II
Nobles and Hidalgos

The nobility in some ways epitomize the problems of delineating the cultural framework of early modern Spanish society. We can learn a great deal about their activities and lives, but the cultural underpinnings often seem alien. The concepts of privilege, rank, lineage, honor, and duty are viewed today as artifacts, in turn picturesque, frivolous, unjust, or hypocritical. Furthermore these concepts are difficult to reconcile with pragmatism, economic dynamism, and social flexibility. Yet all these factors coexisted, as clearly evidenced by the move to the New World—in which the middle and lower ranks of the provincial nobility played a significant part—or the transformation of the Sevillian nobility, who enthusiastically embraced and participated in the commercial expansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and who intermarried extensively with wealthy merchant and converso families.^[1]

Explanation is further complicated by the fact that the period in question was one of rapid change. What could be considered as medieval and modern outlooks apparently existed side by side—uneasily, perhaps, from our point of view, but not necessarily for the people who lived in those times. How, for example, do we reconcile the consistent, if arrogant and unappealing, practicality of Hernando Pizarro—who devoted all his energy and subordinated all concerns to consolidating and maintaining his family's fortune and position—with the misguided heroism (in the medieval sense) of his brother Gonzalo—who to the ill-fated end of his rebellion (and his life) claimed that rather than live forty years he would prefer to live ten and be governor of Peru?^[2] Yet whereas it was

Hernando who was the legitimate son and heir of an old if modest hidalgo family, and Gonzalo one of his illegitimate brothers and somewhat of an outsider as a result, in a sense they both were motivated by the same aspiration. Each sought to claim the position he felt was his by right (and for which, therefore, he was entitled to fight), and this guiding principle emerged directly from the ethos of the hidalgo or noble.

Similarly one might ponder the example of Andrés Calderón Puertocarrero, a caballero and heir to an entail who was related to a number of leading nobles of Trujillo. Andrés was willing to ignore his privileged station to the point of calling himself a merchant when he went to Peru in 1562. But when he returned—as will be discussed—his behavior in every sense reflected the attitudes of his rank. A comparison of Dr. Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal and his son Diego de Vargas Carvajal offers a similar paradox. The former, a historian, professor at Salamanca, eminent jurist, member of the Council of Castile and finally of the Council of the Indies (1525–1527), was very much the new-style professional bureaucrat and statesman favored by Ferdinand and Isabella. His son Diego de Vargas Carvajal, who inherited the office of Correo Mayor de las Indias that his father had been awarded while serving on the Council of Castile, seems to have epitomized the Trujillo caballero. Diego de Vargas devoted his attention to his estates and family interests and embroiled himself in the local conflicts and rivalries that characterized the late Middle Ages and carried over into the sixteenth century, to the extent that in his will of 1562 he warned his sons against involvement in the bandos (factions or parties) of Trujillo. In contrast to his father's lifelong career of service to the crown, Diego's only endeavor along those lines was his brief (but apparently lucrative) tenure as one of the Comisarios de Perpetuidad sent to Peru in 1560. These commissioners proved so venal, and complaints against them so strident, that they were ordered back to Spain; but Diego de Carvajal died in Peru before he could return home.^[3]

I will not attempt here a detailed analysis of how the concepts of honor and position operated among the provincial nobility—these concepts have been treated elsewhere^[4] —nor will I attempt to assess the impact of Renaissance ideas and education^[5] and the growing importance and prestige of the monarchy and court. Nonethe-

less these currents of influence conditioned the thought and behavior of the nobility; ignoring them obscures attitudes and aspirations that in some ways shaped their decisions and responses. Thus when Diego García de Paredes of Cáceres fell out with President Gasca (or perhaps with some of his officers) in Peru, with disastrous consequences for himself, because he felt that the position Gasca had offered him was beneath him,^[6] or Alvaro de Paredes wrote to his brother in Cáceres from Mexico in 1590 to say that despite his failure to find a place there he would not return to Spain out of shame ("vergüenza"),^[7] these individuals were thinking and acting in terms of ideals and expectations that for them were as real as the more concrete dictates of political and economic reality. The paradoxes and contradictions we perceive in retrospect, however, need not have troubled the sixteenth-century observer. The educated, urbane Diego and Alonso de Hinojosa, uncle and nephew who authored a chronicle of noble lineages of Trujillo in the sixteenth century, insisted on the Hinojosas' relationship to the Cid and praised a certain Hernando Alonso de Hinojosa for avenging the rape of a female cousin ("peleando con el Corajo le mató, muy como varón"); yet they roundly condemned those individuals who sustained the bandos,^[8] a judgment that seems notably enlightened for the time and place.

Nobles and Hidalgos: Definitions and Distinctions

Who, or what, were the nobility of sixteenth-century Extremadura? The origins and formation of the Spanish nobility were multiple, complex, and often obscure, and as a result the group set at the top of provincial society by virtue of privilege and inheritance eludes simple categorization. In Castile as a whole in the sixteenth century there were several classes of nobles (grandes, títulos, caballeros, hidalgos) which had their origins in different historical periods and circumstances. The caballeros, for example, to a great extent could be traced back to the heyday of the reconquista (twelfth and thirteenth centuries) and the military services rendered by armed men on horseback, whereas the grandes and títulos were royal creations of a later era. Furthermore a number of juridical distinctions subdivided these groups; an hidalgo might be,

for example, "de solar conocido," "de ejecutoria," "de vengar 500 sueldos." But by the early sixteenth century most of these minute legal distinctions had become blurred or largely ignored in practice and probably had lost much meaning even for contemporaries.^[9] Basically what remained was a sort of three-tiered division of all those who had fiscal exemptions and other real or honorary privileges. These three groups roughly corresponded to the designations grandes and títulos (at the top), caballeros, and hidalgos. Although Trujillo, more so than Cáceres, was home to a number of "señores de vasallos"—from the fourteenth century, for example, the Orellanas (a branch of the Altamirano family) ruled Orellana la Vieja—both cities lacked representatives of the highest group of Castilian nobility. Certain members of the título class, however, did figure in local society by virtue of their relationships (both of kinship and clientage) with the local nobility and the proximity of their holdings or jurisdictions to the cities. The Duke of Béjar, one of the largest stockraisers of Castile, for example, was influential in the cities. A number of young men from noble families of Cáceres and Trujillo served in his household; Juan de Chaves, descendant of Luis de Chaves, el viejo (friend and ally of Ferdinand and Isabella) and himself an author of a chronicle of his lineage, was said to have been raised there. One cacereño noble, Diego de la Rocha, in his instrument of entail drafted in 1546, called the "conde de Benalcázar, Marqués de Gibraleón, Duque de Béjar que espera ser" his lord and said he was a criado (servant, retainer) of that house, from which he had received "good treatment and many favors." In 1570 don Diego Mejía de Ovando, the lord of Don Llorente and Loriana and vecino of Cáceres, sold a censo on his entail to raise 2000 ducados in order to accompany the Duke of Béjar to Genoa.^[10]

Broadly speaking, then, the privileged class in Cáceres and Trujillo comprised two more or less distinct groups. One consisted of the wealthy, powerful, and stable noble families. Most of these nobles were caballeros and many held titles. They filled the seats of the city council, maintained large households—residences in the city and estates in the countryside—and intermarried extensively. The other, larger group included all the other individuals and families which lacked titles but held fiscal exemptions that distinguished them from the taxpayers (pecheros) and could claim hi-

dalgo status of some kind. The distinctions between these groups of course faded at times, since noble families were hierarchies that included poor and illegitimate relatives whose status differed considerably from that of the principal heir or heirs and direct line; and also the fortunes of an entire family could change over time.

The terms "noble" and "hidalgo" will be used here not in a technical or legal sense but rather to distinguish between these generalized social (really socioeconomic) groupings. The terms noble and nobility will be reserved for the small circle of principal families that dominated their respective cities and districts, while the term hidalgo will refer to the privileged group as a whole or will be used to distinguish between the leading nobles and all others. If at first glance the distinction seems confusing or nitpicking, its significance emerges clearly when one compares the wealth and position of a great (by local standards) noble like Juan de Chaves (the chronicler)—who in 1558 at the king's request and at considerable personal expense accompanied the queens of Portugal and Hungary, sisters of Charles V, from Trujillo to Badajoz^[11] —with that of humble hidalgos living in the villages of the countryside who worked the land with a pair or two of oxen and were hardly distinguishable from their fellow labradores.

The hidalgo group was, then, homogeneous neither in wealth nor in social standing or political influence, all of which usually went together. Frequent references to suits for hidalguía indicate the tenuous claim some had to privileged status; hidalgo status often came down to a question of whether one paid normal taxes or not, whether an individual (or, perhaps more important, his antecedents) had been included in the padrón (list of taxpayers). Incorporation of an individual who considered himself to be an hidalgo into the padrón occasioned a number of suits that were taken to the royal chancillería (high court of appeals) in Granada.^[12] The testimony collected in the prosecution of these suits demonstrates clearly, however, that fiscal exemption was only one of the qualities that defined the hidalgo; possibly proof of such exemption in itself did not suffice to prove hidalguía. Just as important was evidence regarding the rank of one's father and grandfather and, perhaps even more convincing, one's association and relationship with a lineage that included prominent and recognized nobles.

