[159] Teaching at Castile's universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a stiff and formal affair. Instruction consisted mainly of lectures delivered daily at appointed times by university instructors. Lasting up to two hours, these classes involved the explication and interpretation of selected passages from well-known texts; meanwhile, the students, known archaically as "listeners," took notes, a tradition which was said to have begun in 1539 when Francisco de Vitoria, Prima professor of theology at Salamanca, told his pupils that they "must write down what we say." ⁽¹⁾ During these sessions good instructors like Vitoria might innovate, contributing their ideas and outlooks of their own; poor ones would not, relying instead upon the hackneyed commentaries of the past. Question and discussion, moreover, were generally unknown except after the hour when the teacher went "against the post" outside the lecture hall. Not all instructors were so accommodating, but those who were earned their students' esteem. Fray Luis de Miranda, professor of theology at Santiago de Compostela in 1584, was considered an excellent teacher in part because "after the hour, he is at the door, waiting for whatever questions the students wish to ask him." ⁽²⁾

Regular university lectures were supplemented by "extraordinary" classes presented by advanced students and visiting lecturers. These extra sessions, however, differed from the scheduled classes only in content, not form. They were intended to examine in a more detailed fashion topics either neglected or glossed over in the regular course. ⁽³⁾ More intimate were the review sessions provided by some colleges and the graduates in charge of the student boarding houses. Since the latter were supposed to be made [160] up of students belonging to a single faculty, this lodging-house instruction could have been rather effective. But in practice this uniformity of students was never obtained and the heads of the houses were known to skimp on their obligations.⁽⁴⁾ In the colleges these sessions did take place, but that was the only formal instruction provided within the walls of these communities. Wealthy students often brought with them a tutor of their own or, alternatively, paid university instructors for private lessons, but for the vast majority of university students instruction was centered in the "Schools."

The one exception was the lectures provided by the religious colleges attached to the universities. These convents and monasteries, many of which antedated the universities themselves, always provided instruction in grammar, the arts, and theology for their members. This situation changed during the sixteenth century, when a number of the more prosperous convents opened their classes to outsiders and began to compete with the universities for students. ⁽⁵⁾ The latter, jealous of their prerogatives, fought back, attempting to quash this unwanted competition, but the religious orders persisted, particularly the Society of Jesus which posed the gravest threat. The root of the problem was a privilege granted to the Society in 1584 by the Papacy which allowed students from Jesuit colleges to qualify for university degrees. ⁽⁶⁾ The universities balked, among them Granada, which in 1585 refused to honor courses taught by the Society after complaining that this competition was the cause of its own shortage of students. ⁽⁷⁾Squabbles between the two sides continued until 1609 when a bargain was struck. Granada agreed to allow the Society to teach but only at hours which did not conflict with university lectures and on topics different from those covered by the regular instructors. The university also agreed to allow Jesuit students to take degrees, but on no condition would these students be allowed to graduate in another university. ⁽⁸⁾ Though their lecture halls may have been empty, Granada's instructors wanted their examination fees.

Other universities were less easily placated, notably, Salamanca. One of its major concerns was what it called the "depopulation of the universities," said to be caused by Jesuit competition. ⁽⁹⁾ The classes in grammar offered by the Society had undercut instruction in that subject at Salamanca [161] and other institutions which refused to allow the Jesuits to teach in the university's name, and, to a lesser extent, the same was true in the arts and theology. The University of Valladolid in 1686 sent a strong protest to the Royal Council, asserting that "students... attended the Colleges of San Gregorio (Dominican) and San Ambrosio (Jesuit), leaving the university with only a few listeners for its professors." It added: "it is well known that the University of Salamanca is suffering from the same problem." ⁽¹⁰⁾ University requests for redress, however, went unheeded until after the Jesuits were expelled. Then, in 1771, the crown ordered that courses heard in a religious convent or seminary could not be applied toward a university degree, and the following year this edict was strengthened by another, making regular attendance at university lectures mandatory for a degree. ⁽¹¹⁾

These decrees marked an important step in the emergence of the modern university in Castile, since they finally brought university-level instruction under university supervision and control. Previously, teaching, particularly in the arts and theology, had been offered by a number of competing agencies, each with approaches, interpretations, and standards of its own. The universities, though strongly opposed to this outside teaching, could do little to root it out. The religious colleges were independent, outside the university's control. Furthermore, the friars' argument that they had to provide their own classes, since university instructors did not adequately treat questions and topics of especial importance to the regular clergy could never be challenged. But that the classes of the religious proved such a success among the students was related to the failure of the universities, interested above all in law and its premios, to provide adequately for instruction in the liberal arts. The religious orders, in other words, filled a pedagogical gap that the universities had left behind. When this competition was ended, students returned to "Schools," while the universities themselves could begin to direct the nature, content, and quality of instruction in areas long outside their effective control. In this changeover, some variety of approach may have been lost, but order and uniformity were deemed more important.

What the universities sought to protect was their monopoly of instruction in five faculties: the arts, medicine, theology, and law (canon and civil). Their problem was that teaching in these disciplines revolved around set texts, readily accessible to any individual qualified to read and interpret the Latin prose in which they were written. Civil law, for example, was based wholly upon the study of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis and its medieval glossators, while canon law was simply the interpretation of papal bulls and church decrees amassed over the ages. In both of these faculties, the subject matter changed but little over the years. Though historical and [162] philological interpretations of the law were introduced early in the sixteenth century by humanist scholars such as Antonio Agustín, the legal curriculum did not take another major step forward until the middle of the eighteenth century when the study of "national law" was added to it, an innovation which involved instruction in the Siete Partidas of Alfonso X, the Leyes de Toro (1505), and subsequent codifications of royal promulgations and decrees. Readings in medicine were equally static: Avicenna, Galen, and Hippocrates remained the standard fare throughout the Habsburg era, and it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the writings of the ancients were supplemented by more up-to-date medical tracts and new courses in botany, pharmacology, and experimental medicine.

Theology and the liberal arts were only slightly more flexible. The former, rooted in the writings of the scholastics, was advanced early in the sixteenth century at the University of Alcalá de Henares with the introduction of sacred texts in their original languages. El Pinciano, Hernan Núñez de Guzman (1475?-1533), author of a Greek edition of the New Testament, was in the forefront of this movement, along with his colleagues, Aires Barbosa and Antonio de Nebrija. Meanwhile, at the University of Salamanca, the teaching of theology was also in flux. Francisco de Vitoria broke with tradition by substituting Aquinas's Summa for the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a change consistent with the interest of humanist theology in questions relating to the interrelation of morality and politics. This was a theme upon which Vitoria dwelt for most of his life, forging in his lectures many of the fundamental principles governing the law of nations, the right of war, freedom of the seas, and other topics dealing with the origin, nature, and limits of political power. His teachings, published posthumously by another Salamancan theologian, Melchor Cano, are often said to form the basis of modern international law. ⁽¹²⁾ And in keeping with this spirit aimed at studying the various problems of mankind, a number of theologians in sixteenth-century Salamanca, including Martin de Azpilcueta, Domingo de Soto, and Tomás de Mercado, concerned with the economic impact of the importation of American silver into Castile, gradually developed ideas which later became known as the Quantitative Theory of Money, a theorem which postulates that the rate of inflation at a given moment is in direct ratio with the size of the money supply. ⁽¹³⁾ Such creativity, however, was not destined to last. By the seventeenth century the religious orders which dominated Salamanca's faculty of theology were more interested in propagandizing their own versions of religious truth than in developing new theories and ideas, the sole exception being the [163] Jesuits, who pioneered instruction in moral theology, the basis of which was the explanation of the human conscience and such themes as redemption and guilt.

Similarly, the arts curriculum, flexible in the early sixteenth century, suffered from progressive ossification and decay. The basis of this program from the Middle Ages to the late eighteenth century was Aristotle and a number of chairs -- physics, metaphysics, logic, etc. -- concentrated on different aspects of his philosophy. Otherwise, the program was subject to alteration. Studies in the literature and language of classical Greece and Rome were added in the years around 1500, and chairs in Arabic, Chaldean, and Hebrew were established as well. Contemporary authors, among them Valla and Copernicus, were also taught while instruction in astronomy, mathematics, and music, none of which was very popular among students, completed the program. ⁽¹⁴⁾ In the seventeenth century the arts curriculum, frozen in time, stood still, the only addition being moral philosophy, a course designed to counter the Jesuits, who had pioneered the subject. And it was only in the 1790s that the universities, under orders from "enlightened" reformers in Madrid to reform their curriculum, expanded the arts program to include instruction in modern languages and other subjects with a more scientific bent: algebra, experimental physics, natural history, etc.

Why the university curriculum stagnated after an epoch of change and innovation in the sixteenth century is a question yet to be solved. The Spanish Inquisition, fearful of heretical influence, was partly at fault, but more significant was the general spirit of the times: innovation, in all walks of life, was frowned upon, difficult to introduce, whatever the merits of change. Moreover, as institutions geared increasingly toward the professional certification of the young, the universities were slow to adapt to changing concepts and ideas, particularly in the realm of science and philosophy. Fundamentally, the universities were guilds of medieval origin and like many craft guilds, entrants were obliged to pass certain stock tests which were considered valid for all time. Deviation was the equivalent of heresy, a dangerous evil in itself. The immutable nature of the university curriculum in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is therefore best attributed, not to any external force such as the inquisition or Spain's "supposed" intellectual isolation from Europe, but to the ideas and aspirations of university teachers themselves.

