ALFONSO THE MAGNA!\:IMOUS AND THE FALL OF ANJOUformulating his attitude is not to deny him more than a
touch of humanity in dealing with his Jewish subjects, which
sets him apart from his father Ferdinand of Antequera.
THE CAT ALAN CRISIS
There were, indeed, severe social and economic tensions
within Catalonia which were in danger of being overlooked
while the king was on constant campaign in Italy. Part, per-
haps a quarter, of the peasantry remained unfree, subject
to what were described as mals usos, bad usages, imposed
by landlords anxious to draw on the large labour reserve
the peasants offered, at a time when labour was in short
supply and expensive.~^6 The unfree (or remenr,a) peasants
agitated for release; since some were in fact fairly well off,
they felt the humiliation of their status all the more, but
they hoped to use their funds to pay the crown for a decree
of redemption. There were about 20,000 households in early
fifteenth-century Catalonia subject to these burdens, and
the monarchy was keen to make money out of the decree;
Alfonso at one point countered a bid of 64,000 florins from
the peasantry of Girona with a demand for 100,000 florins.
However, the parliament of Catalonia, the Carts, represent-
ing in part the noble opposition to these peasants, forced
the monarchy to withdraw its support for the unfree peas-
ants, voting the king 400,000 florins for the revocation of a
decree of emancipation issued in 1455. Once the king had
withdrawn his decree, the Cmts had second thoughts and
revoked its own handsome grant, leading to a reiteration of
the decree in 1457. The issue was still up in the air when
civil war broke out in Catalonia in 1462, and the remences
were not surprisingly in the front line.
In the cities too there were signs of crisis. The pogroms
of 1391 were not simply, as has been seen, a violent attack on
the Jews, but expressed wider economic grievances too. A
populist faction in Barcelona, the Busca, gained royal support
in its attempts to unseat the old patrician Biga; led in part
by cloth merchants, the Busca also offered a political home
- Paul Freedman, The origins of peasant servitude in medieval Catalonia
(Cambridge, 1991).