Chapter XIX—
The Big Buyers

One subject remains before this study is complete. Part 3 has sought to analyze the evolving agrarian structures of Jaén and Salamanca provinces, stressing the patterns that can be discerned from a quantitative analysis of the catastro, censuses, and sales by disentail. It has shown the critical importance of the largest buyers for understanding the forces behind the economic changes. Chapter 15 concluded, one recalls, that the Level 4 buyers in both provinces, that is, those few large buyers who spent half the total amount, were engaged as a group in commercial activities before the disentail and showed a preference for acquiring disentailed properties that were oriented toward production for the market. In other words, they represented the capitalistic sector of the two provinces. We saw also that they had a high proportion of men addressed as don, members of the social and professional elite. What remains is to look more closely at these individuals, almost all of whom escaped us in Part 2 because they resided in larger places than its seven towns.

The deeds of deposit recorded in Madrid tell us whether a buyer was addressed as don, doña, or by a more selective title. Sometimes the deeds add the residence, and if a buyer had a high position in government or armed forces, it may appear. Beyond this, however, the deeds of deposit, our primary source for the study of disentail at the provincial level, tell us nothing about these individuals.

To learn more about them, one must turn elsewhere. Most promising and accessible are the notarial records of the two provinces. (Spanish notaries kept copies of all the documents they witnessed, and those that

have withstood the erosion of time are now assembled in the provincial historical archives.) These records are far too extensive to be searched in full for this study, but the archives of the contadurías de hipotecas, provide a way into them. The contadurías, those offices established by Carlos III in the partidos to record in abbreviated form all exchanges and liens of real property, noted the residence of the buyers of disentailed properties, indicating the date and the notary of the original deed of sale. A review of them shows if the buyers engaged in other transactions involving real property in the area. Since an individual tended to rely on one notary to handle all his affairs, one can discover other activities of a buyer by looking through the records of the notary who recorded his purchase of disentailed property. At best, this approach is hit-or-miss and time-consuming, but it does permit one to draw conclusions about this important group of people.^[1]

2

In Salamanca province there were eighty-five buyers in Level 4, divided by sex and title as in Table 19.1. I have been able to identify the residence (vecindad ) of fifty-six of them.^[2] Thirty-seven lived in Salamanca city, thirteen in other towns of the province, and six outside the province. The capital of the province had 66 percent of those whose residence is known. Although that of twenty-nine buyers is unidentified, it is likely that many of them also lived in Salamanca city, in view of the nature and location of their purchases. Only one other place in the province, Ledesma (zone SD), cabeza of the largest partido after that of Salamanca city, had two big buyers. Alba de Tormes (SB), Béjar (SH), and Barco de Ávila (SI), also cabezas de partido, had one each, and the other eight were found in secondary towns. To judge from the disentail, Salamanca city, with its cathedral, university, provincial administration, and regional market, dominated the province not only in comparison with other towns in the province but with the rest of Spain.

The big buyers known to be living in Salamanca city were a distinguished group. Only one lacked the appellation don or doña. I have

[1] To compound the inherent difficulties, I had a suitcase stolen containing most of my notes from extended research in both provinces. Although I reassembled most of the material lost on this occasion, my resources permitted me to make only an abbreviated search of the notarial records for a second time.

[2] For the large buyers in Salamanca I have used the following sources: AHPS, Contaduría, libros 850–56; Sección Notarial, legajos 3463, 3464, 3470, 3626, 3629, 3844, 5637, 5908, 5909, 5912, 5913.

gleaned additional information about all but seven and have grouped them as shown in Table 19.2. Four were clergymen, two of them prebendaries of the cathedral. (The latter included don Lorenzo Piñuela, the second buyer in both La Mata and Villaverde.) At least four and maybe a fifth belonged to the faculty of the university. Six were involved in various levels of government, including two notaries (escribanos). Of these, two served the crown as administrators of the Consolidation Fund (the concept of conflict of interest had not yet developed), and two others were associated with the municipal government: one was the widow of a former regidor whom we have met as the buyer of half the término redondo of Pedrollén and the other was don Antonio Rascón, Vizconde de Revilla y Barajas, a hereditary regidor. Another six were in the legal profession. Seven were engaged in business, as merchants, stewards (administradores) of landed estates, and a farmer of church revenues. (Among the merchants was don Josef Puyol, fourth buyer in La Mata, and don Francisco Alonso y Moral, biggest buyer in Villaverde.)^[3] Agriculture was represented by a landowner and a livestock owner. The only person not styled don or doña was one of the stewards.

The church, the university, the state, and the municipal council, the

[3] The two brothers don Josef and don Manuel Puyol made all their purchases together, appearing in the deeds as "D. Josef Puyol y hermano, vecinos y del comercio de Salamanca" (for example, AHPS, Contaduría, libro 851, f. 322). A contemporary list of merchants of Spain dated 1806, now in the archives of the Banco de España, even names them this way (Archivo del Banco de España, legajo 708). Evidently partners, I have considered them as a single buyer.

law courts, commerce, and estate management—all traditional institutions of the old regime—provided the bulk of the large investors in disentailed land who lived in Salamanca city. If we look among the buyers below Level 4, we find others of the same callings. Three more members of the university faculty turn up, two more priests attached to the cathedral, and five other notaries. Others involved in business are identified also, although fewer than one might expect: a woolen manufacturer and two estate stewards for ecclesiastical institutions. One can also add

a second titled aristocrat who was a vecino of Salamanca, the Conde de Villagonzalo.^[4]

Of the thirteen Level 4 buyers who lived in other towns in the province, I have information on only five. Three were involved in large scale agriculture. Antonio Toribio y Galán lived in Villares de la Reina, just north of Salamanca city. He was evidently a labrador, and had been chosen a procurador general of the cuarto of Armuña.^[5] Manuel García Serrano was a labrador and ganadero (livestock owner) in Rodas Viejas (zone SC), a town of fifty-four inhabitants and two labradores in 1786. Manuel Moro was a rentero (tenant) in Otero de María Asensio, an alquería twelve kilometers southeast of Salamanca city in the bend of the Rio Tormes (zone SB). It had only nine inhabitants in 1786: a labrador and his wife, two farm hands under twenty-five, three servant girls, and two small children. This sounds very similar to the establishment at Pedrollén, yet here the tenant was able to buy over one hundred thousand reales' worth of properties in six nearby towns: arable plots, pastures, and a storehouse. Unlike the tenants of Pedrollén, Moro had amassed capital out of his undertaking and now set himself up as a major landowner, the person we have met who most resembles an eighteenth-century English farmer or a French fermier général. None of these men was accorded the title don; money did not at once procure such status. They were rural bourgeois in the classic sense of the term, and their money came out of the land. The royal councillors never heard complaints from such men, and they have been lost to historians as a result.

One of the other two identified residents of provincial towns was don Eugenio Alonso y Pizarro, a vecino of Ledesma, who farmed the royal monopoly in salt, tobacco, and playing cards. Doña Manuela de Onís, wife of the "excelentísimo señor don Josef de Onís," a member of the Consejo de Estado, was the other. She lived in Cantalapiedra (SB) and purchased three widely scattered major properties: a despoblado término redondo in zone SC and another despoblado and half a dehesa, both in zone SB. The total population of the three places in 1786 was four people. Wife of a prominent government official, she reminds us of doña María Vélez y España, the widow of a Salamanca regidor who bought the major share of Pedrollén, and not at all of the tenant farmer Manuel Moro just observed above. In sum, the identified large buyers

[4] See Appendix V for details on all these people.

