout the rest of the thirteenth century and beyond they would treat the tercias as a source of regular income, and repeated papal and episcopal cris de coeur would fail to recover what had so unheedingly been granted away.(56)
In 1248, therefore, when Seville was taken, the Castilian and Leonese Churches were in a parlous state. Their financial contribution during the previous thirty-five years had been enormous. They had lost control of their future income. They were under the king's heel, and the anxiety which the Spanish bishops had recently expressed for a tougher papal policy towards Frederick II of Germany sprang as much from weakness as from strength, as much from fear lest the German's example of contempt for ecclesiastics and their property should inspire their own monarchs to similar excesses ('cum principes universi exemplum et audaciam in hac parte reciperent ab eodem'), as from their much vaunted confidence in their own powers.(57) They were leaderless: Archbishop Rodrigo had drowned in the Rhône in July 1247 and his successor, Juan de Medina, had followed him to the grave in July 1248, four months before Seville was surrendered.(58) Their fate was in the balance and depended very largely upon the extent to which they were rewarded from the forthcoming [113] distribution of property, the repartimiento of Seville. It is generally assumed that they were not disappointed,(59) even though the outlook was far from encouraging. In that very spring the pope had protested that Fernando and his son were dragging their heels on the question of the endowment of re-established cathedral churches.(60) Moreover,the evidence itself simply will not sustain the assumption.
An analysis of the repartimiento shows that grants of Seville property to churchmen were restricted, almost exclusively, to a group which had its home in the royal chancery. The recipients represented the Castilian Church only in so far as the Castilian Church had already passed under the direct control of the king. They fell into two main groups: the clique of bishops who were already or who were soon to be most closely associated with the royal administration, and the notaries and chancery clerks who would form the core of the next episcopal generation. Chief among the former group was Bishop Remondo of Segovia, an intimate of the royal house who had charge of the spiritual organisation of Seville from the very beginning and who in 1259, on the retirement from ecclesiastical power politics of the genial Infante Felipe, succeeded to the archbishopric.(61) Four more were bishops of frontier sees who might have been expected to have received sufficient endowments in their own areas. Two of them, Pascal of Jaén and Roberto of Silves, were each sent on diplomatic errands to England in the late fifties,(62) and the former's weight at court was such that in September 1256 the Infante Fadrique chose him as arbiter of a dispute with the archbishop-elect of Toledo, his brother Sancho.(63) Similarly the third of them, Bishop Gutierre who in March 1246 had been appointed to the see of Córdoba at the king's behest 'cum sit genere potens et nobilis, insignis virtutibus et scientia dotatus' -- qualities which were to bring about his promotion to Toledo in February 1249 -- was awarded the villa de Bella for his assistance at the siege.(64) The last of this group was the bishop of [114] Cartagena, the literary Franciscan Pedro Gallego.(65) Moreover, it was only recently that the churches of Coria and Cuenca, which in the persons of Bishops Pedro(66) and Mateo(67) received grants of land, had ceased to be in the Christian front-line.(68) Indeed, in the early sixties, Mateo's successor but one would maintain that Cuenca was still a frontier see.(69)
In contrast to his relatively generous treatment of these presumably well-heeled prelates, the king's remuneration to churchmen from Leon and Old Castile was paltry. Only five bishops from the region that had borne the financial brunt of the long years of struggle received anything from the repartimiento, and for two of them -- Pedro of Zamora and Rodrigo of Palencia -- the morsels which they were granted did absolutely nothing to alleviate the great weight of debt by which they were encumbered. In fact, on balance the Seville operation left Bishop Pedro out of pocket and contributed marginally to his bankruptcy, as he informed his chapter in January 1255.(70) And Rodrigo's modest receipts had soon to be sold off as his see slid deeper into the mire.(71)
The tentacular archbishop of Santiago, Juan Arias, who to his great chagrin had fallen ill at the siege and had been sent home by the king, nevertheless managed, characteristically, to secure something [115] for himself.(72) But the only other grants to bishops of older-established sees were to a pair of prelates who had made their name in the royal chancery: Pedro Fernández of Astorga -- a see which did achieve economic prosperity during this century, principally on account of the close relationship of each of its bishops with the king;(73)and Benito of Ávila.(74) Benito's see was occupied for much of the thirteenth century by men who spent a great part of their time representing the Castilian monarch at the papal Curia,(75) and he himself was active at this very moment on behalf of one of the king's clerks, Agustín of Osma, whom Benito was determined that the church of San Vicente (Ávila) should provide with a benefice, however much the local clergy might protest.(76) For such was the system: Agustín belonged to that second group which profited from the repartimiento, the group which contained at least four future bishops -- Fernando of Palencia, Martín Fernández of León, Suero Pérez of Zamora, and Agustín himself, to whom the bishopric of Osma was awarded in 1261.(77)
It was only then, when members of this group became bishops -- [116] and even then it was only most tenuously -- that the churches of Leon and Old Castile derived any profit from Seville. They had been the victims of an enormous confidence-trick, and though all sections of Castilian society had had to contribute to the cost of military success during the previous three and a half decades, it had been the Church that had been made to sacrifice most. From the concejos of Galicia Fernando III had exacted forced loans. But prompt repayment had been promised.(78) There was no prospect, though, of ever recovering the tercias. Nor was there any compensation for their loss. The cathedrals of Burgos, Oviedo and León, for example, received nothing from the repartimiento of Seville.(79) And the same seems to have been true of the repartimientos of Cartagena and Jerez.(80) It was essential to make the Christian presence felt on the frontier, and if northern churchmen were desirous of sharing in the putative pleasures of the south the only course open to them was to uproot themselves and emigrate, thereby further weakening the economy of the north and in some cases creating considerable disharmony in their new surroundings.(81)
[117] Moreover, the net profit to the Church of the few grants that were made to churchmen was considerably reduced (if it was not altogether illusory) by the personal circumstances of the recipients. For as civil servants they were almost permanently away from their sees Their home was the royal court and even their consecration as bishops came second in importance after affairs of state. In October 1255, at Alfonso X's request, the pope postponed for a year that of Suero Perez of Zamora, the king's notary 'et ei persona plurimum oportuna',(82) while seven years later it was the king himself who instructed the bishops-elect of Osma and Cuenca, Agustín and Pedro Lorenzo, to make arrangements for theirs at Seville, where he and they were occupied for months on end circa rempublicam, rather than in their own province of Toledo, 'because we have need of them'.(83) By Raymond of Peñafort's standards, the atmosphere of curialitas in which they lived would have prevented such men being ordained, let alone consecrated.(84)
