User:OldBookClub/Spanish Institutions of the Old Regime (1)

The Spanish institutions of the Old Regime were the superstructure that, with some innovations, but above all through the adaptation and transformation of pre-existing political, social, and economic institutions and practices in the different Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula in the Late Middle Ages, presided over the historical period that roughly coincides with the Modern Age: from the Catholic Monarchs to the liberal Revolution (from the last third of the fifteenth century to the first of the nineteenth century) and which was characterized by the features of the Old Regime in Western Europe: a strong monarchy (authoritarian or absolute), a class society, and an economy in transition from feudalism to capitalism.

The dispersion, the multiplicity, and even the institutional collision are characteristics of the Old Regime, which makes the study of the history of institutions very complex. The very existence of the institutional unit of Spain is a problematic issue. In this historical period there were unitary institutions: outwardly, in the external perception of the Hispanic Monarchy, the person of the king and his military power; inwardly, the Inquisition. Others were common, like those of the estate society: nobility, clergy, and very different types of corporations were organized in a way not very different in each kingdom. A Catalan Cistercian monastery (Poblet) was interchangeable with another from Castile (Santa María de Huerta); a cattle rancher of the month of May, with another from the House of Saragossa; the aristocracy fused into a network of family alliances. But others were markedly differentiated: the courts or the treasury in the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon had nothing to do with those of Castile and Leon. Even with the imposition of Bourbon absolutism, which reduced these differences, the Basque and Navarre provinces maintained their local privileges. The state and the nation begin forging, largely as a consequence of how the institutions responded to the economic and social dynamics, but they will not present themselves in their contemporary aspect until the Old Regime had ended.

Society in the Spain of the Old Regime
The society of modern Spain (in the sense of the Modern Age or of the Old Regime) was a framework of communities of diverse nature, to which individuals were ascribed by ties of belonging: territorial communities in the style of the house or the people; intermediate communities such as the manor and the cities and their land (alfoz or community of villa and land, to a very different extent); political communities or broad jurisdictions such as provinces, adelantado s, veguería s, intendencia s or kingdoms and crowns; professional communities such as craft guilds, fishermen's confraternities, or universities; religious communities; etc.

The kingdom was contemplated with an organicist analogy, as a body headed by the king, with its supremacy, with the different communities and orders that formed it as organs, joints, and limbs. Men and women were linked by personal ties, such as family ties and kinship. Each link had common rules that were to govern its operation and experience. In the Old Regime the communities were hierarchical, every body had its authority, with links of integration and subordination. But each link had an ambivalent value, of power and paternalism: they had to guarantee the survival of the individuals while maintaining social relations of subordination. What in the contemporary world are understood as civil services were in the hands of individuals, whether they be houses, lordships or domains of the king, one territory having total autonomy from another. The very concept of individual was meaningless, since there was no effective differentiation between public and private in pre-industrial society.

The nobility and the clergy were the privileged classes. From the sixteenth century the nobility tended to become more courtly and moved to Madrid, in the vicinity of the Court. The clergy was a more open class, since individuals could be incorporated without taking note of their social condition, although it was also a hierarchical group with different degrees within its structure. The third estate was the most heterogeneous and numerous. It ranged from the poorest peasants to the incipient bourgeoisie (bourgeoisie of the intelligentsia: the literate with administrative positions for the most part, and the bourgeoisie of business). The degree of integration of several persecuted minorities (conversos, moriscos, or Gypsies) suffered different alternatives.

The monarchy, the nobility, and territory
"La forma de determinar el alcance del poder real es considerarlo como el revés del poder señorial y a la inversa…. El poder señorial nunca fue más allá del ejercicio de competencias de orden local… la acumulación de señoríos, por copiosa que fuese y aunque diera lugar a la aparición de oficinas señoriales de ámbito territorial, nunca consiguió ampliar sus competencias. Fenómenos como la venta de oficios en lugares de señorío pero con beneficio de la Corona, o el hecho sobradamente documentado de la apelación a la justicia real, ponen en entredicho la imagen del poder señorial como una limitación del poder real."