[5] Cabo Alonso, "Antecedentes históricos," 87–88. The role of procurador general of a cuarto (district) of the partido of Salamanca is not clear, but it appears to have been associated with the sexmeros (see above, Chapter 18, section 4).

outside the provincial capital appear to have drawn their wealth from the land or from the state.

Seven Level 4 buyers lived outside the province, of whom six can be identified. Most important without question was don José Antonio Caballero. A reactionary statesman who ingratiated himself with Carlos IV, he was influential in bringing about the fall of Jovellanos in 1798 and succeeded him as secretary of grace and justice. For the next decade he was the leading opponent of Godoy, a champion of ecclesiastical reaction.^[6] His politics did not prevent him from profiting from the disentail. In 1806 together with his father, the Marqués de Caballero, he bought thirty-five plots of arable land and part of a término redondo in Salamanca province.^[7] After the death of his father the following year, he inherited the title of marqués and set these properties up as a mayorazgo.^[8]

Other distinguished Madrileños who bought in Salamanca province include the Duque de la Roca, and the Duque de Alba, both grandes. Alba did not spend enough to raise him to the top level of buyers; he acquired part of the despoblado of Martín Vicente, located in his señorío of Alba de Tormes. Also from Madrid was a military figure, don Josef María Cano Mucientes, sargento maior of the Provincial Regiment of Burgos and a member of the Órden de Carlos III,^[9] whom we met earlier as the biggest buyer in La Mata. His choice of Salamanca for his purchases is understandable, for his father, don Pedro Cano Mucientes, was a vecino of Salamanca city, the Level 4 buyer whom we know to be a landowner. The military career had favored his son; he invested almost three times as much as his father in the disentail, becoming fourteenth buyer in the province.

A more interesting case is that of don Cosme de Trespalacios, a lawyer in Madrid whom we came to know as a major buyer in Villaverde. A native of Asturias, he married a woman from Santander. Why he chose to invest in Salamanca is a mystery, but in 1800 alone he made at least nine purchases there totaling 438,000 reales, mostly in the rich Armuña district, using local agents.^[10] He continued to acquire properties, in-

[6] See Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution , 419–21, 431.

[7] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 856, ff. 77r–93r, 146r–150r, 218r–219r, 293r–294r (1806).

[8] Ibid., ff. 330r–v, 352v–353r, 365v–366r, 402r–v, 403r–v, 440v–441r. Caballero's purchases were made too late to be recorded in Madrid, so that he does not figure among the eighty-five buyers listed in Table 19.1, but his purchases totaled 284,000 reales, placing him among the top twenty buyers.

[9] Ibid., libro 850, f. 455r–v (1799), and libro 851, ff. 145r–146r (1800).

[10] Ibid., libro 851, ff. 53, 75, 110, 132, 268, 289, 318, 347, 381 (1800).

cluding a término redondo south of the city in 1803.^[11] In 1804 he moved to Tejares, a town across the river from Salamanca,^[12] and by 1806 he was a vecino of Salamanca itself. When the sales ended, he had spent at least 1,200,000 reales for properties, making him almost the largest purchaser in the province. He died in 1812, leaving a fortune worth 7,760,000 reales plus 2,900 fanegas of wheat and 2,700 fanegas of barley, a hoard of grain worth another fortune in this year of famine.^[13] Disentail gave this court lawyer an opportunity to become a powerful landowner and speculator in grain.

Three other Level 4 buyers resided outside the province. The señor don Manuel Cambronero lived in Valladolid, where he was an oidor (judge) in the Chancillería, and he was also a ministro honorario of the Consejo de Hacienda.^[14] Don Martín de Ganá was a vecino and merchant of Bilbao. Finally, Josef Mateos Delgado is identified as a vecino of the lugar of San García. The nomenclátor of 1789 lists two San Garcías, one in Segovia, the other in Ávila near the Salamanca border. The obvious supposition is that Mateos Delgado was a vecino of the latter, probably a labrador, for he lacked the don. Still, it is odd that a labrador of Ávila would buy a whole despoblado named Agustínez, in full Charro country, ninety kilometers to the west of his home. The San García of Segovia was a major center for grain trade, with some twenty merchants in the 1780s who bought wheat in local markets throughout Old Castile and resold it in Madrid, making a profit that outraged the Council of Castile.^[15] Mateos Delgado could well be such a figure, seeking the respectability and the assured returns of landowning. Agustínez was small, with only seven residents in 1786, but it had good arable land and a mill, a choice morsel. The buyer paid 450,000 reales for it in 1800, in vales reales, it is true, but this was the largest purchase in the entire disentail in the province.^[16] Surely our man is the grain speculator, not the labrador.

One cannot leave this list of outside buyers without mentioning other royal officials whose recorded purchases did not raise them to Level 4.

[11] Ibid., libro 854, ff. 117r–119v (1803), término redondo La Reduelga in Cilleros el Hondo.

[12] Ibid., libro 855, ff. 46r–47r (1804).

[13] The inventory of Trespalacios's estate appears in AHPS, Sección Notarial, libro 3639, f. 365ff (López Villanueva, 1813). The late don Antonio Moreno Moreno of the AHPS kindly gave me this information.

[14] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 854, f. 68v (1804), and libro 856, f. 189r (1806).

[15] García Sanz, Desarrollo y Crísis, 183–86.

[16] Madrid A4002 (1800).

The Marqués de la Granja was intendant of Burgos: he bought two-thirds of a término redondo.^[17] Don Joseph Joaquín Fernández de Ocampo was corregidor of Santo Domingo de la Calzada (Logroño), his purchase an entire término redondo and numerous arable fields.^[18] Finally one finds among the buyers don Juan Meléndez Valdés, the famous poet. In 1781 he had obtained a chair in humanities in the University of Salamanca. From here he moved to Valladolid as a judge and to Madrid as fiscal in the crown court of the capital. In 1798, after the fall of Jovellanos, he was banished to Medina del Campo and soon to Zamora (just north of Salamanca). From here he and his wife, a native of Salamanca, made at least two purchases of arable fields in the northwest corner of the province (zone SB), spending some 64,000 reales, of which he borrowed 58,000. He set himself up as an absentee landlord, complete with administrative steward, whom he instructed to establish new leases and take delinquent tenants to court.^[19]

3

About the Level 4 buyers in Jaén province I have much less specific information, partly because the notes I originally collected from the notarial records were stolen and partly because of the structure of the province. Jaén city did not dominate its province in the way that Salamanca did. Landed wealth was held by families and churches in each town, not as in Salamanca, concentrated to a high degree in ecclesiastical and university foundations of the capital. One result is that the disentail was carried out in a less concentrated fashion. In Jaén, Level 4 buyers were 6 percent of all buyers (151 of 2,550); in Salamanca, only 4 percent (85 of 2,147). Of the 151 Level 4 buyers, a place of residence is known for 80, and a probable residence can be assigned to 45 others. Of these 125, Jaén city had 28, or 22 percent of those known, in comparison with 66 percent for Salamanca city. Fifteen other towns had more than one; the most important were Baeza with 18, Ubeda with 11, Andújar and

[17] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 851, f. 451r (1800).