Hidalguía adhered to a family and lineage, not to an individual as

such, and in effect this meant the male line since in this period women scarcely figured.^[13] One case that illustrates the kind of evidence that could be brought to bear on the question of hidalguía was that of the brothers Francisco and Martín de Escobar, who initiated a suit in 1588 because they had been included in the padrón of the village of Robledillo (jurisdiction of Trujillo). Juan de Chaves, former regidor of Trujillo (very likely the chronicler), testified that he had talked with the litigants' father, Pedro de Escobar, in the house of Escobar's relative (deudo) Alvaro de Escobar, whom Chaves called a "caballero muy principal." Chaves further testified that the litigants' older brother Gómez Nuño de Escobar, who had gone to the Indies and returned wealthy, had been an intimate of Juan de Escobar (son and heir of the aforementioned Alvaro de Escobar and brother of Fray Diego de Chaves, the confessor of Philip II). When Juan de Escobar's eldest son, Alvaro Rodríguez de Escobar, caballero of Santiago, and his brother went to fight the Alpujarras rebellion, Gómez Nuño de Escobar "gave his relative a beautiful chestnut horse for the journey." Another witness stated that Juan de Escobar had been padrino (godfather) at Gómez Nuño de Escobar's wedding and at the baptism of one of his sons. Chaves's testimony, then, offered evidence of close association between the family of the litigants and a much higher-ranking noble lineage. What further proof of their hidalgo status could be needed? Francisco and Martín de Escobar won their suit in Granada, although virtually none of the testimony bore any direct relation to their own status and activities. Francisco went to the Indies, probably at least twice. While this did emerge in testimony, the fact that he did so as a merchant did not.^[14]

An even more remarkable instance of what might be regarded as largely circumstantial proof of hidalguía appeared in the suit initiated by Pedro de Sande of Cáceres in 1551 and pursued by his sons in the 1570s. Pedro de Sande's father, Hernando de Sande, was from Lugo in Galicia, where he was considered to be an hidalgo. The main branch of the Sande family came to Cáceres and Plasencia from Galicia in the early fifteenth century, and one of those Sandes—Juan de Sande Carvajal, el viejo—was corregidor of Salamanca, probably in the early years of the sixteenth century (see table 2 for the Sande family). Hernando de Sande participated in a jousting tournament "de señores y caballeros hijosdalgo" in which

Table 2
The Paredes, Sande, and Carvajal Families of Trujillo and Cáceres

he so distinguished himself that he came to the attention of the corregidor Juan de Sande, who on hearing Hernando's name decided he must be a relative of his. He invited Hernando de Sande to his lodgings and was so pleased with him that he insisted that his newly discovered relation send a son to live in his household. Hernando de Sande took his son Pedro de Sande to Cáceres; Pedro remained there and became a vecino.

The testimony amassed to prove the hidalguía of Pedro de Sande and his sons included that of another illustrious Sande, Diego García de Sande, a caballero of Santiago and brother of the famous military officer don Alvaro de Sande (later Marqués de Piobera). He testified in the suit that Pedro's father, Hernando de Sande, was a "justador grande" and that "it was clear that he was related to all who were of the house of Sande." Diego García had taken Pedro de Sande, along with other relatives, with him to Seville when he went there to get married. Diego García de Sande further stated that he had known another son of Hernando de Sande, Juan de Sande, who fought with him in Italy and Sicily and elsewhere, and that this Juan de Sande had received a salary increment in addition to his regular pay that only hidalgos received. Everyone thought of Juan de Sande as don Alvaro de Sande's kinsman; don Alvaro had felt it deeply when Juan de Sande was killed in Turkey, "because he was his relative." Diego García also noted that he himself had another brother named Arias de Sande who had been a captain and died in Italy; Arias was also the name of the litigant Pedro de Sande's paternal grandfather. Proof of the hidalguía of Pedro de Sande's family, therefore, rested on several types of evidence: close association with and recognition as "deudos" by prominent nobles; a relative (Pedro's brother Juan) having had a privilege to which only hidalgos were entitled (the "ventaja" he received as a soldier); and the use of a name associated with the much more prominent line of the family (Arias). Again all the evidence pertained to the male line and the activities of the males of the lineage; women were scarcely mentioned except in relation to the litigants themselves.^[15]

It was at this point, when the testimony touched most directly on the litigants, that the case for Pedro de Sande and his sons began to appear less than airtight and that the difference between somewhat tenuous hidalgos and those who were clearly recognized as such becomes more obvious. In Cáceres the litigant Pedro de

Sande married Francisca Picón, the daughter of Francisco Picón, whom witnesses said was an hidalgo and "very rich." In general the testimony emphasized the latter quality; what was undeniable was that Pedro de Sande's wife was not a "doña" at a time (midsixteenth century) when most noble women of substance bore that title. It is also undeniable that, between them, Pedro de Sande and Francisca Picón, hidalgos of middling status, produced a family of upwardly mobile sons whose ambitions and abilities finally brought them at least close to the position to which they aspired. Their son Dr. Francisco de Sande, the most energetic and possibly most capable of the lot, in the last third of the sixteenth century served on audiencias (high courts) in Mexico, Guatemala, and Bogotá and briefly as governor of the Philippines (in the 1570s), working tirelessly in the interests of himself and his brothers, one of whom, don Juan de Sande, eventually ended up on the city council of Cáceres. Yet while their mother, Francisca Picón, in her later years at times was called "doña" and at others not, significantly her own son Dr. Sande omitted the doña in referring to her. Similarly his brothers used the title "don" but not consistently, so that the family's claim to the honorific even in the late sixteenth century, when the use of such titles had proliferated, continued to be uncertain.^[16]

Clearly, in the latter part of the sixteenth century a successful professional career could go a long way toward elevating the status of an entire family. Like Dr. Francisco de Sande, Licenciado Diego García de Valverde, another cacereño who served on several audiencias in the New World, was the son of a woman who was not a doña. His brother Baltasar de Valverde could not sign his name, and they had a first cousin who was married to a surgeon. But Valverde's wife was a doña, and his son was "don" Francisco de Valverde.^[17] A similar process affected Licenciado Diego González Altamirano of Trujillo and his family. He also served on audiencias in the Indies, had relatives who probably were involved in commerce and the lower-ranking professions, and was responsible for his sons' elevation in status. Thus in addition to all the other legal, social, and economic considerations that served to define hidalguía (and foster distinctions between nobles and hidalgos of varying rank and status), in the sixteenth century socioeconomic and political changes generated yet other factors that also came to bear on the determination of hidalguía and status. Inevitably the whole concept

of nobility and hidalguía underwent transformations in the sixteenth century, complicating the task of analyzing and describing the hidalgo group.^[18]

The hidalgos of Cáceres and Trujillo, as suggested, were quite heterogeneous and really constituted a group only insofar as they could claim certain privileges in common. More marginal hidalgos might actively pursue nonnoble trades and occupations or have relatives who did so. One of the more respectable occupations for lower-ranking hidalgos was that of notary. Among the lower-ranking hidalgos intermarriage with non-hidalgos was common, further blurring distinctions between individuals at this level. Very likely, however, as insignificant as the distinction might seem to have been in many instances, it continued to be recognized. A witness said that the parents of the first and second wives of Hernando de Encinas, who petitioned to go to Peru (or Tucumán) in 1591 with his family, were hidalgos ("estuvieron en posesión de hijosdalgo"), while Encinas's parents were honorable and prominent people ("en posesión de gente muy honrada y principal") but obviously not hidalgos.^[19] Hidalguía was one's birthright, and being poor or working at a trade or with the land could not obviate that inherited quality. Thus while it may seem anomalous that the hidalgo appointed alférez (ensign) by the Cáceres city council was a cloth shearer (tundidor ), or that the father of Antonio de Cotrina, an hidalgo who became an entrepreneur in the Indies trade, was a tailor and many of his relatives dyers, the contemporaries of such individuals apparently perceived no incongruity.^[20]

A large number of middle and lower-ranking hidalgos lived in the towns and villages outside the cities. Whereas in 1552 Casar de Cáceres, with over 700 vecinos, claimed to have no hidalgos,^[21] other pueblos had rather large numbers of them. In 1561 nearly 70 of Zorita's 380 vecinos were hidalgos. In 1551 several of them had obtained a royal provision directing that Trujillo's corregidor allow the hidalgos of Zorita to hold offices that up until then had been reserved for labradores; the hidalgos proposed that they be given half the available positions because of their high proportion among the town's inhabitants.^[22] The pueblo of Zarza, where the estates of the Pizarro family were located, in 1561 had 10 hidalgos among its 103 vecinos.

These hidalgos of the villages, however, by no means constituted

a local aristocracy and did not monopolize wealth or, obviously, political power. Of Zorita's hidalgos 7 were called poor or very poor (1 was a tailor and another a carpenter), and several others had just an ox, or a pair of oxen, or three pigs, or the like. It is difficult to estimate wealth based on the 1561 vecindario (census) because the only property listed is livestock, and doubtless some individuals had other sources of income or means of making their living; 4 hidalgos (2 men and 2 women), for example, were described as living well but having no movable property ("tiene bien de comer y no hacienda mueble"). Taking property in livestock as a guide, however, some of the hidalgos probably were among the wealthiest villagers, but some pecheros were their equals. Diego de Trejo, the hidalgo wealthiest in stock, had 300 sheep, 25 oxen and cows, and 40 pigs, and another hidalgo, Pedro de Cacedo, had 250 sheep, 12 oxen and cows, and 60 pigs; but commoner Rodrigo Pérez had 350 sheep, 2 oxen, and 50 pigs. The situation was similar in Zarza, where half the hidalgos were poor and only 3 were called wealthy ("ricos"); but in fact none of them owned as much livestock or land as the well-to-do commoners of the village.^[23] In Ibahernando, where the census included a greater variety of properties, the situation was much the same. The town had only a handful of hidalgos among its 180 or so vecinos. The wealthiest of these, Diego de Arévalo, had a house, a vineyard with 800 vines, a horse, ass, 2 pigs, and 80 sheep; but the commoner Rodrigo Gutiérrez had two houses, two vineyards with 1200 vines, 3 oxen, 2 cows, a bull and a calf, 20 pigs, 2 donkeys, and 300 sheep and goats. Another pechero, Francisco de Roda, had a house and nearly 2000 vines in two vineyards, as well as 4 oxen, 250 sheep and goats, 2 pigs, and an ass. Well-to-do commoners far outnumbered hidalgos in Ibahernando.^[24]

While the hidalgos of the villages for the most part were a modest bunch, the presence of hidalgos was not limited to these local people, since a number of nobles—who were almost always vecinos of the cities and therefore usually not included in the censuses of the towns—owned houses and estates in and around the villages. Some noble families acquired señorío (jurisdiction) over villages in Trujillo's district, a process that accelerated in the sixteenth century and continued into the seventeenth. Around 1558–1559 Alonso Ruiz (returnee from Peru) purchased the village of Madroñera; Diego de Vargas Carvajal (son of Dr. Lorenzo

Galíndez de Carvajal, councillor of the Indies) purchased Puerto de Santa Cruz; Licenciado Juan de Vargas (oidor of the chancillería of Valladolid) bought Plasenzuela with its hamlets Guijo and Avilillos; Pedro Barrantes (another returnee from Peru) acquired La Cumbre; and Alvaro de Loaysa (father of Fray Jerónimo de Loaysa, first archbishop of Lima) became señor of Santa Marta and Diego Pizarro de Hinojosa of Torrecillas.^[25] In addition many noble families exercized considerable influence in villages where they owned residences and estates. The Moraga family dominated Aldea del Cano (in Cáceres's district), and in 1561 members of the related Moraga, Vita, and Cano families were living there.^[26] The parents of don Juan de Sande (nephew of don Alvaro de Sande) maintained a house in Torrequemada where they lived much of the year. In Trujillo's district the Vargas family was influential in Madrigalejo, where they had built a "casa-fuerte" demolished by orders of Queen Isabella, the Pizarro Carvajals were important in Alcollarín, and the Solís family in Ibahernando.^[27] The rich nobles who acquired señorío over villages of course usually already had houses and properties in these places, like the Pizarros in Zarza and Alonso Ruiz in Madroñera.

