[196] In recent years the analysis of student matriculations across a given period of time has become a convenient means of assessing the changing place and importance of schools and universities in the societies of which they were part. Traditionally, however, the success and the failure, the prosperity and the decline of academic institutions were linked more often than not to the reputation of famous teachers, curricular reform, pedagogical innovation, and the like. Though not without value, such methods have many pitfalls, the deepest of which is measuring the performance of a school or university in the past with the pedagogical yardstick of the present. But rather than criticize the many educational histories which have been written in this fashion, the aim of this chapter is to begin where these studies leave off. Its purpose is, therefore, to examine changes in the pace and nature of student matriculations at Castile's universities between 1500 and 1808. Though not without dangers of its own, in particular that of the reliability of the materials upon which the statistics are based, ⁽¹⁾ there is perhaps no better nor more accurate method of measuring how past societies put their institutions of learning to use.

Fortunately, matriculation registers for the universities have survived, occasionally in long, unbroken series, but rarely do they begin much before the middle of the sixteenth century. ⁽²⁾ Any attempt to estimate student population before that time is fraught with difficulty. Medieval chroniclers provide vague reports about various universities, noting that there were "many students" at Salamanca or a "great crowd of students" assembled to hear a lecturer speak, but in the main these descriptions are not of very much use. One of the first reporters to give a numerical estimate of the number of students at a university was Jerónimo Münzer. A German traveling through Spain in 1494, he put the number of students studying at Salamanca at 5,000. ⁽³⁾ Though exaggerated, his report may serve as evidence that this university had attained a considerable size by the end of the fifteenth century. It would also be reasonable to assume that after a depressed period during the civil wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, [197] matriculations were on the rise during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel. This expansion, moreover, was still underway in the middle of the sixteenth century when the first matriculation registers appear. Though some form of matriculation records had undoubtedly existed before that time, the swelling student population seems to have forced the universities to take record-keeping more seriously than in the past.

Ranged behind these larger institutions were a number of medium-sized universities, most of which were located in the south. Baeza supported a total of 600 students a year (Fig. 7), and this figure was probably matched and possibly exceeded by the universities at Granada, Osuna, and Seville (Fig. 7). Incomplete matriculation records for this period, however, do not allow for an exact indication of their size. At bottom were small universities such as Sigüenza, suffering from the competition of nearby Alcalá, which never attracted more than 100 students, ⁽⁷⁾ and Avila which had enrolled even fewer (Fig. 7). In similar straits were Almagro, Burgo de Osma, Irache, and Oñate, although in the latter in some years there were 300 students. ⁽⁸⁾

The severe plague of 1596-1602, particularly devastating in the north of the peninsula, ⁽⁹⁾ kept students away from university towns for a number of years and cut short the century-long rise in matriculations. But most of the universities recovered quickly, and by 1620 student populations neared their previous record levels (Fig. 7). The resilience of the universities in the years following the plague is best attributed to the relatively high social rank of their students. They came from among Castile's more prosperous families, groups normally removed from the worst ravages of plague, famine, and disease. Otherwise, one would have expected that a severe demographic crisis, such as this plague, a period of low birth rates, should be followed by a negative response in university matriculations fifteen to twenty years later. One would be unwise, therefore, to attribute changes in matriculations to population trends alone; ⁽¹⁰⁾ in many instances the two [199] curves show little or no relation to one another, or how else could one explain the later seventeenth century, a period in which matriculations at the universities were falling rapidly but the population of Castile was stable.

Despite the flaws and shortcomings of the matriculation registers, it appears that Castile's universities at their peak during the last quarter of the sixteenth century supported as many as 20,000 students annually (Fig. 8). Inadequate population figures for the era make it difficult to know what proportion of Castile's youth of university age this figure represented. But with some statistical reservations one can estimate that in Castile, with a population of 6.9 million and a student population of 20,000, about 3.2 percent of its males aged fifteen to twenty-four attended university each year. ⁽¹¹⁾ It is important to note, however, that since these students stemmed largely from Castile's populous hidalgo class, perhaps as many as one-fourth to one-third of the kingdom's young noblemen attended university. Such estimates, crude though they may be, suggest that Castile in the later sixteenth century ranked among Europe's most highly educated nations, a position which in part accounted for her cultural florescence as well as her ability to create and to staff a bureaucratic empire which stretched around the world.

Lawrence Stone has estimated that in seventeenth-century England, approximately 2.5 percent of seventeen-year-olds entered university each year. ⁽¹²⁾ To compare this figure with Castile's statistics is troublesome, first because Spanish matriculation books are usually arranged so that it is [200] difficult to know what proportion of the university's total matriculants constituted new, first-year boys. Second, the entrance age of Castilian students varied widely from faculty to faculty, although the mean age in the sixteenth century was in the neighborhood of eighteen. If we allow for these differences and remove the students of grammar from Castilian university matriculations in order to improve the bases of comparison between the two nations, Castile in the last decades of the sixteenth century is left with a university population of about 15,000. Of these, approximately one-quarter were newcomers, and such a figure would allow us to estimate that at least 5.43 percent of male eighteen-year-olds entered university each year. ⁽¹³⁾ If this figure is correct, ⁽¹⁴⁾ then Castile was far, far ahead of England in terms of access to university and, even though similar estimates do not yet exist for other nations, Castile was possibly the most educated society in Western Europe at that time.

[201] If students were numerous, graduates were relatively few. In the late sixteenth century less than one-third of the students who began their course took a degree, and in the succeeding decades, the proportion dropped. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Mistaken aptitude and the high cost of living in university towns were mostly to blame for this high rate of attrition, inasmuch as preliminary examinations to weed out weaker students did not exist. If a student lasted beyond his first or second year, chances were good that he would earn a degree, since very few ever failed the final examination. But the early years of study had exacted a heavy toll, so even at their peak, Castile's universities never awarded more than 1,200 baccalaurea in one year. ⁽¹⁶⁾ Assuming that the average age of these students was twenty-two, this meant that less than 1.73 percent of males at this age had earned a university degree. ⁽¹⁷⁾

Of these, only a handful managed to obtain one of the advanced degrees of master, licence, and doctor. One reason for this was cost. At the smaller universities a licence or doctorate in one of the professional faculties demanded an expenditure of as much as 500 or 600 reales, owing to the fees and gifts, banquets and parades that the successful candidate was required to provide. Similar titles at Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid cost many times more. ⁽¹⁸⁾ Indeed, so onerous were these charges that by the later sixteenth century requests for university loans to help defray the costs of graduation were commonplace. ⁽¹⁹⁾ And aside from students who were clergymen and members of the colegios mayores, all of whom [202] graduated at a bargain rate, the cost of advanced degrees may have presented an obstacle that was difficult to overcome.

Another reason for the scarcity of advanced degrees was time. If a baccalaureate required three to four years, a doctorate demanded a minimum of seven or eight. There were only a few students willing and able to persevere in the hope of achieving the prestige and opportunities such a degree could bring. Thus the law faculty of the University of Salamanca at the end of the sixteenth century graduated as many as 400 bachilleres each year, but conferred fewer than twenty advanced degrees in the same period of time. ⁽²⁰⁾ In total, Castile's universities never turned out more than 150 to 175 licentiates and perhaps 50 to 60 doctors annually, the majority of whom were in the arts faculty where these honors were both cheaper and easier to obtain than in medicine, theology, or law. ⁽²¹⁾ In other words, out of a university population which numbered in the thousands, only a small percentage of students became fully-licensed professionals, with the privilege of putting the valued abbreviation Lic. or Doc. before their name. Yet it was this small group who staffed Castile's cathedrals, law courts, and councils and who, in these positions, directed much of the administrative and religious policy of the empire, while shaping the education of the kingdom's young.

