2 - Rich and poor

Summary

It has become fashionable in recent years to link depopulation in traditional societies with a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor. Le Roy Ladurie has made us familiar with the growth of a comfortable middling peasantry in the depopulated Languedoc of the fifteenth century; and Vilar has hinted at a somewhat similar picture for rural Catalonia in the wake of the Black Death, with the survivors of the epidemic tending to regroup and concentrate their holdings. But it would be difficult to paint the age of the later Habsburgs in the same golden hues. Caxa de Leruela, writing in 1632, noted how the depopulation of Castile went hand in hand with the squeezing out of the middling, active peasantry, to the benefit of the very rich. Indeed, even in France the demographic stagnation of the seventeenth century brought more, not less inequality in landholding.

The problem in analysing Spanish developments, of course, is the extreme paucity of quantitative studies. The materials are fragmentary, often repellent because of the long drudgery of calculations, and always dangerous given the sheer inadequacy of much of the information. The sources for a study of property in Habsburg Valencia can be grouped under four headings. The most useful is undoubtedly the peyta, a tax levied on all forms of visible property, principally land but also houses, mills, herds and the like.