The Noble Way of Life

Almost all the nobles maintained impressive urban residences that were as much an expression of nobility as the family arms that occupied a prominent position over the entranceway, titles, estates in the countryside, or seats on the city council. No wonder that one of the most noticeable results of the involvement of local people in the Indies was the appearance of new or renovated town houses built by returnees, who probably accounted for most of the major new private construction in the sixteenth century. In Cáceres Francisco de Godoy, who returned from Peru in the 1540s, built his house hear the church of Santiago in a largely worker and artisan parish, and don Juan Cano Moctezuma, the son of emigrant Juan Cano and doña Isabel Moctezuma (daughter of the last Mexican emperor), built the "Palacio de Moctezuma" within the walls of the old city. Cristóbal de Ovando Paredes arranged to buy a house in the parish of San Mateo before he even returned from Peru (in the 1580s) and then spent 2400 ducados to renovate it.^[28] In Trujillo

Hernando Pizarro built an enormous house on the plaza, as did the wealthy and well-born returnee Juan Pizarro de Orellana. Gonzalo de las Casas, son of the encomendero of New Spain Francisco de las Casas (a cousin of Hernando Cortés), and Licenciado Altamirano, who twice served on the audiencia of Lima, rebuilt or renovated family residences on the plaza of Trujillo as well.

The flurry of construction and renovation of houses in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries changed the appearance and residential patterns of the cities. Both Cáceres and Trujillo were walled towns with structures within the walls especially that dated back to the fifteenth or fourteenth centuries, or even earlier; but the facades of most houses were altered in the sixteenth,^[29] so it was the architecture of this period rather than of the middle ages that predominated. Furthermore by this time both cities had long since expanded considerably beyond the walls—a process that likely began not long after the reconquest—and the cities' large main plazas lay outside and below the old walls. Still to some extent both conserved the old pattern, with the majority of noble residences located within the walls and the worker and artisan neighborhoods outside. This pattern persisted more strongly in Cáceres, where almost all the residents of the two parishes within the walls, San Mateo and Santa María, were hidalgos or their servants and slaves, or ecclesiastics and professionals. Trujillo's "villa" (as the old walled town was known) was smaller than Cáceres's walled center, bound by the castle and steep slopes on most sides, and it lacked a plaza of any real dimensions—hence the relative attractiveness of the newer part of the city and the monumental plaza for new construction. But the older noble families—the Escobars, Chaves, Altamiranos—had their great houses in the villa, and it was more the newly rich of the sixteenth century who built on and around the plaza.

Regardless of location, a noble's family's casas principales were of such importance that, in contrast to movable goods that frequently were auctioned off at the death of the head of the family, houses were retained and passed on to the next generation, usually to the eldest son and often as part of the family entail. In his will of 1579, for example, Licenciado Diego González Altamirano stipulated that the heir to his entail must live in the casas principales on the plaza which he had inherited from his father and rebuilt.^[30] Particularly wealthy patriarchs might purchase additional houses to

leave to younger sons. The house or palacio and all that it implied symbolized the wealth, status, and continuity of the noble family.

In the city nobles visited and ate in one another's houses. Women might spend the afternoon in the house of a friend, and men strolled and chatted in the plaza or rode about on their horses. The life of the provincial nobles might not have been luxurious or comfortable by today's standards—the huge rooms and dark interiors of many of the noble houses convey more a sense of splendor and wealth than of comfort—but they lived in a style that set them far apart from most commoners. They filled their houses with furniture, wall hangings, rugs, and valuable objects, importing many of these furnishings from elsewhere in Castile or from Europe or more exotic locales such as Asia or America. They took great pride in their clothes, of which they had considerable number and variety, in striking contrast to workers and artisans who might own no more than a change of clothing. Like the furnishings of their houses, the fine cloth of their garments came from all over Spain, or Italy, or Flanders. Women owned and wore costly jewelry of gold, silver, and precious stones; Hernando Pizarro's niece and wife, doña Francisca Pizarro (the mestiza daughter of Francisco Pizarro) owned a fortune in emeralds.^[31] And of course the nobles maintained large households and retinues of servants and slaves, who attended them and were outfitted in suitably impressive livery.

While today many of the expenditures and investments of the nobility would be judged uneconomic and seen as a kind of conspicuous consumption, such a perspective is anachronistic because these expenditures were inherent to the role of a noble. A noble had to live nobly, and that implied or required generosity, charity, and impressive personal display, as well as other qualities such as honor, bravery, and military skills. Arms, title, lineage, a great house, an honorable wife and obedient children, advantageous marriage alliances, a seat on the city council, estate in the countryside, entourage of deudos, retainers, and slaves, lavish display in personal dress and for the celebration of important events, fine horses, and livery were all inextricably linked to the noble ideal.

Most of the nobles of Cáceres and Trujillo owned casas de campo outside the city, in the countryside or villages, which were not only headquarters for estates but residences where they spent a large percentage or even the majority of their time. In February 1570,

for example, the Cáceres city council sent messengers to summon the nobles from the countryside ("todos los caballeros que están en sus aldeas") to a meeting.^[32] Two main branches of the Ovando family owned estates and huge country houses that looked like small castles at Arguijuela, about ten kilometers south of Cáceres on the road to Aldea del Cano. Diego de Ovando de Cáceres (grandson of the Captain by the same name who allied with Isabella, for which he was amply rewarded) built a hermitage near his estate at Arguijuela and spent 1000 ducados to construct an altarpiece for the chapel of his house. An inventory of the estate in 1551 included 30 plow oxen, almost 200 pigs, over 300 cows, and nearly 10,000 sheep.^[33]

How does one explain the strong liking, or even preference, that many nobles had for their country houses and estates? For the most part the nobles were, perhaps, a rustic lot who enjoyed spending time outdoors and whose entertainments to a great extent were physical. Men liked to hunt and fish, and they had special clothes for such activities and tents and cots for camping that could serve them for military campaigns as well as hunting trips. Young men no doubt devoted much time to training and perfecting their skills at arms and in horsemanship. Women as well as men enjoyed riding horses and mules,^[34] and nobles passed the time visiting their estates and friends and family in the countryside and other towns.^[35]

The nobles seem to have felt at ease in the countryside and villages where they were surrounded by relatives, old friends, and retainers and were known and deferred to by the people of the towns, with whom they probably had close relations. A vecino of Torrequemada testified in the información (testimonial) of don Jerónimo de Sande, one of two illegitimate sons of don Juan de Sande (nephew of don Alvaro de Sande) and doña María de Paredes, a vecina of Torrequemada where Sande's parents had their "casa poblada." He said that everyone had known when doña María was pregnant "because this place Torrequemada is very small and with few people [so] that one knows everything, the bad and the good."^[36] Witnesses in Torrequemada knew a great deal not only about don Juan de Sande but about his famous uncle don Alvaro de Sande and a number of other members of that active family (see table 2).

Some nobles took up permanent residence in one or another

town, while remaining vecinos of the city. Juan de Hinojosa de Torres, brother of the famous captain in Peru, Pedro Alonso de Hinojosa, lived full-time in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, and Diego de Torres Hinojosa lived in Torrecillas. Gómez Nuño de Escobar decided to live in Robledillo when he returned from the Indies.^[37] Some were more oriented to the life of the country than of the city. Andrés Calderón Puertocarrero's mother-in-law had a country house in Banis Pedro, as did he, where she lived much of the time, attending Sunday mass at the church in Torrecillas. Andrés Calderón's wife had ties with Deleitosa (a small town near their lands at Banis Pedro and close to Trujillo, although not under its jurisdiction), where the couple had married^[38] (see table 3 for the family).

Economic Base

Holdings in land and livestock enabled the nobles to live as they did. The nobles of Cáceres and Trujillo controlled a substantial portion of the grazing land in their districts, as well as agricultural and pasture lands located elsewhere. They derived an income from this land in two ways: by renting out pasturage, frequently to stockraisers of the north who annually sent their sheep south for winter pasturage, and by raising their own livestock—sheep first and foremost, for wool and meat, and pigs also. The other principal sources of noble income were redeemable censos (mortgages) and juros , which yielded an annual increment tied to a specific royal revenue (taxes, customs duties). Both juros and censos meant a fixed annual income in return for advance of a principal. Since they were investments they do not show much about the economic status of those who held them, other than reflecting that the holder had some surplus disposable capital. Sometimes outside circumstances were responsible for such investments. Many returnees and others involved in the Indies had to accept juros from the crown in lieu of the lump sums they brought back or were owed; but since juros for some time had been a typical royal reward for services, and returnees in any case tended to invest their capital in censos and juros, this policy did not necessarily impose any hardship.