Total matriculation and graduation figures, however valuable, do not tell very much about the character of the universities themselves. Thanks to the geographical information provided about students in the matriculation registers, it is clear that except for Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid, each of which attracted students from across the peninsula and even from abroad, Castile's universities drew the vast majority of their students from the regions in which they were situated. Small universities, Avila or Baeza for instance, attracted students only from the university town itself and one or two others located nearby. Other universities, like Santiago de Compostela, Granada, or Seville, had a more regional pull. The first served Galicia and the Cantabrian coast; the latter, Andalucia. Seville took its students mainly from the west of that region, Granada from the east, although the former, located in a busy, cosmopolitan port city, also attracted a number of students from the Canary Islands and the center of Castile.

The major reason for the local and regional character of Castile's universities was that many lacked the popular faculties of law as well as the prestige which the larger institutions enjoyed. Outsiders, therefore, had few incentives to travel to these lesser-known universities. Meanwhile, [203] difficult and hazardous travel conditions worked to keep many boys close to home. It was also cheaper to live at home or with relatives in a nearby town or to receive weekly provisions from one's family than to pay the costs of room and board at a distant university. Furthermore, universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly the larger ones, were notorious for their riotous life; drinking, gambling, and whoring were common distractions, and parents were understandably concerned lest their sons be led astray.

Yet another cause for worry is illustrated in the baptismal registers of university towns where the listing "son of a student and an unmarried girl" was not infrequent; it has been demonstrated that in one parish close to the university in Salamanca, nearly 60 percent of the infants baptized in 1558 were illegitimate. ⁽²²⁾ Perhaps more disturbing for parents and certainly more dangerous for their sons were the armed clashes and street brawls that occurred at the major universities before the mid-seventeenth century. Repeated prohibitions on guns and swords proved utterly useless, and the results were "tumults and feuds, with arms and without," brawls involving "sticks and swords," "disrupted classes," "wounded" students, students "stabbed with swords," and even occasional deaths. ⁽²³⁾ Under these circumstances, it is easy to understand why parents might not allow their sons to study far from home, or, if they did, they make certain that he lived with relatives, in a college, or a supervised lodging house.

Such considerations can also help to explain why sixteenth-century Spain acquired such a multitude of small universities rather than concentrating its educational resources in one or two larger institutions. Spain was a kingdom divided against itself: by mountains, by languages, by customs, and even by political boundaries. The concept of the patria chica was strong; local pride, combined with parental interests in economy and the security of their sons, demanded that every region have a university of its own.

But, as mentioned above, the universities at Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid were able to escape from this local and regional pattern of recruitment. Valladolid, the most limited of the three in terms of its area of geographical attraction, was a university serving all of the north of Spain (map 3). Alcalá, although heavily dependent upon the large and populous archdiocese of Toledo, of which it was part, managed to attract students from every corner of the peninsula, students who could have easily matriculated at institutions closer to home (map 4). And Salamanca, with students from almost every part of the kingdom, could also be said to be Spain's only international university, thanks to the large contingent of Portuguese who matriculated every year (map 5). The ability of these institutions

The movement of students about the kingdom, however, was not always toward the center, toward the universities at Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid. The high costs of these universities, particularly the elevated costs of their degrees, forced many students to abandon their studies or to graduate at a cheaper "provincial" university. Suárez de Figueroa, an early seventeenth-century author, wrote: "the costs of degrees at Salamanca are excessive, and for this reason, the poor flee from it and [211] we go to where it is cheap." ⁽²⁴⁾ Thus isolated Santiago de Compostela was able to attract each year a number of advanced "transfer" student from Salamanca and Valladolid. ⁽²⁵⁾ Oñate, a small university in Navarre, did much the same. It made a regular practice of incorporating bachilleres from other universities on one day and conferring higher degrees upon them the next. ⁽²⁶⁾ Since the professors at Oñate earned a substantial portion of their income from graduation fees, it was always in their interest to condone such practices, and by the eighteenth century a number of universities, among them Oñate, Osuna, Irache, and Almagro, were known to have sold their degrees. ⁽²⁷⁾

Since most universities failed to list their "transfer" students, it is impossible to get a complete picture of where students were coming from and going to. Presumably, the regional universities lost more than they gained. Though a few students graduated from the cheaper universities, many more headed toward the major institutions, drawn by their professional faculties and the fame of their degrees. This influx assured Castile of a pool of highly educated manpower, perhaps to the detriment of those regions from which these students had originally come. And though it can be assumed that many of them returned to their native regions to take up local jobs, others, perhaps the most talented and ambitious of the lot, stayed on in Castile, competing for the prestige positions offered by the crown. The large numbers of Basques, navarros, riojanos, and other letrados originally from the northern fringes of the peninsula, who served on the royal chancillerías and councils, is good evidence of such a migration. ⁽²⁸⁾ One other sign is Philip II's order in 1588 sending the office-seekers crowding about the court back to their homes, while a similar decree issued by Philip IV in 1639 had much the same intention. ⁽²⁹⁾ Provincials at Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid undoubtedly heightened competition within Castile's letrado labor market; the skilled, the fortunate, and above all, those with family and collegiate ties in Madrid, left home for good, adding to the bureaucratic population of the court. But whether this internal "brain-drain" aided Castile to the detriment of other regions is not yet clear, and the net results of this back and forth movement of students remain unknown.

[212] What is certain is that Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid attracted men from diverse geographical regions and then trained them for the highest posts in Spain and the empire. In other words, these served as the true "imperial" universities of the Habsburgs, and it is no accident that a motto carved into the University of Salamanca's elaborate sixteenth-century façade should read: "Kings for Universities, Universities for Kings." The provincial universities, on the other hand, remained relatively small institutions, serving local, probably clerical, needs. In the long run, Castile's biased and tradition-bound system of royal patronage failed to include the provincial universities in the distribution of national and imperial offices, and this problem, on top of other difficulties with the recruitment of students and finance, meant that these universities had to contend continually with instructors and students who were often mere transients, ready to transfer to the large universities or to leave for higher rewards. Thus Castile may have lost an opportunity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to develop and maintain a broad-based, pluralistic university system which could offer possibilities for competition, variety, and change. As it was, the "imperial" universities, so vital to the monarchy, gradually lost their autonomy and independence to the crown, preventing Castile from developing a tradition of university learning independent of royal interest and control.

The influx of students interested in letrado jobs and professional training also had profound effects within the universities themselves. In every institution which offered instruction in all of the major faculties there was a steady shift, beginning in the middle years of the sixteenth century, away from the study of the arts and theology to the study of law, particularly canon law, gateway to both clerical and secular careers (Figs. 9-1 l). ⁽³⁰⁾ At Seville and Granada, law became the most popular and important faculty and the same was true at Alcalá de Henares. A university originally dedicated to the study of the arts and theology with a curriculum limiting studies in canon law, the number of law students at Alcalá equaled those studying theology in 1550, and by the opening of the seventeenth century, jurists outnumbered theologians almost two to one, a ratio which doubled before the century was out. Moreover, under pressure from the Cortes of Castile, Alcalá, in violation of her original statutes, began instruction in civil law, while making canon law into a regular degree course. ⁽³¹⁾ At Salamanca and Valladolid, neither of which had any curricular restrictions, theology fared even worse; by the end of the seventeenth [213] century law students at both institutions outnumbered theologians over twenty to one, while their arts faculties suffered from a "lack of listeners," a shortage of instructors, and declining prestige. Thus while the legal faculties prospered, one seventeenth-century critic, in reference to the University of Salamanca, claimed that the arts faculty was "totally lost." ⁽³²⁾ This sustained emphasis on juridical studies seems also to have prejudiced those provincial universities which lacked the popular faculties of law, and this in turn contributed to the influx of students at the universities of Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid.