Mention of St Raymond invites comparison with the position of the Church in Aragon and its fate during these years of frantic military activity. There the logistics of Reconquest were rather different, for, having been alloted a much smaller area to resettle by the Treaty of Cazorla in 1179, Aragon had reached its prescribed limits ten years before the fall of Seville.(85) Still, despite the geopolitical advantages which he enjoyed, the decade following the recapture of [118]Valencia had presented King Jaime with a multitude of problems. Although the disparity between the area to be colonised and his reserves of manpower was less daunting than in Castile, he too lacked sufficient human resources for definitive resettlement - la Reconquista lenta, in Vicens's terminology, as against la Reconquista militar.(86) Indeed in 1248 he was especially conscious of this difficulty. The revolt of the Valencian Moors led by al-Azrak had faced him with the difficult choice of either expelling the Moors and rendering the kingdom an economic desert, or retaining them and running the risk of further risings. The dilemma remained with him until his deathbed, when he advised his son and heir to take the former course 'per ço con eren tots traydors', a course which he himself had never been able to take, despite his determination to do so on the morrow of al-Azrak's revolt.(87) Instead he had to content himself with a looser form of control than the Castilian monarch's repoblación intensiva, and a practical demonstration of their dos criterios was provided in the kingdom of Murcia where both he and Alfonso X had control, in turn, during the 1260s.(88)
Dos criterios are evident also in the treatment which churchmen received from each of these monarchs, and that the thirteenth-century Aragonese Church proved able to defend the endowments of reconquered territory which it had been granted in the past was due in no small measure to its tradition of joint conciliar action.(89) For, in addition to their pastoral function, regular church councils had a political significance which the kings of Castile certainly understood and the kings of Aragon soon learnt to appreciate also.(90) Would-be raptores ecclesiarum had to reckon with conciliar constitutions which evidently continued to have some deterrent value sixty or more years after their original promulgation.(91) Moreover, in 1250 the prelates [119] of the Tarragona province assembled at Alcañiz solely in order to excommunicate the king of Navarre, in retaliation for the treatment which one of their number, Bishop Pedro Ximénez of Pamplona, had received from him.(92) Teobaldo I of Navarre may have been a pretty negligible quantity. But Jaime I of Aragon was not. Yet he too acknowledged the political weight of the Church, a fact which his spectacular assaults on individual prelates did nothing to obscure. When he received a subvention of tithes in 1248, the grant was made not by the pope and over the heads of the bishops, as in Castile, but by the bishops themselves at a provincial council.(93) Aragonese churchmen were a serious proposition. They were not docile, and the view that 'they are not found at any time at variance with the king as the nobles often were'(94) is profoundly mistaken, as King Jaime, one of Archbishop Benito's victims, had reason to know. Had they been, Jaime would not have recommended his son-in-law in 1269 to endeavour to retain their support together with that of the people and the towns, if it came to a decision, rather than that of the military classes.
The son-in-law who was entrusted with the distilled wisdom of almost half a century of political experience was Alfonso X of Castiie,(95) [120] and without being unduly callous he could afford to treat this piece of advice as the fond musings of an old man, for the Castilian Church possessed no such corporate spirit of conciliar activity. The Primera Partida -- an otherwise exhaustive guide to ecclesiastical discipline and practice, derived largely from Raymond of Peñafort's Summa -- contains a lengthy description of the procedure at monastic chapters but is silent about councils.(96) Despite the admonitions of Honorius III, John of Abbeville and Gregory IX, Archbishop Rodrigo of Toledo had not been stirred to action. He had been in his element ubi curia regis erat, and under his leadership so closely identified were the bishops of Castile and Leon with the king that the royal court rather then the provincial council was their only common forum. To pay the king a visit, ut decens erat, was the first thought of Bishop Pedro of Zamora after the confirmation of his election in 1239.(97) Training tells. But at least, Pedro had only one journey to make. His predecessor, Bishop Martín I, had had to cope with two kings and two courts, and the tasks entrusted to him by the pope had come a poor third.(98) Small wonder that the Leonese bishops were such keen supporters of the union of the two kingdoms by Fernando III in 1230.(99)
In gratitude to Bishop Nuño of Astorga for his assistance at that [121] time Fernando granted him and his church the town of Santa Marina del Rey since, as he explained, kings had a particular duty to reward those who stood by them at times of crisis.(100) Unfortunately, however, for the majority of the bishops, Fernando seems to have altered his opinion by the time of the repartimiento of Seville. They then found themselves without the means of defence with which Pedro de Albalat had meanwhile girded the Aragonese Church. As late as 1243, in which year Archbishop Rodrigo concluded his contemporary history on a triumphant note,(101) they probably still shared their leader's optimism. But by 1245 they were evidently uneasy, in 1247 uneasiness must have given way to alarm, and very soon after 1248, when their expectations had been disappointed and the king looked to them ever more frequently for financial assistance, they would have cause to curse the late archbishop for having made so little provision for their welfare.
Their collective change of mind was hastened by a combination of national and international developments. At home, the economic benefits of Seville proved just as nugatory as those which had been expected from Córdoba a dozen years before, and the decade after 1248 was not the blissful dawn predicted by the propagandists but a period of even blacker night. While continuing, with papal approval, to receive the tercias, Alfonso X, like his father, failed to honour his undertaking to endow the new sees.(102) It was a bad time for beggars. From the very beginning of Alfonso's reign, in 1252, the economic situation deteriorated. With Seville the Christians inherited all the problems of supply which had induced its defenders to abandon the place,(103) and on his accession the new king's first act was to attempt to reduce demand and to remedy 'las carestias grandes de las cosas que se vendien' by fixing prices, prohibiting exports and publishing [122]sumptuary laws which cast gloom even over wedding-breakfasts :(104) a far cry from the buoyant optimism of four years before. The introduction of a stronger currency which was designed to bring relief produced quite the opposite effect. Having greater intrinsic value, the dineros prietos could be struck in only small quantities, and for the same reason they rapidly left the kingdom.(105) Prices soared and an inflationary spiral was established, while the primitive state of communications reduced the limited stabilising influence which such increase of resources as had occurred might otherwise have produced.(106)
In these unpropitious circumstances the king's personal shortcomings provided the final, fatal ingredient of disaster. Far from possessing 'a puritan streak', Alfonso was -- in the estimation of his Franciscan admirer, Gil de Zamora -- the most prodigal of men, and lacked all sense of moderation. It was characteristic of him that, in the very year when his grandees were petitioning John XXI for permission to debase the coinage, he undertook to provision Navarre from his poverty-stricken country which, he claimed, es tota plantat.(107) But this was neither his first nor his greatest act of folly, for in the mid-1250s, with Castile still prostrate after its recent exertions, he had embarked on his imperial venture: una funesta ilusión Ballesteros pronounces it, echoing Mariana's conclusion that some higher force was bent on deluding him.(108)
