III
Commoners, Clergy, and Professionals

The nobles and hidalgos of Cáceres and Trujillo formed a small and in some ways coherent group. The much larger non-hidalgo population encompassed many more occupational and ethnic groups—professionals in law and medicine, clergy, merchants, agriculturalists, tradespeople, urban and rural day laborers, servants, slaves, Portuguese immigrants, moriscos, and paupers. These groups spanned the range from wealth to poverty, some having in common only their non-hidalgo status. Wealthy merchants, successful professionals, and some ecclesiastics might occupy a position quite similar to that of prominent hidalgos by virtue of their wealth, tax-exempt status, and the deference that their callings and social position elicited. The clergy, like the hidalgos, were exempt from most taxes, as were professionals who had attained a doctorate. At the other end of the spectrum, people classified as pobres (paupers) usually avoided taxation as well. Thus the taxpayers—the "hombres buenos pecheros"—bore a double burden. As peasants, tradespeople, and laborers, they performed most of the productive work of the city and countryside, and they paid the bulk of the taxes. If the nobility dominated the commonwealth, the workers and peasants—the pecheros (taxpayers)—sustained it.

While at times it may seem difficult to penetrate the world view of the nobles, nonetheless by reason of their position in society and their activities we can learn a great deal about how they lived and what they did. Their command of extensive eco-

nomic resources, their concern for the management of family fortune and affairs, and their entrance into many spheres of public life all left ample record in the documents of the period. For the vast majority of commoners, however, this kind of detailed record simply does not exist. With the exception of some of the more prominent and successful professionals and clergy, information on commoners is scattered and scant indeed. They did not necessarily go before notaries to perform transactions, unless these involved a person of a higher rank (an hidalgo, priest, merchant). Frequently they had little or no property of which to dispose, or what property remained was divided according to custom, so that relatively few commoners made formal wills. Similarly at this level people doubtless made most marriage and dowry arrangements by common consent. A number of commoners emerge in the records only because they decided to leave. Since people who undertook to emigrate legally to the New World often presented lengthy testimony and even letters from relatives who had preceded them in support of their applications, the study of emigrants sheds light on the lives and experiences of common people that otherwise is mostly lacking.

As is true for most traditional or hierarchical societies, one sees the commoners of Extremadura largely in relation to their superiors in rank or wealth. The structure of society and economy in this region was such that to a considerable extent it is possible to discuss the position and activities of the nobility with little reference to the rest of the population. The nobles themselves paid scant attention to the rest, and that only insofar as nonnobles figured in relation to their own interests or objectives. One cannot claim the reverse for the commoners; their lives were much more likely to be affected or shaped in some fashion by the wealthy and powerful.

Nonetheless, it is fundamentally wrong to see the nobility as unilaterally shaping and defining society and economic and social relations.^[1] Commoners lived in a world that to some extent they defined for themselves. They were free to move about and organize their own lives. Artisans supervised the conduct and organization of their trades with little outside intervention; they lived together in certain neighborhoods, intermarried, and joined the same cofradías. In the villages, especially, peasants might lead their lives largely without reference to the nobility. Some villages had no hidalgos at

all, or only very few (and those not necessarily set apart from the rest by notable wealth), and in some places the commoners retained control over town offices despite the presence of hidalgos.^[2] The clergy, of course, functioned with considerable independence, since they often had their own sources of income and significant connections with individuals and institutions based outside local society. While priests often had ties of quasi-dependency with members of the nobility, whom they might serve as chaplains, account keepers, or the like, they had strong links with the commoners as well. Many of them came from the commercial and artisan groups.

None of this is to deny, of course, the crucial role of the nobles in organizing the economy and governing and controlling local society. The social and occupational groups that constituted local society—the various orders or estates—were in constant contact, overlapping, interacting, and affecting one another. The different groups had in common a wide range of social and cultural patterns, not because these were conditioned or imposed by the nobility but rather because they all emerged from and participated in a common society and culture. Many commoners, for example, joined the military as did hidalgos. Physical mobility—with its implications for possible socioeconomic mobility—was just as prevalent and important at this level of society (if not more so) as it was for hidalgos. Furthermore it must be stressed that hardly any of the characteristics or institutions associated with the nobility were the exclusive domain of that group, just as many hidalgos were indistinguishable from commoners in terms of their occupations or social status. Many commoners were literate, and they entered the professions and church as did hidalgos. In their concern for family, commoners again were much like hidalgos, even if they operated on a far more modest scale. Everyone joined cofradías, many of which drew their membership from all levels of society. Perhaps the only institution that the nobles could claim as exclusively theirs was the city council, and in Trujillo there is a strong possibility that even that monopoly had faltered in the sixteenth century. A degree of socioeconomic flexibility and the blurring of distinctions between different groups coexisted with the conservatism and stability that upheld the hierarchical ordering of society. In a sense both social fluidity and conservatism could exist because both were rooted in the common culture that united all groups.^[3]

Since the nonnobles were so heterogeneous, in some ways it is easier to discuss various occupational or social groupings separately rather than together. Nonetheless some patterns affected a range of groups. Probably the most important of these patterns was mobility, which could involve nearly everyone. Another factor that affected most commoners, already mentioned, had to do with political power in the broad sense. The commoners were the taxpayers. They provided the bulk of the manpower for military levies, the capital for military requisitions, the quarters for troops. Their direct participation in government usually was limited to village councils and the lower rungs of municipal offices. They were, in other words, subjects. A third point, and one more difficult to discuss adequately because of the scarcity of information, has to do with wealth. Commoners in a number of callings could become "rich." While it might have been easiest for landowners or merchants to accumulate wealth, others could as well. At least three shoemakers in Trujillo were called "rich," as well as an innkeeper who subsequently lost his capital.^[4] As would be expected, the reverse was true also; practically anyone could be poor. The following discussion will address these aspects of the lives of the commoners.

Opportunities and Obligations

A high degree of physical mobility characterized the functioning of the local and regional economy. Since the commoners performed most of the actual labor and tasks involved in economic production and exchange, they frequently moved around as part of their normal means of making a livelihood. Shepherds and swineherds moved with their livestock, muleteers and carters hauled materials in and out of the region, stewards and criados tended to the interests of their employers or accompanied them when they traveled, and merchants or their representatives went to trade fairs or other cities in Castile and Andalusia to buy or to complete transactions. The mobility that was inherent to the local economy, though it could bring people into contact with new opportunities they might find attractive, did not result from the need or desire to seek such opportunities. Moving temporarily or permanently to another locale, however, was much more directly related to the search for new opportunities. In the case of extremeños who moved from one

village to another, or to Seville, or some other part of Castile, physical mobility likely took on another dimension; these people relocated in the hopes of finding new or better opportunities.

Out-migration from the region is difficult to quantify, but all evidence suggests that it was constant. It is somewhat ironic that because of the special nature of the move to the New World, that kind of migration is better documented than any other; yet the very fact that the possibility of emigration to America was so readily taken up by extremeños in itself is convincing evidence that leaving home to seek opportunities elsewhere was quite normal. Leaving the Indies aside, Seville, as a booming center of commerce and industry, probably was the greatest center of attraction for extremeños in the sixteenth century. People from Cáceres and Trujillo living temporarily or permanently in Seville frequently testified in the petitions of people from their home towns who wanted to go to the Indies,^[5] and the records indicate that throughout the century people were leaving Extremadura to settle there.^[6]

Certainly Seville was not the only destination in Castile that attracted extremeños, and furthermore a good deal of local and regional relocation went on. Francisco Román of Cáceres was a vecino of Valencia de Alcántara in 1574, and Francisco Gutiérrez, a labrador from Cáceres who in 1560 emigrated with his family to New Spain to join his brothers, was living in Albuquerque before his departure.^[7] Marriages often involved relocation. For Cáceres it has been estimated that in 30 to 35 percent of marriages of commoners, one partner was from outside the city; the majority of the outsiders were from nearby towns.^[8]

As a result of moves within the area it was not at all uncommon for people to have relatives or property in other towns. In 1558 a vecino of Madroñera testified that his nephew Blas García had been living in a rented house there for about a year, employed by a vecino of Trujillo who paid him to guard his vineyard. Blas García's father had been a vecino of Madroñera, and Blas García was born there, but the family had moved to Abertura (also in Trujillo's district). Thus as a young man Blas García already had lived in two different towns. In another case, when a man named Andres Sánchez was asked whether he was or wanted to be a vecino of Madroñera, he replied no to both questions and said he paid taxes in another village, Herguijuela. In August 1558 he had been living in Madroñera for

seven months, having moved his family with the intention of settling there, but apparently things did not work out. He was about to return to Herguijuela and was waiting only for planting season to sow a piece of land he had in Trujillo's commons.^[9]

There are many other such examples that suggest that moving from one town to another was not at all unusual and that people often maintained ties with their former place of residence. Alonso Bravo was a native of Búrdalo (in Trujillo's district, today Villamesías) and a vecino of Trujillo when he made his will in 1584. With his wife he owned a house and garden in Búrdalo, in addition to a house in Trujillo; he asked to be buried in the church in Búrdalo. One of the executors of his will was a cousin living in Búrdalo and another was a nephew who lived in Abertura. Alonso Bravo belonged to cofradías in Trujillo, Puerto de Santa Cruz, and Jaraicejo (a town outside Trujillo's jurisdiction but with close ties to it).^[10] Economic success may have prompted Bravo to become a citizen of Trujillo, but he retained strong social and economic connections with other towns in the district.