[214] The drift is unmistakable. Students at Castile's universities eschewed the liberal arts and theology for law (canon and civil) either to prepare for a professional legal or office-holding career or to acquire a brief introduction to the subject for practical reasons. Most of these abandoned their studies, turning alternatively to the army, the church, offices not requiring university training or degrees, or independent lives as financiers, merchants, and rentiers. But those who did graduate, perhaps only one-third of those who matriculated initially, competed for scarce professorships and letrado jobs. In this light the old, popular assertion that a one-sided, conservative preoccupation with theology thwarted educational and scientific progress in Spain and her universities is not borne out by the matriculation lists; the almost exclusive pursuit of law, legal studies, and letrado careers would be a more credible answer. Experimental sciences, modern languages, history, and studies in political economy had little place in an institution [215] which was, and which regarded itself as, a professional training school for lawyers and legally trained clerics and noblemen. Law degrees, crown offices, and the prestige these conferred were the ultimate goals of the Castilian universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not the advancement of medicine nor the scientific understanding of the world. Thus it is perhaps no surprise that the first sharp break from this legalistic university tradition which occurred in eighteenth-century Spain came not from Castile but from Valencia, whose university led the way toward a modern medical curriculum. ⁽³³⁾

The decline in the study of the arts and theology, as well as in Latin grammar, at the universities was accelerated by the rise of municipal schools along with Jesuit and other religious colleges. Safety and an opportunity to save on the costs of educating their sons were two reasons why parents preferred to have their teenage sons study close to home, but there is also evidence to suggest that the major universities, geared primarily toward professional training, allowed these faculties to fall into decay, [216] thus contributing to the rise of Jesuit colleges and local schools. Shortages of qualified teachers in the arts and grammar began in the middle of the sixteenth century and continued unchecked into the next. ⁽³⁴⁾ Salaries, which were among the lowest at the universities, were partly responsible for this, ⁽³⁵⁾ but the failure of the universities to pay higher stipends to these instructors is perhaps an indication of their relative lack of concern. Yet even the well-financed trilingual colleges at Alcalá and Salamanca, both of which offered scholarships in the classical languages, suffered from a lack of student interest, and in 1597 the Colegio Trilingüe at Salamanca, without students, was missing from the matriculation books nor did it reappear there for over fifty years. ⁽³⁶⁾ Thus with trained teachers in short supply, dwindling numbers of interested students, and an apparent lack of cash to raise teachers' salaries, a number of universities heeded their critics' demands and allowed the Jesuits and the other religious orders to take over teaching in the arts, grammar, and even theology. In perspective, therefore, the Jesuits seem to have filled an educational vacuum left behind by the professionally oriented universities.

If this vacuum existed, it had been many years in the making. During the Middle Ages jurists occupied the leading place in Spain's universities. Doctors of law were especially revered, having been awarded many of the fiscal and ceremonial privileges of nobility. The other disciplines could not compete until the later fifteenth century, when Spain's blossoming interest in Italian humanism and classical studies, though adding a new historical and philological dimension to law, favored the study of the liberal arts and theology. The new universities of the era, Sigüenza, Alcalá, and Santiago, reflected this trend and awarded these disciplines the leading place in their curriculum, while the new interest in literary philology and classical antiquity breathed fresh life into faculties of the arts and theology at existing institutions. Though law remained popular, humanist theology and the liberal arts won the day. Lectures on classical topics by noted humanists such as Peter Martyr and Marineo Siculo reportedly drew large crowds of students at Salamanca, ⁽³⁷⁾ and this university, in imitation of Alcalá, acquired a Colegio Trilingüe of its own to pursue studies in Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldean. Moreover, Salamanca, at the insistence of its medical faculty which was interested in Arabic texts of the Middle [217] Ages, created a chair of Arabic in 1542 and added it to its faculty of arts. ⁽³⁸⁾ Records for the period are scarce, nevertheless, it appears that the study of the arts and theology won a new popularity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with the need for trained clerics to convert the heathen in Granada, North Africa, and the New World sustaining this interest well into the Habsburg era.

But the challenge offered by the Renaissance did not last long. Religious controversy abroad, troubles with suspected heretics and religious fanatics at home, and the monarchy's new emphasis on censorship combined to put a halt to the free inquiry typical of Renaissance scholarship, particularly that connected with matters of theology and faith. Though the study of classical languages and humanist theology remained popular among the religious orders and within the literary circles of the rich, the medieval legacy of law proved triumphant within the lecture halls. The decade of the 1550s, heralded by the famous debates between Las Casas and Sepúlveda over the sensitive moral and theological issues connected with the problem of slavery and capped by the end of Erasmian influence in Spain at the great auto da fe staged for the new king, Philip II, at Valladolid in 1559, was the symbolic era of change. After that decade, the study of the arts and theology at the universities began to languish, while students increasingly favored studies in the law. Though these students received preliminary training in the arts before studying a jurisprudence imbued with the critical, historical elements which the jurists of the Renaissance had bestowed upon it, by the end of the century Castile's universities had a new intellectual configuration, at once conservative, traditional, and overwhelmingly dedicated to the study of law.

After all, other subjects had their liabilities. In general, they suffered from what contemporaries called the "falta de premios" at a time when the arbiters of patronage in Castile favored students who had studied law. One seventeenth-century author, writing in reference to the University of Salamanca, claimed: "In the faculty of theology, experience has shown that the lack of premios and competition has abetted its fall." ⁽³⁹⁾ And in a similar vein, the University of Salamanca wrote that its Colegio Trilingüe had no students either in Greek or in Hebrew "partly because of the absence of masters, but, above all, because the study of the Holy Languages has no premio afterwards." ⁽⁴⁰⁾ Potential students, so the university claimed, transferred to other faculties, since the only premios for graduates in these subjects were a handful of underpaid university chairs. There were other drawbacks as well. To matriculate in theology involved a long and difficult university career which led almost automatically into the church and the [218] religious orders; consequently, in the course of the seventeenth century, this faculty became more and more the preserve of the religious, as secular students turned to other courses of study. In addition, the inquisition's activity against prominent theologians accused of emending or tampering with scriptural texts and sacred doctrines may have frightened some students off, though it is difficult to say how many.

An alternative course was medicine: profitable, able to bring its most successful practitioners to permanent positions at the royal court, ⁽⁴¹⁾ but a faculty that was shunned by most students, perhaps on account of a long-standing association of the medical profession in Castile with the stigma of converso blood. Finally, to remain in the arts meant either school-teaching or the church or heavy reliance on the influence of family and friends to help secure an important secular or military charge.

Considering the limitations of other subjects and the doors to which legal training could lead, most of the students who attended Castile's universities matriculated in one of the two faculties of law although, in practice, they studied in both. With court letrados achieving positions of influence and power, membership in the Military Orders, and titles of noble rank, legal study quickly shed whatever remained of its old "clerkly" reputation, attracting to it young men in search of wealth, power, and rank.

Yet it would be wrong to insist that the popularity of this subject depended only upon its value as a basis for a career. Owing in part to the Habsburgs' insistence upon domestic peace and tranquillity, Castile in the sixteenth century was an increasingly litigious society, willing to settle its differences before a judge. To accommodate this new business, existing courts expanded in size and new magistrates were added to the royal bench. Even then, the backlog of cases was enormous and increasing year by year. ⁽⁴²⁾ In a society in which most people, directly and indirectly, lived off the land, litigation was a daily fact of life. Suits involving boundaries, mayorazgos, seigneurial rights, dues and taxes involved individuals from every social class. Expansion in the world of commerce and trade was yet another source of legal haggling, while the growth of the royal bureaucracy itself led to lawsuits involving overlapping jurisdictions, demands for special privileges, and countless other administrative details on an unprecedented scale. Thus a knowledge of law and legal procedure was essential not only for those seeking letrado careers but also for noblemen, ecclesiastics, merchants, and officials, anyone for that matter who had some attachment to the land, trade, or government. Contemporaries, too, were well aware of the law's popularity. Francisco de Torquemada, [219] author of the Monarchía Indiana (1615), remarked that this subject was "the most universal science for those who pursue the secular life of the gentry [de capa y espada]," ⁽⁴³⁾ and he could have added that it was also commonplace among those who were preparing to enter the church. In short, the "rule of law" imposed by the Habsburg monarchy was gradually taking hold, sparking new interest on the part of Spaniards to acquire a knowledge of difficult legal texts.