Landholding and land use in sixteenth-century Extremadura, as in the rest of Castile, were diverse and complex, and outright ownership of land was not the only determinant of wealth or eco-

Table 3
Relatives of Andres^[*]  Calderón Puertocarrero, Noble of Trujillo and Returnee from Peru

nomic viability since there were other means of gaining access. Towns and villages owned common lands in which all vecinos had the right to graze their animals, and landless farmers had access to tierras baldías (royal lands) for grazing and cultivation. Dehesa was the term generally used for pasture land. Normally the dehesa was enclosed and, although mainly dedicated to grazing, it might include some wooded areas and agricultural land for farming.^[39] In addition to common lands cities owned properties (propios) that could be quite substantial. Both Cáceres and Trujillo controlled extensive pasture lands; Trujillo owned thirty-six dehesas known as "caballerías," since they originally were assigned to the caballeros who participated in the reconquest. In the fifteenth century the councils of both cities, dominated by the nobles, tended to favor their friends and relatives in the rental of these dehesas; but with the extension of royal control over the cities in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, Ferdinand and Isabella curtailed some of the abuses. In Cáceres the length of rental contracts decreased from five or more years to one or two, and Trujillo was required to give preference in rentals to commoners. People operating on a small scale, however, could not afford the rentals of large dehesas; so groups would rent them collectively, or sometimes the councils of the villages rented dehesas and divided up the land.^[40]

The important point with regard to the nobility and their role in the local economy is that, while their holdings were extensive, they did not monopolize grazing or agricultural land; nor in the sixteenth century were they able to use unchecked their institution, the city council, to control and use the properties owned by the cities. This is not to deny, of course, that commoners might have been experiencing real economic difficulties in this period and losing much of their land; in Cáceres's district at least almost all sales of vineyards and agricultural lands in the sixteenth century were to hidalgos or priests.^[41] Nevertheless the availability of rentals, either from private individuals or from city councils, and of tierras baldías and common lands meant that one could be a viable and even prosperous stockraiser or labrador while owning little or no land. Juan Pizarro of Cáceres, an hidalgo but not one of the city's principal nobles, in 1559 rented two dehesas, for four and six years, at around 1000 ducados each from nobles of the city, as well as other lands. The fact that he was able to afford these rentals suggests that,

despite owning no land himself, he nonetheless was a substantial stockraiser.^[42]

Ownership of land often was quite complicated, since generally several people shared title to privately owned dehesas. Frequently the co-owners were related by blood or marriage. Although over generations these ties could become quite distant, the evidence indicates that a dehesa pertained to a family and that custom and even law dictated that possession should be kept within the family. Certainly this was the medieval pattern. The first episode recorded in the Hinojosa chronicle, probably dating from the fifteenth century, relates how the "very honorable and very rich" caballero of Trujillo Pascual Gil de Cervantes was helping to support a nephew who was studying law at Salamanca. When this nephew decided to sell a part of the dehesa of Magasquilla, his uncle offered him a fair price, which the nephew refused to accept. Instead he sold the property to the lord of Orellana la Vieja which, according to the Hinojosas, "he should not have done." The only conceivable explanation for the response this action provoked was that selling part of the dehesa to an outsider went against all custom. When the señor of Orellana (Hernando Alonso de Orellana) sent his squires to take possession, Pascual Gil's criados confronted them and forced them to retreat. In revenge Orellana's retainers killed a son of Pascual Gil de Cervantes who was on his way to the grammar school, setting off a series of murders and acts of vengeance on the part of both families.^[43]

By (or during) the sixteenth century the strength of this tradition apparently diminished, and rents were bought and sold in what appears to have been pretty much a free market. Ownership in a dehesa often was expressed in terms of a percentage of the rental income and the price determined accordingly. In December 1558, for example, Gonzalo de Saavedra, a regidor of Cáceres, for the price of 357,000 maravedís sold to his cousin Francisco de Ovando, mayorazgo (that is, the holder of the family entail) a tenth part of a dehesa that rented for 85,000 maravedís per winter; he sold, therefore, 8,500 maravedís of "renta de yerba" for 357,000 maravedís.^[44] The price in such sales corresponded to a value figured per 1000 maravedís of rent; for example, a rent of 500 maravedís of renta de yerba which sold at a rate of 25,000 maravedís per millar (thousand) would therefore cost 12,500 maravedís. The value of properties

varied, of course, but the winter rental was the key element in determining value, since summer rentals were quite low.^[45] Rents and dehesas also were among the properties included in noble entails that became increasingly common in the sixteenth century, in which case they became nonnegotiable.

Wills, entails, and inventories convey some notion of the extent of noble properties, which were often quite diverse and scattered over a large area. Hernando Pizarro owned dehesas in Cáceres, Montánchez, and Medellín as well as Trujillo;^[46] by virtue of marriages made with nobles from other cities in Extremadura, many nobles of Cáceres and Trujillo held properties in other areas. An example of the variety and extent of noble properties is that of Juan de Hinojosa de Torres (resident of Santa Cruz). He established an entail for his son Pedro de Hinojosa in 1579 that included all or parts of five different dehesas, an orchard with an olive press, estates and houses in Torrecillas and Santa Cruz, an olive grove, orchards and wheat lands ("tierras de pan llevar") in the ejido (common or grazing lands) of Santa Cruz, in addition to several houses and an inn in Trujillo and juros in the alcabalas of Ciudad Rodrigo.^[47] Another example is that of the huge holdings of the Vargas family which in the sixteenth century passed to doña Beatriz de Vargas, the wife of Diego de Vargas Carvajal who went to Peru in 1560. The entail she inherited included houses, grain lands, and other properties at Balhondo ("todo el asiento de Balhondo"); other grain lands in Puerto de Santa Cruz (señorío of which Diego de Vargas purchased in 1559); houses and estates, including grain land and vineyards, in Madrigalejo; a house and vineyard in Berzocana; orchards and yards in Trujillo (in addition to the main residence there); and parts of twenty-three different dehesas, including one in Medellín.^[48]

Many noble estates were, of course, more modest than these; but even much smaller holdings yielded a decent income. Testimony of 1526 revealed that Francisco de las Casas, Cortés's cousin who became an encomendero in New Spain, owned outright in Trujillo one dehesa that rented for 45,000 maravedís, part of another that yielded 14,000 maravedís, and a third dehesa that rented for 50,000 maravedís. Later in the century, of course, these rents would have been higher. Together with his house in Trujillo Las Casas's assets were estimated to be worth 9,000 or 10,000 ducados.^[49]

As suggested dehesas and noble estates consisted not only of agricultural or grazing lands but often were diversified and included structures such as houses or mills and small settlements with full-time residents. A complicated legal suit that hinged on the ownership and sale of a dehesa called Magasca in Trujillo's término, on the Magasca River and next to the "berrocal y baldíos" (rocky and uncultivated lands) of the city, included a description of the property which shows plainly it was more than just a pasture. The heredad (estate) had houses, yards, and an orchard. One house with a large enclosed yard stood apart, backed by a barley field (alcacer); there also was an alcacer next to a ruined mill and another small one below the road going down to some other mills (which presumably were by the river). Perhaps because of its location on the river and near the city, Magasca might have been a popular spot for trujillanos; almost all the witnesses, including doña María Pacheco, a sixty-year-old widow and relative of the family that had owned the dehesa before its sale, said they knew the property and had been there many times. In 1542 the heredad of Magasca was sold along with a fifth of the pasture of Magasquilla, which bordered on it and rented for 9,000 maravedís, for a substantial 1,446,600 maravedís.^[50]

Despite the diversity of noble estates and holdings, for most nobles sheepraising was the most important component of their economic base. While the lack of descriptive material on the size and location of pastures makes it difficult to estimate the scale of local stockraising enterprises, clearly they varied considerably in size from enormous flocks of many thousands to much more modest ones of a few hundred. The Hinojosas wrote that Juan de Chaves had 5000 sheep in one dehesa and 5500 in another, and these flocks represented only part of his holdings in livestock.^[51] The most substantial transactions in livestock predictably involved the wealthiest nobles. Diego de Ovando de Cáceres sold 1788 sheep at 10 reales in April 1547 to someone from Medina de Rioseco (an important trading center, although not as important as Medina del Campo). In May 1552 he sold 1867 head at 15 reales to a man from Tordesillas commissioned to buy meat for the royal court; the same man also purchased 1300 head at 8 reales, 1737 yearlings (71/2 reales), and 20 rams (at 15 reales).^[52] Most transactions, however, involved the sale of several hundred, rather than several thousand, sheep. The presence of buy-

ers from Castile and León who purchased sheep both for meat and for wool production—several men from Burgos bought, among other things, 216 merino yearlings "with their wool" from a noblewoman of Cáceres in 1556—suggests that the extremeño flocks must have enjoyed a reputation for high quality.^[53]

The large stockraisers of Extremadura mainly sold their wool to merchants and dealers from Castile, who might come in person to the area to buy wool or send their representatives to do so. Buyers sometimes contracted in advance to purchase wool; for example, in January 1549 Gonzalo Moraga agreed to sell all the wool his sheep produced for the following two years at 450 maravedís per arroba (around twenty-five to twenty-six pounds) to a man from Castrojerez. Moraga received an advance of 12,000 maravedís and said he sheared his sheep in mid-April in Aldea del Cano, where the Moraga family had its estates.^[54] Stockraisers also made arrangements to transport their wool to buyers and markets, hiring carters to haul their products to cities in Castile. In 1569 Francisco de Ovando, el viejo, hired a man to take fourteen cartloads, each with forty-four arrobas of wool, from his estate at arguijuela to Segovia or Villacastín.^[55] Transactions frequently were completed in Medina del Campo during the annual trade fair of July. As in the sales of livestock, the quantity and type of wool sold varied, as did prices (see table 4).