Mobility brought outsiders to Cáceres and Trujillo just as it took local people away from the cities and region. One of the three major routes of the Mesta led directly to the region, and the cities were located on major north-south (Salamanca to Seville) and east-west (Lisbon to Toledo) routes of travel and transport. The existence of inns and records of transactions involving one or more outsiders are evidence that the cities served as stopping-places or destinations for travelers of all sorts.^[11] People from elsewhere might decide to take up residence. Whereas in Cáceres at least Portuguese probably were the most numerous immigrants and transients (apart from people from the nearby towns who came to work and live), others came as well, from virtually all over the peninsula. In 1544 a Maestre Pedro, probably a master mason, from Pamplona was living in Cáceres, and in 1569 a vecino of Cáceres originally from Galicia apprenticed himself to a wool carder in Cáceres.^[12]

Special jobs and fine craftsmanship in particular might mean bringing in artisans from outside. In 1557 Francisco de Villalobos Carvajal hired someone from Valladolid to make the retablo (altarpiece) for the main chapel of the church of Santiago in Cáceres for 3000 ducados; the retablo was to be made from oak and pine from Soria.^[13] But the reverse was true as well. The cities had their own

master builders and fine craftsmen, and they in turn might go elsewhere to work. Trujillo especially was home to outstanding specialists in construction. In the sixteenth century Sancho de Cabrera worked on the churches of Garciaz, Orellana la Nueva, Jaraicejo, and Saucedilla, and Pedro Hernández on the palacio of don Alvaro de Sande (the military officer) in Valdefuentes. The renowned Francisco Becerra, son and grandson of master canteros (stonecutters), in addition to his projects in Trujillo itself, worked on the palacio and parish church of Orellana la Vieja and the sacristy of the church of Valdetorres (jurisdiction of Medellín) before departing for the New World in 1573, where he subsequently worked in New Spain and Peru.^[14]

Military service attracted commoners and took them away from home. In sixteenth-century Castile recruitment for the regular army was done on a voluntary basis,^[15] and commoners as well as hidalgos from Extremadura served and died in Europe and the Mediterranean.^[16] The process by which the crown's frequent military levies were met is not entirely clear, but probably enlistment in these urban militias was voluntary as well. The best evidence of how this kind of recruitment took place comes from the Trujillo city council records of 1580. In March of that year the city's corregidor informed the council that they had to provide 200 infantrymen and 40 horsemen ("caballeros jinetes"). The council divided the levy between the city and the towns under its jurisdiction (40 from Trujillo and its huertas; 24 from Logrosán; 22 each from Berzocana, Garciaz, and Cañamero; 15 from Santa Cruz; 10 each from Escurial and Abertura; and 5 or less from all the others) and directed the towns and villages to send double the number required "of the most healthy and able and diligent." In Trujillo the final group would be chosen.^[17]

This method of meeting the military levy suggests that there was little difficulty in finding a sufficient number of volunteers. Probably for many of the laborers of the towns and cities, service in the militia was attractive. The hundred soldiers recruited in Trujillo for the levy of 1558, for example, were to receive 5437 1/2 maravedís for four months, which worked out to about 1 1/2 reales a day. This was the same as the normal daily wage of an unskilled laborer but offered the added advantage of four months of secure employment. Despite the likely attractiveness of militia service for some, how-

ever, there might have been some coercion involved. Martín Jiménez Vaquero, a tailor from Cáceres, hired a substitute to go in his place to the war in Granada in 1570, and ten years later another cacereño, Pedro Laso, paid someone 200 reales to serve in his stead in the Portuguese war.^[18]

Discussion of military levies leads to the second point mentioned in relation to the position of commoners in society. Such levies were an extraordinary rather than a normal imposition of the crown, but they came with some regularity in the sixteenth century; there were levies for wars with France or Portugal in either Cáceres or Trujillo or both in 1542, 1552, 1556, 1558, 1575, and 1580 and in 1569 to put down the rebellion in Granada. Whereas, as suggested, some enlistees might have welcomed the chance to earn a regular wage for a time, the cities not only had to pay the soldiers and officers but usually supplied their weapons as well. Normally the municipality met these costs out of its own resources or by taking out loans or censos on its property, but sometimes the councils collected an additional tax. The taxpayers of Cáceres, for example, had to cover the 1000 ducados needed to pay the soldiers sent to Granada in 1569.^[19]

Doubtless the necessity of quartering troops constituted an even greater burden on the people. In February 1575 don Juan de Avendaño appeared in Cáceres with a royal cédula (ordinance) to recruit 250 soldiers and secure lodging for his troops.^[20] In June 1580 vecinos of the city complained bitterly about the behavior and activities of troops quartered among them, antagonism between citizens and soldiers having resulted in physical clashes and mutual accusations. At the same time the council of Trujillo wrote to the royal confessor, Fray Diego de Chaves, complaining of disturbances caused by soldiers billeted there.^[21] Obviously the presence of troops had a directly disruptive impact on the daily life of the townspeople. Though taxation was burdensome, it was at least predictable, whereas the demands of troops that might be billeted for up to two months were far less so.

As might be expected, such extraordinary demands did not fall equally on all groups. Wealthy and well-to-do commoners were expected to provide capital rather than personal services in aid of the realm. For the levy of 1580 the vecinos of Trujillo whose property was worth 2000 ducados had to furnish one horse each; those

with up to 1000 ducados shared between two (or more) the costs of supplying a horse. The vecinos who provided horses were not the principal nobles but rather, for the most part, merchants (seven of the forty-nine were called merchants and at least another ten were from merchant families), well-to-do artisans (a silversmith and candlemaker were included), and landowners.^[22]

Wealth and Poverty

The repartimiento among the wealthy or at least well-off vecinos of Trujillo underlines the considerable socioeconomic differentiation that existed among the commoners. Yet it is difficult to identify the "ricos" (rich men) or pinpoint the source of their wealth or their real position in society. In 1578 the regidores of Cáceres disagreed about the appointment of Simón Sánchez, nephew of a prominent cleric named Bachiller Ojalvo, as the alcalde of the pecheros. A regidor who spoke in his favor said "he possesses the necessary qualities to hold the said office and he is a rich man."^[23] Sánchez served at least two years as the alcalde, but nothing else is known about him. Some of the early and successful returnees from Peru formed a group of rich commoners which stood out clearly in local society—perhaps too much so; significantly two of the wealthiest of these—Diego de Trujillo and Martín Alonso, both from Trujillo and present at Cajamarca—subsequently returned to Peru.

If few artisans (and perhaps relatively few merchants) became rich, certainly a number of them prospered. Diego García, el viejo, a carpenter of Cáceres, in 1544 was able to endow his daughter with a house in the parish of San Juan, a vineyard, twenty-three fanegadas of land, a pair of oxen, and a bed—a substantial if not dazzling beginning for a newly married couple.^[24] The success of artisans distinguished by economic prosperity probably hinged on a combination of factors—patronage, timely investments, and economic diversification. A locksmith named Pedro Alonso, for example, in 1551 said he had had a store in Trujillo in which he had sold barley for many years.^[25] Cristóbal García, a pharmacist in Cáceres, was an active entrepreneur who for a while served as the city's mayordomo. In the late 1560s he bought a censo for 500 ducados, and his daughter received a dowry of 1500 ducados when she married Licenciado Gaspar Sánchez in 1578.^[26] The two shoemaker

brothers who were called "personas ricas" in 1554 were said to own at least 1000 ducados of property; in contrast Lorenzo del Puerto, another shoemaker of Trujillo, who in 1577 petitioned to go to New Spain with his family, said he was poor and that "with this trade I cannot support my house and family in this country since the said trade is of little profit." Witnesses claimed that only shoemakers with substantial capital to invest could survive in the business.^[27]

Investments were not, of course, limited to one's own business. While censos and juros were safe investments that appealed especially to the wealthy and well-to-do who wanted to secure their capital, other forms of investment offered greater possibilities for profits, if greater risks as well. People often formed partnerships to rent the collection of tithes or taxes. In Cáceres in 1537, for example, the archdeacon of Plasencia, don Francisco de Carvajal, rented out the collection of that year's tithes for Sierra de Fuentes, Torreorgaz, and Torrequemada to two tailors for 9000 maravedís, those of the parish of San Juan to four men (including a blacksmith and the notary Pedro de Grajos) for 37,750 maravedís, and those of Casar to a lawyer and a merchant (Bachiller Jerónimo de Andrada and Rodrigo López) for 110,000 maravedís.^[28]

Commercial investments were probably even more common. In 1579, for example, a vecino of Casar named Alonso Jiménez Garrovillano contributed 100 ducados to a partnership he formed with Jerónimo Carrillo of Cáceres, who put up 200 ducados. Jiménez was to take the money to "the fairs of Salamanca and Ríoseco and Villalón" to buy donkeys and mules to sell in Cáceres. The men agreed to share the profits equally, since Jiménez was contributing his efforts and labor.^[29] The majority of commercial investments, however, were less substantial and formal (and therefore more accessible to people with little capital to contribute). Typically two or three individuals or married couples might purchase thirty or forty pigs, or rent jointly an oven or a mill, or the like. But modest investments meant modest profits, and obviously the majority of commoners were not getting rich.

