Cities and the state in Spain

Conclusions

Leaving aside details and qualifications, the major turning point in relations between cities and the monarchy occurred during the second half of the sixteenth century. The cities paid a very high price for their initial support of the crown. The more the logic of imperial power took over, the less cities had any chance of developing on their own. Nonetheless, they never became simple toys in royal hands. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, as the power of Genoan financiers declined, the monarchy tried again to obtain the support of cities, which finally gave in - at a price. The most crucial price of all was the imposition on the crown of a fiscal system (the servicios de millones) that was even more favorable than the alcabala to the cities having votes in the Cortes. Furthermore, the millones placed severe restrictions on the monarch's use of the funds; from that point on, the monarch had to avert his eyes from the procedures the privileged cities used to collect the taxes that constituted his principal ordinary revenues.

Unlike the French case, the Spanish experience, as seen from Castile, did not end with the complete submission of cities to the monarchy's expansive centralization. Yet we must recognize that the cities never tried to create a form of political organization that could have been a Castilian version of the urban republics. Formally the situation unfolded as a series of ritual confrontations in the Cortes, where each of the parties was well aware of its limits. With that balance of forces, any attempt to enhance state power the monarchy tried to initiate could only succeed with the approval of the cities.

This series of intermediate barriers meant that the process by which communities became subject to statist royal power was halting and indirect. In addition, great administrative decisions became diluted when they entered the interlocked network formed by local urban authorities. Not until the first half of the eighteenth century, after the liquidation of Spain's imperial territories elsewhere in Europe, can we speak of the consolidation of an administrative monarchy, a true predecessor of what one day would become a Spanish state.