[123] It was to the Church that Alfonso turned for financial backing, both to wind up his old accounts and to underwrite the new. He continued to exact the tercias, and his motive in seeking to eliminate irregularities in the collection of tithes during the autumn of 1255 was not, as he piously declared, that the things of God should be rendered unto God, but rather that the things of the Church should be rendered unto him.(109) Apart from suffering from this perpetual haemorrhage the Church was also required to provide further occasional transfusions. In June 1254 when Innocent IV demanded prompt settlement of his father's debts to the Roman Church, the king appealed to the long-suffering bishops of Castile -- those of Burgos, Oviedo, León and Palencia -- 'como amigos e naturales de mi e de mio lignage'. Even more galling to them than the politely worded demand itself must have been the implication that they were morally if not legally obliged to co-operate, and the reference to Fernando III 'que tanto bien fizo a vos e a vuestras eglesias'. Nevertheless, they obliged,(110) though the money never reached the pope, for in September 1263 the debt was still outstanding and, despite the explanation that it had been intercepted by certain Florentine bankers to whom the king was indebted, a curious coincidence suggests that it may have reached a different destination. On 30 October 1255, as well as writing to thank the bishop and chapter of Burgos for their contribution, Alfonso dispatched the archdeacon of Morocco, García Perez, to arrange the treaty with the city of Marseilles which formed the basis of his diplomatic campaign to secure the German Crown.(111)
Of the four churches which had responded to the king's request for servicio, only Palencia had figured in the repartimiento of Seville (and little good that had done Bishop Rodrigo).(112) But by the autumn of [124]1255 they were at least aware that the sacred cow, Seville, for which they had sacrificed and been sacrificed during the thirties and forties was, in fact, a white elephant, and, further, that the monster was still hungry and that they were still expected to feed it. For as soon as the Church had been established there under the general management of the Infante Felipe and Alfonso had claimed three years' tercias from the new province, it was the provinces of Toledo and Compostela that were made to foot the bill.(113) And again, in July 1257, the Infante successfully petitioned Alexander IV for a grant of three thousand marks from the tercias of the northern provinces in order to meet the debts which he had contracted while at the Curia in the previous November.(114) For them Seville was as great a liability after 1248 as it had been before. It was their donations that enabled Alfonso to endow and enhance the church there 'pre aliis ecclesiis Hispanie'.(115)
The glories of Seville Cathedral, then, should not blind the historian to the very real difficulties of the mid-thirteenth-century Castilian Church. For far from providing a physical representation of what most writers have regarded as the medieval Church at its zenith -- a misapprehension for which they may have found confirmation in the suggestion that, almost a decade before Alfonso X went a-whoring after strange foreign empires, his father had determined to celebrate Seville's recapture at a secular level by reviving the old Spanish imperial title(116) -- those glories ought rather to serve to focus attention [125]on the area to the north where so many dioceses were in difficulties and so many parish churches were falling into decay. It was upon the ruins of these that Seville Cathedral was adorned and Abu Yacub's great mosque converted into a place fit for Christian worship.(117)
Of course, new cathedrals were rising in the first half of the thirteenth century. Lucas of Túy mentions them in the same breath as the town walls, cloisters and bridges as visible proof of Spain's resurgence.(118) Yet, to conclude on the strength either of this enthusiast or of the enduring monuments to his veracity that all the aforementioned signs of crisis may be discounted would certainly be to commit that 'sin which no economic historian should commit' and which Professor Postan has denounced from the pulpit of the Economic History Review, taking as his text another age of recession in another country. 'Even if it is proved that the period was rich in acts of private piety, graced by a flourishing religion, embellished by alabaster statues, better educated, more prettily coiffured and gowned, than any other period in the Middle Ages, the basic facts of material development would still be unaffected.'
For 'what do the perpendicular churches prove?'(119) And what can be proved by reference to the laying of the first stone of Toledo Cathedral -- a building which was to take as long to complete as the Reconquista itself?(120) Certainly not that the kingdom of Castile and the Castilian Church were economically buoyant in the 1220s. The cost of building materials was so high, and Archbishop Rodrigo's income from the tercias of his own archdiocese so 'insufficient' that in January 1222 Honorius III was told that the chances of its ever being fmished were 'entirely despaired of'. It was the other churches of the province that were made to foot the bill by contributing their tercias for the next five years.(121)
[126] The 'magnitude' of that project, which bore thus heavily on contemporaries, has mesmerised later observers in its finished state. Victims of the propaganda of such writers as Lucas of Thy whose enthusiasm could transform even Aristotle into a Spaniard,(122) and heedless both of Postan's caveat and of its corollary,(123) historians of the Spanish Church have continued to read prosperity into their subject and have ignored the possibility of the existence of 'economic depression in the midst of artistic plenty'.(124) Yet even if the analogy of the Crown's failure to secure Granada until 1492 cannot shake their faith, it ought surely to weigh with them that only recently the associated doctrine of the extensive Andalucian endowments of the Military Orders has been shown to be ripe for revision,(125) and that documents long in print contain ample proof that in their gifts to the Church the kings were far less liberal than has generally been assumed.(126)
'Liberality' was what Burriel perceived in Gregory IX's dealings with Fernando III (though it was, he opined, as nothing in comparison with Fernando's own liberality to the churches). If, however, Gregory and Innocent IV chose to feel themselves indebted to those 'athletes of Christ', the peninsular monarchs, neither of them was much impoverished thereby. True, Innocent delayed the collection of taxes for the Holy Land in 1248 so that the Aragonese Church might divert its funds to Jaime I.(127) In Castile and Leon, though, it was [127] the local churches, not the Roman Church, that were undermined by the papal grants of tercias in 1247 and later years.(128) 'Out of the needs of the Holy Land has arisen modern taxation', it has been written.(129) Taxation of the Spanish Church, however, was occasioned by a Holy War nearer home. 'Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ', Honorius III urged the churches of Rodrigo's province in 1222 when assigning their tercias to the Toledo Cathedral building fund(130)-- as though they were not already bearing the burden of the war and paying the price of imposing the law of Christ on Islam. As Innocent himself discovered before his death, the effect of his liberal treatment of Fernando was to paralyse the Christian Church in Christian Spain itself. By August 1253 he was aware that the church-lamps were going out all over Sigüenza and the churches falling down, 'pro eo quod partem decimarum. . .luminaribus, ornamentis ecclesiasticis et fabrice deputatam' had been granted to the king. And the same was true of Palencia.(131)
Moreover there is other evidence
-- evidence which has not previously been reviewed but which helps to explain
the unprecedented activity into which the churches had been galvanised
by July 1257 when they were once more required to bear the burdens of the
church of Seville. By then the economic problems by which the Castilian
Church had been plagued for half a century had produced a crisis in its
relationship with the civil power. But before describing that crisis it
is necessary to review this other evidence in greater detail.