Many artisans, and not only those in the more prestigious trades (such as pharmacists or silversmiths), were literate.^[30] Doubtless literacy could enhance their economic possibilitiies and probably contributed to upward economic mobility, especially between generations. The tailor Diego de Monroy's son was Licenciado Antonio

de Monroy, who had left Trujillo for New Spain, probably in the 1550s. In 1567 he was said to be flourishing there—"he has everything necessary . . . he sent to say he has mines"—while in Trujillo his father, Diego de Monroy, was "very old and poor." Monroy also had a son-in-law who held a position as a solicitor ("procurador del número") in Trujillo.^[31] Francisco Rodríguez, a scribe (escribano) who in 1575 wanted to join his parents in Peru, was the son of a blacksmith; one of his brothers, who accompanied their parents to Peru, was a priest.^[32] Upwardly mobile artisans, like wealthy merchants, might adopt some of the customs typically associated with the nobility. The herrador (farrier, blacksmith) Hernan Gónzalez of Trujillo left the "tercio y quinto" (third and fifth) of his property to his son Diego González "for the love he has had and services he has done for me," rather than dividing his property equally among his heirs. He also donated all his clothes, except a cape and tunic he gave to one grandson, to the poor.^[33]

Some landowners as well were able to improve their economic situation and increase their holdings. Francisco Hortún, a vecino of Robledillo who made his will in January 1571 and was unable to sign his name, inherited a modest amount of property from his father—several pieces of land (including part of a vineyard, an orchard, and some grain land), forty-nine sheep and lambs and a cow, and several bushels of grain and flour. In all his inheritance was worth around 100 ducados. The dowry of his first wife, Francisca Alonso, included a house in Robledillo, two alcaceres, a small garden, an enclosed vineyard and part of another, a cow, and house furnishings. He counted fifty sheep, a few pigs, ten goats, twenty-two bushels of wheat, five fanegadas of land, and a vineyard he sold for 9 ducados as property accumulated during his first marriage. During his second marriage, to Estevanía de Carvajal, he made his most substantial acquisitions: another vineyard, ten and a half fanegadas of land bought from his uncle Gonzalo Becerra, a vecino of Trujillo, and another six from two other men; another piece of land from a nephew Alonso Becerra Hortún; a mill on the Tamuja river near Zarza de Montánchez; and a number of tinajas (earthenware jugs) ranging in size from one to fifty arrobas. His second wife inherited 6000 maravedís from her father and some tinajas, including three large ones.^[34] Hortún's possessions, which included a total of at least twenty-three fanegadas (around eleven or twelve acres) of

grain land as well as other types of land (alcaceres, vineyards), the mill, and some livestock, did not make him one of the "ricos" of his town; nonetheless he figured among the comfortable middle group and, significantly, he had made considerable advances from the starting point of his paternal inheritance.^[35]

Alonso Bravo, who moved from Búrdalo to take up residence in Trujillo, was a stockraiser and very well-to-do commoner. In his will of 1584 he disposed of two pair of oxen, a cow, eighty pigs, two mills (one on the Búrdalo river and the other on the Alcollarín, which had two criaderos [probably stock farms] nearby), a censo of 5000 maravedís, 160 ducados, and two cahices (a cahiz equals twelve fanegas) of wheat, which he variously willed to his wife, nieces and nephews, a cousin, and a sister. He ordered all the rest of his estate (wheat, barley, pigs) to be sold to buy censos and the income used each year to marry one or two orphans or poor women, to be chosen from his lineage or the relatives of his first or second wife. In addition to this obra pía (charitable work) he directed that an image he had of the "bien aventurado" San Ildefonso be used to make an altar in the church of Búrdalo where masses were to be said.^[36]

From the wills of individuals like Alonso Bravo or the blacksmith Hernán González, it can be seen that the concerns (and possibilities) of successful and well-to-to commoners went far beyond the basic necessities of life. Nonetheless, lacking the protection of the well-established family and kinship networks and resources that many nobles enjoyed, even well-to-do commoners might not have been very far removed from the spectre of want. Only in the codicil to his will did Alonso Bravo decide to give his sister Mari Sánchez 80 ducados, "considering that she is poor." Even knowing how much property an individual or family held, it still is difficult to gauge real economic status. The sons of Juan Muñoz of Trujillo inherited property and goods from their father and grandfather (a vecino of Navalsaz) that totaled about 750 ducados in value and included eighty fanegas of wheat and fifty of barley, ten oxen, three donkeys and a mule, nearly forty cows, and close to sixty pigs. But by the time all debts were settled and expenses met, each of four sons succeeded to little over 20,000 maravedís (about 55 ducados) and a share in a house and piece of land. Juan Muñoz doubtless understood the limitations of his economic situation, since in 1534

he left for Peru, taking three of his sons and a load of merchandise and slaves to sell. He died in Tierra Firme before reaching Peru.^[37]

The 1557 census of Trujillo classified vecinos according to four economic categories. At the top were the rich—"los que tienen buena hacienda." Next came the well-to-do, "los que tienen medianamente" (or "los que tienen de comer"). Then there were those with some means—"los que tienen algo"—and last the poor. The first two categories accounted for around a tenth of the 1900 or so vecinos, the people of some means one-third, and the poor nearly 45 percent.^[38] While it is clear that there were inaccuracies and shortcomings in this census (it included, for example, only one lawyer and no physicians or priests), the notably high percentage of pobres cannot be ignored. In a much more careful census compiled for the town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra in 1561, of 465 households 163 vecinos (or 35 percent) were counted as poor. The largest number of these, as might be expected, were women; the 51 widows and 27 young single women accounted for nearly half the indigent group. But in addition practically all the laborers were poor (4 or 7 jornaleros , 38 of 41 ganadores ), as were many of the town's artisans—2 of 3 weavers, 2 of 5 masons, 4 of 13 tailors. At the same time in Zorita 73 of 380 vecinos were poor or very poor. Over half of these were women, but nearly a third were male taxpayers, and the poor of Zorita included 3 tailors, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a weaver, and a priest. In contrast, however, Ibahernando in the same year listed only 12 people as poor—some 6.5 percent of the vecinos—and all but one of them were women, mostly widows.^[39]

Do these varying percentages of poor mean that the socioeconomic configuration of the towns and villages differed considerably? Probably so, to some extent, but the question of how the authorities defined "pobre" must also be taken into account. In principle at least a person classified as poor not only did not pay taxes but was eligible to receive alms or to beg. Thus, for example, of the 788 vecinos of Casar de Caceres, 53 were called "very poor persons, of whom many beg" ("piden por Dios"). It seems likely that in Casar and Ibahernando the less than 7 percent of vecinos who were classified as poor fell within the legal definition of the term.^[40] But in Zorita more than half of the pobres, male and female (including many widows), were listed as "pecheros," taxpayers.

Clearly the term poor, in some cases anyway, was used in the descriptive rather than the legal sense.

However poverty was defined, and however inadequate or ambiguous were the censuses—especially those of the cities—there can be no doubt that the poor were omnipresent and that they led a very marginal existence. Some of the poor of the villages were said to have nothing at all in the way of possessions, not even a house or part of a house, although probably only a very small number were literally homeless. The poor did receive charity, especially during bad times. In March 1558 the clergy of Trujillo presented to the city council a list of 200 paupers "who suffer great necessity and hunger," and the council ordered 400 bushels of wheat distributed to them. But the authorities constantly attempted to control and limit the dispensing of charity. In the same month that they distributed the wheat, the Trujillo council issued instructions for the licensing of paupers to beg; they had to prove illness or need and could not beg at night.^[41] Furthermore the city authorities distinguished sharply between their "own" poor and outsiders and transients. The regidores of Trujillo decreed that "pobres forasteros" could stay in the city no more than two days, under threat of a penalty of a hundred lashes. In Cáceres in 1575 the physician Licenciado Ledesma reported that the city's hospitals were overcrowded, and the council had its mayordomo give the hospitals more money to care for the sick. But in November they ordered that the sick who could travel be sent to the neighboring lugares (hamlets) at the city's expense. In February 1576 one regidor was asked to appoint someone to remove the healthy poor from the city and provide whatever "beasts that are needed to carry those who cannot walk."^[42]

Despite official and religious charity, the poor led a hard and probably mostly unchanging life. In his will of 1580 Juan Martín Alamedo of Cáceres said that when he married his second wife, Juana Pérez la Mejía, he brought no property or money to the marriage; his wife had given him the black suit in which he was wed. At the time he made his will he and his wife still had nothing more than what she brought to the marriage "because they have been very difficult and needy years and times."^[43] The assistance of relatives, neighbors, or patrons probably was as crucial to the sur-

vival of the poor as was official charity. Crisante de San Pedro, a notary of Trujillo who testified regarding the poverty into which Alonso Blanco, former innkeeper, had fallen, said that from time to time he had given Blanco and his four children things to help them out. Blanco owned only half a house and had entered the service of don Hernando de Chaves as a squire.^[44]

Commoners and the Agrarian World

The fact that the economy of Spain (as, indeed, of most of the world) in the sixteenth century was fundamentally agrarian is so generally known that it may seem gratuitous to restate it here. Nonetheless, one cannot consider the lives of Castile's commoners without recognizing that the vast majority of them—and therefore the majority of the Castilian population—owed their livelihood or a substantial part of it to the land. The overwhelmingly agrarian orientation of the economy characterized the smaller towns and villages more strongly than the larger towns and cities, as would be expected. The latter, as centers for governmental and religious institutions, networks of trade and communications, and the principal places of residence for the majority of the nobility, of course encompassed and fostered a much greater diversity of trades and occupations. But agriculturalists certainly were present in the cities as well. On Caleros street in Cáceres, for example, of a total of 60 vecinos counted in 1557, there were 6 gardeners, 3 shepherds, 2 goatherds, and 1 torero (probably someone who tended, rather than just fought, bulls). Five others falling within the catchall category of laborer (trabajador) probably worked in either the city or the countryside.^[45] Essentially the difference between large towns and small was one of degree rather than kind, since many city dwellers were primarily agriculturalists, and even those with specialized trades and occupations usually owned or rented some land or kept a few animals (chickens, a cow, a donkey or mule) for domestic use and subsistence.