The apex of the institutional system was the monarchy, justified from the beginning of the Reconquista as a heritage of Visigothic Spain in the Cantabrian nuclei: kingdom of Asturias, kingdom of León and county and then kingdom of Castile; or of the Carolingian feudalism in the Pyrenees: Condal Court of Barcelona, ​​later Principality of Catalonia, County of Aragon, and later Kingdom of Aragon, and Kingdom of Navarre. This, in fact, had gathered almost all of the peninsular Christian territories at the beginning of the eleventh century, and then disintegrated them with the inheritance of Sancho III of Pamplona among his descendants of the Jiménez dynasty, confronting each other while expanding territorially by Al Andalus. By then, the concept of hereditary monarchy was sufficiently established to use it as a heritage institution, within the vassal dynamics of feudalism, with all the limitations that this expression has in the Iberian Peninsula. The European influence that came with the Camino de Santiago and the Order of Cluny determined that the House of Burgundy would end up connecting in the western kingdoms (Portugal, León and Castilla). The same justifying procedures (to which is added the very existence of the monarchy) were those used to justify the social predominance of the nobility (the feudal bellators or defenders), who with the high clergy formed a single ruling class: los privilegiados.The formation of the authoritarian monarchy culminates with the powerful House of Trastámara, originated in Castile in the person of a bastard, Henry II of Castile, raised to power by the jealous nobility to avoid the same concentration of power, which will also be implemented in Aragón as a consequence of the Compromise of Caspe. The crisis of the fourteenth century had been decisive to produce a clear separation between the high and low nobility of hidalgos and knight s, whose social prestige, when it could not rely on land control, was sought with all kinds of evidence, clerical clothing, executions, kings of arms, escutcheon... that if they could not support themselves with those, they did not hide their economic decline. Geographically there is also a gap between the north of the peninsula - the Cantabrian and Pyrenean mountains where the original sites of the noble houses are to be found but where there are no great domains and the greatest equality of conditions allowed the myth of the universal gentry to be born - and the south - dominated by the encomiendas of the military orders and the great nobility states. To the non-privileged, they had the perception of the pride of old Christians, which was legally expressed in the statutes of cleansing of blood, which spread through all kinds of institutions after the anti-converso revolt of Pedro Sarmiento in Toledo (1449). That legal discrimination remained a decisive factor of social cohesion especially after the expulsion of the Jews (1492) and the Moriscos (1609), keeping the existence of the new Christian as a useful scapegoat, a condition from which they did not escape neither the highest noble houses nor the same king (Green Book of Aragon, Tizón de la Nobleza). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instituciones_espa%C3%B1olas_del_Antiguo_R%C3%A9gimen#cite_note-2 To the territorial union of the Catholic Monarchs (by marriage: Aragón and Castilla, or conquest: Canary Islands, Granada, Navarre, Americas, Naples, North African plazas), the addition of vast territories in Europe follows with the arrival of the Habsburg dynasty, whose conception of the power was based on the respect to the local peculiarities (not without conflicts, like the War of the Communities and the Germanías with Charles I or the crisis of 1640 with Phillip IV). The unitary conception of peninsular domains allows historiography to speak of Hispanic Monarchy, although the union is in the person of the kings and not in the kingdoms, who maintain their laws, languages, currencies and institutions. The attempt to unify them from the union of noble families, notably in the founding of the concept of Greatness of Spain (1520), which was incorporated into a small number of aristocratic houses of the two crowns (with clear Castilian predominance). The matrimonial alliances were fomented, with the manifest aim that the social elite in practice was the same in all of them. The union with Portugal, which lasted sixty years (1580-1640), was also tried to consolidate in the same way (not without misgivings, from what comes the Portuguese proverb predicting from Spain: "neither good wind nor good marriage").

Finally, the Bourbon dynasty (curiously, of Navarrese origin) will impose the French uses of the absolute monarchy, not only in the court protocol, but in the centralist configuration of the State and in the succession provisions of the Salic law, after a civil war with a European dimension: the War of Spanish Succession."El Estado del Antiguo Régimen protegía los intereses nobiliarios. Precisamente por eso además de absoluto ha sido denominado por algunos autores —P. Anderson, Kiernan, Porshnev, etc.— como nobiliario o señorial. El monarca nunca pone en cuestión a su nobleza y tampoco a la inversa. El primero se preocupa de mimar a la segunda y mantener sus privilegios económicos, sociales, etcétera. Naturalmente que eso de forma general, y visto como situación a largo plazo. Por supuesto que hay conflictos coyunturales. De ahí que haya que romper con el tópico de que los Reyes Católicos terminan con el poder de su nobleza. Parece un error metodológico plantear el inicio y el desarrollo del Estado Moderno como la resolución de un conflicto de intereses entre el monarca y la nobleza del que salió victoriosa la Corona. Los miembros de la alta nobleza eran los primeros interesados en contar con un fuerte poder central que posibilitara el control social e hiciera difícil, cuando no imposible, la protesta de los grupos sociales menos ricos de los que obtenían sus rentas. El llamado Estado Moderno protege, defiende y consolida los intereses nobiliarios... Por otro lado, sería un grave error, muy numeroso entre historiadores, el de concebir su evolución de una manera lineal. Los desarrollos no suelen ser así, sino que tienen sus progresos -término etéreo- y sus retrocesos. Igualmente ocurre con la función de la nobleza y su papel en el Estado. Poco después de terminar la Reconquista olvida su carácter militar, comienza a actuar políticamente, con una intensidad que encuentra su punto más cálido en el siglo XVII, y gradualmente su papel se va reduciendo al ocupar exclusivamente cargos diplomáticos y honoríficos, tanto en la administración como en el Ejército, si bien esto de forma muy general, y como tal bastante distorsionador. Por último, habría que desterrar el tópico de que durante el siglo XIX, el Estado liberal arrincona definitivamente a la nobleza. Tal cosa no ocurre, entre otras circunstancias, porque tampoco ven lesionada de forma importante su situación económica privilegiada. Gran parte de nuestra historiografía está plagada de clichés que necesitan ser remozados."