Teachers

Teachers at Spain's universities can be roughly divided into two broad groups. At the top stood the senior professors whose chairs carried tenure [164] for life. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Every university faculty had at least two individuals of this rank, although Salamanca's large legal faculties each had four. At the bottom were the junior, nontenured lecturers who read in the "temporal" chairs -- the regencias and catedrillas -- so-called because their terms lasted no more than three or four years. ⁽¹⁶⁾

The division of each university into tenured and nontenured members, that is, professors and lecturers, was not universal. Many of the newer universities were established during an epoch when the concept of life-tenure was under attack; consequently, even the distinguished Prima and Vísperas professorships at universities like Granada and Seville were "temporal" chairs. ⁽¹⁷⁾ Indeed, the furor over this question was sufficiently strong to bring the following petition before the Cortes of 1528:

We ask Your Majesty that the chairs at the estudios of Salamanca and Valladolid be granted not for life but only temporarily as they are in Italy and other places, because when they are life-tenured many problems and troubles arise, especially among those professors who, once they have taken possession of their chair, do not care to study nor to help the students. But when the chairs are temporary, there are many benefits because the readers seek to be returned to the chair, to increase their salaries and to have larger student attendance. They work to aid the students, and they write and make the students take examinations and other exercises in letters. ⁽¹⁸⁾

At those universities where lecturers and professors were not distinguished by tenure, the two groups were set apart by pay, power, and, above all, prestige. Professors enjoyed ceremonial precedence, the right to belong to the university council, and the opportunity to participate in all examinations and degree ceremonies, a privilege which allowed for considerable income, thanks to student fees. Furthermore, their regular stipends [165] were on average two or three times above that of lecturers, and at a few universities, particularly Salamanca, even more, owing to a privilege which entitled professors to share in the university's annual income. ⁽²⁰⁾ Consequently, professors at this university, followed by those of Alcalá and Valladolid, were men of comfortable means. For example, the earnings of Valladolid's instructors in the sixteenth century ranged between 300 and 700 ducats a year, with 500 ducats (187,500 mrs.) as the mean. ⁽²¹⁾ This was a substantial sum, five times the income of a master artisan and nearly as much as a magistrate in one of the royal courts. Salaries at the other universities, however, lagged behind, especially during the difficult years of the seventeenth century, when a number of institutions forced their instructors to take cuts in pay. Teaching positions at Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid, consequently, were the prizes of the academic world, but to win ond was no easy task.

University teaching posts required a minimum of a baccalaureate, although most institutions had additional rules obliging newly appointed teachers to graduate licentiate or doctor within six months to a year. But these degrees were costly and increasingly so; at Salamanca, for instance, a license and doctorate early in the eighteenth century was said to involve an expenditure of as much as 20,000 reales. ⁽²²⁾ And with the prices so high, degrees served not only as stumbling blocks to teaching posts but they also forced many new instructors to go into debt. ⁽²³⁾ On top of this, new professors were required to pay installation fees which could amount to as much as 20 percent of a year's salary. ⁽²⁴⁾

Money was not the only thing which stood between a talented graduate and a teaching post. More problematical was the competition, since the universities regularly produced more graduates than they could absorb. Whenever a chair fell vacant through death or promotion, university officials were obliged by statute to post edicts at other universities and in [166] Madrid announcing the vacancy and inviting qualified scholars to apply. ⁽²⁵⁾ Not all openings were announced nor were edicts posted; competition was easily sacrificed for convenience and corruption or both, and in 1627 the Royal Council rebuked the University of Granada for condoning this very practice. ⁽²⁶⁾ But when edicts were posted and applications filed, the chair was filled after a series of public examinations known as oposiciones. Candidates prepared a commentary of a text agreed upon in advance, and the one judged most competent took the prize.

The means of selection varied. At the college-universities the power of appointment generally belonged to the members of the core community, but at Castile's larger universities, most of which remained loyal to the Bolognese tradition, teachers were elected by student votes. ⁽²⁷⁾ The pitfalls of these elections were many. In the first place, it was difficult to decide which students could vote for a position in a particular faculty, although this was solved by allowing them to participate only in elections held in the faculty in which they were enrolled. More troublesome was the problem of deciding who was a student and who was not. Matriculation books were inaccurate, since many students registered late ⁽²⁸⁾ while others never bothered to matriculate at all. ⁽²⁹⁾ The task of delineating the student population was further complicated by the mass of part-time students and hangers-on who drifted in and around the universities, among them servants of wealthy students, university employees, pícaros, and thieves, as well as former students who never left the university town. Together they constituted an informal student body, ready to take part in elections regardless of rules to the contrary. Officials attempted to prevent this illegal participation by declaring that only those students who had been matriculated for six months could vote, but infractions continued, since it was impossible to check the eligibility of every student on election day. Even then there was no indication that the names in the matriculation books were students. The University of Santiago noted the presence of "doctors, masters, and others who had finished studying but matriculated each [167] year," ⁽³⁰⁾ and it was mentioned that professors at Salamanca had used as voters "the absent and the dead." ⁽³¹⁾ Even the religious orders were not immune to electoral chicanery, and at Salamanca they were known to import brothers from distant convents to serve as voters when an election threatened to be close. ⁽³²⁾ Furthermore, nothing prevented an enterprising contender from hiring groups of street urchins, bribing the university secretary to inscribe their names in the university rolls, creating for himself a hired voting claque. ⁽³³⁾

Once the votes, legitimate or illegitimate, were counted, the candidate receiving a plurality won the chair. But counting was not so simple, especially at Salamanca, where the work was complicated by a system of weighted ballots which awarded first-year students one vote, graduates four or five. ⁽³⁴⁾ Elections, however, were not decided by votes alone. Bribery, corruption, violence and terrorism each played an important part. And despite attempts by university officials and the Royal Council to bring such practices to a halt, one seventeenth-century witness to the chaos of Salamanca's student elections wrote: "there is not a life-tenured chair without one million mortal sins." ⁽³⁵⁾

The salaries and prestige enjoyed by instructors at the leading universities were partly responsible for these tactics, but the mounting corruption that was evident in the oposiciones after the late sixteenth century has also to be connected to the ease with which teachers from Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid entered letrado posts. Chairs at these universities, particularly those in law, were nothing less than guarantees of letrado office; by the second half of the seventeenth century approximately 80 percent of the law instructors at Salamanca who outlived their teaching careers left the university for positions in government, the inquisition, or the church. ⁽³⁶⁾ Accordingly, competition for the teaching posts among the job-hungry students grew intense. In the mid-sixteenth century a vacant [168] chair in the law faculty might attract five or six contenders; by 1700, rarely less than thirty, in spite of a sharp decline in the total number of university graduates. ⁽³⁷⁾ Little wonder then that the oposiciones became so corrupt. The teaching chair, created originally as a pulpit from which professional scholars could teach the young, had developed into a mandatory stop-over for letrados on their way up.

This change had serious consequences for the university, the most important of which was the disappearance of the professional scholar. The faculties of the arts and theology, staffed increasingly by religious little interested in worldly careers, were in this respect better off than the faculties of law, whose instructors were more in demand. Here, instructors, once installed, changed teaching positions rapidly in the hope of reaching the prestige professorships, only to leave the university as quickly as possible for an outside post. This phenomenon first manifested itself within the universities through the disappearance of a ceremony known as the jubilación, which rewarded professors who had taught for twenty years with retirement at half pay. Common during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when scholars frequently remained at the university for a life-term, the jubilación, at least in its formal sense, ended during the last century of Habsburg rule. ⁽³⁸⁾ Salamanca's last true jubilado in the faculty of canon law, Cristóbal Gutierrez de Moya, retired in 1591, while civil law at this university in the seventeenth century gave rise to only one true professional scholar: Pablo de Maqueda de Castellano who was Prima professor from 1625 to l648. ⁽³⁹⁾ Though other professors continued to earn the jubilación, it was only a watered-down version of the ancient ceremony, since the requirement of two decades of service was repeatedly waived. ⁽⁴⁰⁾

In the meantime, the concept of a university chair as something of permanence was forgotten. Table 12 illustrates this change. The increasing frequency of appointments to chairs at the universities of Salamanca and Valladolid means that these positions were less and less able to keep their readers for more than a short period of time. ⁽⁴¹⁾ The Vísperas professorship in canon law at Salamanca is an excellent example of how frequently these appointments could take place. Between 1670 and 1676, this life-tenured chair was in the possession of six different readers, almost one a year. ⁽⁴²⁾ [170] Not surprisingly, the rate of turnover in the short-term "temporal" chairs was the highest, but even then it was relatively common for a lecturer in the sixteenth century to read for his full term and perhaps even stay on for another. In the following century, rare was the lecturer who bothered to teach for his full term. Frequently, one post had two, even three, different lecturers every year. The chair of Code at Valladolid set the record: five readers in two years. ⁽⁴³⁾