[18] Ibid., libro 850, 435v–437r (1799), Madrid A2867 (1800), C25577, C25584, C25585 (1803).

[19] One purchase of twenty-two arable plots in Villaflores for 4,050 reales in efectivo, Madrid, C29373 (1803). The other sale is noted by Meléndez's biographer, an unspecified number of wheat fields in the same town for 60,512 reales, borrowing 58,000 from a private individual to make the payment (Demerson, Don Juan Meléndez Valdés, 238–41). This sale does not appear in the Madrid deeds under Meléndez's name.

Martos with 8, and Bailén with 7. Because the buyers were so dispersed, it is difficult to find them in the notarial records.^[20]

I have information on fifteen of the twenty-eight buyers known to live in Jaén city and have assigned them to the categories shown in Table 19.3. Nine, 60 percent of those known, were associated with the church, the state, or the municipality. They included a prebendary of the cathedral, a member of the Royal Council of the Indies who lived in Jaén (the biggest buyer in the province), a retired surgeon of the royal navy, and the commissioner in charge of selling disentailed properties, who, like

[20] For the big buyers of Jaén I have used the following sources: AHPJ, Contaduría, libros 4412, 4426, Protocolos, libros 2183, 2254, 2255. Unfortunately, the notes from eight other notarial volumes were stolen from me.

his counterparts in Salamanca, used his position for his personal advantage. Two got their income from the land, so far as the available data indicate. Another was an important cloth merchant with dealings as far away as Murcia, still another apparently a silk merchant. Two buyers belonged to the tertiary sector: a steward of estates and a purveyor of building stone, the latter the only member of the group not to be titled don.^[21] My research also produced information on four buyers in Level 3 in the city, not much of a sample but one that reinforces the picture. Two were municipal officers, one a canon of the cathedral and one a noble of caballero rank. Church, state, and city dominate the known big buyers, but with hardly half the Level 4 buyers of the city identified, conclusions must be cautious.

Twenty-nine Level 4 buyers in the province lacked the distinction don, a smaller percentage than in Salamanca. The residence or probable residence of twenty-seven is known. Only five lived in Jaén city. One finds them in second-rank places: four of eleven buyers in Ubeda, three of seven in Bailén, all four of Cazorla, the only buyers in four smaller places.^[22] The Madrid records can be deceiving. Antonio Balenzuela, Level 4 buyer in Lopera, was buying for don Juan Nepomuceno Morales, a lieutenant colonel in Córdoba, as we saw in Chapter 12. But these commoners were in any case a minority. In twenty-one towns (out of thirty-two towns with Level 4 buyers) all the buyers were either priests or titled don. Although I have no further information on them, they recall the hidalgo and clerical notables of Baños and Lopera. Since the wealth of the province was in land, one can be reasonably certain that most of these buyers, scattered through the large agricultural towns of Jaén, were members of the local landowning oligarchy, who took advantage of disentail to strengthen their position.

Only three Level 4 buyers from outside the province have fallen into my net. One was don Josef Pérez Caballero, member of the Royal Council of Hacienda resident in Madrid, the biggest buyer in Baños. Another was the just-mentioned army officer of Córdoba. The third was don Francisco de Paula San Martín y Coello, a prebendary of the cathedral of Seville.^[23] Only the last turns up in the Madrid records; the others became known through the town studies in Part 2. This means that other large outside buyers may lie hidden behind local agents. Yet their number is unlikely to be great. Jaén was not subject to extensive outside ex-

[21] See Appendix W for details.

[22] Lopera, La Iruela, Sabiote, Ibros.

[23] AHPJ, Protocolos, libro 2183, ff. 20r–23v (1802), Madrid C14301 (1802).

ploitation, but it is significant that the three who have become known point again to the church and state as sources for investment capital.

4

It is impressive how traditional these groups of large buyers appear. In Jaén city the church, the crown, the municipality, the navy, land, cloth trade. When one adds the hidalgo elite of the other towns, one has a good sample of the upper crust of Andalusian society of the old regime. So too in Salamanca, priests with fat benefices, university professors, city councillors, servants of the crown, grain merchants. Buyers from outside were high officers in the royal government and armed forces, clergymen, a court lawyer, a Bilbao merchant, a grande. Government, church, land, and commerce were the major sources of capital for these big investors, although one must assume that some wealth also was inherited.

Merchants were an important minority, but one should not think of them as a rival group to the established elite. Almost all were dons, and indeed merchants were fully entitled to the honor. Since the seventeenth century the kings had authorized hidalgos to be members of the mercantile consulados of the major commercial cities, and the Bourbon kings rewarded successful merchants and manufacturers with hidalguía.^[24] Nobility could be purchased by wealthy commoners. The famous expatriate and renegade priest, José María Blanco, tells us that his father, a rich merchant of Seville, in midcentury bought a privilege of nobility for himself and his heirs.^[25] The Bank of Spain preserves a list of large merchants of the monarchy in 1806 and 1807, where the majority, but not all, appear as dons.^[26] We may assume that the merchant-dons among our buyers were either legally hidalgos or considered themselves to be their equals.

Conversely the established elite was not divorced from business. The doctor don Josef Pando, professor of civil law at the university, had a second vocation (or was it his first?) in administering the property of others. In 1799 he obtained, or renewed, the contract to be steward (administrador) of the Marqués de Almarza, owner, we saw, of Arauzo, the largest despoblado of the province. He had two guarantors (fiadores), a

[24] Callahan, Honor, Commerce, and Industry, 15–31.

[25] Blanco y Crespo, Letters from Spain, 68 (the person described is himself).

[26] Archivo del Banco de España, legajo 708. I owe this information to David Ringrose.

municipal regidor and don Anselmo Prieto Hermosino, a merchant of the city and also a Level 4 buyer.^[27] He renewed the contract in 1803, this time using as backers another faculty member and don Josef Iglesias de la Casa, about whom we know only that he was a Level 3 buyer.^[28] Pando also administered the property of a priest, precentor of the cathedral, and at one point acted as fiador, placing a lien on his properties, for the steward of the Royal Asylum of Salamanca.^[29]

There was a network of wealthy vecinos of Salamanca who guaranteed fulfillment of one another's contracts, always, no doubt, for a consideration that does not appear in the contracts. Another member of it was doctor don Antonio Reyrruard, also of the university. He stood guarantor for a patrono (trustee?) of a religious endowment,^[30] and in 1789 he had been involved in founding the Compañía de Comercio of Salamanca, an association of clothiers and jewelers, although in what capacity is not clear.^[31] Don Pablo Reyrruard—from the unusual name probably an immediate relative of don Antonio—was fiador for the farmer of royal taxes in the large town of Cantalapiedra and also administered the property of a large landowner.^[32]

The desamortización gave many of the big buyers an opportunity to line their nests. Doctor don Francisco de Candamo, a member of the university community, not only bought for himself but acted on occasion as agent for Trespalacios before the latter moved from Madrid to Salamanca.^[33] Notaries also got into the act. Don Carlos María Pérez Albarez de Rueda, a notary distinguished by the ownership of a vínculo, acted as an agent,^[34] while don Juan de Andraca, a notario mayor of the ecclesiastical court of Salamanca, lent money to buyers of disentailed properties in the form of mortgages. The latter also had business relations in Segovia, but the nature is not stated.^[35] These men all belonged to

[27] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 850, f. 475r (1799).