The territorial constitution of the Hispanic Monarchy in such a broad ensemble of territories allows us to speak separately of the American institutions, those of the European territories on the other side of the Pyrenees (especially Flanders and Italy), and those of the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, to which this article refers.The latter, can be understood as an institutional unit (with the clear exception of the Kingdom of Navarre and the Basque provinces) from the beginning of the eighteenth century, due on the one hand to the traumatic clarification that led to the separation of Portugal (1640), and on the other hand, the Nueva Planta decrees (1707 to 1716) that reduced the legislation of the Crown of Aragon to that of Castile (which was decisive above all for Catalonia, Valencia, and Mallorca, since the Kingdom of Aragon had seen its fueros very limited as a result of the revolt of Antonio Pérez in 1592). In any case, and despite being used at the time (see From Hispania to Spain), the expression kingdom of Spain and the concept of national unity (of liberal origin) should not be used strictly before the Cadiz Constitution of 1812, and in the New Regime. The definition of Spain as a nation is not the object of this article, but it is necessary to emphasize that Spanish national identity is built precisely as a consequence of the prolonged existence of the institutions of the Old Regime (sometimes, in spite of them), some unitary, others common, and other plural in their territorial configuration. When the Cortes of Cádiz celebrates its debates, it will explicitly try to update the traditional institutions that together with the uses and customs supposedly would form its own natural and timeless "constitution," appropriate to the Spanish national idiosyncrasy, even though the Constitution of 1812 was clearly a revolutionary break. Another thing would be to elucidate the pre-existence of a national character or "Being of Spain", as it was understood in the famous essay of Antonio Machado.

The Municipality, the Courts, and the Treasury
In the absence of powerful intermediate levels of organization of the territory (they existed, but in a discontinuous way, and sometimes without competences or resources that made them decisive: adelantamientos, vegueries, merindades, etc. until with the Bourbon reforms the network of army and provinjce intendentes was implanted, precedent of the provincial governor), the lower level of territorial organization presented an extraordinary vitality in Spain: the municipal institution, heritage of the Roman municipality and reinforced by the repopulation that follows the reconquista during the Middle Ages. The early medieval repopulation process had granted an original freedom unparalleled in other parts of Europe, (presuras, allods, behetrías), and more than in any other kingdom on the border or Castilian Extremadura, where the condition of a peasant was equated to that of a noble if he defended his own land with a war horse (caballeros villanos). With the passage of the centuries and the distance from the border, the early open councils, in which all the neighbors participated, were replaced by powerful corporations, the councils or town halls of cities or towns with fueros, municipal charter that granted them jurisdiction over a broad alfoz or land, composed of numerous rural nuclei (peoples, places, and villages) and more unpopulated lands (mountains, pastures, dehesa s, wastelands) in the face those that behave like a true "collective manor", in a similar way to how nobility and clergy were shaping their own manors. The condition of the peasants, therefore, was not radically different in realengo or manoralism..The involvement of the royal authority in municipal control became stronger at the end of the Middle Ages, as the monarchy became authoritarian, especially after the crisis of the fourteenth century. Finally there was a kind of "distribution of roles" among the councilors, who had become venal and hereditary positions in the families of what can be called urban patriarchy or municipal oligarchy (knights or ennobled bourgeois, ciutadans honrats .. .) and the corregidor, as a direct representative of the king in the municipality. In smaller municipalities the posts were usually one mayor representing the third estate and another, the nobility.