1. Lafuente, Historia eclesiástica, IV, 280, 330. For the legation of John's successor, Guillaume de Peyre de Godin, also cardinal-bishop of Sabina, see Fournier, BEC, LXXXVI, 108-14.
4. Sánchez-Albornoz, España: un enigma histórico, I,356,358, 687.
5. Idem, España y el Islam, 39.
6. 'Probablemente el clero de los estados cristianos alcanzó el cenit de su prestigio y de su potencia social en el siglo XIII, cuando, por una parte, la Iglesia salió enormemente beneficiada de las grandes conquistas, y, por otra, mantenía todavía esencialmente incólume su independencia del poder temporal, alcanzada en los últimos siglos del período anterior gracias al prestigio del Papado': Sobrequés Vidal, La época del patriciado urbano, 164. Similarly J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain 1469-1716 (London 1963), 20; R. S. Smith in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, I, ed M. M. Postan (2nd ed. Cambridge 1966),433.
7. 'Situ... in remotis mundi finibus': Reg. Urb. IV, 305.
8. Chronica Majora, IV, 578-9.
9. Chronica....del...Rey En Jacme, cap. 426, ed. Aguiló, 434-5; trans. Forster, II, 549.
10. Marcos Pous in CTEER, VIII, 97.
11. 'Et quomodocumque omnes homines sint animosi secundum magis et minus super omnes alios sunt Hispani et fortiores omnibus aliis sunt in omnibus factis suis, et hoc habent ipsi a natura sua propria; et robustiores aliis sunt in omnibus et per omnia maxime in proelio', and more in the same vein: 'et semper cupiunt et appetunt mon gladio, et magis homines se interficiunt gladio in Hispania quam per totum mundum': Virgilii Cordubensis Philosophia, ed. Heine, I, 226. This was allegedly written c. 1290, but cf. Bonilla, Historia de la filosofía española, I, 311: 'una superchería'.
12. Rodrigo y el Rey Fernando, ed. Menéndez Pidal in Reliquias de la poesía épica española, pp. 257--89, esp. lines 1052 ff. and the king's exclamation (1. 763): 'Quantos en Espana visquieron/nunca se llamaron tributarios.' The poem was probably composed in the 1350s or 1360s, but this incident seems to have derived from a tradition already current in the late thirteenth century. Cf. Deyermond, Epic Poetry and the Clergy, 12-14, 22-4.
13. 'Sunt hominum peripsima, vultu deformes, cultu despicabiles, moribus detestabiles': Chronica Majora, V, 450.
15. Publ. Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought. 490. Cf. Ochoa Sanz, Vincentius Hispanus, 18; Sousa Costa, Mestre Silvestre, 473.
16. 'In Curia Romana talem petitionem proposuit Rex Castellae Fernandus quod nomen imperatoris et benedictionem volebat habere, sicut habuerant quidam antecessores eius': Chronica Albrici Monachi Trium Fontium, 936 (s.a. 1234); Chiffletius, Vindiciae Hispanicae, 168. On the subject of the imperium referred to, see Menéndez Pidal, El Imperio Hispánico, 146ff.; Sánchez Candeira, El 'Regnum-Imperium' leonés hasta 1037.
17. Davis, Hispanic Review, III, 150 ff.
18. 'O quam beata tempora ista, in quibus fides catholica sublimatur, haeretica pravitas trucidatur, et Sarracenorum urbes et castra fidelium gladiis devastantur. Pugnant Hispani reges pro fide et ubique vincunt. Episcopi, abbates et clerus ecclesias et monasteria construunt, et ruricolae absque formidine agros excolunt, animalia nutriunt, et non est qui exterreat eos': Chronicon Mundi, 113.
19. Written c. 1250: ed. Marden, verses 145 ff., pp. xxx, xxxv-vi.
20. Ibid. y. 151: 'Nunca tales cavallos en el mundo non viemos.' Giraldus Cambrensis thought highly of Spain's 'equi egregii et generosissimi', and the English court went to great trouble to secure some, the export of which from Spain was normally prohibited: De Principis Instructione, 317; Close Rolls, 1237-42, p. 529; 1242-47, p. 174; 1298-1302, p. 378. See Renouard in Homenaje a Jaime Vicens Vives, I, 571 ff.
22. Primera Crónica General, para. 311.
23. Chronica Majora, V. 233 (s.a. 125 1). Elsewhere (v. 311) Matthew again mentions elegance as a Spanish attribute.
24. 'Et todas las cosas ha de ssuyo complidamiente': Setenario, 19.
25. CLI: B. Hisp., XIV, 368. Cf. the account in Primera Crónica General, para. 1023, which suggests that the shortage was not quite so widespread.
26. Vicens Vives, Manual de historia económica, 223; Sobrequés, 8, 46. For a brief account of this period, see González in La Reconquista española y la repoblación del país, 194 ff.
27. Lomax, Orden de Santiago, 114, 119 ff.
28. 'In quadam parte regni Portugalie que Extrematura vocatur. . . maior est populi multitudo a longissimis temporibus quorum memoria non existit': ADB, Gav. das. Notícias Várias, 26.
29. 'Non poblaua tan ssolamiente lo que ganaua de los moros que fuera ante poblado, mas lo al que nunca ouyera poblança, entendiendo que era logar para ello': Setenario, 16.
30. At the Cortes of 1271 (or 1272) the nobles of the north complained about their loss of rents: González, Repartimiento de Sevilla, I, 16. Cf. Ballesteros, Alfonso X, 568 ff. González does not mention his authority for this, and it should be noted that if his source is the Crónica del Rey Don Alfonso X the meaning of the relevant passage (BAE, LXVI, 20-1) is not quite that which he alleges.
31. The increase was of the order of 7.5%. Publ. González Palencia, Los mozárabes de Toledo, I, 163 ff.
32. Rodericus Toletanus, De Rebus Hispaniae, 206.
33. Primera Crónica General, para. 1052-5. The third instalment of aid was sent 'a la sazon que el sol escureçio', either 1238, according to Anales Toledanos II, or 1239, according to Chronicón de Cardeña I and Anales Toledanos III (ES, XXIII, 408, 373, 422). See also Gómez Bravo, Catálogo de los obispos de Córdoba, I, 254.
34. Cuarta Crónica General, 4. Cf. Menéndez Pidal, Crónicas generales de España, 141-5.
35. See above, p. 10, for his plea of justification in the case of Melendo of Osma. The possibility of scandalum and damna non modica if he should proceed against the king led him to disobey a mandate which had papal authority. See also the remark in his History about 'regni prelati, quorum interest regnum et sacerdotium intueri': De Rebus Hispaniae, 204.