[28] Ibid., libro 854, ff. 5v–6r (1803).

[29] AHPS, Sección Notarial, legajo 5912 (Bellido, 25 Oct. 1803); Contaduría, libro 855, ff. 57v–58v (1804).

[30] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 851, ff. 2r–3r (1800).

[31] Larruga, Memorias, 30 : 46: "Doctor Reiruard" signs a request to the corregidor to authorize meetings of the company.

[32] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 856, ff. 209v–210r (1806); libro 851, ff. 194r–201v (1800).

[33] Ibid., libro 851, ff. 53r, 110r, 225r–227r (1800), Madrid A2727, A2738– 39 (1800).

[34] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 851, f. 143 (1800); for his vínculo, libro 855, f. 64r–v (1804).

[35] Ibid., libro 852, ff. 140v–141r (1801) for the mortgage, and ff. 141v–142r for the original sale; also Sección Notarial, legajo 3463, f. 75 (Gómez de Cifuentes, 8 Nov. 1800), for another mortgage.

privileged orders, but they acted just like the men of affairs. Don Francisco Alonso y Moral, grain merchant and one of the biggest buyers, also was an estate steward.^[36]

A fuller search through the notarial records would undoubtedly turn up more examples of big buyers who served the state, church, and university yet were making money on the side in dealings in property and commerce. Their cases add support to the indication derived in Chapter 15 from the fact that Level 4 buyers paid for their purchases with a greater percentage of vales reales than other buyers, to wit, that many already participated in the world of commerce before the disentail began, whatever their official vocation might be.

Let us look with greater care at the activities of a couple of these men. Pando, the professor of civil law, came directly in touch with peasants through his role as estate steward. Some of them turned to him when they found themselves in need of money. In October 1799 vecinos of Cabrerizos (Armuña), evidently tenants of his principal, promised to repay Pando 15 fanegas of wheat after the next harvest.^[37] Again in 1803 he came to the aid of peasants: three hundred reales to one group in January, 120 fanegas of rye to the town council of Cubo de Don Sancho in May to be repaid in cash on 15 August at forty-two reales each.^[38] Prospects of a crop failure had raised prices, and Pando insisted on full value and perhaps a little more, and in money, in case the price fell after the harvest.^[39] The contracts mention no gain for Pando, but everyone knew the realities of life. With emoluments and other perquisites from his chair, his income as estate administrator (in Jaén administrators got 10 percent of the income of the owner), the hidden interest on loans to hard-pressed farmers, and other sources we may not have uncovered, Pando was able to become one of the largest buyers in the province: one purchase of arable fields in 1802, four in 1803, six in 1806, six in 1807, plus a quarter of a término redondo and an elegant house in Salamanca city.^[40] His purchases totaled almost one million reales. He certainly did not give his students his undivided attention.

An even more striking case is that of don Francisco Alonso y Moral.

[36] AHPS, Sección Notarial, legajo 5909, f. 32 (Bellido, 3 Apr. 1800).

[37] Ibid., legajo 5908, f. 229 (Bellido, 6 Oct. 1799).

[38] Ibid., legajo 5912 (Bellido, 27 Jan. and 9 May 1803).

[39] The Correo mercantil, 2 May 1803, lists wheat as selling in Salamanca at 51 reales per fanega, barley at 34. Rye usually sold higher than barley (see Anes, Crisis, Gráfico 40).

[40] Madrid C18654 (1802), C29389–92 (1803), C47400–01, C47408–9, C47411, C50320 (1806), C51231, C51233, C51245–46, C51305, C53145 (1/4 of término redondo of Llen), C53897, C53983 (1807).

Although identified as a merchant ("del comercio") of Salamanca, his extracurricular activities were very similar to those of Pando. He administered the mayorazgo of at least one wealthy owner and was judicially appointed administrator for the embargoed properties within the province of Salamanca of a grande living in Venice, to insure payments of his debts in Spain, including those to the crown.^[41] He was one of the many persons Trespalacios engaged to handle his affairs, and was twice guarantor for don Pablo Reyrruard, once for him to take over the administration of an embargoed estate and once to obtain the lifting of an embargo on an estate under litigation that Reyrruard had inherited.^[42] The estate was important: Alonso y Moral guaranteed Reyrruard to a limit of one million reales. Although they acted together on occasion in their affairs, Reyrruard owed Alonso significant compensation for this service.

Alonso y Moral's commercial activities involved agricultural products, primarily grain and also hides.^[43] He would contract during the winter for wheat to be delivered after the following harvest.^[44] During the crisis years of 1803–4, this activity took on a new form, as he lent wheat to peasants desperate for seed or food. Between 23 March and 26 April 1803 he made nineteen loans of grain "for our urgent needs" to farmers in fourteen towns, mostly of La Armuña, averaging a mere seventeen fanegas each, all repayable on 15 August.^[45] But 15 August came and the harvest had been disastrous. The farmers turned to Alonso for further credit, but now they found his terms had changed. On 16 September he advanced farmers living in the city the money to buy sixty-nine fanegas of wheat at seventy-eight reales; in reality, he must have sold them the wheat at this price against future payment, since this was some five reales below the going price.^[46] In October peasants began to besiege him for help. He gave it in grain, but he demanded repayment in cash on 15 August 1804, quoting a price somewhat below the market and insisting on an acknowledgment of his generosity in the contracts.^[47]

[41] AHPS, Sección Notarial, legajo 5909 (Bellido, 3 Apr. and 4 Sept. 1800).

[42] Ibid., legajo 5912 (Bellido, 7 Dec. 1803); Contaduría, libro 851, ff. 194r–201r (1800), libro 855, ff. 15r–16r (1804).

[43] For grain, see below; for hides, AHPS, Sección Notarial, legajo 5912 (Bellido, 17 Oct. 1803).

[44] For example, ibid., legajo 5909 (Bellido, ten contracts between 1 Jan. and 11 Feb. 1800 for 285 fanegas of wheat).

[45] Ibid., legajo 5912 (Bellido, 1803).

[46] Correo mercantil, 12 Sept. 1803, Salamanca wheat price 84 reales; 19 Sept., 82 reales.

[47] One contract reads, "at 68 reales per fanega, which we admit is moderate, much below the price which it has at present and which we accept" (AHPS, Sección Notarial, legajo 5912 [Bellido, 16 Oct. 1803], vecinos of Aldeaseca de Armuña).

In some cases no grain may have changed hands. Alonso, now a powerful landowner, was converting the rent in kind that had been due on 15 August into cash at what had been the August price and taking credit for his kindness.^[48] By the end of the year, Alonso had made fifty such loans to farmers of villages near Salamanca.^[49] In these same years we discovered that religious institutions simply carried forward in kind the arrears of their tenants.^[50] Alonso converted arrears to money at famine prices and paraded his few farthings of charity. His tenants' true opinion of him does not come through in the contracts; they could now feel the sting of the disentail. These were men and women such as we came to know in La Mata and Villaverde, some of whom had bought fields themselves with their savings. Crisis years and a creditor like Alonso could wipe out their gains. Alonso's books, were they ever to turn up, could tell a fuller story.