Under these circumstances, the universities, the sole organized source of legal training, were filled with youths eager for an education in law. Consequently, these institutions, beginning in the years following the decade of the 1550s, were dominated increasingly by legists. As this change came about, they discarded their pluralistic Renaissance spirit for one that was more strictly professional and vocational. Medieval Salamanca and Valladolid had also concentrated on the study of jurisprudence but with an eye toward ecclesiastical careers. In the Habsburg era, law again dominated these institutions, but now the production of lawyers and legally trained amateurs was their primary goal, and the universities neglected those studies which did not directly serve such ends. Overconcentration on the law, moreover, helped to diminish interest in mathematics and natural history along with philosophy and the classics, thus effectively cutting off Castile's universities from contemporaneous developments in European philosophical and scientific thought.

By the opening decades of the seventeenth century, university expansion in Castile had run its course. The rise in matriculation gave way to a period of stagnation during the 1620s and l630s, followed by a period of steady decline lasting well into the eighteenth century (Figs. 7 and 8). Contemporaries noted this phenomenon, attributing it variously to population decline, the sagging economy, changes in the methods by which professors were selected, university violence, the colegios mayores, and what they called a "falta de premios." To a certain extent, each of their explanations was correct, some being more logical than others. Violence among the students, for example, had almost certainly given the universities a bad name. The competition and rivalries associated with the student election of professors had been a festering sore for decades, a source of constant violence and disruption until the Royal Council intervened in 1623. The resumption of these contests in the years 1632-36 and 1638-41, however, renewed the fighting on an unprecedented scale, as the famous "wars of the nations" erupted. The number of brawls and violent clashes multiplied; students brandishing clubs and sticks and guns were said to be a common sight; and armed, menacing bands of students roamed the streets of Salamanca and Valladolid at night. In an epoch which began to stress strict surveillance of the young, especially when the economic squeeze rendered [220] every son more valuable because of his potential to bring to his family a dowry of considerable size, fathers may have been reluctant to send their offspring into the troubled and dangerous atmosphere of the universities. Such considerations undoubtedly influenced the sharp fluctuations in matriculations at Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid during the l630s. Furthermore, as the corregidor of Salamanca, Pedro de Amezqueta, attested, they probably contributed to university decline as a whole. ⁽⁴⁴⁾

Amezqueta, however, also believed that the "rising cost of living and the probable lack of wealth among fathers" contributed to what he called the "shortage of students." ⁽⁴⁵⁾ It seems likely that inflation and mounting taxation, in addition to the other financial problems which beset seventeenth-century Castile, influenced the downward trend in university matriculations, but the extent of their impact will remain an open question until something more is learned about the effects of Spain's general economic decline upon private pocketbooks, particularly among those families most likely to send their sons to university. For example, although it is true that the years between 1620 and 1640, perhaps the most severe period of economic instability for Castile during the seventeenth century, coincided with a drop in the total student population of the kingdom, in the half decade between 1635 and 1640, the most bitter years of all, matriculations were on the rise. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Even in the worst of times there are those who earn profits and reap their rewards, and in seventeenth-century Castile it is likely that letrados and office-holders, that is, groups among whom a university education was common, were getting rich on the spoils of office and their investments in tax-farming and land. Thus, before any simple economic explanation of matriculation patterns can be offered, detailed studies of family incomes and resources, especially among hidalgos, letrados, and crown officials, are essential.

In the long range, however, the economic situation had its effect. Castile's economic advance during the sixteenth century had helped to finance the spread of education at all levels; conversely, economic problems in the seventeenth century did much to bring such progress to a halt. University costs, particularly those for degrees, were on the rise, and many families were undoubtedly unable to finance an advanced education for their sons. At the same time clerical prebends, a popular means of student support, must have declined in either number or value, or possibly both, depriving would-be students of financial aid. Finally, this era of hard times undoubtedly persuaded many families to cut their costs by educating their children at a local school or a Jesuit college instead of at a university.

If this was indeed the case, these families had good reason to do so. The demands of a new monarchy, a militant Catholic church, and a prosperous [221] society for letrados and other trained officials had helped bring about university expansion in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But as the number of students and graduates climbed, competition grew stiff and jobs increasingly scarce. Moreover, the requirements for official appointments narrowed. University study in law came to mean study at certain universities, advanced degrees, and then teaching experience or a place in one of the colegios mayores. But to earn a teaching post or a colegio mayor beca, family connections and personal ties with royal officials were increasingly essential. High letrado offices, consequently, became the almost exclusive preserve of colegiales and university instructors, while ordinary students, particularly those lacking influential personal ties, were crowded out of the market for letrado jobs. ⁽⁴⁷⁾

Castilians in the seventeenth century were quick to cite the "falta de premios" as a major cause of university decline, although in most instances they put the blame for this situation upon members of the colegios mayores, who they saw occupying an extraordinary number of university teaching posts and letrado jobs. While this argument has some validity, to maintain that the colegios mayores, acting alone, caused university decline in seventeenth-century Castile would be untrue. The colegiales, after all, were relatively few in number, and the posts they monopolized represented only a fraction of the total number of places usually reserved for letrados. Their influence, however, was far greater than their numbers would indicate. The offices that they, along with other university instructors, did control represented the important, prestigious, most sought-after places. Apparently, many students, frustrated by such overwhelming competition in a shrinking, overcrowded labor market, believed that promotion and advancement were almost impossible for those lacking the requisite family and collegiate ties. This was certainly the position of a Licentiate Gregorio Tovar y Pizarro, a student at Valladolid in 1576, who abandoned his hope of winning a university chair because

in the oposiciones they [the colegiales] enter with great advantages and many votes from their fellow-colegiales, huéspedes, servants, and the friends of all of these. Thus it is only by a miracle that a chair escapes them. ⁽⁴⁸⁾

The almost complete lack of contemporary diaries and letters makes any statement about possible student frustrations difficult to prove, ⁽⁵⁰⁾ but it is very likely that student hopes in the seventeenth century were shattered by a diminution in the number of letrado places available, which in turn tended to sharpen competition for scarce jobs and offices. While more and more of the top positions were controlled by colegiales, professors, and other letrados with influential family ties, the average student was forced to look elsewhere for employment. ⁽⁵¹⁾ Although evidence is often lacking, population loss, economic decline, and the atrophy of Castile's industrial and mercantile cities may have combined to reduce the number of local letrado offices and to deprive many lawyers of their careers; certainly, at the chancillería of Valladolid, the number of registered attorneys fell sharply during the seventeenth century from a peak of around fifty in the l590s to an average of approximately fifteen after 1640. ⁽⁵²⁾ It is also possible that the economic squeeze led to a change in litigation habits which resulted in more cases being either settled privately out of court or at a local level, circumstances which may have thrown the lawyers at the chancillería out of work and encouraged them to practice elsewhere. Letrados may have also been shut out of local magistracies, since many of these positions, particularly in the large towns, came under the control of one or two powerful families and were subsequently removed from the open, competitive market. Even school-teaching as a career suffered as Jesuit influence grew and municipal schools, after having their subsidies cut, were obliged to trim their staffs and in some cases close completely. ⁽⁵³⁾

All such estimates require statistical proof, but there seems to be sufficient evidence to suggest that the letrado's world was shrinking at a time when the costs of university attendance were rising and the important posts remaining open to him were blocked by a favored minority. This contraction of the labor market served only to exacerbate Castile's long-standing problem of too many graduates competing for jobs which were always in short supply. Degree-holders, although never numerous in absolute terms, constituted a group too large for Castile's professional labor market to absorb. For these students preferment was not absolutely impossible, but the promise of promotion and advancement undoubtedly waned [223] during a period when the investment demanded by a long letrado education no longer brought a sound return. Indeed, as the costs of the advanced degrees required for the important offices in the church, the royal administration, and the legal profession, spiraled out of control, more and more students may have been encouraged to abandon their studies, while others were forced to earn hollow diplomas at the cheap degree mills. ⁽⁵⁴⁾ Combined with the poor and irregular instruction in the lecture halls, such conditions allowed the pampered colegios mayores to prosper while university matriculations steadily declined.