36. Part.I.5.18: 'Et la razon por que lo deben facer saber al rey ante que esleyan es esta: porque es defendedor e amparador de la fe, e de las eglesias, e de los que las sierven, e de sus bienes, e otrossi porque es senyor natural de la tierra o son fundadas las eglesias': BM, Add. MS. 20787, fo. 20vb, corresponding to the variant to ley 17 in the Academy ed. I, 207. The law printed there as 1.5.18 (p. 208) does not appear in the BM MS.
37. Reg. Greg. IX, 3591, 3967; Mansilla, Iglesia, 171-3.
38. Reg. Greg. IX, 5190; Mansilla, Iglesia, 176. Serrano, Juan's biographer, admits himself baffled by the king's behaviour in 1237: Hispania, I, 15. Part of the reason may have been Juan's promise to the archbishop of Toledo that, in his capacity as chancellor of Castile, he would not accept promotion to any see outside Rodrigo's jurisdiction: ibid. 7; AHN, 3019/8. For Juan's chancery career, see Millares Carlo, AHDE, III, 282 ff.
39. Reg. Inn. IV, 3681; Mansilla, Iglesia, 183: 'Inocencio IV quería sencillamente colocar allí otra persona de su agrado.'
40. Cunha, História ecclesiástica dos arcebispos de Braga, II, 123; Herculano, Hístória de Portugal, V, 50-3.
41. Reg. Greg. IX, 4333. In his study of the Mondoñedo election Quintana Prieto fails to allow for this duplicity (or even, perhaps, multiplicity) of Johannes Hispani, conflates them, and unwittingly exhumes the bishop of Lisbon (the other John, who had died by May 1244 at the latest: ADB, Gav. das Notícias Várias, 28: publ. Sousa Costa, 427, n. 536) and promotes him to Mondoñedo four years later: AA, XIII, 24 ff. For the Mondoñedo John's Spanish benefices, see Reg. Inn. IV, 365, 1050. In Aug. 1246 he was alive and well and living at Salamanca, if only temporarily: AC Salamanca, 3/1/40 (reg. Marcos, Catálogo, 220).
42. He also possessed the archdeaconry of Tonnerre (Yonne): Reg. Inn. IV, 365.
43. Benito Ruano, Hispania, XII, 34. He found himself in the select company of the king's sister, Berenguela; the chancellor, Bishop Juan of Burgos; and Bishop Benito of Ávila. Benito Ruano, p. 22, takes him to be a companion of the Emperor.
44. Mansilla, Iglesia, 186-8. Felipe was appointed in 1249 and Sancho in 1251, before his twentieth birthday: Castejón y Fonseca, Primacía de la iglesia de Toledo, 761.
45. Guzmán y Gallo, BRAH, LXXIV, 50. Matthew Paris had been less favourably impressed by Sancho when the Infante had been in London three years before, and described him as an over-dressed adolescent with a failing for blessing crowds. Henry III had been to some trouble to prevent the crowds retaliating: Chronica Majora, V, 509; Close Rolls, 1254-6, 212. For Felipe, see Hernández Parrales, Archivo Hispalense, XXXI, 195 ff.
47. Cuarta Crónica General, 12; Crónica del Rey Don Alfonso, 24.
48. Cf Giles Constable, Monastic Tithes from their Origins to the Twelfth Century (Cambridge 1964), 47 ff.
49. Reg Inn. IV, 2538 a grant of half the tercias for three years.
50. Reg Hon III, 1937 (MDH, 210) half the tercias of his province for three years. According to the archbishop, laymen were in possession of the tercias anyway, 'pro magna parte'. This was not a grant to the king as Gallardo Fernández, Origen... de las rentas, III, 34, alleged thus misleading subsequent writers. Cf. Mansilla Iglesia, 57.
51. De Rebus Hispaniae, 193. Cf. Fita, BRAH, XXXIX, 529.
52. '...propter quod sic Romanam ecclesiam tibi constituis debitricem': inc. Si regalis serenitas, 20 Dec. 1236: publ. García y García, REDC, XV 149-50.
53. AC Toledo, Z.3.D.I.5=AHN, 3019/5 (publ. Fita, BRAH, VIII, 402). Cf. AC Toledo, Z.3. D. I. II. (publ. González, Alfonso VIII, III, 717). See Cedillo Contribuciones 298-9 on the misdeeds of 'un príncipe tan religioso como San Femando'.
54. Reg. Greg. IX, 3315; Burriel Memorias, 67: 'Fué imposición que en otro tiempo se hiciera insoportable, pero en aquel en que a nuestro Rey todo le parecía poco para dar a la Iglesia esta nada juzgaba excesivo para aliviar al Rey'.
55. 'Otrossi say por verdat quel Rey don Fernando gano del papa quellas yglesias del reyno de Leon et del reyno de Castiella le diessen LX mil morabetinos segundo,como yo creo, por tres anos', Archdeacon Rodrigo of León recalled in 1267: AC León, doc. 1564. He also mentioned that the executor of the grant, Bishop Juan of Osma, reduced the contribution originally demanded of the church of León - a circumstance which may have some bearing on their desire to have Juan as their bishop at this time.
56. 'A partir de esta época este nuevo tributo parece haber tomado carta de naturaleza en Castilla': Mansilla, Iglesia, 57. In Sept. 1301 Boniface VIII protested to Fernando IV that the tercias, which has been allowed to his great-grandfather ad certum tempus, were still being exacted by him and his agents 'in tue ac ipsorum animarum periculum, proprie fame dispendium et ecclesiarum ac personarum ecclesiasticarum dampnum, injuriam et jacturam': Reg. Bon. VIII, 4407. But such protests were ineffective, and at the end of the fifteenth century the same problem faced Sixtus IV: Azcona, Elección y reforma, 288, n. 64.
57. Huillard-Bréholles, Historia diplomatica, V, ii, 1120.
58. For Rodrigo's epitaph, see Loperráez, Descripción, I, 205. Juan de Medina was appointed in Feb. 1248 and died on 28 July: AC Toledo, A.7.A.I.I (=Reg. Inn. IV, 3654); Serrano, Obispado de Burgos, III, 385. His will, dated 20 July 1248 (AC Toledo, A.7.A.I.5), mentions a large and varied library. Part of it is published, from BN MS. 13022, fos. II6r-24v, by Alonso Alonso, Razón y Fe, CXXIII, 296-7.
60. AC Toledo I.6.G.I.12 (=Reg Inn IV, 3770).
61. González, Repartimiento, II, 28, 175, 231, 266, 309, 320. For biographical details see Ballesteros, Sevilla en el siglo XIII, ch. 7; idem, Correo Erudito, I, 313-18.
62. González, II, 29 (cf. 241, 266); Close Rolls, 1256-9, pp. 57, 152, 315; Close Rolls, 1259-61, pp. 166-7 ; Trabut-Cussac, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, II, 51-8.