5

For his part, Alonso responded to the desamortización with acumen. The registers of Salamanca record forty-four purchases totaling 1,369,000 reales, spread over all the years from 1799 to 1807 except 1804.^[51] The vast majority consisted of collections of arable plots in the rich Cuarto de Armuña (zone SA), although some spilled over into the adjoining Cuarto de Valdevilloria (SB) (Map 19.1). Thrown in were some meadows and a few houses. In 1804, when he acted as fiador for Reyrruard to the tune of one million reales, he placed a lien on 539 arable plots, seven meadows, and eight houses, located in twelve towns and Salamanca city. They were not his entire holdings, for his purchases included some 210 plots and ten meadows in twenty-four other places. Between 1805 and 1807 he bought 208 more arable plots and seven meadows. Altogether he acquired almost a thousand plots and twenty-five meadows. When we recall that La Mata had 551 plots and thirty-three meadows for twenty vecinos in agriculture and Villaverde 1,354 plots and eighty-eight meadows for forty-three vecinos in agriculture, we can appreciate

[48] See for example, ibid. (16 Oct.), vecinos of Castellanos de Villiguera. Wheat price 73 reales, Correo mercantil, 15 Aug. 1803.

[49] All AHPS, Sección Notarial, legajo 5912 (Bellido, 1803).

[50] See above, Chapter 7, section 2.

[51] The contaduría records for Salamanca partido. The Madrid records show forty-one sales for 1,268,000 reales. They do not all match, and at least in one of the Madrid sales he acted as an agent. My analysis is based on contaduría; those in Madrid that are thereby omitted would not change the pattern.

Map 19.1.
Purchases of Alonso y Moral, Merchant of Salamanca

the extent of his acquisitions: enough arable land to support a fair-sized town with thirty vecinos devoted to agriculture, perhaps six hundred to seven hundred hectares of prime wheat land and corresponding pastures for the plow teams.

He could not buy large blocks of land in the villages of Armuña, for land was owned in collections of small scattered plots, but he specialized in arable and made his purchases in a limited region. A circle twenty kilometers in diameter would include almost all of them, and within it, he concentrated on certain towns. Villaverde was one of these. In La Mata, on the other hand, he bought nothing, even though it was within the circle.

Only two purchases did not fit this pattern. In 1800 he bought a granary with an attached house and offices eight kilometers west of the city, outside the cirlce.^[52] It would be used in his business independently of his new holdings. The other exception was a portion of the despoblado of Chinín, southeast of Salamanca, purchased late in 1807.^[53] It came as

[52] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 851, f. 452r–v (1800), Cabras Malas.

[53] Ibid., libro 856, f. 374r–v (1807).

Map 19.2.
Purchases of Trespalacios, Advocate of Madrid and Salamanca

part of a sale that included land in two of his towns of Armuña and was his only purchase of an alquería or despoblado. He did not want to deal with large tenant farmers, preferring to concentrate on his established business as a grain merchant and on leasing to peasants in return for prime candeal wheat, where he could turn a pretty penny on their arrears, should the occasion arise. He was a man of affairs who knew the advantage of specialization.

He had his ear closer to the ground than the advocate, don Cosme Trespalacios. Living in Madrid, the latter made twelve purchases in Salamanca province between 1800 and 1803, and after he moved to Salamanca, another seven (Map 19.2). In all he spent 728,000 reales, about half what Alonso y Moral spent. Like Alonso, he preferred sets of arable plots that he could rent, especially in La Armuña, and he picked up some six hundred plots and nineteen meadows, two cortinas, and four houses. But he did not concentrate his purchases as much as Alonso; the towns in which he bought most heavily were not close to each other. His acquisitions also included a término redondo in the middle of the Charro district, about ninety hectares with a pasture of 250 live oak trees.^[54] He apparently did not have quite Alonso y Moral's sense of purpose.

Trespalacios's purchase of a término redondo follows, in fact, a dif-

[54] Ibid., libro 854, ff. 117r–119v (1803), La Reduelga in the término of Cilleros el Hondo.

Map 19.3.
Purchases of Sánchez de Onís, Priest

ferent strategy evident among those purchasers who invested in these large properties. They chose to buy in widely different locations. Take the priest don Segundo Sánchez de Onís, who spent 1,408,000 reales, the largest sum in the province (Map 19.3). He bought three términos redondos in their entirety, one in the Cuarto de Armuña (SA), one in the partido of Alba de Tormes (SB), and one in the partido of Ledesma (SD); in addition he bought part of a dehesa in the cuarto of Peña de Rey (SB) and another in the province of Zamora.^[55] He also bought five sets of arable fields in Cantalapiedra, on the border of Valladolid province (SB).^[56] His holdings now stretched seventy kilometers east and west and perhaps fifty north and south, if indeed he made no other purchases outside Salamanca province. Unfortunately, none of the documents tell us where he lived.

Quite different people followed this pattern. The university professor don Antonio Reyrruard bought a término redondo in the partido of Ledesma (SD), arable fields in four towns of Armuña (including La Mata and Narros, SA), and a fourth interest in a dehesa in the partido of Alba de Tormes (SB), all forming a triangle about forty by thirty by

[55] TR Cañadino, Madrid C12687 (1802), TR Lagartera A609 (1799), TR Valderas C1427 (1800), part of dehesa Val de Santiago C10790 (1801), one half of dehesa La Macadina (in Zamora province), C1276 (1800).

[56] Madrid C13211, C16563, C17235 (1802), C42462 (1805), C45577 (1806).

Map 19.4.
Purchases of Sánchez García

thirty kilometers, with Salamanca at the center.^[57] Don Francisco Sánchez García may have lived in the western part of the province, since he spread his purchases around the partido of Ledesma (SD and SE, Map 19.4). He bought a house in Santa María de Sando and a fifth interest in a nearby término redondo^[58] and added arable and enclosed cortinas in ten towns located sixty-three kilometers east and west and thirty-four north and south. A similar case, the Bilbao merchant don Martín de Ganá: in one purchase he acquired a number of grain fields in seven towns north, east, and south of Salamanca; in another a término redondo—a whole town with nearly three hundred inhabitants seventy-five kilometers to the west near Portugal; and finally in a third purchase more fields and a house in Salamanca.^[59] Was he planning to move to Salamanca? Perhaps, but for all we know, he was buying in other provinces too.

Unlike Alonso y Moral, these men were spreading their properties widely and buying both arable plots and great estates devoted in large

[57] TR Contiensa, ibid., A11091 (1802), 1/4 dehesa Revilla de San Pedro, A1155 (1799), tierras in Armuña, AHPS, Contaduría, libro 851, ff. 66r–v, 111v, 227r (1800).

[58] Madrid, C1343 (1800), TR Valdesuero C30195 (1804).

