FERDINAND AND ISABELLA: THE CATHOLIC SOVEREIGNS 45
of Castile by 1480 and the Castilian peasant was
legally free to leave his village and move elsewhere,
the nobility still owned virtually all the land, so the
peasant’s “liberty” was, as the Spanish historian
Jaime Vicens Vives called it, the liberty “to die of
hunger.”
The royal policy of favoring sheep raising over
agriculture was equally harmful to Castile’s long-
range economic interests. Like their predecessors,
the Sovereigns were infl uenced by the taxes and
export duties paid by the sheep farmers and by the
infl ow of gold in payment for their wool. As a re-
sult, they granted extensive privileges to the sheep
raisers’ guild, the Mesta. The climax of these favors
was a 1501 law that reserved in perpetuity for pas-
ture all land on which the migrant fl ocks had ever
pastured. This measure barred vast tracts of land
in Andalusia and Estremadura from being used for
agriculture. The privilege granted the shepherds to
cut trees for fuel, fencing, or pasturage contributed
heavily to deforestation and soil erosion. More-
over, the overfl ow of sheep from their legal passage
caused much damage to crops and soil. In a time of
growing population, these policies and conditions
inevitably produced serious food defi cits. Chronic
shortages climaxed in a devastating food crisis in
the early sixteenth century.
Modern historians also question the tradi-
tional view that Spanish industry made spectacu-
lar advances under the Catholic Sovereigns. These
historians claim that the only true industries of the
period were the iron industry of the Basque prov-
inces and the cloth industry of the Castilian central
zone, which received a strong stimulus from the
discovery of America and the opening of American
markets. The resulting industrial prosperity lasted
until shortly after the middle of the sixteenth cen-
tury. But the level of industrial production never
reached that of England, the Low Countries, and
Italy. The abject poverty of the peasantry, which
composed 80 percent of the population, sharply
limited the effective market for manufactured goods.
Shortages of capital and skilled labor also acted as
a brake on industrial expansion.
Other obstacles to industrial growth were the
excessive costs of transport by mule train and ox-
carts across the rugged peninsula and the customs
barriers that continued to separate the Christian
kingdoms. Nor were the paternalistic measures
of the Sovereigns invariably helpful to industry.
Through Ferdinand’s infl uence, a guild system
modeled on the rigid Catalán model was introduced
into the Castilian towns. In this, the Sovereigns did
Castilian industry no service, for they fastened the
straitjacket of guild organization on it precisely at
the time when the discovery and colonization of
America promised to enrich the realm. The infl ux
of American gold and silver and the resulting eco-
nomic upsurge challenged Castilian industry to
transform its techniques, lower costs, increase out-
put and quality, and thereby establish its economic
as well as political supremacy in Europe.
No policy of the Sovereigns has come under
harsher attack than their anti-Semitic measures.
During the early Middle Ages, Jews formed an in-
fl uential and prosperous group in Castile. Down
to the close of the thirteenth century, a relatively
tolerant spirit prevailed in the Christian kingdoms.
Relations among Jews, Christians, and Muslims
were so close and neighborly as to provoke pro-
tests by the church. In the fourteenth century,
these relations began to deteriorate. Efforts by the
clergy to arouse hatred of Jews and popular resent-
ment of such specialized Jewish economic activities
as usury and tax collecting, which caused severe
hardship for peasants and other groups, contrib-
uted to this process. The rise of anti-Semitism led to
the adoption of repressive legislation by the crown
and to a wave of attacks on Jewish communities.
To save their lives, many Jews accepted baptism
and eventually formed a very numerous class of
conversos.
The converts soon achieved a marked prosper-
ity and infl uence as tax farmers, court physicians,
counselors, and lawyers. Wealthy, unhampered
by feudal traditions, intellectually curious, and in-
tensely ambitious, the conversos incurred the hos-
tility not only of peasants but of the church and
many nobles and burghers. Whether heretics or
not, they posed a threat to the feudal order based
on landed wealth, hereditary status, and religious
orthodoxy. The envy and hostility they aroused