64. Reg. Inn. IV, 1757, 4341; González, II, 29, 241, 298-9. The grant of Bella was made by the king in March 1249 -- that is seven weeks after Gutierre's promotion -- to the bishop and chapter of Córdoba jointly 'pro multis et magnis servitiis quae me fecistis in frontaria, et signanter pro servitio quod vos domnus Guterrius.. . fecistis me in exercitu Sivillae, quando eam acquisivi': publ. Burriel, 507.
65. González, II, 28-9 (cf. 231), 306 (=MHE, I, 9-10). Cf. Torres Fontes, Hispania, XIII, 356 ff.; Pelzer, Miscellanea Ehrle, I, 407 ff.
66. González, II, 29 (cf. 241, 266). The episcopal succession at Coria is greatly confused by González Davila, Teatro, II, 445, and thence by Eubel, Hierarchia, I, 178, and Ballesteros, BRAH, CVI, 1234. Sancho was bishop by Oct. 1232 and was still alive in April 1252: Burriel, 404, 536. Vacant: by Feb. 1253, for at least four months: MHE, I, 8, 17. Pedro had been elected by 6 Dec.1253: Ortiz de Zúñiga, Anales, 77. He died between Oct. 1259 and Nov. 1260: MHE, I, 154, 169.
67. González, Repartimiento, II, 29 (cf. 241, 266), 303.
70. González, Repartimiento, II, 28 (cf. 241, 266), 40; AC Zamora, 13/7: 'Ex ea (pecunia) enim expensas fecimus: nos ipsos post confirmationern obtentam maiestati regie Burgensi, ut decens erat, personaliter presentando. Item, pro confirmatione nostra Compostellani archiepiscopi presenciam apud eamdem ecclesiam adeundo. Deinde, ad concilium generale Lugdunensem eundo, inibi demorando et abinde redeundo. Postmodum ex vocacione regali nobis facta Yspalim accedendo.'
71. González, II,339, 342; see Ch. 7.
72. Primera Crónica General, para. 1113, 1117; González, II,23 (cf. 231, 313).
73. González, II, 27 (cf. 241), 298; ES, XVI, 235 ff. (for Pedro Fernández) and 225-50 (for the other bishops of Astorga during this century). The almost total destruction of the Astorga archive by the French army in 1810 prevents an analysis of this prosperity, but some information has survived. By March 1224 Bishop Pedro Andrés (d. 1226) had improved the value of the church's property to over nine thousand aurei (RAH, MS C2/9.5422, fo. 92r); Pedro Fernández was one of Pedro of Zamora's creditors in 1255 (AC Zamora, 13/7); and Martín González (d. 1301), Sancho IV's boon companion, was able in March 1288 to lend the archbishop of Toledo 20,000 maravedís monete guerre, having in the previous May obtained from the impoverished see of Palencia control of the abbey of San Salvador de Cantamuda, in circumstances which are obscure (AC Toledo, A.7.G.2.17; AD Astorga, 4/82). For this bishop, see Hergueta, RABM, IX, 328 ff., and Rodríguez López, Episcopologio, II, 291 ff. The financial flair of his predecessor, Melendo Pérez (d.1284) is noted by Flórez, ES, XVI, 244.
74. González, II, 29 (cf. 241, 266), 309. Contrary to Mansilla's account, Iglesia, 177, Gregory IX's appointment to Ávila of the exiled magister scolarum of Lisbon, Estêvão Gomes, in July 1241 (Reg. Greg. IX, 6087: publ. Sousa Costa, 243, n. 360) seems to have been ignored. In the following year Benito was bishop, and by 1246 was a member of the king's inner circle: Burriel, 465; above, p. 110, n. 2.
75. For Bishops Domingo Suárez, O.F.M. and Ademar, O.P. at the Curia, see Reg. Urb. IV, 233, 2860 (1263); Reg. Greg. X, 192 (1272); AC Toledo, A.7.G.I.4/IIC (1281); Mondéjar, Memorias históricas, 174, 183.
76. Reg. Inn. IV, 3943; Loperráez, I, 249 ff.
77. González, II, 31, 231, 320; 20, 139, 264; 70, 243; 69-71 (block grants to the king's escrivanos and clerigos). On this group, see Procter, Salter essays, 115, 120-1.
78. In June 1248: González, I, 184.
79. In the case of Burgos this may be more easily appreciated by reference to the extracts from the Repartimiento published by Huidobro y Serna, BIFG, XXXI, 51 ff., 99 ff. Apart from the royal monastic foundations of S. Isidoro, León (González, II, 43, 243, 305) and Las Huelgas, Burgos (ibid. II, 44, 313, 335-6), the only beneficiary in these three places seems to have been the dean of Burgos, Martín González de Contreras. And in Aug. 1258 he met his end, suitably enough after such assiduous attendance at court, when the royal palace of Segovia caved in, with him inside: ibid. II, 33, 271.
80. The cantor of Valladolid who was a royal cleric, and an archdeacon of Toledo, respectively, seem to have been the only representatives of the churches of the north and centre in these two places: Torres Fontes, Repartimiento de Murcia, 22, 59, 221, 238; Gutiérrez, Historia de Xerex, II, 40. Similarly, at Córdoba the grants of property to Bishop Lope had all been made before his election, as the king stressed when he confirmed them in February 1239: Burriel, 443. However, it would be unwise to generalise about the Córdoba repartimiento without a careful study of the Libro de Tablas in AC Córdoba, which I have not been able to see. The extracts published by Muñoz Vázquez in Bol. Real Acad. de Córdoba, XXV, 251 ff., give no clues, while Sr Muñoz Vázquez's study of the subject remains unpublished. The list of landowners owing tithes to the see of Córdoba, admittedly an imperfect guide, mentions only six bishops: Rodrigo of Toledo, Juan of Osma, Nuño of Astorga, Gonzalo of Cuenca, Domingo of Baeza and Sancho of Coria -- and three of these had frontier sees: Gómez Bravo, Catálogo, I, 264.
81. For the effects of the Jaén-Soria connexion, see below, Ch. 10. There seems to have been some such affiliation between Córdoba and Burgos: Juan de Medina's MS. of the Compilatio Quinta passed from Burgos to Cordoba (Fransen, Rev d' Hist Ecclésiastique, XLVIII, 234; García y García, REDC, XV, 147 ff.), possibly via Juan's nephew Fernán Rodríguez to whom the archbishop's 'decretum et decretales' were bequeathed in July 1248 (AC Toldeo, A.7.A.I.5.). The cantor of Burgos, García de Campo, mentioned in his will that he had Bishop Fernando of Córdoba's copy of Peter Lombard on loan: AC Burgos, vol. 48, fo. 425 (datable to between1269 and 1274).
82. Reg. Alex. IV, 870. The pope had already issued an indulgence for those attending Suero's forthcoming consecration: Tue devotionis, 7 July 1255 AC Zamora II.i/5.