[59] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 851, ff. 29v–30r (1800) lands, ff. 63v–66r house, Madrid A11882 (1803) TR lugar de Vidola.

part to livestock. Twenty-three Level 4 buyers acquired despoblados, and twenty of them made more than one purchase. But of those twenty, only two bought nothing but despoblados, both of them women. One was the now-familiar widow Vélez y España. Besides her share of Pedrollén, she bought three other towns in their entirety. Although all in the Charro district, they formed a diamond twenty by thirty kilometers.^[60] The second was Doña Manuela de Onís, wife of the royal councillor, who bought two despoblados in the partido of Alba de Tormes. Other buyers of despoblados sought in addition all kinds of holdings, preferring arable fields, with houses, pastures, and irrigated plots coming only in package deals. We have seen that large buyers were not generally attracted by labor-intensive land or urban properties. Most wealthy investors sought diversity, especially geographic diversity, not homogeneity.

We may recall that peasants living in the towns of the partido of El Mirón, far enough away from Salamanca city to be beyond its economic control, also crossed their village boundaries in their purchases of land. Those in the valley of the Corneja river, where they could farm profitably, acquired pastures in the barren hills of El Mirón, not just for the oxen of their plow teams but for dozens and hundreds of sheep as well.

The strategy of these buyers, both big and modest, was not new. Religious institutions had scattered their holdings widely, as we can tell from a number of account books of convents and monasteries that have been preserved. The Salamanca convent of Santa Isabel of Observant Minorite nuns as of 1807 received in annual rent 817 fanegas of wheat and 34 fanegas of barley for fields in twenty-three towns spread over a region fifty kilometers from east to west and twenty-five north to south (zones SA, SB, and one town in SC).^[61] In 1800 the rents of the convent of Corpus Christi in Salamanca of the same order totaled 702 fanegas of wheat and 7 of minor crops. They came from twenty-nine places (two outside the province) stretching sixty-five kilometers in one direction and forty-five in the other (Map 19.5).^[62] The convent of La Concepción of the same order had concentrated its property more: in 1800 752 fanegas of wheat from twenty-one towns in a region thirty-five by twenty-five kilometers.^[63] In 1805–6 the Augustinian monks who ran the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Vega drew 1,367 fanegas of wheat and 162 of barley from twenty-three towns spread out fifty-five kilometers by

[60] Ibid., A5767 (1800), lugar of Porquerizos, A11880 (1803), lugares of Taberuela and Alizaces.

[61] AHN, Clero, libro 10888.

[62] Ibid., libro 10880.

[63] Ibid., libro 10854.

Map 19.5.
Properties of the Convent of Corpus Christi, Franciscan Nuns of Salamanca

Map 19.6.
Properties of the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Vega,
Augustinian Monks of Salamanca

thirty (Map 19.6).^[64] The nuns of Saint Bernard, monastery of Nuestra Señora del Jesús, richer than any of the above, owned a number of despoblados as well as many arable fields. Their income in 1800 was 1,467 fanegas of wheat and 19,358 reales in cash (at 50 reales per fanega another 387 EFW), plus minor payments in chickens and straw, delivered from twenty-four places, eighty kilometers east to west and ninety north to south. Their property reached into Zamora, Toro, and Ávila provinces.^[65]

It is true that religious foundations obtained much of their property through bequests, and the luck of the draw could determine where they would receive gifts. Yet the account books show that they occasionally bought and sold properties, so that their holdings were not absolutely frozen. Also they could encourage contributions that would fit their plans. They had a clear preference for properties that they could rent for a return in grain, a commodity that could be consumed or easily marketed. Of this sample, only the monastery of Nuestra Señora del Jesús had wide holdings in pastures and despoblados that brought in cash. Religious institutions were not, of course, averse to owning despoblados and términos redondos. In the previous chapter we saw how many they had and how many were disentailed. But even though most of them liked to receive good, white candeal wheat, they liked to see it come in from a wide circle around Salamanca city. The new secular owners seem to have inherited their concept of estate building from the religious orders.

The great noble houses of Spain had also traditionally spread their holdings, sometimes across different regions of the peninsula. We saw that the Duque de Alba, or, in our time, the Duquesa de Alba, was señor of five partidos of Salamanca and had estates there. The duque also was largest landowner in five places in Andalusia and señor in nine others.^[66] The Duque de Medinaceli was the largest landowner in twenty-four towns located in three of the four provinces of Andalusia and had other estates hardly less notable in Catalonia and other parts of Spain. Just running this vast establishment kept thirty accountants busy in Madrid.^[67] The Duque de Medina Sidonia, the Duque del Infantado, the Du-

[64] Ibid., libro 10653.

[65] Ibid., libro 10668.

[66] See above, Chapter 17, section 2; Artola, Contreras, and Bernal, Latifundio, 42, 54.

[67] Artola, Contreras, and Bernal, Latifundio, 42, 54, and Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution, 96.

que de Osuna, and numerous more modest grandes and other titled aristocrats followed the same pattern to a greater or lesser extent.^[68]

This study does not provide us with a map of a grande's estates, but we can observe some of the activities of a minor local titled aristocrat, don Antonio Rascón, Vizconde de Revilla y Barajas, vecino of Salamanca with a hereditary office of regidor. I do not have a list of his property prior to disentail, but it included at least one despoblado in the Charro district (SC), which he rented out.^[69] He exploited the disentail to acquire a portion of a término redondo in zone SD, arable fields in four towns north, south, and west of Salamanca city, a pasture in the foothills of the Sierra de la Peña de Francia in the south of the province, plus a number of properties unlocated in the deeds of deposit.^[70] Meanwhile he used his influence to obtain a lease—in perpetuity—for a vast pasture called Sierra Menor owned by the city and located on the northern slopes of the Sierra de la Peña de Francia. It contained 1,140 huebras (over 500 hectares), and the vizconde got it for only 1,140 reales a year.^[71] He would appear to have owned large herds in at least two parts of the province, for which he was acquiring extensive pastures through purchase and lease, while at the same time receiving rent in kind from arable plots located in many different places.

Whatever their status—clergymen, laymen, aristocrats, peasants, or religious institutions, local residents or absentees, old or new owners—they all followed a similar approach to landowning: spread your properties widely and hold various types of land. The pattern had its roots deep in the old regime and was still very much in force. According to the generally accepted explanation, no rational, or even irrational, economic planning lay behind the aristocratic practice of scattered estates. Critics have explained it by pointing to the institution of the mayorazgo, which was developed with the primary purpose of protecting future generations of a titled family from the ravages of a spendthrift heir and thus maintaining Spain's nobility from economic decline.^[72] When two heirs to mayorazgos married, their estates would be brought together in

[68] See Artola, Contreras, and Bernal, Latifundio, 32–48 and Map 3. Nader, "Noble Income in Sixteenth-Century Castile," 417–21, describes how a vast network of properties was built up from New Castile to Granada.

[69] Pelagarcía, see AHPS, Contaduría, libro 855, f. 167 (1805).

[70] TR Zafroncino, Madrid C14699, 14700 (1802); arable, C12683, C13158, C17953 (1802), AHPS, Contaduría, libro 853, f. 96 (1802); unlocated Madrid C14645 (1802), C50319 (1806), C51247 (1807).

[71] AHPS, Contaduría, libro 855, f. 84r–v (1804).

[72] This is the explanation offered by Carr, "Spain," 48–49. It is a commonplace.

the hands of succeeding generations, much as Charles V brought together his vast empire across the face of Europe. If royal marriage alliances produced dynastic monarchies, aristocratic marriages produced what might be called dynastic landholdings.

