GRANADA CATHEDRAL, ROYAL CHAPEL, TOMB OF FERDINAND AND ISABEL
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID

Low prices demanded a cheap labour-market, therefore the obvious step was to fix a maximum wage for the worker, that he might not hope to exceed however worthy of his hire. Cheap labour must live, therefore a maximum price must be placed on corn that the wage-earner might be enabled to buy bread. Were grain grown for neighbourly love not a profit, this solution of an almost universal difficulty might have succeeded; but agriculture was never popular in Castile, and such arbitrary dealings tended to depress it still further.

Farmers turned for their profit to the production of wine or oil, or with a still keener eye to business devoted their energies to sheep or cattle breeding. This was the staple industry of rural districts, so extensive and flourishing that in the fourteenth century it had established a kind of trades-union, or mesta to look after its interests and secure it privileges. During the winter months the cattle fed at will on the wide tablelands of Castile; but with the coming of summer their owners drove them to pasture in mountain districts such as Leon and Galicia. It was on these journeys to and fro that agriculture and grazing came into conflict; for where the herds had passed they left a wilderness. Legislation indeed forbade the trampling down of vineyards and of meadows of corn or hay, but compensation for these damages was difficult to obtain from a corporation so powerful that it had won for itself a large measure of royal protection. Tolls paid on the migratory cattle formed a considerable part of the public revenue; and kings of Castile had thus been persuaded to foster a trade so lucrative to their own pockets, granting graziers not only immunity from certain imposts but also special rights with regard to wood-cutting and the freedom of the regular cattle-tracks from any enclosure or limitation. Ferdinand and Isabel renewed these privileges and in 1500 placed a member of the Royal Council at the head of the mesta, bringing that important body under their immediate control.

If the laws of the maximum and the protection of rival industries hit agriculture hard, so also did the alcabala, a tax of ten per cent. on the sale-price of all goods. Originally imposed as a temporary means of raising money, it had become one of the main sources of the sovereigns’ revenues, and, while it burdened every commercial transaction, laid a triple charge on corn in the form first of grain and then of meal and bread.

The alcabala has been described by a modern historian as “one of the most successful means ever devised by a government for shackling the industry and enterprise of its subjects”; and Queen Isabel herself seems to have realized its blighting nature, for, in 1494, she agreed, on Ximenes’s advice, to commute it in the case of certain towns for a fixed sum to be levied by the municipality. Even so, the question of its legality still troubled her conscience; but the request in her will that a special committee should collect evidence and decide the matter justly was, like her kindly thought for the Indians of the New World, afterwards disregarded.

Perhaps it may be asked how, under such adverse circumstances agriculture survived at all; yet at the beginning of the sixteenth century Castile was not only growing sufficient corn for her own needs but even exporting it to the rest of the peninsula. The explanation lies in a comparison not with the gigantic production of modern times, but with the preceding age, when the scorching breath of anarchy had withered the fields. The government of Queen Isabel’s reign, if it favoured the more popular cattle-trade, at least protected the farmer and labourer from pillage; while, by forbidding the tolls which, during Henry IV.’s misrule, territorial lords had levied at will at every river-ford and turn of the road, it gave a sudden freedom to the circulation of corn as well as of other merchandise. Even more effective was the abolition in 1480 of the export duty on grain, cattle, and goods passing from Castile to Aragon, whereby the cornfields of Murcia were enabled to compete with its grazing lands, until at length a series of bad harvests restored the old predominance of the live-stock industry.

The real decline of agriculture, like that of industry, was to set in at the close of the sixteenth century under Isabel’s great-grandson. The reign of the Catholic sovereigns and the early years of Charles V. stand out as a golden age of commercial prosperity. The production of wool and silk increased almost tenfold; the fairs drew foreign merchants from every part of Europe; while Flemish and Italian artisans, attracted by an offer of ten years’ freedom from taxation, settled in the large towns to pursue and teach their handicrafts.

BURGOS CATHEDRAL
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY LACOSTE, MADRID