As instructors busied themselves with promotions, oposiciones, and appointments to letrado jobs, the quality of university instruction suffered. According to primitive evaluations of teachers' classroom performances, students reacted to their professors as they always do, running the gamut from enthusiasm to harsh complaints. ⁽⁴⁵⁾ The worst marks on the [171] instructors' records were their absences and lack of interest in their teaching. This problem was as old as the universities themselves, but it grew progressively worse. As early as the 1520s a student at Alcalá de Henares, in reference to Miguel Carrasco, a professor of theology, claimed that "his absences are so frequent that it would almost be better if he did not read at all," while another remarked: "I do not go to hear [the lesson on] St. Thomas because there is no continuity." ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Complaints of this nature abounded as similar problems affected nearly every university in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Castile. ⁽⁴⁷⁾ Professorial absences were frequent and often prolonged, as more and more of the day-to-day work of instruction was left to young, inexperienced substitutes. Meanwhile, criticism of university teaching mounted. Gregorio de Portilla, professor of civil law at Salamanca for ten years, wrote in 1638 that "in former days there were no lecture halls for the masters, now there are no masters for the lecture halls." ⁽⁴⁸⁾ He also believed that because of professorial neglect university examinations were "diminishing both in quality and in quantity." ⁽⁴⁹⁾ Soon the Royal Council, "recognizing the great harm caused by the absences of professors and the reading of chairs by substitutes," obliged the instructors to read daily and imposed strict fines for those who did not. ⁽⁵⁰⁾ But subsequent rulings, including those which threatened negligent professors with dismissal, brought few results. ⁽⁵¹⁾ Teaching continued to deteriorate, and toward the end of the century the University of Salamanca was obliged to admit that lectures in the religious colleges were well-attended, since the friars taught with regularity, while its own instructors attracted few students because they did not. ⁽⁵²⁾ Such problems were not corrected until late [173] in the following century, but by then whatever prestige had been attached to university instruction had already been lost.

A more accurate assessment of how much teaching time was wasted is possible through an examination of the registers of professorial absences kept by the universities, but, unfortunately, very few of these have survived. The earliest are those for the University of Alcalá de Henares in the mid-sixteenth century. ⁽⁵³⁾ They list the fines or multas levied upon each instructor, and the accounting was done three times a year. Between January and April 1559, Alcalá's 27 instructors missed a total of 383 classes, an average of approximately 14 absences each, although individual records ranged from a low of 2 absences to a high of 60. In the following decade, however, absences for Alcalá's staff averaged only 434 for each academic year, that is, 16 absences for each instructor. Considering the high incidence of illness and disease at the time, Alcalá's teachers appear to have been comparatively mindful of their duties.

The only comparable records are those for Santiago in the seventeenth century, and these suggest that the diligence of university professors had deteriorated (Table 13). On average, a teacher at Santiago between 1634 and 1720 was absent a little more than one month out of each academic year. Overall figures, however, tell us little about the change-over of instructors from week to week. Constantly coming and going, professors taught one month but were absent the next, often, but not always, leaving substitutes in their place. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ But the substitutes were no more reliable than the professors, and substitutes even had substitutes of their own. Consequently, many chairs were subject to a teaching circus, a merry-go-round of different instructors that undoubtedly affected the pace and quality of the course.

Since Salamanca has lost so many great teachers..., I hesitate at taking Doctor Valencia away from it, but I also hesitate at leaving a person of his great merits and [174] skills unrewarded. The Cámara will consider what I have said here and advise me whether it is feasible to have him read several more years but with the promise of a future place on one of the chancillerías; a solution through which everyone's needs can be met without anyone suffering. But above all the Cámara must advise me on what it thinks. ⁽⁵⁶⁾

Melchor de Valencia was an exception. When the Cámara recommended lecturers and professors for government posts, it generally elicited no other reaction but that of agreement from the king. In practice, the camaristas were free to nominate whomever they pleased. Rarely did they flinch at stripping the universities of their instructors, even those newly appointed to their chairs. So teachers were named to letrado posts with increasing frequency, heedless of the injuries caused to the universities themselves. ⁽⁵⁷⁾

But the Cámara was not wholly at fault. Lecturers and professors represented Castile's academic elite, and to the Cámara they represented excellence amidst the swell of university students and graduates. Although it is true that the Cámara did little to ameliorate the universities' loss of experienced teachers, this exodus was spurred by falling professorial incomes, the result of a decline in university rents and a drop in the student population which in turn reduced the professors' fees. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ The Cortes of 1627 explained the situation in these terms: "Nowadays the lack of premios for letters, the expenses of the times, and the shortage of students in the universities are so notable, and the stipends and salaries of the professors so much below what they used to be, that, as a result, wise, serious scholars cannot persevere in the universities but look for other positions more suitable to their support." ⁽⁵⁹⁾ Certainly, the rate of departure was highest in the short-term, lower chairs of law, whose occupants were poorly paid in comparison with the tenured professors. But the entire problem of professorial absenteeism, neglect, and departure was also linked to the "careerism" of [175] the instructors themselves; lucrative and promising opportunities beckoned, they accepted. The Cámara, charged with securing the best of the university graduates for government positions, was merely doing its job.

At the center of this development lay the colegiales mayores. Dominating the faculties of law, their eyes trained on letrado office, these graduates had few reservations about leaving their chairs unattended as they searched for official posts, then to abandon the university as quickly as possible. Accordingly, the students, deprived of adequate instruction, boycotted the lecture halls despite repeated attempts to make attendance mandatory. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ In sum, the university had lost many of its teachers and until the monarchy altered its policies of recruitment and professors developed a sense of dedication to their students lectures went unread while the classrooms remained practically deserted. In Castile such changes were more than a century away. In the meantime, scholarly excellence and curricular innovation were neglected; instructors who put little faith, let alone effort, into their teaching were content to leave things as they were. Such lassitude, no doubt, does much to explain the conservative nature of the curriculum in Castile's universities. Indeed, it is the teachers themselves who must bear most of the responsibility for Spain's removal from the mainstream of European intellectual life. Much more than the inquisition, it was the professors, interested more in profit and prestige than speculative research, who choked off whatever possibilities existed for the development of a rational philosophical and scientific culture in seventeenth-century Spain.

Students

Owing to the limited biographical information contained in the matriculation registers of Castile's universities, students are not a readily identifiable group. ⁽⁶¹⁾ Generally, their age and geographical origins are listed, but their family backgrounds are not. Therefore, any discussion about the students who attended institutions of higher learning in Castile between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is largely a matter of guesswork.

Age

Although in many cases the ages of university students listed in the matriculation registers may not be exact, ⁽⁶²⁾ it is clear that students in the six-teenth century were, in comparison with later decades, relatively advanced in age (Table 14). Young teenagers were few while men in their twenties [176] were common, but the median age at which students first matriculated was approximately eighteen. In subsequent years the median age of incoming students dropped as teenagers became increasingly numerous, older men less so. In the arts faculty at Alcalá de Henares, for example, the median age of first-year students fell to sixteen in 1771 , a figure two years below that of the mid-sixteenth century (Fig. 3). This decline undoubtedly contributed toward the evolution of the arts faculty at this and other universities from a sophisticated degree program in philosophy to nothing more than a grandiose grammar school. By the opening of the nineteenth century this evolution had run its course; the arts faculty, catering for boys who were often no more than thirteen or fourteen years of age, lost university rank.

Yet another reason why matriculation at university was so frequently postponed in the sixteenth century was the loose connection between [179] physical age on the one hand and school or university class on the other. No urgency then existed to advance a boy's education as regularly as he advanced in age, and it was not thought unnatural to mix old and young together in a single classroom and have them taught the same subject in a similar way. By the eighteenth century, however, such ideas were out of fashion. Age-mixing, as such, was regarded as evil; children and adolescents were now thought to be very different from one another (as well as from adults), and, therefore, they were each in need of special attention, discipline, and care. Simultaneously, school age and physical age were linked together for the first time, and this meant that upper- and middle-class children, as they matured, were passed directly from class to class with little interference or delay. Consequently, the age-spread at both school and university was reduced, while more and more students clustered around a single, more youthful, modal age (Figs. 1 and 3).

One important consequence of this decline was the gradual erosion of many of the rights and responsibilities which had been entrusted to the mature students characteristic of the Middle Ages. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ The first to go was the students' privilege to select their own instructors; this occurred in 1641 when the Royal Council appropriated this responsibility for itself. And then, in the later eighteenth century, the students' right to participate in university administration was also revoked. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Age was not the only factor which contributed to these developments, but at a time when adults began to fix in their minds that adolescents were different than adults and not to be treated as such, age cannot be easily dismissed.

Geography

One thing that Castile's students, young and old, had in common was their geographical background. The vast majority were originally town-dwellers rather than residents of rural hamlets and villages. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ This was certainly the case at Alcalá de Henares in the sixteenth century where only a tiny proportion of students hailed from small, village communities (Table 15). And this was also true at the University of Seville in 1570, where over 60 percent of the students living within the archdiocese of Seville came from eleven towns each of whose inhabitants numbered 5,000 or more. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ Though smaller communities had their representatives at the university, few were able to contribute more than one or two students each; thus Seville's student [180] population was overwhelmingly "urban" in character. Two centuries later, little had changed. In 1750, for instance, 100 students from the archdiocese of Seville were registered at Seville's faculty of canon law. Owing to faulty population statistics, it is possible to determine the size of the home-town of only seventy-five of these students, but among them, sixty-seven, or 90 percent, came from towns with populations surpassing 5,000. ⁽⁶⁸⁾

Students at Castile's other universities were of similar geographical origins; city and town boys were numerous, whereas, village boys were relatively few. The towns, after all, harbored those families with sufficient wealth and interest to send their sons to university, while those living in the countryside -- poor, illiterate, backward, and immobile -- did not. Training in Latin, essential for university entrance, was also restricted. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ There were only a few grammar schools in the small villages and these were expensive [181] and available only to a few; higher education, therefore, was almost an impossibility except for those able to obtain sponsorship from an outside source. Boys living in the towns, on the other hand, had an opportunity to learn Latin and to qualify for university. And across the centuries this difference may help to explain the continuing political impotency of the rural areas of Spain. Country boys learned only literacy, if that, while city boys, partly as a result of their advanced education, were able to obtain positions of power and prestige.