These vast estates have been roundly denounced. To read the economic history of Spain is to hear repeatedly the dirge that its grandes, who enjoyed their princely incomes without caring a fig for the condition of their estates or the suffering of their peasants, were over the centuries responsible for the low productivity of Spanish agriculture and the poverty of the countryside. Unable to live on more than a small portion of their estates, they gave up any attempt to be resident owners and escaped to Madrid, center of the royal court and of social intercourse with their peers, leaving their estates and their peasants to the mercies, neither tender nor enlightened, of their stewards.

Structurally one may well compare the aristocratic penchant for broadcasting their estates to the well-known feature of north European open-field farming, the scattered collections of strips worked by individual peasant households. Its inefficiency has also been frequently censured, both by eighteenth-century agricultural reformers like Arthur Young and by later economic historians. Scattered strips wasted the time of the peasants and their draft animals in unnecessary trips back and forth across their village fields and raised the cost of fencing to prohibitive levels even where local law and custom might have permitted enclosure. Recently, the economic historian Jan de Vries has compared the economic advantages of integrated peasant family farms to the disadvantages of exploitations consisting of scattered strips. In contrast to aristocratic entails, which are blamed for assembling excessively large holdings, the strip system, according to de Vries, led to unchecked distribution of the parcels among heirs and resulted in individual exploitations that could not engage the full labor of the owners or support their families.^[73] The arguments hold equally well for the irregular scattered plots of Castile.

Some people in Spain were aware of the arguments in favor of concentrated ownership. In 1803, one may recall, the king authorized owners of mayorazgos and other lay entails to sell their outlying holdings in order to purchase disentailed properties nearer their main estates, "to facilitate . . . the gathering of the scattered estates that belong to them, in which [possibility] they have so much interest because of the savings

[73] De Vries, Dutch Rural Economy, 1–17.

in cost of administration and because of the advantage of being able to attend themselves to achieving the improvement of which the estates are capable, with great potential benefit to the public welfare from the advance and general development of agriculture."^[74] How many noble owners took advantage of this offer is not known. The example of the large Salamanca buyers suggests that very few were, like Alonso y Moral, convinced of the benefits of concentration.

Opportunity, of course, controlled to a certain extent what they could buy, but so many properties were going on sale that they could pick and choose, as Alonso y Moral did. The explanation lies not in constraint or even accident, but in conscious motivation. Their strategy implied little direct involvement with the farming of their lands. They did not intend to inspect their holdings in person or through their stewards, certainly not regularly. Instead they were happy to sign leases with tenants who took full charge of what went on in the fields and fulfilled the wishes of their landlords by presenting their rent in kind or in coin each year on the appointed day. Miguel Artola argues correctly that the policy of great owners of leasing their lands to others who carried out the direct exploitation was a rational economic decision when their properties were so dispersed that they were perforce absentee owners in most places.^[75] His implication is that the dispersal forced the policy on the owners. The example of the buyers in Salamanca indicates that the policy was accepted wisdom and governed the creation of estates, both great and small, rather than vice versa.

In an attempt to explain the enigma of why the system of scattered strips common to English villages was established in the Middle Ages and preserved long after the development of markets for agricultural products had shown the advantages of consolidation, Donald McCloskey has argued that farmers practiced it because it diminished the risk from natural disasters and consequent poor harvests. Scattered strips were an economically rational arrangement in an age that did not yet know crop insurance.^[76] Fifty years ago Marc Bloch reached much the same conclusion with reference to the pattern of scattered strips in France: "If the plots were dispersed . . . everyone had some hope of avoiding the full impact of the natural or human disasters—hailstorms, plant diseases, devastation—that might descend upon a place without

[74] RC, 3 Feb. 1803. AHN, Hac., libro 8555, no. 6375.

[75] Artola, Contreras, and Bernal, Latifundio, 49–51.

[76] McCloskey, "Persistence of English Common Fields."

destroying it completely."^[77] In his study of the agrarian economy of early modern Poland, Witold Kula applies a similar explanation to the vast dispersed estates of the Polish nobility. While they created difficulties and expenses of administration, they provided a form of insurance from natural calamities and the destruction of war. Since most disasters would affect only part of the country at one time, the nobleman could use the product of his unscathed properties to rebuild those that had been devastated.^[78] A letter of Pliny the Younger written at the end of the first century after Christ reveals that the policy of distributing one's landholdings may be of very ancient origin. Debating whether to buy a fine rural estate contiguous to one he owned, and intermixed with it, which would provide the advantage of using the same agent for both, he reasoned, "I don't know whether it is prudent to venture so much of one's property under the same climate, and to the same casualties; it seems a more sure method of guarding against the caprices of fortune, to distribute one's possessions into different situations."^[79]

Spanish society of the old regime was permeated with a timeless folk wisdom that admonished anyone who looked to the land for his income not to put all his eggs in one basket. Scattered aristocratic estates dominated Spain at the national level, and scattered plots dominated the grain districts of Castile at the village level. In between, ecclesiastical owners and big buyers dispersed their holdings throughout their regions. Glorified peasants, they turned the plains around Salamanca into a vast three-field system. The mentality that preferred dispersal ran the social gamut from top to bottom. Scattered plots were not the creation of peasants alone. Indeed, in most instances, the peasant rented his plots in a set from a larger owner, very likely a religious institution before disentail and an individual afterwards. In turn the predecessors of the current owners may have received them as a series of bequests or purchased them from peasants, with the actual origin of the dispersal being lost in time, in Spain as in northern Europe.

In a classic passage, Marc Bloch described how the medieval French lord in the process of substituting rent for labor dues from his serfs transformed himself from the manager of a business—an entrepreneur, if you will—into a stockholder in the land.^[80] Our wealthy Castilian buyers acted like the later medieval lords, but it would be a mistake to

[77] Bloch, Caractères originaux 1 : 56.

[78] Kula, Economic Theory, 146.

[79] Pliny, Letters, book 3, letter 19.

[80] Bloch, Caractères originaux 1 : 100–101: "Il cesse d'être un chef d'entreprise. . . . Il est devenu un rentier du sol."

see only the past in their behavior. Quite the contrary, they can be likened also to modern investors who spread their portfolios to hedge their bets. The rent these men received in fanegas of wheat or reales de vellón hardly differed from dividends on blue-chip stocks. While the harvest of the farmer rose and fell, the yield to the owner remained relatively fixed, depending only on the stability of the markets for grain and currency. The farmers had to come to Salamanca to sign the lease and to deliver the rent; transactions costs were minimal for the owner. Theirs was a strategy of investors, not managers.

6

Dispersal had its limits, however, as our maps indicate. The religious institutions had established the economic control of Salamanca city over the surrounding plains, and the new buyers, with rare exceptions, stayed within this orbit. Political administration appears to have reinforced transportation networks and the markets in determining the shape of different ecconomic regions. Don Francisco Sánchez García (Map 19.4) bought widely but kept within the partido of Ledesma. The peasants around El Mirón bought within their much smaller partido. An observation of Jaén province is eloquent in this respect, for here the acquisitions of the large buyers did not range as broadly as those of their Salamanca counterparts.

