But the boldest assaults on the power of the aristocracy were made in the famous cortes of Toledo, in 1480, which Carbajal[e] enthusiastically styles “cosa divina para reformacion y remedio de las desordenes pasadas.” The first object of its attention was the condition of the exchequer, which Henry IV had so exhausted by his reckless prodigality that the clear annual revenue amounted to no more than 30,000 ducats, a sum much inferior to that enjoyed by many private individuals; so that, stripped of his patrimony, it at last came to be said he was “king only of the highways.” Such had been the royal necessities that blank certificates of annuities assigned on the public rents were hawked about the market, and sold at such a depreciated rate that the price of an annuity did not exceed the amount of one year’s income. The commons saw with alarm the weight of the burdens which must devolve on them for the maintenance of the crown thus impoverished in its resources; and they resolved to meet the difficulty by advising at once a resumption of the grants unconstitutionally made during the latter half of Henry IV’s reign and the commencement of the present. This measure, however violent and repugnant to good faith it may appear at the present time, seems then to have admitted of justification, as far as the nation was concerned; since such alienation of the public revenue was in itself illegal, and contrary to the coronation oath of the sovereign; and those who accepted his obligations held them subject to the liability of their revocation, which had frequently occurred under the preceding reigns.
The plan suggested by Cardinal Mendoza seems to have been partially adopted. It was decided that all whose pensions had been conferred without any corresponding services on their part should forfeit them entirely; that those who had purchased annuities should return their certificates on a reimbursement of the price paid for them; and that the remaining creditors, who composed the largest class, should retain such a proportion only of their pensions as might be judged commensurate with their services to the state. Admiral Enriquez, for instance, resigned 240,000 maravedis of his annual income; the duke of Alva, 575,000; the duke of Medina Sidonia, 180,000. The loyal family of the Mendozas were also great losers, but none forfeited so much as the overgrown favourite of Henry IV, Beltran de la Cueva, duke of Albuquerque, who had uniformly supported the royal cause, and whose retrenchment amounted to 1,400,000 maravedis of yearly rent.[52]
By this important reduction, the final adjustment and execution of which were intrusted to Ferdinand de Talavera, the queen’s confessor, a man of austere probity, the gross amount of 30,000,000 maravedis, a sum equal to three-fourths of the whole revenue on Isabella’s accession, was annually saved to the crown. The retrenchment was conducted with such strict impartiality that the most confidential servants of the queen, and the relatives of her husband, were among those who suffered the most severely. It is worthy of remark that no diminution whatever was made of the stipends settled on literary and charitable establishments. It may be also added that Isabella appropriated the first-fruits of this measure, by distributing the sum of 20,000,000 maravedis among the widows and orphans of those loyalists who had fallen in the war of the Succession. This resumption of grants may be considered as the basis of those economical reforms which, without oppression to the subject, augmented the public revenue more than twelvefold during this auspicious reign.
Several other acts were passed by the same cortes, which had a more exclusive bearing on the nobility. They were prohibited from quartering the royal arms on their escutcheons, from being attended by a mace-bearer and a bodyguard, from imitating the regal style of address in their written correspondence, and other insignia of royalty which they had arrogantly assumed. They were forbidden to erect new fortresses, and they were expressly restrained from duels.
Resistance to Papal Encroachment
In the earlier stages of the Castilian monarchy, the sovereigns appear to have held a supremacy in spiritual, very similar to that exercised by them in temporal matters. It was comparatively late that the nation submitted its neck to the papal yoke, so closely riveted at a subsequent period; and even the Romish ritual was not admitted into its churches till long after it had been adopted in the rest of Europe. But when the code of the Partidas was promulgated in the thirteenth century, the maxims of the canon law came to be permanently established. The ecclesiastical encroached on the lay tribunals. Appeals were perpetually carried up to the Roman court; and the popes, pretending to regulate the minutest details of church economy, not only disposed of inferior benefices, but gradually converted the right of confirming elections to the episcopal and higher ecclesiastical dignities into that of appointment.
These usurpations of the church had been repeatedly the subject of grave remonstrance in cortes. The sovereigns, highly dissatisfied, ordered their subjects, ecclesiastical as well as lay, to quit the papal dominions; an injunction which the former, fearful of the sequestration of their temporalities in Castile, obeyed with as much promptness as the latter. At the same time Ferdinand and Isabella proclaimed their intention of inviting the princes of Christendom to unite with them in convoking a general council for the reformation of the manifold abuses which dishonoured the church. No sound could have grated more unpleasantly on the pontifical ear than the menace of a general council, particularly at this period, when ecclesiastical corruptions had reached a height which could but ill endure its scrutiny. The pope became convinced that he had ventured too far, and that Henry IV was no longer monarch of Castile. He accordingly despatched a legate to Spain, fully empowered to arrange the matter on an amicable basis; but the legate received orders instantly to quit the kingdom, without attempting so much as to disclose the nature of his instructions, since they could not but be derogatory to the dignity of the crown.
Far from resenting this ungracious reception, the legate affected the deepest humility. Cardinal Mendoza, whose influence in the cabinet had gained him the title of “third king of Spain,” at length so far mitigated the resentment of the sovereigns that they consented to open negotiations with the court of Rome. The result was the publication of a bull by Sixtus IV, in which his holiness engaged to provide such natives to the higher dignities of the church in Castile as should be nominated by the monarchs of that kingdom.
The Regulation of Trade
[1480-1481 A.D.]