Among the cities from which students hailed, Seville and, above all, Madrid, stood out. ⁽⁷⁰⁾ The wealth and dynamism of the former, the latter's position as capital and court, attracted to them families likely to seek a university education for their sons. Thus Madrid, lacking a university of its own, was able to provide those of Castile with more students than many whole provinces could muster. At the end of the seventeenth century, for example, Madrid had as many as 500 of its youths enrolled in universities each year, a figure approximately equal to 3 to 4 percent of its boys of university age⁽⁷¹⁾ and one that was well above the national mean for university attendance at that time. ⁽⁷²⁾ Together with other graduates who chose to make the capital their home, this reserve of university-educated manpower helps to explain why Madrid, the political core of the empire, the economic heart of New Castile, was also a capital of culture, the arbiter of Spain's artistic and literary tastes

On a regional basis, most of the university students in Castile came from the north and center of the peninsula, in particular, Asturias, the Basque provinces, León, Navarre, Old Castile, and the parts of New Castile surrounding Cuenca, Toledo, and Madrid. On the other hand, Extremadura and Andalucia, save for cities like Córdoba, Granada, and Seville, contributed relatively few students. ⁽⁷³⁾ This distribution should come as no surprise. In the sixteenth century, the former were wealthy, well-populated regions, well-stocked with Latin schools. Furthermore, and especially in comparison with the southern and western parts of the kingdom, they contained a relatively high concentration of hidalgo families, a group among whom university attendance was commonplace. It follows that thirteen of Castile's nineteen universities were situated in these same regions, while the hidalgo- and Latin-poor lands to the south supported only a few, none of which attained a size comparable to their northern counterparts. Clearly, [182] universities in Castile followed in the wake of privilege and of wealth, not to mention an abundance of primary and secondary schools.

Beyond age and geographical origins, very little can be known about the students at Castile's universities. There are some exceptions, but owing to the shortcomings of the matriculation registers, a systematic analysis of student backgrounds is next to impossible unless one were to search through local and parish records, an endeavor which could easily consume several lifetimes of labor. Nevertheless, a more impressionistic approach is still valuable.

The Nobility

As in England, the nobility of Castile in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries matriculated at universities in growing numbers, but to compare the experiences of the two countries is difficult. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ England had a small, easily recognizable aristocracy and a somewhat larger gentry class which together represented not more than 2 percent of the total population. In Castile nobles of one sort or another accounted for as many as 10 percent of the kingdom's inhabitants, that is, about 600,000 persons. So large is this group that it is often difficult to determine who was noble and who was not. By strict, legal definition, anyone who was not a clergyman and who did not pay direct taxes was a nobleman, but among those who could be classified as noble through this definition, the differences were huge. In the Basque provinces privileges granted to the local population by medieval kings exempted everyone from direct taxation; consequently, the entire population was "noble," including those who tilled the soil and practiced manual crafts technically prohibited for members of a privileged class whose major occupation was supposed to be war. Similarly, the kingdom of Navarre was awarded "noble" status, and throughout the north of Castile there were countless "nobles" who had little more than such status to their names.

Simple noblemen such as these were known as hidalgos, a term derived from those individuals who had been traditionally able to keep a horse and who had also participated in the Reconquista against the Moors. By the sixteenth century, however, hidalgo referred broadly to the poor, often landless, noblemen who constituted the bulk of Castile's "noble" class. In addition, there were six higher rankings of nobility of which only two, títulos and grandes, the equivalent of the English aristocracy, resembled a coherent, easily-definable group. In 1520 only sixty Castilian families boasted titles, although royal generosity in subsequent years quadrupled this number by 1641 . Likewise, grandee families, set apart from títulos by their greater wealth, prestige, and certain ceremonial privileges, were limited to twenty in 1520 by order of Charles V, but by 1707 their number [183] had passed one-hundred and the class was divided into three ranks so that grandees of ancient vintage could be distinguished from those of recent creation. ⁽⁷⁵⁾

The matriculation registers of the University of Salamanca make note of students with aristocratic backgrounds, but as these begin only in 1546, it is impossible to know how many sons of the aristocracy attended this university before that date. To be sure, the younger male offspring of Castile's titled houses who were destined for ecclesiastical careers had attended this and other universities since the Middle Ages, but it would have been unlikely for a young título or grandee who was preparing for a worldly career to attend university much before the opening of the sixteenth century. Then the university's acceptance of humanist studies helped to attract the aristocracy's interest, while the Catholic kings openly encouraged the sons of their courtiers to attend university by offering special subsidies. ⁽⁷⁶⁾ Writers of the time also mention the presence of young nobles at university during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel, but they could not have been very numerous. ⁽⁷⁷⁾ Even in the middle of the sixteenth century, there were only a few at the University of Salamanca (Table l6). ⁽⁷⁸⁾ Other, less renowned universities proved no more popular, and in total, it does not appear that more than 5 or 10 percent of the sons of Castile's aristocracy were registered at university at any given time. The others, like the commander of the Spanish Armada, the seventh Duke of Medina-Sidonia, were educated at home.

Among those members of the aristocracy who did attend university, many belonged to families who were in the habit of doing so generation after generation. Notable in this regard were the Dukes of Gandía, the Counts of Benavente, Monterrey, and Santisteban, and the Marquises of Cerralbo. Otherwise, university matriculation among the aristocracy was a chance affair, almost a whim. The Duke of Infantado sent a son to Salamanca in 1570, but never again did a scion of this famous house appear in this university's books. And the same is true for most of the other magnates; except for a handful of interested families, Spain's aristocracy had little use for the universities.

[184] One should note, however, that among those grandees and títulos who did matriculate, law was the favorite subject for study, although only a few went so far as to take a degree. ⁽⁷⁹⁾ The university provided them, on the other hand, with an opportunity to acquire a smattering of useful knowledge as well as a chance to have a good time before they assumed the responsibilities of inheritance, marriage, and the offices of state.

More numerous at the University of Salamanca, but with interests similar to those of the grandees, were the sons of caballeros and other important, though untitled, noble families (Table 16). Relatively common in the sixteenth century, their presence diminished in the next century, although the decline in their numbers is exaggerated by apparent flaws in the matriculation books. Sons of these families continued to enroll at Salamanca, particularly as members of the colegios mayores. ⁽⁸⁰⁾ But it does appear that many important noble families had altered their educational habits in the course of the seventeenth century, preferring to educate their children at home or in a local college rather than send them to the universities, notorious for their riotous and undisciplined student life.

Their lifestyle, moreover, was infectious. Other students, many of whom aped noble status, sought to acquire for themselves the fanciful trimmings and dress of their more privileged counterparts. The Royal Council reacted by demanding that students must wear only the prescribed academic gown and lead a modest, scholarly life Moreover, their "excessive spending" had to stop, and in 1606 the crown decreed that "students of every quality and condition are not permitted to have carriages, coaches, litters, mules, or horses." ⁽⁸²⁾ But violations of this ruling continued, and it had to be proclamated anew in 1608. ⁽⁸³⁾ Yet this decree and others like it, based on aged statutes and rules, were out of step with the times. Most students in the seventeenth century had little interest in the monkish regulations of the past. Aristocratic students, however few, had brought to the universities new standards of behavior and dress which students of lesser rank adopted for their very own.

With regard to teaching, on the other hand, the leading noblemen at university were practically without influence, except for the few who, as members of the colegios mayores, obtained professorial rank. Had it been otherwise one could imagine that the academic routine, already in decline by the seventeenth century, would have been further sacrificed to lightheadedness, [186] superficial learning, and play. As it was, the absence of the aristocracy from the teaching chairs helped to preserve in the university a professional milieu in which students interested in scholarship and others seeking letrado careers worked to obtain their degrees.

The Clergy

These students included the clergy, regular and secular. Among the latter those most in evidence were priests holding a cathedral office: a canonry, deanship, chaplaincy, etc. The University of Salamanca's registers listed seventeen of these dignitaries in 1546-47, although in the following years their numbers decreased. ⁽⁸⁴⁾ By 1600 it was rare to find more than one or two members of the cathedral clergy at the University in any year. Paradoxically, this disappearance suggests that the educational attainments of the priests who were entering the upper echelons of the Catholic hierarchy was on the rise, rather than the reverse. Before the Council of Trent (1545-63) many ecclesiastics received cathedral appointments and were subsequently sent to university to acquire academic titles and degrees. Then the church made degrees mandatory for members of the cathedral clergy, and this meant that clerics elected to canonries and other cathedral offices had to be graduates. It appears, therefore, that the decline in the number of church dignitaries studying at Salamanca in the course of the sixteenth century had something to do with improved standards of recruitment among the cathedral clergy in Castile, standards which were in part strengthened by the orders of the Council of Trent.

