[1] In the sixteenth century Spain was the greatest power on earth. She enjoyed a preeminent position in Europe, and ruled over a vast overseas empire with immense resources. The Habsburg world hegemony during this period was supported primarily by a twofold economic base: taxation in Castile, and mining in America; the former far outranking the latter as a source of revenue. And in Castile it was agriculture that bore the brunt of the burden of supporting the Habsburg empire, for Castile was a rural society, with land the source of her wealth. Over 80 percent of her population lived in villages or small towns, and owed their livelihood to the growing of crops or the herding of animals. Even the great cities of Castile were parasites on the agropastoral economy, for there was little industry, and most industries that did exist (textiles, for example) were related to rural production. It was the toil of the peasant that produced the wealth of Golden Age Castile, and that supported her powerful and extravagant institutions.

Yet, we know comparatively little about the world of this all-important peasant, who constituted the foundation and the mass of Castilian society. Specialists in Spanish history have long deplored the paucity of information about early modern rural Spain. And despite the recent publication of a number of important studies on the subject, there are a host of questions remaining to be answered (Vassberg 1977).

One of the problems faced by scholars who deal with the subject is that the overwhelming majority of sixteenth-century Castilian peasants were illiterate, and illiterates tend not to leave records for posterity. Even if a peasant happened to be able to write, it was not normal for him to keep a record of his day-to-day activities. Ordinary people simply do not write things down unless special circumstances require them to do so. Of course there were chroniclers and other [2] observers who kept records during this period, but most of them did not think that the activities of peasants deserved their attention. The peasant did not go completely unnoticed, though. We can learn about the life of rural inhabitants from certain governmental records and various other documents such as censuses, notorial records, and transcriptions of lawsuits. But nearly all of these relate to extraordinary circumstances, rather than to everyday activities, and we can never be sure how closely they reflect the reality of the peasant's life. Our documentary evidence could be likened to the tip of an iceberg; the iceberg itself a mass whose shape we cannot know from the shape of its tip alone (Freeman 1981).

This book is primarily about land and landownership. I think the importance of landownership to the life of the peasant is perfectly obvious. Land is the basis of agropastoral production. It is the medium in which crops are grown, and it provides the vegetation for grazing animals. It would be impossible to understand the society of early modern Castile without asking about landownership, for land was the means to agricultural and pastoral wealth, and to social prestige, as well. It is important, then, to ask: who owned the land? Who was the legal possessor, or the de facto possessor? And who enjoyed the fruits of the soil?

It is traditional to classify landowners according to their status as ecclesiastics, nobles, urban middle-class investors (the bourgeoisie), or peasants. But this classification is not complete: where does one put crown lands, for example? In some respects crown lands can be treated as the private property of a reigning member of the nobility; but in other respects they have the characteristics of publicly owned property, particularly in Castile, as we shall see. And where does one put municipally owned property, which was treated sometimes as the private property of the towns, and sometimes as commons? As one studies the landowning system of early modern Castile, it becomes clear that public, or common, ownership of rural property is important enough to merit a category of its own. Thus, it seems that a more suitable classification is one embracing five categories of rural property ownership: (1) public; (2) ecclesiastical; (3) noble; (4) urban middle-class; and (5) peasant (Cárdenas 1873). But because of the complexities of Castilian society, there is considerable overlapping between them. In this book I am devoting five chapters to the various forms of property ownership. But since the first category (public) is much less known than the other four, I am spending three [3] chapters on public ownership, followed by two chapters on private property. The final two chapters will deal with changes in ownership and production, and with the question of who enjoyed the fruits of the soil.

This book deals with Castile. In the sixteenth century 'Castile' in an administrative sense included all of peninsular Spain except for the kingdoms of Aragon and Navarre. But I have decided to exclude from my study the Basque provinces, Asturias, and Galicia, because the geography of these northern provinces has caused their rural institutions to develop along distinct lines. It should not be thought, however, that conditions in the rest of Castile were everywhere the same, for they were most certainly not. In fact, the different regions of Castile varied widely, and even within a given region the way of life of one community was often strikingly different from that of its neighbors. Throughout this book I have tried to stress the diversity [4] of conditions in sixteenth-century rural Castile. One might ask: why, then, a book about land and society in Castile? Why not break Castile down into more manageable and more homogeneous units? A splendid idea! There is a crying need for regional and local studies, although some excellent ones already exist, and I have relied heavily upon them in the preparation of this book. But we also need a vision of the whole, and that is what I have attempted here. The picture we see is that of a heterogeneous Castile, but one which lends itself to treatment as a unit, in geographical and institutional, as well as historical terms.

This is by no means a definitive treatment. It is an introduction to the subject of landownership in early modern Castile. There are many problems yet to be resolved, and many questions that remain unanswered. Consequently, from time to time in my work I have found it necessary to make guesses, based on fragmentary evidence, but I have been careful to warn the reader when doing so.

I have based this book on a wide range of sources, most gathered in Spain during research trips in 1968, 1969-70, 1974-5, 1976, and 1978-9. Among secondary sources, the works of Spanish geographers have been most valuable to me, but I have also been able to profit from a number of fine recent studies by historians (both Spanish and foreign), as my bibliography attests. My documentary sources are primarily from the central archives, especially Simancas and the Chancillerías of Valladolid and Granada. I have preferred to use these central archives rather than local archives, because my goal was to gain a vision of the Castilian situation as a whole, rather than of some isolated locality in Castile. Furthermore, it would have been impossible for me to spend the time necessary to exploit all the fine local archives in Spain, except through the works of other scholars, which I have done.

For the convenience of the reader, I have placed in parentheses the name of the province (using present boundaries) following my textual references to names of places, many of which are obscure villages. I did not do so when referring to provincial capitals, because in those the name of the province is the same.