83. '... porque les avemos mester pora nuestro servicio. Ca si por aventura se fuesen consagrar a Toledo o a otro lugar fuera de provincia de Sevilla non nos podriemos tan ayna servir de ellos': Ballesteros, Sevilla en el siglo XIII, cxxi. The court was at Seville for most of 1262: idem Alfonso X ,1084 For the phrase circa rempublicam occupati, see below p 180.
84. According to Raymond, ordination was to be withheld 'nisi primo sint absoluti a curia': Summa de Poenitentia, 287-9.
85. Valdeavellano, Historia de España, I, ii, 567-8; Font y Ríus in La Reconquista española y la repoblación del país, 88 ff.
86. Vicens Vives, Manual de historia económica, 143 ff.; Sobrequés, 10-11, 46-7. In maintaining that Castile enjoyed a demographic advantage over Aragon, Vicens, op. cit., 223, seems to ignore the fact that Aragon had a smaller area to colonise.
87. Chronica del Rey En Jacme, cap. 361, 364, 564, cd. Aguiló, 379-80, 382-3, 533; trans. Forster, II, 475-6, 480, 674.
88. Torres Fontes, VII. CHCA, II, 332-3, 336; Font y Ríus, in La Reconquista española,121 ff.
89. For these endowments, see Lacarra, RPH, IV, 272 ff.
90. Below, Ch. 8. It would be interesting to know what King Jaime's attitude was towards Pedro de Albalat, in 1239 and after.
92. Tejada, Colección, VI, 47-8; Goñi Gaztambide, Príncipe de Viana, XVIII, 97 ff.
93. Fita, BRAH, XL, 446-7. The provision of some form of assistance without delay -- 'auxilium.. . sine difficultate ac tarditate;. . . opportunum subsidiurn' -- was both authorised by the pope and confirmed by him. But the initiative remained with the bishops; and it was they who granted Jaime the vicesima of ecclesiastical income for one year, and in March 1249 extended it for a further year -- as the papal confirmation makes clear: 'Cum.. . tu tuique suffraganei. . . unanimi ad preces et mandatum nostrum conveneritis voluntate ut vicesimam. . . praeberetis...': ACA, Bulas, leg. X-43 (reg. Miquel Rosell, Regesta, 153); Reg. Inn. IV, 4309 (publ. Baluze, Miscellanea, I, 217). Yet Mansilla, when referring to this latter rescript (the text of which he adjusts), implies that the Aragonese grant was identical in form with the papal concession of Castilian tercias: 'no faltaron tampoco para Aragón privilegiadas concesiones pontificias': 'La Curia Romana y la restauración eclesiástica en el reinado de San Femando', RET, IV (1944), 127-64, at p. 163; Iglesia, 57-8. That they were not identical is further indicated by the pope's ability to refer in Jan. 1253 to his 'explicit concession of medietatem tertie six years before as 'illam partem tertie. . . quam (episcopi) expedire viderent (regi). . . exhiberi', as though the size of the Castilian grant had been decided by the Castilian prelates too: Reg. Inn. IV, 2538,6316. There could be no such confusion or prevarication in Aragon.
94. Chaytor, History of Aragon and Catalonia, III.
95. 'Si a retener nauia negu quen retingues dues partides si tots nols podia retener, ço es la esglesia, els pobles e les ciutats de la terra: car aquels son gent que Deus ama mes que fa los cauallers, car los cauallers se leuen pus tost contra senyoria quels altres, e si tots los podia retener que bon feria, e si no que aquests .ij. retingues, car ab aquests destnuyria los altres': Chronica del Rey En Jacme, cap. 498, ed. Aguiló, 486-7; trans. Forster, II, 617. See Valls i Taberner, B. Hisp. XXI, 40.
96. Above, p. 39. There is a solitary, casual reference to the provincial council in Part.1.6.54, prescribing penalties against bishops who hunted: BM, Add. MS. 20787, fo. 49ra (cf. Academy ed. I, 285, as Part. 1.6.47). For St Raymond's influence on the Partidas, see Giménez y Martínez de Carvajal, AA, II, 239 ff.; AA, III, 201 ff.: the Primera Partida is 'integra y exclusivamente canónica', and the Quarta 'fundamentalmente canónica' (AA, II, 239). Apart from St Raymond ('la principal fuente canónica inmediata de la Primera Partida': AA, III, 235) many other sources, from Gratian onwards, are distinguishable -- though the title of the Gratian MS. (BC Tortosa, 239), reported by García y García as 'liber decretorum dividitur in tres partidas', proves not to have been a felix culpa but Prof. García's culpa: Studia Gratiana, VIII, no. 33; conversation with the author, Feb. 1967.
98. AC Zamora, II.ii/8: excusing himself from acting as judge-delegate in a case between the bishop of Burgos and the monastery of Oña 'quia rex Legionis vocat nos ad cuniam quam incontinenti est celebraturus apud Legionem, et statim ituri ad colloquium regis Castelle': undated, but from the context an. 1210-11. Cf. Alamo, CD Oña, I, 463.
99. Rodericus Toletanus, De Rebus Hispaniae, 204.
100. 'Sicut ad ultionem malefactorum accingi debet regis auctoritas sic et ipsius clementia perpetuis tenetur honorare munenibus eos potissime qui tempore discriminis ad eius obsequium fideliter laborarunt', Jan 1231: Burriel 376.
101. De Rebus Hispaniae, 207-8.
102. Reg. Inn. IV ,6316, 5216: reproving Fernando III for his failure to provide for the church of Jaén whose bishops 'propter temporalium rerum carentiam nimium indigentem... inibi pro tempore cogantur in obprobrium pontificalis dignitatis egere', 6 April 1251 (publ Mansilla 357) Yet only twenty-four days later he authorised a further grant of tercias to the Infante Alfonso from the diocese of Cuenca BN, MS. 13071, fo 55r.
103. Anónimo de Madrid y Copenhague, 190; González, Repartimiento, I, 207 ff.
104. Cortes de Castilla, I, 54 ff.; A. Ballesteros y Berretta, 'Las Cortes de 1252', Anales de la Junta para la Ampliación de Estudios, III (1911), 109-43; García Rámila, Hispania, v, 205 ff.; Castro, Rev. Filología Española, VIII, 6 ff.; Carlé, CHE, XXI-II, 303-4.
105. In May 1277 Pope John XXI was informed of these developments when the Burgos Cortes requested that he permit Alfonso to break his oath to maintain los dineros prietos and strike a new coinage mas comunal: E(scudero?) de la P(eña?), RABM, II, 58-60. Cf. Ballesteros, Alfonso X, 836-7; Crónica del Rey Don Alfonso, X, 3-4, 6; Gil Farrés, Historía de la moneda española, 204.
