Featured Graduate Student Research: Valentin Figueroa

Introduction

The period 1300-1800 was one of political centralization. In 1300, a merchant carrying goods by land from Seville to Rome bordering the Mediterranean coastline had to cross around 15 borders of sovereign or semi-sovereign polities, each with its own rulers, commercial policies, and taxes. Trade routes were also fragmented within sovereign polities, as different towns were often under the jurisdiction of different territorial lords. These lords wielded enormous power over the territories they ruled. They administered justice, appointed local officials, set and collected taxes, defined weights and measures, established monopolies, and provided defense. In 1800, in contrast, that same merchant could reach Rome from Seville crossing only four borders, and those four polities were more hierarchically organized, as political power was concentrated to a larger extent in the hands of monarchs.

Part of my research in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University examines the long-term process through which the fragmented European feudalism gave way, in some regions, to the rule of the large, internally hierarchical, and centralized territorial states we know today. The rise of the territorial state involved a bundle of simultaneous tasks, including the creation of unitary tax systems, defining explicit borders, consolidating internal hierarchies, disputing power from religious authorities, building professional bureaucracies, eradicating private armies, and legitimizing rule. I focus on an often-overlooked, yet crucial, aspect of political centralization: the inclusion of towns in the royal jurisdiction and the erosion of jurisdictional power of the Catholic Church, landed secular lords, and other social groups. I examine a case that figures prominently in macro-historical research: The Crown of Castile.

Castile is a useful case to study political centralization. In other Eurasian kingdoms, such as the Ottoman Empire, rulers inherited centralized bureaucracies to rule over towns and could appoint bureaucrats at will. In contrast, in the middle of the 14th century, the Castilian crown had jurisdiction over only a small subset of towns in their realm. In royal towns, the crown could rule through courtesan officials or autonomous municipal councils with delegated power.  Most towns, however, were under the jurisdiction of landed magnates, clerics, military orders, municipal corporations with the prerogative to elect lords, or combinations of these. In non-royal jurisdictions, which encompassed the vast majority of Castile's territory, lords exercised authority in the military, judicial, administrative, and fiscal spheres. They had the prerogative, for instance, to appoint officials, collect taxes, build castles, levy troops, intervene in economic activity, and exercise justice with primacy over local councils. My goal was to document the monarchs' efforts to manage the urban landscape given this initial heterogeneity, and to explain changes in the jurisdictional composition of the realm.

Field work

With funding from The Europe Center at Stanford University I travelled to Madrid for three weeks in June and July 2019 to conduct research on the long-term political centralization of Castile and to gather town-level information about political jurisdictions from 1352 to 1787. I visited the libraries of the Universidad Carlos III (in the Getafe Campus) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid to obtain information on a panel of over 2,000 towns in Old Castile and around 500 towns in New Castile. These data allow me to track towns across four centuries to study the transition from feudalism to the territorial state using novel and detailed micro-level data. The figures below show the towns in the sample of Old Castile ---between the Duoro River and the Cantabrian sea---, their political jurisdiction in 1352 and 1787, and a transition probability matrix summarizing the information about jurisdictional transitions across four centuries.

Figure 1. Towns in Old Castile, 1352-1787

Some preliminary findings using these data confirm long-standing claims about the process of political centralization. While state-building is often described as an incremental process, the town-level data I gathered shows that monarchs often failed to preserve the towns under their jurisdiction. As Charles Tilly famously argued, “the history of European state formation runs generally upward toward greater accumulation and concentration, but it runs across jagged peaks and profound valleys." In Old Castile, only 29 out of the 127 towns under royal jurisdiction in 1352 remained under royal jurisdiction in 1787. This does not mean that the crown lost power. In fact, from 1352 to 1787, towns under the royal jurisdiction grew from representing less than eight to over 43 percent of all towns in sample in this period. Another set of preliminary findings suggest that the agglomeration of small towns engaging in low-volume and low-added-value trade in a region favored transitions from the jurisdiction of lords or the Church towards the royal jurisdiction, and also made monarchs more likely to preserve royal towns.

In addition to collecting data, I also met with Spanish scholars during my stay in Madrid. I interviewed Carlos Alvarez-Nogal (Universidad Carlos III), a leading specialist in the political economy of the Castilian Cortes, to discuss data sources and historical literature about bargaining between the crown and cities in the late medieval and modern periods. Professor Alvarez-Nogal meet with me for over three hours in the beautiful Juan March Institute for the Social Sciences in the Getafe Campus of the Universidad Carlos III, and I had the opportunity to discuss my research agenda with him.

Last but not least, I met with Maria Asenjo-Gonzalez (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), a leading scholar of urban politics and consolidation of royal power in medieval Castile. The meeting with Professor Asenjo-Gonzalez helped me grasp the open debates in Castilian political history, learn about the must-read works in this area, and identify useful sources of information for my research.  Moreover, I met with her doctoral students to become involved in the network of young scholars working in my area of interest. It took a while for us to get used to disciplinary differences ---detailed case studies with attention to specificity on the part of historians versus the emphasis on macro-generalizations using the complete set of cases that is typical of political science--- but the meeting was fruitful.  I hope I can exploit this network to collaborate with medieval historians in the near future in an interdisciplinary project.

Conclusion

The field trip to Madrid provided me with a wealth of empirical data for my ongoing research projects. It also allowed me to become connected to a vibrant network of scholars of Spanish political development that typically does not interact with political scientists. Now that the field work phase is completed, my plan is to use the data I gathered to work on at least two papers that will kickstart my dissertation research.

Valentin Figueroa is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Stanford