Whether similar improvements occurred in the training of the lesser clergy is difficult to ascertain. Ordinary priests, holders of benefices, and simple clerics ordinarily merited no special distinction in the matriculation books, consequently, it is impossible to know how many received university training. The universities of Seville and Valladolid made an effort to note the presence of a clérigo or presbítero among their students, but many went unnoticed. At Valladolid, for example, less than 12 percent of the students matriculating in 1570 were listed as clergymen, and at Seville the percentage was even less. ⁽⁸⁵⁾ Such figures are misleading, since they are certainly too low, but they do emphasize the overwhelmingly secular character of the student population at Castile's major universities in the sixteenth century. In Seville clerics preferred the Dominican University of Santo Tomás, and clerics elsewhere may have attended the convent-universities instead of larger, more expensive and more turbulent institutions. But in general the rank-and-file churchman was educated in a Jesuit college, cathedral school, or in a seminary, while only the intellectual elite of the [187] clergy -- bishops, canons, urban priests, etc. -- bothered to pursue advanced training at the university level. ⁽⁸⁶⁾ To understand this division in the education of Spain's churchmen is also to understand why the secular clergy made such a poor showing at Seville and Valladolid in the sixteenth century, although it would be wise to repeat that there were many more clerics at these universities than the matriculation books, rife with omissions during that epoch, reveal.

More in evidence and clearly noted as such were students who belonged to the regular clergy. ⁽⁸⁷⁾ At universities in which the religious orders had colleges of their own, the followers of each order matriculated en masse, usually in the faculties of arts and theology and, to a lesser degree, in medicine and canon law. The largest of the religious colleges attached to the universities was San Esteban at Salamanca, a Dominican house which at its peak counted well over 150 members. In addition, the University of Salamanca by the seventeenth century incorporated eighteen other religious colleges.

Nor was Salamanca's experience with the religious orders unique. In Alcalá de Henares and Valladolid the membership of the religious colleges incorporated within the universities grew sharply throughout the seventeenth century, reaching a peak around 1750. By then, the religious represented approximately 40 percent of the students registered at Valladolid ⁽⁸⁹⁾ and nearly as many at Alcalá. ⁽⁹⁰⁾

Increases in the number of religious studying at the universities between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries were matched by their appearance in university teaching posts (Table 12). Before the sixteenth century the convents surrounding the universities were independent institutions of learning. Correspondingly, the religious, either as teachers or students, occupied a relatively small place within the universities proper. But in subsequent years they adapted to the general demand for university degrees and began to matriculate on a regular basis. Those who earned degrees competed for and often obtained university chairs, with the result that instruction in the arts and theology fell increasingly under their sway, since secular scholars preferred the more lucrative teaching positions in the faculties of law. But the religious were also dedicated instructors, while the lay teachers, busy with promotions, appointments, and letrado careers, were not. This alone may help to explain why the regular clergy met with such success in the oposiciones for university chairs, although it is true that they were not above the bribery and corruption practiced by other graduates. ⁽⁹¹⁾

[189] The presence of the regular clergy as teachers within Castile's leading universities was also assured by a number of chairs especially reserved for members of particular orders. The first of these, created for the Dominicans in Salamanca's faculty of theology in 1605, was a gift from the Duke of Lerma who, a few years later, awarded this order a second chair. ⁽⁹²⁾ The Dominicans also acquired special chairs at Alcalá de Henares and Santiago de Compostela, while similar privileges were extended to the Augustinians, Benedictines, Franciscans, and Jesuits. ⁽⁹³⁾ Soon every major Spanish university had a number of chairs attached to one or more of the religious orders, since each was thought to deserve a special pulpit from which it could expound its particular version of philosophical and theological truth. With similar reasoning in mind, an administrative procedure known as the alternativa was instituted at a number of universities. In operation, for example, at Alcalá by 1673, it made certain that new instructors in the arts faculty alternated among the religious orders represented at that university. ⁽⁹⁴⁾ Consequently, nearly all of the teaching in the arts as well as that in theology was handed over to the regular clergy.

The infiltration of Castile's universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the religious orders stands in apparent contradiction to what is generally conceived to be a "secularization" of higher education in Europe after 1650 or 1700. In Castile, the tide flowed the other way. Overwhelmingly secular in the sixteenth century, the universities were "christianized" in the centuries that followed. This evolution, led by the Dominicans and Jesuits and aided by the inquisition, seems to have helped to keep new ideas in science and philosophy out of the curriculum at a time when universities in the north of Europe gradually absorbed the discoveries of Descartes, Galileo, Leibniz, and Newton. Castile's universities, bent on orthodoxy, protested loudly against any "perversion" of the traditional course. ⁽⁹⁵⁾

It would be wrong to attribute the intellectual torpor of these universities to the conservatism of the religious orders alone. The professorate's antipathy toward innovation and their general distaste for teaching are no doubt sufficient to explain why the universities of Castile failed to keep abreast of European ideas. But it is also true that curricular innovation in Castile only took place in the l770s and 1780s, that is, after the religious orders had all but abandoned the universities and the governance of these institutions had been assumed by "enlightened" reformers at the royal court. By 1800 the universities of Castile manifested a secular spirit. Akin [190] to their counterparts in the Golden Age, they again stood open to the intellectual currents of the world. It seems tempting, therefore, to speculate that the interim, a period of general stagnation and decay for the universities and an epoch in which the influence of the religious orders was at its height, brought about a severance of many of the links which the universities in the early sixteenth century had forged with the wider world. A popular, open, innovative spirit was superseded by another grounded upon tradition, orthodoxy, and resistance to experimentation and change. In this regard the universities only mirrored wider changes within Castile itself, but retrenchment and withdrawal were exactly what so many of Spain's religious, as teachers and students, so solemnly espoused. ⁽⁹⁶⁾

Manteistas and Colegiales

The remaining students at the universities, the vast majority by far, are little more to us than names. One can be sure that they were literate in the vernacular and had probably been introduced to the rules of Latin grammar; therefore, it can be presumed that they belonged to that minority of the population able to acquire such skills. Beyond this, however, the scanty information provided in the matriculation books reveals nothing about students' family backgrounds.

It was not expensive to register at a university in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Castile. A fee was required, but it was so small -- only four or five mrs. a year -- as to be well within the reach of most literate Castilians. ⁽⁹⁷⁾ Costs spiraled, however, when it came to living in a university town, or this is at least what surviving records of the pupilajes or licensed student lodgings at the University of Alcalá de Henares would indicate. ⁽⁹⁸⁾ These houses, subject to university jurisdiction, were inspected annually by officials who questioned lodgers about living conditions and costs and then challenged the pupilero, the head of the pupilaje, if any violations of university rules had occurred. The results of only two of these inspection tours [191] have survived; the first, dating from 1557, covers 24 pupilajes serving over 200 students -- all of whom studied the arts or grammar -- while the second, made in 1567, is more fragmented and involves only 5 pupilajes and 83 students. ⁽⁹⁹⁾ Nevertheless, together these reports are sufficient to paint a picture of what life for a university student in the sixteenth century was like. ⁽¹⁰⁰⁾

In the first place, the pupilajes were small. The largest belonged to a Master Segura who had twenty-eight students under his charge, the smallest were those of two masters named Peña with only four students apiece. The average pupilaje, however, housed between ten and fifteen students: small enough to allow the pupilero to conduct the weekly review sessions required by university rules, although complaints by students indicate that such classes did not always take place.

Fees in the pupilajes varied. In 1567 the cheapest was that run for six students of grammar by Francisco de Orillano, who charged 24 ducats for eight months. The most expensive, those of the masters Beltran, Espejo, Morales, and Segura, cost each student 60 ducats for the academic year, although lodgers who were accompanied by a servant paid up to 100 ducats each. But students accompanied by servants were rare; the majority came to university alone, and for them the average cost of a pupilaje was 40 to 50 ducats a year. ⁽¹⁰¹⁾

For such a sum each student was entitled to a bed, bed-clothes, food, soap, and candles for light, ⁽¹⁰²⁾ but students frequently claimed that the pupileros skimped on what university regulations required. They protested that the water in one house was "very dirty," that the sheets in another were "unclean," and in a third that the bread was "very bad and very black." Others grumbled about the insufficient quality and quantity of the meat provided at meals and about the lack of candles. In one instance a pupilero who was charged with having substituted oil lamps for candles defended himself, answering that candles would not last the six or seven [192] hours [sic] his students were accustomed to study each night. Other masters, criticized for charging different prices to individual students, replied that they had to charge more to those who wanted single rooms than those who shared doubles. Ambrosio de Morales defended his high prices on the grounds that he catered only for wealthy students. He tried to make clear that "It is well known that the students I have in my house are all distinguished gentlemen and from the principal families of the kingdom; consequently, they have to be treated well and presented with more amenities than the rest of the students." ⁽¹⁰³⁾ Others claimed they charged higher prices only to those students who learned Latin with difficulty, justifying this practice On the basis of the increased time that they had to spend with dull students in comparison to those who learned quickly. Furthermore, the masters were quick to cite inflation as the reason why they had raised prices above the levels the university had set.