Since the size of a town or village clearly bore a relation to economic specialization, one would expect the smallest places to be most homogeneous, if not necessarily in wealth, at least in the way people made their living. Larger towns like Casar de Cáceres or Santa Cruz de la Sierra could support a number of artisans and some

local industry. But in large towns and small villages alike, the largest number of heads of household were labradores. El Campo, in Trujillo's tierra, in 1555 had 97 vecinos, of whom 61 were labradores and 13 viudas labradoras (farmer-widows). Of Santa Cruz's 465 households in 1561, 185 were headed by labradores (16 of them women). Most of these labradores were middling to humble. Nearly two-thirds (115) of Santa Cruz's labradores had only one pair of draft animals. Although a peasant might have other kinds of livestock as well, for most labradores the one pair probably represented their principal asset.^[46]

The available censuses for the different towns vary greatly in terms of the kind and amount of information they provide on occupations and property held, but it does seem clear that each community encompassed socioeconomic (if not occupational) differentiation. At the top was a small wealthy or well-to-do group, composed usually of both hidalgos and commoners, followed by a larger middle group, and then a large, sometimes larger, poor group made up principally of laborers and widows. In Sierra de Fuentes, with 90 vecinos, the 22 labradores listed as having just one pair of oxen probably formed the bulk of the middle group (25 percent of the vecinos), while for Ibahernando the 28 percent of vecinos who owned vineyards with between 200 and 500 vines probably constituted the equivalent.^[47]

If the presence of artisans correlates with the size of towns, the number of laborers in a place does not. One might expect that small places would support few laborers and large towns more; but in fact of Sierra de Fuentes's 90 vecinos 21 were wage laborers, while Casar in 1555 claimed to have only 24 "mozos de soldada," all of them children of vecinos, out of its total of 788 vecinos.^[48] Once again the information in some censuses may be misleading. Probably some labradores worked for wages as well as on their account at certain times. Basic unskilled agricultural work paid approximately the same wages as unskilled urban labor. Juan de Figueroa, a priest in Cáceres, paid his criado Diego Gonzáles 11/2 reales a day for forty days for harvesting the wheat of Figueroa's brother Sancho de Figueroa in 1549.^[49]

In addition to labradores and wage laborers, there were a number of agricultural specialists—shepherds, swineherds, goatherds—who usually contracted their services for a year at a time. An important

group of specialists were the hortelanos who cultivated the orchards and gardens around the cities. Orchards and gardens were valuable property, since they had to be located near sources of irrigation (rivers, springs, or wells). As a result they changed hands infrequently; more normally they were taken at censo or rented, with rents often paid in an assortment of produce as well as in cash.^[50] A number of moriscos who arrived in Extremadura in the 1570s after their expulsion from the Granada region took up their traditional occupation of irrigated gardening there. In 1580 Isabel González gave her huerta in "censo perpetuo" (the equivalent of a long-term lease) to a morisco couple for 91/2 ducados a year.^[51]

Because of the fertility of the irrigated gardens and the variety of their produce, all of which no doubt was sold on the local market, the municipalities took some interest in their cultivation and maintenance. At the beginning of January 1580 Trujillo's city council ordered a census taken of the city's huertas to find out how many gardeners there were "who really are gardeners and have gardens and wells and provide vegetables and greens." The 108 hortelanos counted included 17 women (presumably mostly widows, since doubtless they were counting heads of household) and 1 mulatto. The largest huertas were those of los Alamos and las Alamedas, with 16 gardeners each.^[52] The people of the huertas formed a tightly knit and virtually independent community on the outskirts of the city. Because of stability of ownership or tenancy over generations, the residents were closely connected by ties of marriage and kinship. The testimony of 1559 regarding the situation of Juana Martín, a resident of the huertas whose husband, Francisco Márquez, had been living in Peru for many years, suggests how extensive these kinship ties were. Francisco Márquez himself was a native of Monroy who had moved to Trujillo. He and his wife had married in the church of Santo Domingo, the parish that served the huertas, before he went to Peru (where, incidentally, Márquez continued to practice his "trade of planting and harvesting grain and other vegetables and raising cattle"). The audiencia in Peru had ordered Márquez to send for his wife, but she was too ill to make the journey. In 1559 Márquez's full sister María Alonso was living in the huertas, as was his first cousin Juan Galeras. Another witness was Mari Jiménez, also a resident of the huertas, widow of a first cousin of Márquez's wife Juana Martín.^[53]

Artisans, Trades, and Industry

Cáceres and Trujillo had numbers of artisans in a variety of specialties (the towns and villages of their districts, as seen, had many fewer in either sense); but the most important local industries were clothmaking and construction, and the greatest concentration and variety of artisans were found in the trades related to these enterprises. Clothmaking and construction were also the two industries that were most nearly self-sufficient in terms of the local economy. Wool and some flax were grown locally and supplied the clothmakers, who sold most of their cloth locally as well. The construction industry relied on the high-quality granite and lime produced in the area. In the sixteenth century a high level of demand, not only in the private sector—the nobles and wealthy returnees from America—but on the part of the municipalities and various organs of the church as well, fueled a boom in construction. Other trades relied more on materials imported from outside the region. Blacksmiths purchased iron at the trade fairs of Castile, and shoemakers and other leatherworkers usually bought hides from suppliers in the more western part of Extremadura (around Albuquerque especially). But clothmakers as well had to look elsewhere, to the Castilian trade fairs or suppliers in Seville, for dyes. Furthermore local trades or industries did not have a monopoly over supply or markets. The local cloth produced was of medium to low quality, and local merchants imported and sold substantial quantities of higher-quality cloth from Segovia and Valencia, or even Flanders. Even in the construction industry, the most nearly self-sufficient, artisans and specialists from outside the cities often came to work on particular projects.

In terms of local organization, of course, the different trades did function as monopolies, electing their own veedores (inspectors) and examining artisans who wished to establish themselves. The city council generally oversaw the trades by approving the elections of the veedores, ensuring that no artisans set themselves up without the approval of the officials and occasionally hearing and deliberating upon complaints about artisans or the conduct of trades. Otherwise the trades for the most part saw to their own business without outside interference.

Apprenticeships were arranged on an individual basis. While

each trade probably had its guidelines and minimum requirements as to what must be taught, terms of apprenticeships varied not only from one trade to another but even within the same one. The apprentice (or more likely his parent or guardian) might pay the master, or the master might be obligated to provide clothing, room or board, or tools of the trade and new clothing at the end of the term of apprenticeship. The term ranged anywhere from one to five years, depending on the trade; apprenticeship to a tailor might be as short as a year and a half, but it could take three or four years to study to be a pharmacist or a barber. Most apprentices were minors and fairly young, as would be expected, but not necessarily so. In 1544 Juan de la Huerta of Cáceres apprenticed himself for four years to the barber Francisco Durán for 7 ducados. Before the term ended, in 1547, Huerta married, his wife bringing a dowry of 34,000 maravedís, which included two oxen.^[54]

Trades and occupations were, to a considerable degree, a "family inheritance," as one historian of Cáceres has suggested.^[55] In 1576, for example, Gómez Hernández, barber, son of Martín Hernández, barber, married Ana de Muesas, the daughter of Nicolás Muesas, also a barber.^[56] But there was crossover between occupations as well, with fathers not infrequently apprenticing their sons outside their own trade. Still, solidarity within trades (or groups of related trades) manifested itself strongly in marriage choices, living patterns, and carry-over from one generation to the next. Practical reasons underlay this solidarity. Continuity from father to son could minimize investment in tools and equipment or property (a shoemaker's tannery, a blacksmith's forge) and avoid the necessity of arranging a formal apprenticeship. The more successful a business, the more likely it could support a number of family members. The brothers Benito, Martín, Bartolomé, and Francisco Cotrina Delgado were tintoreros (fabric dyers), and Pascual López, Martín Alonso Galeano, and Juan Martín Galeano were all "wool carders and brothers."^[57] Despite family solidarity, however, because boys usually were apprenticed or trained by their fathers fairly young, an artisan might be established and independent at a rather early age. Melchor González, a locksmith of Trujillo, decided to go to Peru in 1554, taking with him one of his apprentices. He had had his own shop in which three or four artisans worked for four years, although in 1554 he was only twenty-two years old.^[58]

The clothmaking industry was small but active, especially in Cáceres. There the range of trades encompassed every stage of the manufacture of cloth and clothing; there were wool carders, fullers, weavers, cloth shearers, dyers, and, of course, numerous tailors (as everywhere). The relatively low price of local cloth compared to imported products indicates that it was not of very fine quality,^[59] but some of the local cloth made its way out of the immediate area. Benito Sánchez, a wool carder of Cáceres, in August 1544 made a contract with a man from Badajoz to sell all the "paños berbís como estambrados" (cloth of uncombed and worsted or spun wool) that he could supply until New Year's, at 119 maravedís per yard for worsted and 80 maravedís per yard for berbi. The buyer agreed to arrange to transport the cloth to Badajoz.^[60]