The most important municipalities are the cities with votes in the Cortes, representatives not so much of a third estate as of an urban patriciano ennoblecido, more in Castile than in Catalonia, where the city of Barcelona has a fundamental importance and since 1359 the permanent deputation of the Cortes (the Generalitat) exercised an effective counterweight to the increase of royal power; or in Aragon, where they were presided over by the Justicia (which warned the kings, "We make you King if you fulfill our Fueros and comply with them, if not, not"), in addition to arranging from 1364 its own General Deputation. A similar institution existed in Valencia since 1418. The Cortes was the representative institution of the kingdom (an entity dialectically opposed to the king), with legislative and fiscal functions; strongest in Aragon, where they maintained their structure in three arms (four in the kingdom of Aragon, with the nobility divided into rich men and hidalgos), weaker in Castile, where they stopped convening the privileged estates. They lost importance in the 18th century, when the two crowns were summoned together, but only met for questions of succession."Tres fueron las instancias con capacidad fiscal independiente: la Iglesia, el Reino y la Corona. La fiscalidad eclesiástica consistía en el cobro de diezmos y primicias, impuestos directos que gravaban la renta de la tierra... La Iglesia, que, por su función pastoral, tenía distribuidos a sus individuos por todos los lugares, estaba en condiciones de exigir un tributo de este tipo, cosas que la corona no podía realizar... Las Cortes de cada reino tenían facultades limitadas en el proceso legislativo —formulaban peticiones que el rey concedía, aplazaba o denegaba— y decisorias en lo que respecta a la votación de servicios. En el comienzo de las sesiones, el rey o su representante exponía los puntos más significativos de su política exterior y solicitaba un servicio o donativo que habitualmente se fijaba después de negociaciones con frecuencia laboriosas, y sólo en una ocasión, las Cortes catalanas de 1626, no se votó el servicio, debido no a la negativa de los procuradores sino a que no concluyeron las sesiones... La hacienda real carecía de unidad. Cada reino constituía una administración independiente y en todos, con la excepción señalada de los presupuestos del Reino en Castilla, se aplicaba el principio de consumir íntegramente en el territorio los recursos que en el mismo se obtenían... no existió unidad de tesorería hasta que en 1799 se estableció la llamada «reunión de rentas»."

The hacienda was one of the pillars of the functioning of the Monarchy, much more substantial in Castile than in Aragon and Navarre (and in the Basque provinces, which although Castilian, had a tax exemption linked to a confused universal nobility). The Chamber of Comptos of Navarre or the private institutions of the other territories did not collect more than necessary for the maintenance of the operation of a minimum bureaucratic apparatus of their own, being insufficient even for the defense of their own territories in a necessary case. The same can be said of the more substantial incomes from Flanders or Italy (in these cases faced with constant and large military expenditures). For Castile, the unquestionable fiscal center of the monarchy, the Treasury Council and the Cortes designed the system, but it was really based on the encabezamiento (heading) by the cities, for their benefit and against the territory they administered, and in their effective collection -based on recorded taxes on consumption and commercial traffic- it was usually leased to private individuals. The main income was always insufficient; consequently, the resources of extraordinary urgency to bankers' loans (successively Castilian, German -the mythical Fugger s-, Genoese, and Portuguese) to the public debt (juros) and to devaluation were a chronic encumbrance that undermined the credit of the monarchy and led to periodic bankruptcies. These revenues were basically the quinto real of the American metals (which altered the economy of Europe producing the Price Revolution) and the alcabala, a theoretically universal indirect tax. The multiplicity of royalties and other taxes (ordinary and extraordinary service, millones, regalía de aposento, etc.) made the system ineffective and unfair, which led to some failed attempts at reform, such as the Union of Arms designed by the Count-Duke of Olivares and the Only Contribution linked to the Catastro of Ensenada. Prior to this, the Nueva Planta Decrees had administratively unified Valencia and Catalonia without any difference with Castile (Aragon had already lost its fueros in the time of Philip II of Spain after the revolt of Antonio Pérez), as a result of its defeat in the War of Spanish Succession, which gave the opportunity to establish a practically ex-novo tax system without the obstacles involved in having to respect acquired rights, which resulted in a simple and effective system that in fact encouraged economic activity during the eighteenth century while producing a substantial increase in revenue. That fiscal ideal, added to other legal characteristics (the emphyteusis census that guaranteed the Catalan peasant the continuity of his agrarian exploitation, and the survival of civil law, which guaranteed the heir the full conservation of the family patrimony) was a model of the enlightened reforms although the resistances found made its application nonviable in Castile, in what can be seen as an inverse situation to that of the Union of Arms of the Count-Duke of the previous century.