Despite the preponderance of buyers and merchants from Burgos, Segovia, Villacastín, and other Castilian cities, stockraisers in Extremadura sold wool in a number of markets. Local sales must have been the mainstay of the clothmaking industry, which was of some importance in Cáceres especially. In addition Italians were active buyers in Extremadura. In May 1572 the city council of Cáceres authorized a Genoese, Tomás Sable, to wash all the wool he had bought. They justified their decision saying that "Tomás Sable has made many expenditures here, both in collecting the wool he has bought and for the people he has brought to improve and repair the lavadero ."^[56] In an inventory made at the time of his marriage in 1588 Cristóbal de Ovando Paredes, a wealthy returnee from the Indies, said that he had sent 5,160 arrobas of washed wool, worth 43,000 ducados, to Florence during the years 1584–1587.^[57]

Alongside sales of livestock and wool, the rental of pastures to northern stockraisers brought the nobles a significant additional

income. The subject of stockraising in Castile automatically brings to mind the Mesta, the powerful stockraisers' association that regulated the transhumant movement of northern herds to Extremadura and Andalusia and their access to the green winter pastures of the south. But by the middle of the sixteenth century the Mesta had lost considerable ground to local stockraising and agricultural interests. As a result many stockraisers of Castile and León made their own arrangements to rent pastures, frequently for several years at a time and often year-round. The stockraisers who rented

pastures in the jurisdictions of Cáceres and Trujillo could come from as far away as Soria, but the majority were from Segovia, Villacastín, Avila, and Piedrahita. In 1578, for example, the mayordomo of don Diego de Vargas Carvajal rented to the foreman (mayoral) of the monastery of Parral in Segovia all or part of several dehesas in Trujillo for a total of 323,500 maravedís for the winter.^[58]

The fact that such arrangements in the sixteenth century commonly were made on a private and individual basis does not mean, of course, that the Mesta had become powerless or irrelevant by that time. Both Cáceres and Trujillo had long histories of conflict with and opposition to the organization, which sought to extend its access to all classes of land, and the conflicts continued through the sixteenth century. As late as 1580 the Mesta secured a royal edict ordering the curtailment of cultivation that had been initiated in the past twenty years on certain kinds of land. Twenty-one towns and cities in Extremadura and Andalusia, including Cáceres, protested the directive, which probably was not implemented very successfully.^[59] Thus, while by the midsixteenth century the Mesta not only was no longer in the ascendant but in certain ways very much on the defensive, and both the municipalities and their vecinos often succeeded in thwarting the organization by means both legal and otherwise, the Mesta remained a factor to be reckoned with.^[60] The Mesta claimed the right to participate in the arbitration of disputes between stockraisers and local landowners. In 1551 some people from the area of Ayllón had rented a dehesa from Señor Martín de Chaves of Trujillo for 100,000 maravedís and twenty-six yards of cloth ("holanda"); Chaves seemingly changed his mind and refused to rent the pasture at the agreed price. The frustrated stockraisers pointed out that there existed an agreement between Trujillo and the council of the Mesta to arbitrate jointly such disputes, but Chaves refused to submit to arbitration.^[61]

The last major component of the economic base of nobles and hidalgos was the breeding of pigs, which was important and lucrative. Like sheep, hogs could be raised on a large or small scale, but of the two probably hog raising was more cost effective when conducted on a small scale. Thus while sheepraising tended to be a more exclusively noble, or at least upper class, enterprise, raising pigs could be profitable whether one owned several hundred or just a few. This was particularly true in the tierra of Trujillo, which

had extensive montes (woodlands) of live oaks which annually provided a rich harvest of acorns (bellota) that nourished and fattened the herds of swine. Since much of this woodland formed part of the city's common lands, vecinos who had little or no land of their own or could not afford to rent pastures with bellota had an important source of sustenance for their pigs.^[62] Still it was the wealthy nobles especially (if not exclusively) who raised pigs on a large scale. Pedro Rol de la Cerda, a regidor of Cáceres and member of the wealthy Ovando clan, registered 300 pigs with the city council in August 1553, and tax records of the middle and late sixteenth century show that nobles were the highest contributors to the tax on pigs.^[63] Pig breeders of Trujillo sold their swine as far away as the fairs of Toledo and La Mancha.^[64]

Nobles and Their Retainers

The economic impact of the nobles and hidalgos on local society of course involved much more than how many sheep or pigs they raised and sold and how much land they had at their disposal for stockraising or rental. Their wealth and control of resources meant that they exercized considerable influence over the economy of the region. In the cities, villages, and countryside the nobles employed large numbers of servants, stewards, agents, shepherds, swineherds, cultivators, and other urban and rural laborers. They also affected people whom they did not employ directly, providing a market for local tradespeople and artisans and hiring temporarily carters and muleteers to transport the products of their estates. Clergymen, professionals, merchants, and other well-to-do entrepreneurs served the nobility as sources of capital and financial and professional expertise in law and medicine.

Because the nobles sat at the apex of socioeconomic hierarchies that included their immediate families and households and extended to encompass large numbers of servants and employees, examination of the relationship between nobles and their retainers sheds light on aspects of patronage and the relations between the nobility and the rest of society. The term most commonly used for a full-time employee, retainer, or servant was "criado," and this designation could refer to individuals who functioned in a variety and range of capacities. Criados were not necessarily closely attached to

a household. Cristóbal de Ovando of Cáceres, for example, had criados who were vecinos of Campo Redondo and Malpartida and who probably looked after his properties or herds in those places. "Criado" implied more a relationship (of employee to employer, client to patron) than it did a fixed status. Naturally it was not only hidalgos who had criados; almost any person or family of any substance more than likely would have a criado or two, perhaps a woman who did housekeeping or someone who helped out with the family business. Criados could be tradesmen, artisans, or apprentices, as well as poor or orphaned relatives who might be brought into the household.

As the wealthiest members of society, however, the nobility doubtless employed the largest number of servants and agents of all kinds. Juan de Chaves (the chronicler) reportedly had a squire for each of his dozen horses, in addition to many other servants.^[65] While criados might live and function quite independently, many were closely tied to and integrated into noble households, which fostered a quasi-familial relationship between employer and criado. The wills of hidalgos, both male and female, contained numerous bequests to criados—small sums of money in addition to wages owed, or objects of clothing or furniture—and hidalgos often contributed to their servants' dowries as well. Sancho de Figueroa, a returnee to Cáceres from the Indies, left his "muchacho" Alonso 20,000 maravedís and arranged for him to be apprenticed; the ambiguity of the wording, however, suggests that Alonso could have been an illegitimate child. Another cacereño, don Juan de Ulloa Carvajal, archdeacon of Naja, gave 100,000 maravedís to his criado Diego García Machacón on the occasion of his marriage in 1547. He said he gave him the money "because I have raised you and because of the love I have for you," as well as for his services "and so you may live more honorably." This criado's bride brought a dowry that included a slave (valued at 20,000 maravedís) and properties worth 50,000 maravedís she inherited from her father. Given the size of the dowry, the criado must have been a key employee, or possibly even a relative of some sort; relatives certainly served in this capacity. Juan de Carvajal Villalobos gave his niece 70,000 maravedís and a bed as her dowry for the time she had served him.^[66]

Given that criados might be integrated into employer house-

holds, one would expect that in some cases at least the criado's relationship to an individual or family would be long term and even extend beyond one generation. While there is evidence that service as a criado could be undertaken as a short-term expedient because of lack of other alternatives or as a kind of apprenticeship, fostering an essentially businesslike employer—employee relationship,^[67] this kind of arrangement coexisted with a more enduring patron—client type relationship. In testimony of 1549 a seventy-year-old man from Trujillo, Nuño de Ortega, said he had served Martín de Chaves, el viejo, for almost thirty years. A twenty-four-year-old trujillano named Melchor González in 1578 testified that he had been the criado of Bachiller Gaspar González, clérigo presbítero, and his siblings for more than eight years and before that had served their parents. In his will of 1578 Hernando Pizarro stipulated that all his criados were to be kept in the household.^[68]

One of the best examples of this kind of long-term attachment between criados and their patrons emerged in the testimony presented in support of Diego Hernández de Aguilar, a young widower of twenty-eight, vecino of Trujillo, who in 1579 petitioned for a license to join relatives in Tierra Firme. He planned to take his two younger, unmarried sisters, his three-year-old son, and a criada from Trujillo. Diego had been married to Isabel de Solís, who died in childbirth. According to Juan de Chaves (the chronicler) and other witnesses, the families of both Diego Hernández and his deceased wife were hidalgos, and they and their parents (and even their grandparents) had served the house of Juan de Chaves and his father for more than fifty years. Diego and Isabel were both criados of the family when they married. Mencía Alonso, an eighty-year-old criada who had lived in the household for some seventy years, serving Juan de Chaves's mother, doña Juana de Acuna, said that the parents and grandparents of the pair had served as mayordomos and collected rents ("unos se sirvían de mayordomos y otros le cobraba sus bienes y hacienda y rentas"), while others had served in the household itself. Juan de Chaves and his wife, doña Isabel de Cárdenas, were the padrinos at Diego and Isabel's wedding.^[69]

The position of criado encompassed considerable variety. Criados were largely of worker and artisan background but not exclusively so, and they were too heterogeneous to constitute a unified or identi-

fiable class as such. While because of this diversity there could hardly be a typical criado, still the scarce information that we have for certain individuals such as Diego Hernández de Aguilar and his and his wife's family conveys some idea of the activities, responsibilities, and place in society of a criado in a noble household. A Diego García, who wrote his will in 1571, was the criado of the cacereño noble Francisco de Ovando Paredes. García was married to Mari Jiménez, with whom he had three children. Her dowry had included a small amount in cash (6,000 maravedís) and beds and other furnishings, as well as a house in the parish of Santiago which they sold for 10,000 maravedís. At the time of his marriage Diego García had a house he had inherited from his father which he sold for 15,000 maravedís, 10,000 maravedís he had inherited at the death of a sister, and another house that he had bought for 2 ducados in which the family actually lived. Towards the end of his life he occupied a position of some responsibility, but formerly he had worked for Ovando as a shepherd. When his employer went to the royal court in October 1570, he left the keys to his houses in Cáceres and in the country with Diego García. García said he kept accounts during that period, including what he sent to Ovando at court and the cost of food for the servants. He also collected rents and said that he had given account in Madrid for rents collected until August 1571, so evidently he traveled to court on business or to consult with his employer. The picture one derives of García from his will is that of a man of fairly humble circumstances who obviously was literate, somewhat surprising in view of the fact that he was a shepherd at one time. His literacy, of course, would account for the position of responsibility Ovando entrusted to him.^[70]