Of all the trades and industries, most is known about the construction industry because carpenters, masons, stonecutters, bricklayers, architects, and lime manufacturers usually contracted their services in advance. As a result the records reveal a great deal about the nature and conditions of their work, wages and compensation, and duration of particular projects. Furthermore the construction trades differed from most others in that they frequently involved a substantial use of unskilled labor alongside skilled artisans, whereas in most other trades the artisan probably worked with no more than a handful of apprentices or assistants. One instance has been found where women performed some of the heavy labor in the renovation of the parish church of Herguijuela in the 1560s. They carried stones and tiles on their heads and received only 1 real a day.^[61]

A detailed accounting of renovations done on the main house and property of Dr. Nicolás de Ovando in the parish of Santa María in Cáceres in 1559 provides considerable insight into the employment and organization of skilled and unskilled labor. The renovations required the services of a large number of artisans and unskilled workers, called peones, employing altogether four stonecutters (three of them brothers), two masons (albañiles ), and five carpenters, with as many as fourteen laborers assisting the artisans at times. Sancho Carrasco, a priest and former cura (parish priest) of Santa María, kept these and all the household accounts of Dr. Ovando, a royal councillor who lived at court in Valladolid or Madrid.^[62]

The bulk of the work was the reconstruction of galleries and stair-

ways in Ovando's house. Pero Gómez, master stonecutter, received 43,000 maravedís for building the gallery (corredor ), stairs, and chimneys. Two other stonecutters (the brothers Hernán López Paniagua and Lorenzo Martín) did some incidental work and earned 2 reales a day. Carpenters and a mason helped complete the work on the corridors. Carrasco paid three carpenters 3600 maravedís for the beams for the arcade, and a mason worked with another carpenter on the ceiling. These two artisans received 2 1/2 reales a day, and seven peones earning 1 1/2 reales a day each assisted them for two days. Three carpenters worked on the other arcade as well.

The renovations used a good deal of semiskilled or unskilled labor. Carrasco paid a man 5 reales to clear the remains of the old corridor where Pero Gómez had taken out the stonework. Starting Monday, April 1, 1559, the work progressed as follows. On Monday and Tuesday two peones earned 1 1/2 reales a day to knock down the corridors and stairway and take out the wood, beams, and planks. Three laborers performed the same work at the same wage on Wednesday and Thursday. Five laborers worked on Friday and Saturday. The following Monday, April 8, fourteen peones were demolishing and cleaning, and the next day thirteen, all receiving the same basic daily wage (1 1/2 reales), did the same. Eight laborers worked on Wednesday. The next day there was no work because it was Holy Thursday, but on Holy Friday eight peones worked after midday, and nine the following day. After Easter work resumed on Wednesday, April 17, with six peones and seven the next day. These laborers probably worked in gangs to perform the heaviest work.

Unskilled laborers were hired for incidental tasks as well. Carrasco paid a man 1 1/2 reales for one day to clear the earth and tiles that had fallen into a neighbor's house during the construction work; a peon who worked at the same job for half a day earned 20 maravedís. A carpenter named Maderuela who worked for six days on the second gallery was assisted by his son, who received a small wage. Carrasco hired a black slave belonging to a neighbor to assist the mason Bartolomé Martín for thirteen days at 1 1/2 reales a day. Later he paid the same slave for four days to clean up and remove stones. A peón received 45 maravedís a day for three days to make the mixture of lime and sand used in building.

Other than Pero Gómez (and the brothers who built the second

gallery), none of the artisans employed in these renovations earned a great deal. Their daily earnings exceeded those of the peones by only 1 real, and their employment security was not much greater. All evidence suggests that these wages were standard and hardly varied in the sixteenth century. In 1570 Francisco Becerra received 4 reales a day and the artisans working with him 3 reales for their work on the church of Orellana la Vieja (the parish also paid their lodging, since they came from Trujillo); and Becerra and another stonecutter, Francisco Sánchez, earned 3 reales a day each working on the convent of San Francisco in Trujillo.^[63] Master artisans like Francisco Becerra or Pero Gómez of Cáceres had no shortage of work and probably their choice of projects. Becerra in fact took on so many projects during his last years in Trujillo that few were actually completed under his direction before he left for Mexico in 1573. The remarkable entranceway to Trujillo's "dehesa de las yeguas" (pasture for breeding mares) that Becerra designed and initiated was finished in 1576 by three other canteros. The iron grating was fashioned by Santos García, a locksmith who had returned from Peru, where he had gone in 1555 with his half-brother Alonso García, also a blacksmith.^[64] But highly skilled individuals whose work was in demand constituted a minority of artisans. The accounts of the renovations on Dr. Ovando's house show clearly that both skilled and unskilled labor was readily available should someone require such services; it was a buyer's market, hence it is no surprise that wages varied little and could be kept low.

The other crafts and trades represented in the region mostly involved the processing of agricultural products and other raw materials for local consumption and use. There were millers, potters, candlemakers and soapmakers, and people who made various kinds of arms. Bakers and cheese vendors were almost always women. People who specialized in transport—muleteers (arrieros, recueros) and carters (carreteros)—were similar to artisans in some ways, also associating closely with one another. They provided essential services that tied Extremadura to the outside world, conveying raw materials and finished products into and out of the towns and cities. They also functioned as trusted messengers, carrying letters and often money as well. Moving over considerable distances, they must have spent a lot of time on the road, although they worked locally as well. The most active muleteers and carters were like

artisans in that they probably worked primarily in their trades (even if, like other tradesmen, they owned and worked some agricultural property). Mules, the preferred animal for transport, were expensive, and it seems unlikely that a relatively humble labrador would invest in these animals unless he planned to use them commercially as much as possible. In sixteenth-century Extremadura people continued to use oxen rather than mules as the primary source of animal power for agriculture,^[65] and only the wealthier labradores owned more than one mule.

In addition to all these trades, there were a number of occupations that defy easy categorization, falling somewhere between the commercial, industrial, and professional sectors. Pharmacists, for example, were related to the medical profession, but the commercial nature of their business often led to more general entrepreneurial involvements. Barbers performed some surgery, but they were not identical with surgeons, nor did surgeons—even those with university degrees—enjoy the status of physicians. Similarly notaries and procuradores (solicitors or untitled lawyers) constituted a part of the legal profession, but they ranked below university-trained and titled lawyers in status. Even the more purely commercial sector included a range of entrepreneurs, from shopkeepers to substantial merchants, as will be discussed next. It should be noted, in any case, that industrial and commercial sectors overlapped considerably, since many artisans were the vendors as well as the manufacturers of their products.

Merchants and Trade

The merchants of the region maintained a broad network of commercial contacts with other merchants, suppliers, and customers in Extremadura, Castile, and Andalusia. The majority probably operated on a fairly small scale in terms of the merchandise they handled and the amount of capital they had at their disposal. They were principally retailers who dealt in a variety of items, from cloth and hides to livestock and iron, although finished cloth of all kinds probably constituted the core of their trade. Because of the nature of their activities and their mobility, they frequently acted as agents and representatives for collecting money or completing transactions involving other parties, and they also lent money.

The merchants owned houses and shops in the cities, usually on or near the main plaza. Like most vecinos of any means, they frequently owned rural properties and invested in rents, censos, mills, and the like.

The activities of Gonzalo Jiménez, a merchant active in Cáceres in the 1530s, show something of how a successful merchant functioned. In the year 1534 alone he sold wheat, zumaque (used in tanning leather), sugar, pigs, an ass, and a calf. In 1538 a vecino of Cáceres owed him 7,204 maravedís for various merchandise purchased in Jiménez's store, and the noble Alonso de Ribera owed Jiménez 29,000 maravedís for loans taken by Ribera and his son. Ribera arranged to repay the money in wheat planted in one of his dehesas in 1540 and 1542. Jiménez belonged to a family of tradespeople and entrepreneurs that produced a number of priests. In 1535 Gonzalo Jiménez bought a vineyard from his nephew Gonzalo Jiménez Solana and another vineyard from Francisco Jiménez Solana, a priest (probably also a relative); both these vineyards were located next to one owned by Jiménez's uncle Francisco Jiménez, also a priest.^[66]

Another cacereño merchant, Francisco de Madrid, sometimes called tendero (shopkeeper), dealt primarily in cloth in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Madrid had contacts with merchants both within the region and beyond it, but he himself moved around relatively little. He maintained his shop in the city and either sent agents elsewhere to make large purchases or depended on merchants from outside the city to supply his needs. In July 1565, for example, he gave his power of attorney to another cacereño merchant, Antonio Gutiérrez, to buy up to 300,000 maravedís of merchandise at the fair of Medina del Campo, and also empowered two other merchants, Diego Pérez de Herrera and Mateo Ortiz, to do the same. He had frequent dealings with three merchant brothers from Mérida, Hernando de Morales, Tristán de Morales, and Juan López, who were quite active in Cáceres and Trujillo in the 1560s and 1570s. Given the value of Madrid's wholesale transactions, his contacts within the trade networks of Castile must have been fairly extensive. In 1574, for example, he gave his power of attorney to two merchants in Toledo to recover a sum of money which doña Leonor de Guzmán, the wife of don Diego de Mejía (señor of Don Llorente and Loriana) owed him for merchandise; she was at the royal court at the time.^[67]