Regardless of the merits or demerits of each pupilaje, it is clear that such lodgings were expensive and certainly beyond the means of all but a small proportion of families in sixteenth-century Castile. Therefore, it is safe to presume that the poorer classes of Castile contributed relatively few students to the universities, with the exception of those lucky enough to be a servant to a wealthy student, a familiar at a university college, ⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ a local resident, or the recipient of either church support or a college scholarship. For the majority of the poor, university was simply out of the question. These families, living at the edge of subsistence, were predominantly illiterate and ignorant of Latin, and, therefore, technically unable to qualify for university. Moreover, their immediate interests, necessities, and goals had little to do with universities and academic degrees. Thus to eliminate the 80 percent of Castile's population who worked on the land and in small shops and to concentrate on the 20 percent who are left is to place most of the universities' students within the proper social context. Although there were sharp differences of wealth and culture within this minority, these people represented the literate members of society, a portion of whom had also been trained in Latin. Here was centered most of Castile's wealth in the form of land ownership, banking, finance, commerce, and offices. Here were the families of sufficient means, interest, and ambition to launch their sons into professional and office-holding careers and into the upper ranks of the church, occupations which required a nurnber of years at university, if not a degree. And here too were those families sufficiently well-placed that a university education could serve as an informative and pleasurable preface for their sons' adult years. To recognize these limitations is to understand that the universities lived by means of an extremely limited clientele.

[193] This minority encompassed the nobility, above all the large hidalgo class interested in improving their fortunes through crown offices and the church, officers in government and in the military, members of the liberal professions, and Castile's small but wealthy merchant class. Among the latter, the family of Diego de Espinosa, an early sixteenth-century merchant who emigrated to the New World, may be typical. ⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ While many of his sons, grandsons, and nephews entered into the world of business and commercial enterprise, others entered the university in order to qualify for offices and the liberal professions. They in turn sent their offspring to university in order to prepare them for careers similar to their own. Along with the wealthier members of the artisan class, these were the families who provided the bulk of the university students in Castile.

In sum, the university lived off the top, if not the peak, of Castilian society, and its fortunes rested largely with their changing educational tastes. The popular classes were far more concerned with food and survival than with higher education. For these people, the university was often no more than a prospective employer, a landowner, a tax-collector, an official who claimed to buy wheat, wine, and meat free of tax. It was also a monumental stone building, an imposing array of stately gentlemen in long black gowns parading through the streets, a bunch of rich and rowdy young nobles carousing late into the night. Otherwise, the university was generally aloof from their world and its goals.

The exceptions were those members of the popular classes who, thanks to a college scholarship, managed to attend university and benefit from the opportunities conferred by its degrees. Every Castilian university had a number of colleges, each with its own rules and statutes but which shared a common charitable goal. By imposing a limit on the private income their members could enjoy (a figure which rarely exceeded 40 to 50 ducats a year) the founders of these communities had hoped to allow sons of families who could not otherwise meet the costs of higher education to attend university. Outside of the church, therefore, the colleges were the only organized source of financial aid available for students of modest means and thereby provided a few students of humble origin access to elite jobs and positions that they could otherwise never have hoped to reach.

In practice, however, the colleges never lived up to these exalted goals. Like the colegios mayores, their limitations on income were open to increasingly generous interpretation, especially during periods of financial difficulty when the colleges' survival depended on their ability to attract rich boys. Furthermore, the rents promised by the college founders frequently fell short, and the fiscal problems that resulted allowed only a few of the colleges to attain their statutory size. Matters grew worse during the financially disastrous years of the seventeenth century. By then, a number [194] of the university colleges had folded, while others struggled along with no more than two or three students apiece. The charitable intentions of the founders, in other words, had been frustrated by a combination of economic circumstances and statutory abuse, and this situation further restricted the opportunities for the "poor" to attend universities in Castile.

The experience of the University of Salamanca demonstrates how difficult the colleges' position became. Ostensibly, Salamanca allotted to the "poor" the largest number of scholarship places in all of Castile. In addition to the religious colleges, the colegios mayores, and those of the Military Orders, this university early in the seventeenth century incorporated approximately twenty colleges known commonly as colegios menores. ⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ They differed from the colegios mayores in that they admitted students of grammar and undergraduates, and they differed from one another in terms of their entrance requirements. ⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ Most were small -- less than ten places each -- but taken together with the colegios mayores these scholarship students formed a sizable proportion of Salamanca's students (Fig. 6).

Between 1550 and the opening of the eighteenth century, the number of college students was on the rise, but this increase belies the fact that the majority of the colegios menores were in financial straits which forced them to reduce either the number or value of their scholarships. Indeed, the increase in the collegiate population at this university can largely be accounted for by the colleges' willingness to accept fee-paying huéspedes and porcionistas whose contributions helped to defray mounting debts. The problems faced by Salamanca's oldest college, Pan y Carbón, were not atypical. After a relatively prosperous period in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the college, despite the presence of pensioners paying 80 ducats a year, closed its doors in 1628 because of diminishing revenues. It reopened in 1650, but within a few years, Pan y Carbón attempted to unite with other colleges in an effort to stay alive. ⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ The Colegio de la Concepción de Teólogos, established in 1608, was in more serious trouble. It closed down permanently in 1665, while Santa Catalina, created in 1594, left the university's records in 1652, although it was not officially disbanded until 1780. ⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ A number of other colegios menores, faced with a financial pinch and a lack of scholarships, amalgamated, pooling students and rents. The first of these unions took place in 1624 when Santa Cruz de Cañizares merged with San Adrian. ⁽¹¹⁰⁾ Encouraged by the Royal Council which regarded the existence of these small, impoverished colleges as useless, the [195] process of union continued into the eighteenth century, when six of the colegios menores banded together because of their mutual problems. ⁽¹¹¹⁾ Amalgamation, however, was not sufficient to rescue them from their plight; in 1780 the surviving colegios menores at Salamanca were suppressed and what rents, goods, and buildings they possessed were put toward the establishment of a seminary for the church. ⁽¹¹²⁾

So even though the proportion of college students at Salamanca increased sharply between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, this rise cannot be interpreted as an increase in the number of "poor" students at the university. The financial difficulties of the colleges ensured their takeover by students whose incomes far exceeded the limits imposed at the time of their creation. Aided by Castile's economic decline and a widely felt unwillingness to allow the "poor" access to Latin education, the exclusion of students of modest origins from the colleges meant that the number of students who could be truly said to qualify as paupers probably diminished at Salamanca at this same time.

Meanwhile, students of noble background were siphoned off into the privileged colegios mayores, leaving the universities to the religious and the preprofessionals seeking letrado careers. Cloistered behind college walls, these students were hard-working and industrious, little given to raucous violence and play. The open street brawls and the "wars of the nations," the last of which occurred in the 1640s and 1650s, became a thing of the past. Concurrently, change in the curriculum came to a halt. During an era of economic decline and an uncertain labor market, these job-seekers, as students and teachers, were content to leave things as they were, to satisfy the requirements of a program sanctioned by time in the hope that perseverance would bring its just rewards. Thus the universities of Castile in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries lost their flexibility and with it their ability to adapt to changing conditions, to a changing world. In time this inelasticity contributed to the institution's ultimate decay.

1. On Vitoria's teaching and pedagogy at Spanish universities in the sixteenth century in general, see Demetrio Eparraguirre, "Quelques Aspects De L'Enseignement Dans Les Universités Espagnoles A L'Epoque De La Renaissance," in Pedagogues et Juristes (Paris, 1963), pp. 72-85.

2. S. Cabeza de León, Historia de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (Santiago de Compostela, 1945), 1: 430.

3. Typical of such instruction was a special class on the writings of Hippocrates offered in 1626 at the University of Seville by Diego Matheo Capino, a medical student; cf. AUSA, lib. 862, folio 72. See also Cabeza de León, Universidad de Santiago, 1: 329-30. Not all "extraordinary" instruction, however, stuck to the regular curriculum. The University of Alcalá de Henares, for instance, admitted in the mid-seventeenth century that Roman Law, a subject which was not officially taught at the university until the l660s, had for many years been offered in an "extraordinary" fashion; cf. AHN: Univ., lib. 1222 F, folio 234.

4. See p. 191.

5. The University of Salamanca, for example, complained in 1593 and again in 1601 about the instruction offered by the Benedictine, Dominican, and Jesuit colleges of that city; cf. Esperabé Artega, Historia Pragmática é Interna de la Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca, 1914), 1: 610, 648.

6. See Montells y Nadal, Historia de la Universidad de Granada (Granada, 1870), 1: p. 117. This privilege was originally granted in 1571.

7. Ibid., p. 118.

8. Ibid., pp. 120, 122, 152.

9. Ibid., p. 196. The University of Santiago used the same phrase in 1694 when it referred to the effects upon the university of the instruction in the liberal arts that was offered by the Jesuit and Dominican colleges of the city; cf. AUSC: lib. A 126, folio 3v.

10. AUV: lib. D 6, no. 9.

11. Ajo y Sainz de Zúñiga, Historia de las Universidades Hispánicas (8 vols., Madrid, 1957-72), 5: 47-49.

12. See L. Pereña Vicente, La Universidad de Salamanca, Forja del Pensamiento Político Español en el Siglo XVI (Salamanca, 1954).