Slaves were far less numerous than criados in sixteenth-century Extremadura but were common enough that they formed a normal rather than a novel component of noble households. A typical noble establishment might have five to ten slaves, including men, women, and children. While there still were a few morisco (of Muslim descent) slaves in the sixteenth century, the majority in this period were African by birth or ancestry; Extremadura's proximity to Portugal guaranteed a steady supply of slaves. The status of slaves was quite different from that of criados whose position, as seen, could be flexible and open-ended; an individual could move in and out of the criado category. Slaves, in contrast, had little possibility for the free

exercise of choice, especially in a setting like Extremadura which doubtless did not offer trained or skilled slaves the opportunities for earning money on their own that their counterparts in Seville might have. Information on slaves in Cáceres and Trujillo is largely limited to transactions, manumissions, and dispositions in wills, none of which give much indication of their activities, skills, or social ties, either as slaves or after manumission. It seems likely that they functioned mainly as domestic and personal servants and that the majority belonged to noble households, although nonnobles such as members of the clergy or professionals commonly would own a slave or two as well.^[71]

Despite the legal and socioeconomic factors that differentiated the status of slave from that of criado, in reality the fact that slaves functioned in households alongside other servants and retainers for extended periods, or might actually be born in the household to which they belonged, meant that their position in some ways was analogous to that of criados. There appears to have been—as was true for criados—considerable variety in the nature and strength of the tie between master (or mistress) and slave, so that treatment of slaves varied greatly, not only among individual slaveholders but even within the same household. The same person who freed one or two slaves in his will, or at least made provisions that certain slaves not be sold outside the family, also might arrange for other slaves to be sold off as part of the estate. For example, Juan de Vita, while omitting any reference to at least three other slaves included in the inventory of his estate, in his will of 1544 made extensive provisions for his slave Juan de Vita (perhaps an illegitimate child related to his household?). Vita stipulated that Juan de Vita must be kept in the family and that he could opt for the household where he was treated best, and he obligated his heirs to care for him in his old age. In a codicil, however, Vita changed his mind and freed Juan de Vita, who in 1550 was living in Cáceres as a free man.^[72] Some nobles not only manumitted numbers of slaves but bequeathed them sums of money or personal objects. Ties of affection and intimacy and the birth of illegitimate children to slave women probably accounted for the majority of voluntary manumissions, and most likely many or most of the children freed were mulattoes.^[73]

The ties between a noble and his retainers certainly included elements of loyalty and obligation that went beyond the relation-

ship of paid employee to employer or humanized that of slave to master. Recall that it was Pascual Gil de Cervantes's criados who drove off orellana's retainers when they tried to take possession of the dehesa, and that it was the latter who killed Pascual Gil's son. In a more contemporary example, in one episode of the protracted and occasionally violent enmity between two returnees from Peru, Juan Cortés and Juan de Herrera, both of them regidors of Trujillo in the midsixteenth century, Cortés's criados—apparently at his instigation—attacked and wounded Herrera and his brother, the latter seriously.^[74] Nobles generally were held to be accountable for the actions of their criados, the implication being that criados normally would undertake certain actions only with the knowledge and sanction of their patron. A royal letter of pardon issued to the powerful Luis de Chaves in 1476 (for reasons unknown) included not only Chaves's sons and nephews but his criados—and the criados of his criados—as well, for a total of 193 individuals considered to be under his authority.^[75] A century later, in October 1576 the regidores of Trujillo's council deliberated about what action to take in regard to a "certain crime that certain criados and a black [slave] of don Rodrigo de Orellana, vecino and regidor, committed." The criados had killed one of the guards of the montes, who were employed by the city. Most of the regidores insisted that some action be taken or no one would be willing to guard the montes. At the time don Rodrigo and one of his criados were already in jail, and the council sent constables to arrest two of his swineherds and a slave.^[76]

The loyalty of criados was not, of course, invariable. In August 1573 the alcalde de la hermandad, responsible for law enforcement in the countryside, appeared before the council of Cáceres to report that he had taken prisoner a "famous thief" who under torture had named a criado of Antonio Gutiérrez Sanabria as one of the guilty parties in a theft of Sanabria's cattle.^[77] But mutual loyalty and trust were the ideal for nobles and their retainers. The Hinojosas described Diego de Hinojosa, el viejo, as being a virtuous and forthright caballero, a good friend to his relatives and friends, and greatly attached to his criados ("por sus criados, erales en gran manera aficionado"). Juan de Chaves was "magnífico con sus deudos y criados y amigos."^[78] A noble should be generous and fair, and his retainers loyal.

Noble Ideals and Behavior

Despite the fact that nobles were surrounded by and in constant contact with people from the other orders of society who constituted the majority of the population, these nonnobles to a great extent figured only indirectly in the nobles' world view. Their main points of reference were their peers, families, and lineages. Surely it is no accident that the three sixteenth-century chronicles of Trujillo authored by hidalgos referred by name only to hidalgos and mentioned others only insofar as they formed part of the cast of supporting characters in the episodes recounted. The nobles' concept of history focused on the honor and deeds of their antecedents, since a noble's honor and status were inseparable from and defined by that of his family and lineage.^[79] All three of the Trujillo chronicles were essentially genealogies in one form or another. The nobles' view of their place in society and the importance of family and history shaped the institutions characteristic of that group. Entails, the high dowries that formed an essential part of carefully chosen marital alliances, even the importance and prestige of a seat on the city council derived from the ideals and objectives of the nobility.

The noble's relations with both peers and others were judged in terms of ideals associated with his station, which were a product of the amalgam of military and Christian virtues that developed in the Middle Ages throughout Europe. Honesty, charity, generosity, and justice were on a par with physical strength, military skills, horsemanship, and wealth. Juan de Chaves, who received highest praise from the Hinojosas, apparently possessed all these virtues (in their view), as well as grace and authority:

He favors the poor and gives them aid and raises them from the dust; he honors the rich as each deserves and equally esteems and honors the virtuous poor; the bad and haughty, even if they are rich, he persecutes. . . . He works for the good of the commonwealth.

In the same source it can be seen that the ideals for women emerged even more directly from Christian attitudes. Constanza de Hinojosa, mother-in-law of Andrés Calderón Puertocarrero, was "devoted, charitable, prudent, complaisant and quiet." She was temperate and diligent with her household and husband and religious and devoted in her widowhood.^[80]

If the ideals of generosity, valor, and justice emerge clearly, other components of the nobles' world view are murkier. This was, after all, a society where the violent feuds and conflicts of the late Middle Ages were still endemic in the sixteenth century, where violence was frequently brutal and treacherous, where "enemistades" seem to have had the same importance and legitimacy as deudos and friendships, and where the natural leaders of society—the nobles—apparently felt free to ignore the law and its representatives as they saw fit.^[81] The imprisonment of a regidor of Trujillo, don Rodrigo de Orellana, on suspicion of instigating the murder of a guard of the montes has been mentioned, but this was hardly an isolated or unique occurrence. An astonishing number of regidores, in Trujillo especially, were jailed or placed under house arrest at one time or another. Luis de Chaves, mayorazgo, and Juan de Chaves in 1565 were implicated and arrested in connection with the murder of Licenciado Argüellez, who at the time of his death was serving as a regidor.^[82] The bitter conflict between Juan Cortés and Juan de Herrera saw them both in jail at different times. In 1545 the corregidor of Trujillo placed eight regidores under house arrest when, in protest of the monastery of Guadalupe's appointment of notaries for the city and its district, they attempted to instate their own choice. When Juan de Chaves protested the order, the corregidor had him imprisoned in the city's fortress.^[83] Regidores of Cáceres also came into conflict with their city's corregidor in January 1571. On a Monday morning by eleven o'clock only one regidor had arrived in the council chambers. Sancho de Paredes and don Diego de Ovando de Cáceres were outside strolling in the portales (arcades) of the plaza mayor. When they were summoned and refused to come, the corregidor ordered them arrested and imprisoned in the city hall. He also sent notice to the other regidores, ordering them to appear under threat of a fine of 1000 ducados.^[84] Violence and defiance of authority could be found, of course, at all levels of society; but the status and wealth of the nobility often enabled them to evade the legal consequences of such behavior.

The nobles' concept of their rank, their relationship to the rest of society, and of honor fostered a concept of "freedom" that is not easily defined, since it was both an individual and a collective notion. The regidores who protested the monastery of Guadalupe's

control of Trujillo's escribanías (a royal concession purchased by the monastery in the late fourteenth century) based their objections on the contention that because Trujillo and the monastery had many suits and conflicts over jurisdiction, notaries appointed by the monastery would hardly be impartial and would work against the city's interests. The argument seems fair enough, although of course they hoped to replace the notaries with their own choices, who probably would be no more impartial. Regardless of whether their argument was justified, however, the monastery's right to name the notaries was irrefutable, so that the regidores' campaign to rescind that privilege had to be conducted outside any legal context. They turned to their fellow nobles for support, collecting signatures from the members of the cofradía of La Paz, whose membership consisted mostly of hidalgos. A letter from an unknown source in Trujillo to the prior of the monastery, purporting to inform him of these doings, continually referred to the "pasión" with which the regidores conducted themselves: "so great is the passion that Juan de Chaves and Diego de Vargas and their followers have in this business that even if that house [of Guadalupe] were of Turks it could not be greater." Martín de Chaves was quoted as saying "'freedom, freedom,' as if he were captive in the land of the Moors."^[85] The "freedom" that the regidores and their noble supporters sought to defend in this instance was collective, not individual. The perceived threat to the city translated into a threat to a freedom claimed by the nobility as a group.^[86]

The concept of freedom in the individual sense allowed nobles to ignore the entire apparatus of law and officialdom when these conflicted with their own interests or objectives. The case of Andrés Calderón Puertocarrero, caballero and mayorazgo of Trujillo who went to Peru in 1562 (see table 3), is a fine example of the extent to which a noble could flout the law. During his short stint in Peru Andrés Calderón, who was the nephew of the wealthy and respected encomendero of Cuzco don Pedro Puertocarrero (also a native of Trujillo), killed a merchant named Gonzalo de Almonte in Lima. Almonte allegedly had slandered either Andrés Calderón or his mistress. Calderón then fled Peru for Spain before he could be arrested. By 1566 Almonte's mother and sisters in Spain (they were vecinas of Guadalcanal) had discovered that Gonzalo's murderer was back in Trujillo, and they initiated proceedings to have him

arrested and tried. The husband of one of the sisters, Licenciado Diego de Puebla, corregidor of the town of Moguer, wrote a brief that included the following observations:

Andrés Calderón goes publicly in the city of Trujillo and its district on horseback, armed with a crossbow, accompanied by many relatives and friends who favor him, against the corregidor's order that no one accompany him . . . under [threat of] a fine of 1,000 ducados . . . and exile. . . . And the worst is that Andrés Calderón boasts that whoever comes to arrest him will have to kill him with a crossbow. And . . . my parties are women and among them a widow and a young orphan, miserable persons whom the law favors, and Andrés Calderón is a man [well] related and favored in that city.