Other merchants did move around quite a bit. Juan Pizarro gave his power of attorney to Diego Pérez, a merchant of Cáceres, in 1562 to buy merchandise in Medina del Campo—"cloth and silks and other things for Sr. Gonzalo de Ulloa . . . up to 400 ducados," give or take thirty.^[68] Some merchants apparently served as distributors or wholesalers. In 1562 two men from Ibaren, in Vizcaya, bought 15,000 maravedís of cloth and other items from Mateo Ortiz. They agreed to buy all the merchandise they needed from Ortiz, or at least to go to him first; their purchase price would be equal to cost plus 10 maravedís (presumably 10 maravedís per yard of cloth). If they bought from someone else without Ortiz's consent, they would have to pay him some percentage. They put a mortgage on their merchandise as a guarantee of their part of the bargain.^[69]

Local merchants did not have a monopoly over local supply, although they did have a strong hold on it; outsiders like the Morales brothers of Mérida might be active in the area, and of course wool merchants from Castile and elsewhere played an important role in linking the extremeño economy with the rest of Castile. A number of wool carders in Cáceres in the 1570s bought wool from Simón Sable, a Genoese who had formed a partnership with a cacereño merchant, Juan Martín Agudo.^[70] Francisco de Madrid bought cloth in 1580 from two Frenchmen who were vecinos of Salamanca,^[71] and merchants and dealers from Seville also made their way into the area.^[72] As was true for artisans, merchants showed considerable solidarity and often acted jointly, and a successful commercial enterprise frequently was a family business. Juan Pérez, a shopkeeper, was the father-in-law of the merchant Diego Pérez de Herrera.^[73] Trade was also a family business in another sense, in that several members of the immediate family all might participate in some capacity. In his will of 1544 the cacereño merchant Diego Martín Sotoval said that if his wife, Benita Jiménez, wished to continue their business "as at present we have it," she and their son Aparicio Martín, a priest, could choose which of the children should work with her. Obviously Benita Jiménez already had an active role in the business, if her husband assumed she would continue to do so in the future, and their cleric son played a part as well.^[74]

Most merchants probably lived comfortably, if not on a grand scale. Diego Martín Sotoval left two houses to his sons and some

small properties he had inherited from a brother (a priest) and sister—part of a vineyard, an alcacer, some corrals. He and his son Aparicio Martín apparently were patrons of a capellanía, but Martín did not mention who the founder was or what rents it included. Martín also left two beds and 20 ducados to their criada Juana, whom they had raised, if she would serve his widow two more years.^[75]

The most successful merchants, or merchant families, of sixteenth-century Trujillo achieved a place in society which went beyond the comfortable but fairly modest position of most local merchants. They secured places on the city council, founded entails, and as time went on identified themselves less and less frequently as merchants. They intermarried with one another and allied themselves with some of the city's most prominent families, especially those other important members of the nouveau riche, the returnees from Peru. In fact a direct or indirect involvement in the Indies might have been of some importance to this group of merchants; but for this realm of their activities—as indeed for many aspects of their lives and careers—there is frustratingly little information.

One of the first of the prominent merchants to emerge in Trujillo in the sixteenth century was Diego del Saz, whose son Luis del Saz was a regidor of Trujillo in the 1560s. Diego del Saz's son-in-law Felipe Díaz was also a merchant (he was one of the individuals required to provide a horse for the military levy of 1580, as was Diego del Saz's grandson Diego del Saz, the son of Francisco del Saz); the three of them frequently undertook transactions and obligations together. Diego del Saz and his son-in-law Felipe Díaz invariably appeared in the records identified as merchants, but Luis del Saz less consistently so, although as late as 1565 he was called a merchant in a power of attorney given to him to collect a debt. The activities of these merchants differed little from the norm, and their success was probably a result mainly of the scale on which they operated. Diego del Saz had customers in the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s in Cáceres and Benalcázar and suppliers in Segovia and Córdoba, and he and his son seem to have had good relations with Trujillo's nobles. Alvaro de Loaysa owed Diego del Saz 102,215 maravedís in 1561 for merchandise and a loan, and the regidor Cristóbal Pizarro gave Luis del Saz and Felipe Díaz his power of attorney to collect a debt of 184,620 maravedís from

vecinos of Pedraza. As a regidor in 1567 Luis del Saz bought part of a dehesa from don Juan de Vargas Carvajal for 240,000 maravedís.^[76] One of Diego del Saz's grandsons, Luis del Saz (son of Felipe Díaz) emigrated to Peru in 1592 to join his brother Antonio del Saz, an uncle (his father's brother), and other relatives who had preceded him.^[77]

An even more successful merchant family was the Camargos, who intermarried with the Enríquez family; this family also sent sons to the Indies and secured places for themselves on the city council. The patriarch of the family, Luis de Camargo, who had died by 1551, by the end of his life seldom was called a merchant. He had close relations with the Pizarros and their retainers. In 1535 he acted on the part of Inés Rodríguez de Aguilar, the sister of Hernando Pizarro, to purchase part of a dehesa from Juan de Orellana, the señor of Orellana; six years later he himself bought the same piece of land from Inés Rodríguez for the same price, 24 ducados. In 1549 Camargo testified that he had been in touch with Gonzalo Pizarro while he was in Peru and for a year or two had collected juros (159,000 maravedís a year) that Gonzalo held in Mérida. Camargo maintained before royal officials attempting to confiscate all Gonzalo's properties that he had handed the money over to Hernando Pizarro; but he was not released from jail until he had paid off the sum in silver objects and money.^[78]

In the next generation, none of Camargo's sons were called merchants, although at least two of them—Juan and Diego—often acted jointly with their father while he was still alive. Among the people required to provide horses in the 1580 levy were Alvaro Pizarro de Camargo, another son of Luis de Camargo, Luis de Camargo, mayorazgo (doubtless a grandson of the first Luis de Camargo), and Juan de Camargo, tesorero, and his cousin Luis de Camargo (also probably grandsons).^[79] Two of Luis de Camargo's daughters, Leonor Alvarez and Mayor Alvarez, married two brothers, Vicente Enríquez and Alonso Enríquez.

The line of the family through Vicente Enríquez achieved notable successes. Vicente Enríquez's activities and associations show that he was a merchant. In February 1551 he was a witness along with another merchant, Juan González de Vitoria, to a document executed by Juan de Camargo, who was trying to apprehend a "Turkish" slave, and in 1565 he bought twenty-six oxen from a

merchant of Peñaranda. But Enríquez never called himself "mercader," and in 1569 he was a regidor.^[80] One of his sons, Juan de Camargo, was a regidor in Trujillo for the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and Vicente Enríquez created an entail for another son, Vasco Calderón Enríquez. Vasco Calderón's son Licenciado Vicente Enríquez was a letrado (lawyer).^[81]

Several members of this family also went to the Indies, although whether they functioned there as entrepreneurs or agents for their fathers is not known. One son of the patriarch Luis de Camargo, Alonso de Camargo, went to Santa Marta in 1536. Alonso Enríquez, son of Vicente Enríquez and Leonor Alvarez de Camargo, emigrated to Chile in 1569, possibly accompanied by his first cousin Vicente Enríquez (son of Alonso Enríquez and Mayor Alvarez), who died in Chile in 1578 in the city of Concepción. In 1577 an Alvaro de Camargo, son of Diego de Camargo, left Trujillo for New Spain. Another grandson of Luis de Camargo, Juan de Camargo, left Trujillo for Peru in 1592 at the age of twenty-five.^[82]

A merchant who had connections with the Camargos and with people who went to the Indies was Juan González de Vitoria who, in contrast to the Camargos, virtually always was identified as a merchant. In 1561 Juan González gave his power of attorney to his son Diego González in Peru to collect outstanding debts owed to him by Diego Velázquez (long-time retainer of Hernando Pizarro) or anyone else. Among the witnesses to this document was Andrés Calderón Puertocarrero, the noble of Trujillo who went to Peru the following year as a merchant. Juan González often associated with Juan de Camargo—the two together sold a censo in 1551 to the returnee Diego de Carvajal—and he was either the brother or brother-in-law of the surgeon Juan Alvarez, who emigrated to Peru in the late 1550s, possibly at the same time that Juan González de Vitoria's son Diego went. Juan Alvarez's son Alonso Alvarez de Altamirano, who accompanied his father to Peru as a child, later became a merchant himself. Another indication of Juan González's connection with people involved in the Indies is that in 1561 he was acting as the guardian of don Gonzalo de Hinojosa, the son of Alvaro de Hinojosa and the youngest of the Pizarro sisters, doña Graciana.^[83]

Obviously the information on these merchant families is scattered and often inconclusive. Since by the 1560s most were trying

to downplay their commercial origins and activities and enter into the more genteel ranks of local society, it is difficult to gain a clear picture of their activities. Even less is known, for example, about the Alarcóns, a large family whose names appear frequently in the records. The evidence for their commercial background is entirely circumstantial but fairly convincing. The often associated with the Camargos; six Alarcóns appeared on the 1580 list of vecinos required to furnish horses; and several Alarcóns went to the Indies, one as a merchant in 1557.^[84] The most successful merchant families of Trujillo behaved much as did socially ambitious mercantile families elsewhere; they invested in properties and rents, founded entails, got their sons on the city council, and stopped calling themselves merchants. But they stopped short of intermarriage with the local nobility, and not one of them married a woman with the title "doña."