13. See M. Grice-Hutchinson, The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory (Oxford, 1962), and Pierre Vilar, "Les Primitifs espagnols de la pensée economique. Quantitatavisme et bullionisme," Mélanges Marcel Bataillon (special number of the Bulletin Hispanique, 1962): 261-84.

14. The teaching of the liberal arts at Spain's universities is described in A.F.G. Bell, Luis de León (A Study of the Spanish Renaissance) (Oxford, 1925). More specialized is José Lopez Rueda, Helenistas Españoles del Siglo XVI (Madrid, 1973) which examines the study and teaching of Greek.

15. The top positions were the Prima and Vísperas professorships, so named because the former met in the morning, the latter in the late afternoon.

16. The number of these lower chairs varied from university to university. Salamanca had close to sixty, while Baeza, Oñate, and Osuna had no more than one or two. Each was named after the subject matter upon which the reader was supposed to lecture. The chair of Instituto in the law faculty, for example, dealt with Justinian's Institutes; Biblia in the theology faculty concentrated upon the Holy Book, etc.

17. Requests from the readers of these chairs that their positions be "perpetual" were usually denied; see Cabeza de León, Universidad de Santiago, 2: 367.

18. Cortes de Madrid, 1528, pet. 49. The President ofthe Royal Council took a similar stand in 1648. For his comments, see BM: Add. 24,947. folio 101-02.

19. See Collección Universal de Todas las Reales Ordenes que para el Régimen del Estudio General de la Real Universidad de Valladolid se ha Servido Cominicar... en... el... Reynado de... el Señor Carlos III Hasta el Presente Julio de 1771 (Valladolid, 1771), pp. 183-85.

20. In 1739, the Prima professor of canon law at Salamanca earned over 650,000 mrs., a very substantial salary indeed. Cited in Addy, The Enlightenment in the University of Salamanca (Durham, 1966), p. 24.

21. Bennassar, Valladolid au Siècle d'Or (Paris, 1967), p. 359.

22. Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, 2: 824. One reason for the elevated price of university degrees was the guild-like nature of the university teaching staff. A degree, especially the doctorate, was much less of a test of one's knowledge than an entrance card into the professors' guild. Membership entailed special privileges: ceremonial precedence, a share in university revenues and graduation fees, and access to important letrado offices. And it was precisely because of these privileges that the costs of advanced university degrees rose quickly in the seventeenth century, since the professors' sought to keep their guild as small and restricted as possible in order that every member could reap the maximum benefits.

23. Frequently, new instructors petitioned the university for loans and advances in pay in order to meet the cost of the required degrees. For example, Baltasar de Céspedes, appointed Prima professor of grammar at Salamanca in 1597, asked the university shortly thereafter for a loan of 400 ducats so that he could pay for the license and doctorate he needed to keep his post; cf. Andrés, El Maestro Baltasar de Céspedes y su Discurso de las Letras Humanas (El Escorial, 1965), pp. 80-81. For a similar request, see AHN: Univs., leg. 48; Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, 2: 816-17, 884.

24. Ibid., vol. I, statutes of 1567.

25. As an example, see that posted by the University of Santiago in Valladolid: AUV: lib. 514, "Edicto de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1647."

26. AUG: leg. 1462, letter of 29.VII.1627. See also AHN: Univ., leg. 42, letters of 19.V.1691, 16.IX.l708.

27. There were exceptions, however. At Seville the students were empowered to select every teacher except those competing for the Prima professorships in theology and canon law. These were entrusted to the College of Santa Maria de Jesús. At Salamanca, the regencias in grammar and certain minor chairs in the arts faculty -- astrology, music, and oriental languages -- were specifically designed to be beyond student control; cf. AUS: leg. 2109, carpeta 3, folio 15.

28. The University of Santiago de Compostela was obliged in 1594 to order that all students studying at the university have their names inscribed in the matriculation book promptly at the beginning of each academic year. See Cabeza de León, Universidad de Santiago, 2: 506.

29. Manuel Sagado, a student at Salamanca's college of Pan y Carbón, never matriculated officially at the university; cf. Nogaledo Alvarez, El Colegio Menor de 'Pan y Carbón,' primero de los antiguos Colegios Seculares de Salamanca, 1386-1780 (Salamanca, 1958), p. 92.

30. Cabeza de León, Universidad de Salamanca, 3: 507.

31. BM: Eg. 439, folio 164v.

32. The famous Augustinian friar, Luís de León, leveled this very charge against the Dominicans at Salamanca in 1565. See Gregorio de Santiago Vela, Ensayo de una Biblioteca Ibero-Americano de la Orden de San Agustín... (Madrid, 1917), 3: 425.

33. In a related situation a Master Juan García, opositor to a chair in the arts faculty at Alcalá in 1583, was known to have "by himself and through third persons bribed some of the Votes." An investigation revealed that he had promised to "students and friends from his land and nation" good marks in their examinations if they voted for him. García was subsequently ousted from the competition and stripped of his university degrees. See AHN: Univ., leg. 43, folio 22.

34. AUS: lib. 955 lists the results of a number of these contests.

35. AHN: Cons., leg. 7138, letter of l8.VIII.1632. The following year the Royal Council threatened to have excommunicated any opositor found to have purchased student votes (AHN: Univs., leg. 43, folio 79). Bribery had long been a common tactic in these elections. As early as 1419, investigations revealed that sums up to 50,000 mrs. had been distributed in the name of a single opositor; cf. Riesco Terrero, Proyección Histórico-Social de la Universidad de Salamanca a Través de Sus Colegios (Salamanca, 1970), p. 103. See also pp. 138-39.

36. This estimate is based upon my own lists of officials on Castile's councils and tribunals.

37. See Alcocer Martínez, Historia de la Universidad de Valladolid (6 vols., Madrid, 1918-31), vol. 3.

38. Canon and civil law at Salamanca during these centuries gave rise to sixteen jubilados, eight apiece. Gonzalo Gomez de Villasmedina, Prima professor of canon law from 1481 to 1532, had the longest teaching career.

39. Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, 2: 285, 436.

40. As examples, see ibid., 1: 790, 802.

41. This point has also been made by Addy, Enlightenment at Salamanca, pp. 22-23. Figures he publishes demonstrate the sharp decline in the average stay of instructors at the University of Salamanca between 1650 and 1750. He notes, for example, that the average tenure of the Prima professors of canon law dropped from twelve years in the period 1650-1700 to a little more than four years in the succeeding half century.

42. Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, 2: 436.

43. See Alcocer Martínez, Universidad de Valladolid, vol. 3.

44. AGS: GJ. leg. 943.

45. The earliest and, incidentally, the most objective of these are published in Antonio de la Torre, "La Universidad de Alcalá. Estado de la Enseñanza, según las Visitas de Catédras de 1524-25 a 1527-28," Homenaje ofrecido a Menéndez Pidal (Madrid, 1925), 3: 360-78. Later ones for this university can be found in Juan Urriza, La Preclara Facultad de Artes y Filosofía de la Universidad de Alcalá de Henares (Madrid, 1942), pp. 123 ff. See also AUSA: lib. 939; AUSC: lib. A 115; AUS: lib. 940-41; and Cabeza de León, Universidad de Santiago, 1: 427, 431.

46. La Torre, "Universidad de Alcalá."

47. A report sent to the Royal Council in 1610 about the work of Granada's professors states: "there has been so much neglect in teaching that some [instructors] have not read two lessons in two years" (AHN: Libros de Iglesia, no. 8, folio 3). See also Montells y Nadal, Universidad de Granada, pp. 86, 104, 106, 118, 159, 167, 201 , 211 , and 252. Teaching problems at Santiago are noted in AUSC: lib. A 36, folio 38 if., visitas of 1600 and 1611, and Cabeza de León, Universidad de Santiago, I : 348; 2: 392, 449. For other universities, see AUSA: lib. 862, folio 78; AHP Toledo: lib. 1/429, folios 80, 99v.

48. AUS: Ms. 1925, letter of 2.X.1638.

49. Ibid.

50. AUV: lib. D-6, no.2.

51. Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, 1 : 767; AUV: lib. D-6, no. 8; BM: Add. 24,947, folio 103. See also AHN: Cons., leg. 7138, "Arbitrio y Discurso del Modo que puede aver para remediar la facultad de Artes en la Universidad de Salamanca," 17.III.1648. This report noted that "all the troubles in this faculty stem from those instructors who enter its chairs but fail to remain in them. Among the opositores there are none willing to read a three-year course, only those wishing to leave the chairs for oposiciones, canonries, or parishes as soon as they can." Furthermore, "for the major part of the year the chairs are left completely unread because the professors leave their chairs deserted when they go to the oposiciones."

52. AHN: Cons., leg. 7138, "Impreso memorial de la Universidad de Salamanca...," 1694.

53. AHN: Univs., leg. 49.

54. AHN: Univs., lib. 417 F illustrates this problem at the University of Alcalá de Henares in the late seventeenth century.

55. AUS: Ms. 939, folio 135.

56. AHN: Cons., leg. 13494, consulta of 4.II.1627.

57. The Cámara did make one isolated gesture at correcting the universities' teaching woes. This occurred in 1648 when it recommended that Toribio de Santos Risoba, a student in the Colegio Mayor de Oviedo and a substitute instructor at Salamanca, be named to a tribunal post so that his position could be filled "in property," that is, on a life-tenured basis (AHN: Cons. leg. 13494, consulta of 11.II.1623). One must suspect the true motives of the Cámara, however. In this case it probably acted in the best interests of Santos, the dull nephew of a former President of Castile, rather than in those of the university.