According to the brief, in 1568 Almonte's widow, Isable García, said that Calderón was living in Trujillo "as if he hasn't committed any crime and because he is a 'mayorazgo' and prominent man," no one had been able to arrest him. Calderón continued to evade arrest, moving between his house in Trujillo and country house in Banis Pedro, or crossing the border into Portugal when the pressure increased. In 1574 he was still at liberty. In that year he finally made an effort to reach an agreement with Almonte's family, authorizing several vecinos of Trujillo in Spain and Peru to settle with one of Almonte's sons in an amount of up to 1000 ducados.^[87]

The same Andrés Calderón who in this instance so blatantly placed himself beyond the reach of the law, however, did not hesitate to use the legal system when it suited his own interests. In the 1580s and 1590s he pursued a seemingly interminable suit in Granada over properties in Medellín that his uncle don Pedro Puertocarrero's mestizo son in Peru had inherited and which he claimed.^[88] Andrés Calderón's opportunism was as basic to his character as were the ideals of behavior associated with his rank.

The nobles' preference for conducting their private affairs of honor and revenge outside the law prolonged the conflicts and violence of the late Middle Ages; as late as the early seventeenth century Cáceres, Trujillo, and Plasencia were notorious for the continuation of banderismo.^[89] Hernando Pizarro's son don Francisco stabbed Rodrigo de Orellana, the son of his father's "enemy" Pedro Suárez de Toledo, long-time regidor of Trujillo, in 1571.^[90] Earlier in the century García Holguín, the señor of Casa Corchada

and chief of the Golfines de Arriba clan of Cáceres (father of the Diego García de Paredes who got into trouble with Licenciado Gasca in Peru) was murdered by Diego Mejía de Ovando in the church of the monastery of San Francisco as a result of a dispute between the two clans over the location of their coats of arms inside the church.^[91] Doubtless this violent incident was the culmination of a longstanding feud.

Careers and Mobility

Tales of the bandos, revenge, and local violence conjure up a picture of backward and unenlightened provincial societies, turned in upon themselves and cut off from the currents of change affecting the larger world of Castile in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Yet the provinciality of local extremeño society coexisted with another, perhaps equally important aspect that hinged upon the careers of members of noble and hidalgo families that took them away from home and involved them in the more cosmopolitan academic, bureaucratic, ecclesiastic, and military life of Castile and its empire. Earlier in this chapter mention was made of the successful professional careers of middle-level hidalgos such as Dr. Francisco de Sande of Cáceres and Licenciado Diego González Altamirano of Trujillo; for these men and their families such careers meant a significant elevation in status. But it was not only the middle- and lower-level hidalgos who entered professions and pursued careers that took them away from Cáceres or Trujillo to the universities or the court, to Seville, Italy, Flanders, or the Indies. The noble families of these cities consistently produced important figures in the academic, bureaucratic, ecclesiastic, and military circles of Castile and its empire.

The explanation for this phenomenon lies in several distinct but related considerations. The provincial nobles were the leaders and the wealthiest members of local society. They received at least some education, which would make further study at a university, and all that could imply, more accessible to them than to most. As society's leaders they also were in a natural position to form ties with the court. Captain Diego de Ovando de Cáceres's support of Ferdinand and Isabella paved the way for his son Frey Nicolás de Ovando to become Comendador of Lares of the Order of Alcántara,

and Frey Nicolás's continuing ties with Ferdinand—as well as his administrative abilities—led to his appointment as governor of Hispaniola in 1502. Doubtless Dr. Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal's long-time professional career and association with the crown was largely responsible for his son Diego's appointment as a Comisario de Perpetuidad for Peru in 1560. Fray Diego de Chaves, eldest son of the prominent Escobar family of Trujillo, served as royal confessor to Philip II's unfortunate son don Carlos and later to Philip himself. Many families had longstanding traditions of service to the crown, either in the bureaucracy or military, or in the Church. The military tradition was particularly strong because such service historically was identified with the nobles' position and role in society.

What underlay and to some extent sustained these traditions of service and career mobility was the structure of the noble family itself. The nobility's emphasis on lineage and preservation of family wealth and position led to an increasing concentration of inherited property in the hands of one or two children. In the sixteenth century the growing number of entails conveyed the largest portion of inheritable estates to one heir per generation, usually (but not invariably) the eldest son. Many noble families, of course, continued to follow the practice of partible inheritance (equal division among all legitimate heirs), and some very wealthy patriarchs might create two or more entails. But it was becoming more and more common for one son to succeed to the entail or largest part of the estate, while only one or two daughters received dowries substantial enough to allow them to marry individuals of comparable wealth and status. While all legitimate children inherited a portion of the parental estate, the creation of entails often impelled noble children who would expect to inherit relatively small legacies to pursue alternative careers. The convents of Cáceres and Trujillo were filled with the daughters of local noble families, and young men went off to study at the university, join religious orders, serve in the military, or, increasingly in the sixteenth century, try their luck in the Indies.

While most nobles and hidalgos probably were functionally literate, levels of education varied considerably. Gómez de Solís, captain and encomendero in Peru from a prominent family of Cáceres, sent a letter in December 1546 to Gonzalo Pizarro in which he said his good firend and fellow cacereño Benito de la Peña actually

wrote the letter because his own crude efforts ("estos letrones míos") were unsuitable.^[92] In contrast one of Gómez's brothers in Cáceres, Lorenzo de Ulloa Solís, was an ordained priest who managed the family's complicated affairs in Cáceres and Peru for years.

Most extremeños who sought a higher education studied at Salamanca, which is not surprising given the university's proximity to the region and its reputation.^[93] A university education did not come cheaply, and most students depended on assistance from their families or other patrons during their years of study. In 1575, for example, Diego de Vargas Figueroa of Cáceres gave his son don Cristóbal de Figueroa Ocampo 250 sheep and 150 lambs to sell in order to buy himself books when he entered the university.^[94]

Certain families favored higher education and professional careers. Dr. Nicolás de Ovando, nephew of Frey Nicolás de Ovando and on his mother's side of don Bernardino de Carvajal, canon of the cathedral of Plasencia, spent most of his adult life and career at the court. He served first on the audiencia of Valladolid and from 1550 until his death in 1565 as a member of the royal council of the Military Orders. In his will Ovando left all his law books to his grandson Nicolás de Ovando, who wanted to study in Salamanca or Alcalá.^[95] Doubtless the most outstanding member of this family was Licenciado Juan de Ovando, descendant of an illegitimate branch of the family of Captain Diego de Ovando de Cáceres and a cousin of Dr. Nicolás de Ovando. Born in 1514, in his remarkable career Licenciado Juan de Ovando served as a catedrático of the University of Salamanca, canon of the cathedral of Seville, member of the Council of the Inquisition, and eventually sixth president of the Council of the Indies, from 1571 until just before his death in 1575. As president of the Council of the Indies Ovando initiated the codification of laws relating to the government of the Spanish empire. He died before codification was completed, but the ordinance of 1573 represented a first step toward standardization. Ovando also served as financial advisor to the crown. As a public figure, he was renowned for his integrity and competence.^[96] Other families also developed traditions of public service and higher education.^[97]

The church, especially religious orders, attracted members of the nobility and brought some extremeños into considerable prominence. In addition to the royal confessor, Fray Diego de Chaves, Trujillo produced the cardinal Licenciado don Gaspar Cervantes de

Gaete, who successively served as archbishop of Messina (Sicily), Salerno, and Tarragona, where he died and was buried in 1575, and was a prominent specialist in canon law at the 1562–1563 meeting of the Council of Trent.^[98] The first bishop and subsequently first archbishop of Lima was the Dominican Fray Jerónimo de Loaysa, member of a prominent noble family of Trujillo. Another Dominican, Fray Felipe de Meneses of Trujillo, became catedrático of the University of Alcalá de Henares and prior of the convents of Toledo and Segovia. Philip II put him in charge of the reform of the Mercedarian order in Galicia.^[99] In Cáceres don Bernardino de Carvajal was a cardinal, and in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries several members of the Sande Carvajal clan served as dignitaries of the cathedral of Plasencia.^[100] Licenciado Fray Antonio Gutiérrez de Ulloa was Inquisitor of Lima in the 1570s. In addition to these luminaries many other young men of noble families entered orders such as San Juan de los Caballeros or the mendicant orders, which normally took them away from home and sometimes even outside of Spain. Although certainly there were hidalgos in the secular priesthood, and non-hidalgos could enter religious orders, the majority of hidalgos who chose ecclesiastical careers opted for the regular rather than the secular priesthood.^[101]

While the church probably accounted for the largest number of hidalgos who sought opportunities away from home—an ecclesiastical career, after all, did offer a lifelong solution to the problem of making one's livelihood—military service might have been nearly as popular. Not only did military service correspond to the traditional role and predilections of the nobles, but it offered greater flexibility in some senses than the church, since entering the military need not be a lifetime commitment. Because so many nobles participated in military campaigns at one time or another—the politics and conflicts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries assured there would be many opportunities to bear arms—it is impossible to estimate how many nobles and hidalgos gained at least some military experience at some point.