In Jaén province 744 people made more than one purchase in the disentail. Of these, the Madrid records give evidence of only 37 (5 percent) buying in more than one town. They included only 19 (13 percent) of the Level 4 buyers. These documents state the location of properties for only half the sales;^[81] nevertheless, it is clear that buying across town lines was the exception, not the rule. Furthermore, almost all those who bought in more than one place acquired property in adjacent towns, usually centering on a cabeza de partido. Ten bought in Jaén city and adjoining towns such as La Guardia and Los Villares, 6 in Baeza and its neighboring towns, 3 in Andújar and places adjacent. Cazorla was another such regional center although not a cabeza de partido. It dominated the southeastern corner of the province and had 4 such buyers. When the residence of the buyer is known, in all but one case it is the leading town. Jaén province, in other words, appears to have been made up of a collection of small local economies through which some buyers,

[81] Of 2,831 purchases made by multiple buyers, that is, an average of 3.8 purchases per buyer, 1,377 are located.

Map 19.7.
Jaén Province, Purchases Across Town Lines

but a definite minority, spread their purchases (Map 19.7). Or rather, in view of what we learned in Part 2, each municipality that produced olive oil was an economic unit tied directly into the national market rather than dependent on a regional intermediary. This economic decentralization can explain why Jaén city had a much smaller proportion of the province's big buyers than Salamanca city did. Indeed, the buyers were more locally oriented than the religious institutions, for the lands bought by an individual in a single town often belonged to institutions located in various towns. The institutions, in accepting bequests, had taken them from farther and wider than the new buyers cared to.

Only eight individuals bought in markedly different parts of the province, and then only one or two purchases would be separated from their main concentration. Don Joaquín Muñoz, a Level 4 buyer from Martos, made eight purchases in his own town, arable fields, two olive groves, and a house, and he also bought two olive groves in Jaén.^[82] Don Juan Torralba, a Level 3 buyer of Ubeda, bought four sizable fields, several houses, and a baker's oven in his city and one large field in Jaén.^[83] But compare these rare cases to don Juan Pablo Casanova, a Level 4 buyer of Jaén, with twenty-seven purchases for 357,000 reales. Eighteen are located in the adjoining town of La Guardia, an olive grove in Pegalajar, also adjoining, and three in Jaén itself (the rest are unlocated). A similar figure was don Ignacio Pérez de Vargas, vecino of Andújar, one of the leading buyers in the province, who made thirty purchases and spent 830,000 reales. Eleven of his purchases are stated to be in Andújar, three in Villanueva de la Reyna, and four in Marmolejo, adjoining towns in the rich basin of the Guadalquivir. His purchases in Andújar were mostly arable, with some olive groves; those in the other towns were only olive groves and one vineyard. We saw in Part 2 that nonresidents preferred olive groves to arable because of the ease of administration. Pérez de Vargas followed this path. Even these men were rare. A more common figure was don Cristóbal Jurado y Vargas of Ubeda. A Level 4 buyer, he made fourteen purchases, all apparently in Ubeda.^[84] Juan Francisco Nebrera, vecino of Baeza and Level 4, made twenty-three purchases, all apparently in Baeza.^[85] And many others like them.

The records used for this study do not identify the locations of the properties within the boundaries of the towns, and a search through the original deeds of sale, which could produce such information, was beyond the resources of this study. The términos of the towns of Andalusia are much more extensive than those of Salamanca. That of Jaén was the largest in Andalusia,^[86] about twenty-five by twenty kilometers at its widest points (leaving out the mountains behind it). Adding La Guardia and Pegalajar, where Casanova bought, one obtains a region some

[82] Madrid A6832, A6856, A6864, A6887, A6889, A7108, A7269, A7272, A7275, C11240 (all 1801), C22081 (1802).

[83] Ibid., C668 (1800), A8723 in Jaén (1801), C23771, C25347, C25349 (1803), C30960 (1804), C41130, C41145 (1805).

[84] Eleven are specifically identified in Ubeda, the other three belonged to institutions of Ubeda.

[85] Same reasoning, ten and thirteen.

[86] 152 km (Artola, Contreras, and Bernal, Latifundio, 23).

twenty-five by twenty-seven kilometers. The fertile part of Ubeda is about twenty-five by eighteen kilometers (it has a tail of virtual desert stretching south fifteen kilometers more). The group of towns centering on Baeza measures twenty-three by twenty-eight kilometers, those of Cazorla, twenty-four by eighteen (omitting the Sierra de Cazorla to the east). These are all, however, extreme limits of the términos, and in the eighteenth century the cultivated areas were much smaller. The large buyers no doubt scattered their purchases within the cultivated zones of their towns, but almost all kept them within clearly defined geographic and economic units that centered on nucleated settlements. In Salamanca purchases were spread over regions stretching two or three times more each way, and many villages could lie between the properties of a single buyer.

The villages of the wide plains of Salamanca were economically dependent on the provincial capital, whereas Jaén city had much less impact on the units politically under it. Although this difference can be associated with the distinct buying patterns, one has the impression that the Jaén buyers, many of them already local landowners, saw themselves as managers rather than investors. They may well have intended to oversee the actual farming more than the religious institutions whose place they took. Chapter 16 showed us that Jaén province had been expanding its olive groves and commercializing its agriculture for many decades, and its landowning class was aware of the potential for further growth. Purchasers, especially large purchasers, would have a more-than-average share of this awareness. Desamortización provided an opportunity to accelerate the development of Jaén agriculture.

The last chapter showed that it hastened commercialization in Salamanca, but here it was through buyers who were not prone to management, and almost in spite of them. The commercialization of the countryside progressed in the nineteenth century in the términos redondos, despoblados that became cattle ranches devoted to the production of meat. Their owners planted them with live oaks, surrounded them with stone walls, and produced the magnificent estates visible today. Arable farming on small plots became a less attractive investment, as the growing population of the villages pressed more and more against the limits of production. By the end of the century, the absentee owners had sold off the plots to the peasants, no doubt seeking to transfer their capital to more obvious growth sectors. Thus, ironically, Alonso y Moral, the one buyer with a clear sense of commercial purpose, was setting out on a dead-end road in acquiring his thousand arable plots. The buyers with

the investor's mentality, who hedged their bets by purchasing both despoblados and scattered plots, found themselves on one main road even as the other led them nowhere. Commercial expansion would not hit the open-field villages until the parcellary concentration of the Franco era produced larger, economically viable holdings and state credit permitted a technological transformation: modern agricultural machinery, deep-well irrigation, and a smaller, more efficient labor force. Then sugar beets, soy beans, and sunflowers, modern commercial crops, would replace wheat, with its large component of subsistence consumption.

At the top level of buyers the disentail attracted the established elite of the old regime. Where these were men who already were experiencing the opportunities of a wider market, as in Jaén, disentail would be an impetus toward more rapid development. Where, as in Salamanca, the elite that produced the buyers looked on the land as an investment in a sure but stable source of income, the effect of disentail would be much less radical. New land was being put under the plow, as we have seen, but in the despoblados and términos redondos, not in the nucleated villages, which already cultivated all their land. Here was the growth sector, and here, later, would be the sector of development toward livestock, but the buying patterns of the purchasers of términos redondos show that they were not aware of the difference. The lesson came to later generations. Once again we see that disentail could act as a catalyst for change, but the changes it led to—agricultural as well as social— depended on existing conditions, one of which was the mentality of the people with money to invest in land.