The colegios mayores, however, were not the only successful colleges in seventeenth-century Castile. The communities of the religious orders, particularly the Jesuits, offered alternatives to university education and, since the late sixteenth century, the number of their students was on the rise. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ Faced by a world of war, disease, famine, and uncertain employment, the instruction offered by the religious, deeply ingrained with lessons of Christian doctrine and example, offered for many of these students not only an alternative to a university education but also a new ideal and way of life. Given the special economic and social conditions of the time, the expansion of the regular clergy in seventeenth-century Castile possibly represented one facet of a general reaction against university education and the competitive, office-holding world. ⁽⁵⁶⁾ It appears, therefore, that the church in Spain may have channeled the energies of frustrated students in a way that seventeenth-century England was not able to achieve.

But falling university attendance was connected with other circumstances, the most important of which was the rapid rise of capa y espada offices in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These positions, many of which were up for sale, rarely required a university education, let alone a degree. So rather than sending their offspring to potentially dangerous universities, where the quality of instruction was known to be inferior, wealthy families could educate their children at home or in a local school and then purchase a fee-paying office, the income from which could support a son for life. Indeed, it is tempting to connect the drop in the number of nobles studying at Salamanca, as well as the first signs of stagnation in university matriculations, with the increase in the sales of offices beginning in the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV. What may have occurred is that potential letrados shunned the universities for venal offices and capa y espada careers, but until more information is collected about office-buyers and the total volume of offices sold, this particular hypothesis must remain untested. Yet it is likely that among those families who, in the sixteenth century, would have automatically directed one or more of their [224] sons into letrado careers, the university in the course of the following century became an increasingly superfluous institution.

On another plane, there is the possibility that the great international conflicts of the l630s and 1640s and the coming of war to the Iberian peninsula itself after the Catalan and Portuguese revolts of 1640, together with Olivares's complaints about the "lack of leaders" among the court aristocracy, may have persuaded sons of hidalgo families to shun offices for military careers. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ The declining interest in university education after 1640, therefore, could also have been related to the spread of traditional aristocratic ideas and chivalric values among the sons of the wealthy, particularly those of royal officials, merchants, and members of the liberal professions who aspired to noble status and a genteel style of life. Such a change would probably have fostered a movement away from the traditional school-college-university education common among society's middle and upper ranks toward training of a more private, literary, and chivalric nature. A systematic study of educational and career patterns among hidalgo and office-holding families would be necessary to confirm (or refute) this assertion, but there is some evidence which suggests that colegiales mayores, toward the end of the seventeenth century, began to shy away from letrado offices in order to become military officers, dignitaries in the royal households, and rentiers living off their estates. ⁽⁵⁸⁾ Thus it is possible that Castile's educated classes, eager for the rank and titles of the aristocracy, attempted to live "nobly" and that this practice, perhaps akin to the well-noted trahison de la bourgeoisie, hindered university as well as economic development in seventeenth-century Castile.

Whatever the exact cause, the outcome is clear -- the general decline of the university in Castile. After more than a century of new foundations, Castile after 1620 would not receive another new university until the 1830s, when the moribund university at Alcalá de Henares was moved and reorganized to become the Central University of Madrid. ⁽⁵⁹⁾ Similarly, after 1620 the establishment of a new university college was a rarity while existing ones, suffering from lack of interest, Jesuit competition, and [225] financial difficulties, either disappeared completely or amalgamated. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ Moreover, by 1660, Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid attracted less than one-half of the students they had had a century before (Fig. 7). Matriculations continued to fall even after the end of the seventeenth century, while graduations, hurt by increases in the rate of attrition among students, followed suit. At the provincial level, where universities had begun to languish even before the major institutions, the number of students at Santiago and Seville fell to less than 300 per annum. ⁽⁶¹⁾ Granada and Baeza barely managed the same (Fig. 7), and poor Sigüenza after mid-century could never muster more than thirty students in any one year. In overall terms, many of Castile's smaller universities by the close of the seventeenth century were close to extinction and the major ones were rapidly losing their influence and prestige.

Despite the accession of the Bourbons to the Spanish throne, the history of Castile's universities for the next seventy-five years merely confirmed those trends begun the century before. Matriculations at the major universities stagnated at relatively low levels: Salamanca attracted between 1,500 and 2,000 students a year; Alcalá rarely had more than 1,000; Valladolid, even fewer (Fig. 7). At the regional level, the smaller universities continued to decay, and a few, notably Granada and Sigüenza, temporarily dropped out of sight, while others stayed alive by selling their degrees, a practice which the larger universities, aided by the crown, attempted to stamp out. ⁽⁶²⁾ By the middle of the eighteenth century the universities of Castile could together attract no more than 5,000 to 6,000 students a year, a figure less than one-third of the total two centuries before (Fig. 8). In relative terms, this decline meant that Castile around 1750 sent only 2.2 percent of its seventeen-year-olds to university each year. ⁽⁶³⁾ In other words, since 1600 Castile had lost only a small fraction of her population and by the mid-eighteenth century demographic recovery was well under way, but during this same period her professionally trained, university-educated population had diminished by over one-half, while the number of students earning degrees had declined at a similar rate. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ Once the educational [226] leader of Europe, Castile in the middle of the eighteenth century was well on the road that in the course of the next hundred years would turn her into one of the educational backwaters of the European continent.

In the meantime, the universities changed profoundly. Now that many of the law's attractions had faded, students were distributed more or less evenly about the various faculties, although the arts were slowly becoming the university's most popular discipline (Figs. 9-11). Students were also younger, ⁽⁶⁵⁾ but more of them belonged to one of the religious orders or lived behind college walls, a situation which helped to bring street violence to an end. ⁽⁶⁶⁾ Nevertheless, the universities continued to languish and decay. The curriculum stagnated, money was short, and the monarchy did relatively little to rescue them from their plight. The Royal Council, for example, was generally more concerned with protecting the colegios mayores than aiding the universities and by doing so contributed to the latter's decay. After the reconstitution of Salamanca's Colegio Trilingüe in 1648, a measure partly designed to bolster sagging interest in the study of the liberal arts by creating new premios toward which talented graduates in the arts could aspire, ⁽⁶⁷⁾ the council did little more than issue stop-gap orders designed to end statutory abuse. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ Though reforms of a more general nature were often suggested, ⁽⁶⁹⁾ few were put into effect until Philip V ascended the Spanish throne. In his opinion the University's mission was to "educate youth and to provide ministers for the government." ⁽⁷⁰⁾ Toward this end Philip worked in the opening years of his reign to aid the troubled arts faculties and colegios menores. He also instituted instruction in Spanish law, "since it is by this and not by Roman Law that future judges must decide and substantiate legal cases," and put an end to the corrupt and [227] nepotistic methods the Royal Council had used to fill university professorships. ⁽⁷¹⁾

But Philip's early enthusiasm for university reform, followed by an unsuccessful attempt in the 1720s to curb the influence of the colegios mayores, waned by the later years of his reign. Sweeping change had been blocked by inertia and tradition, and with the exception of piece-meal changes, the issue of wholesale university reform was not raised again until the 1760s, when it emerged as part of a campaign to weaken the power and independence of the colegios mayores. With the advice and encouragement of influential court officials such as Campomanes and Jovellanos, Pablo de Olavide's plan to overhaul the structure and curriculum of the University of Seville in 1768 spread in the course of two decades to Castile's other universities. ⁽⁷²⁾ Consequently, these institutions, with the crown's help, achieved a new look. The colegios mayores were suppressed, the turno, along with other procedures thorough which instructors had been able to advance to important university chairs by means of seniority alone, was abolished, and the government of each university was handed over to the senior professors, working under the supervision of a royal minister in Madrid. In addition, degree costs were reduced by ending the elaborate pomp of the degree ceremonies, diplomas from the cheap degree mills were invalidated, and competition from the religious colleges brought to an end, all in the hope of encouraging students to attend the major universities. Meanwhile, the curriculum was modernized along European lines; medicine shed many of its classical vestiges for studies of a more empirical bent; the works of Newton and Galileo as well as algebra and experimental physics were added to the faculty of arts; and in jurisprudence new emphasis was given to Spanish as opposed to Roman and canon law.