Another unanswered question regarding Trujillo's big merchant families is whether they were converso in origin. It is hard to avoid speculating that at least some were, especially given their connections with physician families (medicine was a profession with strong Jewish and converso associations). Luis de Camargo's son Alvaro married Juana González de Orellana, the daughter of physician Dr. Marcos de Orellana and his wife Isabel Alvarez (who were also the parents of the priest Dr. Felipe Díaz de Orellana). Felipe Díaz, the merchant who married the daughter of merchant Diego del Saz, was the son of a Dr. Gonzalo García Carrasco of Trujillo. A surgeon named Juan de Belvis, who testified when Felipe Díaz's son Luis del Saz emigrated to Peru, said he and Díaz lived next door to each other and visited and talked together frequently. Again, such evidence is inconclusive; but the close association of these merchant and professional families, taken in conjunction with their failure to form marital alliances with hidalgos, certainly suggests a common converso background.^[85]

Priests and Professionals

Like the well-to-do merchants and labradores, the clergy and professionals in many senses bridged the gap between noble and commoner. In fact members of either group might themselves be hidalgos; although, as has been noted, members of the nobility who

chose ecclesiastical careers showed a marked preference for the regular over the secular branch of the church, and the professions generally had a greater appeal for middle-level hidalgos than for nobles. For all groups, entry into the clergy had much in common with other professional careers. The priesthood required at least some study, not as much as law or medicine, although there were priests in Cáceres and Trujillo who had attained a bachelor's degree or higher; and the priesthood, like the other professions, could be a vehicle for upward mobility.

Both Cáceres and Trujillo had sizable ecclesiastical establishments, with monasteries and convents in addition to the parish churches. Cáceres had four parishes (Santa María and San Mateo within the walls, Santiago and San Juan outside) and Trujillo six (the small, older parishes of Vera Cruz and Santiago in the "villa," to which San Andrés was added in the fifteenth century; San Martín and San Clemente in the newer part of the city; and Santo Domingo, below the castle, serving the huertas), as well as Santa María la Mayor, an archpriestal church. Santa María la Mayor alone had at least six benefices and eight cantores (singers) in the sixteenth century.^[86] In addition most of the towns and villages of their jurisdictions had their own parish churches, whose priests were sometimes vecinos of the cities.^[87] A number of priests served as chaplains for capellanías, and those who had no benefice or capellanía and no private means of support pursued occupations for which their literacy and education equipped them. The priest Sancho Carrasco kept accounts for Dr. Nicolás de Ovando in Cáceres in the 1550s and 1560s, as seen. Bachiller Ojalvo, another priest of Cáceres, was preceptor de gramática for a while in both Cáceres and Trujillo and also taught private students.^[88] In contrast to those individuals who left home to join religious orders, secular priests often remained closely involved in family affairs, serving as chaplains for family capellanías or working in the family business, as did Aparicio Martín, the merchant's son.

The secular clergy ranged in background from hidalgos like the vicar Juan de Figueroa or Lorenzo de Ulloa Solís of Cáceres, who were wealthy in their own right by inheritance, to individuals of much humbler beginnings. Probably the majority of priests came from the middle or upper-middle strata of local society, and a number of families produced at least one priest per generation. This

pattern has been noted for the families of cacereño merchants Gonzalo Jiménez and Diego Martín Sotoval; the latter had a brother, a son, and a brother-in-law (his wife's brother) who were priests. Juan Sánchez, a priest of Trujillo, was the nephew of Alonso Sánchez, who had been the priest of Vera Cruz.^[89]

Thus entrance into the priesthood often was a family tradition, logically passing from uncle to nephew, although the vocation also could pass from father to son, since in the first part of the sixteenth century it was not unusual for priests to have illegitimate children of their own whom they recognized. A prominent priest of Trujillo, an hidalgo named Alvar García de Solís, vicar and beneficiado of San Martín, had at least three children. One of them, Cristóbal de Solís, from an early age served in the churches of San Martín and Santa María as a singer and was ordained in Badajoz in 1558. In 1578 he decided to emigrate to Peru to join his brother-in-law Sancho Casco, a priest. Casco had been married to a daughter of Alvar García de Solís and must have joined the priesthood after her death.^[90]

Most children of priests, however, probably did not follow their fathers' calling. A shoemaker of Cáceres named Francisco Jiménez in 1562 said he was the "hijo natural" and universal heir of his deceased father, Gonzalo Jiménez, a priest.^[91] Illegitimate children of priests were in the same position as all illegitimate offspring, their fortunes tied to the recognition their fathers chose to confer upon them. A vecina of Cáceres named Isabel de Paredes, the wife of the physician Licenciado Salinas, claimed to be the daughter of the vicar Alvaro de Paredes. In 1556 she sued the cofradía de la Cruz, which had inherited Paredes's estate, for a yearly allowance of 40 ducados for herself and her four children. The cofradía maintained that she was not his daughter, but one of the witnesses claimed that Paredes, an hidalgo and caballero, did have Isabel's mother Mari Morena "for his friend" and that he had recognized Isabel de Paredes; furthermore he had brought Isabel to his house and treated her as a daughter. Forty years later the suit remained unresolved.^[92]

The exact numbers of clergy in Cáceres and Trujillo are difficult to pinpoint. At least forty-five priests were living in Cáceres in the years in 1534–1537, and so a conservative estimate for the numbers of priests in either city at any time throughout the century might be fifty or sixty.^[93] Actual figures notwithstanding, since in any case the

secular clergy constituted only a small percentage of the population, the clergy's role in the religious, intellectual, and civic life of local society endowed them with an importance that had little to do with their numbers. In addition to performing the religious duties and other functions of their calling, they taught and served as guardians to minor children and as witnesses to and executors of wills, particularly those of individuals (especially widows and single women) who had few if any close relatives. Furthermore priests were active participants in local economic life, which also enhanced their importance and visibility. They purchased lands and rents and administered capellanías, and as collectors of ecclesiastical and other rents had a solid basis for expanding their personal fortunes.

The clergy, then, was a diverse group but, both individually and collectively, a powerful social and economic force. The will of Antonio Galíndez, a priest of Cáceres, shows something of how one priest lived. A man of obviously comfortable means, almost certainly an hidalgo, he was much involved with his family. A nephew of the vicar Hernando Galíndez, Antonio Galíndez took charge of the rents and estate of the hospital of doña Gracia de Monroy in Plasencia for his uncle. An inventory of Galíndez's estate after his death in 1574 included many books, both secular and religious, in Spanish and Latin. He had established a capellanía in 1572 making a nephew the patron. To a niece who lived in his household with him Galíndez left his bed, an image of San Jerónimo, and 20,000 maravedís. Another nephew, Juan Mogollón de Acosta, had gone to Peru in 1571 to join his parents who had been there for twenty-three years. Galíndez said that he had an understanding with this nephew that "he would send me some portion . . . of money for the quantity that he owes me and [that] I spent in his childhood."^[94]

Like the secular clergy, professionals—individuals who had earned a university degree in law or medicine—came mostly from the middle and upper-middle sectors, although possibly a greater percentage of professionals than priests were hidalgos. As was true for the priesthood, some families might produce several professionals (or what might be called semiprofessionals—notaries, procuradores, surgeons). Professionals also were similar to the clergy in that they often diversified their economic pursuits, supplementing the income from professional practice with various investments and business interests.

The city councils employed lawyers, physicians, and surgeons at varying salaries. Cáceres's council contracted in March 1554 with the city's leading physician, Licenciado Bernáldez, to serve as physician for twenty years at an annual salary of 30,000 maravedís. They renewed this contract in 1571, raising his salary to 40,000 maravedís and citing his well-known competence. In 1574 Trujillo's council hired three surgeons for six years at 25,000 maravedís a year and in 1584 contracted with a physician named Bartolomé de Bonilla for four years at 300 ducados (112,500 maravedís) a year, quite a high salary. These salaried physicians provided medical services for the poor and supervised the cities' hospitals, pharmacies, and other medical practitioners, in addition to their own private practices. Similarly the lawyers employed by the city councils might be required to furnish services to the poor in addition to representing the municipality; the Cáceres council appointed Licenciado Lorenzo Delgado letrado at 8000 maravedís in 1570 "provided he help the poor so that their suits do not go undefended."^[95] Physicians could be more visible in local society than lawyers, since lawyers frequently worked away from home, tending to the city council's or individuals' interests at court, in the chancillería of Granada, or elsewhere.

