Blood, Land and Power

The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Nobility and Lineages in the Early Modern Period

Manuel Perez-Garcia

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781786837103
• eBook ISBN: 9781786837127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts

The analysis of land management, lineage and family through the case study of early modern Spanish nobility from sixteenth to early nineteenth century is a major issue in recent historiography. It aims to shed light on how upper social classes arranged strategies to maintain their political and economic status. Rivalry and disputes between old factions and families were attached to the control and exercise of power. Blood, land management and honour were the main elements in these disputes. Honour, service to the Crown, participation in the conquest and 'pure' blood (Catholic affiliation) were the main features of Spanish nobility. This book analyses the origins of the entailed-estate (mayorazgo) from medieval times to early modern period, as the main element that enables us to understand the socio-economic behaviour of these families over generations. This longue durée chronology within the Braudelian methodology of the research aims to show how strategies and family networks changed over time, demonstrating a micro-history study of daily life.

1

Lineage Glory and Honour in the Late Middle Ages: Conquest and Consolidation of Economic Power

1.1. War, Power and Land: From the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period (1265–1350)

The actions that the Riquelme family pursued in the last third of the thirteenth century to become part of the troops to conquer the kingdom of Murcia were in perfect alignment with the Castilian monarchy’s reconquest campaign. The Riquelme would later settle in the kingdom after receiving the donación (donation) of lands and heredamientos (inheritances) that the crown provided in return for their services rendered during the conquest campaigns.¹

The Riquelme lineage was a typical case of an outsider family that permanently settled in the kingdom of Murcia during the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula.² They were part of a larger group of the peninsula’s Christian population that moved to the Murcian territory seeking easy riches and a comfortable way of life. Nevertheless, there were limits to their aims to increase their family wealth and estate. Among the difficulties that the new settlers faced and that truly hindered their socioeconomic development were the scarcity of land given, lack of resources to exploit the inherited properties, the limited productivity of the land and the lack of water.³

For legitimacy and real social advancement, the making of what can be defined as ‘historical memory’ began. Thus, among the Riquelme family group, the concepts of lineage, family, political strategies, social reproduction and a hereditary system began to take shape around the framework of land possession in southern Spain. It was during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that the true lineage identity started to become coherent – and it happened around an already fixed heritage and estate, and an established surname. As James Casey says, ‘up until the thirteenth century, genealogies were like an entangled web from which a fortuitous man emerges from the average, makes a fortune and takes upon a lineage for himself, which is based on a last name that comes from the tower or town that he himself built.’⁴

The concept of the family provides a framework to analyse the acting mechanisms and the behavioural patterns of the individual, which he drew from the group’s interest. In the Castilian system, las Partidas (Divisions) show that the group was structured strictly in a conjugal fashion (husbands and sons).⁵ However, some scholars have noted that the family, during the late medieval period, was already using specific mechanisms to build up a group that would be identified through lineage, which in itself was defined through close ties of kinship and common interests.⁶ Kinship at the time was becoming a cultural phenomenon subject to the Church’s rules, established in Europe after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), in regard to the degree of consanguinity – or real kinship – though these norms were not always respected.⁷ Political strategies and social reproduction worked hand in hand, and they became extremely valuable in the late medieval period in providing the family with a true idea of group cohesion. In this sense, marriage was a fundamental tool in this process.⁸ In Mediterranean Europe the social strategies that lineages used were based on setting up marriage alliances to ultimately place the family group on top of the social hierarchy, to socially reproduce the lineage and to avoid its biological depletion by establishing a perpetual succession line.

A bilinear type of succession defined the hereditary system of the late medieval period in southern Europe, one in which the individual and the group could choose which offspring path to follow – either female or male. However, the male succession line prevailed, opening the way to the emergence of the mayorazgo (entailed estate) in the Iberian kingdoms, morgadio in Portugal.⁹ In turn, marriage strategies fundamentally shaped any inheritance process and thus landownership became the main element of power among the nobility.¹⁰

Late medieval lineages cemented their idiosyncrasies within this edifice of ideas, and these also became central to their actions and modus operandi. During the early modern period in Europe and the Iberian kingdoms, the value of these concepts became even more grounded. Historians argue that ultimately lineage was nothing but a mental construction conceptualised around kinship, blood and the memory that needs to be materialised.¹¹ A late fifteenth-century Spanish chronicle by Fernando del Pulgar validates this affirmation, saying that in a world where everything is of divine origin, ‘God created man but not lineages’.¹²

The case of the Riquelme family can be understood in this theoretical framework – they were a typical case of a group that gained wealth by their participation in conquest and benefited from the Castilian crown’s donations of land that followed. From the first possessions acquired in the early land partition process, the Riquelme family accumulated an extensive estate that over the years, and especially at the threshold of the sixteenth century, placed them among the Murcian landowning nobility.¹³ The origin of the Riquelme family in Murcia is dated in Riquelme manuscript of 1265 the year of the conquest of Murcia.

Guillén Riquelme entered victorious [and conquering] into that city . . . and he was designated heir in it, among 323 illustrious other knights and settlers as it is shown in that book by king Alfonso X the Wise (on page 4) . . . he was at the capture of the city of Orihuela, the town of Lorca . . . and he received lands as it is shown in his archives and population books.

In the time of king Don Ferdinand, when the king of Aragon James II took the kingdom of Murcia from him and then the king of Aragon expelled from Murcia all the knights that had followed the campaign of Don Ferdinand, and Guillén Riquelme was among them, he sought refuge with king Don Ferdinand who, when he went down to reclaim his kingdom of Murcia, brought with him Guillén Riquelme as the main captain of his troops . . . the king of Murcia entered and ordered the lands of Guillén Riquelme to be returned to him.¹⁴

As is common in sources of the early modern period, the language exaggerates and glorifies the family’s past, aiming to provide magnificence and honour to the lineage. The same document mentions that Riquelme individuals came from the great kingdom of France, from the house of Monfort, señores and counts of Tolosa. They came from the castle of Rodelas (city of Rochela) – Guillén de Monfort was among other wealthy men from France and Germany who came to the call of Don Pelayo.

Provided the Ricoielmo with weaponry and the piece of land where the Ricoielmo battle had taken place – that is, clos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures, Graphs and Tables
• Foreword by J. B. Owens
• Introduction
• 1 Lineage, Glory and Honour in the Late Middle Ages: Conquest and Consolidation of Economic Power
• 2 Honour and Purity of Blood
• 3 Building a Social Network through Political, Social and Institutional ties
• 4 Family and Entailed Estate (Mayorazgo): First-Borns as Keepers of the Family’s Economic Power
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Appendix