Together these changes were designed to kindle a new enthusiasm for university study and in some respects they did. Students who a few years earlier would have eschewed the university for a Jesuit college turned to the estudios generales, and their return helped to raise matriculations at many universities in the late eighteenth century. The most popular faculties were the arts and theology although students in the former displayed little interest at first in "modern" subjects such as experimental physics (App. A, Table ix). On the whole, they preferred Aristotle; science, even in the late eighteenth century, was still a pastime for gentlemen dilettantes, whereas the traditional course offered the meal-ticket [228] ticket the job-hungry students of the eighteenth century had in mind. For this reason it would be unwise to attribute the renewed enthusiasm for university study at this time to administrative and curricular changes alone. Equally important were advances in the population and the economy and an expanding labor market now freed from colegio mayor control. Although the history of this period in Castile is still relatively unknown, it seems likely that the late eighteenth century brought to the kingdom new places for university graduates in schools, government, and law. It also coincided with the emergence of a class of new families with fortunes rooted in the commercial expansion of the epoch, who were interested in university education for their sons, since such training would help them to escape or at least to disguise their mercantile past. And it was developments such as these, together with curricular reform, changes in university rules, and the end of competition from the religious colleges, which formed the bases of the recovery for Castile's universities after 1770.

In many instances, this recovery was remarkable. The University of Sigüenza, moribund for much of the previous century, now enrolled 100 students and more; Avila, which had only 5 students in 1740, had close to 200 in 1790; and the University of Osuna in 1790 enrolled close to 300 students, nearly 6 times as many as it had attracted in the century's opening decades. Similar advances were recorded at Granada, Oviedo, Seville, Toledo, and Valladolid. In fact, the only major universities not to share in this epoch of prosperity were Alcalá de Henares and Salamanca, but their failure to take part was significant. Though matriculations at the smaller universities were up, losses at Alcalá and Salamanca caused total university attendance in Castile to rise marginally, if at all (Fig. 8). And now that Castile's population was rapidly on the rise, ⁽⁷³⁾ the overall position of the university at the opening of the nineteenth century was weaker than at any time since the early years of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel.

What actually seems to have happened to university matriculations in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was a shift away from the established universities of Castile toward smaller, less renowned institutions in the provinces. Years of colegio mayor domination, inordinately expensive degrees, and resistance to innovation and change had gradually weakened the reputations of the famous universities. For many of these same reasons, Alcalá and Salamanca after 1700 resembled the other universities in that they too had become "regional" institutions, drawing the bulk of their students from the province in which they were located (Maps 4 and 5). For much of the Habsburg era these two universities, along [229] with Valladolid, had helped to unite the kingdom, mixing together intellectuals and professionals from every province and region. But by the eighteenth century no university, Alcalá and Salamanca included, was serving more than a local clientele. This situation no doubt helped to keep the nation's educated populace apart, perhaps reinforcing the deep cultural and political divisions of Spain. ⁽⁷⁴⁾

When interest in university study revived, would-be students from outlying areas, rather than trek to Alcalá or Salamanca, universities  which could no longer guarantee either scholarly excellence or a secure future, attended the cheaper, sometimes more flexible and innovative institutions closer to home. Accordingly, Alcalá and Salamanca lost ground, but their inability to keep pace with the other institutions coincided with the weakening of Castile itself. The region's economic and demographic preponderance within the peninsula had long been eroded; its political leadership was under attack; and its empire in the Americas, increasingly independent of the mother country's control, was soon to fall apart. It was only fitting that in educational, perhaps even in intellectual, terms, Castile's leading universities linked closely to the royal government in Madrid, would give way to institutions located in more prosperous and dynamic parts of the kingdom. Barcelona and Valencia, along with Oviedo, Seville, and the medical faculties of Cadiz, were to be the intellectual leaders of Spain during the next generation. And it was not until the establishment of the Central University in Madrid in 1836 that Castile and its monarchy attempted to renew its educational mastery over the kingdom as a whole.

At the opening of the nineteenth century, the fortunes of higher education in Castile were relatively bleak. Though some gains had been made in the last twenty years, matriculations continued to languish, the quality of instruction was poor, and most of the universities were almost bankrupt. To improve matters Charles IV in 1807 pushed through a new series of administrative and curricular reforms, ⁽⁷⁵⁾ and three years later, he suppressed the majority of Castile's universities, leaving only seven behind. ⁽⁷⁶⁾ This measure, designed to concentrate the remaining financial and intellectual resources of the universities and to ensure graduates of a superior and more uniform caliber than before, had no immediate chance of proving itself. The Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808 and the bitter civil war which ensued closed the universities education for nearly a decade. The 1820s brought the beginnings of recovery, but it would take most of the [230] nineteenth century before Castile's universities could rival the position and importance they had enjoyed three centuries before. ⁽⁷⁷⁾

The dynamic shift in the importance of the university within Castilian society in the century between 1550 and 1650, the year which signaled the beginning of a long century of stagnation and decay, was perhaps more of a readjustment than an absolute decline. One could postulate that in the sixteenth century the university, despite its numerous students, rested upon weak foundations. Elementary and secondary education in Castile was primarily limited to a small elite within the towns and cities, and the university, dependent upon this wealthy, educated elite, was sensitive to its interests and tastes. When, in the course of the seventeenth century, these apparently changed, the universities were stripped of their larger clientele and were left to the religious orders, scholarship students, and hard-core professionals. In other words, by the mid-seventeenth century the university, after passing through a phase -- we may call it the "Renaissance" -- somewhat resembled its medieval counterparts: small, dominated by churchmen, highly vocational, and overwhelmingly legalistic. Matriculations, however diminished, may have reflected the kingdom's actual demand for lawyers, theologians, and physicians, rather than the social and cultural interests of the elite. Thus the university regained its purely professional spirit, while its popular, pedagogical, "Renaissance" element passed into the hands of the regular clergy. Not until late in the nineteenth century would the two be reunited under university auspices, and then matriculations in every faculty were rapidly on the rise.

1. See appendix B. In this chapter I have omitted as many references to matriculation registers as possible. The statistical material for various universities is available in appendix A while archival references to these registers are noted in appendix C.

2. See appendix B.

3. Cf. García Mercadal, Viajes de Extranjeros por España y Portugal (Madrid, 1962), 1: 392.

4. See p. 166. Approximately 100-150 signatures in the matriculation registers were those of instructors, university officials, etc.

5. Possibly the largest university in Europe as well. No precise estimates for the number of students at the University of Paris, the largest of the French universities, exist for this epoch. Germany's largest university, Leipzig, had well under 1,000 students throughout the sixteenth century; cf. F. Eulenburg, Frequenz der Deutschen Universitäten (Leipzig, 1903), p. 289. In Italy, the University of Naples, the largest on the peninsula, had approximately 5,000 students in 1607; see Francesco Terraca, Storia della Universitá di Napoli (Napoli, 1924), p. 255. In England, a 1577 estimate put the joint student population of Oxford and Cambridge at 3,000 although Oxford, alone, in the sixteenth century had a resident population which regularly topped 2,000, cf. W.R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590-1640 (London, 1972), p. 16, and Stone, "The Size and Composition of the Oxford Student Body," in The University in Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (Princeton, 1974), 1 : 3-110.

6. The Cámara de Castilla noted that students at Valladolid numbered c. 2,400 in the year 1584-85; cf. Bennassar, Valladolid au Siècle d'Or (Paris, 1967), p. 358.

7. On 6.I.1714 Sigüenza complained: "those students who have the means to do so go to the University of Alcalá since it is so close by" (AHN: Cons., leg. 7294).