106. For 'la espiral infiacionísta', see Carlé, CHE, XV, 132 ff., where the great disparity in the cost of horses between Galicia and Castile is noted, p. 137. Spaniards abroad had a down-at-heels appearance: sharp-eyed Matthew Paris noticed that the Infante Sancho's retinue was mounted on mules rather than palfreys: Chronica Majora, V, 509. For the currency fluctuation, see Colmeiro, Historia de la economía política, 491 ff.; Usher, Early History of Deposit Banking, 214 ff.
107. Guillaume Anelier de Toulouse, Histoire de la Guerre de Navarre en 1276 et 1277, p. 126, line 1910. Van Kleffens infers the 'puritan streak' from Alfonso's draconian legislation: Hispanic Law, 152, n. 2. Gil de Zamora, ed. Fita, BRAH, V, 319. See also Procter, Alfonso X, 138; Wolff, Speculum, XXIX, 57 ff.
108. Ballesteros, RABM, XXXIV, 219; Mariana, De Rebus Hicpaniae, I, 555-6. Jofré de Loaisa described the expenses of the imperial Venture as 'fere incredibiles': BEC LIX 337. See also Schramm, Festschrift Stengel, 385 ff.
109. Ballesteros, BRAH, CV, 139-40, 149 ff ;Menéndez Pidal, Documentos lingüísticos, I, 299-300; AHN, 20/4 MHE, I, 70-5; AC Salamanca, 16/3/7, 16/2/11-12 (reg. Marcos, 255, 257, 262). Fernando III had shown a similar interest in the technicalities of tithe collection: AC Salamanca 16/1/16 (reg. Marcos, 236 text, misdated, in Burriel 528).
110. Reg. Inn. IV, 8306; AC Burgos, vol. 48 fo. 212 (publ Ballesteros, BRAH, CV 151-2); AC Oviedo, A/7/14 (reg Garcia Larragueta, Catálogo, 364); AC León, doc.1092; Fernández del Pulgar, Historia de Palencia, II, 340.
111. Reg. Urb. IV, cam 478; Jordan, De mercatoribus, 16; Scheffer-Boichorst, MIöG, IX, 242.
113. Reg. Inn. IV, 6214, 6497. The 700 mark subvention was an annual charge, renewed by Alexander IV: Reg. Alex. IV, 2078.
114. Reg. Alex. IV, 1921, 2078. He had borrowed £3,O00 Tours at the Curia. From his own archdiocese he had been granted the decimae de oleo of all churches for life: ibid. 99 (January 1255). See also F. C(ollantes) de T(erán), Archivo Hispalense, IV, 39-42.
115. Gil de Zamora, ed. Fita, BRAH, V, 321.
116. This suggestion was made by Schramm in 1950 on the basis of the adaptation to the Spanish context of the imperial coronation ordo, the work of a Bishop Ramón, whom Schramm identified with Remondo of Segovia, afterwards archbishop of Seville Escorial, MS. III & 3, fo. 1-32 (reg. Zarco Cuevas, Catálogo, I,282); Festschrift Ritter,136-8. However, the ordo -- which previously had been ascribed to the twelfth century and Alfonso VII by Tubino, Museo Español de Antigüedades, V, 53-5 -- is, in fact, an early fourteenth-century work, done for Alfonso XI by Bishop Remundo of Coimbra, as Sánchez-Albornoz had already demonstrated in Logos, II, iii, 75 ff., where the ordo is published: a study which became known to Schramm between 1950 and 1952, when he corrected his error: Festschrift Stengel, 387, n.I. By then,though, the error had been popularised by Folz, L'idée d'empire, 69. Moreover, when Sánchez-Albornoz republished his Logos article, in Estudios sobre las instituciones medievales españolas, 739 ff., he made no reference to the Schrarnm theory.
117. González, Repartimiento, I, 525-30.
119. M. M. Postan, 'The Fifteenth Century', Ec. Hist. Rev., IX (193 8-9), 160-7, at p. 164.
120. See Larnbert, L'art gothique en Espagne, 203 ff.
121. Reg. Hon. III, 3697 (MDH, 388): '...ad cuius perfectionem, turn pro sui magnitudine, tum pro tenuitate reddituum ipsius fabrice, turn pro lignorurn et lapidum raritate, usque adeo insufficientem proponis ecclesiam memoratam, ut de eiusdem consummatione fabrice penitus desperetur, nisi aliud remedium apponatur'. In July 1224 the grant was renewed for a further four years: ibid. 5074 (MDH, 512). Rodrigo's stock was evidently rising again at the Curia.
122. See Rico, Italia Medioevale e Umanistica, X, 143 ff.
123. 'One of the principal tenets of the home-made sociology, which the non-socio-logical historians commonly assume, is that ages of economic expansion are necessarily ages of intellectual and artistic achievement. As if the generations which make the money also know how to spend it best...': Ec. Hist. Rev., IX, 160-7.
124. Cf. R. S. Lopez and H. A. Miskimin, 'The Economic Depression of the Renaissance', Ec. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., XIV (1961--2), 408.
125. Lomax, 112-13. Cf. Sobrequés, 12 ff., 75.
126. For example, the 'grant' of Talamanca to Archbishop Rodrigo in Nov. 1214 was in reality compensation for the apoteca de Talavera, bequeathed to the archbishop by Alfonso VIII but now resumed by Enrique I's guardians as 'regio fisco necessania'. Talamanca had been granted to the church of Toledo earlier, but again 'sine beneplacito archiepiscopi Toletani', in compensation for certain property at Alcalá requisitioned by the king; and when Alfonso had restored the Alcalá property in June 1214 he had reclaimed Talamanca: Fita, BRAH, VIII, 240, 242.
127. 'Mandamus quatinus vicesimam ecclesiasticorum proventuum terre sancte deputatam subsidio a prefatis archiepiscopo, episcopis et aliis pro tertio anno usque ad triennium nullatenus exigatis': ACA, Bulas, leg. X-45 (reg. Miquel, 155). For these papal taxes, see below, Ch. 9; for Jaime I as 'fidei specialis adleta': ACA, Bulas, leg. XI-54 (Miquel, 164). See also below, p. 186.
128. The so-called Formulary of Marinus de Eboli contains a further undated mandate ordering the prelates of Yspania to pay their tercias to the king 'per biennium': BAV, Cod. Lat. 3976, fo. 291V (Schillmann, Formularsammlung, 3001).
129. By Cartellieri. Cit. R. C. Smail, 'Latin Syria and the West', TRHS, 5th ser., XIX (1969), 1-20, at p. 12.
130. Reg. Hon. III, 3697: 'quando etiam lex est Christi ut alter alterius onus portet' - Galatians, vi. 2.
131. AC Sigüenza, doc. pontificio, 22 (publ. Minguella, Historia, I, 571, misdated). For Palencia, see below, Ch. 8.