Dr. Bernáldez, Cáceres's most prominent physician, epitomized the active entrepreneur-professional. He received his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Valladolid and appeared before the city council in June 1554 to ask that his name be removed from the tax lists in accordance with the exemption from taxation the doctoral degree conferred. Bernáldez was from a professional family; his father was Licenciado Hernando Bernáldez, a native of Medellín, and his brother Licenciado Bernáldez in 1554 held the position of secretary (relator ) of the audiencia of Santo Domingo and "teniente de almirante de las Indias." Another brother, Francisco Bernáldez, took his wife and four children to Santo Domingo to join him in 1555. Both these brothers had been vecinos of Plasencia, where their widowed mother was living in 1555.^[96]

Dr. Bernáldez owned a number of properties, both rural and urban, in Cáceres and elsewhere: houses on Pintores street, an inn on Camino Llano which he rented out in 1561 for 18 ducados and four hens a year, and a half share of an oven on Pintores which he bought in 1549.^[97] In 1546 he bought a house, orchard, vineyard,

olive grove, and apiary with sixteen beehives in the Sierra de San Pedro (in Cáceres's district) for 75,000 maravedís and sold the same property (although with only twelve beehives) two years later for 90,000 maravedís. He and his brother Francisco owned land near Plasencia which they rented out for grazing pigs at a rate of 5 1/2 reales (187 mrs.) per pig.^[98]

In 1548 Bernáldez formed a company with a merchant named Juan Pérez, by which Bernáldez furnished 400 ducados for Pérez to go to Seville and buy 300 cowhides ("of those which are said to be from the Indies or any others that he sees fit") and then return to sell them in Cáceres. Pérez would earn one-quarter of the profits. Bernáldez had a business that involved cutting and finishing wood, and he also contracted for agricultural work. In 1556 he provided Pedro Carrillo six fanegas of barley to sow in a field he had; Carrillo would cultivate and harvest the crop at his own cost, and they would split the produce.^[99]

If Bernáldez's investments were individually modest, together they must have enabled him to live well; their proliferation suggests a man who was ensuring for himself a sound financial future and a comfortable place in society. In 1549 he bought a censo for 78,000 maravedís. In 1556 he acquired a twenty-five-year-old black slave named Isabel for 63 1/2 ducados. He raised his nephew Gonzalo de Sanabria from the age of five, caring for him and teaching him to read and write, and then assisting him to study at the university. Bernáldez's university training, medical practice, and various sources of income allowed him to achieve a lifestyle in some ways similar to that of the nobility. Despite his many economic involvements, however, there is no doubt that he regularly practiced medicine and had an excellent professional reputation. In July 1555 the bishop of Badajoz sent to Cáceres for Bernáldez to come treat him. In 1553 he received a payment of 15 ducados for treating a hand wound.^[100]

Professionals as well as priests achieved varying levels of wealth, prestige, and success. A university degree could lead to a position and career away from home. A number of professionals from Extremadura went to the Indies as officials or served in the royal bureaucracy in Castile. Many others, however, remained at home—pursuing practices in law or medicine, employed by the city council, engaging in various commercial activities—either because of personal preference or lack of other options. Similarly, the secular

clergy were a prominent and rather heterogeneous group. Many were well established in local society, with holdings in property and rents, a secure position in one of the parishes or a chaplaincy, and a comfortable lifestyle. A number of secular priests nonetheless left home, for the New World or elsewhere. It seems fair to say that, despite the potential for upward mobility that training in the church or in one of the professions might offer, local society could not provide a place for all the individuals who sought such careers.

Ethnic Diversity: Moriscos and Others

Up until 1570 possibly most of the moriscos living in Cáceres and Trujillo were a small number of slaves.^[101] That situation changed dramatically at the end of 1570, in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Alpujarras rebellion. This rebellion had begun in 1568 in the region around Granada, and at its conclusion thousands of moriscos were exiled from their homes and sent to towns and cities all over Castile and Extremadura, among them Cáceres and Trujillo. The end of the Granada war also meant the arrival in Extremadura of newly acquired morisco slaves; so in the 1570s the previously very marginal presence of moriscos became much more substantial. Of the more than 50,000 people deported, the orders designated 3,910 individuals for Extremadura—310 to Cáceres, 670 to Trujillo, and 900 to Plasencia—but mortality rates were extremely high. Approximately a third of those sent to Extremadura never reached their destinations, and most of those who did complete the journey arrived sick and destitute.^[102] The Cáceres city council attempted to follow royal orders that the moriscos be treated well, although their arrival in the city must have posed serious health problems and strained existing sources for relief. The city's hospitals served as temporary shelters. The council evidently was not altogether certain of the treatment to accorded to the new residents; in the fall of 1571 they wrote to their representative at court, Francisco de Ovando, asking him to find out if there was an order that the "Moors should receive the sacraments."^[103] On the whole the response seems to have been fairly humane. In one case a woman and her baby reportedly on the verge of starvation were taken to Mérida where she had relatives.^[104]

The moriscos constituted quite a different phenomenon from the

travelers, transients, and immigrants who normally came to or through the area. They arrived en masse, and the cities perforce had to allow them to remain; they could not oust the moriscos as they were wont to dispose of other poor transients. The moriscos who survived the illness, poverty, and despair of their exile seem to have entered into local economic life, usually in agricultural occupations or menial positions or as servants, without causing notable disruption. In 1594 there were 290 moriscos living in Cáceres (and an additional 49 in the towns of Aliseda, Sierra de Fuentes, and Casar), and 512 in Trujillo, with half again as many living in eight towns in its district (Santa Cruz had 87, El Puerto 40, Herguijuela 35).

The considerably larger number of moriscos living in Trujillo and its tierra might have meant that they integrated more successfully there and formed significant patronage ties with the city's leading families. The 1594 census recorded as residents of Trujillo a morisco priest, a beata, a procurador, and three university graduates: Dr. Vázquez, a thirty-two-year-old physician, and two lawyers, Licenciado Diego Motaça (age forty-five) and Licenciado Gonzalo Pizarro (age fifty).^[105] An intriguing suggestion of patronage ties comes from a letter of 1611, written from Algiers after the expulsion by a morisco named Licenciado Molina, to don Jerónimo de Loaysa "caballero of Trujillo." Licenciado Molina referred to "the great favor I have always received from your house" and described their travels and difficulties before arriving in Algiers: "all of us from Trujillo came to this city of Algiers, where there were the others from Extremadura, Mancha and Aragón." He wrote that in Liurna the Italians only wanted them to do agricultural work and "other low occupations."^[106]

Former slaves and the mulatto children of slaves contributed another element of ethnic diversity to local society, but these individuals figure so rarely in the documents that it seems likely that they either assimilated fairly easily into local society (recall there was a mulatto living in the huertas in Trujillo), or left Extremadura for other regions. A slave named Diego Martín obtained his freedom in 1558 from Francisco Téllez after the period of twelve years they had agreed upon; Martín was married to a free woman named Toribia Sánchez, and they paid Téllez 15,000 maravedís.^[107] The number of people of African origin being so small, race as such seems to have posed little obstacle to assimilation and acceptance.

In his will of 1513 Hernando Corajo named his cousin Sancho de Paredes, illegitimate son of Corajo's uncle Alvaro de Paredes and a black or mulatto slave woman, successor to his entail in default of Diego García de Paredes (the military hero) and his legitimate heirs.^[108] A barber of Cáceres named Francisco Martín bought his ten-year-old mulatto son from the executor of don Francisco de Carvajal's estate; and a criado of Juan de Perero who had a child by one of Perero's slaves raised the boy in his home and secured his freedom from Perero's daughter when his son reached the age of sixteen.^[109] Acceptance need not mean that race as such was ignored; in fact it was invariably noted. One of the criadas from Trujillo who accompanied Licenciado Diego González Altamirano to Peru in 1569 was Francisca Alvarez "de color negra"; Antón de Vargas, mail carrier ("correo de a pie") and vecino of Trujillo, was "moreno de color."^[110] But race and former slave status do not seem to have imposed any real stigma in a society where so many people were humble and poor.

Conclusion

The towns and villages of Extremadura encompassed a large number and variety of social and occupational groupings. This variety resulted in extremes of wealth and poverty and considerable differences in the way people lived, in their status in local society, and in their possibilities for change or advancement. Socioeconomic differentiation characterized not only the cities but most of the smaller towns of the countryside as well. The majority of people lived in poverty or just above the threshold of poverty. Irregular employment, sudden fluctuations in food prices, bad weather and crop failures, new or increased taxes, or other kinds of impositions (such as the billeting of troops), all could constitute real hardships for the many people whose main concern was not advancement but simple survival from one year to the next. For most of the sixteenth century, an unskilled laborer in Extremadura earned an average of 1 1/2 reales (51 maravedís) a day. An inventory of the household of Dr. Nicolás de Ovando, made on his death in 1565, showed that food for two of his pages, a servant of his nephew, and a black slave came to 3 reales a day—in other words, about 25 maravedís per person per day.^[111] A laborer's daily earnings, then, provided a little more

than twice what it cost for one person to eat. A worker who was married and had a family, therefore, at least at times must have faced severe financial strains and even real deprivation, even assuming that he and his family were able to supplement their income or diet by practicing some agriculture, keeping a few animals, or the like.

Despite the great variation in the way people lived, however, the hierarchical and corporate structure of local society did serve to integrate individuals into groups and groups into the larger society. Strong ties of kinship, marriage, friendship, and common interest fostered coherence within such socioeconomic groups as the nobles, merchants, artisans of a particular trade, or gardeners, whereas clientage, employment, economic interdependence, and sometimes kinship ties bound the different groups together. Furthermore local society had some flexibility and fluidity, even if the possibilities for social and economic mobility were fairly limited. Members of the middle and upper-middle sectors of society—merchants, the better-off tradesmen, well-to-do labradores, lower-level hidalgos—were the most likely candidates for upward mobility. These groups produced the most active entrepreneurs, the individuals who invested in collecting tithes and taxes, and many priests, professionals, and bureaucrats. On the whole, however, upward mobility probably was the exception rather than the rule, especially if one wished to stay at home. The increasing appeal of emigration to the New World, particularly after the first generation or so when people at home were becoming aware of opportunities the Indies offered, perhaps does not require very complex explanations. Certainly there is ample evidence that people were accustomed to leaving home for short or extended periods and seeking opportunities elsewhere.