8. The estimate for the University of Oñate is that of Ignacio Zumalde, Historia de Oñate (San Sebastián, 1957), p. 615.

9. For estimates of losses caused by the plague, see Bennassar, Valladolid, p. 205, and by the same author, Recherches sur les Grandes Epidémies dans le Nord de l'Espagne a la Fin du XVIe Siècle (Paris, 1969).

10. There were a number of contemporaries who made this same observation. Pedro de Amezqueta, corregidor of Salamanca in 1638, wrote: "If there is a shortage of students it does not necessarily correspond to the general shortage of people in the Kingdom. This cause is important but not accurate..." (AHN: Cons. leg. 7138, letter of 11.XII.1638).

11. To obtain this figure, the percentage of males, aged fifteen to twenty-four, has been estimated at 9 percent of Castile's population. Using the recent figures offered by Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, The Golden Age of Spain 1516-1659 (New York, 1971), p. 174, Castile, along with Navarre and the Basque provinces, had a total population of 6.9 million; therefore, youths of university age numbered approximately 620,000. It was on the basis of this figure that the percentage of youths attending university was calculated.

One must recognize that the 9 percent figure is not intended to be exact, but only a rough approximation of the number of university-aged males in Castile's population. It is based upon the application of the birth and death rates of the province of Valladolid during the sixteenth century (see Bennassar, Valladolid, pp. 171-99) to the age distribution tables in Ansley J. Coale and Paul Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (Princeton, 1965). The stable population, Model South, Mortality Level 4 with a growth rate standing between 0/ 1000 and 5/1000 (ibid., p. 782) may apply to sixteenth-century Valladolid and, by extension, to all of Castile. In a previous article (Richard L. Kagan, "Universities in Castile, 1500-1700," Past & Present 49 (November 1970): 48, footnote 11) a number of difficulties posed by this estimate have been raised. It should also be noted that the discrepancy between the estimate presented there and in this volume has two causes: (1) In the earlier version, a misreading of Coale and Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables, resulted in a faulty calculation for the number of males aged 15-24 in Castile. They represented 9 percent of the total population, not the 18 percent noted there, a figure which included both boys and girls; (2) an upward revision of the population of Castile, Navarre, and the Basque Provinces to 6.9 million.

12. Stone, "The Educational Revolution in England, 1560 to 1640," Past & Present 28 (1964): 57.

13. This estimate presumes, again on the basis of the life tables for stable populations that male eighteen-year-olds constituted c. one percent of Castile's total population, or c. 69,000 persons. One-fourth of the university population of 15,000 was c. 3,750 students. 3,570/69,000 = 5.43%. Once again, this figure represents only a guide. My thanks go to Professor Lawrence Stone for advice on these calculations.

14. Possible flaws in this estimate are several. The matriculation books may be either wildly exaggerated or our estimates of what proportion of the population represented eighteen-year-old males may be far off, but neither of these two possibilities is very likely. Alternately, the replacement rate at the universities, that is, the figure which represents the length of time the average student remained in residence, allowing us to calculate what percentage of students were new each year, may be incorrect. "Drop-outs" were common to the universities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (see above, p. 178), and the high attrition rates among the students complicate our estimate of the number of first-year students at the universities, since one does not know whether drop-outs really dropped out or if they returned the following year, matriculated in another faculty, or even in another university. It would appear plausible, however, that the average stay for most students approached four years, even though the four years may not have been consecutive or at the same institution.

15. This figure has been calculated by comparing the number of students in the four years of the arts course at Alcalá de Henares over consecutive years with graduation records. By the mid-seventeenth century only one in four first-year students managed to earn degrees, and in the following century it was only one in five. The law faculties at the universities of Granada and Santiago recorded similar rates of attrition.

16. Seventy to 80 of these degrees were in medicine, and about 100 were in theology. The remainder were divided more or less evenly between the arts and the law. The universities of Alcalá, Salamanca, and Valladolid awarded close to 80 percent of the baccalaureates in Castile.

17. Males, aged twenty-two, like those of seventeen or eighteen, presumably accounted for about one percent of the total population. The arithmetic used in this estimate is outlined in footnote 13.

18. University statutes regulated the fees which graduates were required to pay; see AUBA: Estatutos de 1609; Montells y Nadal, Universidad de Granada (Granada, 1870), Statutes of 1542, tit. xxxi; Cabeza de León, Historia de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (Santiago de Compostela, 1945), 2: 150. The expenditures outlined by the statutes, however, represented only the minimum of what a student had to pay since they failed to include the mounting expenses of the ever more elaborate degree ceremonies that were demanded of a new graduate. Petitions by students for university loans to cover degree expenses give a more accurate indication of the total cost of these titles; cf. the following note.

19. See AHN: Univs., leg. 48, nos. 16, 17, 23, 24, 26. It was about this time that Baltasar de Céspedes asked the University of Salamanca for a loan of 400 ducats (4,400 reales) he needed to pay for license and doctorate; cf. p. 165, note 23.

20. See AUS: Libros de Grados.

21. According to the statutes of the University of Santiago de Compostela, a master of arts degree, the equivalent of a doctorate in this faculty, required a total of five years of study. A baccalaureate in law took as long, a license in law another year or two. Meanwhile, a master of arts degree at this university cost 150 reales in 1610 while a doctorate in law required a minimum expenditure of 300 reales. See Cabeza de León, Universidad de Santiago, 1: 246-47; 2: 113.

22. Riesco Terrero, Proyección Histórico-Social de la Universidad de Salamanca a Través de sus Colegios (Salamaca, 1970), p. 88.

23. Cf AUSA: lib. 862, folios 25-26, 31, 45-45v, 48, 63, 116, 170.

24. Cited in Valbuena Prat, La Vida Española en la Edad de Oro Según sus Fuentes Literarias (Barcelona, 1943), p. 47.

25. 1637 was a record year: five students from the University of Salamanca transferred into the fifth year of Santiago's course in canon law.

26. See AUV: Universidad de Oñate, Libros de Grados.

27. See Ajo, Historia de las Universidades Hispánicas (8 vols., Madrid, 1957-72), 5: 34-36. As early as 1597, Almagro had its right to grant degrees temporarily revoked because of such practices; see A. Javierre, "La Universidad de Almagro, Fundado por Fernando de Córdoba, Clavero de la Orden de Calatrava," RABM 68 (1960): 622.

28. This information can be garnered from the biographical information assembled in the consultas of the Cámara; cf. p. 96, note 30.

29. AHN Cons. lib. 666, folio 3v; AUS: Ms. 939, folio 135.

30. In 1563 the Cortes asked Philip II to establish two or three chairs of civil law in order to make Alcalá "perfect"; cf. Cortes de Valladolid, pet. CXIX.

31. A major problem in attempting to measure the number of students in each faculty is to decide whether those students who signed up in one faculty actually came to study that subject. There exists, for example, the disturbing case of Alonso, hero of the picaresque novel El Donado Hablador o Alonso Mozo de Muchos Años, by Jerónimo de Alcalá y Yañez. He moved about from faculty to faculty; at times he heard laws, at times medicine, and on other days attended lectures in philosophy and theology, all without leaving his assigned place in the class of Greek and Latin rhetoric. How many Alonsos there were it is impossible to say al though it is certain that in the faculties of canon and civil law, students regularly studied both "laws and canons," although they were registered in only one faculty, usually the former.

32. AHN: Cons., leg. 7138, "Memorial de 22.VII.1648 a Antonio Camporredondo y Rio." That same year the suppression of a number of chairs, among them, Greek, rhetoric, Hebrew, astrology, and mathematics, none of which attracted very many students, was advised; cf. ibid., memoriales of 17.III. and 22.VII.l648. The combined Greek-rhetoric faculty for instance, matriculated its last students in the year 1557-58, while Hebrew had disappeared from the matriculation books in 1555. It did not appear again until 1800.

33. See Richard Herr, The Eighteenth Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958), p. 166.

34. In 1578, for example, a complaint was registered at the University of Salamanca that the chairs of astrology and mathematics had been vacant for over three years without any candidates except for one under youth lacking in qualifications; cf. Esperabé Artega, Historia Pragmática é Interna de la Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca, 1914), 1: 568. For similar problems in the faculties of grammar, see p. 43.