As was true for the bureaucracy or the church, certain families had a high level of involvement in the military. The patriarch of the Pizarro family, Captain Gonzalo Pizarro, fought in Granada, Italy, and Navarre (in Italy with "el Gran Capitán," Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, and with Diego García de Paredes), and his son Hernando

accompanied him in the last campaign, as did Juan Cortés, the Pizarro ally who went to Peru and returned to become a regidor of Trujillo. Juan de Chaves ended the brief chronicle of his lineage with a list of his forebearers who died in the service of the crown: Martín de Chaves, older brother of Luis de Chaves, el viejo, died in the battle of Archite; Francisco de Chaves, his great-grandfather, died in "las lomas de Málaga"; Nuño de Chaves, his father's brother, and Francisco de Chaves, his own older brother, both died in Peru; and his brother don Alonso de Sotomayor, who was named captain for the infantry sent to fight the French in 1558, died of illness on the campaign.^[102] Captain Martín de Meneses (brother of Fray Felipe de Meneses), who spent over forty years in Peru, claimed his father and three uncles (one of whom died in Florida and another in Mexico) all had served in the military.^[103]

Probably the most famous military hero of the epoch was Diego García de Paredes, the "Samson of Extremadura," who had legendary strength, courage, and skill; he was born in 1468 and fought alongside "el Gran Capitán" in Italy. In the early sixteenth century Diego García's illegitimate half-brother Alvaro de Paredes, who died in 1511, accompanied him, as later would Alvaro's own illegitimate son, Sancho de Paredes (see table 2). After numerous campaigns Diego García de Paredes, loyal member of Charles V's entourage, was named "caballero de la espuela dorada" in Bologna in 1530, where he died in 1533. His illegitimate son of the same name, born in Trujillo in 1506 and raised by a cousin, went to the Indies in 1524 but returned to Europe in the 1530s. He spent about ten years fighting in Flanders, Germany, Italy, and Sicily and attained the rank of captain before returning to Trujillo and then leaving for Amazonas with his compatriot Francisco de Orellana. His nephew Luis, oldest son of legitimate half-brother Sancho de Paredes, died fighting in Andalusia.^[104]

The participation of the Sande family of Cáceres in the military (see table 2) was perhaps exceptionally high. The outstanding military figure of the family was don Alvaro de Sande. Second son of the third señor of Valhondo and a relative through his grandfather of Diego García de Paredes, don Alvaro was destined for a career in the Church and studied briefly in Salamanca before deciding that his vocation lay elsewhere. In the 1530s he participated in expeditions to Tunis and elsewhere in the Mediterranean and in the 1540s

fought in Flanders and against France, returning subsequently to Italy. After the Spanish disaster of 1559 at the island of Gelves (off the Tunisian coast), he was captured by the Turks, taken to Constantinople, and finally ransomed at great cost. Because of his reputation the Turks at first invited Sande to join them. When he refused, they delayed considerably in arranging the ransom. Ferdinand, the Holy Roman Emperor and grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, whom Sande's grandfather Sancho de Paredes Golfín had served, at the request of his brother Maximilian finally interceded on Sande's behalf, and the ransom (variously 40,000 or 60,000 escudos) was accepted. Despite the expense and the hiatus in his career, don Alvaro de Sande returned to active military life in Italy and the Mediterranean, serving as coronel, field marshal, and captain general, and finally as governor of Milan, where he died in 1573. Philip II granted him señorío of the village of Valdefuentes and later the title of Marqués de Piobera.^[105]

Don Alvaro de Sande was the most famous but not the only military officer in the family. One of his brothers, Diego García de Sande, was a general who served in the Mediterranean and a comendador of Santiago, and another, Arias de Sande, was a captain who died in Italy. Four of his nephews, sons of his brother Pedro de Sande, joined the military as well. Two of these nephews died at Gelves and another in Italy. The fourth, don Juan de Sande, also fought in Italy and served as a captain in the Gelves campaign. In 1569 the city council of Cáceres made him captain of the two hundred infantrymen recruited to fight in Granada. He survived the campaign but died shortly after his return to Cáceres in 1571.^[106] Don Alvaro de Sande's first cousin on his mother's side was another Diego García de Paredes (they were both grandsons of Sacho de Paredes Golfín), who fought in Italy under his famous cousin and in Flanders. He was made a captain before he left the military and went to Peru in the 1540s. And in the less prominent branch of the Sande family (those distant relatives who sued to prove their hidalguía in Granada) at least two sons of that Pedro de Sande had military careers. Don Juan de Sande served in Italy and Flanders, and his brother don Bernardino was a captain in the Philippines.^[107]

Military service provided an opportunity to earn distinction and royal favor as well as personal enrichment, but as seen in the case of don Alvaro de Sande and his relatives, the fortunes of war also

brought death or captivity. For officers and soldiers of some means, the last could mean long periods of imprisonment awaiting payment of ransom money by relatives or charitable organizations at home. Baltasar de Valverde (brother of Licenciado Diego García de Valverde, who served on several audiencias in the New World) thought that his nephew (his first cousin's son) was a captive of the "king of Fez." In his will of 1579 he asked his brother's son to help ransom him because "the lad is very virtuous and very honorable" and deserving of help.^[108] Ransoming was a standard feature of the many military campaigns and conflicts of the period. Relatives of Hernando de Monroy, a prisoner in Algiers, sent 200 ducados to Dr. Nicolás de Ovando at the court to negotiate his release. Family and relatives raised 300 ducados toward the ransom of Pedro Alvarez Holguín, who was missing after the Gelves disaster but was finally located in Sicily in 1561.^[109]

Like study at the university or entrance into a religious order, military service was a career choice that many noble families willingly supported. The regidor Sancho de Paredes Holguín, for example, gave his brother Jerónimo de la Cerda 75,000 maravedís when he went off to serve in Italy in 1554.^[110] While the military was often the career choice of younger or illegitimate sons, this pattern was not invariable. Since military service could be of short duration, and individuals who opted for long-term careers still would be likely to return home periodically between campaigns, the military did not mean a permanent absence and so was not incompatible with marrying and establishing a household. Given the strength of the military tradition, and the possibility of maintaining one's position at home despite periods of absence, conceivably many hidalgos went off to the Indies (especially in the earlier decades of the sixteenth century) in much the same spirit that they, their fathers, or other relatives joined the army. Like the military, going to the Indies meant service to the crown with the expectation of personal distinction and gain and a possibility of returning home.

The careers that hidalgos chose were important not only because they offered a solution to the problem of how to provide for sons whose inheritance was small; these careers also created the basis for a network of contacts that connected nobles in Cáceres and Trujillo with the outside world. The network diminished the provincialism and isolation that threatened to engulf local extremeño soci-

ety, put the nobles in touch with the wider currents of Castilian life, and provided opportunities to acquire expertise in legal, financial, and commercial matters. Cacereños frequently turned to their compatriots Dr. Nicolás de Ovando or Licenciado Juan de Ovando, and trujillanos to Fray Felipe de Meneses or the royal confessor Fray Diego de Chaves, for assistance and advice. By extending itself geographically—sending its sons or illegitimate or poor relatives away from home—and encompassing a number of different careers, the noble family bolstered its position at home while preserving and protecting the lineage linked to the entailed estate, title, and arms.

Nobles and the "República"

Despite the varied and often distinguished careers of nobles who left home, the principal focus of attention for most remained their home towns. There they founded convents, capellanías, and charitable works, belonged to cofradías (some of which limited their membership to hidalgos), and sat on the city council, which enabled them to dabble in many aspects of the city's political, social, religious, and economic life. By law and historical tradition, the nobles monopolized the regimientos (seats on the city council), which they retained and passed along within families, even though appointment to the council nominally was the prerogative of the crown. Diego de Vargas Carvajal actually held three regimientos—two in Trujillo, which he left to his sons don Juan and don Diego de Vargas Carvajal, and a third in Salamanca (presumably inherited from his father), which he willed to another son, don Fabian.^[111] Nobles who held them considered regimientos as much a part of the family estate as a house, lands, and rents. The practice of passing on city council seats meant that at any time a number of regidores might be related by family ties or marriage. Nonetheless, whereas in Cáceres the occupancy and transfer of regimientos seems to have been fairly conservative and stable, in Trujillo there appears to have existed, or developed in the sixteenth century, something of a free trade in city council seats, which in effect could be rented out. Hernando Pizarro designated one of his regimientos for Francisco Durán and the other for Melchor González (possibly both were returnees from Peru), and don Alvaro de Hinojosa de Torres and his son paid the widow of

García de Vargas Ocampo 40,000 maravedís for five years for a regimiento that her minor son could not occupy.^[112] But certainly in Cáceres as well nobles could buy regimientos; the going price in the sixteenth century was around 500 ducados.

The varying practices that affected the disposition or retention of regimientos meant that some nobles spent long periods on the council—in 1571 Sancho de Paredes Holguín said he had been a regidor (of Cáceres) for twenty-five years^[113] —while others served perhaps five or ten years, and yet others only briefly. One would expect that individuals who spent longer periods on the council would take a greater interest in the city's affairs. Despite the sale of regimientos and the inheritance practices that kept them within families, nobles who served on the council did fulfill a civic duty that many took quite seriously. Dr. Nicolás de Ovando, after years at the court, willed 12,000 maravedís to the city council of Cáceres "for some payments that were misspent because of my vote while [I] was a regidor."^[114]

Conservative and limited as their view of society and their relationship to that society might have been, the nobles nevertheless identified with the "república" and saw themselves as responsible for the common welfare. The nobles on the council sometimes protested the taxes or military levies demanded by the crown, stalled in the implementation of royal directives, or quarreled with the crown's representative (and ultimate authority), the corregidor. Nevertheless, although they doubtless took seriously the obligations of Christian charity, patron-client ties, and their responsibility for protecting the people and república, in fact the nobles' sense of duty to the rest of society ultimately did not serve to protect the less powerful people from economic exploitation and privation. The nobles, especially in their role as city council members, might ponder the proper or just course of action in a given situation; in 1571 Sancho de Paredes, for example, urged that the price of bread be lowered, saying that in all his years as regidor "he has never seen . . . this republic . . . [spend] anything in benefit of the poor in all this time and . . . there have never been such hard times."^[115] But they never wavered in their fundamental understanding of their rights and privileges. They saw their obligations to the rest of society as a function of their privileged position, and not the opposite, and this perception negated the possibility of innovation.