58. The diocese of Salamanca, one-third of whose revenues supported the university, lost over 40 percent of its recorded laborers in the first two decades of the seventeenth century the result may have been a drop in university revenues, and consequently, in professorial incomes. Records of this nature, however, do not exist. See Domínguez Ortiz, La Sociedad Espailola en el Siglo XVII (Madrid, 1963, 1970), 1 : 119.

59. Cortes of Madrid, 1627, p. 334.

60. See AGS: CJ. leg. 942, cédula of 12.X.l650; AHN: Cons., leg. 7138, cédula of 24.IX.1656; AUV: lib. 1, no. 10, cédula of 25.II.1685.

61. Available matriculation registers for Castile's universities are listed in appendix II.

62. See appendix B.

63. See below, p. 178.

64. It has recently been asserted that one of the reasons why students at medieval universities in the south of Europe gained so much power was their relative maturity; cf. Cobban, "Medieval Student Power," Past & Present 53 (1971): 28-66.

65. See below, p. 227.

66. "Intellectuals" during the Habsburg era were also products of the towns; cf. Juan J. Linz, "Intellectual Roles in 16th and 17th Century Spain," Daedalus (Summer, 1972): 70-74.

67. AUSA Libros de Matrículas. There were 275 students from the archdiocese of Seville registered at the university that year. Similar distributions were recorded in 1610 and 1660.

68. Ibid. Six students (8 percent) came from towns with a population between 2,500 and 5,000; two from communities with 500 to 2,500 inhabitants; and none from villages with a population under 500.

69. See p. 48.

70. Again, this is comparable to the geographical origins of Spain's "intellectuals"; cf. Linz, "Intellectual Roles," pp. 73-74.

71. For the mathematics involved in this estimate, see chap. IX, note 13. I have put the capital's population at approximately 150,000.

72. This was approximately 2.5 percent.

73. This distribution differs from the regional distribution of "intellectuals" in that relatively few of the former were from the south, while few of the latter were from the far north. However, the center of the kingdom (i.e., Old Castile) was well-represented in both groups.

74. See Lawrence Stone, "The Educational Revolution in England, 1560 to 1640," Past & Present 28 (1964): 41-80.

75. On Spain's nobility, see Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad Española, I : 209-22.

76. The crown, for example, granted 100,000 mrs. a year to the sons of the Court of Haro "who are studying at Salamanca" in 1498, 1499, and 1500. Previously, they had awarded 30,000 mrs. to two sons of the royal councillor, Doctor de Madrigal, "so that they could remain at university." Cited in M.A. Ladero Quesada, "La Hacienda Castellana de los Reyes Católicos (1493-1504)," Moneda y Credito 103 (1967): 99, 107-08; 110.

77. Known to be university students at this time were sons of the Duke of Alba, the Count of Paredes, and Pedro Fernandez de Velasco, who subsequently became Condestable de Castilla; see Antonio Gil y Zarate, De la Instrucción Pública en España (Madrid, 1855), p. 10.

78. The first members of this class recorded in Salamanca's matriculation books were Alonso de Fonseca, son ofthe Count ofToledo, and Sancho de Avila y Toledo, son ofthe Marquis of Velada. Both were enrolled in grammar in the year 1555-56. See AUS: Libros de Matrículas, 1555-56.

79. One who did was Juan de Mendoza, son of the Duke of Infantazgo, who was a bachiller in canon law in 1570. The other aristocratic students who earned degrees were primarily those belonging to the colegios mayores; see p. 128.

80. As colegiales, they would not appear in the special section of the matriculation books reserved for nobles and dignitaries.

81. See J. García Mercadal, Estudiantes, Sopistas, y Pícaros (Madrid, 1934), p. 116.

82. Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, 1: 673.

83. Ibid., p. 762.

84. These clergymen are listed along with nobles in the "Nobles, Generosos, y Dignidades" section of Salamanca's matriculation books.

85. In 1570 clergymen at the University of Seville accounted for 4 percent of the 244 matriculants. In 1599 they represented 5.3 percent of the students (14 of 299).

86. On this point see Domínguez Ortiz, Sociedad Española, 2: 11.

87. They are noted in the matriculation registers by the Fray or Fr. preceding their names.

88. In comparison, the University of Valladolid incorporated fewer than ten religious colleges, the largest of which was the Dominican college of San Pablo. Alcalá had six religious colleges, while Granada and Santiago each had two or three.

89. The students belonging to Valladolid's religious colleges numbered 234 in 1755, of whom 161 were members of the College of San Pablo.

90. In 1750 the religious colleges at Alcalá enrolled 182 students, that is, approximately one-fourth of all the students at Alcalá.

91. In 1608, for example, "the corrupt voting practices of the religious" were criticized; see AUS: lib. 2109, folio 5v. Apparently, each order arranged to have its members vote as a solid bloc for their particular candidate, a procedure which was in violation of university rules.

92. Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, 1: 659, 667-68.

93. At Salamanca the Jesuits received a chair of theology in 1665, the Franciscans in 1734; cf. ibid., 1: 822, 899.

94. Ibid., 1 : 873; Addy, Enlightenment in Salamanca, p. 21; and AGS: GJ, leg. 941 , "Relacion del turno...."

95. Typical was the University of Seville's complaint about new Dutch and English ideas "perverting" Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Galen; see Ajo, Universidades, 5: 235.

96. In this perspective, the contribution of the Benedictine friar Benito Jerónimo Feijóo (1676-1764) at the University of Oviedo is indeed remarkable. Speaking out for the need to reform the universities and to modernize their curriculum at a time when the intellectually conservative religious orders were gaining in strength, Feijóo stood alone. Perhaps this is the reason why his ideas had little influence until he was nearing his death. For Feijóo's contribution, see Gaspard Delpy, L'Espagne et l'Esprit Européen, l'Oeuvre de Feyóo (Paris, 1936); Ramón Cañal, "Feijóo, hombre de la Ilustración," Revista de Occidente 2 (December 1964): 312-24; and the collective work, Feyóo y Su Siglo (Oviedo, 1961). Addy, Enlightenment in Salamanca, pp. xiv, 104-05, also discusses his contributions.

97. Santiago charged four mrs. a year (cf. Cabeza de León, Universidad de Santiago, 3: 65), while Salamanca, according to its statutes of 1561, declared that students of grammar must pay 3 mrs., ordinary students 5, graduates 7, and nobles 17 (Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, 1: 311).

98. What proportion of this university's students lived in such dwellings as opposed to private houses, colleges, and rented rooms is unknown. Presumably, the pupilajes catered for quite a substantial number.

99. For the first, see AHN: Univs., leg. 65, no. 18. The second can be found in the ACM: leg. 3, no. 1.

100. For a literary picture of university life, the picaresque novels are excellent, especially Mateo Aleman, Guzman de Alfarache (1 599), Francisco de Quevedo, La Vida del Buscón (1626; written ca. 1604), Jerónimo de Alcalá, Yañez y Rivera, El Donado Hablador o Alonso Mozo de Muchos Anos (1625), and the Novelas Exemplares of Cervantes, particularly "El Licenciado Vidriera" and "Colloquio de los Perros." Also interesting are García Mercadal, Estudiantes, Sopistas, y Pícaros; Reynier, La Vie Universitaire dans L'Ancienne Espagne (Paris, 1902); and Marcellin Defourneaux, Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age, trans. Newton Branch (New York, 1971), chap. 9.

101. These prices are comparable to the forty ducats which the University of Salamanca, in its statutes of 1561, allowed its pupileros to charge; cf. Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, 1: 552. Ten years later, prices of pupilajes in Alcalá had not changed very much. In 1567, for example, Master Segura collected 100 ducats a year from students who were accompanied by a servant. In 1577 the charge was only ten ducats more.

102. A pupilero in Salamanca was required to provide each of its students with one pound of meat daily except on Friday, fish day, although servants of students were entitled only to a half portion. In addition, regulations called for a good bed, two clean sheets weekly, and a three-hour candle daily. See Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, 1: 552.

103. AHN Univs., leg. 65, no. 18.

104. A familiar was a student, akin to a sizar at Cambridge, who worked as a house servant in a college.

105. See Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Les Espinosa, une famille d'hommes d'affaires en Espagne at aux Indies a l'époque de la colonisation (Paris, 1968).

106. See Sala Balust, Constituciones, Estatutos, y Ceremonias de los Antiguos Colegios Seculares de la Universidad de Salamanca (4 vols., Madrid, 1962-66), 1: Introduction; Riesco Terrero, Salamanca a Través de Sus Colegios, p. 14.

107. See p. 66.

108. See Nogaledo Alvarez, Pan y Carbón, pp. 44, 72.

109. See Sala Balust, Constituciones, 1: 27; Francisco Borraz Girona, El Colegio de Santa Catalina de la Universidad de Salamanca, 1594-1780 (Salamanca, 1962).

110. Sala Balust, Constituciones, 1: 25.

111. Ibid., vol. 1: 32. In 1713 the colleges of Pan y Carbón, Monte Olivete, Santa María de los Angeles, Santa Cruz de Cañizares, San Millán, and Santo Tomás united.

112. See Nogaledo Alvarez, Pan y Carbón, p. 75.