35. At Salamanca, chairs in arts and grammar frequently received less than one-half the salary of those in law; cf. AUS: Libros 1027-28.

36. In 1648 one reformer urged the abolition of this college, since its rents "served no purpose"; cf. AHN: Cons., leg. 7138, Memorial de 22.VII.l648.

37. See p. 35.

38. On the establishment of this chair, see Marcel Bataillon, "L'Arabe A Salamanque Au Temps De La Renaissance," Hesperis 20 (1935): 1-16.

39. BM: Eg. 439, folio 163.

40. AHN: Cons., leg. 7294, report of the University of Salamanca, 20.I.1714.

41. The successful career of one sixteenth-century medical doctor is outlined in Luis S. Granjel, Vida y Obra del Doctor Cristóbal Pérez de Herrera, 1558-1618 (Salamanca, 1959).

42. The litigiousness of sixteenth-century Castile is reflected in the numerous petitions of Cortes of Castile directed toward the expansion and improvement of the royal bench; cf. Kagan, "Education and The State," chap. 3.

43. Cited in Hernan Cortes Letters from Mexico, ed. A.R. Pagden (New York, 1971), p. xlvii.

44. See AHM: Cons., leg. 7138, letter of 11.XII.1638.

45. Ibid.

46. For the economic history of this period, see A. Domínguez Ortiz, Política y Hacienda de Felipe IV (Madrid, 1960), esp. chaps. 2-4.

47. See pp. 101-02.

48. G de Tovar y Pizarro, "Un Jurisconsulto del Siglo XVI Pintado por sí mismo," RABM,

18 (1903): 21.

49. AHN: Cons. leg. 7294, report of Salamanca, 21.II.1713.

50. One student who kept a diary was the Italian, Girolamo de Sommaia, son of a Florentine senator, who was enrolled at Salamanca between 1602 and 1607. I have not been able to consult this diary, which is housed in Florence, but reference is made to it in George Haley, "The Earliest Dated Manuscript of Quevedo's Sueño Del Juicio," Modern Philology 67 (February 1970): 242.

51. It was also at this time that the century-old expansion in the letrado hierarchy came to a halt; cf. pp. 82-83.

52. See p. 84.

53. See pp. 45, 50-51.

54. See p. 211, note 27.

55. See p. 55.

56. On the growth of the regular clergy in seventeenth-century Spain, see Domínguez Ortiz, La Sociedad Española en el Siglo XVII (Madrid, 1963, 1970), 2: 70.

57. Certainly, there were more opportunities for military officers in seventeenth-century Spain, since the number of these places doubled after the size of army companies was halved; see N.G. Parker, The Spanish Road and the Army at Flanders 1567-1659 (Cambridge, 1972).

58. See p. 133.

59. In 1693 the Bishop of Astorga, concerned about the "great ignorance of the clergy" and the fact that the closest universities to his diocese, Santiago and Valladolid, were too far away for many local youths to attend, expressed interest in the creation of a new university, but his ideas came to naught (AHN: Cons., leg. 7138, letters of 26.II. and 12.III.1693). In the eighteenth century two universities were added; the first, Cervera in Catalonia, was established in 1714 with the revenues from the six existing Catalan universities which Philip V had suppressed; and La Laguna, an Augustinian convent-university in the Canary Islands. This institution received papal approval in 1701 and the jus ubique docendi in 1744, only to be suppressed in 1747 and turned into a seminary. A small university emerged in Murcia in 1771 out of an existing estudio particular, but its foundation does not appear to have gone very far.

60. See p. 194. Salamanca's last college was established in 1608, Granada's in 1611. Alcalá acquired five colleges in the seventeenth century, one of which was reserved for Irish Catholic émigrés, but only three of these rent-poor foundations survived.

61. In 1626 the University of Santiago, alarmed at the disastrous fall in its number of students, implored fathers to make their sons attend university and exhorted its instructors to continue to give their lectures, even though the professors had complained that their classes were empty; see Cabeza de León, Universidad de Santiago, 2: 449.

62. This campaign, sparked by the University of Salamanca during the l730s "against the multiplicity of universities without standards or many students and in which degrees are awarded in a manner which prejudices those who achieve them legitimately," led in 1771 to the invalidation of degrees from Avila, Irache, and Osma. See Ajo, Universidades, 5: 34, 49.

63. Castile's population at this time was about 6.3 million. For the mathematics involved in this estimate, see footnote 13 in this chapter.

64. In comparison with the 1,000-l,200 baccalaureates they awarded at their peak, Castile's universities in the eighteenth century rarely awarded more than 400 to 500 of these in a single year. The output of advanced graduates was also halved, although at some universities the decline was more pronounced. At Alcalá de Henares, for example, the number of licences in arts awarded annually went from a high of 110 to 120 in the late sixteenth century to about 25 by 1700; cf. AHN: Univ., libs. 400-413.

65. See pp. 175-79.

66. See pp. 188, 195.

67. Sala Balust, Constituciones, Estatutos, y Ceremonias de los Antiguos Colegios Seculares de la Universidad de Salamanca (4 vols., Madrid, 1962-66). En 1659, however, four of this college's becas were switched from the faculty of arts to medicine; cf. Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, 1: 779. Sixteen hundred and forty-eight also marked a year of proposals to revive the entire arts faculty at Salamanca; see AHN: Cons. leg. 7138, "Arbitrio y Discurso del Modo que puede remediar la facultad de Artes en la Universidad de Salamanca"; Francisco Chumacero y Carrillo a Antonio Camporredondo y Río, 22.VII.1648. See also BM: Add. 24,947, folio 101.

68. Many of these are recorded in Esperabé Artega, Universidad de Salamanca, vol. 1.

69. One ingenious plan, noting that there are "few friends of early rising because Salamanca is such a cold place," advocated that the chairs of Prima at this university be read at 9 or 10 a.m. instead of the usual 7:30. Otherwise, the lecture halls would remain "almost completely deserted," the professors "crippled," and youth "benefited" but little; see AHN: Cons. leg. 7138, letter of 13.V.1684.

70. Cited in Ajo, Universidades, 5: 32.

71. Ibid., pp. 31-33. Philip began his campaign to reform the universities after conducting an inquiry into their problems; see AHN: Cons., leg. 7294.

72. See F. Aguilar Piñal, El Plan de Estudios de la Universidad de Sevilla (Barcelona, 1969), and by the same author, La Universidad de Sevilla en el Siglo XVIII. Estudio sobre la Primera Reforma Universitaria Moderna (Sevilla, 1969); Addy, The Enlightenment in the University of Salamanca (Durham, 1966); Ajo, Universidades, 5: 60-73; and A. Alvarez Morales, La Ilustración y la Reforma de la Universidad en la España del Siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1971).

73. Massimo Levi-Bacci, "Fertility and Population Growth in Spain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Daedalus (Spring, 1968): 523-35, deals with the question of rising population in late-eighteenth-century Spain.

74. To some degree the advent of scholarly journals with a national distribution had rendered this function of the university obsolete. On journals, see Herr, Eighteenth Century Revolution, chap. VI.

75. See Addy, Enlightenment in Salamanca, pp. 228-43, app. II.

76. Cf. Ajo, Universidades, 5: 90. The survivors were Alcalá, Granada, Oviedo, Salamanca, Santiago, Seville, and Valladolid.

77. The history of student matriculations at Castile's universities in the nineteenth century is difficult to trace. Mysteriously, most of the matriculation registers after the l830s have either been lost or misplaced or they are in such a state of disarray as to render their use almost impossible. Madrid's few remaining registers, for example, have suffered from a recent archival flood, and as of the summer of 1970, they were damp, covered with mold, and soon to fall apart. Moreover, no university archive or library has in its possession a complete set of the annuarios, many of which contain summaries of student matriculations, that every university published annually.