The bankruptcy of the senyors

The concept of ‘the aristocracy in crisis’ is an old one for the early modern period. Already in 1912 Lucien Febvre had painted the dire plight of the nobility of the Franche-Comté, whose old feudal rents failed to meet the needs of the new age and who were forced increasingly to sell out to bourgeois creditors. More recent studies have cast a lurid light on the financial predicament of the great families of France, Spain and England. The exact implications of the phenomenon, however, are not all that clear. Perhaps only in England was there a massive transfer of estates out of the hands of the old nobility, a development which would help explain the uniquely radical nature of the challenge to the social and political hierarchy which is associated with the Civil War. In France as in Spain the great families still seem to have been as firmly in the saddle in 1640 as in 1540. Jago has noticed in the case of Castile how the Crown intervened time after time to save the big houses by staggering, postponing or reducing their debt payments, and Tricoli has observed much the same phenomenon (though royal intervention was more informal) in the case of Sicily. The Castilian and Sicilian nobles kept their estates, but at the cost of subservience to their protector, the king. In Valencia by the beginning of the seventeenth century the all-too-familiar outlines of the debt problem were clearly visible.